Thing #25 - My Own Newsletter

This was interesting. I made up my own newsletter - sort of a little journal about my golf "vacation" in June. I see lots of interesting uses for this site. And I think it's cool that it's free. However, I was a little frustrated with the formatting. Pushing enter automatically gives you a two space jump, so you can't go down to the next line directly below the text you typed. I also would have liked to justify the columns where all my text is, but it wouldn't allow me to do that either.

Anyway, here it is: http://letterpop.com/newsletters/?id=58188-ee18f5. Check it out, if you like, but it's not really that interesting.

Zamzar continued...

So, the amount of time it took me to type up my thoughts on Zamzar (which was just a few minutes), was the amount of time it took to have it converted and the link sent to my e-mail. Two clicks away and there was my pdf - bloody brilliant!

Zamzar

Ok, I didn't think I was going to do it, but I've decided to venture into the world of 2.1. Today was step #24, Zamzar. We had a brief introduction to this during on of our little PO staff meeings, but I hadn't gotten around to playing with it. I decded to check it out today. I uploaded one of my word documents to try to turn it into a pdf. I'm still waiting for the e-mail telling me it worked.

If this does work - it's fantastic. A couple of years ago when I was building my own website and trying to post my resume as a pdf, I was having to go through all kinds of hassle to get it converted. I didn't have the program on my computer (and then I found out it cost something crazy like $800), and I only knew of one computer that I could do it on at the Carnegie Mellon University library. If only I could have used Zamzar it would have been so much easier. I see much potential for this for lots of people!

Thing #23 - The Finish Line

Success! Here I am at the end. This has been a really cool experience. I flatter myself as someone being fairly technologically savvy, but there was so much out there that I didn't know. Starting with blogging - some of my friends have their own blogs, but I was hesitant to take that step and try to learn myself - thanks YPL for the incentive. I think the most outstanding learning moment for me was the RSS feeds. This to me was a foreign language of which I wanted to no part in having to figure out on my own. I love it now - I love knowing what the little orange button is for on webpages and I love going to my bloglines account and reading all my different feeds. I also just like the feeling that I'm not missing out on something anymore. There were very few things here that I didn't find interesting. I also enjoyed the process of helping others with their blogs, getting help for my own, and just checking out what other people are up to or interested in. I hope we have more learning opporunities like this. In the meantime, I can't wait for my MP3 player!

Just need to rant...

I am beyond frustrated at this point. I tried to put a couple of posts up today (things 21 and 22), and for whatever reason, after I typed them up and hit publish post, they wouldn't appear in my blog. About an hour later, they finally showed up, but in the meantime, my YouTube post and video that I put up Thursday night was gone. Now, this was extremely aggravating because that took almost an hour to get it posted and formatted the way I wanted. Now, I cannot embed the text at all to get the video to appear. I did learn from all this that you can post to your blog straight from YouTube, rather than trying to embed the html text. However, the text I posted underneath the video doesn't look the way I want, and when I try to change the date and time to back to when I actually did it Thursday night, the video disappears. Grrr...

Thing #22

I checked out both NetLibrary's list of e-books and PLYMC's list of audio books. When I worked at Carngie Mellon, I used to read a few different e-books form their million book project, but I've never been a big fan of reading books on my computer. It gives me a headache to stare at a screen for too long. Pretty much the only time I've read books on line was on Sunday nights at the CMU arts reference desk and I was REALLY bored.

As for audio books, I love to listen to books on cd in my car, but I have this wierd thing about being able to concentrate on listening to someone else read, so I always have to have read the book first, so there isn't a whole lot for me to choose from on the list - I haven't read most of the titles available. Plus, I've thought about downloading an audio book before, but I get all freaked out when it tells me I have to download software, so I end up not doing it. But, with a new mp3 player, perhaps I'll give it a shot!

Podcasting (Thing #21)

Ok, I've gotten some podcasts on my bloglines account. I'm finding Podcast.net to be very frustrating. The titles of podcasts don't necessarily give any indication of what it's really about, so I quit using that one. Using Podcastalley.com, and picking from their top podcasts list I found a podcast from the Harry Potter fansite Mugglenet.com. I also found a "Movies you should see" podcast that I fed to my bloglines account. Using the search tool and searching libraries, I found a podcast called "Uncontrolled Vocabulary" about current events in the library world. Now of course, when will I find the time to listen to them, because unfortunately while I was doing some sample listening out here at Springfield at the librarians desk, there was some vulgar and offensive language being used on one of the podcasts that I thought would be safe.

7Up - vending machine

This is a commercial from YouTube that I always thought was so funny. I went searching for it because a couple of years ago I was trying to find it on-line and couldn't, but it never occurred to me to check YouTube when it became popular. I also put this on here for my daddy because this commercial use to crack him up!

I've messed around with YouTube before, but not much because a lot of it is crap that I could care less about. I did, however, go searching and find the videos of "Extras" with Orlando Bloom and Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter to you Muggles). (Thanks to Megan for telling me about this show - hilarious!)

#19 - the end is in sight

I've been playing around with the Web 2.0 awards since yesterday, and these are really fun. I know it says just pick one, but that's so boring. I've played around with Zillow before, but I find it wildly inaccurate. If it manages to zero in on the right house with the aerial photos, it usually has the specs wrong - but still it's fun to see your house from the sky! I played around a bit yesterday with the free online games - Penguin Push was particularly amusing, and actually requires a little thinking - I'm currently stumped on level 9. If anyone figures this out, let me know. The best one I found so far: Cocktail Builder! It gives you drink recipes for whatever liquor you've got hanging around the house. Always good fun in my book!

One more Wiki Thing...

I thought I would just throw this out there - while searching for on how long to cook a potato in the microwave to make a "baked" potato, I found this neat wiki for how-to stuff: WikiHow

Check it out if you're bored!