Back at work and boy do I feel it

Today is my first day back in the office after “almost” finishing the bathroom rebuild I have been working on for the last week.

There are some pictures up on flickr of some of the work, with more to come tonight when I get home.

It looks “awesomesaucy”

And mrsbaldgeekinmd and I are still married. Yeah!.

Now to catch up on 14 projects at work…..

Pandora and Last.fm favorites mashup

Yes, I am still on vacation, but I am checking out my feeds while taking a break from bathroom remodeling.

So lo and behold this thing comes across my interwebs. (via a friend on friendfeed)

Favtape will play your most played, top tunes or just loved.  The last 50 of them.

Same folks who bring you favthumbs, so you know its cool.

If you use Pandora or last.fm (which I do daily) you will love this one stop shopping for your favorites and top tunes.  And your friends’ too.  .  (My recent 50 favored items.)

YEAH!

Now I will go back to laying tile.   Wooohooo.

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N in the summertime….

Dear Readers…..

I am going to be away from my office for the next almost two weeks, so you may not hear from me much during that time.

Nothing fun, just going to Artscape, redoing a bathroom, pool time and some day trips.

$4.08 for gas a gallon scared the bejeebers out of me.

See you all on the intertubes o’ information.

And if you haven’t you should sign up for this fantastic Webjunction course:  Creating a Technology Petting Zoo.  on August 14th. (Related blog post)

TTYL.

Baldgeekinmd

<3 Flickr or Delicious? You will love these…

I am a del.icio.us junkie, as my almost 700 bookmarks can attest to. I also love flickr and use images (with attribution and Creative Commons permissions) for presentations.

Lets call them chocolate.

I also love API’s which allow programmers to create applications that extend the use of popular services. Like Del.icio.us and Flickr.

Peanut Butter.

Favthumbs and Tag Galaxy mashes the two together. Two Great Tastes in One! Squeeeee!

Tag Galaxy lets you visually search flickr. Makes sense, no? Visual Media, Visual Search. Using your mouse.

And they made it look soooverycool. Try it out today.

Favthumbs uses your del.icio.us tags as the basis for a visual preview of your bookmarks. Thanks to MLX (whose blog completely rocks!) for pointing me here via FriendFeed

Regular Del.icio.us vs. Favethumbs Del.icio.us:

Which looks better. Yep, I think so too…

This is my delicious account using Favthumbs And you can save the view for others to see your bookmarks that way!!

In addition, they are truly developers that want your feedback. Click on the feedback tab on the right hand side and you are taken to a space where you can suggest and VOTE on the things you want to see Favthumbs do. The participatory web in action….

Check them out..

1st try at Second Life

The name is Magic.  Edgewood Magic.

The avatar below is from Second Life, the famous (infamous? useless?) virtual world.

I wanted to show HCPL/Maryland Libraries presence in Second Life to our system’s pages,  so I had to create an another avatar.

Are you a second life citizen? Do you know of great resources within Second Life?  What should I do there?  Where should I go?  If you are on sl, send me a message.

Now if there only was a second life type virtual world for mobile phones.

The Most Important Three Minutes in Training…

…are the first three minutes.

From today’s the Maise Center’s Learning TRENDS newsletter, the first three minutes of a training, the participants are doing some heavy duty evaluation of the training, trainer and formulating their own instant analysis of the whole program.

I always do several things withing the first three minutes.

I introduce everyone to everyone else:

Ask what each participant want to take from the workshop or why they came to the workshop;

Go over the agenda and announce a break will occur;

Describe my two rules for a workshop, (which workshop vets say before I finish) No stupid questions and feel free to get up and use the restroom.

And then off we go..

What do you do to encourage learning in the first three minutes of your trainings?

Image acquired july9 at 6 pm est from http://www.flickr.com/photos/2create/2170597742/

Invading WebJunctions’ learning interwebs

If you didn’t see this July 2008’s  WebJunction newsletter Crossroads, I wanted to let you know that my local training buddy (@nbookworm on twitter) and  I will be co-presenting an online session of Creating a Technology Petting “Zoo” for WebJunction on August 14th.

If you want to sign up to learn or just to heckle us,  here is the registration link. It starts at 2 pm Eastern, 1pm Central, Noon Mountain and 11 Pacific.  It lasts one hour.

Hope to see you virtually there!

FriendFeed and I are now, well friends.

After a couple of consideration  I am now on FriendFeed.

Check out my feed on FriendFeed, a service that acts like a RSS reader for your life.

Do you or your library use FriendFeed?

If so, how and what is your user name?

So, I keep my truck I save money?!?

So according to Car Site Edmunds.com if I trade in my truck and get a Toyota Prius Hybrid, it would take 119 months to realize any real savings.

Yikes and Ouch.

Gas Mileage Savings Calculator

What I need is some company to sponsor my move to a Prius.  And yes, I just might drive around in a car that has your info on its back panel for a free ride.

Via the sublime Consuming Interests Blog at the Baltimore Sun.

Hey, I am a .0000125% part of a world record. Yippee!

Well, it is a part.

Today it became official that Firefox 3 (hereby knows as the a** kicking browser) set a world record of for software downloads the day it was released.

And I was a part of it.  And here is proof.

Summer Reading Love @ Sheldon

The web comic strip Sheldon (about a 10 year old billionaire, his talking duck, pug, grandpa and a philosopher lizard) is in the middle of a very funny arc about Summer Reading Programs (nee contests.)

Enjoy this first strip and read them all.