Elephant Stamp 19

Molly thumbnail

Yep I have indeed uploaded my pet picture on the VUlibrary wiki. It is a drawing of my previous moggie. Her name is Molly. Click on the picure to link to the Wiki.

Wikis are useful, but you would not use them as a source of primary information. I have made use of information from Wikis (most particularly Wikipedia) many times. My Duggup blog devoted to the review of music often requires me to follow up on band information. It is rare for nothing to exist about a band or musician except for a Wiki entry, usually it is the other way around.

Take everything you read with a grain or two of the proverbial and you are unlikely to go wrong.

Elephant stamp no. 18

The next generation of library services; shared resources, collaboration and community building are an exciting prospect. A step in the right direction is the wonderful collaboration between some Victorian university libraries and some from interstate called Bonus +. This is a valuable and logical extension to inter library loans.

I have used this service quite a few times and it is wonderful. Now all we need to do is to get more libraries involved.

Going to be briefer – running out of time.

Thing 17 – on the home run.

Looking at my bookmarks at work and comparing them to those on my machine at home – I am struck by the almost complete lack of overlap. I use the library website remotely if I need to access anything library related but otherwise that’s it.

I can see the value of looking at other people’s bookmarks to see if they have found resources that I may have missed and thanks for that, I will be spending some time over the Christmas break investigating that aspect of del.icio.us.

I tend to use my RSS feeds for just this kind of thing and have been directed to some fantastic design sites and resources, including fonts, typography and related subjects which are my passion. But I can say that through del.icio.us I found an excellent article called 10 Examples of Beautiful CSS Typography and how they did it… which I had not come across before and the website was a new one for me too. Very happy indeed.

1 more elephant bagged and 4 to go!

I have (we)blogged iGoogle for 23 things on Nov 23rd

By my count, as of today I should have an elephant to number 16. This will be the next one I do.

Thanks elephant stamper.

The next few things – ah Google.

Someone asked jokingly if Google were trying to take over the world. Well, um, yes, of course they are. Mind you because they are doing it via the Internet and it is free (except for advertising) they aren’t being swamped with lawsuits the way Microsoft was when they tried the same thing.

Mind you the fact that Micrsoft held you to ransome and required your firstborn or a pound of flesh in exchange for the privilage of using their software has nothing to do with it. So they are heading towards the virtual desktop paradigm as well. May the best um, company win.

I love to get information, news, video, software, images, opinions, entertainment, work, ect, over the Internet, but my inherent distrust for something I can neither bite nor touch means that I may well have accounts with services of this nature (i do have a google docs account and a Box.net account because you never know when the storage may come in handy.)

Anyway I got a little sidetracked. Google maps are wonderful and I use them in preference to just about anything else (with the exception of the Melway I have in my car at all times.) A friend of mine in Denmark showed me the little village he and his family live in via google maps. His house is next to a small wood and surrounded by farmland. just lovely. I could see his house and garden and could imagine him standing in the garden waving to me.

I in turn showed him my house sitting on the edge of an old disused quarry slowly being turned into residential allotments.  Mind blowing is the detail when you look at street level and realise the there is your driveway. Getting just a little intrusive. Big Brother is watching kind of thing and I don’t mean that asanine tv show either.

Like this picture of 220 Ingles Street which is the address of the Australian Academy of Design in Port Melbourne. Thatch’s where I study graphic design.

Australian Academy of Design

So finally we are on to the Google research tools. Anything that makes searching for source material easier is a good idea. For researchers, Scholar used in conjunction with other research tools can provide a quick way to find recent articles on given topics. It’s easy to see if there are online sources and of course the saving of citations makes bibliographic referencing faster and less painless.

If I were inclined to use Google docs some of the collaborative tools it provides are very good. I like the fact that they try new theings (though I’m not really keen on being their guinea pig). In the past I have tried the odd advertised Google tool that have subsequently mysteriously disappeared.

The best thing about google is that it is free and the ads are relatively inobtrusive when compared with yahoo for example.

Surely I have earned another three elephants with this post.

Thing 12 MySpace and Facebook

Some time back a musician and poet friend wanted a website to support his soon to be released album. This is the site I made and maintain for him: http://ianbland.com.au/ . he wanted a MySpace site to match it and this is what I did: http://www.myspace.com/ianblanddrifter. I have a couple of other sites, but they are to be finished one day, I promise – so I think it is safe to say that I know my way around MySpace.

Additionally my husband and I have a music related blog called Duggup at http://duggup.com.au/. I regularly troll the music there and have even interviewed acts I have found on MySpace for Duggup having an identity of Duggup for the purpose.

