thoughts and rants

since we all read LISNews (and if you don’t - wtf?) and since Blake rocks all things LISHost (if you need a site hosted - check it out!), we should all subscribe to LISWire, which is:

a brand new idea from the guy behind LISNews & LISHost, Blake Carver. The plan is to allow member companies and organizations to use LISWire to send their full-text news releases and multimedia content to librarians, journalists, library professionals and the general public. We’re going to build a network to distribute this information world wide.

love it.

there’s a great meme making the rounds and i thought i’d jump on the bandwagon since some pretty rockin’ folk have uploaded their pix.

here’s what to do:

Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title. And link back to this post.

i’m going to tag a bunch of new/soon to be librarians on this

• Jan over at 7.9/8 librarian
• Karin, who blogs many places, but I’ll tag her at Musings of an LIS student
• Jason of Jason Puckett.net
• another Jason (this one’s a Canuck) at Head Tale
• Timothy who blogs at TimothyGreig.com

upgrading to WP 2.5 was totally painless. but the photo dropper plugin no longer seems happy. hmmm.

a bigger post will follow later this week (once i catch up on sleep and the job-that-pays-the-bills) but as of this morning, i am finished my master’s degree.

i’m a bit stunned that it’s suddenly over. leaving my job in vancouver to finish my undergrad so that i could go to library school - that all began 4 years ago!

finished undergrad, got into various grad schools, chose McGill, worked my tail off, joined waaaaay too many associations (though the people i have met makes it all worth it), did some decent school work, explored somefun tech, and now…

we’ll just have to see what happens.

pecha kucha (pronounced “hootchie kootchie” by those of us who were tired of sounding like idiots) is a rockin’ great way to present at a conferences.

here’s the dirt: you get 20 seconds to talk about your slides, and 20 slides for your presentation. the slides advance automatically (well they’re supposed to - aaron was taking care of this for everyone but then started cheating during his own presentation so greg took over) so you really only have 20 seconds to get your message across.

it rocks.

you have to be creative with both the visual and the aural presentation, and the time constraints gives the whole thing a sense of urgency which the audience picks up on and it really increases engagement.

the presenters at this hootchie kootchie were all rock stars:

• amanda - IM
• greg - podcasting
• david - videocasting
• meredith - wikis
• aaron - facebook
• greg n. - skeptic

i really think this format would be great for students - it allows you to practice a presentation, using tech, where you have to be succinct and entertaining at the same time. you could hold monthly hootchie kootchies over a lunch hour. you could choose a theme, or even better, turn them into skill-shares/unconferences where people would present on a topic which they know particularly well.

so much fun!

UPDATE

check out the hootchie kootchie for yourself. 

but it wasn’t totally uneventful. the security folk in Montreal weren’t sure what my XO laptop was so i got the “special” treatment - went into that little glass room and told them all about Nick Negroponte, MIT, the issues surrounding the north/south digital divide…
actually i just turned it on for them and tried to surf the net (no free wifi at the Montreal aeroport - blech!) i guess they believed me because rubber gloves never made an appearance.

so i’m here and bunking with krista. our beds have remote controls and the wine glasses come with lids (sippy cups anyone?) so i feel like i’m the lap of luxury.

i’m not meeting up with the twitter gang (twang?) tonight because i still have homework to do and they are doing naughty things.
but tomorrow night - i’m meeting them for a beer or two and so that cindi and i can write the rules to the twitter drinking game (more on that soon).

…like me.

i really hope i don’t act like a complete dork (a little dorkiness is de rigeur for me) at CiL2008 when i come face to face with librarians i think. are. the. bees. knees.

i’m heading down april 6-10 (returning in time for my presentation at the ABQLA conference on the 11th) and staying at the Radisson which i’m told has free wifi in all the guest rooms, which is good, because the conference hotel does not. (actually, that’s not true, it has T-Mobile, which isn’t actually bad for me because my little XO laptop came with a year’s free T-Mobile service! yay! free stuff!)

oh! and i get to spend some time with krista writing our IFLA paper (has to be dunzo by may 1st) which rocks because i have only met her once in real life (though we’re old SL buddies).

so the new WP update is out and i’m dying to get it in place on this blog.
only i’m crazy busy trying to graduate.
so for the next two weeks, i’ll be running lame old WP 2.3.3. but soon…

so i’ve been working on a project for class which requires me to make a mini machinima (machine + cinema - think SL movie). since i tend to spend most of my life on a Mac (i have an Intel iMac though, and for work i occasionally need to run programs using the “evil side” of the computer - aka Windows XP) i was looking for some screen capture apps that were:

1. wicked easy to use
2. able to record audio from a mic
3. capable of simply taking snapshots if i ever forget the cmd-ctrl-4 key combo

Jing to the rescue! you can choose to export directly to file, ftp or screencast.com which will host the vid for you for free. it’s got a sunshine-y interface (i’m not kidding) and is very easy to use. oh, and you can use it on Windows too. (sorry all my Linux peeps - no go yet.)

BUT

you can only export the files to .swf which is why i’m up at 1:21am on a monday night. i need to turn this bad boy into something that iMovie can import so that i can make a little YouTube-y video for class. i’ve downloaded a gajillion demos to try and convert it, and if they work (if!) they throw a watermark on it. erg. i know, i know, i should just gave and by SnapzProX and all of my problems will be solved, but since i don’t see myself as a total machinimaniac (unlike my friend HVX - check out her blog if you want more machinima info) i’m trying to do this on the cheapola.

so if anyone knows of a free app that will convert my .swf into .avi, .mpeg, .wmv… please let me know!