Itch...? part 2: greetings from Limbo

I bumped into a colleague the other day who asked me "How's life in limbo?" Spookily enough, I had been thinking about my life in just those terms for the last few weeks, and thinking back it's a similar situation to that in which I found myself seven years ago too.
Once I knew I had my job, I had to wait to start it. Two weeks can seem like a lifetime when something as big as a new job, a new start in life, looms on the horizon, and what I mostly remember about that time was the frustration of not being able to just get on with it. Of course once I did start I had what felt like all the information in the world crammed into my head in such a short time that I am sure by the end of the first week I was just wandering the corridors like a zombie...
Limbo seven years later is somewhat different.
Once we get the move (which is what is currently looming ever closer) out of the way work will carry on much as it has before. I anticipate a change of some workflows, hopefully for the better as I think there is more I could do in some cases than I currently do, but the big change this time around is one of location.
It is not lost on me that as the arrangements stand now I will work in the New Bodleian for exactly seven years. The day after my "library birthday" as a fellow student called it happens I will be out, and by the beginning of next month will hopefully be able to find my desk. Until then, the boxes and the dust and the likelihood of putting away something I will need consume me... For the sake of posterity, I therefore present a view of my workspace, replete with theses, as it looked on Tuesday November 16th, before the boxes arrived.

Itch...? Part 1

...Can it really be almost seven years?
I don't remember what day of the week it was, but I do remember that it all began on a day when my hair would not behave. Having had two failed interviews within the previous few days, I was spent. With the hair situation obviously meaning that I would not look my best, I decided that giving up trying to make a good impression and just taking everything as it came was the only way forward.
I arrived on time, just as the previous candidate was being shown out. The gentleman who showed me around introduced himself, went away to show the (utterly terrified-looking) candidate out, and then introduced himself to me again (which I found amusing), before taking me into the bookstack, right up to the top, and then admitting to me that he didn't really know his way around...
Pressing on, he showed me other floors of the stack, and the Reading Room, before taking me round to the office. I know now (having been pressed into service myself) that his purpose was to tell the panel what his impression of me had been; I must have made a favourable one.
The interview panel were pleasant enough. I answered the questions, the most useful thing I was able to bring being my knowledge of people having sold beer across the road for almost a year, and when I got the call later that day to offer me the job I accepted with enthusiasm.
I later concluded that being slightly un-groomed was hardly a hardship given the mess which some people walk around in, and that knowing most of the porters from the pub probably didn't hurt either.
Still seems unreal that this all happened in 2003!

Postmortems and other procedures...

...Part 2
Wow, I am actually managing to do this the following day as promised! Must be a sign...
Anyway, as I said in my previous post, this one is concerning the new stuff which I have been doing since the end of NBRR as we know it.
The procedures mentioned mostly involve circulation, which does sound rather medical, but which is just the euphemism for (gasp!) letting the readers remove books from the building.
Since the closure of NBRR I, along with a few of my Oriental colleagues have been redeployed at the Bodleian Oriental Institute Library on a rota basis which means for me that I am on the desk three afternoons a week.
Now, back in the mists of time when I began at the Bod, the OIL was regarded as something of a mystery by my naturally misanthropic and suspicious colleague, but I must say that the welcome I have had has been warm and that I am enjoying working in such a different environment from those with which I have previously been familiar.
Being a Faculty Library, OIL is closer to the sharp end of the teaching side of things, so it's actually far more dynamic than the Bod, which is rather ivory-towery. The atmosphere is more informal, and although there are all sorts of new things to learn I am finding it a rewarding experience being somewhere different.
When one is in a rut, it's hard to realise. The walls become familiar and the path easy to follow. My rut came to a natural end thanks to the refurbishment, and as a result I find myself with new horizons (albeit ones blocked by the silly round library next door!). The next big thing will be the office moves in November, but before that there will be the actual start of Term, which promises to make things even more interesting!

Oh, and in case anyone wondered, it was Merton in the photo, taken on a very foggy morning from Christchurch Meadow.

Postmortems, and other invasive procedures...

