Knitting stuff...

So, I have been busy over the last few months. Making things. Mostly with knitting needles, although kitchen equipment has featured in the making-things department as well. Kitchen tally was about 12 quarts tomatoes (nice Romas and Amish Paste from our garden) canned, 6 1/2 pint jars of tomato paste, 6 pints yummy Icicle Pickles, 3 pints pickled beets, apple-cranberry butter, strawberry jam...
In the knitting department: fingerless gloves from the pattern in One More Skein, although I have no idea whose hands she measured! Another half-current for bedroom window with one more window to go. Wonderful warm felted slippers - from Drops pattern and a breeze once I figured out the decreases! Making a hat now.. and gearing up for a Guernsey sweater from Traditional Knitting. That will take forever as the gauge is 13 x 17 over 2 inches... fingering weight yarn, I think, is called for.
Of course, all knitting updates are over on www.ravelry.com under my lovely page... AthenaNike.

after a long hiatus..

A feeling of ... guilt? Nah. Been busy with garden - lots of flowers doing very well this year, and tons of veggies growing well. And, now we're waiting for the kids to arrive - Pearl should kid around the 25th July!

The boys are growing well... Leopold is looking more and more like a buck with a heavier neck and head. Henry is a pill, just like his Alpine counterpart Miss Mossy.

Been knitting away too.. that's all up on www.ravelry.com - especially happy to have the baby shower items done.

An update..

.. of sorts. I'm really terrible at blogging, journaling, what ever you want to call it. Loads of stuff rambles through my head, I just never take the time to commit it to words..

Added a playlist feature down at the bottom. Not sure it will function as I intended - should autoplay and hasn't seemed to want to do that yet.

Ok - back to work...

In which reading instructions becomes a virtue

After yesterday's technology debacle (see tweets under NikeBlack, though you'll have to ask permission!) and a non-functioning MP3 player I was ready to throw the thing out. Well, today after hearing that, per the instructions, the MP3 player has to be charged before use and doing so, I am now successfully listening to Elizabeth Peters' Crocodile on the Sandbank. So. ta-da. I have an MP3 player and already have some music tracks on it, and an audio book.

23 Things wrap up..

Well, it was fun - I enjoyed playing around with Web 2.0 stuff and, especially, finding new things to play with. (just remember I need the next disc of a downloaded audio book! left our heroine on the banks of the Nile... ).

The podcasts and Overdrive were perhaps the most useful thing - at least to me personally. I found some interesting podcasts (other than NPR's) and Overdrive was pretty easy to use.

Technorati, I think, was a bit overrated... well, at least for right now I have no direct use for it. That may change.

I do like learning in this format - somewhat self-directed, some contacts in the virtual space, some in the physical. We certainly enjoyed sharing what we found and were learning here in my library.

Overdrive!

Not bad - found a title I wanted, checked it out, downloaded it, after a bit of fishing found the overdrive console software to download, and have burned part one to CD ready for me to listen to on the way home!

Based on this experience, I'd shop here again...

Podcast surprise

So, I noodled around on podcast alley and wasn't being particularly impressed by what I was seeing. Finally, I narrowed the list to libraries and found a list of likely podcasting libraries, most of whom are not podcasting regularly.

However, I clicked on the Lansing PL (Illinois, though I thought initially it was the Michigan Lansing) and found a fascinating author talk podcast! Yugoslav born, of German descent, Katherine Hoeger Flotz talked about what it was like to grow up in WW2 Yugoslavia. It wasn't fun. She wrote a memoir A Pebble in My Shoe chronicling her childhood and how she came to America.

This was a real find for me, one I never expected. WW2 has some interest for me as I have relatives who lived through it, on the ground as they say, in Germany. FLotz's account was great to listen too, and the best part was that I could hear what her story in her own words. I certainly never would have known about her otherwise, and going to Lansing IL for the actual program was not an option, even had I known about the program.

Socializin' on the web...

