Whew!

Ya-ha! I think I'm done! Demos watched, sites visited, articles read, survey completed.

Likes: Demos--liked the 'look-here-click-there' format. Made it much easier for a non-techie.

Picasa--yum! What a great tool to have--basically for free.

You Tube--yeah, there's a lot of junk on it, but some great demos for learning, too. Plus getting to revisit my younger years via old music videos. I'm still not sure about how to imbed one, though.

One-on-one sessions--thanks, Brandy, for patiently--VERY patiently--answering my blogging questions.

NetTrek Wiki--Fun to read about others learning experiences and how they approached the assignments. Plus, seeing their photos or what images they chose to accompany their posts.

BiblioCommons--WooHoo! I like the new catalog. I want more training on the new catalog.

Dislikes: Not much, really. I hope there will be more interesting online training sessions in the future.

Facebook, Twitter, etc.--this isn't a violent--ugh!--kind of dislike. They're just not my cup of tea. I do good to get a blog done occasionally. Can see why others enjoy them, though.

The End of NetTrek Training--it's been fun. Hope we can do something like this again!

And what does the deer have to do with anything? We just saw five of them cross a neighbor's yard. And they're beautiful.

'Nuf said.

Yea, Bibliocommons!

Ya know, this is kind of fun! I've been playing around with the new catalog, etc.--rating an item here, creating a list there, doing searches--that I almost forgot we're supposed to blog about it.

Sure do like the search engine, though. The way it will focus in on what you're looking for much more quickly. Sometimes I'd put in what I thought were good search perameters on the old catalog and still come up with way too much stuff I wasn't interested in at all.

I like the way you can narrow searches down on the new catalog to show what is available on the shelf right now. And the "Browse the Shelf" feature is really great. Surely, that will be especially helpful with non-fiction interests. I've already found a couple of poetry books from "browsing" that I want to check out later.

ANOTHER POETRY BOOK

Yes, I've been looking at poetry books again--a favorite pasttime, I admit.

Caroline Kennedy's anthology "A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children" is worth a look. Or two. Or going back and looking at again and again. Though it's a fairly tight anthology--logging in at around 125 poems--the range is impressive. From Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" sonnet, to "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Frost, to Jack Prelutsky's "Today Is Very Boring," you'll find old and new, humorous and thought-provoking.

And then, there's the artwork. Take a look at the illustration for William Blake's "The Tyger." Just gorgeous. Then try the smaller painting for Ogden Nash's "The People Upstairs." Are you smiling? Jon J. Muth--who also illustrated and wrote "The Three Questions," "Zen Shorts," and "Zen Ties"--has done a dazzling job with this collection of poetry. His beautiful watercolors, along with Caroline Kennedy's poem choices, make this anthology well worth a read.

RSS Feeds

O.K., I think I did it.
Feeds I'm now following:
DBRL
Awful Library Books
Library Garden
About.com.Children's Books

Should be fun!
And now. . .on to "video"!

Web 2.0 sites

Now that the Christmas whirl is over, I'll try to get lesson four of WebTrek completed.
Before Christmas I'd looked at a couple of sites, just hadn't gotten around to writing about them. Food was on my mind then, so I checked out Imcooked and found myself watching videos on baking sugar cookies (which inspired me to make some), cheesecake (I've got to try those blueberry cheesecake squares!), and molten lava cakes (what do you expect from a chocoholic?).

Quality of the videos varies as far as sound and lighting. So does the amount of explaination during the process. At times, just a few seconds, a few words more here or there would have been helpful. My only other grumble is that some of the videos don't give ingredient amounts--you have to go to another website to get that information. While I understand it from the cook's point of view--they want you to visit their website--the printed recipe should be right there to go with the visual. Otherwise, it's an enjoyable site, not only because of the recipes, but to see the variety of people--male, female, old and young, of various ethnic backgrounds--who simply enjoy food and cooking.

The other site that drew me was Picasa. I know we looked at that a bit earlier, but I wanted to know more so took the "Working with Digital Photos" session taught by Sally A. and Svetlana G.
one afternoon. We got to tinker around with some preloaded photos--cropping, coloring, adding text, removing blemishes and red eyes, straightening images that somehow got snapped off-kilter and highlighting with soft focus. Very cool stuff! This is a site that anyone who takes pictures can use. Does it take the place of Adobe Photoshop? No, but it can do a lot of neat things and won't cost hundreds of dollars, either. You can also create web albums so others can view your pictures.
This is a site I look forward to using, but I'm almost hesitant to upload my photos to Picasa because it may be too much fun playing with them!

A New Poetry Book

I enjoy children's poetry, and this week got my hands on one of the newer anthologies--The Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry. About two hundred poems, large format pages, and bold, bright illustrations from several renowned artists, including Lois Ehlert, Steven Kellogg, and Nancy Tafuri. What a treat!

So, for my Google Docs assignment, I've copied one of the poems, and will see if I can get it from there to here.

Poetry and Pups

Although I'm more of a cat person now, we had dachshunds when I was a kid. Here's a poem to honor those childhood "weiners."

BECAUSE OF PREVIOUS GLADNESS

There was a little dachshund once,

So long he had no notion,

The time it took from head to foot

To register emotion.

And so it was that when his face

Was filled with tears and sadness,

His little tail kept wagging on

Because of previous gladness.

--Anonymous