FINISHED.

Alright, I'm just going to answer the prompt questions..

1. The things I was most interested in were LibraryThing (which I've continued to use) and Bloglines (which I've also continued to use). Especially Bloglines, because I keep track of quite a few different things online, and it's nice to be able to have it all in one site. Rollyo was also pretty cool.

2. Um.. lifelong learning. Well. I know more about the Internet than before. And it's mostly useful stuff. So. It should help.. life. Did I get it right?

3. I was surprised at how many things interested me in this program, to be honest.. I kind of thought it was going to be just a boring "class" that is supposed to make us better library employees or something, but it was more than that.. it introduced me to some useful tools, things that I can use outside of work as well.

4. Improving the program? Don't force us to create so many accounts. It's hard to keep track of all of them.

5. I have no idea. I'm not the most up-to-date dude ever.

In closing, I would just like to say..

Thanks in advance for the Best Buy gift card. Goodbye.

Thing 22

Well, we're almost finished. Woo.

So I decided to use Overdrive, because it looked the easiest. Yeah.

Anyway, I looked around at a couple different books, and I requested one. I was told I'd get an e-mail when it becomes available. I'm not sure what that means, since there was no one in front of me on the list, but whatever. I checked my inbox and it wasn't there, so I will continue to wait for it. Anyway, it looks like it could be pretty useful, so I'm interested, and it seemed incredibly easy to use, so I'm excited. It seems like an excellent thing for a library to have, for obvious reasons..

Anyway, on to the final thing..

Thing #21

I tried a couple podcasts on one of the lists and couldn't get them to work.. I finally was able to listen to one that posts electronic music (which I'm listening to as I type this..). I did subscribe to some feed about folk music, too, so.. yeah. I already knew about podcasts, I just don't use them. I never have found one that was particularly interesting, to be honest. Sorry. I don't really see what the library would use them for, either. But I'm just a page. Library assistant. Whatever.

Things 19 and 20

My eyes are bulging a little right now, because I just had a bunch of stuff typed out, and then somehow deleted it. Great thing is, Blogger autosaved right after I did it. Awesome.

Anyway, I was interested to see pandora.com on one of the Web 2.0 lists, because a friend had mentioned it to me, and I had meant to check it out for a while. Perfect.

It's a pretty awesome site. You can type in the name of any artist or song you want, and Pandora finds music similar to what you you've selected. You can create your own "radio station" that plays only the music that you want it to play. And the coolest thing is that it's all free. (As I understand it, the site is paid for by advertising..) Also, because it costs the site for every play(again, as I understand it), you can apparently skip only so many songs per hour. It's still awesome.

Thing 20

I didn't actually know that there are people out there who don't know what youtube is, but whatever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU96Yvk310s

No real video, but the song is amazing enough that every person who links to it should sit mesmerized through the entire thing. All fifteen minutes. Yes.



Hopefully that works..

Things 17 and 18

Thing 17

I tried this a couple times and couldn't get it to work, so yeah. Sorry. I can't really say anything about it, which is why I combined two "things" into one post.

Thing 18

I must confess, this is the first I've ever heard of online apps. It's an interesting program, but I can't see that it would be useful to me.. I mean, I'm 16, it's not like I'm sending out lots of important documents.. but it's interesting, and I'm glad I know about it for future reference. Nice to stay with the times, I guess.

Still, I don't really have a problem with carrying stuff on my flash drive, I use a portable Internet browser anyway, so I have the flash drive plugged in either way.

But mainly, as I said, I just don't have any reason to use these apps.

So yeah, more learning.

Well, I already know what wikis are, but I didn't realize there were so many of them. I will say that I'm constantly amazed by just how much information is available right at my fingertips. Now I sound like one of those over-enthusiastic elementary school teachers or something.

But yeah.

I checked out the BookLoversWiki and liked it, though it's still kind of small.. There are hardly any reviews up right now. Hopefully it grows, it's an easy-t0-use site for book reviews. For now, I'll still probably just do a google search or something.

I also looked at some of the other wikis, but wasn't terribly interested in most of the topics, to be honest. They looked kind of small as well. But whatever.

Okay, great...

So there's a search engine for blogs, and it's called Technorati.

I looked at a few random blogs.. one about Sarah Palin, one about the iPhone, one about Windows 7, and one about.. I can't remember. But anyway, yeah, I guess this could be useful, I'll definitely remember to use it when doing research on something I want to buy.. I mean, if there's any market for it at all, somebody's probably written a blog about it, so I will probably use Technorati in the future, yeah.

Anyway. I'm not going to do the optional thing, because I'm lazy.

Okay, let's get Library 2.0 in here, as well.

Um.. yeah. I'm not really a librarian... and I've worked here as a page for only a few weeks.. so maybe I'm missing something. But aren't libraries, like everybody else, always trying to adapt and change with the world around them? Aren't they, like everyone else, always trying to be more efficient, give better service, stay up-to-date?

I mean, like I said, maybe I'm missing the concept here. But it sounds like we're taking something that everybody does out of necessity, slapping on the rather kitchy (in my humble Library Page's opinion) label of "Library 2.0," and trying to make it something profound, when really, it's just things we're SUPPOSED to do anyway: provide good "customer service," run things smoothly, stay up with the times, etc. And if we haven't been doing that up until now.. well, I'm not sure what to say about that.

Seriously, if I'm misunderstanding this concept, help me out. I don't want to be blabbing about a topic about which I really know nothing. So enlighten me, I'm definitely open to looking at things from a different perspective.

Well, whatever.

I will most likely never use Delicious.. I'm sure it could be useful, but I just carry all my bookmarks in my FF browser on a flash drive.. and because I'm really finicky about organization on the computer, I already have my bookmarks organized very specifically. So yeah. I don't really have any interest in this. Except that one of the websites linked on the home page was pretty funny.

http://sadguysontradingfloors.tumblr.com/

I checked out the comments (or reviews, or whatever you'd like to call them) that people have left for some websites, and it looks pretty useless too. Those who did leave any comment at all ususally said something stupid or irrelevant.

I'm definitely not creating the optional account either. I'd never use it anyway.

So yeah.

Those are my thoughts.

Thing 12: Rollyo

My inerest in this thing was definitely clouded by the fact that we're required to create our own searchrolls.. I was a little bit irratated by that, because I don't want my own searchroll, and I don't want to create another account. Anyway, as you can see by the title, I wasn't in a great mood. I'm over it now. But I'm not going to fix it. Unless week six tells me I have to.

http://rollyo.com/polyurethane/i_dont_care/

So that's my search engine. Pretty awesome, huh?

Even though I didn't want to create my own searchroll, I will definitely be using other peoples rolls. So thing 12 wasn't a total failure for me.

Have a nice day,
Polyurethane

More week 5

Well, as you can see, I got the image to appear on the page.. but I thought it would be.. bigger. But apparently not.

Anyway, I don't really care, I've moved on to thing 11. So now I'm experimenting with "LibraryThing." I guess it's pretty cool, I haven't had much time to experiment with the website yet, but it seems like it might help find more books I would like. I will definitely at least explore it a little more, it looks interesting.

So yeah. I created the account and added five books: LotR trilogy (you can't call yourself a fan of fantasy if you haven't at least read them), The Art of Racing In the Rain, which is a new book that I just read and enjoyed very much (came across it while shelving, and it looked interesting), and Flowers For Algernon, which I also came across while shelving.

And there you have Thing 11.

imageja1.jpg hosted at ImageShack.us

Figured out how to make the image bigger, but it looks blurry from here, hopefully when I post it will look better, but who knows.

Quickpost this image to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, and others!

Week 5, thing 10

Mmk, image generators.

I tried one of the things from the "generator blog," but I don't have a clue if it works or not. It was called "Bullet With Your Name On It." So yeah. All you did was type in what you wanted on the bullet.. not to hard.

http://img376.imageshack.us/my.php?image=imageja1.jpg

I made that.. but I'm not sure... how to post it in my blog.. yet....

Oh, here's the url for the image generator..

http://161.58.20.24/signs/sign-generator/?parody=Get+Revenge&text=Enemy+name+here%21&font=dunkin&color=black&fontsize=12&move2=-340&move=333&rot=-90&pic=Bullet-With-Your-Name&offx=5&offy=5&tag=left&shadecolor=yellow

I don't really know what else to say.. except that, honestly, I'll probably never use this again unless I'm required to by someone. But whatever.

Week 4, Thing.. 9?

Yeah, more RSS stuff today. I tried out the different search tools recommended in the OWhatAGeek blog, and I definitely would say I like Syndic8 the best.. Topix.net immediately started flashing stupid ads in my face, I thought I was going to have a siezure before I could close the window. Technorati was okay, but didn't always find the things I was looking for. I will have to explore all three options a little further.

Anyway, RSS feeds are really nice, I don't have to check a bunch of websites anymore to see if they've been updated. I will definitely be using RSS outside of work from now on as well.

That picture is just a random thing that was on this computer, I wanted to experiment with the "add photo" option. It is pretty, though.