...Part 1.
I have been meaning to do this for ages.
Thing is, though, I kept being busy.
After my last post on the end of the NBRR I thought I would leave it a bit, see how I got on with my new regime, new library and such, and I find myself now almost a month on feeling deeply positive, which is always a good thing!
I will concentrate on the new place in my next post (part 2, all things being equal), but for now I must bask in the total freedom which I now discover (*basks*).
If I look back, the gradual release from the dreaded Reserve Desk is obvious to see. From the tyranny of the ORR, when I was in the reading room all day every day and only occasionally got to go somewhere else, to the NBRR, where I was on the desk about 14 hours a week to now, when I am at the Oriental Institute Library (OIL for short; it's technically the Bodleian Oriental Institute Library, but BOIL is rather an unfortunate acronym...) for three afternoons a week.
The rest of my time is my own, to do with as I need, and I am finding new reserves (oops!) of efficiency as-yet untapped as I work in an organic, sensible way, fitting in the bits and pieces of my various jobs in the bits and pieces of time as it arises. Finally my time is mostly my own, and I am enjoying myself immensely.
Don't get me wrong; the NBRR was a fun place to work, with interesting people and many challenges, but that rota was Hellish. I had to do two-hour slots at odd times of day, Wednesday lunchtimes being one that was particularly hard as I'd end up with a 7-hour afternoon if I was on evening duty. I didn't mind the duties per se, it was just the lack of freedom... I never was one for being told what to do!
So yes, much as I do miss spending time with my Map and Music chums (although not those weird Map and Music questions!), I do not miss that rota :)
Part 2 soon. In the meantime, major points for anyone who can spot the college in the photo...

The end of a Reading Room

It felt like a bit of an anticlimax, in the end.
On Friday last I worked my last couple of hours in the New Bodleian Reading Room, which ceased to be open to readers when the library closed on Saturday. I had expected it to be somehow more of an emotional moment, but the truth is that I am actually looking forward far more than I am looking back.
Ahead are the rest of the changes which will have to take place before the refurbishments are complete: the staff are moving out of the building, starting in the next month, and after we are all gone the crane will move in... I'm quite excited about the crane. I will watch with interest the dismantling of the infrastructure of the New Library as much as I tend to watch building sites with interest (it all comes from spending my 20s in holes in the ground...), all the time getting on with my new duties elsewhere.
Behind... well, seven years (nearly) of working in a building which has undergone many alterations since I began. I have learned a lot, I have worked with some very enjoyable people and some less so, both in terms of readers and colleagues, I have become the proto-librarian I now am through the years that I have been here, but where I work is not as important as the people, and we will all still be around, albeit in different places.
It had felt to me as if the NBRR was being slowly starved as the books were removed, but there is life after. The barcoders are using the space, and periodicals from the Camera and DH are occupying the empty shelves left by the Oriental books. One thing that never stays for long in a library is a flat surface!
So yes, on the whole the future is where I am looking. Not too far, or in too much detail, but forward.

