Back from the wilderness?

Well it's January 2 nd, and I am sitting in my new kitchen thinking about the year ahead. I have had in my mind that I should revive my blog, and actually write about what I'm reading. So here goes.

Sometime in the last year I started using a Nook. It was a present from my son, and although I took quite a long time to start using it now I LOVE it.

The best part for me is having a lot of books with me all the time. I used it when I travelled to the US recently, and since I have been home I have been immersing myself in the Tom Thorne series by Mark Billingham. I was given the first three of these by a work colleague, and enjoyed and have just raced on from one to the other. I am just about to read the most recent. Tom Thorne is the usual grumpy loner, with a a conscience and a liking for C & W music. But likable, with a dark sense of humor. The plots are fast paced, and the other characters are written with depth. It's been quite a while since I read five or six books by the same author, and I am finding it perfect holiday reading.

And just in case you wondered about the grandchildren - now I have FOUR. Here is a photo of Bram drumming at the library. He is the fair haired one in the front row.

Happy 2012 to my readers - if I have any.

Pixelated Mushroom - Craft Blog: Free crochet TARDIS pattern

Pixelated Mushroom - Craft Blog: Free crochet TARDIS pattern

Season's Greetings to All

Photo of flowering red gum by Georgie Sharp from Flickr

Best wishes to my friends far and near for a wonderful holiday season.

I'm missing the snow a little, and envious of my friends in Maine who have had TWO snow days already this winter. In a somewhat bizarre turn of the weather in Melbourne the weather bureau is saying it might snow here this weekend. Melbourne is suffering through a terrible drought, but it has been raining for the last two days. What a wonderful gift for everyone!

I don't have a lot of time to read at the moment, but am enjoying a nightly chapter or so of The Memory Room by Christopher Koch, one of my all time favourite writers. It's a busy time for a casual librarian - lots of other people taking time off.

I will be having Christmas dinner in my back garden with family and friends, and of course The Sainted Grandson, who has taken to looking at presents and saying hopefully 'train?'. I hope Santa has a train in his sack for Abraham William and I hope whoever brings your presents, that you get at least one great book!

What I've been reading #3

In the last weeks I have read some truly wonderful books!
Away by Amy Bloom was recommended by my good friend Ellen, who is in Maine. She and I worked together and have a very similar taste in books. I always trust her recommendations, and she has lead me to some wonderful authors. Away is the story of Lillian Leyb, who immigrates to The United States from Russia in the 1920s. Lillian fears her daughter Sophie was killed during a pogrom but finds out she is still alive and so sets off to find her. Lillian is an engaging heroine, determined to do whatever she has to to make her way. It is well written, funny, and not as sad as one might think.

It reminded me of another book I read on Ellen's recommendation The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens. This is another immigrant story, this time Irish and told by Fergus O'Brien. Fergus relates his story as he is driven off his family's small holding by the potato famine, and travels to Dublin, Montreal and Boston. Behrens is a wonderful and poetic writer and I will be looking out for more books by him.



souvlaki from avlyx, via flickr.

I love reading mysteries of most varieties and have read two wonderful ones recently. Nice Try by Shane Moloney is the third in the Murray Whelan series. It felt a bit like a souvlaki to me - immensely satisfying in a slightly guilty way. It is very funny, and being set in my part of the world even more interesting to me.

I went to hear Ian Rankin on his recent book tour, and he was saying that a number of well known authors are living in Edinburgh now. He mentioned that Kate Atkinson is writing mysteries, and he recommended them. I read One Good Turn and can endorse it with enthusiasm. Great characters and lots about the Edinburgh Festival from a somewhat sardonic view. And the plot twist that is revealed on the last page was a kicker!

Why I'm not Reading

I haven't been reading much lately, too much going on. And I have been watching a bit of TV. I am loving Rain Shadow, on the ABC. It's finished now, but maybe it will return. The scenery is beautiful and the story line interesting. It presents country Australia struggling with drought, and the performances are wonderful.

One piece of technology I have come to love is the hard disc video recorder, I can set it to record programs I want to watch, and then watch when I have time. This of course results in more TV watching than I should do.

#24 I haven't Stopped Learning!

I have very fond memories of visiting the Botanic Gardens with my mother as a child, and then of taking the boys when they were little. So one recent Sunday morning, Grammy & Grandad took Bram. It turns out you aren't allowed to feed the ducks any more, but it is still a lot of fun.

