Who Doesn't Like Plinko?

Okay - so I added another little Google Gadget to my blog - it's the dearly loved plinko game. Enjoy!

Feed the Fish

Looking for something to do? Then feed my new fish. It's really easy - just point and click in their pond.

Virtual Motivators? How Motivating!

I started poking around at some of the sites listed and immediately fell in love with Trainco. Truth be told right now I'm on a little diet. Trying to lose that vacation weight. So, I started my account and posted my daily calorie counts and work out info. Yep, it was that easy! And you know what? I feel surprisingly motivated. I'll admit I was starting to feel the fade on the old calorie count but now I feel refreshed and recharged.

I did not go into catster or dogster because I've been there before, but at one time there was a site called enemyster - not sure if it's still up and running. Not sure how many people would sign up to be your enemy - and if you have that many enemies then you probably wouldn't want to tell the world - or would you?

PopUrls

I decided to check out PopUrls and immediately got sucked into the site - especially the video section. I will definitely be heading back to this site!

Appity-Apps

Library Apps are very much part of my life, as are general apps. What is my favorite library App? Ugh! That's a hard one! I guess it's easiest to say that I really don't have a favorite app. I experiment constantly with library apps. So if you don't mind I think I'll restructure your question, "What is your favorite thing to do with an app?" - then I guess I'd answer something like this, "My favorite thing to do with apps is to play with them. To see how how the Library can benefit from them, but also to see how I can use it in my own personal life."

I guess since my position at the Library is so heavily involved with web apps, by the end of the day my head is generally full.

mah meez puhleeze

Here is my meez. It was very fun. I really wanted the robot background [i <3 robots]but it costs 10 coinz and I only have 5.
I guess I'd better figure out how to make more coinage...

I won't let you win toeat!

So in this weeks Adventure section of our weekly course we were asked to tag a local restaurant with the term OCLS. After several minutes of wrestling with the website it became (painfully?) clear that unfortunately toeat does not allow you to create custom tags for their restaurants. This could be a good thing I suppose, but for me it meant not finishing my challenge. So, in lieu of losing my mind I decided instead to create a new entry for "Season's Harvest" and to ignore the whole tagging assignment all together. Hopefully within 24 hours my new entry will show up, gloriously displaying on the site.

I found toeat to be incredibly frustrating. This may in fact be fueled by the fact that I could not do what I was hoping to achieve. But had I gone to this site with one task at hand (to find a restaurant to eat at) my experience probably would have been a much better one. So, I have decided that the next time I'm looking for a good (new) restaurant to eat at, I will first come here and search. I have no doubt that it will be a lovely experience.

My Xploration

So I went into SEOmoz and took a look-see around some of the award winning entries. The first one that I had to share with friends and co-workers was CSS Beauty. I myself have very limited CSS skills, but this site had everything CSS. Its uses ranged from seeing the best websites designed using CSS, finding a CSS job, and forums discussing CSS code. A really great resource all around. While looking around I saw the usual suspects: youtube, rollyo, pbwiki, facebook, etc. But found a couple of really cool apps. I went into page flakes and created my own custom aggregator of services suited to my interests, even had a suduko puzzle integrated into the page. I personally like to do suduko on paper but I loved the little "help me" link.

Another area that I enjoyed was the real estate section. As we all know searching MLS listenings can be kind of bland, but some of these new sites are making it so easy (and fun!). Using Propsmart I was able to focus on the location and then drill down my search results to exactly what I wanted to see. Super cool! A really nice feature was the use of the Google map mash up. So not only did I find the property but I could plot it directly on the map. There's nothing worse than knowing you like the sound of a property but having absolutely no idea where it's located. I wrote this URL down to share with my husband. So many good sites to look at - I finally had to print them to look at later!

Yahoo Pipes and Celebrity Gossip

Thank you for providing me the opportunity to try Yahoo Pipes. So I followed the tutorial and set up my own Celebrity Gossip pipe. I then went into my Blogline and set it up to start receiving the juicy gossip. It was pretty easy to set up and now I'm interested in setting up some other content - other than RSS feeds. Not sure what yet, but I'm sure an awesome idea will come to me in the middle of the night.

