23 things +5

Today I polished off the plus 5 tasks for 23 things.
I joined Linked-in, made a search for colleages and added an invitation.

I experimented with the National Library of Australia version of VuFind.
NLAs VuFind is rather dull looking, I think it needs to have images added to liven it up. I like the way having the See references and Subject headings in the Narrow Search area gives them more prominence. I discovered that you can narrow your search by format but I'd also like format to be one of the drop down sort options.

In Kartoo I made a search for softies. The initial results were way off track, but once I narrowed things down by clicking on plush, the second screen of results was more promising. I found that compared to a similar search in google, there were lots of commercial retail sites rather than blogs or crafting community webpages. Does Kartoo give preference to "sponsored sites"?

I wasn't impressed with Voyager for managing RSS feeds. The blurry grey on grey colour scheme of Voyager would be no good for sight impared users. It would be helpful to be able to search RSS feeds by keyword like you can in Digg.
I had to search in Digg to find the address of an RSS feed I liked before I could paste the address into Voyager. I added /Film http://feeds2.feedburner.com/slashfilm
I successfully deleted most of the US-centric news feeds and added my own but somehow kept getting results from Newsvine which I couldn’t delete.

I read up on the idea of the Semantic web. I've been using AskJeeves for years through its various incarnations and name changes. I'd always found it especially useful to show to international students who tended to type their whole essay topic into google and then get no results. Though I think it helped them to understand it when I called it "natural language search".

Online Manual Handling training

Bookmarked the online Deakin Uni Handle with Care training site today, worked through it, & answered the review questions. Wow, Deakin have really scary looking weird trolley lifts.
Plus I dont think I'd like to have to lug around those 10 kilo book bags they showed in their demos. I liked the way they broke up their clips into lots of little ones, just right.

Ultraman

		I'm not sure if this is a waffle iron or a cookie maker. It was pitch black when I found it but I couldn't resist - lots of steel wool and wrecked fingers later its spotty brown. Not sure that it would be hygenic to ever use it!

Sydney finds

Spent lots of time during my Sydney hols trawling through op-shops. There were some finds I just cant resist posting photos of, like this cycling frog ashtray. I dont know about you but I take one look at it and just think "Wheeeee!!!"

As soon as I get photos I'll post my three little pigs in a jalopy and my Ultraman waffle iron too!

Latest additions to LibraryThing

Used my Borders 40%off voucher to get stacks of books last week & added them to librarything

23 Things roundup

23 Things has been a steep learning curve - the only one of the 23 things I had previously dabbled with was Flickr (I’d searched for images but didn't realise there were groups and hadn't joined or posted).
Prior to 23 things I wondered what the attraction was with blogging & Youtube & facebook. They seemed like big timewasters. I’m afraid my mind hasn’t been changed about Youtube & Facebook but I think I’ll keep blogging and using Flickr & Delicious.
I liked iGoogle but it would be more useful if you could make it into fully customised desktop that could follow you from PC to PC. Its so frustrating when you work across campuses and have icons in different spots on the screen and software on one computer that you cant access from another without downloading it from the NAL or web. Delicious takes care of the bookmarks but something similar for your desktop would be great.

iGoogle Homepage & GoogleDocs

I uploaded a GoogleDoc today. Its a backup of my list of DVDs so that I dont get burned the next time my memory stick or my external computer drive dies.
I also created & personalised my iGoogle homepage & added weather, google docs, spreadsheets etc to it. Added optional extras like an animated banner & list tools too. When I made a list of my fav actors with the iGoogle list tool- it wouldn't let me add photos, so I experimented on my blog.
I made a table in dreamwaver, changed to code view & copied it to a blog post. I've been uploading unformatted images and then cutting & pasting them into the code for each cell. PS: Hooray! I got rid of the gap I had in my post between the text & the frame. I changed to Compose instead of Html & found lots of hidden returns.

Amitabh Bachchan	Shashi Kapoor	ShahRukh Khan	Amir Khan	Hrithik Roshan
Susumu Terajima	Asano Tadanobu	Matsuda Ryuhei	Toshiro Mifune	Takeshi Kitano
Anthony Wong	Andy Lau	Leslie Cheung	Sean Lau	Takeshi Kaneshiro
Ti Lung	David Chiang	Javier Bardem	Paul Naschy	Marcello Mastroianni
Vincent Cassel	Gerard Depardieu	Jean Reno	Daniel Auteuil	Alain Delon
Lee Van Cleef	Donald Sutherland	Lee Marvin	Yul Brynner	Burt Lancaster
Derek Jacobi	Christopher Lee	James Coburn	Charlton Heston	Kirk Douglas

Wiki pet photo & more

I finally got round to taking a photo of the rest of my tribal stuff. I should have waited for the sun to go behind a cloud- too many shadows, but it looks better if you click on the photo to see the enlargement.
A favorite is the fork/backscratcher in the back row. Its carved faces manage to be both funny & serene. My other fave is the siamese cat. It had an old handwritten label that said "voodun" which made me wonder if its former life was on an alter in Haiti. When I scratched that off, underneath was a label that says "carved from genuine kiln dried monkey pod". What on earth is a mokey pod? I'll have to google it!

While I'm on the topic of photos, here's a link to my staff wiki pet photo

Second Life & Library 2.0

I read some pages about 2nd life linked from the 23Things Task 22 site. Mostly about using it as a library youth outreach tool. When I followed a link for "SimTeach: Universities and private islands in Second Life" I found that The Australian Film TV & Radio School has its own island called Esperance. They run Machinima screenings and festivals of virtual films. I’ve been to some sessions of the Machinima festival shown at ACMI and I think some of their shorts have screened in the MIAF animation festival. Even if its cheaper to look at stuff on Esperance island, I think its too many hoops to jump through. Its easier to just roll up and see stuff on the big screen. Better with an audience too!

