Tuesday, June 26, 2007

My magazine cover


My creation
Originally uploaded by snow_maiden
I decided that my Latin American Studies students are worthy of fame and attention! I hope none of them mind being put up here for the world to see, but this picture has been on the Latin American Studies department website already (in its non-magazine iteration), so I doubt it.

Some more pictures of home

Oh my stars! (I had a friend in library school who always used that expression, and it never ceased to crack me up, so I'm using it very ironically now.) I was looking at the Flickr map tool where you can see pictures taken in a certain place, and I looked up my hometown, certain I wouldn't find anything. But there is a wonderful photographer who lives there and has taken hundreds of pictures! He goes by the whimsical name of Bird Socks. (A look at his front page will quickly tell you that not all of his pictures were taken in North Dakota! We don't really have many macaws or tigers.) It's hard to pick out just one picture to highlight, but here goes. Or no, wait! I really mean this one!

Myspace vs. Facebook

The Machinist has a good post today about the differences between Myspace and Facebook. I only use Facebook, because when I've gone to Myspace it doesn't appeal to me at all! I'd always thought this was just an issue of personal preference, but the post is tracing this to differences of social class, based on how each site got its start. So am I a snob because I use Facebook?

Monday, June 25, 2007

Og the Mighty

Since I'm from North Dakota, I'm always trying to play up my "exoticness" here in Ohio. And so today I'm posting a link to a Flickr photo taken by someone from North Dakota known as thstrand. It's a picture of Og, the large gorilla that used to stand in Harvey, one town over. I think the photo is beautiful for its composition, as well as documenting something that no longer exists. And so, without further ado, here is Og.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Article about the crisis in independent publishing

Ok, now I found a real book-related link to post. There's an interesting article in Salon today about how small book publishers are in trouble because a distributor that most of them did business with has gone bankrupt. You can find it here.

And now for something completely different

I'm testing a post to see if I can make links successfully. Somehow it never occurred to me to do that before, but I can see why you might want to look at something like this. Well, at least I do!

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

A word of explanation

Now that I've posted a link to this blog on my Facebook account, I thought I should put an explanation here about what it is for people who don't work in the library. Basically, we're learning about various features of Web 2.0 this summer, and we've each started a blog to track our learning. So I'll be posting at least once a week about the assignments I've done. I'll probably also put up other library-related things that I find interesting and would like to share. After the summer is over, depending on how things go, I might convert the blog for personal use. I'm still unsure about that. I tend to be pretty selective about which of my friends know about which parts of my life. The idea that work and home would mix is pretty unsettling!

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

7 1/2 habits

The easiest one of the 7 1/2 habits for me is the first one, "Begin with the end in mind." I usually don't even bother to begin something unless I can see how it will turn out. So it follows that the hardest one for me is number 7 1/2, "Play!" Not that I never play, but when I do, especially around the library, I immediately start to worry that I'll get in trouble for not "doing my job." Being encouraged to spend time playing this summer is a new experience for me, and I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.

Hello, world!

Ok, I guess I've proved myself to be a big library/computer geek by naming my first post that, but I couldn't resist. I haven't actually done my homework for last week yet (gasp!), but I will come back shortly and talk about my reactions to the lifelong learning assignment.