Goodbye to the bookstack

They say the shortest route between two points is a straight line, but in the extraordinary little world where I work, the shortest route is often through the bookstack.
The New Bodleian Library, for those unfamiliar, is a big square stone building in Oxford on the corner of Broad Street and Parks Road. It is large and anonymous like so many of the other University buildings in our city, neither as columny as the nearby Clarendon Building nor as pretty and nobbly as the glorious Old Bodleian, with its 15th century bits and its gargoyles.
It is, however, deceptive. The New Bodleian is actually two buildings with a third perching on the top; the outer, stone structure is where the public bits get done, (although now the original six reading rooms are reduced to two) with offices and workspaces around the outside, then inside that is a nine-storey concrete and steel structure-- the first in Oxford to be entirely lit by electricity-- which is where the books live. The third building, the Indian Institute, was built on a flat roof overlooking the Sheldonian Theatre in the 1960s. It is connected to the rest of the building but has always been a separate entity from the Bodleian, having originally lived across the road in what is now the History Faculty Library.
My interest for this post, however, is the bookstack. Although I have never officially worked there, the stack has been an integral part of my job since I began in the Oriental Reading Room in 2003. We did all our own fetching and replacing, so my job included venturing into the shadowy recesses of H-Floor or up to the lofty heights of A-Floor (the floors are lettered A-L, but there is no floor I because of possible confusion). As I became more familiar with the stack I ventured further; the Oriental collections occupied some space on most stack floors, with many of our valuable manuscripts on the locked floor below ground and still others, rare Chinese printed books and even Egyptian papyri encased in glass on other floors towards the base of the structure.
By the time things began to change, when the reading rooms began to be amalgamated in preparation for the refurbishment of the New Bod (which is frankly long overdue in some respects), I was familiar with most of the floors, knew where the Oriental stuff was and more importantly, knew where other things were too. The stack was somewhere I could go and hide when things in the reading room got beyond clash-of-personality and headed towards me-saying-something-I-shouldn't. I got a great deal of satisfaction out of spending a meaningful half an hour pootling around, putting things away.
Lately, though, things are changing. The stack is not what it was. The special collections material has been moved out and the floors which used to be bursting with Victorian books classified using a system devised by a former Bodley's Librarian, E.W.B. Nicholson (which contained over 6000 divisions) have been rearranged and in some cases emptied. The muted chirruping of legions of people with yellow hi-vis vests on can be heard as they stick barcodes to every book in the stack before they are removed to a new facility in Swindon which will do what the stack has done for 60 years only with better climate control and less chance of leaks. The shelves of A-Floor are partially empty; their former inhabitants currently in boxes in a salt mine in Cheshire (yes, really!). D-Floor, where the Music material is kept, no longer has a special lock on its doors.
It is all progress, all change which is happening before even more change happens. Soon the New Bodleian will close, be refurbished, and reopen as the Weston Library, a flagship Special Collections Library for the 21st century.
I'm not saying any of it's wrong; I just wanted to go on the record to say I for one will miss the bookstack. I'll miss taking photos out of the window on A-Floor, watching the traffic on Broad Street while I wait for the lift, banging on the door of said lift when some idiot leaves the door open, traipsing up and down the stairs looking for the lift when some idiot leaves the door open and then walks away... I will miss the shadowy forms of the stack people, who do such an amazing job making sure the books get to the reading rooms but among whom I have never counted myself. I will miss the tunnel, which is about to close and which has been invaluable in allowing one to get to the Old Library without getting soaked on wet days, and the particular smell of the floors which house the old stuff... a proper library smell!
Still, everything changes, doesn't it? I am honestly looking forward to most of it, but I am also a little sad to see the end of such a unique and remarkable institution, which most people who use the library are blissfully unaware of.

Back from Blog Limbo...

Hello...? Anyone still there? Thought not! Well, it has been a while.
I thought about launching in with why I have decided to start adding to this again; but on further consideration I realised that explaining why I stopped is probably necessary, so here goes.
Ok, well, the week after the end of 23 Things was my third Study School in Aberystwyth. That was the first disaster. I went along, confident that I would get on as well as I had at the first two schools... only for that confidence to be shot down in a flaming mess when the reality assailed me. That reality (which I don't think was really made clear by the course team) was that not having a topic for one's dissertation was a bad idea. I expected to be able to get help choosing my topic, and as such was disappointed. I did not expect to leave Wales feeling as if I had done something wrong by concentrating on my taught course and getting 110 credits!
The second disaster was another case of expectations being wrong, in a way. My expectations that Saturday morning in May were that the ceiling would stay put (I even gave it a poke with my umbrella!!). It didn't; and I was fortunately not under it when it decided to give up. I did, however, have to decamp to the next-door room, have all my stuff covered in dust, and have to put off sending in my last assignment for my last module because I couldn't study due to being keen to get home most evenings to see how the repairs were going.
That was May taken care of, although the early arrival of my nephew Jack on the 30th was a highlight.
June was promising... right up until the morning when I woke up with chicken pox. No photographic evidence of that exists; I spoke to four people face to face during my 12 days of quarantine and only survived with my sanity intact thanks to patient friends and family who listened to me whine.
So, now we get to why I have decided to take this blog up again. Well, for a start there's been no major upsets in July! I am beginning to feel as if I can report on things library and not so library without having to mention anything sad or unpleasant.
Also, there are major changes afoot at the Bodleian, and I feel the need to give my slant on things. Before long the reading room where I work will close, and by the end of the year the staff will be moving out of the building in preparation for the redevelopment of the New Library. Already much is changing, and I think recording my thoughts on this will help me to feel as if it isn't passing me by. I will try to keep giving regular updates, keep it more-or-less library related and keep things amusing (I have some pix of bad hyacinths outside the National Library of Wales which I must use). For now, though, I think that's quite enough!

The Last Thing!

