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!

more #18

Ok, I'm doing a separate post for #18, because I didn't want to mess with what I had typed in Zoho writer. That was so cool! So, so easy to type in Zoho word processer and then publish to the blog - scarily easy!

Thing #18

Here I am typing along in Zoho writer. This is pretty nifty actually - and quite frankly I'm all for any applications that could take away from the Microsoft monopoly. Especially now with the release of Vista, some of whose applications will not be compatible with older office versions. So nice that there are these easy ways around it.

Thing #17

My blog is officially linked to from the PLCMC Learning 2.0 wiki under favorite blogs. I also posted to the Favorite Book and Favorite Movie pages. However, I was getting extremely frustrated trying to italicize my book title. Whenever I attempted, it italicized all the entries before mine, but not my title. I restorted to using quotes, then when I posted to the Movie page, I just used old html code, and wonderously, everything was fine, sigh...

Thing #16

Ok, first, if I have to read what are supposed to be intelligent, intellectual articles about the technology we are supposed to be learning, is it too much to ask that someone use proper English? I know when we're blogging, it's not a bit deal, and I could care less about people's grammar, but in the article on wikis called "Using Wikis to Create Online Communities," I found this sentence that just irked me to my core: "And if someone don’t like what I wrote, they can make their own changes." Seriously?

Now that I got that off my chest, I'll move on. I think wikis are great. Even though it's not always the most reliable, I love Wikipedia, and I'm always looking at it for stupid little trivia things. I also really like that there's a way for people to contribute to the information on the Internet without have to know HTML or CSS languages. That they can just go in and type (like with these blogs), and presto, they've contributed to the knowledge of others.

As a side note: did anyone notice on the St. Joseph County Public Library's wiki, that they offer computer classes for the public for free (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more).