Week 5, Thing 12: Roll your own search tool with Rollyo

I think I would have to spend a lot more time with this to make it work well for me. I'm not sure how to put up a link to the "search engine" I created... I'm marvinkmooney and the engine is called "my find this book."

Week 5, Thing 11: Take a Look at LibraryThing...

My husband was teasing me for being a big-time librarian-type nerd when I was playing around with LibraryThing, but I had a lot of fun seeing how many others had cataloged my favorites (Jane Austen). I also couldn't resist finding out how many people were on the Harry Potter bandwagon with me! And speaking of nerds, here's an article a good friend sent to me about librarians:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/fashion/08librarian.html
?_r=1&em&ex=1184040000&en=9ae24dcd72a1b0ff&ei
=5087%0A&oref=slogin

And here's my LibraryThing catalog:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/marvinkmooney

Week 5, Thing 10: Play around with an online image generator

Here's my avatar! Had lots of fun creating her :).

Week 4, Thing 9: Explore MERLIN etc.

I wish I'd known about MERLIN before... I concentrated mostly on finding book/author blogs because I've been (historically) really horrible at keeping up with what all is due to come out!

Week 4, Thing 8: Make Life Really Simple with RSS and a News Reader

Bloglines: what a beautiful thing! Most of my friends have blogs, and I just try to check them on a weekly basis to find out if anything is new, but this is so much easier!

In terms of libraries: there are so many book/author/library blogs out there we could be making use of. Not to mention the ability to keep our customers updated with our events!

Lego Sneaks

sneaks01
Originally uploaded by marcnelsonjr

I was actually looking for James Caparas' pictures of Sneaks when I found this! Maybe I'm the last to see it, but I figured everyone would get a kick out of it anyway!

Week 3, Thing 7: Create a Blog Post About Anything Technology-Related

Wow. Soooooooooooooo much I could say here... but I think I'll go with my love for the Nintendo Wii :). Some of you may have seen these set up in local shopping malls (and the commercials- "Wii would like to play" - are all over TV), but basically it's the newest version of Nintendo; it's main distinguishing feature being the "wii-mote" control.

We got the Wii for my birthday this year (despite being a "girl," I have always loved Nintendo, and have owned every Nintendo system from the NES on) and I immediately fell in love with it. It comes with only one game, "Wii Sports," but that was all I needed for a good long time. The wii-mote works with a sensor to communicate your movements: you swing the wii-mote like a baseball bat while you're playing "baseball," you jab and uppercut to beat your opponent in "boxing," etc. It's fabulous! Wii Tennis is my personal favorite-- I played it so much on the first day that my legs and arms were sore!

Long-time Nintendo fans can purchase games dating from the originial NES library through the Wii. I've already gotten "Super Mario Bros." and "Donkey Kong," and it's like reliving childhood :). Another popular (and highly commercialized) feature is the ability to create an avatar (or many) called a "Mii." After creating Miis for ourselves, my husband and I moved on to Jon Stewart, Oprah, Dr. Phil, Howard Stern, Kim Jong Il, and a host of others.

As far as I'm concerned, the Wii is the best video game system on the market right now (and I also happen to own the Xbox 360, so I do have a basis of comparison). I highly recommend it :).