Recently in misc Category

There's a lot in the works at the moment but there are two events I wanted to highlight here for anybody interested.

Ed Vielmetti @ WSU

The student chapter of ASIS&T at Wayne State University is excited to have Ed Vielmetti of Pure Visibility in Ann Arbor come out and present to the LIS students at WSU (Ed is also known by some as Superpatron).  Details of the talk will probably come later on this blog and elsewhere but here's what we're planning.

March 6, 2008

Presentation @ 11:00 am

Lunch get together after the presentation.

Ed has a very interesting topic lined up and I can't wait to hear it!  I'll save the details for a more proper post though.  This event is also open to anybody interested in attending.

Library Camp in A2

Ann Arbor is hosting a second Library Camp on March 20th.  The first was a great success, and actually where I met Ed for the first time!

Library Camp Ann Arbor

I also noticed that the folks in Kansas are having their Library Camp the day before. 

Library Camp Kansas

March is the month for Library Camps, that's for sure!

There's a lot going on around Ann Arbor, and there's a lot we have planned for ASIS&T too, I'm really excited for the rest of the year.

I honestly don't know how long we've been throwing our Chinese New Year Party now, it seems like 5 years, but now I'm thinking this is the 4th, but honestly I can only find pictures going back to 2005, so maybe it's 3?  Three doesn't sound right though, my pictures might be labeled wrong.

It doesn't matter though, it's fun every year.  We started having a Chinese New Year Party (despite the face we're not Chinese) for two reasons:

1.  We're huge procrastinators, the first year we wanted to throw a Christmas Party, but we never got to "planning" until about January. 

2.  It's hard to compete with all of the other festivities around Christmas time, so this seemed like a better solution.  Now when Christmas rolls around I can go to everybody else's parties, start thinking about our Chinese New Year party plans, and actually enjoy myself, to the extent I can enjoy myself during the Holiday Season.

This year we feasted on Chinese food and White Castle (our parties are certainly unique, to say the least), watched a few hilarious YouTube videos on our TV through the PS3 (what's a party without YouTube videos?), then played Guitar Hero.  Oh and I can't forget the hit of the party, the Champagne Punch!

Champagne Punch

• 1 1/3 cups lemon juice
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup orange liqueur (such as Grand Marnier)
• 1/2 cup Triple Sec
• 1/2 cup Cognac
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• 2 bottles dry Champagne (chilled)
• Orange slices
• Strawberries

Combine lemon juice through orange juice and stir to dissolve sugar.  Add the Champagne and stir.  Cover and refrigerate for about 1 hour until chilled. Add oranges and strawberries and serve in a nifty punch bowl.

Then enjoy of course!  The orange slices were especially yummy to munch on.

Happy Year of the Rat!

Just a few words about my experience at ArbCamp yesterday (A2's un-unconference), I had a great time! Thanks to those who organized, it was really well put together. I talked to quite a few students there, I know there were several that came from all over Michigan, and being a student myself, I was felt so welcomed at the event and I do appreciate that.

I didn't take a whole lot of notes at ArbCamp, I think I was noted out after ASIS&T, but I did have a lot of wonderful conversations with people the entire day.

I enjoyed Mitten's enthusiastic talk on Grids in Web Design. I wasn't aware of Blueprint Grid CSS but I am now! I'm a big fan of generators (or anything that will do things for me for that matter) so I found a link to one while I was listening to the discussion. Also mentioned was the nifty Firefox extension It's All Text! There were other great tools being bounced around here, but I actually missed the rest, I think my internet cut out toward the end of the session.

Before lunch we went to Ed's Lunch 2.0 which mostly just turned into a chat session with an SI student at Michigan. Garin from SI explained the Community Information Corps, a weekly lunch featuring speakers in the Information field. It's too bad I normally work on Fridays, the speakers sound fascinating and I wouldn't mind attending some time. From here on until after lunch I met and talked with several interesting people.

After lunch I started in the Photography & Social Networks session but then ended up in the Library Camp session after a few minutes. Sometimes it's just so hard to decide. My friend Sarah stayed in the photography session though. During the library session we talked about some interesting ideas of small libraries or personal libraries. Peer-to-peer circulation came up. As it was being described I almost envisioned it as a library social network, within your library network you're able to share library books with one another or see what your friend has, bypassing the hold/checkout process at your local library. The advantage to the library would be that your patrons bypass the circulation process and deal directly with one another, saving circulation costs and freeing up shelf space (if the library allows items to stay out until they are needed by somebody else). In a Library 2.0 dream world this sounds like a fabulous idea, but l know that libraries would never buy in to this. It's hard enough getting things like RSS in catalogs and social features in our systems scare most librarians. It's too bad.

LibraryThing also came up a lot. I find LibraryThing interesting but I'm not a user myself. One point I mentioned at the discussion was that since I borrow most of my books from libraries and don't actually own them myself, that has always been a perceived barrier for me to start to use LibraryThing. I did start a LibraryThing account to catalog our sheet music a long time ago though; I wouldn't mind trying to start that process back up again. I wanted to catalog our sheet music and then also our classical music CDs so finding corresponding pieces would be easy to cross reference between the two collections. Since we don't play much anymore this hasn't been high on my priority list. Anyway, one reason why I would start using LibraryThing would be to contribute to the collective tagging data on materials. Some libraries are starting to import LibraryThing tags into their catalogs and I think this is potentially more beneficial than trying to integrate tags on their systems themselves.

