I bid you adieu!

finally completed all the web2.0 learning activities!!! yay for me!!

thanks to all of you who took the time to read my blog, i know towards the end (like now), i've gotten really slack with grammar and not doing proper capital letters and stuff, but you can forgive me, it is after all the internet where the wild roams. ha!

that's all fro moi. aideu! :D

Ebooks

google has that free online book thing, what is it called again? google scholar? google books? well its google something and I've read some reference books on there doing research and the university library has electronic resources aka ebooks that i've accessed before. so i know ebooks are basically just books without spine, without pages, without physical presence, just some virtual text you read out of your browser, on your computer screen. no fun at all.

but still i've got to say, its really handy for research. i mean you can search key words in there and it'll lead you to the page with what you're looking for and you can skip pages by just typing the page number. i went to project gutenberg (what does gutenberg means anyway?). i looked for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) and 'lo and behold! they have it! pretty cool hunh? I can read it at home now, but still i'd prefer to have an actual aged copy of baudelaire's work in my hands than reading one on the screen.

An illustration associated with fleurs du mal. i recommend you to read it if you get the time to. why? i'm not going to say well Les Fleurs du Mal is such a dark and erotic collection of poems that explores human's deep dark subconscious. just read it coz baudelaire wrote it. haha


Image credit: Wikipedia

Podcasts

I've heard of podcasts, knew that they were kind of recorded audios or videos by people and can be about pretty much anything. i just never bothered to check them out.. (i'm obviously not the go-get-them type of person)

So after having read the techtutorial on podcasts, i went to iTunes to check them out, good thing i already have iTunes installed, i absolutely loathe (i say that with passion) installing new software on my computer. i have this paranoia that one of these days, one too many unnecessary software will bring about the unfortunate demise of my increasingly obsolete computer (its running on windows XP, pentium whatever-edition-they-were-up-to, so not too bad. but still you never know what could happen.)

there i go off the tracks again. back to the topic at hand. I downloaded a flight of the conchords podcast (they were right on the podcast page on iTunes, i had to click on it), it pretty cool, all these extra bhs stuff that i could watch. only thing i didn't like was the it took a while to download the podcasts, but oh well at least they're free.

here's a screen shot of how it looked:

















(i couldn't resist drawin on the pic like Perez Hilton does.. its fun)

Youtube

oh boy, i've been waiting for this. the 9 weeks of (ok, more like 20 weeks for me) web2.0 exercise building up to this.... YOUTUBE!! lol just kidding. but i do have a obsession (healthy one, i assure you) with youtube, mainly just that i spend too much time on there. Anyways continuing in the the veins of exploring web2.0 technology, let me present to you, a vid about Facebook, another web2.0 technology that we've explored.




Hilarious, isn't it? loved the "poke!" part. right, time for picture of the week again! (ok, more like picture of the month, but you get the idea.)
























I chose this picture coz I just love Iekeliene's expression (the girl on the right) in this ad campaign for sonia rykiel, fw08/09. her eyes are all glazed over, her visage's got that vacant look, there's snow flying around her and irina, her hair's all dolled up and pretty.. it just looks totally amazing, to me even though you can say she looks a bit out of it. haha.

WEB 2.0 tools

Hey, good to be back after... hmm.. i actually can't remember how long its been since i've done a post. Anyways, good to say that my exams are all over, only 3 this semester, thank goodness. All of them were kinda hard.. maths108 was a SOB (ok, not really i'm just complaining coz i was slow, ran out of time and didn't get to finish),

marketing201 was WTF, as in our new lecturer of the course wrote a completely off the wall exam, as opposed to just following what our old lecturer have been doing for the past few years. (he asked why causal statements are better conceptualized logically rather than proven statistically.. what?! we weren't even given any calculation questions and this was basically a stats course. i know, he's so gonna get sh*t for it).

French was the better out of the three, even though still hard, as to be expected from Kevin, our french lecturer. but since he's such a nice guy, he wrote in a little encouraging comment in the exam to keep us going.

Ok, enough of my ranting on exams, back to my journey traversing through the web2.0 technology. i'm suppose to be exploring some of the web2.0 technology listed on the Web2.0 Awards. I've decided to check out craighslist, an online classified website. You can advertise anything on there (and by anything, i mean absolutely anything), in different locations, america, europe and asia.

Here's just one of the more random (for the lack of a better adjective) ads that I've come across on craigslist.

best of craigslist > SF bay area > Nemesis required

Nemesis required

---

Date: 2008-05-07, 2:49PM PDT

I've been trying to think of ways to spice up my life. I'm 35 years old, happily married with two kids and I have a good job in insurance.

