And you are the wind beneath my wings ...

I am greatly amused. Wait for it to load and the title will all make sense. Don't know where they found it, but it gave me a laugh. Shame they didn't find it before this assignment was due. Such is life. Go, make your own.

this is the end ...

So, how do I feel about all of this? To be honest I'm not sure. Some of these exercises were fun. Some were painful. Mostly I've been wondering how I would use this at work. I still don't have an answer to that. The hardest part about keeping a blog is that you need to be online regularly. While I might check my email, do my banking, pay the bills, or work on assignments, I don't spend a huge amount of time in front of my laptop.

This wasn't always the case. Once I could have spent days online or gaming. I've had housemates who'd forgotten I lived there because they rarely saw me. But I can't do it anymore. I made the conscious effort to reclaim my life, and unplug. I’m more likely to be absorbed in a good book than go online. Perhaps it is because I recognise that computers and the internet are meant to be tools; they are for my convenience. They are not my link to the rest of the world. I’m sure that for some people it is their link, but I’m not one of them. I use them for what I need and then I go do something else.

Some of what we covered I already knew. Other things I had been avoiding like the plague, twitter being the best example. I am resigned to the fact that I will not do brilliantly on this assignment. I have given everything a bash, but I don't know if that is enough. My group has not been communicating a great deal, but from the other pages I've looked at this doesn't seem to be unusual. I think it is good to have broadened my knowledge base, even if I don't know what I'll use it for.

After all you get asked the strangest things in a public library.

Maps and mashups

View Long way from home in a larger map

I decided to play with google maps to document some of the places I have been, and the events that took place there. By the end I have lost all track of time, and all the other things I was supposed to be doing.

RiP: A remix manifesto is something that I think is brilliant. It is all about mash-up media. Definately worth checking out.

I had a look at Yahoo Pipes and have every intention of giving it a go, but unfortunately life got in the way. Given that this assignment finishes on Monday whatever I do find out will no longer be relevant, but I'll probably wack it up here at some point anyway.

The big print giveth ...

I'm still laughting over this: Gamers risk everlasting limbo. I know it was meant as an April Fools, but it highlights what we were talking about earlier. People don't read the shit that they are signing, or more accurately in this case clicking. Scary stuff. If you like the image you can check out the other images here. Making the web pretty, one page at a time.

HW5 Video, photos and other media

This is one of my most favourite shows from my childhood. My brother and I used to watch this with Nona. One of my favourite things about YouTube and sites like it is that you can find things you never thought you’d see again. Though given its ability to warp time you need to be really careful about where and when you chose to look at YouTube. Many productive hours lost there.



This one is more a flash back to my undergrad days. Getting to the end of the movie and having one of my friends say to me: “Hang on, you mean the guy playing the boyfriend wasn’t really a guy? Dude.” Yes indeed, dude.

I did have a poor quality video that my old housemate took of one of my cats dragging the bone from our lamb roast up the hallway, but can’t find it. It was super grainy, but you can make out her hissing at the other cat, and the fact that the bone was the same size as her. We did laugh at the time.

I don’t have a camera, or even a camera phone (yes, it’s true, and no I have no intention of getting one) so I don’t see any point in having a Flickr account. I do however have a decent link to something on Flickr. For those of you who don’t know I bake as a form of therapy. Baking, and killing zombies, keeps me sane. The girls sent me this some time ago, as a request. I haven’t got round to making them yet. Work and study doesn’t really leave a lot of time for either baking or zombies. Perhaps in the uni break (depending of course on what stage of the holidays my niece decides to be born). Follow the link. Try not to drool onto the keyboard.

HW4 social bookmarking is delicious

Ok, social bookmarking. Peter played with Diigo so I went with Delicious. I didn’t mind this. I quite like the idea of having all my links available where ever I am. Having had to reformat my laptop more than once (stupid vista) I have long kept my bookmarks listed in an email. Tedious yes, but using Firefox I can open all links and then mass save the open taps to my bookmarks. Ok, so sorting them alphabetically might take a little longer, but I can appreciate that not everyone needs to go that far in their organisation.

So, a little bit about Delicious. They belong to yahoo. They allow you to save and sort bookmarks that are of interest to you, and give you the option to share these sites with others. There’s nothing worse than finding a really interesting site, and then not being able to remember how you got there, or being able to find it again. With its use of tags you can bookmark anything of interest, and find it again no matter how long it has been or which computer you are on. In a world full of net cafes and backpackers this is a blessing. It is not without its danger. With tags you can find related sites that others have linked to. As anyone who knows me well will tell you, I love a good tangent. If you’ve ever talked to me for a reasonable amount of time you will know that in any one conversation we can go from one extreme to another. I may know how all the topics are linked, but it may make no sense to who I’m talking to. Even typing I have been known to go off on tangents. This is a perfect example.

With that in mind I can easily see how you could become lost following the links supplied by other people’s tags. Nice if you have all the time in the world. Not so good if you have places to be, assignments to do, a pie in the oven ... you get the idea.

It is easy to use once you install the software. I run Firefox and it installed quickly. The support page advises that the software will also run with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. Bookmarking is essentially the same. There are the options of adding tags when bookmarking sites in Firefox, so the option to do so with Delicious is not unusual. From a social point of view you can now share your bookmarks with your friends, and even total strangers.

