It would be easy to spend all day with google books.  In just a few minutes of exploration, I came across an edition of collected George and Martha stories that includes a long introduction by Maurice Sendak (and the entire introduction is available).  This by clicking on and browsing through the category ”short stories,” which apparently means adult short stories and some children’s books, too. 

Re the magazine feature – has anyone found a list of the magazines they cover?  All the results I get with various searches include Jet, New York Magazine, and Baseball Digest.  Seems like an odd mix. 

Also could spend all day with google news.  I’ll have to sign up for google reader, I hear it may be an improvement over the bloglines account I use for RSS feeds.  And google docs would be worth exploring, too, I’m sure.

My husband is much more techie than I am.  I know that he has used a gps on a bike ride, and then somehow loaded the gps file onto google earth (not maps), and then added comments about various stops along the way.  It’s on an older version of his web page and I just tried to pull it up here – could not, so he may have used a program that we don’t have on WPL computers.  Anyway, it’s a great concept.

If any other librarians here are old enough to remember pre-google-image-search days, you’ll identify with how grateful I always feel to be able to find pictures of things so easily.  It used to be a surprisingly difficult thing to find good pictures for patrons – esp. if there was no particular single book on a topic.  Not any more!

The Lifehacker tip about finding similar things is really interesting.  We have a bad fluffy white cat who doesn’t like the standard hairball remedy, and I got some good ideas this way.

Oh well, enough about google.  Too bad they won’t pay me for all of this glowing praise.

I added a book review to the great8 wiki, and also commented on a few articles.  I found the interface pretty easy to use.  I’ve been wanting to develop an internal communication wiki for the youth department, and this is a good motivator to do that.  Seems as if it would lend itself to organizing and retrieving information very well.  Thanks for a good “adventure,” Lisa!

I asked if there is a weekend farmer’s market on any weekend in January in Madison, WI.  It took the librarian all of 45 seconds to send me the web page with the information.  turns out there’s one every weekend in the winter! 

I think that IM is great for many types of reference questions, esp. if you want to be able to send links directly.  Sure beats a phone call for that!  Also, the back-and-forth nature allows you to have some type of reference interview going on – unlike regular email.

I liked a lot of the acronyms – maybe especially EG (evil grin).

Lyn on Elephant!

Originally uploaded by shirleyboothfan

Hi! do I look nervous? Larry took this photo on our elephant ride today. Seems like a long way down!

I’ve recently discovered some old time radio mystery podcasts, too, which are perfect for walking to work, since the plots are generally fairly obvious and if a really noisy truck goes by, it doesn’t matter if you miss a word or two (or even more, in some cases).

iTunes U also has lots of free audio offerings.  I listened to an interview from the 92d St. Y in NYC – Susie Esseman (who plays Jeff’s wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm) interviewed Carl Reiner, which was a lot of fun.

But then I saw this: “Bush says U.S. can use A-weapons in combat.”  Wow!  which Bush is that, I wonder?  And are “A-weapons” the atomic bomb? (yes, that is what it meant).  I thought I remembered that the current occupant’s grandfather was a politician – Prescott Bush, maybe a senator from Connecticut?  Anyway, this 1951 Bush was not that Bush either – this one was Dr. Vannevar Bush, the president of something called the Carnegie Institute of Washington.  Yikes!  I’ll have to do some more research on him sometime to see what other ideas he came up with.

I’m already signed up for email notification and have fooled around with the genealogy databases, which can be fascinating.  I can see why some people can really get into that!  I used Consumer Checkbook a bit when we were looking into roofers last winter.  Seems handy and easy to use.

Our cat Dobbs idolizes Larry and copies him every chance he gets.