Thoreau Fragment Assignments

Here are links to the two fragments which I have also included in my home page:

Thoreau fragment using inline styling

Thoreau fragment using external style sheet

Technical Difficulties

Before I left for my on-campus visit, I was rather pleased with the images I had placed on my personal home page. I had been surprised by how easy it was for me to move the images from their sources to my page. HA! I knew it was too easy. In the discussion board, I learned that by simply copying an image location and pasting it into Kompozer, I was using the original page's bandwidth. Instead, I should save the images in a folder of my own before using them. This was confirmed when I checked with my brother, my personal consultant for all of these things! (I still think that I was following the instructions in Kompozer's help section when I did it my way.)

I deleted my images. That made it look like I hadn't been working on my page, so I added a note about my need to redo this in the discussion thread that would be seen by my professor.

Anyway, it took me a long time last night to get this right. I finally succeeded. Now it's time to find out why the RSS feed that I inserted hasn't updated!

Kuhn (Reprise)

Like many of my classmates, my reaction to our first assignment to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn, was "Why?" That was followed by "An MLIS? What was I thinking?" Gradually, I have been seeing the significance of the work. The phrases scientific revolution and paradigm shift keep popping up in other required texts. Most recently, Tim O'Reilly discusses Kuhn in his article entitled "The Open Source Paradigm Shift", one of the entries in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. Also, I just finished reading Linked, by Barabasi, who also uses Kuhn's terms in his book.

Even though reading Kuhn's book was a struggle, I now appreciate how his ideas are incorporated in the works of other authors to this day. Now, when I read the phrases he coined, I think of Kuhn's book (even when his name is not mentioned).

I never thought I'd say this, but I now know why we had to read it!

Personal Home Page

I've completed about half of the requirements for my home page. In fact, I finished the portion that was due on July 8 on that day. However, there's some confusion about where we should post the link. I've suggested a separate discussion board where we can each do so. I don't want the assignment to be considered late, but I also don't want to post it in my blog. I added a new thread to the Kompozer DB and posted it there. I'm leaving for the long drive to the university tomorrow, so I wish I knew what to do about this.

Update! As soon as I finished this post, I went back to the Kompozer DB. A new DB was just created for this assignment.

Almost Time to Travel

On Friday, I'll stop sitting in front of my computer and will instead sit behind the wheel for about six hours and drive to the university campus for a required visit. I'm looking forward to this (the visit, not the driving) for a number of reasons. For one thing, it will be great to meet the people that I know only from the course discussion boards and lecture videos. I was told by friends who take online courses that personalities come through on the DBs, and it's true. My cohort members, professors, and teaching assistant are all friendly, helpful people, and I'm looking forward to spending time with them.

Getting ready for this experience is a challenge. I've had a lot to do at work in preparation for being away for more than a week, and I still have a lot of reading to do for Understanding Information. I wanted to have my car with me, but now I wonder if I should have bought a plane ticket so I wouldn't lose all that reading time.

Also, I'm very concerned about my weekly assignments for the technology course. I'm keeping up, but will I be able to finish this week's installment before I leave? I need my laptop for it, and we've been told not to bother bringing laptops. Does that mean that the assignment is not really due until after we return home and that the time frames are only guidelines? Our professor and teaching assistant have been strangely silent this week. I think they're watching and waiting as we figure these things out for ourselves within our class.

Koha -- Virtual Shelves

Books about library personnel management that I cataloged using Koha.

Koha -- Virtual Shelves

I'm wondering if this is an acceptable way to post the titles. I was trying to find an easy way to do this without typing the eighteen titles in my blog. The problem with this method is that it requires a Koha log-in. I'll wait in case more instructions come along. If not, I think I should start typing!

An update (July 8) for the thousands of readers of my blog who don't have a Koha account: Please see the title list under my ZoomCloud (and just in case this is the preferred method of posting the assignment).

ZoomClouds URL

I posted my ZoomCloud on my blog by the due date, thinking that this indicated the URL. Now I'm wondering, based on what some classmates have posted on the DB. After trying various URLs that I see in ZoomClouds, it seems that this is the only one that actually shows anything. However, it does not show the variety of tags that are in my cloud.

