Subscriptions, please.

Okay, at last press, I had subscribed to 26 feeds!  And I’m still hungry!  Innovations Team, I think you created a monster.  As of today, after a little fine-tuning, I subscribe to 32.  Of course, I haven’t exhausted all of the possibilities out there.  I’m sure with a few (free) moments to really think about it, I will find more things that pique my interest.  I did, however, find it hard to find feeds about libraries.  Well, I guess I should say, it was hard to find feeds that were not about a single library/library system.  I stumbled upon a couple of good ones, though.  There are some great feeds on our website(of course!) and I have subscribed to a couple.  The other one is about libraries in general.  It’s a weblog by Steven Cohen that I found on librarystuff.net.  Mr. Cohen writes for Information Today magazine and he posts his blogs about, you guessed it…all things library.  I don’t know about anybody else, but that kinda rocks to me.  Of course my other feeds are cool, too.  New music, new movies, new HK films(!), food and drink…gotta love it!  The only thing I don’t like about this is that there is so much information and it never leaves.  Does anyone know how to make the articles I’ve read go away?  Help!

Correction!  I just read Dewey the Decimal Smasher’s blog, and I now subscribe to A Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette.  Thanks, Dewey!!

RSS…Feed ME!!!!

Let me preface this blog by saying that I will probably talk about my kids a lot in these blogs.  I can’t help it, they’re great!  Plus, they know their way around a computer, let me tell ya. 

Last August I attended a Web 2.0 presentation by the wonderfully informative Laura Solomon.  Needless to say, I walked away with a fair amount of basic knowledge and a thirst for more.  I learned about Library 2.0, podcasts (I even starred in one!), Second Life, and much more.  One of the great things I learned about that day was RSS Feeders.  I had wondered for a while what that strange orange block was at the top of my yahoo! homepage.  I even noticed that we had one on the library’s website.  I remember one day I clicked on it and was met with a load of mumble-jumble.  I was happy to find out from Laura that I had not broken the Internet, I just needed a special “reader” to view the information.  I learned about bloglines and how helpful it can be to people who like to be in the know.  After the presentation, I did my own research, scoping out bloglines and such.  I guess I wasn’t too impressed because I didn’t create an account.  Even then I could see the use for such a thing, I just didn’t think I needed to be that connected.  Well, Thing 5 has let me see the error of my ways.  I now have an RSS reader, through Google, though not bloglines.  It’s better this way; I don’t have to remember yet another password, since I can just sign in through my gmail account.  I have set up my reader, and I have subscribed to so many things.  Music, movies, games, food…I’m getting it all and in one great place!  I can’t wait to tell my daughter about it; maybe she can anime and manga news.  Gee, I sound like a commercial or something.  I love this!  It’s neat to have all that information right at my fingertips; even stuff I didn’t know I wanted!  Wait, maybe that’s a little crazy.  You tell me.

Tech-savvy? Not really.

Thank God for teenagers!  I honestly don’t know where I would be if I didn’t have a high-schooler at home.  She is constantly on the computer, showing me more new and wonderful things.  She’s the reason I have a myspace and a facebook.  She’s also the reason I have a playlist on both of them.  She introduced me to Slide, wikipedia, and blogthings.  Under her influence, I no longer use dictionaries or thesauri; I simply go to dictionary.com or m-w.com.  In short (no pun intended), I wouldn’t know about half of the 23 Things if it weren’t for my teen.  That being said, I have made it my mission to learn more about all of the things that have had such a profound effect on our lives and our world’s pop culture.  I took the Innovations Team’s advice and visited some of the sites listed for this entry.  I have to say, for the most part it was like reading Aramaic or something.  The blogs and news(?) on a few of those sites were definitely geared for a certain type of person.  Ahem, not me.  I did, however, find a few articles that peaked my interest:

• wired.com: I didn’t read too much, because of the spoiler alerts, but there was a blurb about the cool gadgets Batman uses in The Dark Knight and how “real-world” they are. 
• I also liked that wired didn’t blog about just gadgets and new technology; there were a couple newsworthy articles about the environment and such.
• makezine.com: Under projects, I found that someone had made a magnetic chess board to hang on their wall.  Why?  Because of the lack of space for any other type of chess board.  I think that’s a pretty cool idea.  I wonder if the inventor will make more to sell.

Well, I learned a few things from those sites; more than anything I learned that I’m just not that into technology.  Not that I don’t appreciate the progress that has been made thus far and what is still to come, but I’m the kind of person who likes to wait to make sure something actually works before hopping on the bandwagon.  I guess I’m kinda old-school that way.

2 of 7/12 Things…One Easy, One Difficult

It’s hard to believe there are only seven habits of highly successfully people.  It seems like there should be more, but what do I know?  Anyhoo…after watching the tutorial about said habits, and gaining a better understanding of them, I decided to write about Habits 2 and 7.

Habit 2 – Accept responsibility for your own learning.  Duh!  This habit not only makes perfect sense to me, it is definitely the one that I find the easiest to succeed at. <sorry for the displaced preposition!>  It just so happens that I enjoy learning; so much so, I have attended a fair number of conferences and workshops over the past five years.  I think it is important to expand my knowledge base as often as possible.  “Idle hands” and all that good stuff.  Well, idle minds, in this case.  Lifelong learning isn’t just a catch phrase for me, it is extremely important.  As a famous person once said, “You’re only as smart as….”, wait, wrong quote.  Nevermind!

Habit 7 – Teach and mentor others  I actually love helping others; I get a sort of kick out of it. (I’m such a dork sometimes!)  However, in some instances, I find it quite difficult to teach people.  Especially if I’m teaching something that is completely foreign.  There are times when I have trouble getting people to listen to me.  I don’t know if people see me as too young, think I’m not smart, don’t trust that I know what I’m talking about, or a combination of the three.  And to be honest, I don’t really care.  I know what I know and that’s enough for me.  I have noticed that if I talk about certain things enough, people begin to listen, but for the most part they don’t.  I’m guessing I need to work on that.

Well, this has been a real slice…until next time.