A Passion For 'Puters

I’ve arrived in Springfield and have already gone to one really interesting session on Microsoft’s next version of the shared toolkit – SteadyState. It looks really interesting, and may save us some money if I can make it work at least as well as Centurion Guard! I ate lunch at a fast-food italian place called Pasta Presto (I basically got into my car, pointed it vaguely west and drove until I saw something interesting – that’s what I found) which wasn’t too bad – the salad was great, the rest was OK. I’ve checked my email, taken care of things at work and I’m now ready to head back to the conference and spend some time grabbing free stuff from the vendor booths.

On a completely different note – I apologize to Margaret and Bobbi – their comments on a previous post got eaten by the spam filter. I’ve restored them and appreciate the time they took to reassure me that they both read my blog – though I’m not sure I buy Margaret’s claim that she has nothing to blog about…

More tomorrow! Tonight is vendors, eating, WoW and sleeping so I’m somewhat capable of doing two presentations tomorrow – one right after the other. Fun… Drinking and partying will have to wait ’til Thursday night!

GND: Getting Nothing Done

Getting Nothing Done GND ™ does not compete with Getting Things Done, it complements GTD.

I’m not sure I’m expecting a lot of posts from this blog, but it’s pretty funny anyway…

Post Like a Pirate – Your Pirate Translator will take your text and post it to Twitter, MySpace, a web-based Email client or just translate it for you (as it did the title to my post here) so that you can talk like a bona-fide pirate today. Enjoy!!

Reading Library The future of Web Services isn’t the Library website got me thinking about websites in general. There will always be a need for a specific “place” on the ‘net for organizations and businesses – that’s the website. For most people, however, it won’t occur to them to go to your website for the information that they need. That’s where Karen says that web services come into play. If your site is publishing information in reusable chunks – bits of info that are easily put into other people’s websites, newsletters and profiles (in the case of social networks like MySpace and Facebook) – they don’t have to think about coming to your site to get their information – it’s already there, wherever they may be. Jenny Levine, of the Shifted Librarian blog, just posted a “tweet” that said that the reason for libraries (or any organization, really) to be in social networking site at all is to be found because people don’t remember URLs. (my paraphrase, there…) All of this adds up to the idea that, while we want people to visit us both on- and offline, they may not remember to do so if we aren’t a visible presence where they are. It’s just another take on my “go where our users are” theme, but Karen says it very well!!

Blog Day is a day where all bloggers are asked to recommend 5 blogs that their readers (hi Tab and Margaret – I’d link to you Margaret, but since you don’t have a blog yet…) may not be familiar with. So, without further ado, my 5 blogs:

• New York Times Books Section
• Newshounds – “We watch FOX News so you don’t have to”
• Consumerist – Information about consumer issues – mostly the bad, which is, of course, far more entertaining…
• Web Worker Daily
• 43 Folders – A Getting Things Done blog that is in no way responsible for my lack of getting things done

There you have it – 5 blogs that I regularly read that aren’t specifically about the content of this blog (though that last one may be rather close for comfort, considering all of the times I’ve blogged about the GTD methodology…)

Stephen Abram made me do it!

77%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² – Dating Site

I’m starting to grab posts from the cached feed at Google Reader (thanks ever so much Beth and Google’s cache!!) so that I’ll have at least some of the older posts back up and available. I won’t be recovering all of them – some were just link pointers that have outlived their usefulness, some were downright not interesting enough to go to the trouble to save. I’ll try to recover some more later, when I have time, but it does appear that some of them may be returning to make my little blog seem less bare!

Besides my utter dejection at having lost the last 3 years of work on this blog, I have had other reasons as to why I’m not posting very often. One of which I can share with you all now – I’ve accepted a new position at the library. My boss left the library at the end of the month (July) and I’ve been busy being both him and myself for the last 2 and 1/2 weeks – as well as applying for, interviewing for and accepting his job. Now I get to be both of us again while we look for *my* replacement. Hopefully, in 2 weeks, we’ll have both positions filled and I’ll be able to concentrate on my new duties as Information Technology Manager for the library. Sometime after that, I may begin blogging in a regular way again. Won’t that be fun? As for the other reason(s) I’ve not been blogging, well, we’ll just say that I’m kicking butt with a level 20-something hunter in WoW…

Twitter and the Missouri River Regional Library is the name of the article explaining why my library is Library of the Month for the WebJunction community. Very exciting stuff! Now I actually have to get the twitter account for MRRL active and advertised…

• The KGB, the Computer and Me
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  (tags: Computers videos)