tom foolery

Last I checked, playing around is haphazard, so off we go!

According to the fluffy kitty name directory,

My Kitten is Gregory Merryweather.
Take The fluffy kitten name generator today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

I could have sworn I'd asked for a girl kitty, but maybe the generator classifies Gregory as a unisex name like Leslie or Lee or Ashley.

I rocked out with the Jackson 5 on the Alphabet Soup Word Generator.



There are definitely a lot of fun generators to play with but alas, it is time to move on.

LibraryThing

OK, so, about 4 years ago, my brother-in-law and his brother pulled me into the computer room and were super excited. They said "Jenny, check this out! You're going to love it!" Pretty much, it was the beginning stages of a library cataloging application wherein you used a camera to scan in the bar code on all of your media and it would keep it all in one place. There were even tools that helped you check movies or books or cd's or whatever out to friends. This wonderous application was Delicious Library.
Then about a year ago, my boyfriend got that same excited look in his eye. Turns out Delicous Library had revamped and released Delicous Library 2. The interface is much richer and it really is fun looking now. I, um, just never scanned everything in.
This all being said, I checked out LibraryThing and liked a lot about it. I really like that it's built for networking and book clubs. I can see being excited about it. But, I still think that I'd prefer to use a system that is built to record all of my media. I'm not just a book geek after all.

Rollyo

I don't really know what to say here. Remember last week when I said that I'm a google girl. Well, I pretty much just search on google...
I think I may need to find some more search engines to rollyo on in before we can really bond.

down with rss

So, being a google girl living in a google world, I chose to use google reader for my rss feeds. Really, the only reason I have is that I think I'll be much more likely to read them if I don't need to sign into another program just to access them. It's all about convenience. And boy has it been convenient. This week I set up quite a few rss feeds. I chose to go for a wide variety of topics. Some are library related, some are current event/entertainment related (I still need to be able to talk to my non-library friends), and, as this is a tech class after all, some are technology related.

Now, I say that I set them up, but what good is an rss feed reader if you don't actually READ what comes in? Well, I'm proud to say that, as of this week at least, I have actually been keeping up with them. I think it all feeds into that convenience thing again. It's there, everything comes in, I check my email, and I check my rss feeds. Sweet! Right? Here's hoping it doesn't go the way of my stack of unread Entertainment Weekly's. Boy was I great about reading those at first. But, I remain optimistic. Because, from the tech site (Gizmodo) alone, I have gained some real nuggets of information. I mean, how cool is it that I was able to beat my techie boyfriend to the punch and tell him about the new robot theme park being built in Korea: Robot Land! And, check this out - you can get internet security built into your router.

How cool and tech-knowing am I?

Speaking of...This Pecha Kucha thing. I'll be honest, I've sat through some intensely long Power Point (and OmniGaffle) presentation. They seemed to last days, but to be fair, it was really only hours. So I appreciate the brevity Pecha Kucha affords. And still, I think there is a major flaw in this plan. When can people ask questions? How do you learn more from the presenter? Isn't that a big part of any presentation? Not to be a hater - but I just thought I'd throw that out there. What does everyone else think?

boxee is my hero!

I feel like almost every cool 2.0 web application I've learned about has been introduced to me by my brother-in-law, Jonas. You could say he has his finger on the pulse. So, when flickr first started up, he was there. Being trigger happy with the camera, there were almost constant update emails about new photos he had uploaded. And it was sweet. Suddenly from, no matter what distance I was, and am still able to, keep up to date on what my sister and her family were up to. And, to break it down to its simplest form, it really is great to be able to keep that closely in touch and be able to see each other even though we may not be able to travel the distance to visit face to face. To be honest, I think that's part what I appreciate most about the 2.0 advancements.

Of course, to keep up my end of things, I keep a photo stream as well. Only, I use picasa. While I typically don't keep my photos open to the public, I have opened one of my links for all to see. Just click

Mermaid Parade

and view my outing to the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island last year before its great demise. There is some serious eye candy.

Anyways, as my title suggests, neither Flickr nor picasa are the hero of this story. Allow me to introduce you to my newest online buddypal: Boxee. Check out the awesome video about all that Boxee can do. And don't be fooled by the super cute logo. Boxee is some serious business. With a little fiddling, Boxee has been able to pull all of my online and local media into one location. Now I don't have to open 15 websites to catch up on my TV shows. Now I don't have to search my entire computer to find where I saved that song I want to listen to. Now I have Boxee. Boxee is my ever faithful computer puppy. I love you Boxee.

p.s. Thank you, Peter, for introducing me to my newest hero. :)