MyFace, well that’s another kettle of fish. I investigated social networks pretty comprehensively (well the most popular ones anyway) including FaceBook. I didn’t like FaceBook because it’s a closed community. If you are not a member you can’t enter. MySpace allows you to search and access people without logging i (see my previous entry), unless they specifically have restricted access. So
while the elephant stamp is for establishing a Facebook identity. I’m sorry I’m not prepared to facebook – so how about one for MySpace instead??? Hmmmm?

Meanwhile here is “I’m not going back” by Ian Bland and the Lamington Drive Orchestra to entertain while you consider.

Library Thing

Cream of the Jest

Grudgingly I can see the point of a community here. I came to the radical realisation while talking to my other half about the 23 Things exercises that I absolutely don’t trust the Internet. While I live a good part of my life in the Internet cloud – I don’t trust it as far as I can spit (and believe me – that’s not very far).

Perhaps it is the fault of my reading habits (I have been a science fiction fan since I was able to read) One of my favourite writers still remains the now sadly departed John Brunner. His books and in particular, the 1975 pre-cyberpunk “Shockwave Rider” taught me to be paranoid about data, all data.

Add to the mix a husband in the IT game with a more than healthy respect for data security and you end up with a person -me- who doesn’t trust the cloud. The internet is the best possible sandbox, but you need to careful that someone hasn’t planted a sharp for unwary players.

Now I’m not suggesting that the Library Thing is dangerous after all they only require a username and a password. They do book reviews too. I used to review mostly horror and fantasy (mainly because real science fiction was out of fashion at the time) for the real world science fiction community and I loved getting review copies in trade paperback (my favourite) or hardback.

So here is my “Library Thing” Thang http://www.librarything.com/catalog/pretentette where I added the book that I am currently reading called The Cream of the Jest by James Branch Cabell originally written in 1917 and classed as Adult Fantasy.

23 Things and Flickr

Flickr is a wild and wonderful place to play. I often come across very interesting pictures there. Mind you there is also considerably more dross. Still I am an avid collector of images for the purpose of inspiration. From many sources I have emassed a wonderful collection and I’d like to direct your attention to the Typography tag and I invite you to explore the pictures using this tag. Some pretty amazing stuff I am sure you will agree. Pages and pages of the stuff – 118,000 + entries. I could happily spend hours just looking. I subscribe to several feeds that are nothing more than uploads of peoples drawings. Just yummy.

Which brings me to The Dictionary Of Image. Go have a look.

23 Things catchup

Well, here I am, I managed to score a whole bunch of elephant stamps for my last post, so let’s see what we can do this time. I’ve had a look at iGoogle for the first time today and while I use Google mail and Google maps (wonderful tool) and Google Picasa and lots of ther tools – iGoogle is not one that is of any interest to me.

I can see where it might be useful for people but my default webpage is to my server at home which includes a calendar and diary that I share with my husband. If I were usinf Web 2 for the very first time and neede to familiarise myself with the tools – it would be a good place to start.

A suggested question from the list of 23 Things is whether I would like to work for Google. Well hell yes, who wouldn’t? So are you listening Google? I’d love to work for you. I don’t neccessarily like or use all of your products but I’m sure I’d help you make them better.

Point by point then:
Your Gmail account – I have several for various purposes.
Headlines from Google News and other news sources – um I barely have time to read the RSS feads that I subscribe to, not to mention the news articles that my personal news feed, my husband, sends me.
Weather forecasts, stock quotes, and movie showtimes uh huh, well no I use Bureau of Met for weather and as for the rest – well ….
Bookmarks for quick access to your favorite sites from any computer This is mucho useful and probably the only reason why I would use this service.
Your own section with content you find from across the web, and that’s why I have a few blogs – I don’t need another one right now thanks.
Google Book Search another resource that could be useful.

Finally I have a clock and calendar right on my desktop toolbar, I’m not sure why I need another. In short great for an entry level user without any other options.

No 6 of 23 Things.

For me it says it all when you have pictures of 13 year old girls adorning the pictures for ImageChef, but I have seen “Surf’s Up” generated gifs in a few places recently. Now I know who to blame.

Now I’ve never had anything against time wasters , nothing wrong with a bit of harmless fun. Truly though – these silly things don’t really appeal. On the other hand avatar generators are mucho funno! At least for a while and I have spent enough of it making avatars for myself and my husband Thatch.

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cassette title generator piccy

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But as someone on television used to say “…but I digress,” and so I do. I will try to explain the picture. Many moons ago I had a band and that’s what we called ourselves – three of us had husbands who played together in a band (hence Band Widows), one was a ring in but she could play keyboards. I think she was the only one of us who could actually play and sing at the same time – a feat I never managed to master properly and I was lead vocal and bass. You have to laugh.

So that was Play Week taken care of. Another elephant thanks.