Twitter

I'm a little conflicted about Twitter. On the one hand, I like the idea of posting a short amount of information at a time. I'm pretty busy, so even though I want to post more on my blog, I just don't seem to have the time. Twitter would give me a chance to say what I want to say without having to come up with something more substantial than a sentence.

Although, I tend to be pretty wordy, so keeping posts to under 140 characters might be hard for me. Plus, I don't really think my life is that interesting that someone would want to read about it. For instance, one of my tweets was about getting double my discount at the retail store where I work. I'm not sure anyone would really care about that.

I did find a couple of accounts that interest me. I started following the TwitterLit one because I like the concept. I'm always looking for interesting books and this is a way for me to get an idea of what I might like without having to physically pick up a book and read the synopsis on the back. You can tell a lot about a book by its first sentence.

The other one I found was a crafting magazine. If there's one thing I look for more than new books to read it's new crafts to try. The tweets for this one have links for instructions on craft projects that seem really cool.

Bottom line: jury's still out on this one. I need to fiddle around a little more to decide if I like it or not. If you want to follow my Twitter page, it's under craftykatie32.

Ode to LibraryThing

This is by far my favorite part of learn and play so far. I love to organize, so being able to catalog my books, as well as my thoughts about them, online is great.

It's also been the easiest "thing" for me. I can't wait to add the rest of my library and see what other people think about the books I'm reading.

My friends are talking about starting a book club but we're a little too busy right now to do it the traditional way. This would be a good forum to do that without having to connect everyone's schedules.

This is definitely something I'll continue with after Learn and Play is over.

Image generators

This task was a little harder for me than the other ones. Did I have trouble finding the right picture? No. There were lots of them that I wanted to play with. I had trouble thinking of what to change in the picture.

When I was in school, I had no trouble coming up with clever things to say. But now the words fail me when I need them.

Complaining about the price of gas isn't really something I wanted to do, and not to pick on Disneyland at all, it just seemed to fit. I live in the eastern U.S., so if I drove to Disneyland, regardless of what the price of gas is, it would amount to a lot of money.

Anyways, I enjoyed this part of Learn and Play. I think I'll play with image generators more when I'm feeling a little more witty.

If you'd like to make changes to the Disneyland sign, here's where I found it.

Finding RSS feeds

Again, the hardest part of this exercise was thinking of something to search for. As with any type of search, I found that the more specific I was, the better results I got. Since they were mainly keyword searches, I got all results where the term was used at least once, and they may or may not have had anything to do with the posts.

I did like the feature on topix.net that lets you search by zip code. I live in a small town with a weekly newspaper, and we only make the television news if something shocking or catastrophic happens, so it was nice to be able to get information as it happened. That said, the most recent post I found about my town was from the end of August, so I guess my town isn't even interesting enough for the Web.

RSS Feeds

Okay, so the RSS feeds part of CML's Learn and Play was a little tough for me. But not necessarily because it was confusing--more so because I didn't have very many blogs to get feeds for. I don't usually read blogs in my spare time, so other than a few news-related blogs I had no idea where to look. Luckily Bloglines has some to choose from when you sign up.

I do like the idea of having all your news/information sites in one place and automatically tell you when they are updated. It's really frustrating when you go to a page expecting something to have been changed and it hasn't.

Technology: Love it or hate it

For the most part, I'm a big fan of technology. Sure there are learning curves, and sometimes a few bugs to work out, but overall I think it can make life easier. That being said, I've been having a love-hate relationship with technology lately.

I work at a retail store in addition to the library, and we just upgraded our computers which were supposed to make our lives easier, and for the most part it does. But it tends to fail at the most inopportune times. For example, I have a little handheld computer that tells me where items go, how much they cost, and how many we are supposed to have. However, if I leave it idle for too long it knocks me off the system and I have to start over. Awhile ago I was trying to make a lot of shelf labels (18 pages worth) and I got called up to the register, which left the computer idle for too long, knocking me off the system, which made me have to start over!

Luckily, CML's Learn and Play program hasn't given me such headaches. The only problem I've had so far is coming up with the time to do it, especially after the Labor Day holiday.

Flickr Exploration part 2

Today I started looking at the third party sites that use Flickr images and found one that really caught my attention. I love to travel, so when I saw Trip Planner by Yahoo I had to check it out. There's lots of cool features like plotting out your next trip and opening up your plans so others can comment on them. You can also view what other people have done when they travelled. There's lots of pictures and even a virtual map where you can mark places you've been and places you hope to go. It's a really cool site and worth checking out when you need to plan your next trip.