Lookybook

I read about this website in the December School Library Journal and thought I'd take a look at it, having just recently reviewed some children's books on Goodreads (and here, of course, but more on Goodreads). I thought, "Oh, goody! A site that will let someone page through books and look at the illustrations!" but within seconds I was disappointed that two worthy author/illustrators were not on their list. /me goes all frowny-face. I know they can't have every author or illustrator listed (and they do have some great ones), but no Tedd Arnold?! Gah! How can I wax eloquent on the fun illustrations in The Roly-Poly Spider? There are currently only about 300 titles available. I might wait a while for the list to grow before using this website.

In the meantime, though, is this cool or is this cool? ...


As of April, Lookybook is no more. :(

Just When You Thought ...

Finish the sentence as you like. (... you had all the social networking you needed; ... the internet was driving you crazy; ... the internet was driving Marf crazy ...)
Are you troubled by too many social networks to post to? Do you spend all your time making the same boring posts to Twitter, jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, plaxo, tumblr, (deep breath) Frazr, beemood, meemi, gozub, mumpa, (inhale) MexicoDiario, feecle*, fanfou.com? Me neither. But for those who do! there is an answer! There is HelloTxt!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not rushing to sign up for this. Yes, I subscribe to Twitter (very handy for keeping track of what I'm doing for the monthly reports - "Oh, right! I did that special storytime in December!" - and recording amusing but brief anecdotes "Child goes into puppet theatre, picks up puppet and says, Git outta mah house, bitch!") ... and Facebook and plaxo, but Twitter already automatically feeds into Plaxo and I've embedded Twitter into this blog. You know, at some time I have to stop! No, really. No, I know you don't believe me. I'm not going to do it. Not even to find out what "feecle" could possibly be. It boggles the mind, of course. But I'll find some other way to figure out what it is.

*It's a Japanese site, like Twitter, I think. I had to make sure that it was what it was and I wasn't misreading the logo. All of these seem to be similar to Twitter - many in different languages as you can see if you click on the links. I didn't find mumpa.

Testing Zoho, 1-2-3!

An article in this month's School Library Journal reviewed some on-line slideshow programs. The first one was at google.docs ... and because I have a Google account (which is what Blogger is), I went there first. :( /me no like. Very basic, not much fun. So I next tried Zoho, which I thought was brilliant ... until I came to the part where I could embed the slideshow in my blog ... and it doesn't work in this blog. And we all know I've been embedding in this blog until the cows wended their way homeward. So, if you want to see what I created, you'll have to click on the link:

http://show.zoho.com/public/marfita/Virtual%20Afterlife

Other than the embedding problem, I found it loads of fun to use. Sure, it could use more flashy stuff like Scrapblog, but Zoho is more a business site and Scrapblog is a fun site. There is lots more office software available on Zoho and I think it would be a very useful tool for our patrons who would like to share the work they do or who need an on-line alternative to the Microsquash Office.
Now, if they can only work out that embedding thingie.

Looks Like I Picked a Bad Week to ...

I'm working my way through the backlog of blog posts in Library 2.1 and found FitDay just before Thanksgiving. I think we all know that a little less intake and a little more activity wouldn't hurt me, but everyone knows what happens when you go on a diet. It works for a while and then your body kicks into starvation mode and starts being more efficient. Or the minute you stop - it all flies back on and then some. For this I recommend the book Mindless Eating, wherein the author suggests that you cut back only about 100 calories a day so you don't trip the starvation meter in your body. He has some other tips - read it yourself. Back to FitDay.
FitDay is a social weight control site. Oh, boy! I heard you say. Just how aware are you of what you consume in a day? Sure, you can write it down, but only FitDay can call up the calories for you and then tell you at the end of the week if you're burning as much as you're taking in. I recorded a Thanksgiving dinner and two trips to Ryan's (along with all the rest of my eating - lunch at Santa Fe, dinner at India Palace, snacks) and still came in at burning more calories than I consumed! Something was wrong, so I adjusted my activity level to having a seated job, as opposed to seated with some movement. I'm still burning more. I'll have to go over my intake again. I mean, I posted two pieces of pie a day! You do have to be careful about entering a correct portion size, which involves a lot of airy-fairy estimating. That might be it.
FitDay only as social as you want it to be. I'm really only using the food and activity part. It's time-consuming to enter all the fiddly bits you've eaten in a day ... maybe if you had to enter each one before you ate it ...

Plaxooooo

Ha ha - Plaxo tries to be funny.

Let's see, how many websites do I subscribe to that are supposed to control the clutter in my life? Bloglines is supposed to aggregate my RSS feeds. ClaimID wants to manage my on-line identity. Google wants to host my e-mail, photos, videos, blogs, groups, etc. I have at least six e-mail addresses that are current.

Now Plaxo wants to coordinate my calendars, address books, and all the other little social networks that have me scattered like seed beads after the cat's been playing on my work table. What a great idea! I'm more scattered on the internet than seed beads after my cat's been playin' on my work table. If only ...

Well, I have to say this much, it did coordinate my calendars. Now I can add something to my Yahoo calendar or the Plaxo calendar and it will appear on both. I don't see it showing how to differentiate between business and personal calendars, though.

There is also a feed that shows everything I entered as one of my websites (that I was able to enter - I can't get it to recognize thingie, Bloglines, or Blogger ... ironic because I have a Plaxo widget on this page now!). This is called Pulse. It will not only show my additions to these sites (when I post more photos to Flickr, mini-blog to Twitter, etc.), but also when my contacts do. It will even check my address books to see if anyone else therein is signed up for Plaxo. I was surprised to find my cousin's son, my friend in Hong Kong, and good old Jane Connor at the State Library! You can also p-o your other friends by having Plaxo invite them, which I haven't done for Yahoo Messenger or anything else, so I'm not about to start.

