New Favorite Thing: WhenIsGood

If you haven't discovered this handy-dandy tool yet, you must try it out. I discovered whenisgood thanks to Jay, our IT person at Great River.

Here's the scoop:

Instead of sending out an e-mail to all your committee members saying: we-need-to-meet-when- are-you-available-in-the-next-month you go to WhenIsGood ~ no password or signup needed! ~ and highlight on a calendar when you are available to meet. Then you use WIG's handy send feature to add in however many e-mail addresses you need to send out. 

Ta-da... each committee member receives a little calendar that they can highlight with their availability. You then can go in and check the calendar to see the best possible time to meet.

Slick!

In the event that you're working with a big enough group that no time will be good for everyone, WIG's calendar shows you how many people voted down specific time slots, and who voted them down. So then you can prioritize and pick the least bad time for your meeting.

And you can get all this accomplished in just a couple of e-mails instead of a blizzard of them.

SO COOL.

MToaS 26: Ning-ing-a-ling

Okay, here it is: I will try the Ning thing again. I can see the appeal of a social network created around a specific subject area. In fact, that's far more appealing to me than the broad-brush strokes of Myspace or Facebook.

One thing that is frustrating to me is trying to figure out who else on the 23 Things Ning is a GRRL member... not that I can't chat with other folks, but I'd like to know who else from Great River is active in the 23 Things loop. So many of us, however, are afraid to put real details on our profiles. We use nicknames or share no more than that we're from "Minnesota." I am as guilty of this as anyone else. For my picture, I used one of my cat. This will only help someone figure out who I am if they've had the privilege of meeting our "official greeter" Rosie. And, if they've gotten that close, they've probably already heard me chatter excitedly and incessantly about cool Web 2.0 things like GoogleDocs, PBWiki and WhenIsGood.

So... I dutifully added a couple of messages and sent one and updated a picture and other things on my profile. 

I think it is good to have the Ning be at the top of the list rather than at the end (not that we can't shuffle). I'm hoping that as the MoreThings group continues it will be used more, and therefore more worth the time to use...

Diggin' those free pics! (MToaS 25)

When my lovely Gabi and I first returned from our Peace Corps service in Togo, West Africa... and this was 1993, mind you... we couldn't wait to go to the grocery store. Especially Gabi. She'd been having dreams of Doritos, don't you know. Three years we'd been in Togo, often eating in little roadside buvets drinking warm beer and eating fried bread or cassava that was sometimes scrumptious and sometimes just foul with rancid oil.  Or rice with various sauces ~ again, some amazingly good and some just god-awful.

So we got back and my goodness, we really wanted that good-ol-bad-for-you American junk food.

It's one of my most vivid memories of our return. We drove to Coborns and Gabi went to get some Doritos while I dashed off to find something else. She took a long time, so I started looking for her. I rounded the corner and found her standing in the center of the looong snack aisle, shoulders slouched and jaw slack, a look of being completely overwhelmed on her face. She was nearly crying. All she wanted was one little bag of Doritos and here was an entire aisle of brands, flavors, big bags, small bags, full-fat, low-fat... and good-god there were pretzels too.

I get a similar sort of feeling when I look at widget options.

Creativity is wonderful. I am glad there is so much of it. But, wow, if we could harness the enthusiasm for quizzes and comments and discussion communities found on the web and turn that instead toward diplomacy... why, we might even get peace in the Middle East.

Still, I enjoy the wealth of ideas and the possibilities for customizing your space. It's cool. It made me want to add one more item to the article 20 Usability Tips for Your Blog. The author suggested limiting the focus of your blog. I'd include limiting the number of gizmos and widgets. Have a rotating collection, sure, but too much at one time just overwhelms the senses.

That said, some of these widgets are incredibly useful. I've been using site meter, clustrmap,  as well as Blogger's subscriber widget and search bar for some time. I like all these tools immensely. There's nothing like looking on clustrmap and wondering who in New Zealand has been reading me. 

I added a recent comments widget, but I put it at the bottom of the page. That probably breaks every rule of blog promotion, but it felt better to me all the same. I also added click comments. I have some shy readers, I know, who have said in phone calls or e-mail that they like what they read on my blog but they just don't  feel comfortable leaving comments. Perhaps they're not sure what to say. I like the "thumbs up" feel of click comments, and am hoping that will make these readers (you know who you are) more comfortable giving feedback.

Lastly, thanks Things staff, for the listing of copyright free and Creative Commons licensed photos. It can be hard sometimes to find pics to add to my pages ~ and I do like to include them because I know they improve the look and readability of the blog.

The one tool I want to find (hoping that Blogger supports it) is the "read more" link. I do sometimes write long entries and it would be better to have the blog not look so text-heavy. Any suggestions?

MToaS 24: Refreshing the Blog

Hi MoreThings'er Staff! I'm so happy to have you back!

I enjoyed the SlideShare Presentation on 25 Basic Styles of Blogging. My blog, over the past year, could be categorized as a whole big jumble: insight, ambition, life, review, etc. My entries have covered all of it, and I like it that way. I've never been one to fit into any particular box.

I took the "refresh" challenge and simplified. Instead of adding widgets I deleted them. I know from experience with the original 23 Things on a Stick that I will find lots and lots of things to be curious about (not to mention passionately intrigued with, at least over the short term).  I'm sure I will want to add them, so for now I reduced my blog to more of a clean slate. Think of it as... ready.

Also, I must confess, I am uber-enthused over my lovely, lovely new Mac, and I am sure that I can come up with ways to pretty up my blog. So the "white sheet of paper" aspect is all about my expectation that it will look very different by mid-May.

Lastly, dear More-Things'ers, please be forewarned that if you RSS this blog or otherwise sign up to know whenever I update, you will have to plow through garden musings, recipes, news about friends-and-family gatherings and kayaking excursions, book reviews, and the whole big ungangly mess that this blog is. I know your time is limited, so I have tried to make it a little easier for you by attaching a widget at the top left that will let you know which Things I've worked on.

Actually, the way I write/live this blog makes me think of why I so love working in a library: it is the perfect place for the irredeemably curious. There are so many amazing books, movies, magazines, CD's out there... and we get to see them! We get to learn that there is a whole book devoted just to the socio-economic history of the Toothpick, and it's fascinating. We get to see that there are young-adult fantasy books that are brilliant beyond belief (and no, I'm not talking about the Twilight series). There's just so much to read, think about, write about... 

Ah. The joy of blank, white paper.

And time passes

Crazy how time flies when you're doing too much... again I find myself in that place where for days ~ weeks even ~ I've been thinking about blogging, even rehearsing the words in my head. I've been moved to tears and flights of (mentally at least) rhetorical fancy over the words, "President Obama." Just can't hear that enough. Wow. After eight long years of snarling every time I saw or heard the president, after six plus years of feeling downright ashamed of the man, and of what he was doing in my name, finally I feel like I can breathe again and be proud. Perhaps we have turned that corner and are heading back to being our better selves.

I also was sick for a week or so ~ nothing serious, just a cold that wouldn't get bad enough that I felt I could just crawl into bed and ignore the world, and neither would it go away so that I had energy or enthusiasm for the days. Instead, it was just a sore-throated gray in-between that sapped all my creativity and spark. Didn't even cook beyond making some tom yum soup ~ and that, at least in our house, is a staple during colds.

Also, when I have had the energy, I've been working on our cookbook ~ for those who don't know, instead of writing the "holiday letter" like many folks, we put together a small collection of the year's favorite recipes along with anecdotes and stories to go with them. It's always fun, but admittedly takes much longer than a letter would take. That is why we rarely ever get them mailed before mid-January. I'm shooting for this weekend. Last year, I think we just barely got them out before Valentines day.

And... over the last couple of weeks we did lots of research about new computers. Ours was showing its age more and more, and we didn't want to wait for it to crash completely. So, Sunday we took the plunge and bought... a lovely new IMac. Joy, joy, joy. I am loving it. Even though I've been a life-long PC'er, I am so thrilled with the Mac. I'm even enjoying the learning curve of figuring out how to do things with Mac vs. Windows. When I do get stuck, I've found that if I just pause and remind myself that some very smart person worked very hard to come up with a way for me to do this particular thing easily, somehow the fog lifts and I figure it out. The Help Menus for Mac are awesome as well.

Lastly, I am very, very happy to say that More Things on a Stick* has started, which means that I'll be making more technical entries for a while. For my faithful readers in Texas, Switzerland, Nevada and elsewhere, I hope that you enjoy the info. I'm looking forward to writing about Web 2.0 gizmos, widgets and whatnots in a way that will (hopefully at least) be interesting for you as well as other geeky-gadget library folk. 

