Fun with Flickr

I found this little lion in SAPL's Flickr account. Isn't he cute? I wonder what he's reading?



I actually had a hard time with this Thing of the 23 Things. This is not my first time on Flickr though. I've created several reading maps for SAPL, like The Golden Age of Mysteries and Exploring the Classics: Jane Austin, so exploring and getting around was not the problem. Nope. The problem was selecting a picture to blog about. Finding something that I could wax eloquent on. There are a lot of good pictures out there, but I'm not one for saying much. Probably why I don't have a lot of posts yet. I've been playing with Flickr for days and days and days and now I'm finally blogging about it, and what do I have to say? Only that the lion is cute.

But really, this is my favorite SAPL picture so far. Its simple and bright. There aren't a any distractions in the background. A lot of our pictures have messy backgrounds. Lets face it, metal shelving does not pretty picture make, especially with some of our angles. I'd like to see more pictures of things that might not see in the library. Like the DIY Library set. Its a small set, but I love the idea of it. Pictures of things people have made using library resources. There are so many possibilities.

Now to continue playing with mashups. Got to get me some ear buds though, or do this on a computer with speakers.

But will it be as good as the book?

For the past few days I have been searching the blog-o-sphere, looking for blogs that deal with reading and reader's advisory and libraries. There is sooo much out there that it makes me dizzy. I found one site called EarlyWord. It talks about all the fun stuff publishers are coming out with in fiction and popular non-fiction. According to them A Platter of Figs is going to be the cookbook of the season, so I hope you all have your orders in. My favorite part of this site is their movie tie-in lists. All the books that are being turned into movies are listed with their release dates and in December, The Time Traveler's Wife will be coming the a theater near you.

I first discovered The Time Traveler's Wife while I was getting my MLS. It is a beautiful book about how Henry and Claire fell in love. Normally I don't go for romance/love stories, but add in Henry's ability to spontaneously travel through time (but only within his own lifetime) and I'm hooked. And now its being made into a movie. There's danger in this. How many times have books been made into movies and how many times have they not lived up their expectations? Or been changed beyond recognition? When Hollywood does it right, the movie usually ends up on the Oscar list (see The Silence of the Lambs, The English Patient, There will be Blood, LOTRs, etc, etc), so I really hope they get this right.

Tweaking

Why are there so many options for for blog pages? There are so many applications to explore! I could never ever get through all of them, yet there may be something else out there that would go perfect with my blog. Something that just screams "I belong with you!" How would I know unless I go exploring through the application and the widgets and plug-ins and whatever whatnots there are? So, in case you haven't guessed, I've been spending a lot of time exploring the goodies. My favorite thing so far is the quote widget from Goodreads. I love quotes. I have binders full of quotes. Now off to the tedious part of entering them all in.

Flickr Mosaic

A friend of mine who also blogs (really, who doesn't anymore) came across a photo mosaic on another friend's blog and had to do one. It looked pretty simple, so I tried it too. Here are the results:

Of course you just can't use any old picture you can find. There are rules. Each picture is an answer to a question, and you can only choose the picture from the first Flickr search page.

Here are the questions:

1. What is your first name? Stephanie

2. What is your favorite food? Strawberries

3. What high school did you go to? Roy

4. What is your favorite color? Purple

5. Who is your celebrity crush? David Tennant

6. Favorite drink? Smoothies

7. Dream vacation? Enlgand

8. Favorite dessert? Apple Pie

9. What you want to be when you grow up? A dancer

10. What do you love most in life? Stories

11. One Word to describe you. Timid

12. Where do you live? San Antonio

I'm sure there are lots of Mosaic Makers out there, but the one I (and my friend and my friend's friend) used was fd's mosaic maker. All you have to do is copy and past the URL of the pictures into the boxes. And you can change the size and layout of the mosaic too. Here's one I did with random library words:

I used the words library, books, program and librarian. I'll let you guess which picture is which.

Begin the Learning

So work has decided that it would be good for all of us to become familiar with Learning 2.0. Hence this blog. If I like it, I may keep it. Who knows, maybe by the time I'm finished with this course, I'll have transferred my whole life to Google applications.

Anyway, assignment #1 is to say which of the 7 1/2 habits for lifelong learning is the hardest for me to do and which is the easiest. The hardest is the teaching/mentoring part. I'm pretty good at picking things up, but teaching other people . . . well, I just don't feel that confident in doing it. I'm never sure on how much to explain and how much to show. I usually end up really nervous and talking too fast.

The easiest thing in the 7 1/2 steps is play. Who doesn't like to play? Do I even have to explain this one?