After then was Derek's discussion on Social Media 101. Some of the topics included a rundown of the popular social networking tools, a brief discussion on privacy, as well as a list of potential uses for the tools. I'm sure I'm missing a lot. I use a lot of the tools already, but one thing I did think during this is that I will probably want to figure out what I'm not using anymore and clean all that up. Network portability came up and this is something I'm interested in. Probably not so much portability but just some way to know what it is I'm signed up for and a more efficient way to aggregate my online presences. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the number of choices in various networking tools and also the fact that I'm not even sure what open accounts I have out there anymore.

Sarah and I spent a good while talking to Andy, a neogeographer, which is a title I find fascinating. I also enjoyed talking to Andy at ABC later that evening.

All in all it was a good day; I met a lot of great people, had a lot of interesting discussions, and took my husband out with me for some beer and more great discussions at ABC later. Although I think today is the first full day I've spent at home in over a week so I'm actually enjoying this time too.

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I cancelled my MySpace account just now. The comment spam has been driving me nuts, not just in my name but I've been getting the same sort of thing from some of my friends. Today I changed my spam settings and it happened again so I'm done. I don't really do much on MySpace, I'm not sad to see it go either. Sorry if any one of you were my friends on there, but if you really want to keep track of what I'm doing, feel free to add me on Facebook instead.

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I knew there was a reason why I messed around with the MT StyleCatcher plugin so much when I first switched the site to where it is now. I've been thinking about changing the format to 2 columns for some time now, but if I had known it would be this easy I would've done it sooner. I changed one line and deleted two lines in the html, and voila!

Now all I have to do is work on fixing the sidebar to get all the link things I want on there.

Part of University of Michigan's Tunneling System Exposed
Originally uploaded by heidigoseek.

I was walking by the construction at the library one day and I saw this, then I noticed a sign inside the undergrad library explaining what it was all about. I find this stuff interesting. I didn't find a good website about the tunnels but I did find an article in The Michigan Daily Online.

Me as a Simpson's Character
Originally uploaded by heidigoseek.

Ever wonder what you would look like as a Simpson's character? You can find out at SimpsonizeMe.com

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I do realize that my blog posting has been lame of recent. It does seem that when I do finally get to blogging and end up writing more lame posts like this. I won't apologize for that though, that's just the way life and blogging goes with me sometimes.

First things first, I'm posting this in Word 2007! We'll have to wait until I'm done to see how well that works though. It was pretty easy to set up and I may just continue to use this to post entries. I tend to install too many blog apps that either end up not working or aren't exactly what I hoped they would be once I got them working.

I have received my new computer so hopefully there will be minimal complaining in the computer area (at least until 3 years from now until this one dies). I have a shiny new HP with all sorts of neat things and Windows Vista. Now that I've been using Vista for about a week or so I have to say that I do like it. At first I called it "cool and annoying at the same time" but it feels more like the "kinder, gentler Microsoft." The error messages seem a bit more helpful (if not a little too frequent). I've heard from others that it's slow, but this doesn't seem to be the case for me yet. I think it's snappy and I even like the nifty vista-like animations. I haven't had much of a problem running my old applications on it, but I've only been installing things as I need them. Now, I just need to keep it running this way and I'll be happy.

I did have a list of things I wanted to post about, but those are stored on my other computer, and I have been neglecting that one since I got the new one. One post I had in my mind is how to sync GPS tracking data with your digital images to auto geocode your pictures. I ran a little test a few weeks ago but I never wrote about that. The bummer is that the one utility that worked the best is only available for XP, but everything else runs fine on Vista...I suppose this is why I'm hanging on to my old computer.

If you don't see me around my blog this summer I'll probably be doing one of these things; geoaching, something for my class, working, camping (in August, yea!), more geocaching. We attended a geocaching event a few weekends ago, we'll be attending a least 3 more until September (not including our camping trip which will be week long geocaching with our friends). We're eagerly awaiting the Midwest GeoBash in Kendallville, IN, presently there are 915 people signed up to attend. That's a lot of GPS receivers in one place :)

What I really wanted to do this summer is some website maintenance; I've been meaning to update the site for some time now. Things never go the way we plan though, oh well.

Hopefully some real blog posts are on the way (I know I said that last time I posted a lame post).

I realize I hadn't written in my blog for some time. Almost two weeks ago I had to take my computer in for repair and I've been playing catchup with email and feeds (well mostly email, feeds are still a mess).

My computer is home and happy, and hopefully I'll be motivated to post on the blog again soon.

"From your 81 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,900 items, starred 106 items, and shared 0 items."

Wow, that's a lot of stuff. The only thing I have trouble doing is going through my starred feeds and doing something with them. That requires time I don't have.