I uploaded these photos into Picasa and then published them directly into my blog from there. It's taken me an hour - but I'm very pleased with myself for doing it!

I often get inspiration from my colleagues - Chellie suggested visiting the swans. Thanks Chellie, we all had a great time.

More on podcasts

AND I can get podcasts of The Book Show. I love listening to the radio but I often miss out on my favourite show. Now I can just download them, and listen whenever I want to.

#23 Is This the End?

Well, obviously hopefully not!

I have enjoyed this program. I have found out how some things that I was interested in work (youtube, podcasts), found some very useful things that I didn't know about (del.icio.us), and generally had some fun.

I think I will continue to use Flickr and the image generators, Del.icio.us, IGoogle and Bloglines. And let's not forget Library Thang!

I have found that as I have looked into some things, I have been lead down paths towards others. I have found some very interesting blogs (Steve Abraham, James Oppenheim).

Some of my colleagues have found it hard to complete the course. Not everyone has the time or the equipment to do the work at home. I think that I have done more than 90% of the work at home on my own time. I am fortunate that I am able to do that. If I still had children at home, or if I was studying it would be much more difficult. Our lives are already very busy, and it's hard to find the extra time to complete something like this, no matter how interesting and valuable it is.

I have had help, encouragement and inspiration from my colleagues. Maybe we could all get together and swap stories and hints some time!

Photo of the New York Public Library taken by Dr. DeNo.

#21 Podcasts

Again, what fun. I looked through some of these, and then I went to look at two of my favourite radio programs. This American Life and Prairie Home Companion and found that I can download both of these as podcasts. Then (I am reliably informed by my resident computer guru) that I can load them on to my mp3 player and listen to them. There are lots of great radio shows out there, I was aware that I could listen to podcasts (John Faine keeps on telling me), but I didn't know it was actually so easy.

Cool!

I will certainly book mark the podcast sites, and use them to find information about particular authors. Should come in handy for book talks!

#22 Downloadable audio books

I am an enthusiastic audio book user, and have been using Aduible.com for some time. I love listening to audio books, I listen when I'm walking sometimes, when I'm doing boring things around the house and when I'm travelling. Having an audio book on the mp3 player is great when you are in that exhausted state about twenty hours after you have left home, and you're still in the airplane and you can't read, and can't sleep and the movie is stupid.

The Lord of the Rings read by Rob Ingles is truly wonderful - I encourage everyone to listen to it.

A year ago when I was still working in the States downloadable audio books were just starting to become available in public libraries. I'm waiting for them to be available here. Maybe something that Gulliver should look at?

More thoughts on ZOHO writer

It's certainly easy to use, and posting is not a problem, adding tags within ZOHO adds the tags to Technorati, which isn't what I was expecting. I have trouble in getting the formatting the way I want it though. I would like all of my blog posts to look the same and I can't quite figure out how to do that.
O, well back to the drawing board!

ZOHO Writer revisited

After looking through some of my colleagues' blogs, particularly Jules the Xmas blog (http://xmas-jewls.blogspot.com/), I decided to give ZoHo writer another try.

I would like to be able to put some nifty little animations here,

and I'm jumping for joy because I did!

Now can I publish into my blog?

Technorati Tags blog,writer,ZoHo,animation

#20 YouTube

This is fun, it was done in Maine, notice the pine trees? Posting is easy, but a bit restricted. I can't figure out how to add tags.
I could become addicted to YouTube though. Lots of things I haven't looked for yet!

#19 Web 2.0 awards

I've been playing around a little with this list. The fare watcher looked interesting, but not only doesn't deal with fares outside the USA, but doesn't deal with any of the biggest cities in the US. A work in progress. The city guides are all for the USA also, and the one I looked at seemed to be full of reviews put on by college students that listed where to get the cheapest beer (useful information for some I'm sure).

I tried the games site, since I'm somewhat of a computer games junkie, and looked around at Ning (who knew there was a network of gay nudists in Melbourne?)

I will go back to the start page applications, at first glance I quite like Netvibes, since it automatically came up with Australian news, one of the things that I have been thinking about since I started this class is to set up a home page for myself. I have had a My Yahoo page for quite some time, but I want to do something different. I will play with Netvibes a bit more I think.

I did a Google search for Web 2.0 awards and restricted the search to Australia thinking I might find some Australian sites, but no luck so far.