Wow... Thing 23... When I started the Programme April 9th seemed like a very long way off, but suddenly it's the day after tomorrow.
I should really start this entry with an apology. To all my fellow participants who worked so hard to get to this stage... I am sorry I didn't read your blogs! I tried, but eventually it got to be too much like hard work to keep up with everyone's thoughts as well as doing the Things themselves, and something had to give.
I don't regret following the Programme, however. It was definitely a positive experience for me in terms of learning exciting new things about Web 2.0 which I would not have discovered for ages without it. There were times when it all got a bit much; when having Things to do on top of work and studying and sleep (and suddenly finding myself with a boyfriend) seemed like TOO MUCH, but I think it was worth it.
Without 23 Things I would not have discovered Twitter, and the glorious Texts From Last Night, which is by far the funniest thing I have found on the Internet this year. I would also not have penguins on my iGoogle page, or an iGoogle page for that matter. I will take those away, along with my blog, which I am going to rename and continue with for the sake of the few people I have arm-twisted into reading it. I will leave behind Delicious, which I thought was pointless, and those Office 2.0 applications which seemed like a good idea at the time but which will only come into their own in a few years when speeds are better and it doesn't take twenty minutes to load. I daresay other things we have covered will seep into use over time; I am going to unsubscribe to things on Google Reader so I don't feel guilty about the 544 unread items and someday I might have time to have a play with podcasts and YouTube. Today I found a Library of Congress Subject Heading (Hikikomori) which cited Wikipedia as a source... I was very pleased!
If I were to offer suggestions to the team I might say that this programme ought to have been run at a time when people were less busy, such as the Long Vac, maybe, and that perhaps two Things a week were a bit tough, especially the ones which took a lot of time.

So... all in all a positive (if a bit hard work) experience.
Thanks Team, for all your hard work! I hope it proves beneficial to the whole of the Bodleian Libraries Group and beyond to have so many Web-savvy librarians on the staff!

P.S. Yes, that is my trolley, and yes, it is extremely lilac!

Gadgets again

Remember back in the distant past when I rebelled? I'm doing it again. I added the required gadget to my iGoogle page, found the settings irritating, tried to remember my login, couldn't because I don't see the point of sharing my bookmarks, and deleted it. Twice. There are more useful gadgets which one can add to iGoogle and I am always changing mine. I have a nice picture of clouds at the moment, and various other things which I move around depending on my mood. The penguins, however, remain constant. I get the point of this whole gadget business, but frankly the Wikipedia search box I have above my link to the BBC news on iGoogle at the moment is much more useful to me.
Sorry!

Photostream

Oooh! Look what I did!!
Now, it would have been nice if some of the other Things had been as easy as adding my Flickr photostream to my blog; not to mention as quick!
I think there will be cause to rearrange things as I go on as I have decided I might keep this going once the 23 Things Thing has finished. I know of a couple of people who might read it, so it's worth it, I suppose (thanks, guys!).
I've not looked at the dashboard element of this much since I started using it, and am pleased to note I can change the name of the blog... Not sure what I'll call it as yet!

Think Free...?

It is interesting to know that these online "Office 2.0" applications exist, but I felt the same way about ThinkFree Online that I did about Google Docs: my own needs, as mentioned in my document, right, are met by Word and my memory stick.
The application required me to disable the pop-up blocker in order to open the window (annoying) and also took about five minutes to load, despite this being on my work computer, so I can see why this would be a very frustrating tool to use on a slower machine.
So... interesting, but maybe not.

Google Docs

Ok, so this is kind of like Word, only not, right? Interesting... anyone who can be bothered to try to read the text on yonder screenshot will see that I have taken a mildly sarcastic tone on this one, but as I didn't have any actual text to hand at the time I thought this would suffice.
Again, Firefox and the whizzy way it remembers all my passwords saved me much tedious rummaging in my drawer for my login details, so it was actually quite an easy task compared to some of these.
On a slightly more positive note I do love the concept of cloud computing and I loved that article to which there was a link at the end of the 23 Things blog post about the wherabouts of the servers. I guess that might make me a geek, but frankly I don't care. Regardless of whether I actually have time to do any of this stuff (which I don't), I still find the explosion of opportunity which the more recent Web innovations have brought about fascinating and inspiring.
So, will I use GoogleDocs? I might... but probably not. My PC at home has Office 2007, and I am probably more likely to use something like Open Office when I (eventually) get around to installing Ubuntu on my tired laptop as that will skip between operating systems. There is no mention in the 23 Things blog about whether these things are supported on Linux... Enquiring minds want to know...