Did some reading on Library 2.0 as well. I can see the benefits for both the library and the user. But do library users want to spend more time interacting with their library, even if its via sexed up technology? I think they’ll need to see big payoffs/bribes to get motivated (ipods, grocery vouchers?).

Youtube

Friday night I went to ACMI's screening of The American Astronaught (think dancing space cowboys with a bit of Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon thrown in). I first saw it at MIFF and haven't been able find it on DVD. I thought I'd show my support and see it again to get audience numbers up. It was a sell out session. Seems word has spread!

To kill time waiting for ACMI's screening I saw Cloverfield at MelbCentral. The audience was comparing it to Godzilla??? Not even close! I would have been more impressed if I hadn't already seen The Host. They nicked the creature & half the action, spliced it with 9/11 re-enactments, then sprinkled it with bad teen actors. It didn't have the wit, political bite & heart of the Korean film. It also didn't have my 2 favorite actors Byeon Hie-bong (even better in The Host than Memories of Murder) & Bae Doo-na (I loved her as the gormless Korean exchange student in Linda, Linda).
Here's a Host trailer I found on Youtube after I got bored searching for Library clips www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCsBMwK40hw. Youtube's easy to search but creating an account & exporting clips is a painful process.

del.icio.us & podcasts

I created a del.icio.us account today http://del.icio.us/Doodle_bug
I also made a del.icio.us search for retro and followed the trail to a bookmark on 70's TV shows. Its a great idea to have your bookmarks follow you around - now I just have to find time to add them all.

The first favorite site I bookmarked was Josh Agle www.shag.com I first saw his work in Outre gallery in Elizabeth St. He designs retro stuff thats like 50's cigarette advertising.



He's also heavily influenced by Tiki culture. I'm a fan of Tiki's too. Here's my collection, I've thrown in a few retro 70's carved madonna's too!
Perhaps I should add a photo of my old Balinese wall plaques?





Shag's designs look like this plate I found at the Salvos. It reminds me of seeing Tezuka's anime 1001 Nights at the Kino cinema. It had the same 60's playboy graphics. It also had a pink tinge because the film stock was old and brittle. Halfway through they managed to set fire to the film!
A few years later there was a more successful screening of 1001 Nights at ACMI to tie in with the Tezuka exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria. I found some podcasts Philip Brophy made for the exhibition at: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/podcasts/namedSets/3/playlist.html?genSetId=5

Google Books

I made surprising discoveries in google books. I thought they just scanned copyright free classics but I found Janet Evanovich books, the whole Kerry Greenwood Phryne Fisher series and best of all "One For Sorrow" the 1st in the John the Eunuch series. Its a mystery set in C6th Byzantium. I have the 4th book & couldn't find the rest before they went out of print. Dont think I could stare at a screen to read the whole thing-I still prefer paperbacks.

Google maps

Turns out I'd been seeing google maps for a while without realising it. They keep popping up as links when I look for shops in Sydney. Google maps seems to combine yellow pages & whereis, so you use just 1 tool to easily look up places when you don’t know their exact address.
Have to say that I prefer whereis.com.au when I already have the exact address of where I'm going.
For info of exactly where a business is on a street yellowpages.com.au maps are clearer.
I like GoogleMaps satellite maps better & searched for my favorite needlework store.

MySpace & Facebook

I've created MySpace and Facebook accounts. Found some familiar faces in the Swinnie part of Facebook. MySpace looks like it would take lots of time to customise and would duplicate things I've already set up in Blogger like RSS feeds. The search facility is a bit of a blunt instrument, it would be good if it ranked sites in order of relevance (like how often your searchword is tagged in a page)

I made a search in MySpace for El Santo because I'm a fan of 1950's, 60's & 70's masked mexican wrester films - Des Mangan used to show them on SBS and got me hooked. Since then ACMI at Fed Square have shown a couple, but mostly I find DVDs 2nd hand at Dixons. I've gathered a library of over half a dozen. Here's the cover of one of the DVDs I have at home.

The 1st page of MySpace results were rubbish, I changed to searching MySpaceBlogs and had better luck. I found this neat page www.myspace.com/bluedemon1922 dedicated to Blue Demon who teamed up with El Santo & also made solo films. Its a popular site, 857 friends! There's cinema lobby cards, posters & film clips with funky music.

RSS Feeds

Set up a google feed reader today and added a subscription to DIGG Videos to it. It will be a handy way to find out which clips everyone's buzzing about. I also added feeds from Soviet Poster A Day and Shibuya 109 which I decided to also display in Widgets on my blog. Getting the Widget onto my blog took ages. Making the Widgets was easy and they loaded into Google Reader no probs getting them into blogger was harder. I was clicking on Get Blog list and getting an XML error but eventually I found if I clicked on the Layout Widget button it worked straight away.

Forgot to mention that I've commented on other folks blogs. I remember leaving comments on the blogs of Fiona's 23 Things & Tokyo Trash Baby, there could be others I cant remember. It's fun guessing who everyone is.

Image Generators - Bollywood Subtitles

Had a look at some image generator sites over the weekend.
I haven't spotted one I like yet but I found this groovy site that lets you replace the subtitles of old Bollywood film clips.
Found one with one of my favorite actors - Amitabh Bachchan and added my own subtitles.
Click on the link below
www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/play_uk.php?id=1865819