internets

Internet Friday

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A bit of this and that to wrap up the work week:

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Stuff I’m digging

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Hey there Internet!  I don’t have much to say tonight, but I thought I would share with you a few sites I’ve been enjoying with the hopes that they will give you inspiration and/or spice up your feed reader of choice:

  • Artificial Owl, which is a blog about abandoned man-made structures.  The photos are eerie and beautiful.  It’s maybe my favorite thing on the Internet right now – except for, of course, you friendos out there.
  • Holga, which is a Tumblr dedicated to “Art, literature, music and film from creative wonders around the world.”
  • 30 Bucks a Week, a blog kept by a Brooklyn couple who are trying to eat on $30 per week.  That $30 doesn’t include booze, meals out, or non-food items usually purchased while grocery shopping – but technicalities aside, I’ve found it pretty inspiring.
  • Letter from Hen Waller, which I just started reading recently, though I’ve been Flickr-spying on this couple for a while.  Their dedication to sustainable urban agriculture and urban living is what I hope to aspire to someday.
  • Pete Bakes!, which is a new discovery by way of my friend Stephen.  It is, as you might imagine, about baking, and is written by a 20-something dude who lives in DC.
  • Zooborns.  I know some of you don’t enjoy images of cute animals, but I do, and Zooborns does it best – perhaps even better than Cute Overload.  Yeah, I said it.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to bed in my hotel room 143 miles away from home.  Let me know what you think if you check out any of the above – and also if there are wonderful things I should be reading.

Things I’m loving about the internet these days

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  1. The influx of my library school friends on Good Reads. I get a daily digest of things that my friends are reading, or want to read, or have liked/hated enough to write witty and useful reviews. Many days I just skim, but some days there are real gems, and that makes me so happy.
  2. Farm to Philly, which served as my introduction to the One Local Summer challenge. Each week the blogger, along with regional coordinators, post links to dozens and dozens of participants’ blogs, where they’ve shared their exiting meals. Clicking through these links has also given me new, fun, inspirational things to read.
  3. Book Mooch, recommended by Karins, which has helped me clear off an entire shelf of my bookcase, while at the same time letting me pick up books that I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Financially the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t really work out, but I’m confident it will over time. I figure that I’m getting books that I want, giving books that I don’t want to people who DO want them, and earning a lot of Book Mooch points that I will cash in over time – and the money that I’m spending on shipping is money that I would otherwise spend on books anyway.
  4. I noticed recently that I’ve stopped making friends through the internet. That makes me sad, and so I think I’ve been seeking out opportunities to make friends by being more active in commenting. Whether or not this results in friends, we’ll see. Either way, I enjoy fostering the sense of connection and interest.
  5. Remember the Milk has kept me organized for the last couple of months. It’s fantastic. I’m a compulsive list maker, so being able to do all of that online, from the privacy of my inbox, and then have the lists available wherever is sooo helpful. I’m sure everyone else figured all of this out years ago, but I’m a new convert, and damned excited about it, too.
  6. I’m totally making this number up, but I think somewhere around 85% of my friends from Champaign are blogging or Twittering or Flickring or Facebooking or using some other form of internet technology to regularly update the world on their lives, their research, and their adventures. While just reading is a really passive way to feel connected, I do still feel very connected – and up to date! – on my friends’ lives, even if we don’t get to talk regularly. I’m very thankful for this.
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Flickr meme from Kimberly at Music & Cats:

Mosaic Meme

Here’s how it works:

* Type your answers to each of the questions below into Flickr Search
* Using only the first page, pick an image
* Copy and paste each of the URLs into the mosaic maker

Questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.

1. Maria Elizabeth Winblad (1895-1987) and Otto Perry Winblad (1902-1977) circa 1905-1910 possibly at Wayne Street in Jersey City, New Jersey, 2. Meant To Be Dinner: Cheese Board, 3. Day 100/366: A Well Lit Memory Lane, 4. Handmade Postcard – Cyan, Blue Green, Green, 5. Day 130/366: Ralph Fiennes, Rendered in Chalk, 6. My coffee loves me too, 7. Morocco. Alone in the sahara desert., 8. German Chocolate Cake!, 9. i like you because you are a good person to like, 10. sub urban love, 11. 247/365 Silly IS Sexy, 12. Brixton tube

Blogtronicus

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My goal for February is to post every day on either this site or Outpost 505. I make no promises of hard-hitting exposes or content that is truly newsworthy, but I’m going to try.

Today is a wet and dreary day, and I spent the morning and early afternoon in very productive meetings. My coworker (I should say ‘colleague’, but it sounds so artificial and grown up) and I had a proposal accepted for an ALA virtual poster session, so we laid the groundwork for that project today. While we’re still figuring out the meat of our presentation, I’m very excited with what we’ve got so far. I’ve felt kind of beaten down in the last few days, so it was really encouraging to make substantial headway on several new and newish projects.

Tumblr

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So the LJ is all abuzz about Tumblr, which apparently makes posting all kinds of random web things incredibly easy. Having already fallen in love with delicious, embraced and abandoned Vox, and then jumped straight into Twitter, I think I already have enough places to post things, though the idea of a posting bookmarklet is pretty cool. Instead, my faithful readers, I’m going to be more steadfastly resolved to sharing ephemera here, rather than fattening your feed readers with another site to manage.

Speaking of which, how in the world did I ever manage my internetting before feed readers? The Google Reader feature set is my current best friend, especially the sharing options. Say what you will about Google – I’m happy to integrate my reading, my email, my document composition, and my calendar, and then also have the option to highlight text and send it to my phone.

afk

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I’m in a bit of a Catch-22. I’ve been trying to spend less time online – especially on IM – at home, as I hate coming home after staring at a computer for 8 hours and then staring at the computer for a few more hours for absolutely no good reason. I hated it when I had to do it for school, but at least then there was a good reason for doing so.

The flip side of this is that I have also been trying to minimize my social chatting when I’m at work, so if I’m not on IM at work and I’m not on IM at home, I don’t get to talk to many people that I would otherwise chat with here and/or there.

The not-totally-explicit part of all of this is that I hate talking on the phone, I’ve proved to be a poor email correspondent if the message requires more than five minutes’ response time, and very few of my friends are letter writers.

All of this goes to the point of that while I really want to follow Leslie’s example, I’m fighting a losing battle, and am doing my best instead to broadcast my thoughts and feelings instead of keeping in touch. I’m sorry. I’m a bad correspondent. Please keep me on my toes.