Thing 47 - Evaluation

Well I did it! And by the ORIGINAL finish date I might add (do I get an extra third prize for finishing in the original time frame :-) )

I really enjoyed this as I did the first 23 things. The folks who put this together obviously took a lot of time to find all the different resources, articles, sites... There is a lot of information packed in here! Some of the things I whizzed through pretty quickly because I just did not have the time to really get into everything but my hope is that the site will stay up and available so I can revisit some of this and find articles, sites etc. later at my own pace. Lots of good stuff! Also, now that I am done it is possible I may go back and do some more, add things, explore them more and edit some of my blog postings to reflect this. But even if I don't change anything on this blog I will for sure continue to use and explore many of the tools I learned about here. Thanks!

Thing 46 - Webjunction Minnesota

I signed up for an account, asked someone to be my friend, and poked around the calendar and discussion forums. It looks like this could be a useful place to get familier with. Especially for the training. I will need to keep an eye on it and check it from time to time!

Thing 45 - Cloud Computing

I like the concept of cloud computing. I have a lot of accounts that can be considered "in the cloud" Gmail, facebook, my bank account, twitter, photobucket, delicious can pull all of my bookmarks up on any computer, I have google docs and google calendar accounts set up. I like the idea that no matter where I am, home, work, traveling, on vacation or whatever, I am able to access these easily as long as I can hook into the Internet. None of it is stored directly on the hard drive of my computer. The cool thing about it is that then if my computer died or something, I would not lose any of the info since it is out there in cloud-land! I wish I could back up my entire itunes library of 80,000 plus songs this way and I would have no worries about that! I do have these backed up on a separate had drive though so I think I'm OK!

Thing 44 - The Economy

I looked at a lot of these sites and poked around but so far have not signed up for any of them. I am amused that part of the assignment is to "set up an account and get started" but then there is the warning "Fine Print: We are not responsible for anything but telling you about these sites. You make the decision to use them." I did not feel comfortable with allowing a site to pull all of my banking information, credit card history etc. so I did not do that. If I could be 100% sure it would all be kept confidential and everything perhaps they could help find savings.


I do like some of the info sites like Frugal Dad and the coupon sites. I will certainly expolore these further when I have time. The one site I have used quite a bit is craigslist. I have often bought and sold concert tickets on craigslist. My wife is always looking on there for free stuff people are giving away and has found some real cool stuff. I would highly recommend it for people looking to save a few bucks because often there are great things people are giving away or for a very good price. You just never know...

One thing not listed here that I will mention I like is simply using my own bank's(in my case Wells-Fargo) website to do online banking. I like it that when I get a bill I can simply go to online billpay and set it to pay the bill a couple days before it is due and I'm done, nothing to send, save on the stamp. Works great!

Thing 43 - Online TV and Video

I like this. Hulu is really fun and I can see how it could start sucking up a lot of time if you get addicted to it but so can regular TV and DVD's etc. It was fun to find some old Simpsons episodes and some movies and things to put in a queue. I watched a couple minutes to see how it looked and the quality seemed fine. I can see how they do this now because there are some ads you have to watch. At home we have a really nice imac with a large screen and sometimes I'll watch movies on it and the quality is great. I've been watching Lost on ABC and a couple times had to miss an episode. It was really nice to be able to go to the ABC site the next day and watch it in high quality and actually, even though there were online commercials there were not as many as on broadcast TV so it was better that way! It is another tool to use. I don't think it is really going to affect the way my family watches TV too much except for the fact that sometimes we'll watch sows we want to when we want to instead of always when they are on TV. Nice.

Thing 42 - Music 2.0

I have used pandora a little bit and it is pretty fun to listen to and see what it comes up with. I have two stations set up right now, one jumping off from The Butthole Surfers and the other from The Residents . I like Internet radio a lot. I enjoy that i can listen to KFAI or the Current on a computer anywhere in the world. Or I can find a cool station from California or whatever. One Internet radio station that I really enjoy is Radio Paradise . Check it out! I don't think Internet radio will ever totally replace broadcast radio but it is a nice addition to it.

Thing 41 - Mashup your life

I signed up for lifestream and tried it out. SO far I am not really impressed and doubt I'll use it much. The only services i added were facebook, twitter and delicios. Looking at my stream it pretty much just pulls facebook posts. I don't really do twitter too much and really who needs an update that I added a new bookmark on delicious? Also, I just signed in and the latest facebook update it pulled up was from Friday and I've posted a number of things since then. So far not impressed but I may play with it some more and try again..

Thing 40 - Mashups

I tried a few interesting mashups including Walk Score Mashup As you can see my neighborhood scored an 85, very walkable! TimeTube with the keywords "punk rock"

YouTube: Punk Rock on Dipity.

and the Wheel of Lunch

And I found a site called Portwiture which pulls photos related to your twitter posts

And here is a mashup I made on Polvyore. It is not very good. Norm Coleman in a dress!

Norm in a Dress by sonicfreak featuring Coach Bags

Well, OK. I gotta work some more on that one! Mashups are very interesting and the possibilities seem endless. I'll be exploring them for years to come...

