bill's 23 things

Thing 7

Yeah, I know I promised to do a slide show of my grandkid, but I never got more photos, so I'll come back to that later. I did the reading and viewing of the materials related to Thing 7 this morning. There wasn't much there with which I wasn't at least familiar, but we're only doing a few of the things here. We've had internal email for almost as long as it's been widely available, and I've got Outlook on my desk pc, so I use some of the organizing features of that with my work email--for example, I get a lot of suggestions from patrons about particular titles we should add to our collection through email. I've set up a separate folder for those, and as I make decisions about whether to buy particular titles, I move the email into either an "ordered" or a "rejected" folder. But that's as sophisticated as I feel the need to be.
We've been using Instant Messaging internally for about 6 months, and it's really useful. We're in a two story building, and it's handy to ask questions of my colleagues upstairs while I'm at my desk downstairs. Saves many a trip up and down the stairway. We have also begun using it to eliminate overhead announcements about phone calls etc. Another way we've used it is to rpelace meetings. We hold discussions among the librarians on a monthly (give or take) basis related to some particular topic. We've held a couple of these meetings using IM with a moderator inviting all the librarians logged in into the discussion. It felt kind of weird at first, and those of us who are, shall we say, typing-impaired were at a distinct disadvantage i9n keeping up with the discussion. But it was a fun experiment. We'll probably do it again as the need arises, and the topic lends itself to a non-face-to-face meeting. We'd like to move towards proving IM reference for the public, but the closest we've gotten is an "Ask a Librarian" email reference service.
It may just be my inner fuddy-duddy coming out, but I've never really understood the attraction of text messaging, especially when I see people driving down the road texting as they drive. I guess I can see individuals texting the reference desk from remote parts of the building as in the Youtube video, but I'd be surprised if that happened very often. And it seems like it would be really hard to have a real conversation via text.

Thing 6

Another fun time waster. But I can see where this would be a fun way to connect with users.

When I get a new influx of photos from my daughter, I'll try out the slideshow creator tool. Maybe tomorrow. Then it's on to Thing 7.

thing 5--a real time sapper

I've been playing around with Spell with Flickr for what seems to be a really long time. I was trying to get it to appear inside the post with the picture of my grandkid, but I'll be darned if I can figure a way to do it. So I decided to leave it as a header, just to show that I did accomplish(?) something after all my mucking about with it. I also made a puzzle of another photo--let's see if I can import that to this post:
Yeah, it worked!
I can see that the permutations and combinations of all these Flickr tools could create some really interesting products, but I can also see them taking over one's life, if one is not careful. So I'll stop with these two options and move on with my life to Thing 6--which unfortunately also involves playing with images. So it goes.

keep spooning it in!

keep spooning it in!
Originally uploaded by billmichel53

This was the first time he ate semi-solid food --he loved it.

mason and his papa

mason and papa
Originally uploaded by billmichel53

Yeah, I know, you can't really see him, but the back of his head is pretty freaking cute too.

Thing 4--Flickr

OK, it's been way too long since I've posted here, but in my defense, it took me a long time to figure out how to import photos from my wife's Picasa web album into Flickr. In the end, it was kind of clunky, but not all that difficult. I expect it'll be easier to import directly from the camera or the pc. Picasa allows some editing of the photos, which is why we use that. The pictures are freaking cute, albeit not very interesting pictures of my no longer new grandson, who is 5 1/2 months old now. I like the way that Flickr allows fairly lengthy comments about the photos, both by the owner of the account, and by other viewers. I've posted a couple of the photos from the Flickr account to this blog, but in other standalone posts. I'll have to play some more to figure out how to bring the pictures into an existing post, as well as if I can link directly to my Flickr account from this blog.