Wikipedia

SERIOUSLY?? Does anyone NOT use this?????????
I have a tool on my iGoogle page with a search box! I have cited it in assignments for my Masters!!
I am only dignifying this with a post because it appears on the 23Things Oxford blog in bold.

Wikis

This task looked at first to be pretty straightforward, but having attempted a deeper investigation I once again find myself with more to do than I have time to do it!
I object on general principle to the first thing I noticed when I opened the page to which we were directed (http://socialouls.wetpaint.com/) which was the dreadful flashing and leaping-around advert right at the top of the page. I realise that these sites must generate revenue by selling advertising; it is a shame that the adverts on this particular page were directed at teenage girls rather than at a more sensible audience.
I had a look around the site but as I have been busy this week it looks as if the references to OULS have been expunged quite well by the hundreds of my colleagues who are taking part in this! I will bookmark the site for future reference, and may deign to edit something if I discover an error in the future, but don't hold your breath...

Still Tweeting as @inky_fluff

I must admit, I think Twitter is one of my favourite Things on the programme so far! This morning I got into work to find a message that Yoko Ono is following me, which I know is just a response to my following her, but still, not something you expect to find on a Friday morning!
I spent a fruitful few minutes yesterday customising my page to make it a bit less agonisingly BLUE... the starry purple background appeals (but will probably clash with my blog!) and I also like the intuitive way you can customise all the colours of all the other things, from the background of the sidebar to the links. I am following a couple of library related people so far, and I think I will definitely make more use of this as time goes on. I have sent messages to people, and re-tweeted a funny headline from the Onion, so I think I've covered all the tasks for this Thing. It will take me time to really get into my stride, but I am sure that if I take two things away from 23Things that I will actually use this will be one (and the other will be the penguins!).

Tweeting as Inky_fluff

I must admit to having been looking forward to Twitter. I might even have delayed joining in order to do so as part of 23 Things!
I have found several people/things to follow and look forward to exploring more; time constraints due to working (that old issue again...) mean that I cannot explore for as long as I would like to today, but the appeal of something so well, tidy, compared to the sprawling mess of Facebook is such that I think I will probably engage with this quite well.
A word about my user name: long ago in the dim-distant past (2003), I used to participate on a forum on the Daily Info's website. Inky fluff was the name I chose, mainly because I spent a lot of time cleaning library stamps during that period of my illustrious career and inky fluff is what you get if you clean a stamp! It was also anonymous enough for me not to worry about the possibility of being discovered... in those days the idea of an online identity frightened me more than it does now, although I still have the occasional twinge about the prospect of so much data about me being available. Although, having said that I did have that existential crisis last week when I Googled myself, so perhaps I shouldn't worry so much!

LinkedIn

Hoorah! I have completed both Things this week without having to spill over into next week! Well, when I say completed, I have a very sketchy LinkedIn account now, which I will probably seldom use but which might be of use to me in a professional capacity someday.
It's rather a boring website, a bit too much green for my tastes, and the instructions are even more obtuse than Facebook, which took me some time to figure out. I have come across this service before in a professional capacity; as part of my job I sometimes have to look up academics who have supervised theses which I am cataloguing and they often have profiles on LinkedIn, albeit sketchy ones with hardly any details (a bit like mine then...).
I suppose if I think about my long-term professional future then services which provide work-related contacts with people are potentially going to be of use to me. For the time being, however, I am still vaguely uncomfortable about the level of Web presence I do have, whilst also being a bit depressed that when I Googled myself the other day I didn't find myself AT ALL. Talk about an existential crisis!

Facebook and Libraries

Finally! Something I don't have to sign up to!!
As is my way, I was a late convert to Facebook, having dismissed it as intrusive and banal for quite some time. In the end I joined on the back of a number of discoveries, not least that my 70-year-old father uses it to communicate with his chums in the Poker community and also that I needed it in order to find out the movements of the Oxford Part-Time Learners Group. Having joined I found myself in touch with various disparate people from my landlord to friends from school to my more recent fellow-students at Aberystwyth University, and so I began to appreciate the value of this type of networking-resource.
The trouble with libraries is that their content has always, until recently at least, been pretty static and not particularly obvious from anywhere but within the library itself. Facilities such as Facebook, blogs and other Web 2.0 applications give libraries the opportunity to inform their readers and potential readers what they are doing, when there are events which might be of interest to the wider community, and also to highlight aspects of their collections which might otherwise not be widely publicised.
The News Feed on Facebook is invaluable as a way of sneaking in information to users/fans/members (although I do get a little tired of other people's horoscopes), which requires no effort on the part of the people who are signed up for updates, unlike for example Google Reader (mine is showing over 450 unread items at present...).
In a setting such as Oxford University, where many of the users of the libraries are young and have grown up used to using the Web as a tool far more than those of an earlier generation, these sites will already be an integral part of their lives and therefore ripe for exploitation by forward-thinking librarians.
And as for the older generation, it does not pay to underestimate their involvement either; when my new Bodleian email failed to work yesterday, my Mum sent me a message on Facebook... :)