Just so that I don't feel this has made my life any more stress-free, there is an option to have count-downs to events on your calendar! 54 more days to my husband's birthday!
No pressure, Plaxo!!!


Oooo, look! The editor of our local paper has been sucked into my social vortex! This is the business version of the Pulse page. On the left you can see that I can select other feeds: everyone, friends, family, just little me ...

The calendar, showing what's up for tomorrow, and the infamous countdowns.
Oh, no! What am I getting Bob for his birfday??!!
I've got my cursor over the Yahoo link to show that it last sync'd
with Plaxo almost three hours ago.

New Widget!

In case you're interested, and I'm sure you're not, the reason the blog comes up so slowly now is that I've added yet another widget.
"Why, Marfie?" you ask, tearing your hair. Oh, because I can. And it was so easy.
There's a new guy (R. A. Meyer) for October's Charlotte-Mecklenberg Library 2.1 learning thingie and because he hasn't actually put anything up yet (to date), I went to his blog, The Internet Can Change Your Life.
Waaaay down there was an entry on widgets, cute little tools you can add to your website or blog. I already have a poo-load of them, but I combed the list at mashable.com until I found something new I thought I could insert into this blog: the del.icio.us widget that shows the last few things I added to del.icio.us, which is a sort of traveling bookmark. Yes, we all have bookmark/favorite functions on our internet programs, but if you move to another computer (and I have one at home as well as two here at work I use), you have to find the site all over again and mark it. And what if you are out of town on business and, like me, you don't have a laptop? Or what if you are a library patron and you don't always get the same computer?
Post to del.icio.us (I hate typing that with all the periods so I usually just call it Thingie which unfortunately renders it indistinguishable from other Thingies)! Once it's on Thingie, you can access it from anywhere and find other people who marked it at well. Another step, and you can discover more interesting sites from their Thingie collections. Yes! It's a social bookmarking!
You can also mark your own blog or site and see how many other people marked it. I used this to see who and how many people linked to Bob's sites.
Right now the widget is a huge list, but perhaps if I add to it, it will show only the most recently ones. And perhaps after a while it will become a nuisance and I will ditch it. Only Time Will Tell.
Widgets: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore!

LiveMocha!

Where was this LiveMocha idea forty years ago when I still had brain cells? When I was still branching, instead of pruning? What a great idea this is! Well, it's a great idea for those of us who want to speak another language.
I signed up for Spanish. Okay, okay - y'all think I already know this stuff, but you don't really know it until you have to use it day after day with, like, real speakers and all. I wanted to see how this works and I should have kept in mind that it's in beta-test because there are some little niggly things that annoyed me.
I went for Intermediate because I'm definitely not a beginner but I'm nervous about my abilities. So I started with Spanish 202. And what are they teaching? Telling time ... People, I'm telling you, it was Math!!!!! I have no trouble with the Spanish. I've taught telling time in Spanish. But I have to figure out what time it was a half an hour ago, etc.! Talk about sweating!
First they showed clock faces and had written underneath (there was probably some audio that went with it, but I don't have a way to actually talk so I was going to ignore the audio portions) the time, then what time it was such-and-such amount of time ago (which is the "it makes so much time" construction in Spanish). Then it showed people being in certain locations (use of the correct verb for location is a tricky thing for non-Spanish speakers) at certain times. Then they were in those locations a certain amount of time ago. Then you were asked if it were such-and-such time, with the response being, "Naaa, that was three hours ago!" Fine. That was just showing you what to do.
Next came the finding the correct response portion. You had to pick from four possibles the correct time or phrase represented by the sentence. Not too bad, I only screwed one of those up because the photo was missing and I wasn't sure if I'd clicked it. Tch - beta-test!
Then there was the magnet board: you translated a sentence by clicking on separate words made available. It was easy enough to find the first and last words in the sentence because they were capitalized and punctuated. I messed up once when I used the right words with the wrong punctuation in the "Is it blank o'clock yet?" "Naaa, it was blank o'clock fifteen minutes ago." Obviously, in Spanish the word order is different:

¿Ya son las 7:15? Hace treinta minutas eran las 7:15.

And I screwed something else up being careless. sigh. So, you ask, what's the point of this? It doesn't sound like such a great system. Ahhh, but you forget the social aspects. You are also required to make friends. When you sign up, you are given a few people to ask to be friends that either are taking the same language, or are native speakers. If you are the misanthrope I am, this is a painful process. I rooted about and clicked on three people that looked safe (female). One of them has already contacted me! She sent me a simple note in Spanish and I have replied. She's a nice granny, semi-retired, and brushing up her old skills.

Well, hot damn!

I also had the opportunity to look over someone's written composition (only about 7 sentences). Shhhhhugar! Her English is worlds' better than my Spanish! As a native speaker, I could correct it and/or give comments. What could I say? It was all excruciatingly correct, if overly careful. So I told her it was perfect and gave the full five stars. Other people had been giving marks as well and it showed her average star tally.
Oops! I had written a short piece as well. I hope people are kind.
Also, I've noticed that there is a tote board that shows the rankings in each class of how many points students have accumulated. I guess that's for the terminally competitive. Me, I'm glad I didn't bite off too much by aiming too high in levels. Phew!

Hmmm, perhaps I should look into the German as well. Then again, Germans grade really hard. "Och, ja - nice of you to zend ze note, but ve don't use ze datif in zat case, you know ..."

Added later: Horrors! Someone graded my short written piece! They walked all over it! Then they sent another note and said they had misunderstood something and that other than a little tiny bit, it was good. Phew! You need a thick skin for this! Next time I will write le minimum. Fewer words, fewer mistakes.