I couldn’t figure out how to get all my Firefox bookmarks directly into Delicious, so had to add them one at a time. I stopped at 47. There was probably an easier way, but I couldn’t find it. As an option to add new links as I go along I can definitely see myself continuing to using this. I’ll probably still bookmark things using Firefox as well. Old habits die hard.

twitter and micro blogging (or bamboo under the fingernails)

I am not a fan of twitter. If not for this class I could have successfully lived my life without every have gone anywhere near it. But I did. And, as I’m sure you’ve become accustomed to my brutal honesty, you expect me to start sledging twitter about now ... but I won’t. I just don’t have the energy.

I don’t think it is a generational thing. I really don’t think I’m so old that all new technologies are beyond me. I do think that I have moved beyond the need to know what people are doing every minute of every day. Mind you, I’d live on my own as far as I could get from people if I could. It may seem like an odd statement for someone who works, happily I might add, in a public library. I think we all have that part of our personality that we switch on in order to deal with people face to face in the world at large. It is much harder to maintain that persona when sitting in front of a computer in your pj’s.

Perhaps that is where my reluctance to engage on twitter comes from. It feels like pouring out this part of yourself and then waiting for a response. Not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you know your friends are waiting for you. It's just not for me. I no longer live in front of my laptop, so might not log on for days. Not the easiest way to have a conversation. But what if you truly have nothing to say? Are you insulting someone by smothering then in the minutia of your everyday life? Or are you (subconsciously or otherwise) waving a very large red flag, warning others of you complete self absorbency?

Either way, I quickly reached my limit. Nothing I saw or read made me wish to continue using twitter. I couldn’t find all the others in my group. I did find others in the class by the “#isys1166”, but again found nothing to hold my attention. (I know I'm not the only one who thinks this. There are other in this class who agree with me, though perhaps I am the only one prepared to be so vocal about it).

I have added links to twitter related things that I did find interesting.

How To Scan Thousands of Tweets Without Tears

Twitter Cruft Remover: I Needs It

Parting is such tweet sorrow: Romeo and Juliet get Twitter treatment

Twitter takes ads

HW2

Google Reader. It seemed like such a good choice in the beginning. Or to be brutally honest, it seemed like the easiest choice. Oh, how wrong I was. Maybe that was a little harsh. Getting in wasn’t difficult. Neither was signing up for sites that looked interesting. All that seemed to be simple enough. I admit that having all the things I looked at on a regular basis in the one place is brilliant. Or it would be, if it actually worked.

If, for the sake of this argument, I were to attempt to log in to my reader 10 times a week, I can confidently say that 7 of those times I would have difficulties. It may open to the main page, and give me little snippets of all the article that have been published since I last checked. But, the minute I try and click on each subscription individually I get an error message asking me to try again shortly. It doesn’t seem to matter if I am on either of the home laptops (one runs Windows7 and Mozilla Firefox, the other Vista and internet explorer) or the uni computers. It refuses to let me in. My supposedly convenient port of call is no longer convenient. In fact it is downright frustrating. I’m angry damn it.

The most disappointing part is that when the reader does work, it does exactly what I want it to. I toyed with the idea of finding another reader, but to be honest I haven’t bothered. I don’t think I could take the disappointment. I’d much rather just automatically open all my bookmarks in their own tabs, and flick through them. At this rate it is less labour intensive that fighting with my reader.

And yet the feeds come through fine on my blog. Just another of life’s little mysteries.

While we are on the topic of frustrating things (it's all coming back to me now) I did eventually manage to edit something on Wikipedia. It took several attempts to set up my account, and multiple error messages (I seem to have been attracting them) but I did get it to work eventually. I made a few small edits.
I can't say that I found it a particularly engaging experience.

I have no issues with the thousands of people who do contribute, or anyone who becomes intensely passionate about its content. It just isn't for me. Perhaps I am a little dismissive. I admit that I do use it as a starting point for general information, but I certainly would treat it as definitive. I think it does have a place for anyone in the quest of knowledge, but I'd take most of it with a grain of salt.

HW1

Ok, so obviously I did set up the blog. I had thought I wrote on everyone's wall, but it would appear that I only looked at them. Will correct that momentarily. Obviously it is a bit late to be making a welcome post, but I see no dramas with making comments on later posts. It is after all the engagement that counts.

For some reason I'm having difficulty commenting on Matt's page. Not really sure what's happening there.

Anyway, I decided to check out ResearchBuzz. I added this page to my Google Reader. I'm not thrilled with the reader but that is another post. I do like this site. It appeals to my inner geek. There's always something new being developed, and while it would be naive to think that we really are the first people to read about it, there is almost a sense that you are just a little bit in front of everyone else. Granted that at this stage the things discussed are not significantly practical. I will not be doing any major research projects any time soon. Still it is comforting to know that the information, and better ways to find it, exist.

not quite right

It has come to my attention that instead of just wading my through stuff I should have been documenting my progress, or lack thereof. Ranting to my partner and/or my cats on what I've been doing isn't helpful. Though to be honest I think my other half was just happy to see me, rather than only hearing noises from the study. My cats are supremely indifferent, unless they're hungry at which point they are suitably attentive.

But I digress.

To rectify this I will be going through my history and trying to recreate those situations which provoked my ire in the first place. There were also things I really enjoyed playing with. Hopefully I'll remember what they were when I see them.

pet hate

When taking time out from writing the odd assignment, I enjoy finding things that are relevant to my view of the world.