The Bowling Librarian

All about Mii

2008-05-28T15:55:00.000-07:00

Far be it from me to pass up another opportunity to self-deprecate. So, without further ado, I present to you my Mii. This Mii looks nothing like me. I suppose my face is better suited to Simpson's caricatures.

In the meantime, I have wasted time looking at this site of famous Miis http://www.famousmii.com/mii/. As for the identity of the Mii posted above, if you guessed, Kim Jong Il, you'd be correct.

Thing 10: Chatting with Skype and Meebo

2008-05-28T10:25:00.000-07:00

Skype and Meebo -- both are applications I have used before. Currently, I have Meebo on my computer and have used it as my primary chat application. I used it mostly for AIM, though I thought that our UCI accounts would be linked up with Meebo too.

I've also used Skype . . . for my annual baseball drafts. I've also seen cousins use Skype to talk to family back in the homeland of Vietnam. With international internet cafes, they use Skype and other software to save hundreds of dollars and to talk to family. Pretty neat.

Thing 9: Personalization with iGoogle

2008-05-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

I'm going out of order here (again). But that's the beauty of the online world, liberating individuals from the slavery of sequential order.

On to igoogle, which isn't really for me. The personalized boxes and the Japanese tea garden are okay, but I was most excited about the ability to add a Pac Man application to my igoogle. Other widgets I added were the weather channel, the LA Times, and a UCLA Bruins reader.

I also did a search on igoogle and found the perfect gift for me. I wonder how long it took to convince this man to model this hoodie.

Thing 7: Social Bookmarking and Folksonomies

2008-05-21T13:16:00.003-07:00

Yummmm. . . delicious: http://del.icio.us/jnovak001

So I created my own delicious account and have to say, I really like it. I think it's the application with firefox that won me over, for before, it seemed odd that you had to go to a site to access your bookmarks. Now it seems a part of your browser, even if it is online.

Learning outcomes. . . in keeping a theme, I bookmarked some videologs (vlogs) and blogs about food and cooking. I read about these last week in the LA Times, and used the Times own site to upload the article as a link (delicious icons are everywhere).

For me, the most useful part is not the tagging, but reading what others who bookmarked the same site have done. By following a serendipitous chain, I discovered those who have bookmarked LA food sites and other interesting restaurant reviews. It was interesting and I can see wasting many hours going through different links.

Folksonomies -- I suppose you can find related links and I like the generated suggested tags that delicious comes up with. However, I'm not yet convinced how useful these may be.

For libraries -- setting up bookmarks that one can import would be of great help to researchers. Also, the freedom to organize bookmarks on one's own can allow me or any librarian to mark sites that may not be suitable for our site.

Thing 6: Social Networks - Facebook & More

2008-05-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

I truly am on a roll. I have a facebook and have added and deleted applications like JSTOR and Antpac. Outside of humanizing a librarian, I don't see much utility for librarians in this virtual forum. With fun applications to install, I can't imagine many students willing to give up that real estate for a librarian chat box, especially since we are so easy to find on our own Web site. But then again, I never thought facebook would be appealing as it is before I signed up. One never knows.

Thing 4: Tagging Using Technorati

2008-05-15T12:14:00.000-07:00

So, I've done it. I Pinged and Technorati'd, and yet my site doesn't show up on the searches. Actually, I'm grateful for this, for I haven't said anything relevant over the past few months I've been blogging here. But I will now consider this Thing complete and move more towards the 10+ things I need to do.

Thing 5: RSS Feeds & Readers

2008-05-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm skipping thing 4 about Pinging. Why? Well, I've waited two hours and I can't wait anymore. My blog has yet to appear in technorati and its ilk, so I went ahead and tried out bloglines.

It looks to be a good service, especially for those blogs that update infrequently (like this one). I can see a professional use for this, especially for the literature blogs I'm interested (not so much the ALA ones, which usually email the same information).

Thing 3: Flickr

2008-05-09T10:59:00.000-07:00

They call it flickr, flickr, faster than lightning.

So I'm checking out the flickr and doing searches for librarians and bowling. To my surprise, the Claremont Colleges have a whole set from their SCELC bowling tournament. Here are the tags for this picture: scelc, scelcbowling, librarians, bowling, lotcc, and librariesoftheclaremontcolleges. Awesome is not a tag for this picture, but it should be.