But somethings missing. I feel like I'm old before my time. I need to inject some excitement into my daily routine through my arm before its too late. I need a challenge, something to get the adrenaline pumping again.

An addiction would be nice, but, in short, I need a nemesis.

I'm willing to pay $350 up front for your services as an arch enemy over the next six months. Nothing crazy. Steal my parking space, knock my coffee over, trip me when I'm running to catch the BART and occasionally whisper in my ear, "Ahha, we meet again." That kind of thing.

Just keep me on my toes. Complacency will be the death of me. You need to have an evil streak and be blessed with innate guile and cunning. You should also be adept at inconspicuous pursuit. Evil laugh preferred.

Send me a photo and a brief explanation why you would be a good nemesis.

British accent preferred.

• Compensation: $350 up front

Seriously, I swear there are people out there with too much time on their hands... (as in too much time spent on writing up hilarious craigslist ads. Nobody in their right mind would advertise for an nemesis to spice up their life right? right??)

Online Productivity Tools

I've come across Google Doc before, for some work at university so I know how to work it. Basically you just sign up for a Google email account and its pretty straight forward from there.

These editors are really good for file sharing and editing, you know, so after several rounds of editing between colleagues, there aren't 100s of different copies lying around.

Here's a screen print of what it looks like. You can do word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and databases with Google Doc. Quite convenient hunh? No wonder there are talks of the desktop being eliminated by the the browser.. everything you need is on the internet!

WEEK 7

This week's about social networking, think Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. Even though I consider myself slight anti-social, I actually have accounts for all three of those sites. Ha, just shows even I can't escape common trends of youngsters of today.

I added the the Auckland City Libraries bebo account as a friend (2 days later they accepted. Whoo i've got one more friend! lol what an accomplishment) and went onto Myspace to check out Maroon 5, one of my favourite bands.

I just visited the Hennepin County Library Facebook. I loved how they put the catalogue search on their page, what a good idea. But um since Facebook changed their layout, i find it really confusing navigating the pages.. don't you think that everything just looks so sparse? No more random bumper stickers, super wall posts or anything, just the basics. I miss the old layout..

Time for Picture of the week again!

























Image Credit: Flight of the Conchords Tribe

Flight of the Conchords' this awesome kiwi comedy duo/band that's making a name for themselves in the States. Check out their HBO series of the same name. It's hilarious! Here's a little scene from the series.

Mugger: What is this? Why does this phone have a camera glued to it?
Bret: It's a camera phone. Jemaine wanted one for his birthday.
Mugger: (To other mugger) Look at this. (To Bret) Oh yeah? Where'd you get it?
Bret: I made it. It's homemade.
Mugger: Yeah, it's a piece of shit.
Bret: Well, how come Jemaine likes it so much?
Jemaine: You can have it.

Library2.0

Has anyone seen that Telstra clear ad where they're auditioning a spokesperson for their ad? Where there were two candidates, one an old model telephone that complains and moans a lot about progress and the other cool young animated person that embraces it?

Well all this Library2.0 talk is making me feel like the old model telephone.. I love books; I love the smell of brand new books; I love bookmarks (good old traditional nicely made ones, mind you) and using them to mark where I've read up to; I love going to libraries with shelves upon shelves full of books, the sight of that is just so *e x c i t i n g* and of course I love spending hours in the library just enjoying the books. Now they're suggesting replacing good old traditional books with online digital books? OVER MY DEAD BODY!

Image credit: Tempe Library

Ok so i'm overreacting, the number of print media and its readership has been steadily declining and online media becoming more and more popular (I'd find a reference for this, but meh, too much work), it'd make sense to shift the paradigm (i hate saying this word, I always get it wrong). I agree with Rick Anderson that it no longer makes sense to build a comprehensive library collection and has unnecessary items available on the internet already, when it is difficult, expensive and slow to distribute. However surely there is still a place in today's society for the library in the traditional sense? Don't tell me your eyes can take looking at a computer screen hours on end, day by day (ok i know a lot of people do this) but reading books just give a different pleasure than reading it off a screen.

Ok, so I'm slightly off topic here. So the suggestion seems to be that the web2.0 technologies can be used to benefit librarians in providing a better and more sophisticated service to library patrons, which I agree, to an extent. Web2.0 technologies such as blogging, photosharing and the use wikis make technology as readily available as ever. However for most library patrons that I have come across, most of their requests were still normal in that I could assist by pulling out the title of the book on a certain subject or by a certain author that they wanted from the computer database. None of them has yet to ask, I would like to know what are some of the opinions blogged about the issue of Georgia being invaded Russia. People that actually come to the library are those that know that what they are searching for are in print, on a book somewhere in the library, or in a newspaper or videos or dvds such as school children researching for projects, recreational readers and reading up on a hobby. Those that are savvy with web2.0 technologies, I'd assume would not need the library in the same way as the aforementioned, and therefore probably would not need services of librarians that are savvy with web2.0.