Thing 39 - Digital Storytelling

This one was fun! First I tried to go to Scrapblog and the link did not work so I tried Framento. I signed up and never got the confirmation email. So I tried Scrapo but did not like it very well so I tried Scrapblog again and somehow it seemed to work. I'm glad it did because it was very easy to pull photos from both Photobucket and Facebook and put them in an album. This one I did in about 10 minutes (trying to quickly work through all the things by May 20) but I will definitly be using this a lot more. So cool!

Thing 38 - Screencasting

I looked at the tutorial for Skitch and signed up and tried to download but found something about it not being compatible with windows. I decided to try another one and chose ScreenToaster. It seemed to work pretty well and within a few minutes I was able to make this video demonstrating how to find a book on the library catalog.

Record your screencast online

This would work well for basic library tutorials and that sort of thing.

Thing 37 - Photo Tales

I have used Photobucket to store pictures for a long time. I will attempt a photo tale with the help of captioner. OK, captioner worked to make caption bubbles but I could not figure out how to save the pictures so I found another called Speechable. It is kind of goofy but here is my photo story:

Thing 36 - Comic Relief

Here is a comic I found on ToonDoo:



And here is one I just made!!



That was really fun!

Some other generators I tried were Obamiconme. Here is one I did awhile back:



I also like the excuse generator:

I am a worm. You've reminded me-- oh, it gnaws at me in every waking moment-- that I have been a selfish, slime-wallowing hog. It would be your right, perhaps your duty, for you to never speak to me again. Say the word, and I will rend my garments and shave my hair in apology.

Finally, my favorite generator for years has been the surrealist compliment generator

Your dainty nostrils flare with the humblest grandiosity of an ant swallowing a water buffalo.

Thing 35 - Books 2.0

There are a lot of things to look at and explore here so I'll just touch on a few things i looked at and played with. First I tried using lib.rario.us It is pretty slick how I can look up a book, CD, DVD and easily add it to my library with a picture and everything. It would take me FOREVER to catalog my collections but I may try bit by bit!

I've used What Should I Read Next? before and it can sometimes help. I tried Reading Trails and found that to be a useful and fun site that can help find books I might enjoy. I just had training on NoveList which seems like an excellent reader's advisory tool but it is a subscription database. I think many MELSA libraries have it.

The reading communities and book club resources look like they would be fun to explore.

I don't listen to a lot of audio books but am intrigued by Librivox which is aiming to record all public domain books. Finally I added the WorldCat application to my facebook account and think it is a new and interesting way to use a resource I have used for years. I searched for a random book and found I could organize the libraries that own it from closest to farthest away. The closest was Minneapolis Public Library where I am and the farthest away was the University of Western Australia which is 10,600 miles away!!

So much to explore! All of these sites just make me want to read, read, read more more more! They certainly have great potential to enhance one's reading experience!

Thing 34 - Online Answer Sites

The appeal of an online answer site is that you could need some bit of information and be able to find a site where like-minded people may have the answer to your question and you don't need to make a phone call, get put on hold.... you just get on your computer and go...

There are all sorts of questions on these sites and many of them may be more apropriate to this sort of forum, rather than through a library because you get a number of ideas from different people and can decide which is most helpful to you. Some examples of recent questions on Ask metafilter:

What is this sticky residue on my tea kettle?

Please tell me the name of this recent British TV comedy series featuring two guys and usually started with their walking down a long white hall and then opening a door and entering into a scene

Other than vampires and zombies, what human-like beings are rumored to be immortal? Obscure and obvious answers all appreciated!

Please recommend your favourite books on editing.

Please recommend some smart, nifty-looking, story-heavy Xbox360 games for an relatively artsy, overly cerebral, 30-something newbie.

The list goes on and on.... Some of these questions are "opinion" type questions where it may be good to read a lot of peoples ideas and opinions rather than try to get help at the library although some of the questions potentially could have answers a librarian could help with such as the tea kettle or TV show question above.

WHere I have had great luck with these sorts of sites is when I have a computer problem. I'll often throw it up on google or a Mac?apple site and find that others have had the same problem and often solutions are provided. Also, one time recently my wife was having a problem with her hotmail account so we searched and found that hundreds of people were having the same problem so were reassured that it was their glitch and not something we did.

I looked at the slam information and it could be useful to do this for some of the more factual questions asked. I did not get far into it or answer any questions myself at this time.

Thing 33 Travel 2.0

Travel 2.0 eh? This one pretty much just made me sad that we really have no money to travel anywhere! We go to Vermont once a year to see my wife's family (sometimes we do cross the border and go visit friends in Montreal which is kind of exciting!) but any other travel is tough with two kids and jobs and $$$. I enjoyed living vicariously through others adventures looking at the Lost Girls and My Kugelhopf. It is nice to be able to read regular folks reviews of hotels and such, I did this last year when trying to find a hotel in Chicago for a night.The travel journal sites I might try out on our next trip. I find it interesting and amusing that one can find websites devoted to fast food or wi-fi but these things may come in useful sometimes. The Green guide is a very nice idea.

Here is the Half Marathon I ran yesterday!

Thing 32 - Google Maps & Mashups

I played around with google maps and looked at some of the mash ups that have been created. Some of them are kind of fun like the map with all the locations mentioned on The Lost TV show. Another I liked was the mashup that showed music happening in my area. I signed up for "Map My Run" since i run to and from work each day as well as run races and other training. I thought it would be fun to map all my runs and keep track of them. I made a map of one of my regular routes to work which i will attempt to embed now: