Too Hot...

It's 9:30 p.m. and still 80 degrees in our house. Fans are on, and temps should go down overnight tonight, but the dogs are plastered to our wood floors, soaking up as much cool as possible. Chelsea still hasn't shed off all of her winter coat, so she's really feeling it, and leaving hair everywhere!

First attempt at adding video

Okay, here's my first try to add the video of Chelsea swimming.

Been A While

Well it's been a while since I've posted, so here's what's going on in our world with dogs. Chelsea and I are taking a freestyle class - and it's been fun, and I'll say very challenging. She knows some moves, but we're working on more. She can face me and walk backward, she can heel on both sides and also back a few steps on both sides of me. She's learing to step sideways as I step into her. I'm hoping to be able to post my own YouTube (45 sec. to a full min.) of a routine we're working on. In the meantime I'll soon add a very short vid of Chelsea's pool time last winter while she was rehabbing from her knee surgery.

Project Play lives on

I just got the go-ahead to create a blog for this summer's Teen's Choice book awards program. At the top I'm hoping to make a mashup with all of the Teen's Choice review book covers for this year - made with One True Media - it can include music, so I'll also look for music in public domain that would work. I'm also envisioning one post per book with links on the sidebar to each book's post. Each post will include the book summary, the book cover as a live link to the catalog for holds placing purposes, and then some audio or video content - I found an amazing video of Tamora Pierce talking about writing and about her book "Terrier" on YouTube, for example, so one of the TCA review book's authors speaking or promoting the particular book would be cool, as well as some podcasts of booktalks by teens. Oh yeah, posts will invite comments and voting. By the way, my assignment re: curiosity is two posts below - but don't miss the YouTube just below of Canine Freestyle.

What's the big "to-do?"

Here's my favorite video of a high-ranking competetive canine freestyle team. By the way, scroll down to see my comments re: weeks 11/12 assignment - curiosity.

Curiosity

I like to think that librarians are a pretty curious bunch. After all, it's not so much what we know, but what we are able to discover and create that makes us so valuable to the community. I have to admit, though, my risk-taking threshold is very low. So, in some ways I have to push myself to stay curious. I do like the quote from Albert Einstein, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." I tend to pick and choose my areas of intense interest or exploration, which border on obsession,like my curiosity about dogs and dog behaviors. So if obsessive exploration counts as curiosity then I must have some - though I doubt it's going to make me rich in anything other than experience.

Thanks so much for the project play curriculum, for all of the web links - I now have photos posted to flickr and built my own radio station on Pandora and have created slide shows and wikis and am looking forward to creating widgets for potential use on Teen Topix book blog. It's been an incredible course!!

More Mashups

I've added two sites - both mashups - to Chelsea's Favorites in the sidebar. For those of us who like to travel with our dogs, one is a dog park locator and the other is a dog-friendly hotel finder.

Mash-ups

It's so wierd to realize that while I've definitely used mash-ups created by others, I could actually make one myself??? I put Sequoya on the project play mapbuilder. I've also used mash-ups to create a really cool slide show at slide.com
Have a look. It's a combination of flickr.com and slide.com Also, as I watch it I think - wow, it'd be even cooler if I could attach old-time piano music to it so just like a silent movie it would play piano music simultaneously - mash-up again? I'll also just add that Lee LeFever and the Common Craft Show is a bit more plain English than this week's video creator. I visited some library mash-ups, and I'll visit some more and have a look at the instructions for making mash-ups. My favorite library mash-up was the one with the book covers carousel that link people to the catalog entry with summary - that's a really nice way to display a topical bibliography or, come to think of it, it would be a great way to highlight the book discussion kits for 4th through 9th graders that we have at MPL. A carousel of book covers with a link to a summary and directions for checking out the kit...hmm. Gotta learn more about this.

YouTube and Screencasts

Well, thanks to that handy Screencast, embedding the YouTube video was easy! I've put off the Screencast assignement because I'm not coming up with many ideas about how to use it other than as a great way to provide directions- but it might be handy for people who don't know how to sign up for free email services at the library as we do get questions about that still.

I can tell it's time for me to start getting some short video footage of Chelsea and Barney and posting on my blog, and on YouTube. What a great way to share information. Not only could teens create podcasts of booktalks for Teen Topix, but they could create videos that we could post as well. I think Teen Topix would get many more hits and comments if kids could see and hear other kids on the site.

Puppy-Fix Flick

Here's 2 minutes and 37 seconds worth of pure puppy cuteness!!

Breadth and Depth of Content

As I look over my blog, it's really neat to see the breadth of content that can be assembled in one website. There are some things I don't have, like YouTube links or inserts, but there's still a lot of information that can be highlighted.

On a Podcast High

Hey, scroll down and check out my dog-lovers' widget. It's a bit hard to get to due to the page template, but in the upper right corner of the widget you can click on the little bit of headphone graphic that shows. That will take you to the DogCast Radio website and when you click the play button you will hear the broadcast of their latest show - which from the accent must be produced in England. Amazing!!! I also added two podcasts to my Bloglines account, one of which was The Onion - I'm going to have to watch that I don't spend too much time listening to that one during work hours, but it's hilarious.
I love the idea of adding podcasting to MPLs Teen Topix book blog for teens. It'd be great to get teens reviewing their favorite books on podcasts and then post them on Teen Topix. I also really like that music can be added to podcasts. The podcasts I listened to that had a consistent jingle at the opening sounded more "radio-like" and just cooler. This has been a fun assignment and I'm looking forward to sharing the capabilities with friends and family.

That "I get it" feeling

I'm not sure I quite get social networking sites, though if dogster.com is a social networking site for dogs, then maybe I do. I'll re-read the assignment and look at the library sites again. I'm not sure how people who don't use their library would happen upon their local library's profile in facebook or my space. Anyway, I did happen upon this article from the NY Times about the difficulties people are having deleting their accounts from facebook in particular. Now I understand how social networking sites are viable - even dogster has adds for dog-type products and other things.

Oops

It looks like I didn't comment about the week 2 assignment, Google Docs. I added a photo of Barney raking leaves to the project play slide show. It was pretty straightforward. I like knowing that people can use Google Docs to work on their word processing files, without needing the Word program on the computer, because three of the five internet access computers we have don't have Word on them. I'm looking forward to testing it out and seeing if it works well for patrons.

No Assignment?

Okay, so nothing much is up with the pups and there's no assignment, so I really don't have much to blog about. Still, I feel duty-bound to post something this week, just to keep up the flow.

Barney's first birthday is coming up in March - when Chelsea had her first birthday we had a party with all her dog friends at Cherokee Marsh dog park. It was a hoot, to say the least. Originally I had ordered chocolate cake (for the people), but then I realized that was a really bad idea since many of Chelsea's canine friends were at picnic-table height and could maybe snag an unattended piece of cake. Sure enough, Chelsea grabbed a piece (I switched to yellow cake) off a plate that our neighbor's daughter was trying to hand out to the human attendees. I also had made some doggie snacks - little liver biscuits with peanut butter smeared on them. And Bev and I supplied doggie party favor bags with biscuits, ball and squeaker toy. Of course the decoration theme was none other than Scooby-Doo. I still have a picture of Chelsea wearing her Scooby-Doo birthday hat.

Odd...

Okay, I sent my email for the Remember The Milk assignment, and not only did my name and task show up on the list, my email signature showed up on the list in six different places. Hmmm... If I have time this week I'll try the telephone thing. I really like the idea of using an online list with a phone. It's good to know what tools are out there and being used by people, too. Okay, I signed in and figured out how to delete the lines that were my email signature. I also gave my task a due day, and since it was a weekly task I set it to recurr.

Meanwhile, I added some photos of the dogs to flickr.com and tagged them barneypup, and sure enough, they're now showing up in the slideshow.

Moment of Dogster Fun

Just posted Barney and Chelsea's pages on Dogster. Here's Barney's Page. And here's Chelsea's Page.

Make Your Dog Famous!

Allright, maybe small-time fame, but, nonetheless, wouldn't you like to see your dog's cute mug come up in my blog's sidebar slideshow??? Come on - I know you want to. Here's how. Add the photo(s) of your dog to your Flickr.com account and give them the tag "barneypup." The way the slide show is set up, this should automatically get your photos to appear in the slide show. Anyone wanna try it and see if it works?

Instant Messaging Unlike Instant Coffee

Okay, last Friday Katherine, Terry and I were all at Sequoya working at separate computers and figured out enough to IM each other using Meebo and Yahoo accounts. It wasn't easy, and took quite a while to do, but we did it. The actual messaging may be instant, but the set up seems to take a chunk of time, and I still don't have a working Meebo widget, but have a guess why that might be. Meanwhile, the slideshow on my blog is now up and working, so if you'd like your dog's pic.s to appear, simply tag your dog's photo in Flickr with the tag "barneypup" and it'll appear in the slideshow.

Sharing

Hey Everybody,
Chelsea and Barney would like to share their slide show space with your dogs. Here's the easiest way to do this. Add the photo(s) of your dog to your Flickr.com account and give them the tag "barneypup." The way the slide show is set up, this should automatically get your photos to appear in the slide show. Anyone wanna try it and see if it works? And, hey, please don't any wise crackers out there add barneypup tags to, say, cat photos, flower photos, shoe tread photos, you get my drift. Thanks!

The Stars of this Blog

Here are a few more photos of the stars of this show!

Almost...

Well, Barney made it in the car for 3 hours without getting sick, then when we were two blocks from our destination, he lost it. Eeuuuw! Poor Chelsea just turned her back on it. The next two legs of our trip we gave Barney a low dose of Pet Calm and he slept through the driving -easier on us and on him.

Now, a few things I've gotten out of Project Play: I'm posting more links to fun web sites for teens on MPLs "Teen Topix" blog. I've begun a wiki for family use. I keep adding good dog books to Library Thing.

Questions: Can I create more than one list of books on Library Thing? I'd like to keep track of books I give to the kids in my life, but don't want to add the titles to the list of dog books I have going. Also, has anyone created a slideshow using flickr? I mean like the one I have in the sidebar of my blog. If you know how to do it, could you share? Also, what's a good way to ask "help" type questions in flickr?

TIA (which is an abbreviation for "Thanks in advance" and not my name - I used to think there were an awful lot of librarians named Tia...)