Thing 9--Pasado, Presente, Futuro Mural

This the mural that is mounted above our circulation desk. Commissioned in 1975, it's part of the city's public art collection and visitors come to view it and photograph it all the time. The kids love it, they comment on it all the time. The artist still lives in the neighborhood and has taught classes to kids on how to create murals at the library.

Hope you like it too!!

Thing 7--Byers Programming Wiki

I know, thing 7 was in Week 3 and this is Week 5. Time has gotten away from me. I will catch up though.

I created a wiki using wikia software. The URL is http://byersprogramming.wikia.com.

My colleagues and I organize a calendar of programs for kids and adults each month. We send emails with attachments back and forth until we are satisfied with the calendar. After watching the YouTube demonstration, Wikis in Plain English, I thought creating a wiki for this purpose would be perfect. I certainly think we will use it once we get the following bugs ironed out:

1) I'm having some trouble with organizing the wiki. I want to have subheadings like the pages on wikipedia but I can't figure it out.
2) I also want to be able to view it like the public would and it seems as though there's no link for that.

Until I figure out these bugs, my wiki is a mess right now. If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Thing 8--No Squint Add On

My library installed Firefox on our workstations about a year ago. The IT person told us that we would love it, that it offered "more depth" than Internet Explorer.
We weren't convinced right away. In fact, some of us didn't try it for about two weeks. I was one of those people. I wasn't quite ready for that type of change.

I started slowly, using it about once a day. I would look over the shoulders of my colleagues as they played with it. We thought it was quite amusing when we tried to print something and it wouldn't print in Firefox, but would print in Internet Explorer.

About a month later, I decided that the best way for me to really learn "the depth" of this new browser was to download it on my personal laptop. Afterwards I really started to play with it. I learned how to bookmark my favorite sites, customize the toolbar, and I discovered add-ons.

I think I have only downloaded 3 or 4 add-ons. My favorite is the No Squint. My vision isn't what it used to be and this helps me enlarge the font to my liking.
If I recall correctly, unlike Internet Explorer, where you can increase the print at the bottom right hand corner, in Firefox I had to go to the Firefox homepage and query the question about increasing the font. Once I did this, I got the answer and the name of the add-on I needed.

Another benefit of No Squint is that I receive messages automatically when it is time to update my version. That's wonderful!!

Other reasons I like Firefox are the ability to move around in more than one website at a time. Having this option via the tabs is awesome.

I haven't explored all of what Firefox does, but I really enjoy what I have learned so far.

Thing 4--Google Reader....

I've had a Gmail account for about a year now and I've always wondered what the Reader option on the top header stood for. Now I will have a reason to use it.

As I subscribed to my blogs of interest, I wanted to diversify my choices. I think I've done an okay job for my first time using this.

My current subscriptions are:
Larry King Live, ALSC, Epicurious.com: New Recipes, Bees Knees Reads, Denver Public Schools, and NPR Music.

This short list has already produced 50 items! I'm glad that once I scroll down that the items I read are marked as read and the list of unread items decreases.

While I see the advantage of this, who's to say that I will stay current with this. Will I read it everyday when I check my email or will I let it pile up?

I look forward to seeing what others have subscribed to.

Thing 3--IPODs

I thought I would write about how my new IPOD is bringing me up to speed as my post about something technology related.

I recently purchased my first one back in Feb. 2010. I bought the 8 GB IPOD Touch because almost everyone I know has some version of the IPOD and constantly talks about its benefits.

As soon as I turned it on, I was sold. Not only does it play music but I can download tons of apps and have the ability to perform many tasks, like check my Yahoo email or upload photos on my Facebook account(when I am in a Wi-Fi hot zone.) There's also this cool app called Stanza that I've been meaning play around with. Stanza allows you to download classic novels. This would come in handy when I'm traveling and don't want to carry around a big, heavy hardcover book.

I'm so eager to learn about more apps and to download more music. The IPOD is an awesome invention.

I was nervous

I have been looking forward to becoming more tech savvy. When I saw our first assignment was to create a blog, freaked out. I thought it would involve learning html or something. Then I watched the YouTube demos on the 21 things blog and it seemed simple. Now I've created my own blog!!

I hope that I will learn lots of new things in the next few weeks. I told my supervisor about this opportunity and she already has plans for me to perhaps blog about chidren's programs for our library website.

We'll see how it goes....