Wednesday, August 8th

Alrightie, time to report on del.icio.us and Technorati. I got on del.icio.us and formed an account and started adding some websites with my little descriptive tags......the thing is I really don't look at very many websites. I mean other than email accounts and the NYTimes, my bookmarked pages don't range very far beyond our banks and the electrical company. This was evident when I started adding my websites to del.icio.us: I added Epicurious (of course, my favorite recipe website), my marathon plan and runner's log at the Runner's world website, and then the site for Performance today, the NPR program I like listening to at work. Ummmmmmm and I think that's about it for my day-to-day life. Am I abnormal??? Anyway, I don't think del.icio.us is really for people like me....when you only have 4 or 5 websites you look at regularly, there really is no need to catalog them for retrieval. And I could use delicious to look for other similarly-tagged sites, but honestly, unless I'm on a mission for something specific, I just don't see myself taking the time to surf around.

I feel the same way about Technorati. If I'm looking for something specific, then Technorati could be a great tool, but otherwise I'd just be using it to find the most popular favorited sites or to check out the best blogs on Iraq, and honestly that's just too much of an information overload for me. The current #1 site, for example, is Boing Boing: a directory of wonderful things which it appears is just a compilation of human interest stories and curiosities. It's all interesting...I just don't have the brain space and time to intake it all. I feel the same way about cable television actually....I start to cave every once in a while because I miss all my sports, but I know that if I had cable television I'd watch very interesting shows and I'm sure I'd be a better person for it, but I'd have a whole lot less time on my hands.

I wonder how normal I am. Do most people have loads of websites and blogs they monitor? Maybe I'm just a bear of very little brain. :)

Friday, August 3rd

I was a little dubious about Rollyo...would I really use this?? That is until I saw the Food and Dining rollyo someone had set up....to only search true food sites like Epicurious, Chowhound, and foodie blogs. I realized that it would have helped if I had had this last night when I was searching for a good recipe for Chiles Rellenos and trying to figure out whether the original recipe uses Hatch New Mexican chiles (or Anaheim) or Poblanos. Searching on Google brought up a lot of personal pages and mexican grocery stores websites which I didn't want to have to take the time to evaluate. But when I searched for chiles rellenos in the Rollyo engine, it brought up some of the recipes I had searched for in Epicurious, plus a discussion of Hatch vs. Poblano in Chowhound, and a thread on a forum in egullet.....all sites which have delivered for me in the past. Plus, it brought up a blog I had never heard of The Accidental Hedonist. So I can see myself using this for food; I would also be interested to perhaps create one for archival issues. When I'm searching for help on a general topic, I have various websites and forums I search which I could roll into one engine.

Note: searching for "Archives" in Google is not recommended as almost every site has what it calls an Archive. Archivists will argue that this is a misuse of the word, but I'm afraid it's a losing battle in the world of semantics.

Note #2: It appears that Poblanos are the most commonly-stuffed pepper in Mexico and California, while in New Mexico, you'll most likely get the Hatch. So there you go.

Tuesday, July 31st

So this is me in the Simpsons world....I uploaded a photo of myself to the SimpsonizeMe image generator sponsored by Burger King in the buildup for the Simpsons movie. The image it generated looked nothing like me actually.....really short and curly black hair, a pointed nose, big round eyes...so I made some changes. I actually would love for my hair to look this groomed every day. :)

And Librarything is cool. I like adding my own library, looking at others' libraries, seeing what suggestions it has for other books under the same tag. I like reading and talking about book recommendations so this site is really up my alley. I thought the UnSuggester was a little presumptuous...I mean, how does it know me and my likes/dislikes???? Maybe I like Shakespeare AND Stephen King! I put in one of my very favorite books, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, and the fact that, indeed, I had none of the unsuggested titles in my library was quite beside the point, I thought. :)

Speaking of Shakespeare, I discovered Antony and Cleopatra last weekend....well, I guess I always knew Shakespeare had written such a play but I've never read or seen a production of it. Wow...this play has it all. Shakespeare was able to relay an important historical event in Western civilization, explore the tragic love story therein, and bring out some interesting ideas by playing the Roman structured male-centered world against the Egyptian female-dominated looser world. This West vs. East conflicts throughout the play as it shifts across the Mediterrean between Rome and Egypt and covers differences in the concepts of honor, gender roles, and success.....Shakespeare was quite a guy.

