This week's Patron Picks

The Mask of Atreus: some secrets should stay buried
by A. J. Hartley (MPK patron) Dr. Hartley teaches Shakespeare at UNCC. This is his first published novel, released in paperback in April. We have had good response from patrons & have filled several QP requests to other branch locations.

King of Lies - John Hart

Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen

My SitePal exercise. Woa, it worked!

I was playing around with SitePal and decided to give it a try. I was thinking of putting it on my blog but when I clicked on the "embed" option (as opposed to "email") it seemed to be telling me I had to subscribe or pay for that option. So I emailed it to myself instead. When I opened the email there was a "click here" to play link which worked fine. It also said that if that didn't work to paste the url address into my browser. I decided to try and paste that address into my template and Voila! Click here to see my "talking Avatar."

Library 2.0 - FUN not FUD

I took a look at "Technorati" and searched for library related blogs. I found several interesting ones, The Shifted Librarian, Librarians' Internet Index, and LIS News among them, but mostly I discovered that it would be hard to find even one where the subject of L2, 2.0 or RSS is not mentioned. One post of particular interest "Neither far out nor in deep" by John Blyberg (Ann Arbor District Library) discusses some of the insecurities of libraries today regarding technology and why some consider L2 to be "scary". Until now my concern has been whether I can keep up with all the changes in information technology. Now I wonder if the ones who are the most frightened are our patrons. Through their Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) we may become inhibited and afraid of experimentation and innovation.

The past two weeks at work I have witnessed our staff coming together for a common goal, teaching each other and learning more than most of us expected through that process. Yes, we are definitely having fun and I think we have reached a point where we can finally say, "There's no more FUD at MPK!"

RSS Feeds

OK. I set up my account with bloglines.com http://www.bloglines.com/public/marlobro
and created ONE MORE username & password. I hate to admit that it's almost too much for me. Yahoo, Blogger, Flickr, Bloglines, Bell South, Duke Power, the bank, eBay, Paypal. . . not to mention the "I am I said a fan of Neil Diamond" message board! So now I have a little black book with all those important names & passwords and I am sleeping a little better at night.

I'm still learning my way around the bloglines site and have a few feeds on my list. Most of those I don't really need since I can book mark those places in "my favorites" with my Earthlink total access at home. I would like to keep up with a few blogs I've come across so I think I might try using Bloglines for that. I can see the advantage to using this service. It would be a great time saver. So I will continue to explore this idea.

Today I experimented with the Flickr Color Pickr

You just click anywhere on the color wheel and it brings up several pictures with that color scheme.

"Winter coloured by a glass vase" was originally downloaded by Zqb.

This week's Patron Picks

Owl Island by Randy Sue Coburn

Dangerous Undertaking by Mark de Castrique, former Charlotte police officer.
http://www.readersclub.org/reviews/tresults.asp?id=2315
This is the first in a series by this author. If you enjoy this book you will want to read
Grave Undertaking (2004) and Foolish Undertaking (2006)

Flickr continued -

Since Yahoo doesn't appear to recognize that we are not all 20 somethings in mini skirts I wanted to modify my Avatar badge. After giving it some thought I downloaded my full size avatar into Picasa and cropped it to the close up view I wanted. I then uploaded the new picture into my Flickr account & pasted it into my blog template. This last part is never easy for me. It is definitely a process of trial and error to figure out which section of language to replace with the new code. I was amazed that it only took two tries to place my badge where I wanted it but then I became over confident and decided to change the border color of my badge. It took four or five tries to put it back afterwards! I will say that I'm not so phobic about making changes now that I've experimented some with the template.

Flickr & Picasa

Last night I was able to set up my Flickr account and posted one picture successfully. My next task was to post the picture on my blog. While trying to figure all this out I went to my photo editing program on my home computer and discovered a shortcut. I use Picasa 2 which is now hosted by Google and a free downloadable program. I have used this program for several years and find it pretty user friendly for non techies like me. What I discovered last night is that there is a "Blog this" button on the tool bar. I had not paid much attention to it before since I didn't know much about blogs (& probably didn't expect to). I hit that button and from there I was just two steps away from posting my picture into my blog! Now I have a few other ideas I would like to try. More on that later. . .

My Flickr account Flickr continued

My first Flickr attempt

I took this picture in July 2004. We were at the airport to see our son off on a trip to China. 

Making progress

Aha! With help from Chrisite B's blog I was able to paste my Avatar picture exactly where I wanted it. I was concerned at first because it took about 45 minutes for it to show up on my blog. When I previewed it everything looked good but even after republishing, signing out and back in it wasn't posted. I had the same problem when adding my third link. Maybe it makes a difference when making changes on the weekend with heavier traffic? Thank you, Questing Librarian for your informative blog!

This week's Patron Picks

These books come highly recommended by MPK patrons:

Father Joe: the man who saved my soul - a 2004 biography by Tony Hendra

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson http://www.readersclub.org/reviews/tresults.asp?id=2599

Black Cross by Greg Iles

90 Minutes in Heaven: a true story of life and death by Don Piper

Marlo's Good Reads

These are titles I've recently enjoyed:

Telegraph Days - Annie Potts' narration brings Larry McMurtry's old west characters to life in the audio book version.

Killer Dreams by Iris Johansen

I have been making my way through Michael Connelly's "Harry Bosch" detective series, start to finish. I am almost caught up & awaiting the arrival of his soon to be released book ECHO PARK.

7 1/2 Lifelong Learning Habits

Hardest - #6 Using technology to my advantage. I always seem to spend too much time trying to figure things out. Although I feel a sense of accomplishment when I complete the task I wish I could do it faster!

Easiest - #7 1/2 Play! See, time flies when you're on the computer. I enjoy the playing (practicing?) but nothing else gets done while I'm happily clicking away!

I do agree that we all need to be more savy when it comes to new technologies in learning, for our own benefit and that of our customers. What better way to do that than by working and playing together - I guess we all have #7 licked!

Today I changed the name of my blog. I decided it was more (or less?) descriptive of what my blog is all about - anything & everything! With that in mind here's a question. I'm planning to trade in my car and I've been seeing all those Scions around town in interesting colors. Today I saw a lime green one. They look roomy and fun to drive but does anyone out there own one? I'm looking for testimonials so any comments would be appreciated.

What's it all about?

This is my first blogging experience so please bear with me! No, I don't really know what I'm doing . . . but I intend to find out - hopefully within the deadline. marlo