Week 4, Thing 8

Actually, I'm totally thrilled with this week's project, I never knew what RSS feeds were, and they've opened up a whole new world to me. Checking two dozen sites for updates can be tedious, to say the least, and RSS feeds solve the whole problem. I've already subscribed to a blog, Unshelved (comic strip), and xkcd (comic strip), and I've only been working with this for fifteen minutes. So yeah, I'm excited about this one, thanks to whoever's in charge of this program for including this stuff.

More Week 3

Hm, well, I checked out some of Flickr's apps, and the two that stuck out at me were the Montagr, where you can create photo mosaics (I've always thought these were awesome), and Flock, which is apparently a web browser specifically designed for better Flickr use. Interesting, no?

Anyway, as long as I'm here typing, I might as well do the next thing in week three, which is.. blog about technology? Hm. Lots to choose from.

Okay, I'll tell you about my mp3 player.. it's a Sony, it is compatible only with a program called Sonicstage (which is a crappy program made by Sony), and it's really old, so cracks are starting to spiderweb across the screen. I don't like it, especially because I can't format the songs the way I want to on it. (You may be thinking, "Well, Tim, why didn't you put in for that new mp3 player?" Actually, even if you are reading this, you probably aren't thinking that, because I never said what I asked for. Well, it's the Best Buy gift card. I'll tell you why I'm not getting the mp3 player anyway. What do I care if you care? I don't want just another crappy mp3 player, see? No offense to whoever's picking them out.) So, I'm thinking about getting that cool 8 gig SanDisk, which may not be the best option, which is why I haven't bought it yet. But I like what I've seen, and I like what I've heard.

No iPods for me, by the way. I don't really like Apple very much.

And so another entry is posted on the great walls of (InsertBlogTitleHere). I'm sure no one will ever read it, but guess what? I'm actually starting to have fun writing these, so I don't care if anybody reads them or not. I probably should care, what's the point of all this if no one reads it? Oh well.

Polyurethane, signing off.

Week 3

Hm. I guess people actually read/might read this, so I shall have to actually say something.

So. Here we are.

Sorensen was closed for a week, thus, I did not come to work last week, thus, I did not post on this.. blog. (I can't tell you how much I hate that word. My hatred for it is only surpassed by my hatred for stuffing, and the even worse word, "blogosphere.")

Anyway, I'm playing catch-up. I'm still not sure exactly what's required of me, I'm sure that by the time I get to the end of this, I'll find out that everything I was supposed to do, I didn't do, and I don't get my gift card to Best Buy. Oh well, all I can do is try.

I checked out Flickr just a few minutes ago, it was pretty cool, like youtube with pictures or something. I don't want to create an account, hopefully that's not part of this exercise.. I already have enough stupid accounts that I can't remember how to access. Anyway, after typing in the search term "scissors" (there was a scissors lying next to me on the desk), I came up with some pretty cool images. Yeah, believe it or not. Pretty cool images of.. scissors.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/snapify/1234712605/

There's one of 'em.

I like scissors, they come in handy so often. This one looks sharp, I would like to use it on some paper. And I like stuff that looks like it's floating. And I like the shadows and light.

Did I do a good enough job blogging about it?

And, just because I'm the kind of person that goes above and beyond the call of duty (wink, wink) here's another one.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/turbomatte/531505385/

I like this one too, the scissors look like they've cut a lot of stuff. They're all marked up and old. And rusty. And the lighting is cool in this one as well.

I hope that's what I was supposed to do. If not, then oh well. I can do only my best. Did I already say that?

Weeks 1 & 2

Well, it's really nice out today. Perfect weather, just cool enough for a jacket. I watched a slide show about lifelong learning, and I read a Wikipedia article about Library 2.0. I created a blog. The Cubs are in first.

Overall, it's been a good day so far.

And.. apparently I'm supposed to write about lifelong learning.. Okay, here goes..

I think everyone is a "lifelong learner," whether they know it or not. Just think about how many mundane things you do every day. For example, if you aren't me, you might make your bed. Chances are, you'll get better at it after years and years of doing this. Obviously, there are more important things to learn than making a bed (although, if you're me, you still don't really know how...), but the idea is there. It applies to everything you do. Maybe you cook. (Again, not really my forte..). I'm guessing that experience makes you better at it. I can't say, I haven't done it. Come to think of it, I probably shouldn't be talking about all these things I'm NOT learning....

Okay, I play music. Every day. I've definitely gotten better over time.

My point is, I guess, that everyone is a "lifelong learner" in some way. We need to take that ability to learn, that some of us don't even know is there, and apply it everywhere. Anyone can learn anything, if they are willing to try.

So there it is, I hope it's long enough.