YouTube

Ahh, YouTube... yet again a Thing which feels as if one shouldn't be doing it at work. It has taken me rather a while to do this Thing, mostly because, as I said in my previous post, I have had more pressing commitments with work. Still, I have had a look, and I am sure that I would use it far more than I currently do if I had more time on my hands. I actually have a little YouTube gadget on my iGoogle page, so can access it whenever I wish.
I am not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I am glad to have been introduced to it and will probably find myself coming back to it later.
P.S. I did upload a podcast or two to GoogleReader after my previous post. I just haven't had time to listen to them...

Shhhh....

Podcasts. Audio files... audio being the operative word here. As in SOUND (ok, and video), which is not the most popular thing in the more traditional of library settings!
Tell you what chaps, (is anyone even reading this?), I will put the whole Podcast/RSS feed thing on my To Do List, which I have yet to create on account of being a bit busy.
(Memo to self: Make a To Do List, add Podcasts to it.)

Maybe not so Delicious

Sorry, guys, but this is just not going to happen. It's not that I don't see the purpose/usefulness of the social tagging phenomenon, it's just that frankly it's all getting rather much at the moment and having access to other people's networks and having to pay attention to them as well as the RSS feeds from everywhere and all the other stuff which is now at my fingertips is actually beginning to eat into the time I am supposed to spend WORKING! I consider myself to have investigated Thing 10 and found it wanting, which is not the same as not having tried. Maybe when the Web 2.0 Directory (which I will bookmark for further use, thanks) has a few more libraries on there then I might decide I want to know, but feigning interest in the activities of an institution which I have no connection with or need to know about is beyond me today. If I have time between work/studying/life/sleep I will attempt to muster the enthusiasm for more of the same. I am pleased to see that next week's Things look a bit less involved. Thanks all the same, but no thanks.

Delicious?

Social tagging... Hmmm. I'd seen the little icon on the pages of various websites which I browse and had never (as usual) looked into it any further, so once again I am being forced to find this stuff out and, also once again, I am finding that I sort of like it...
The concept of being able to share bookmarks for things which are useful/fun/vaguely entertaining is appealing, not only from the point of view of using other computers (although as long as I have Firefox I can use XMarks for that), but also because sometimes you just come across something which you have to show your Mum! I imported all my bookmarks to Delicious automatically (have I mentioned here how much I love Firefox?? I don't know what I was thinking wasting my time on IE for so long...), and will therefore have to do some tidying, but I did add the url for the Theban Mapping Project as that is one of my favourite Web resources; a wonderful source of information about the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
I will expand on this at some other time, for now I am happy to have started finding out about Delicious, and will explore further when I have time later in the week.

Editing Photos with Picnik

I think Picnik might actually be the "thing" which convinces me to use Flickr! It's a lovely site (I liked the bit on the progress bar where it said it was buttering sandwiches), and the basic editing tools are really easy to use.
Problems which I incurred were mostly due to the nature of my pictures; being taken indoors and in most cases with a flash, so things like exposure were slightly tricky. The tool which alters colours was very strange and did not get on at all with the bright colours I used in my patterns so I undid that sharpish! Above is a cropped version of my first cushions picture, which conveniently hides the fact that they are languishing on my fur bedspread.
The beauty of Firefox is that it already knows me, so I did not need to log into Picnik or create an account, which saved time and remembering where I put the printout with my login details. All in all a positive experience!

Photos on Flickr

I agonised for about twenty minutes about what I should do about this Thing. I was very prolific with my camera a few years back and have hundreds of pictures I could have used, but they are mostly on my PC at home, or on discs in random places, which wasn't ideal.
Anyway, having decided to go for the esoteric option of posting a couple of pictures of my other obsession (besides books), I have successfully uploaded four shots of exciting cross-stitch patterns!
I don't know if I will use Flickr for other pictures; I may decide to use it, but as I am also on Facebook I might use that instead. I'm not really one for publicising... maybe I need to go through my hundreds of pictures and share some of the better ones with the wider world!