I haven't commented on anyone else's blog yet. I guess for some reason I find the idea to be somewhat unsettling. Not sure why I haven't made the leap yet. I've written on my own blogs and I've read other people's blogs but I guess actually posting on someone elses makes me feel like I'm treading on their private property. Though, truth be told, I have posted comments when the subject is tied to work. I guess since it generally has nothing to do with their intimate thoughts it somehow makes it okay.

Grokker vs. Google: The Family Vacation Challenge

So in this lesson we were asked to do a couple of things. One of them was to use Grokker. I have been on the ultimate family vacation quest for the past year or so. Traveling with two small children means a lot of stops on the way. Since I have a vacation planned for next month, I have once again started looking for things to do when driving to North Carolina. So I took this opportunity to allow Grokker to help me do what Google has failed to do; help me find something to do with small children in Georgia.

So I began my Grokker search using those familiar vacation terms "Savannah Georgia Family Vacation." In the outline view I quickly found the term I was looking for, "Family Fun" and there were nine entries. I found some pretty good info there, and I found the delivery format to be interesting. It took me a little bit to orient myself to how this info was displayed but I caught on pretty quickly. I really liked the "drilled down" approach. It made me feel that I was in charge of the information and it allowed me to filter down to exactly what I wanted.

As for my learning style I do best as a "do-er." I have to do it to learn it. So usually if I need to create something online, I'll find some code and start picking it apart. Or I'll find a tutorial and start building. I also picked up somewhere along the way that you learn something faster if you write it down three times. I tend to write everything down. It's like I absorb the information deeper when I think it, then write it. I actually had a professor yell at me once (in class) for writing too many notes. This has baffled me to date, but I guess he had a different learning style than me.

Blograrians

So, as we all know there are a gazillion blogs out there that have to do with the field of librarianship. So I figured I would share with everyone the blogs that I read regularly. My first blog happens to be a good friend of mine's. (shameless friend promotion). Anyways, his name is Brian Mathews and he won a 2007 Mover & Shaker award. So his blog is http://theubiquitouslibrarian.typepad.com/ and it is always an interesting read.

I also ready David Lee Kings Blog, The Shifted Librarian, The Librarian in Black, blogwithoutalibrary, Library Web Chic, blah, blah, blah...

On the other side of the aisle, I also like to read blogs that have absolutely nothing to do with with libraries (hush your mouth!). I like to read really bad celebrity gossip blogs, parenting blogs (just so I know that this is a normal stage and they'll grow out of it), and my friends blogs. I love to use technorati to find new blogs. But the funny thing is, until you asked me to do this task (thank you Tom) I don't think I realized how much blog reading I do!

Blogs Gone Wild

It seems that today blogs are quite the norm. Almost every web app has some sort of blog functon available to turn on. I myself turned my "blog" on in my myspace profile. I wrote an initial welcome message and then proceeded never to write anything again. I'm not sure why. I guess we're all really waiting to find something that we can blog about.

The thought of other people reading my thoughts doesn't bother me too much. With so many blogs available to read I wonder what is it about mine that would make someone want to spend the time reading it. It would be interesting to capture someone's thoughts about my blog. Not only why they read but but how they got there. Suppose I could ask that if you're a stranger please leave a comment on why you read my blog. I think I might be somewhat surprised.

I've been known to read other people's blogs religiously. Some of them were my friends, others were complete strangers. I got addicted reading to this one guys programming blog. He was in high school and he was worried about college. He had applied to several school's and was waiting to find out which one accepted him. It's funny because the real reason I first went to his blog in the first place was because I had a programming question that I was looking for the answer to. Then as I was researching I kind of fell into his life. It was so strange. I guess I could relate to him on several levels.

Anyways - so I think that there is a time in everyone's life, when you need to blog. Whether your the writer or the reader, it's therapeutic.