Happy Halloween

Good morning and Happy Halloween. I hope that everyone is having a pleasant day.

Yes, I'm dressed up as a librarian. A few of my librarian-friends balked at the idea, suggesting that others in my profession would think it mean or rude. Don't care! If we can't make fun of ourselves, then how are we going to deal with others making fun of us?

My First (Official) Screencast

This is not to say that I hadn't created previous versions of this. You are probably looking at version 15.0.

Good morning from MLA!

Good morning, all, from Mankato, MN! The last day and a few hours have been a fine frenzy. My librarians from the Twin Cities metro and I drove down to Mankato early yesterday morning for the Start of the Minnesota Library Association Conference. Each of us attended some great programs yesterday afternoon - including one on the use of Web 2.0 for library marketing. I found her uses of some of the technologies innovative; including the use of Flicker to embed links to the catalog record of the books that she was displaying (in the photograph). I only wish that she'd talked a bit more about the drawbacks. 1) How do you convince management and the IT partners within your own institution that this method of promotion your resources is ethically sound (in the case of MySpace) and secure? 2) How do you manage time to update these tools on a regular (i.e., daily) basis? After all, patrons will stop looking at pages that are dormant or irrelevant. 3) How do you help patrons move past the learning curve? Some folks I know can barely utilize a keyboard, let alone access and manipulate Flckr.

My presentation went alright this morning. I think I kept to my time limit reasonable well (had about 5 minutes to spare). Most of the participants laughed at my jokes and took some good notes; several came up and send that it went well and took my business card. I'm glad that I'm done... and I am really excited to move on to preparing another one.

Later tater.

Star Wars Opening PowerPoint

Good morning everyone.

It's 4:25 AM CST (no matter what this blog post actually says, it's never really right). I am working on my presentation for the Minnesota Library Association. I wanted to do some kind of pre-presentation presentation for folks to enjoy; it would also give me the opportunity to share some disclaimers and contact information, etc. I'm in one of those moods... so I decided to use a Star Wars theme. With a little animation and color, it's much easier than you'd think.

For your Title Slide:
1. Find some kind of starry night background and apply it to all of your slides.
2. Visit Gallery Far Away for the Star Wars font. Add your Star Wars font to your font folder (Start, Control Panel, Fonts).
3. Open a new PowerPoint presentation. Remove the main title text box.
4. Select WordArt. I think that the best selection for this is the white-to-rainbow choice, which in 2003 is 5 across, 5 down. However, play with it as need be. For my needs, I chose size 36.
5. For your sub-title, change the font to Franklin Gothic Demi Cond, color bright blue.

For your Text Slides:
1. I find it's best just to use Word Art for this as well. However, please note that using Word Art limits the amount of text that you can fit on a slide.
2. The best for this is the Word Art with the shadow (in 2003, it's 3 across, 4 down).
3. Again, select Franklin Gothic Demi Cond as your font. Size 20 worked for me, although you may have to adjust. You may also have to shorten your lines to make the text fit right. Just hit enter at the ends of words, like a return carriage on the typewriter.
4. You may want to change the color for a little authenticity. To do so, on the Word Art toolbar, select the Format WordArt icon (the paint can). On the colors and lines tab, select Fill Effects. Choose two colors - I chose a blue and yellow - and leave the shading style as horizontal.
5. Now, you must make your word art move. To do so, right-click on the word art and select Custom Animation. Choose the following:

a. Entrance - Fly In - From Bottom - Very Slow
b. Exit - Fly Out - After Previous - To Top - Very Slow (add in a delay if you want folks to have more time to read your content)
c. Exit - Fade - With Previous - Very Slow - right click and select timing, then put it on a 5 second delay.

You may have to play around with the timing a bit to get it to match your needs.
If you want to see it work, let me know and I'll send you the presentation.

The moral of the story is: you can waste a lot of time when you have insomnia.

Improve Your Vocabulary.... Feed the World

Check out Free Rice. This is a vocabulary builder; for each word you get correct, the sponsoring companies donate 10 grains of rice. There are 50 levels to the game (when I stopped, I was at level 36 and feeling pretty good about myself). I had also, at that point, donated over 1000 grains of rice.

Does anyone else think that...

Toilet bowl cleaner smells like root beer?

It could also be that, since I spilled nearly an entire gallon of 1919 on the back floor of my car, that I have root beer on the brain.

Saturday

I could not think of a better name for this post. I find this odd, because normally I am filled with witty repartee. However, since I've been thinking most of the week, perhaps my brain decided to take a miniature vacation.

I believe it also decided to take a vacation last night, because I was goofing around right before bedtime and pulled a muscle in my neck. I suppose that it could also be a nerve issue of some sort: whatever the case, I was unable to turn my head more than about 15 degrees to the right, nor able to move my right arm with any kind of flexibility, nor even able to sit up or turn in bed. I move quite a bit when I sleep (old worn out mattress), so the twilight hours were especially displeasing. However, today is a new day, as I located the bottle of hydrocodone that I keep on hand for such emergencies. I see mobility on the horizon.

The weather is finally lovely - and I am so glad that it waited until Saturday to be so. I abhor lovely days during the work week (although, having a window-less office makes a sunny workday much more tolerable). I think that I'm going to get lost today. To those of you who know me, you know that this isn't unusual - I have the sense of direction of a Taraxacum officinale. However, my mother became worried when I found myself near Michigan on a trip home from Wisconsin (read: the wrong way), and promptly gifted me a TomTom. I LOVE it. We took an extended midnight drive earlier this week and I was fascinated with the ease of navigation, the alternative route features, the pretty touch screen, and the incredible brilliance of it all. I remember when I was in Governor's Academy in high school and we participated in a demonstration of GPS, an up-and-coming technology. I now feel old, but grateful that I don't have to carry maps that don't make sense to me anymore.

HOT... but No Hot Tub

This is not a talk on global warming. Really, I don't know if I buy it - and even if I do - it would be because it's part of a natural cycle.

But it's hot. Like 80 degrees hot. Perhaps this is not abnormal for Minnesota - I haven't lived here long enough to know. But this WOULD be typical weather in, say, Panama City Beach this time of year.

After a lovely day looking at fall colors and taking some lazy walks in sandals and shorts (SHORTS, mind you), we decided to go soak in the hot tub. After all, we sacrificed our first child to our landlords for this little amenity. So, we take the key fob (what does fob stand for?) and enter the... well, wait. We don't enter. Green light and an immediate red light. And again. And again. Darn the hot and hot tub gods! And for technology that doesn't work like it is supposed to. *Sigh* back to football.