On Past 23...

My favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey included actually creating my blog and becoming comfortable expressing my thoughts through the blog. I can't see myself stopping any time soon. Even though it is a little frustrating when I don't get a comment on something I think is clever or pithy.
23 Things has introduced me to so many new ideas and ways to use on-line resources personally.
The living isn't always easy in the summer. Summer Reading activities were the highest priority for me and that kept me from focusing on this program. I found that often it was next to impossible to work on the program because of the slowness of our internet during such a busy season.
If another discovery program like this was offered in the future, I would definitely choose to participate.
Last night at our first Girl Scout meeting of the school year, we were discussing some upcoming concerts the girls were interested in attending. The girls were lamenting the fact that many of the concerts - particularly Fall Out Boys - were scheduled for school nights. I mentioned that the DropKick Murphys were on a Monday but that my daughter's school had off the next day and mentioned that I had a clip of them performing on my blog. One of the girls squealed - You have a blog! Oh, give me the URL, I've got to see it.

Pando - a peer to peer file sharing tool

http://www.pando.com/

I found out about this tool while surfing other 23 things projects. It is a way to send large files to others that might otherwise be too big for your e-mail account to handle. It works by compressing files.

Downloadable Audio

Project Gutenberg: The Audio Books Project - Project Gutenberg makes audio eBooks available for some of the same great literature available in plain text. Listings are divided into two categories: Human-read and computer-generated audio books. These are FREE so you don't need an Overdrive or NetLibrary subscription to learn about downloadable audiobooks!

Great idea and wonderful choices but I didn't find any of the titles that came to mind - Almost French, How Green Was My Valley - neither were listed.

Overdrive and NetLibrary have been popular with our patrons and I have directed a number of people to the area where they can register and have shown them how to search for titles. These both offer access to popular titles and fill a need.

Celtic Folk Podcast

I have added Celtic Folk Podcast to my Bloglines account. This feed includes Celtic music from Nova Scotia and Cape Breton.

I was frustrated with the search capabilities of Podcast.net, Podcastalley.com and
Yahoo Podcasts. I searched for podcasts dealing with Nova Scotia and with storytelling. I didn't come up with anything for Nova Scotia and found that the term "storytelling" is used very loosely.

My best results came from googling "Nova Scotia Podcast." This brought me to a Podcast.net selection, so go figure.

Almost Half Way to St. Patty's Day

I like YouTube because it is easy to search and I enjoy some of the exchanges between various viewers. It would be easy to spend way too much time viewing these video clips. My daughter has committed so many of these to memory - quotes from the video clips become a kind of communication shorthand for teens, immediately establishing their quirky humor.

I chose this clip from Dropkick Murphys because it is almost halfway to St. Patrick's Day and they will be performing at Ram's Head Live on September 17.

Peggy's Cove

Carnival Cruise to Canada

I was lucky enough to go on the Maryland Library Association's cruise to Saint John, New Brunswick and Halifax, Nova Scotia. We took a coach from Harford County and boarded in time for lunch in the Mediterranean Restaurant on deck nine, Lido. I thought at the time that I would never stoop so low as to walk around with soft serve frozen yogurt. Little did I know...
After lunch, we heard Eloisa James discuss her schizophrenic career as a Shakespeare scholar and lecturer and her success as a romance writer. She was funny and thought provoking.
We sailed out of New York City and left under extremely foggy conditions. We were glad to hear the fog horns from our stateroom balcony but a little disturbed to recognize that the soft tunes being piped into the deck five common area sounded an awful lot like the theme from Titanic.
On Sunday, we spent some quality time in the Black and Red Sea Lounge or as Michael Gannon called it, the floating brothel.
Storytelling from the Field: Unusual Library Experiences explored prison librarianship- Gleaner Shirley and Shirley Smith told us about their experiences in the Maryland Correctional Library, Carol Carman shared her experiences working in the Maryland Department of Legislative Services and Louise LeTendre shared her experiences as an Army Librarian in Vietnam and currently at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Next, Michael Gannon had us laughing with Love and Death on the High Seas - A Readers' Advisory.
That night, we attended the Captain's Party and formal dinner. We librarians cleaned up nicely. We had a wonderful dinner.
The next day was sunny and our Monday and Tuesday shore excursions to Saint John and Halifax was the best weather the Atlantic Provinces has seen all summer. (Perry, our tour guide to Peggy's Cove told us so.) On Monday, I went on a small group tour of Saint John with Lance Timmons, a professional photographer and teacher who helped us improve our skills with his top photography tips. He also shared interesting facts about Saint John. His web site is
www.timmonsphotography.com
Remembering Lance's tips, I tried to be arty on our tour of Peggy's Cove, in Halifax the next day. You can see my stunning photo of the lighthouse at Peggy's Cove. Halifax is an interesting city with a lot of stories. More on that later.