One of the things I've been fiddling with lately is LibraryThing. It's kind of painstaking to enter in all the books in our vast library, yet oddly satisfying. Feel free to take a look at my library (just keep in mind it's a work in progress).
I've been such a slacker this month. But now it's back to the blogging!
Been reading a lot, so I might get to babbling about all the new trashy romance I've been plowing through. Also, we painted the living room last week - so now I'm on this home improvement jag. (The Home Depot gift card from my folks is feeding that.) Painting is great fun - it's the taping I could do without.
Tis the season for gift-giving and whatnot, so Recalls.gov is handy for checking out the toys and other gear for safety. It's a government web site that gives you all the dirt on which products have been recalled by the manufacturer.
Brought to mind by: Inter Alia
"Chuck Norris' calendar goes straight from March 31st to April 2nd; no one fools Chuck Norris."
"The grass is always greener on the other side, unless Chuck Norris has been there. In that case the grass is most likely soaked in blood and tears. "
Find these and other exciting Chuck Norris facts using the Chuck Norris Random Fact Generator!
Thanks to: The Generator Blog
Pandora generates custom online radio stations, playing music specifically tailored to your tastes. Basically, you tell it what artists or songs you like and it makes a radio station for you to listen to that will play songs kind of like the ones you entered.
It's the child of the Music Genome Project, which apparently has a crack team of "music analysts" who delve into the guts of each individual song and then compare it to other songs, with an eye for compatibility. From their About page:
"Each song in the Music Genome Project is analyzed using up to 400 distinct musical characteristics by a trained music analyst. These attributes capture not only the musical identity of a song, but also the many significant qualities that are relevant to understanding the musical preferences of listeners."
Interesting theory, but I'll have to try it out. I've been using LastFM for some time now, with fair results, so we'll see...
Phixr is a FREE photo editor that let's you resize, recolor, crop, overlay another photo, and pretty much do anything else you can think of to photos you upload. It even has red-eye reduction! It's easy to use AAAAAAAAAAAAND you don't have to download anything. You can do it all from the web.
In addition, when you're finished tinkering, you can upload your newly-doctored creation directly to your flickr account. (it also supports upload to photobucket, livejournal, & a few others)
The only real drawback is that it requires registration (annoying), but it's still probably the best free editor I've seen that doesn't require download (like Irfanview).
Brush up on your typing skills with Word Shoot. It's a typing game where little beasties show up on the screen and you have to correctly type the words next to them before they get you. It's pretty fun - wish I could've had it instead of Mr. West's 7th Grade Typing class...
I love The Office. As my friend chitto says, it's the funniest 30 minutes of the entire week.
You can bring home a little joy this holiday season by giving the Office fan on your Christmas list the Dwight Schrute bobble-head doll!
As has been observed by an astute reader, I did NOT indeed shy away from the Urban Dead multiplayer online. It is one of my vices, I guess. What's not to love, though, really? Zombies eating brains, humans shooting zombies in the head... And it's free!
It's great fun, and even though I get tired of it periodically, and stop playing it for days at a time, I always seem to go back to it eventually.
So I switched over to the new version of Blogger in Beta over the weekend. Needless to say, the changeover hasn't gone perfectly smoothly, but I'm trying to roll with it. For example, apparently all of my previous posts were republished, so if you subscribe to the feed, your RSS reader probably got the whole shootin match all over again. The look of the blog has been tweaked a little and there's also a new "labeling" feature so you can now look for posts on a particular topic.
OK, yall have to try this:
The Automatic Flatterer
(p.s. - it's going to ask you for your name but it's ok - just give it your first name or whatever)
I have always shied away from online multiplayer games due to the addiction factor. However, Arden: The World of Shakespeare sounds right up my alley. It's not out yet, but I'll be watching for it.
According to this review on CNet, "players can expect to trot around in 17th century regalia, buying ale in Elizabethan taverns and joining guilds aimed at toppling dukes and earls." All in a massively multiplayer online game. It doesn't get much better than that!
Thanks to: Librarian in Black
I saw this and had to post it. Now you can play Fantasy Congress. It's like Fantasy Football for nerds!
From their site:
"As in other fantasy sports, you - the Citizen - draft a team of real-life legislators from the U.S. Congress and score points for your team's successes. Join a league and compete against other Citizens, or form a league of your own! Play against your friends, family, bloggers, fellow politicos, or even a sitting U.S. Senator (one could be playing incognito, you never know!). On weekends, move Members of Congress into your active line-up or off your team to strategize for the upcoming week of legislation!"
wheeeeeeee!!!
Thanks to: Robert Ambrogi's Law Sites blog
Here's another free image hosting site: thumbq.
I like this one because it lets you host multiple images on one URL. Also, the site's a good deal less cluttery.
Thanks to: Library Stuff blog
Use Image Shack to host your images on the web (for free of course). This is handy for generating a quick URL to an image. You just browse to your image and click "Host It." No passwords or email invitations required to share your picture!
This one was so cool, I put it into the latest issue of my Law Library's newsletter.
Thanks to: My pal Frank!
