reflections

It is hard to believe that Semester 1 is coming to a close. Project Play has been a lot of fun for me for a couple of different reasons. I have learned so much (1), and discovered how pleasant it is to write blog entries that are not so content driven (2). The blog entries that I write for work are so dry - city recycling or new books on soup. My Project Play blog is a bit looser. It is highly entertaining to be able to offer polls about new television shows (Pushing Daisies is still my favorite - I nearly cried when the Aunts got their flippers wet at the end of the last episode - they desperately needed to get back in the water! closely followed by Chuck, a show that I hadn't watched until someone recommended it in the survey).

I have started using quite a few of the tools we have been playing with, entertaining friends and family with my JibJab disco dance featuring Bill Gates and Martha Stewart, making magazine covers with various photos and enjoying a daily dose of Cute Overload.

And thank god for SurveyMonkey. At the eleventh hour I had to re-work an online staff holiday guessing game because the form I created in Dreamweaver didn't work. Something about scripts, and variables, I don't really know. Our web librarian said I could redo it in SurveyMonkey and I actually kind of knew how to do it! She has the fancy $$ subscription, so I was able to add images and stuff. It is not perfect, but I was able to do it in about an hour and that is all that matters.

The Week 6 assignment was my favorite. Not necessarily because of flickr, but because of the other entertaining things I can do with photos on the web. There is a whole world of distraction out there. I also valued reading fellow players' blogs and seeing what they were up to. I found out about dogster (see Taffy the wonderdoodle's page) and Church Sign Generator (thanks, Emily!).

I will definitely continue with Semester 2. I have never tried IM'ing and the productivity week looks appealing. Ta-da lists? I love lists!

So until next semester,

Play More. Learn More. Fear Less. And JibJab like your life depends on it.

if you want to send a letter to santa,

get it postmarked in Rudolph, WI. Home of the Grotto Shrine and Wonder Cave, Rudolph also postmarks thousands of holiday cards and letters with a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer stamp. Did you know you can send your package of cards to the Postmaster of a particular city, and label it "Holiday Greeting Card Re-Mailing" and they will send your cards out with a special little cancellation? There are other communities that do this, too, like Bethlehem Georgia and Christmas Valley, Oregon, but Rudolph is nearest and dearest to my heart.

For this week's assignment, I searched Rudolph, on Wikipedia. I would have added my name to the notable residents area of the Wikipedia entry, but even though I grew up there, it's been 26 years since I have lived there, and it's debatable how notable I really am. Instead, I added a line about the postmark. That was quite thrilling! There really is a lot of trust there, as it got edited and posted immediately, I didn't even have to login. I had a new found love for Wikipedia. But then the love was tarnished. My post may have been the victim of vandalism! I am not sure why, but when I went back later, my addition had been deleted. Then, a short while later, my post was back up with a reference note! Who researched and then referenced my post, I have no idea. The wiki gods? You can see the whole sordid deal in history.

And for pbwiki. I have already made out my holiday shopping list! Online! This is genius! I can link to everything from the front page and then sort my various lists into separate pages. I think I might do this with my book lists, too. LibraryThing only sorts with tagging, which is nice, but not like a separate list. This way, I can have separate lists organized by year! I really enjoy making lists, so wikis are tailor made for me.

That's all for today.

Play more. Learn more. Fear less. If you want the scoop about what it was like to race around the Wonder Cave during school picnics, or play kickball near the grotto cemetery, just give me a holler! (That means you need to comment.)

mm-mm, good

Delicious. In honor of our tagging assignment and del.icio.us, I am posting a graphic of quiche. I made a gorgeous quiche this morning (red peppers, carrots, onion, tomato, garlic, marinated artichokes and provolone!) and it was quite delicious. But who can remember where to punctuate that word when referring to the tagging site? del.icio.us is not intuitive. At least not for me. As for quiche, I think that I favor quiche so much because it reminds me of pie, and I luuurrrve pie. Anything with a crust is OK with me.

I am currently using del.icio.us for tracking recipe sites. This was a great suggestion by the Project Play coordinators. I spend a lot of my free time browsing sites looking for recipes (and even more time digging through my cookbooks, looking for the printed copy of something that I found on the Internet and didn't want to "lose"). I think this will save me a lot of time and is handy, too. I like the idea that you can find your bookmarks on any computer; this truly does take a world of chaos and make it orderly. But what happens if multiple people use the same computer? If more than one person tags something, can you add additional keywords? At home, I am the only user with my login, so I haven't run into this yet.

And what about the social aspect of this? This might be handy, or it might be a giant pitfall. Do I really need to see other people's bookmarks? Will their bookmarks really be useful to me and save me time? Or will I just spend more time browsing through the curiosity that Web 2.0 provides in terms of seeing what other people are up to?

Finally, a big hooray to Blogger! The blog tags get alphabetized automatically. Woo hoo! That, too, is delicious.

Play more. Learn more. Fear less. Eat quiche.