Time...

I have a minor grumble about RSS feeds. How am I supposed to find the time to keep track?! Sometimes I open Google Reader and discover 73 unread posts, which is almost enough to put me off completely. I've admittedly not spent that long playing this week, having had work-related stuff to keep me busy. Perhaps I will have a look at home over the weekend.
I have managed to work out how to subscribe to feeds from my fellow 23 Things participants (Martha Braithwaite, I know who you are...), but it took me a while to realise that this was done through the little Atom link at the bottom of the screen. There are so many of us now that I have only looked at a few (mostly people I know, or intriguing names) as again, time is against me.
I look forward with anticipation to next weeks Things, although as I am a good little Library Assistant I don't have many photos on my PC at work so I will have to bring some in or do the Flikr stuff at home.

Feed me...

Ahh, another grey Tuesday morning... must be time for more of the Things!
I had heard of RSS Feeds, but was not sure what to do with them, so once again had to be forced to learn... The instructions on the 23 Things blog are excellent; very simple to follow and broken down into a step-by-step sequence that makes it almost impossible to get wrong. I must admit, though, I have subscribed to several feeds from the BBC website (mostly concerning sport) as those were fairly easy to set up!
Once I get the hang of this I will try to subscribe to a few participants' blogs (just so they get paranoid...) too.
I have had the added complication of this week of switching my browser from the deplorable IE6 to the much nicer Mozilla Firefox, which has a handy function of remembering who I am and saving tabs when I close the page so that I can find all my stuff again straight away. Unfortunately something went wrong with this over the weekend so I had to load all my bookmarks again, but that was fairly straightforward thanks to XMarks, which is a facility for migrating bookmarks from other browsers. I still need to work out how to get iGoogle back as my homepage, but as I am actually working most of the time this has not been a priority! Still, for the purpose of Thing 5, the fact that the browser already had my details meant I only had to sign into Google Reader, rather than re-typing everything. Bonus!

The Blogs of Others... continued

I've had a bit more time to look at other people's offerings today and have managed to find something to say on a couple of people's posts. If I have any complaints it's the anonymity factor, which I suppose is one of the reasons people do this sort of thing. I know that there's a chance that some of the blogs I've been perusing today have been written by people I know... I just don't know which!
I look forward to the challenges we will be given in the weeks to come; I am already finding the temptations of 23 Things too difficult to resist when my day gets dull...

The Blogs Of Others

It's interesting, looking at the things other people on this programme have written. The consensus (from the several I have looked at this morning) is that most people like iGoogle, although I am disappointed not to see more penguins! I didn't comment on anyone's blog; perhaps when I come across something more interesting than the usual similar responses I will do so.
Incidentally, just to clear things up, the reason this is "Katie Mae's 23 things" is that there was already a Kate on here, and technically my full name is Katie Mae. Blame arty parents with a liking for the works of Lightnin' Hopkins...
I look forward, as the programme progresses, to seeing how people develop their blogs and I hope to have time to do justice to mine. I also hope fondly that someone else will read it; not having had much of an online presence before it would be very disappointing if I registered no interest at all!

Start Pages

I kind of like iGoogle. I like the penguins, having my horoscope on my homepage and being able to just get at all the things I usually scroll around for. It is periously easy to get sidetracked though! Whether I will retain the frivolous things I first added remains to be seen...

First things first...

Well, this is new!
When I first heard about the 23 Things Programme I was dubious that I would manage to find the time for it as I am already in the throes of a Masters degree by Distance Learning and seem to spend an inordinate amount of my spare time doing that. Still, Laura Wilkinson is persuasive, and I figured that there was probably much I could learn from the programme.
The trouble with the internet is that it is like any tool; you use it in the ways you know how to use it. With all the developments that have happened in the last few years it would be foolish of me to put off learning about any of these things any longer. I am typically late to embrace these things; I only joined Facebook in November last year!!
I don't know that I have any expectations for the Programme. I hope that some of the things I learn about will eventually become second nature, much like all the other innovations (mobiles, email etc) have over the years. Those I find less useful will no doubt fall by the wayside, but at the end of the day if you don't try new stuff you never know!