Yes - I have been twittering, facebooking, urging others to do likewise, and madly saving websites, articles and the like on Delicious. All useful tools!

The best part of Twitter has been keeping up with my sister who has been living under what amounts to house arrest in Islamabad for just over a year (she's due home next week!). Even got my mother onto Twitter so she'd know what was going on with our world-traveler. Anyway, via Twitter we've known that my sister was safe and sound, had experienced an earthquake, saw a Lamborghini in Islamabad, as well as assorted vehicles all hell-bent on arriving where ever they were headed before anyone else might get there... and on and on. It beat rare phone calls - try coordinating phone calls when the person you want to call is 10 hours ahead of you (it always seems to be tomorrow where she is).

Yesterday I was poking around the lists of libraries that use Twitter and found one in Manchester, NH (I think I've actually been in that one!) using Twitter to update their customers on library happenings. They let folks know when they had closed early due to weather, that a particular part of the library was closed, and other assorted pieces of information a library patron might want to know. Made me think that we could use Twitter to let our patrons know when a hot new title is available...

Now, if I could just get our Facebook page to feed all sorts of cool library info... but that means learning code. (just watch my eyes glaze over, besides, I don't think that way)

23things out of order- youtube..

I've tubing for a while - love it! Found some real fun stuff worth a giggle or two. Here's my favorite music video from an over-the-top Bollywood film of the same name: Om Shanti Om.

Have also found some intriguing new sounds: ever heard of a HANG drum?

And, then there's the incomparable Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir in Sweet Home Alabama. Of course, The Zimmers have to be in the fav list, too. This one's for all of us who will be rockin' the nursing/retirement homes in a few years. Kudos to you if you know what a "zimmer" is. And, no, in this case it's not the German word for "room."

Finally, for those of us who enjoy a good bilingual joke there's the German coastguard item.

Happy New Year edition

There is always a price to pay for being on vacation (even when that vacation is interrupted by bank deposits, security company calls, and overflowing book drops that need to be emptied). I'm still working through an endless to-do list and the darn thing keeps growing.

Right now the big push is to get nominations in for the library's Literacy Heroes program. Lots of opportunities to nominate folks who are working to improve literacy in Chester County.

A bonus message.

Web 2.0 tools...

I took a look at the award winners - love the one where you can play around with haridos, hair color, etc.

Then i checked out wufoo.com and immediately set about creating a customer survey to put up on the lib's website. Wasn't rocket science and I'm sure there are better surveys. However, for a first try it wasn't bad and the site was easy to use. Sometime I'll have to go try out surveymonkey though - more precision there, I think.

Web-based apps..

We don't have the full MSOffice software at home, only the piddly little program for wordprocessing and spreadsheets included with the PC we bought. So, whenever I receive docs that are in MSOffice format, I go to my Google account and open them in Google Docs. It's a real lifesaver!

Wiki's, or, I'm terribly behind..

Ok - my take on wiki's - what a way cool way to get things done. I have participated in our library's wiki, a professional association's conference planning wiki, a local event planning wiki; I have looked at wiki's and drooled about what could be done, if only, if only I had more time (and now I'm planning on jumping into the world of online courses in January... so, I get wiki's and there must be so much more we can do with them... family genealogy, parties, who wants what for Christmas-birthday-Hannukah?

update:
Ok - added my fav library-scene-in-a-movie to the wiki...

A hand-made spinning wheel...

and gorgeous at that!

See more photos here...

Ravelry, knitting, online societies and life

Oh lordy, another blog to follow. But, really, how could I possibly NOT follow a blog that combines French cooking with German... cafe creme and pretzels. Really.

One thing we Amis (German shorthand for Americans) miss out on is the Advent calendar... loads of them out there with different themes. My favorites - the DROPS calendar with cute holiday knitting ideas and the the culinarily themed one from Kochtopf (aka the Cooking pot, stock pot, etc).

And it gets better - here's a flash-back to the eighties (in case you were feeling nostalgic) - as someone commented somewhere else, the hairdos alone are worth looking at here!

