Well, I thought I’d just take a moment to let everyone know out there that I will be closing this site down soon. This is the second blog I’ve maintained. The first more personal and took in a good deal of effort, but this one has been more sporadic with grad school taking up much of my time, so I’ve decided to close it down. This won’t be the end, no, no…

At a later date I’ll relaunch the site, but this time it will be more of a focus on my poetry and other creative pursuits. Till then, au revoir.  

Thanks, for everyone who has communicated including Jonnie. Also, thanks Infopeople for the honorable mention during the 23 Things project.

 Cheers and ta ta for now!

Finally, another semester over. Whew! Has it been long semester. I can finally get a few weeks of rest before the next semester starts. I am looking forward to a few weeks of R&R.

I am going to transfer a few of one of my class blog’s postings. I’ll go through edit and then add those entries that seem interesting and not too much of a focus on my classes. I’ll do that within the next week or so. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

Also, one more thing to look forward to- In a couple weeks you should be seeing my first book of poetry finally out as an e-book!

Well I’m out to enjoy a little rest from this exhausting semester.

Okay, image generators are cool. So much fun that I think I found a new hobby and didn’t want to move on to the next 23 Things item. To me they are more like fun toys that allow you to manipulate photos and graphics to create new images that you could do what you want with. Some generators are pretty simple with what they can do, but others are more complex. My favorites were

• the Simpsons avatar creator

• and the film poster creator  

Naturally, I reduced the size of the image for the movie poster to fit on my blog page.

A couple others I had fun creating were

1. A funny name badge of myself.

1. An inspirational poster.

To create your own Simpson Avatar go to the Simpsons movie site and click on Create Your Own Avatar at the top of the screeen. Most of the other images were created using a site, Big Huge Labs,  with a whole lot of cool image generation toys. You could spend hours playing around on that site. You can have  a lot of fun with image generators. Let your imagination go and release the kid in you though if you really want to have some fun with these. Well, that is enough babbling for now. I am off to play with some more image generators.

Okay, my little social experiment has run its short course. It was weird and creepy in a kind of stalker way. I also found Twitter a bit addictive. It is true that it is easy to update, but I often found that I either did not have the time, had no access to a computer or I would get busy and forget to update. I guess you have to really be committed to run this as a successful program or social experiment.

Apparently you can upload with a cell phone to really let the world know what you are doing while you are on the go, but I haven’t tried that yet. I’ll have to look into that more. Tiptoe around the concept. I don’t like extra expenses, I have enough of them, so I have to see whether my cell phone company will charge me for that and if so how much?

Further thoughts about libraries. I decided there are other uses for Twitter besides the micromanager. My ideas focus more around marketing. Staff could post letting the public know what they are up to. Say a new book is added, one could post, “Just added Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. Or posting funny or interesting things that just happened to the staff member in the library. One could also mention they are watching the current children’s program. These could all be an extension of the library and the way it presents itself to the public. Ways of making the library and its staff more personable and of creating another way of reaching out to the public.

To take this further, the library could create its own Twitter account. This would extend the library as an entity. Postings could be done by various staff members and could in the process extend what the library is doing. What items are being added, how many people are coming in or checking out items, interesting reference questions being answered, various programming that is going on at the moment or other interesing happenings. Followers could tune in to see what is going on in the library. The library could simply set up and embed Twitter on the library home page, so that users checking out the library have something else to tune in to and interact with. This could be a fun way of bringing the library into the community. Seems like a cool idea to me.

Okay, I am supposed to sign up for a Twitter account. Allright, I did.

In a lot of the tech journals they seem to either rave about or say it is a mindless waste of time. One article I read said it was an extension of our ability to know what is going on the lives of people we know, but don’t always get to see. Thus, increasing our ability to communicate with them and understand how their lives are going. I don’t know about all that. To be honest I’m a bit sceptical of this whole Twitter phenomenon, but I won’t pass judgement yet. So here I am running a Twitter experiment on myself. I am supposed to use Twitter to monitor myself for the next few days and then figure out how it could be used in a library setting. Good question that. Maybe, I’m not being very creative, but I don’t have an answer to that yet. Anyhoo, monitoring my own behavior sounds a bit creapy.

A few posts ago I talked about an interesting artist who has made his life public. With photos constantly updated, lists of his transactions, and a gps tracking to show his current whereabouts on a map. Seems like Twitter would be quite an extension of making his life public. Now one would really know what he is doing.

Anyhoo, I’m off to go monitor myself. Let me strap on my social scientist hat and see what I’m up to.

The past few months has been really occupied with school. I’m slowly learning to juggle the various things I need to do with what time I have. Grad school is a great intellectual exercise that hopefully will give me more opportunities once I graduate. I feel bad in some ways though that it occupies so much of my time. I had a blog last year that I posted constantly too, but it seems since launching this one this year I haven’t spent much time on it at all. I hope that I will be able to spend more time posting in the future, but for now I have to focus on what is most important my schooling. As time goes along I would hope that I can juggle some more time in to post, but I’ll see. Next week classes start up again for the summer, so once again I’ll find myself in a whirling rush of papers, assignments, discussions, readings and projects. Ahhh, school….

I recently discovered the answer to the meaning of life. Although, I’ve read this in a book before some years ago, the world seems to have confirmed it to be so….

So if you want the answer, I’ll tell you the secret.

• Go to google
• In the search box type
• what is the meaning to life, the universe and everything
• hit enter
• look at the first hit

You’ll be amazed how simple it is!

Do this exactly, don’t add a question mark or anything. And if you really want to complicate things, or mix things up a bit try multiplying or adding to the answer.

• For example, in the search box type
• what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything + 4
• or try what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything * 86

In case you don’t know * is how google multiplies things.

Good luck and happy hunting! Hope you breathe a sigh of relief after finding your answer to the ultimate question.

I haven’t been able to write anything in a couple of months because grad school has been consuming a great deal of my time. But I guess it is worth it. I have a temporary blog up for one of my classes, if you wish to check it out, Strolling the Info Streets.

In the meantime here is something funny from Google.

• Go to Google
• Click on Maps
• Click on Get Directions
• left box type New York
• right box (end address box) type London
• click on Get Directions Button (on the right)
• scroll down to line 24  

i’m sitting here sipping a cup of cappuccino, which is good and relaxing, but my favorite hot drink is a spiced chai. the sunshine is illuminating the world around me. it is such a beautiful day and i wonder why everyday can’t be spent simply enjoying the day rather than rushing off to work or endless errands. it seems like so much of our day is taken up by the various activities that allow us to have just a few moments to spare to enjoy ourselves or to follow our true passions. we compromise so much of our time, but it seems at times we have little choice, unless we are independently wealthy and have “people” who worry about the problems of our everyday life. unfortunately, that isn’t most of us. so what are we to do? nothing i guess. just do what we can, work to give ourselves the few moments in which we can slow down, sit and take in the world. so i take another sip, relax into my chair and relish the beauty of this day.