old news

something i noticed about google reader -- i can't see a way to get rid of the old messages after you've read them?? i mean, i guess you're not really STORING them, and they do give you a way to search, but i just seems strange that you can't purge the ones you've already read from your lists. maybe i'm missing something -- either some functionality, or some fundamental rss knowledge... or it looks so much like email that i'm expecting the same things from it.

finally for ipod! (#9)

okay, so i'm going to skip around anyway, even though i thought i'd go in order from now on. indu and i worked on downloading audiobooks (#9) a couple of weeks ago, and i just haven't had a chance (if only i had a nickel for every time i heard/said that...) to blog about it.

first off, i was really happy that netlibrary finally has a selection that is ipod compatible! i do like to listen to audiobooks when i'm driving, walking or even doing housework, and it's nice to not have to tote around yet another gadget (different mp3 player) or change discs (books on cd). however, the selection is very limited, and that was a bit of a let-down. also, browsing by subject doesn't show you the format for the titles -- it seems you have to click on one of their links (subject heading, author, reader, etc.) to get a list which displays which formats are available for those titles. roundabout, but better than having to "show details" for each individual item. however, this is just what worked for me, but maybe someone else had more luck? the search engine also seems temperamental. i forget exactly what i was doing, but one time i put in an author's name for a title that i MADE SURE they had, and my search found no results.

downloading the selection i finally made was easy. i attached my ipod to the computer, then selected "my portable device" on the One Click Download page. there was a small glitch during the download where i got a message saying "your portable player is working on another request, please allow it to complete its current task and select transfer to portable player again" when all i was doing was downloading the audiobook. hrm... a little annoying, but not insurmountable. i downloaded The age of fable, by Thomas Bulfinch and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, by Mark Twain. i also downloaded Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey to my computer because this was one of my favorite books when i was in junior high school (that's a picture of the cover it had when i first bought it in a used bookstore on my way home from school) and i've read it many times, so i wanted to see what the audiobook was like.

arya a trading card?? (#7)

(her name is arya) so here is #7 (flickr mashups), i think i might be able to go in order now.

unfortunately, the card creator had to crop my picture so you can't see her whole face, but you can see the original picture here. this trading card creator was fun, although i can't really see making a whole deck! i did like the flickr color pickr, it was very striking and i really liked seeing the different pictures that matched the chosen color. the color fields group seemed like a fun one to join. the flickr notifier looked cool, but i didn't want to download anything. if i had more friends who were uploading pictures, i might consider it, or if i had long-distance family members who were exchanging photos with me, or something like that. it's flickr AND rss in one -- what a timely discovery!

back to RSS (#4 & 5)

since i already have a google acct, i set up an rss newsreader on Google Reader, which was really easy. i didn't want to set up yet another new acct somewhere else (with bloglines), and it imported the blogs i was already following automatically, which was nice. i noticed that it only added the ones i was "following" as opposed to the ones i added to the blog as a "gadget". i added some of the blogs suggested by maura, new science fiction and books on cd from our library, the post punk kitchen (vegan cooking), patrick rothfuss (the author of The Name of the Wind - the sequel has been delayed a couple of times, so this should be a good way to stay updated on when it will finally come out!) and of course my favorite addiction, world of warcraft.

i like the convenience of having all the blogs coming to one place and not having to jump from website to website. the layout is similar to email, where there is a list of blogs you're following on the left, with the number of unread blogs entries highlighted. i don't normally read blogs, so i don't think i'm going to make a lot of use of this, but i can see the tremendous advantage if you do follow more than a handful of blogs. or if you want updates on the newest books coming out at the new canaan library and you don't work in tech svcs!

much better now

okay, this picture is a good description of how i was feeling about finding time to do Learning 2.0!! but after laurie's inspirational class today, and listening to everyone's personal experiences and suggestions, i have a renewed desire to explore. i did work on downloading an audiobook with indu on sunday, but i haven't downloaded it right to my ipod yet, so i'll write about it after i've done that. i've been around youtube before, we touched on rss feeds today, and librarything sounds like it could be useful both at work and at home, so i'm excited about looking further into those first. so i WILL be posting again soon! no, really.

i'm late! i'm late! (#6)

well, i realize that i haven't been prioritizing the learning 2.0 blog AT ALL, so i'm going to cheat a little and skip topics 4 & 5 for now and jump ahead (that sounds odd, since i'm still behind!) to flickr at #6, which is something that i had already explored in the past.

if you look at my photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/8787305@N02/), you'll see from the dates of my last uploads that i haven't been prioritizing flickr, either! it was fun for a while, and it is convenient for sharing pictures with a large number of friends and family at once, but i found i wasn't really interested in other people's pictures, or sharing with people i didn't know or even spending that much time messing around with my own pics. (i'd rather be playing world of warcraft) i did try the "project 365" group (where you take one picture per day for a year), but soon came to realize that i'd be scrambling to take a picture at the last minute or would take a picture just for the sake of taking one for the project. so i ended up feeling obligated rather than inspired and dropped it. i mean, as a photo essay of a year in my life, i didn't think it would be really meaningful to look at a picture of my feet a year later knowing that i'd taken that shot 5 minutes before bed since nothing else had interested me enough to bother that day -- no matter how artfully the light was hitting them.

btw, the picture above was taken of a window display at design solutions on elm street. also, i had a problem uploading the picture with the "add image" function on blogger using the url ("add an image from the web"), so i saved it to my desktop and used "add image" with the file from my desktop instead. apparently if you want to "blog this picture" from flickr, it should be the first thing you do, because when you use that, it adds the image to a new blog, rather than adding it to a blog you've already written. unless there's something i'm missing, which is possible.