Never seen an Advent calendar? Well, the idea is that it helps you count down to Christmas from December 1. Children are big fans - lots of fun stuff for them. For the grups (grown ups) it's themed calendars, with everything from craft ideas, to recipes, to knitting patterns, to, well, who knows.

We are missing out! Demand your local Advent calendar today.

Library 2.0

I think some of the discussions referenced have become moot: people are using library/web 2.0 in libraries and out.

Personally, I think the Web 2.0 tools are just that: tools to use in our work. I use what works, learn about what I don't know yet (like how to create a fabu Facebook page for my library a la Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts, Trinity College of Music (Greenwich, UK). They have RSS feeds from their OPAC to the Facebook page to show new books. Not to mention a catalog search button, and other good stuff.

So, for me Library 2.0 means learning lots of new stuff, fast, in order to keep up with the world which is where my customers are.

Dancing Border Collie...

Remember, if you want to get a Border Collie as a pet - they need something to do. They MUST have something to do - then they're happy happy dogs....

In which I do not conquer Technorati..

However, it has its uses, especially in the serendipity department, or wow, look at what I found.

So, I started out with a search on library management. Not so good. Tried that as a phrase. Hmm. Better. Looked through the blogs listed and found, sigh, ANOTHER one to add to my bloglines blog roll on library stuff.

Browsing through that blog's posts (see link above if you've already forgotten my newest find) led me to the infamous Annoyed Librarian. Ok - the AL, as those in the know call this blogger, generates an inordinate amount of comment, far more that this blogger is due. Some say they know who it is, some are incensed this person blogs anonymously and at LJ, too boot. Here's a fine example of an AL post with 176+ comments. The comments are worth reading, too; lots of self-impotent peeps gassing away there, too. Yes, I posted there. Booby prize to you if you figure out which post is mine.

Some folks think the AL is funny - well, not ha-ha funny, but funny as in tongue-in-cheek so. I'm not so sure. Sometimes I think the AL is out to cause discord in the ranks for no better reason than, "because I can." Francine Fialkoff quotes the AL as saying that the AL is no more "the writer" than Charlotte Bronte was Jane Eyre. Well, that don't warsh. Publishing one unified story, that comments on society and mores, is not the same as publishing a long string of posts in the blogosphere that masquerade as serious commentary and then asking us to believe it's all in good fun. Besides, all fiction entails autobiography.

As to whether the AL is fostering necessary discussion - well, I'd say the AL isn't adding anything new or original to the debate on "whither the library." Tina McElroy Ansa has a much better written and thought through, though old, argument about books and reading in the November 30 Atlanta Journal-Constitution; it's worth reading this essay, pondering it, and discussing the issue.

So, there you have it. My technorati odyssey. I'll be back for more.

on Technorati...

... which will be multiple posts until I figure this out. Talk about information overload, especially at the end of a long day, at the end of a long week.

So, I did find our humble library blog listed among the blogs on Technorati. We've been fav'd once but have no authority. Oh well. One step at a time.... :-)

Del.icio.us

It was a great day when I first discovered Delicious. No, I am serious about this. Finally, a place where all my bookmarks could live, and I could find them again! No more looking for a bookmark on the wrong PC. No more, "I know I found a site about that...." No more wading through 4 million bookmarks hoping to find that URL. Fully portable, fully findable bookmarks. With tags! Here are my bookmarks.

I tag things for friends, save articles, websites, knitting patterns, the local weather-report site, and on and on. I put the Delicious tools on my toolbar right away - highly recommend you do that, too. It's a quick login, and away you go. Click the "tag" icon, make a few notes in the comments box, adds your tags, and save.

Dislike disorganized tags? You can bundle them, rename them, delete, them; in short, you are in control of your indexing and subject headings.

And, for those of us using Firefox - when you bookmark a site using Firefox, you can add it to your Delicious account as well.

Best thing since sliced bread.