Thing #13 - Twitter

I'd heard of Twitter before but had never actually tried it; it never sounded appealing. Now that I've tried it ... well, I still don't really find it appealing. Trying to do this on any kind of regular basis would be one more distraction from whatever I'm trying to do. (Strictly speaking, any "tweet" that was really trying to honestly answer the question "what are you doing?" would have to say something like "I'm typing on Twitter.")

In a way, it reminds me of people who talk on their phones the whole time when they're supposed to be doing something else: the process of constantly talking about what they're doing would, I think, inevitably interfere with the main activity. At least Twitter might be less bothersome to others nearby.

I can't see this really fitting in with either my work or personal life; again, it would be mainly a distraction. I can see some value in libraries doing something like NLC_Reference does, but I can't help wondering if there might be better ways to do the same sort of thing.

One way I could imagine this being potentially useful would be for something like an online meeting between several people, all following each others' tweets, like a conference call via keyboarding. Is anyone using it this way?

Thing #12: LibraryThing

I'd set up my LibraryThing account several months ago, and thought it looked like it could be useful, but I never got around to adding any books (until now). Adding the books is easy enough, but nonetheless I doubt that this is something I'll be able to keep up with.

The social aspect of this doesn't particularly appeal to me. I'm not that interested in finding out who else owns the same books that I do: I don't see from looking at this that common ownership of a particular book is a good predictor of common interests in other areas. (Or perhaps this just comes with being a troglodyte.)

I could see that having a remotely accessible catalog of one's own books could be useful when going to used book sales: you could check to make sure you didn't already have a particular book before buying it. There are a couple of problems with this, though. If you have a book collection large enough to make this necessary, you'd need a paid account (whether it would be worth the cost is debatable). More significantly, a large collection (especially of older books without ISBN's) would take considerable time to enter and keep up.

On the other hand, the Readers Advisory staff at our library has made good use of their LibraryThing account.

Thing #11: Blog about Technology

This one should be easy... get ready for a rant.

Last week was one of those times that bring out the latent Luddite in me. In the middle of the week, a tech from a company that we sometimes use for tech-support odd jobs that we don't want to do ourselves showed up to do a long-postponed replacement of a piece of equipment, something that should have been a simple matter. But Something Went Wrong, and our ILS was down for most of the next 24 hours, and we're still having some cleanup issues from that.

Just at the same time this problem developed, an apparently unrelated problem at the telephone company's end disrupted Internet access for one of our branches. Wouldn't have been a big deal except for the wasted time caused by the assumption that two problems occurring at the same time would also share causality.

And just as we were starting to get those two issues straightened out, another (apparently unrelated) problem developed with one of our servers that caused the database of customizations for our public catalog to be corrupted. Not a big deal, I run weekly backups of that - except that the last two months of backups have disappeared. Still not sure what happened there.

So last week was not good from a tech standpoint. Technology can be wonderful, and I'm normally an enthusiastic user of computers, but when things go wrong, and especially when multiple things go wrong at the same time, it can be a headache.

I don't remember now where I read this, but someone has said that computers are very good for solving problems we wouldn't have if we didn't have computers. There seems to be some truth to that.

Image generators

This one went better - I had some fun with it. The Custom Computer Keyboard gave me this - which I could really use sometimes:



And ALA's mini-READ posters gave me this (based on a Photoshopped picture from my sister):



It's easy to see where these tools could have application for our library Web site.

One other image generator tool we've used is Yearbook Yourself, which gave us this lovely photo:

More flickr

This one was almost a washout. I tried "Bubblr" and "Flickr Font" - couldn't get either one to work. Then I tried the "Flickr Logo Maker", which worked, but seemed pretty pointless - you could do pretty much the same thing in Word.

I had better luck with "Spell with flickr", which resulted in this:



Not sure about its practical applications, though.

flickr - part one

Violin
Originally uploaded by pejorg2000

This photo is of a violin made by my grandfather in 1955. My wife found it listed on the site of a violin dealer in Anchorage earlier this year and we made arrangements to purchase it. (No idea of how it ended up in Alaska.)

I've had a flickr account since Yahoo discontinued the old Yahoo Photos service last year. Flickr is great for sharing and finding photos (and adding them to blogs, obviously), BUT if your main interest is in using it just for sharing photos with a few friends and family members, and you don't need all of its special features, eventually you may find the limitations of the free account to be - well, limiting. I'm currently trying out Shutterfly for that purpose, and so far it seems OK. It remains to be seen how well I like it in the long run.