Week 5, Thing #10:

This came from imagechef. Simple. Fun. Seemed appropriate for the approaching holiday.

More to come...

Week 4, Thing #9

I love google's blog search! Whenever playing with a new search system, I like to put in two disparate things and see what comes up. So I searched "library bike" and checked out the results. Most of the blog searches found me lots of library blogs and lots of bike blogs, but few that brought the two together. Google found ME! Yes, this very blog was its first hit. I think this may have been due more to currency than relevancy. I had just finished that post a couple back in which I had written about bikes and libraries. But I must admit that I am amazed by Google's search logarithms which somehow always seem to find what I am seeking. Even when I am not so sure myself. So what if they read my e-mail to send me targeted adds? Surely "Do no evil" does not mean they should sacrifice potential revenue streams.

So now I have a bunch of rss subscriptions. Some comics, some columnists, School Library Journal's Breaking News, and education articles from the SF Chronicle and NY Times. And I find that, like my e-mail in box, I feel guilty if there are unread articles in my rss reader in-box. At the end of the day, I can toss my printed newspaper in the recycling bin, guilt free. But there is something about marking an article as "read" just so it won't show up that seems wrong. I mean, isn't that lying to say you read something when you really just skimmed the first two sentences? How high school! Of course, I could just ignore what I don't feel like reading. But the nagging guilt...

As far as finding feeds, I just thought about what I look at or search for regularly. Or what I would like to know about without going looking for it, like local education news. I skim the headlines in the print paper, but my rss does it for me now. The searches didn't find me anything that seemed worth reading regularly. I subscribed to a couple fellow CSLA bloggers, but those were folks I already knew in the real world.

My favorite thing about Google Reader: There is a button that says "manage friends" as if one click could manage Rebecca or Jess or.... Oh, but according to Google, I don't have any friends. Well!

Off Topic

Since I wrote about my little guy's seizures earlier in the blog, I may as well keep it up even if it has nothing to do with library 2.0. He has been doing great. He is in kindergarten now and is really starting to read independently. Just last week he wrote a story about a robot. It was furry, cute and cuddly. (or as he wrote: free, cuet and cutily)So you can all see that his brain works just fine, thank you very much. He also sings, dances, tells jokes, is learning to play the violin, and throws the occasional tantrum.

Last week, after 3 months with no seizures, he had a mild one in the night. I woke up, sat with him until it was over, then we all went back to sleep. The next morning I went to work, and he went to school. I'm thinking, "No big thing. I can deal with an occasional twitching fit in the night." Then three nights later it happened again. It was slightly longer, three minutes instead of two, but the jerks were bigger and stronger than the past. It left me feeling scared and helpless again, like the first ones over the summer. The hardest part is that I can't settle in to sleep. My son sleeps on a single bed pushed up next to my side of the bed so that I will wake up if he seizes. My husband and 90-pound dog share my bed. They both twitch, toss, and make strange noises from time to time. And it all wakes me up. So I am grumpy, tense, and did I mention the PMS?

To add to my general level of worry, a close friend of mine has a daughter who is also epileptic. (This condition is amazingly common, once you start talking about it.) But her daughter is a very different case. She is older than my son by six months, but is developmentally behind him. When she was younger, I thought she might be autistic. She talks now, but still has some symptoms of Asperger's. We have suspected for quite some time that she might be having those mini absence seizures because she does check out from time to time. So her mom took her to Children's Hospital to have an extended EEG done, where they watch her brain patterns for several hours. Within a one-hour period, they recognized 16 brief seizures. Sixteen! The family had been avoiding medicating, but after that they decided they had to. Obviously her frequent brain storms are getting in the way of her development. But then she had some reaction to the medication that was life threatening. I didn't get all the details, just that if a rash showed up she should stop the medication and go to the ER. The rash showed up last week. And the mom has had both thyroid cancer and breast cancer in the last three years. So what am I whining about? Thankfully, she is doing great.

Week 4, Thing #2, The Avatar

I teach my students that research is cyclical. I am finding that Library 2.0 is as well. Yes, I finished my avatar oh so many months ago. Or 2 weeks ago, according to the assignment order. But today my kids became enthralled with it. Then they wanted to make their own so they played around with the program. Then they wanted to look at other librarian avatars. (Yes, they are geeks in training.) So we took a tour of the SLL 2.0 blogroll and looked at lots of avatars. And they all look essentially alike. We are all so trim and wrinkle free. Honestly, the avatars do not look anything like us. I have been to our conferences. So I added my most recent school photo to my profile just to counteract the unrepresentative avatars amongst us. Let's show our true faces, warts and all.

Week 4, Thing #81/2, RSS Part 2

I have tried Bloglines. It is much easier to share. But I do prefer the layout of Google Reader. I like how it displays all of the feeds in a single in-box. Bloglines shows the folders, but you have to click on each one to open the folder, making it feel like I am opening bookmarks rather than receiving a feed. More pull, less push, technology-wise. So, I guess I prefer Google's passive consumption. If I am going to feed, just shove it down my throat.

I have also found, thanks to a X-Mas gift from Aunt Becky, that yes, I am smarter than a 5th grader.

Week 4, Thing #8, RSS

My old RSS feed was a fellow named Erik who sat in the co-pilot's seat of my library and routinely flopped around on the Internet occasionally turning his monitor toward me and saying, "you gotta read this!" Hence my regular blog reading paralleled his interests, more than my own. Yes, I like bikes, but he was a true bike snob. I like dogs, but he would spend hours ogling photos, saying "Wook at da cute widdle puppy." But he has moved on. Just a few days ago, he moved to Santa Cruz to further his education.

The most intimidating thing about this assignment was selecting my own interests without my sidekick. So, no bikesnob, no dogblog. Education. Libraries. Some humor and random stuff. I used Google Reader, which works fine for me. But I notice that I can't just publicly share my RSS feeds. I can only share particular items. So, I starred a bunch of items to be shared. But I wonder if bloglines is more fluid in its sharing abilities. I will go play with that. Until my kids demand my attention. For now, here is the link to my public Google Reader.

Week 3, Thing #7 I'm Back!

It is nice to see that my blog has been sitting here patiently waiting for me all these long months that I have been neglecting it. So, that is my thing that I like about technology. It can actually be patient. But that is also one of its downsides. I wonder how many blogs sit around gathering dust, started with the best of intentions, maintained daily for awhile, then every few days, then just petering out. By the time the writer tries to revive it, the audience has lost interest. Look! Over there! A new blog, all new and shiny, whose author is still excited and the posts are still fresh.

For awhile I was reading a dogblog regularly. It was fresh. It was funny. Then the poster stopped posting. I stopped checking back daily, then weekly. Months went by. Then, for old time's sake, I typed in the URL. There was something new. But the humor felt old, worn-out. The dogs all looked the same. I had moved on. To a bikesnobblog.

Another thing I love about technology is craigslist. It is my resource for all things old and out-dated. I'll take some digital photos of my antique typewriter and bicycle found on craigslist and add them to the post once I am back at work.

I also love that I got an e-mail from a physicist in Romania who had a question about a statue I had taken a picture of and posted on my flickr site. And a travel site, schmap.com, asked to use one of my flickr pics as well. It is included in this widget.


Side Note: In order to edit this post, I had to spend quite some time realizing that my widget was not working, figuring out why I was unable to edit my post, and then downloading a new version of Internet Explorer (not my favorite browser!) in order to edit my post. Ah, technology! For every new wonder, we wonder where all our time goes.

I am off to post a comment on someone else's blog now.