Friday, September 19, 2008

Ann's Fun Photos

I'm sure I'm missing something simple here to get them to just show up, but for the life of me I'm not sure what...
Please click on the box below to see my fun pics.

Friday, September 12, 2008

It Has Been Far too Long!

The summer flew by as they tend to and we are now a couple weeks into the new fall schedule for the bookmobile which has a new look for the Monday stops. One of the interesting things I realized when updating my Bookmobile Stop mashup map is that because it lives on the web any changes I make occur instantly. If I had wanted to keep the old summer schedule for posterity I would have had to start from scratch to create the new fall schedule which just didn't seem logical. I simply went in and tweaked a few things to add the Monday stops and through the mysterious magic of the web the link on our website automatically reflected the changes I had made!

I have been enjoying the 8N08 exercises 5 & 6 and have found them to be quite useful. The first RSS feed I tried was a bizarre British serial graphic entitled "The Night Bookmobile" (by the author of The Time Traveler's Wife). After that I started looking for some Reader's Advisory websites and blogs for the WOW strategic plan and was able to add a few more.

I ended up on all kinds of tangents with the downloading and podcasting exercise and have determined that I'm going to replace my ipod (which my daughter has confiscated anyway after an unfortunate water accident with hers) with a different MP3 player that is more audiobook friendly. While it is great that Clevenet now has books that will play on ipod the choices are still so limited! That ended up leading to research on various MP3 players and I was leaning toward a Zen of some sort until I discovered that they don't work with Macs which is where all of my music resides at home. Then I discovered a shareware that does allow some Zen models to work with Macs, but the model I liked best hasn't been confirmed as one that works yet so I guess I'll be doing more research... If anyone has a great recomendation for an MP3 they like please let me know!

As for podcasts -- they are an interesting concept, but I am too addicted to audiobooks to add one more thing to listen to. If only there were more hours in the day!!!