So instead of a revolutionary way that changes librarian services, web2.0 is more like little extra something, that librarians can use. I still have a ton of things to say in response to Dr Wendy Schultz's little opinion pice of how library services are evolving but i'm afraid whatever scarce readers i have of this blog will just frightened by the sheer length of this blog entry. I'll save it someday for another blog entry.

Picture of the Week(!):

Sarah Palin (played by Tina Fey) in response to Hilary Clinton (Amy Poehler) proposed use of diplomacy in foreign relations:

" I can see Russia from my house!"

Technorati

Is it just me or most of the top blogs on Technorati seem to be technology or gagetry (Linda's neologism 232) related? Seems to me that the Technorati blogging community's main demogrpahics is nerds that has a lot of things to say...

yeah anyways i explored some of the top searches eg jennifer garner. pretty mundane stuff really.. jennifer garner out with violet (at least 3 listings), jennifer stands up to cancer (at least 10 of these) and jennifer's prenatal check-up (lost count of this tag), Last but not least: Jen Scratches Face - Violet Shows Her Stripes. HAHA this just made my day.

Here is the infamours outing of the mother and daughter:

Image credits: Zinkalo

Del.icio.us

I've seen the Del.icio.us link on web pages before but I just didn't know what it meant. Funny thing was I always thought that Del.icio.us was like in Spanish and said like "Del icio us" (meaning something like come see us... I dunno how I came to this conclusion) and just happened to resemble the English word "delicious".

So now I know what it is, "Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet." From the Del.icio.us website.

I tried to have a look at the Discovery resources posted by Manukau Libraries Learning 2.0 but they were blocked by the City Council so I guess I'll just have to found out about this service myself.

Some of the pages saved to the Library del.icio.us account were quite useful, esp. this one article on YouTube statistics. I was looking for Youtube statistics before for a marketing assignment and could've have used this article.

Another good thing about Del.icio.us would be the access to your favourite pages from anywhere. I mainly use my computer at home and all my fav pages are saved there so I haven't come across a time where I forgot the webpage I wanted to see but can't remember. good to know that del.icio.us is there if I need it.

Del.icio.us Logo: Image Credit Chi Hi Earth Science

P B Wiki

I added my blog to the favourite blogs on the Learning 2.0 Favourites wiki last week but didn't have time to blog about it. I had a look under the favourite recipes and favourite numbers section.. we need more entries under those!! I found some really cool blogs under the favourite blogs sections, so everyone should go and check out some of other people's blogs.


Picture of the Week:

Shrek's coming to Westfield Manukau!! Today (31st Aug) at 1 and 3 pm. Exciting :D

Photo courtesy of iWatchStuff

Wikis

The only wiki that I've ever used is Wikipedia but that's really all I needed. Has anyone else find that once they go to a Wikipedia entry, it's hard to leave? They have such a comprehensive linking system, anything related gets linked together and you just feel that you have to visit those links for the sake of complete research, or just out of curiosity. For example anyone doing a research on Anne Frank, goes to the entry on Wikipedia and starts reading it. The article contains links to Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam, movies and plays inspired by her diary, anti-semistism and also Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century. I'd be tempted to clink on links to see pictures of Anne Frank's house and Time 100: The most Important People of the Century. Once I click on that, it's pretty much a point of no return because once I go there, there will be something on that page that will distract me and take me further down the road of procrastination by the name of filling my brain with unnecessary information. That's the awesome and slightly additive nature of Wikipedia. But I disgress.

What I'm suppose to tell you about, is the other wikis that exist. Especially the library wikis. I went to the Booklover's Wiki and had a look there. They had recommendations of books that people read over the summer. I liked that if I wanted to find some book to read, I can just come here and look up books that are recommended for people. There are also wikis that teach you how to write resumes, ace job interviews, and um how to pick a pet tarantula for yourself. Fascinating stuff, again stuff that can lead to hours of procrastination. I really must get a hang on my procrastination tendancy.

Image credit: WikiHow

Invisibility Cloak

Hey what do you know? Invisibility cloak such as the one described in the Harry Potter books by Rowling may not be such a far stretch from reality afterall.

"Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them "disappear"

Sounds awesome doesn't it? Now if kids are sneaking out or undercover spies need to infiltrate somewhere, all they need is to slip on a cloack made out of that material and voilà!! They're in! (or out, as in the case of kids sneaking out)


The Catch?

"The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre."

I say give it another 10 years or so.


Quotes courtesy of BBC Science: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7553061.stm

TRADING CARD!

I haven't touched or seen a trading card since I was 10. So that was 10 years ago... Technology has evolved to the point where now I can get to make my own trading card! Awesome, no more binging on chips just to find that rare card no one seems to have or lust over someone else's trading card... But the one I make probably doesn't have the value of what the other ones have, oh well, can't have everything. Take a look!

You can make your own trading card here: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/deck.php

Here's your French vocabulary for the day: Hydravion.
It literally means a water plane... It came up in my assignment.



Ma soeur est jolie, n'est-ce pas? Maintenant ses cheveux sont plus longues et elle a l'air d'une fille très vivante!

F L I C K R

Colorful Rainbow Balloons 114/365, originally uploaded by Pink Sherbet Photography.

who's been waiting for my filckr post?? Hands up!! Alright probably none of you but never mind. I've used flickr before and I really like it, such a handy little photo sharing portal. I always come to flickr to find desktop backgrounds or find photos that one can't find on Google picture. One day I'll resort to upload all the photos that I have, hopefully not too distance in the future, not when the computer's crashed and all the photos are lost.

So here's a delightful image from Pink Sherbet Photography. Don't you just love the colours?

roll'n'search

Roll'n'search doesn't have a ring to it like rock'n'roll huh? anyways i just created my 1st rollyo search engine today. True to my nature, it was a gossip search engine, haha. I didn't have many urls on there, but the ones that I had, they were gossip sites alright. One of them was even banned by the manukau city council HR! Ha, those sites do lead to procrastination alright!

Rollyo will probably be useful if you need to search specific sites or trusted ones. Still I'd choose Google any day over Rollyo, just so much easier.

Image credits: sixapart.com, BusinessWeek images

my secret library

ok, it's not so secret, since i'll give you the url to my librarything anyways. i guess i can use this library thing as like a reading list, put the books that I haven't read but I fully intend to or record all the books that I have read so I don't forget them. That'd be convenient!

I've found French books on there which is really good but I wonder if they have Chinese books on catalogue? Worth checking out.

Et voilà!

http://www.librarything.com/profile/lindada

hey, look at what I found!

Don't you just love image generators? so much FUN!














PS can you read what's in the speech bubbles?

do your own comic cover at http://www.coverbrowser.com/bubbler

seek and you shall find

blogs and new feeds. So I had a go at searching using Topix.net and Technorati (Syndic8.com was unavailable). I always use Google for all of my searching needs, so if it was a current event that I wanted to look up on, I'd use Google and it would turn up some relevant news website links along with a lot of other links that may not may not be relevant or what I'm looking for. Good thing with Topix.net is that it turns up relevant news feed items, not much random web pages or sites.



I think they're all pretty simple to use, just type in the search word or phrase that you have. I searched the Auckland Internation Film Festival on Topix.net but only had a handful of newsfeeds came up. Does that mean there aren't a lot of coverage on this topic or maybe I've got the title wrong? Going off on a tangent here, have you thought about going to the Film Fest and what films you're going to see? I think there are some pretty good French films so hopefully I'd be able to find time to go...

Righto, onto the next task!

Isn't it Really Super Special?

Hey y'all

Wow RSS.. I've heard of it but never used it. I didn't know it was this... awesome!!! :D Really Super Special, my lame but apt backronym. (yes, backronym is a word, check it on wiki!)

I had way too much fun with subscribing and now I can't stop. Such a cool way to get all the info you need with just a few clicks!! saves a lot of time as well. so here's my public blogroll, have a browse if you're interested. (http://www.bloglines.com/public/lindada) Sucks for you, internet advertising companies, now you can't take away my precious short attention and annoy me. Go figure!

Thanks Manukau Libraries Learning 2.0 for introducing me to RSS!!!

Voilà, my first blog entry

um, hi there! I'm totally lost for what I should say on my 1st blog entry. Ok, right minimum 50 words... So, registering this blog wasn't too hard. I read quite a few blogs on the net so it feels quite good to finally get one myself. Some of the blogs that I like are The Sartorialist, Bryanboy, The Superficial, I am Fashion and many more... when I know how to post links, I'll put these up and you can go have a look for youselves.

Is it 50 words already?

Maybe this blog would get really popular and I can start earning some advertising revenue. Can't wait for that day to come. haha. Just kidding :]