What I'm Reading #2

This week I took a holiday from Perdio Station, I haven't given up on it yet and I will probably finish it, I'm still not sure what I think about it.

Meanwhile I read Alphabet Sisters by Monica McInerney. I saw it in a Horizon Books in Traverse City (which by the way is a truly wonderful independent book shop, and well worth a visit), and my sister-in-law pointed out it was Australian, and asked if I had heard of it. I hadn't heard of Monica McInerney at all, but made a note of the name so I could look out her books on my return. Well, I DID read it, not my favourite kind of read. Why in books like this (three sisters torn apart by a terrible fight, feisty grandmother, romances, etc, etc) does someone ALWAYS have to get cancer and die in a very elegant and beautiful way? Everyone is very sad, but they get over it in a heart warming fashion and go on with their lives. Maybe I'm a bit jaded and twisted, but I find it all a little light weight and tedious. That being said, she is compared to Maeve Binchy, and I can see why. Enough said, I would certainly recommend her books to others based upon what sort of books they like to read, but not for me.

I also read Friend of the Devil by Peter Robinson. Much more my thing. One of the Alan Banks series, this is a thoughtful and well written police procedural. This being said I don't think it is the best in the series, a bit too much time spend on the lives of the two police officers and a bit too little on the actual crimes. I do enjoy the sense of place in his writing though, a quite different view of the Yorkshire dales than that seen through James Herriot's books!

The book I enjoyed most this week was Beneath the Bleeding by Val McDermid. Another police procedural, featuring Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. Having seen the TV show I always see Robson Green in my mind when I read about Tony Hill, and that's not a bad thing! A good book, a complex investigation that certainly kept me guessing and enough character development to keep the series going along. We do learn a little more about Tony Hill's past life, and find out what has helped to make him the strange person he is. Maybe that's why I like him so much!

ENOUGH! Using Google Docs to create blog posts

Well, I decided that I liked creating posts in Google Docs. However... if you create in Google Docs, you lose the automatic formatting that Blogger applies to the post, and you don't have the possibility to add tags. I need to fool around with for a bit. I think the formatting thing can be overcome, but I'm not sure about the tags.
Grr! Well, I've been fooling around with this long enough to do two loads of laundry and put it out, so I"M DONE!
Maybe I'll go back and try to figure out how to format my Google Docs to keep my posts looking the way I want them to, but NOT today.

#18 On-line Productivity Tools

Google docs. I already use Google calendar to keep track of comings and goings in my house. I've been using it for a couple of months now, and find it helpful. It's great to be able to check it at work when I want to see what's happening.

I tried Zoho also, and created a nifty to-do list (time to make the Christmas pudding and refine the address list for writing Christmas cards). I think I will keep the list up, it's possible that being able to access it quickly from any computer might be helpful. I'll see (ask me after Christmas if I feel more organized!)

While I think that these applications could be useful for people who don't have access to the commercial products, I think that most people who are savvy enough to know about them and use them undoubtedly have Microsoft Office also.

I will keep them in mind if I need to have a document that other people could collaborate on with me (I needed this last week when I was working on homework for the ABS training!)

Posting to my blog from Google Docs is a snap. It's easier to work with images with Google docs, but uploading from a file on my computer doesn't seem to work. Somehow in the process of uploading the .jpg gets removed, and then of course I get a message saying 'the file is not in the correct format'. All of this is somewhat frustrating and time consuming, but then this often happens while exploring new applications. One of things I know about exploring all of these wonderful things is that you have to expect it to be frustrating sometimes, and not everything will work the way you expect it to. AND, you have to expect to spend a little time with it to get it right.

#17 Playing Around in the sandbox

By now this wiki is somewhat unwieldy. I don't think anyone will be searching for my entry about favourite places to eat in East Brunswick, but just in case you want to know

The Gelo Bar
A Minor Place
The Lomond Hotel

I do intend to play around with a wiki to share with some friends as we plan a trip. It seems that this will be a better way to share information than circular emails.
Posting and editing were easy.

Why I work in a public library

I encourage everyone to read the post 'Thoughts on Customer Service' on Icarus, the Santa Fe Public Library blog. This is so well put, and echoes many of my thoughts.

A Bit of Fun

This is my avatar. I couldn't get it perfect, I would have added a book as well as a martini glass. Note the groovy red shoes!