Perfect Storm

IMHO, a perfect storm delivers enough snow to close the library but not enough to close our street. In fact, the snow plow visited our little two blocks of nowhere before noon (a first) and we were able to pack up the skis and investigate the local rail trail. This is my husband. He took one pic of me in which I look like a nesting doll with a blotch where my nose should be, which would preserve the supposed anonymity of this blog but crush my self esteem, so it's not here. Not visible in the pics are the Easy-Gos which happily stopped short of plowing through our half-mile winter wonderland.

iStockphoto

A friend who recently retired from the county school system has developed a longtime hobby into a little retirement income using iStockphoto. Editors, publicists, and designers can search this website for photos loaded and tagged by digital photographers. Prices for use seem to start at about a dollar, but over time a popular photograph can bring in a nice chunk of change.

There are certainly of few of my fellow bloggers who are wonderful photographers and might want to check the site out. And I actually found one of the photos my friend described to me by searching for the words popcorn foot.

The Human Factor

I wonder how many of you showed up for work this morning? If so, don't be embarrassed or unduly put out. I woke up at 8 a.m. to a bright, sunshiny day and the thought that we might have a delayed opening never crossed my mind. It wasn't until I checked my email two hours later that I saw the message from alerts.com. Had I been on the early shift I bet I would have shown up early. Way too early. The lesson learned from this, I suppose, is to check your email, call your branch, or pull up our website when there's even a slight possibility of a delayed opening.

Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft Office Live inserted itself into my life this weekend while I was trying to update an Excel spreadsheet. This free document sharing program from Microsoft is modeled on Zoho and GoogleDocs, although you need to download Microsoft's program to use it. If the library decides we want it, we'll need ISS to install the software on our staff and/or public computers.

Because Office Live supports Microsoft Office Word and Excel, I think that it might, in the end, be a more attractive option than GoogleDocs. However, right now I can't get rid of the annoying Office Live ad that pops up every time I open a Microsoft document, even when I tell it that I never want to see it again. I would not want to inflict that on the rest of my colleagues.

Musings

I've been wondering recently just what my dad would have done on the web if he'd been born just a little later. Unfortunately, by the time attractive web pages with bells and whistles arrived he was already suffering from Parkinson's disease. Not that he didn't try. We bought my folks a computer. Our first sign that all was not well was when we had to extract my dad's Visa card from the floppy disc drive. Eventually, after we could no longer get the thing to work, he literally took it apart. I had my first look at the insides of a pc.

In his working days, my father was a wonderfully witty book review editor and columnist, and also a talented photographer. Although in general a techno-klutz (he never learned to drive), he did learn to use a word processor. I think he might have enjoyed having a forum beyond the Sunday paper for his take on the world. He would have loved posting his photos. And the man who wrote about one letter to me in his whole life might actually have had a use for e-mail.

Whether I could have turned my dad into a competent computer user I don't know. But every time I help a senior use the library computers I know that nothing they do on them can surprise me.

Streaming Screaming

During a slow hour off the desk, I finally turned on some streaming audio from Naxos Library. The featured music all seemed to be classical except for Snack Time by Barenaked Ladies. I do enjoy classical music, but somehow the day seemed to call out for Barenaked Ladies. I enjoyed listening for a while, despite occasional static and some abrupt stops when mouse-clicking in other applications. If you are not a music purist, you can probably live with the glitches for a time, but eventually you may reach your tolerance limit. I am going to try this at home and compare the sound quality.

I did wonder how much bandwidth I was claiming. (While I was streaming, were patrons screaming?) A colleague here was watching a Skillsoft video online this fall and later found out that her web activity had slowed the patrons' computers to a crawl.

Spreek je Dutch?

AquaBrowser's HQ is in Amsterdam. Who knew? I am ruminating about this morning's session with an AquaBrowser trainer via the bat phone. Lots of useful features, although the vocab was not as user friendly as I'd been led to suppose. Syndetic, for instance, and that acronym with four letters, three of which are frb. Supposedly anyone who can use Amazon can use this. I can use Amazon. Sort of... I do like being able to see the refine options on the results page.

Then there's the word cloud. When I put in barbara rosenblatt, did I get the correct spelling, which is rosenblat? No. I got Greenblatt, barbra, barbera, havers, lynley. Stop trying so hard, AquaBrowser! I then clicked on author and retrieved a list of Rosenblatts. Including Rosenblatt, Barbara, which was the first listing. So, AquaBrowser was smart enough to put the last name first, but it still didn't show me what I wanted. Maybe there is a way to scroll through the list that I missed.

One interesting feature is the ability to add an RSS feed of a search to your own reader, blog, etc. I occasionally do a PowerSearch in iBistro to look for new DVDs. AquaBrowser would feed me titles right to my reader. You can even select to be fed every new title added to our entire catalog. Yikes. I am tempted...

A wonderful feature--AquaBrowser will remember your username and PIN after you've typed them in once when placing a hold. No punishing you for not remembering to login first.

Ok. Here is my greatest apprehension. I was practicing back at the branch. I brought up one detailed record, because that is the only way you can see what's in and what's out. And the little circle flower thingy went around and around for a lot longer than I'd like. Will bandwidth issues slow down our catalog?