LibraryThing - Personal Online Library

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=the-quote-queen

"Libraries are not made; they grow."
- Augustine Birrell

Image Generator...through the generations.

This one was probably my favorite so far. I spend most of my time on The Generator Blog and played around with some of the fun stuff on there. I ended up using the old photogragh converter to see what the South High Branch Library looked like 150 years ago. As you can see from the picture above, it looks pretty much like it does today, except for the fact that it was black and white. Of course, everything used to be black and white in the "old days", until we got modernized and everything switched to color. But that's another story... ;0) And in case you're interested in seeing what your own pictures would have looked like in the old days, here's the link:

http://labs.wanokoto.jp/olds

I thought it would be fitting to have some sort of quote about black and white photographs:

"Life is like a good black and white photograph, there's black, there's white, and lots of shades in between."
-Karl Heiner

Discovering Newsfeeds

While the last "Thing" focused on adding feeds for news sites that you would normally peruse on a regular basis, this one expanded it to looking for other feeds about topics of interest. I found Technorati to be helpful in the area of narrowing down the interest fields. For each topic (Lifestyle, Politics, Sports, etc.), there were several sub topics to choose from. I liked this approach from the standpoint that it gave you a list of suggested news blogs that you might not come upon on your own searches. I also liked the front-page set-up, which gave you the most popular blog posts of the day (which just happens to be mainly about politics right now). However, I liked the main page of Topix better, which seemed to supply a wider variety of topics and news to choose from. I suppose if you're a real news connoisseur, then sites like these would give you a wide array of options. So, while I think these sites would be helpful to some, I personally did not find them to be something that I would use on a regular basis.

And while we're on the subject of news, here's an interesting quote from Homer on that subject:

"For you are goddesses, inside on everything, know everything. But we mortals hear only the news, and know nothing at all."
-Homer

RSS Feed: Everything at Once

This has probably been the most helpful "Thing" so far. I knew other people who used RSS Feeds, but had never taken the time to create one for myself. I was the kind that had my favorite websites, and just went back to them time and time again to check for updates. Now that I've had the chance to play around with it, this is definitely something that I'll be using everyday.

And the quote for the day:
"RSS 'brings websites to the user, who would otherwise have to chase the website.'"
Keith O'Brien, PR Week

Technology...I never had that as a kid

As I think about all the technology we have, I'm reminded of the fact that many of the things that are common to kids today (iPods, the internet, cell phones, etc.) weren't even heard of when I was a kid. And it wasn't all that long ago that I was. :) It's amazing to think about how much technology has been developed in the last 20-30 years, and then to wonder how it will continue to develop in the next 20-30. My generation is one of the last to grow up without knowing what the internet is. And who knows...maybe one of these days cell phones will be outdated.

In looking for quotes on technology, I found several that I really liked, but this one seems to help puts things in perspective:

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." ~Elbert Hubbard

Flickr Fun

Wow, I was impressed with all the different things you could do with Flickr. My first introduction to it led me to assume that it was just a place to upload photos and keep them organized. Little did I know... I had seen Mappr used before on other sites, and like the concept. The retrievr also looks fascinating, and I can't wait to bring in some photos and try it out.

And now for a quote:
“An optimist is a person who sees only the lights in the picture, whereas a pessimist sees only the shadows. An idealist, however, is one who sees the light and the shadows, but in addition sees something else: the possibility of changing the picture, of making the lights prevail over the shadows.”
- Unknown