So, onward! 

*More Things on a Stick is  continuation of the Web 2.0 Library Learning Program that began last January with 23 Things on a Stick. It's a web-based, individually-paced training program that helps participants explore the many amazing things available through web-based technologies. Some is productive, some silly, some more trouble than it's worth. But it's all interesting.

How can you not feel joy?

When we got up this morning, it was 19 degrees outside.

FIFTY DEGREES WARMER THAN 24 HOURS AGO.

Perhaps we will survive this winter after all. However, I can't help but think that spring will be interesting. There will be holes in the garden for sure. Even some zone 3 plants might not make it through this cold. But thank goodness they're under a thick blanket of snow. That will give them at least a little protection.

More snow is expected today, and I'm actually looking forward to getting outside and shoveling.

A good day

Today, Friday afternoon, we were driving through town and saw the temperature reading on one of the bank signs: 3 degrees. It was the first time since Monday that the temperature rose above zero. This morning, in fact, it was minus 33 in St. Cloud.

The low tonight is supposed to be between one and three above.

So, good news. It's "warm."

And, even better. Tonight is the first night of the new season of Battlestar Gallactica.

Two things to be excited about.

And he's a (good!) food critic, too.

New Year starting

It's a new year. Tomorrow, I go back to work after a two-week vacation. It's been a good break, but I have to admit that I could easily stay home another week or two...

So, the holidays were good to us. Christmas (before Christmas) with Nick and the kids, Hanukkah with the whole Minnesota family, Christmas Eve with Gabi's mom, Christmas day with Jenny and the kids, Second Hanukkah with friends... and then my anti-social tendencies set in. Don't ask me to cook. Don't ask me to clean. Don' t ask me to think of anything interesting to chat about. I'm done-done-done.

So New Year's Eve was quiet. Gabi wasn't feeling well on the first, so it was quiet too. And I did something so unusual, hedonistic and lovely that I just have to brag about it. I read. For hours. I didn't make anything for anybody. Not crafts, food or conversation. I just curled up and read. New Year's eve day I read Nation by Terry Pratchett. On New Year's I read People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. Just read. Read till my eyes were dry and my butt hurt from sitting.

It was bliss.

So... Nation and People of the Book. Seems like a crazy combination, I'm the first to admit. The oh-so-British parodist with absurdist social commentary on one day and Pulitzer Prize winning historical novelist on the next. But what surprised me is how well the books went together, and the thematic similarities between them.

Nation is not a discworld novel, yet it's still classic Pratchett. The story is about an island boy, Mau, whose entire family and village is swept away by a tsunami, and a very privileged and proper victorian-age English girl, Daphne, who is the lone survivor of a shipwreck on Mau's island. The Blue Lagoon this is not. There's no sex, but there is childbirth and a profane parrot. Pratchett, as is typical for him, combines astute observations about society with humor that is both silly and pointed. Take, for example, Mau's attempt to understand the British obsession with legs (the only thing white people are afraid of ~ sight of an islander without trousers will cause English women to scream in terror and a glimpse of a woman's ankle will cause English men to faint). This befuddlement happens alongside Mau's attempt to make sense of everything he's learned about gods, ancestors, sex roles and gender identity. And Pratchett has something to say ~ or rather, question ~ about all these things.

People of the Book, on the other hand, is a fictionalized account of the Sarajevo haggadah, the Jewish prayerbook used for the Passover service. There is such a book, and it is remarkable in that it's a Jewish prayerbook from the mid 1400's, created with illuminations like those only otherwise found on Christian holy texts, and kept safe from Nazis and the Bosnian war by Muslim clerics and librarians. The real Sarajevo haggadah survived the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of Jews from Spain, and Brooks' novel provides a brilliant imagining of the precious book's creation and travels.

Brooks is never as blatant with her questioning as Pratchett, but they share a surprising number of similar questions: How do we really know what gods/G-d wants from and for us? How can we know whether the knowledge passed down through family and culture is correct? How do we react to barbaric and/or senseless death? What are our obligations to those who are like us and those who are different? What, exactly, are Likeness and Difference?

Both books are well written, intricately plotted, thought-provoking and suspenseful. Both are very much worth ignoring phone calls, chores and any number of other things that could pull you away from the sheer bliss of diving in and voyaging out. Books like these are why we love to read.