July 25th

Well, I scrapped the feedster Iraq news feed since I couldn't figure out how to change the text/background colors and replaced it with a feed to David's blog which he's going to maintain while he's in Iraq. I'm all about first-hand accounts anyway....especially when its my husband's. Hey, and I can see the text clearly....so bonus. I spent some time setting up my UA portal and carefully selected the elements I wanted and rearranged them on my page....and pretty much haven't used it since. You can't manipulate your messages the same way you can in Webmail (delete, move them to other folders) and I just didn't like how it displayed. The only other advantage was having my Blackboard on the same page but the element only shows a Blackboard icon which I have to click to go to the login page, which I guess is more convenient than typing in "classes.uaf.edu" but barely so. I guess I just don't like the interface....so it's back to visiting separate sites for me.

I found a list of blogs related specifically to Archivists and their work and found an interesting one by Richard Cox, who's a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and publishes a lot in the Archives world. Anyway, he's highlighting "scholarly and popular literature analyzing the nature of archives or contributing to our understanding of archives in society". And the first book I looked at was the new one by Anne Fadiman, whom I love, but then there were other titles such as "Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items From Around the World", "Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge", "Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder", and the ever popular "Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory". :) Seriously though, I think this is a blog I would read when I get a chance....that way at least I can read about books that I don't have time to read.

And as far as general learning activities, I just discovered that the big towering black thing in Van Gogh's painting "Starry Night" is supposed to be a group of cypress trees. I just got a puzzle of the painting and realized I've never really noticed the huge black thing in the center of the painting....I guess I was just always distracted by the vibrant sky. They don't really look like trees to me but I guess that's why it's called Impressionist art. Impressionism doesn't lend itself well to puzzles.

Wednesday, July 11th

Well, I explored around Feedster a bit and created a rss feed for my blog on the subject of Iraq (it's feeding just news stories not blog entries). I then spent a good amount of time trying to get it in the right place and then changing the background or font color as the text was unreadable. I got the link color changed but not the text so I'm letting that go for now. I knew next to nothing about rss feeds and the tools for creating them so this exercise was good for me.

As far as tracking what else I've learned, it's turned out that the wiring to our well pump has to be replaced and rerouted. So over the last week I've absorbed so much about pumps, wiring, and pvc pipe that it's difficult to pinpoint anything specific. I knew so little about it that even simple things like wire splicing and couplings were new to me, so the fact that I'm walking around Home Depot spouting phrases like "I'm going to need 150 ft. of cable (three wire with ground), some pvc cement, three-quarters inch bell pvc pipe, some 90 degree elbows, and a trencher" is astonishing.

Tuesday, July 3rd

I looked through a few of the technology-oriented sites for assignment #6 and they've only confirmed that 1) I really need an iphone (and I just saw in the news yesterday that AT&T is buying Cellular One which will open up Alaska to iphone connectivity!!) and 2) I'm intrigued by Second Life, the virtual world where you can create your own identity and, well, a second life. I haven't actually registered and entered the world but just reading about the ramifications Second Life is having on Real Life has been fascinating. I've heard about being able to buy SL currency with real US dollars in order to purchase virtual real estate, clothing, and food; real life businesses are marketing their wares on SL; libraries are constructing their virtual counterparts in SL; Reuters has a Second Life correspondent. Musicians, artists, and authors can give concerts, exhibits, and readings. And just the other day I was listening to a report on the darker side of SL: crime. Apparently, mafias and gangs exist in SL. And the Real life Brussels police had started an investigation on a rape which happened in SL, an investigation on the real life person behind the avatar. Starting a whole other life doesn't really appeal to me since, frankly, it just seems like a lot of work....but I'm interested in reading about it.

And, speaking of technology, I learned something this morning which, unlike many of my other little knowledge tidbits about caribou antlers and earthworms, had immediate application to my life. I woke up this morning and had no water and our well pump wasn't working which was especially bad timing since my husband left last night for an extended deployment. To make a lengthy story short, I learned how to manually restart our pump! It's all good now. :)

Thursday, June 28th

Well, I didn't know anything about mashups until this assignment #5 so I guess I'm a Learning 2.0 success story. :) I thought the Zazzle postage stamps were pretty darn cool and am surprised I haven't seen any instances of people using a tool like this. I would imagine it really being useful for things like wedding announcements or thank you notes, Christmas cards, and business logos.

I learned yesterday that while caribou antlers are usually asymmetrical, they grow back the same way every year. Honestly, I have never noticed that antlers are usually asymmetrical and I don't know whether this is the same for all antlered animals or just caribou. Interesting!