Thing 8: RSS feeds

Whoo, boy! I can't believe I haven't been able to work on this training project since August. Ah, well, better late than never. I have certainly heard of RSS feeds before, but never really understood how they work. I have registered at Blogline, and have a small list of feeds I am now subscribed to, including Library Journal News and Helene Blower's blog.

I can certainly see the appeal of having a feed reader that aggregates all your favorite blogs into one place. At home, I have sites I visit every day, and have them bookmarked on my computer. This is so old school! I will now have to just bookmark Bloglines, and go there for all my blog fixes. : )

In addition to some library feeds, I have added one for my favorite web comic, Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio, and a feed to the "Talkin' Trash" blog from Montgomery County's Division of Solid Waste Services. This blog is very useful to find answers to questions about what we can and cannot recycle in the county.

I tried to add a link to the blogroll, but was not successful. Will have to play around with it later!

Thing 7: I love technology!

This training has been a fun introduction to some things I've heard about in passing, but never took the time to explore fully. Digital cameras were the first thing my family and I have truly embraced in this 21st century. We have what I'm sure is a clunker of a camera now, but it still works well and we've been doing online photo sharing for years through a Kodak website. I had been using digital photography to help unload stuff from my house for a while as well, using my Flickr account to post photos of things I want to give away on FreeCycle. I'm a newbie on Facebook, but have already reconnected with some old college friends that I had completely lost track of from the days of email and snail mail. Maybe someday we'll eventually break down and buy an MP3 player!

Thing #6 Mashups

I did a search in Google for Flickr Mashups and came up with one that I found intruiging, Street Traveler. Street Traveler is a mashup with blog postings representing street scenery of a selected place in Google Street View with the added content of Flickr photos from that place and YouTube videos as well as informational articles gleaned from Wikipedia. It's a fun way to do some "armchair traveling".

Whoops! Forgot Thing #4

I'm doing this all out of order; I made my blog first of all before listening to the lifelong learning podcast, and also registered it and have been keeping track of my progress by filling out the tracking log as I go along. Looking forward to Flickr mashups once I have some more time off the info desk!

Thing #5--Flickr

stairs, 7/5/09, originally uploaded by beezus_67.

My all-consuming summer project, the renovation of my basement. This is a "before" picture. Once you click on the photo, it will take you to my Flickr account and you can then mouse over the photo to see a couple of comments about how much I loved that pink and yellow color scheme!

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Thing 2: Lifelong Learning

I overcame my first obstacle to my lifelong learning 23 Things plan by arranging with a work colleague to have an hour off the desk to listen to podcasts and work on my 23 Things assignment!

The easiest habit for me would be begin with the end in mind. I always have a goal in mind when I start a new project or tackle a new problem. The hardest for me is to view problems as challenges. When I run into a roadblock, my first reaction is not "Oh, goody! A new learning opportunity!" It's more like "Argh! I cannot BELIEVE that just happened! What am I going to do now?" I'll have to try to step back, take a breath and start over, keeping the goal in mind.