Conduit offers a way to make your own toolbar for searching the web, a particular site, whatever. It's pretty nifty, although (like so many other downloadable toolbars) it looks like you may end up with some toolbar buttons and programs you may not necessarily want. Still, it's kind of a neat way to make your own toolbar and share it with others.
Thanks to: DALLNET blog
I've used Irfanview for a number of years to resize, crop, and edit images. It's a free download and offers a lot of functionality for working with your photos.
I came across ResizR on another blog this morning and thought it looked pretty handy. You don't have to download anything; just browse to the image on your computer and use the little slider to change the size. It also lets you rotate the image. This could come in handy if you have an image you want to resize and say, you're not on your own computer.
Thanks to: http://www.inter-alia.net
So I'm superjazzed about the new Marie Antoinette movie. Big hair. Big dresses. Fans. Pretty Pretty Pretty! And a killer soundtrack!
Official Site: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/marieantoinette/index.html
IMDB Site: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422720/
I hear they based it on this biography written by Antonia Fraser. Think I'll try to read it before I go see the movie...
Everybody collects SOMETHING. One man's trash is another man's cheesy Barbie doll collection, I guess. Maybe it's the librarian in me, but I can't help but be drawn to cool tools that allow you to classify and organize your stuff. Squirl is a FREE site that allows you to organize and share your personal collections on the web. And it's social, so you can meet other people who collect the same stuff you do.
According to this press release, former VP Al Gore is going to deliver the keynote address at the SLA annual conference in Denver next June. Now I've been planning on going to the AALL conference in New Orleans next July, but the idea of seeing Al Gore is mighty tempting...
Finished at last!
Logan sprayed the final layer of texture on the ceiling today and put the house back together. It made a real mess, with little flecks of popcorn spray on the fireplace, walls, etc. Glad it's over!
Today I sanded down the ridges left from the joint compound and then primed with a spray primer.
Next it was time to spray on the popcorn acoustic texture. This was a freakin nightmare. Here I am covered in goo and I only got HALF of it done. I think I over-applied it. Oh well... So it looks like I'll be heading back to Home Depot tomorrow for another couple cans to finish up.
Apparently, when you search using the GoodSearch search engine, it generates money for your favorite charity. And if you don't see your charity listed, you can add it to their listing. Interesting concept...
From their "About" page:
Where does the money come from?
Search engines make most of their money from companies that pay an advertising fee when users click on links during a search. At GoodSearch, we've developed a patent-pending way to track and direct these search-generated proceeds to charities. In other words, a portion of advertiser dollars (and not your own!) earned as a result of your search, are now passed along to the organization you've chosen to support.
So I got up this morning and taped everything and then spread 2 layers of joint compound over it.
Now I have never mixed up joint compound before and was a bit taken aback by the instructions on the packaging: "mix to desired consistency" was not particularly enlightening. The internet was not helpful here either. Why doesn't anybody write instructions in terms that women can understand? Do they think only men do handy projects like this? What about men who maybe have never done this sort of thing before?
Anyway, for all you gals out there who need to know: Mixing up joint compound is like cooking. You always add dry ingredients to wet! Mix up your joint compound by first putting a little water in the bottom of your pan. Then, just like in cooking, add in your compound powder one scoopful at a time, stirring constantly. Make it the consistency of thick frosting. There you go.
So I had my head stuck up through the ceiling a lot. I kept having flashbacks to the movie Aliens.
So after we cut the hole, then we had to bolt this big chunk of sheetrock up there. Logan had to do this part for me. I just don't have the upper body strength to hold up the drill like that.
Thanks to my good friend Chad, I was able to use this handy guide throughout the project. It was pretty helpful, if not extremely detailed.
This is the 2' x 2' hole we had to cut to accommodate the new piece of sheetrock. Cutting through the ceiling is a lot harder than it looks. Not only is it tiring, but it's also very messy.
This weekend we said goodbye to the unsightly hole in the ceiling of our "library" room. The hole was left by the plumbers who had to cut through the ceiling to fix a leak earlier this summer. I was determined that we could fix this on our own (and save some money to boot). So Violet and I took a trip to the Home Depot yesterday and bought some sheetrock, joint compound, a buncha tools, and some spray on popcorn texture for the ceiling that I can't wait to play with. ;)
To honor my new handygirl status, I have been chronicling the project with photos.
Create an online catalog of your private book collection with Library Thing! Enter up to 200 books for free, as many as you like for $10/year or $25 for life. You can also write reviews, see what other people are reading and what they think about books in their own collection.
Did you know that you can get RSS feeds from Netflix letting you know when new movies are released? Get the feed at: http://www.netflix.com/RSSFeeds?lnkctr=mfRSS
It updates several times a week.
Want to know when it's a good time to book that flight? Farecast has a nifty little way of predicting whether an airfare is going to go up or down in a few days. Just plug in where you're departing from and where you're going to and it'll tell you if it's a good time to buy your tickets.
Thanks to: http://www.inter-alia.net/
Hey yall!
So I decided to make my own blog. I probably won't be posting about anything of great import, (hell, I don't even know if anybody will be reading this thing anyway) but it looked like fun so what the heck.
I'll probably post a little about the kids, writing, librarianship, cool web stuff I come across, etc.
Let me know what you think!