I changed the Archive in "View Feed Properties" to the maximum. Hopefully, that will create an improvement in the next update.

http://mpoly.suprglu.com/feed/rss20/supr.xml

Update (August 1, 2007): After reading a posting on the DB, I might finally understand what I should have posted as the URL for my ZoomCloud.

http://zoomclouds.egrupos.net/CircSuper_Cloud/viewCloud/12193

ZoomCloud Floated Away!

OK, what's going on?

My cloud disappeared from my blog, but the HTML is still in the template. When I just went to the site to investigate, it was in Spanish again!

ZoomClouds

I've posted my cloud, but after a lot of work, I'm not happy with it. I tried feedblendr and suprglu. Both picked up phrases from my blog postings, not just the labels. I filtered out a bunch of them. The good thing is that I see tags from all three feeds (blog, Connotea, and del.icio.us.

There's a problem with ZoomClouds when you try to reload your cloud after editing. (And that's not the only problem!)

Taking a Quick Break to Complain

We were told to use this blog to vent, so here goes. This has been a rotten week (except for going to ALA).

I'm behind in my reading and have a paper due by the end of the day on Monday. On top of that, I have to participate in an online discussion (Hot Topic) by noon on Sunday. There's a quiz for the technology class on Monday. I have to blog again tomorrow to meet my three per week requirement. Somewhere, I thought I read that two classes in this program would not have assignments due on the same day, but there's no time to try to find that again. Maybe it was wishful thinking.

I'm using vacation days today and Monday for coursework. It's a good thing I'm in charge of staff scheduling at my library. When I've used up all of my comp time, maybe I should consider going from full-time to part-time. A few hours less per week might make a difference. As Head of Circ, though, I don't want to get behind at work!

I'm not able to stay up as late at night as I did in undergrad school, which was a long time ago. I feel like a cold might be trying to catch up with me.

Finally, I took my mother to three different doctors this week and missed work for two of the appointments. I sit in on her appointments with her now, so I don't get much reading done. I had Life Alert installed in her apartment today in case my brother can't get home to stay with her while I'm away for an on-campus visit. Fortunately, she is doing well. I'm very blessed to still have her after a number of medical crises in recent years.

I was disappointed that I could only take her out for dinner tonight on her 76th birthday. I spent the rest of the day on classwork. We usually go out for the day. She didn't mind, of course. I'll make it up to her during the semester break.

I also missed my best friend's birthday party last Saturday because of my library schedule, and, you guessed it, coursework.

I enjoy the content of my classes very much but I'm getting tired of rushing through everything. I am still in awe of my classmates who have children. How do they do it?

Enough of this. Tomorrow will be better (or maybe not).

Grazr Widget Assignment

I've created a Grazr widget that includes my blog, my Connotea library, and my del.icio.us library. Please click here to see it.

The URL is http://grazr.com/gzpanel.html?addbar=off&view=3p&theme=sateen_blue&file=http://grazr.com/data/mpoly/export.opml

Google Co-op Assignment

Here is my custom search engine. Since I'm on a task force that will write a case statement to obtain grants for my church, I might as well work on two projects at once. I've already used some of these sites, while some are new discoveries. I also added a search box to my blog (see below).

Preservation of Sacred Buildings and Their Histories

The URL is:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=007054411542131865525:jpnom8qjpve

Scopus/Bloglines Assignment

Click here to see my public Bloglines subscriptions, including the LIS2600 folder of my Scopus search results.

The URL is http://www.bloglines.com/public/mpolymenakos . (I added the URL here on July 2. While going over my notes, I thought this might be necessary. The rest of this post was created on June 22.)

My Scopus search included 48 items; however, only 20 seem to have been included in my LIS2600 folder. I am able to view all of them by selecting that option; they just aren't in the posted list. I'm not sure why, although the Scopus help information states that an RSS feed can not be created for all searches. Does that pertain to individual items within a search?