As I suspected, the Claremont Colleges have a worthy library system.

Agony of Defeat

2008-01-28T19:17:00.000-08:00

This clip is great and shows why and how bowling makes great sports television. Just last week I was watching bowling with my buddy and commented that I never see Chris Barnes win on TV . . . sort of like Parker Bohn III in the 1990s when he was still married to Mary.

And then, there's yesterday, in the Tournament of Champions, one of the three Triple Crown tournaments, this happened to Barnesy. Thank goodness he has a lovely wife and children to console him. I give you the second half for that's when the emotional and psychological collapse begins.

Last Night's Bowling Scores

2007-12-13T14:44:00.000-08:00

Because you all care and I have a captive virtual audience:

Here are my bowling scores: 214-203-247 for a 664 series. That's a 221 average for last night. Not great, but not bad either.

In team news, we won 4 out of 4.

Last Night's Bowling Scores

2007-12-06T10:54:00.000-08:00

Because you all care and I have a captive virtual audience:

Here are my bowling scores: 267-233-223 for a 723 series. For those who can't divide by three at home, that's a 241 average last night. Booyakasha!

In team news, we won 4 out of 4.

SCELC Vendor Day Bowling Tournament

2007-12-04T09:19:00.000-08:00

What! Why did no one tell me about this tournament? Does the library world not want the services of perhaps the best bowler/information scientist west of the Atlantic?

Read more about this tournament here:

http://scelc.org/meetings/vendorday/2007/letsgobowling.html

Being held about an hour away, I feel I should attend the 2008 SCELC Vendor Day. The powers that be have got to recognize my bowling greatness. Don't make me demonstrate my information seeking bad behavior to discover that the vendors won last year. Just don't.

This is no idle threat. Fueled by righteousness and outrage caused by 8-10% annual increases for databases and a weak dollar, I can reclaim some (L)IS pride by taking home the SCELC trophy (engraved with my name of course).

As you can see, I'm working for you, information professional.

Thing 2: Blogging (Part 2), or It Came from the Blog Search

2007-11-29T20:51:00.000-08:00

Blog searching -- the assignment for this exercise was to use blog search engines to find blogs worthy enough to be linked to "The Bowling Librarian." I used the terms bowling, then horse racing and discovered the following.

1. Technorati

I thought this was the best search engine, allowing one to search by posts and by blog. There are a lot of posts out there, but the posts feature allowed me to find some blogs on my favorite topics. Searching was imprecise (despite the tons of search options), and I had to go through a lot of results to pick the wheat from the chaff, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I found -- e.g. Into the Bit.

2. Blogscope

Though it looks cool, I didn't find this one or the charts or graphs all that useful. And the hits I was getting didn't seem to be as relevant as the technorati search I did earlier.

3 Sphere
This news-related blog might be interesting for breaking news. It would've been interesting to use this during the Santiago Canyon fires, when everyone was searching for news and blogs first captured pictures and news of the events.

4. Blog.Ask.com
This site is okay . . . but perhaps I'm not using it for the right purposes. The feeds on the right are all things I've seen before. I didn't really discover anything new.

Last Night's Bowling Scores

2007-11-29T18:08:00.000-08:00

Because you all care and I have a captive virtual audience:

Here are my bowling scores: 277-223-267 for a 767 series. For those who can't divide by three at home, that's a 255 average last night. Booyakasha!

In team news, we won 3 out of 4.

A hybrid discovered, on Biographia Literaria

2007-11-28T10:43:00.000-08:00

This Samuel Coleridgesque librarian was found via google . . . and I'll have another post soon detailing my experience with search engines. But google seems to uncover more juicy blog entries than other search engines I've tried.

Anyway, back to the blogster, Lorna, a librarian in training who also happens to have fallen for bowling. Click here to read more about her bowling experiences and her friends' disdain for community bowling shoes.

As with all information professionals, I'm impressed with her wide-ranging knowledge of literature (Proust) and film (The Big Lebowski). And her comic story of "The Pin" marks her as a literary wit in the tradition of Dorothy Parker. If only she'd come across the pond and work in the U.S.

Pete Weber, Bowling Hero

2007-11-28T10:29:00.000-08:00

I bring you the man, Pete Weber, embedded into a blog entry. After bowling three 300 games myself (and countless 299 games, for I'm a choker), I know what pressure ol' Pete was going through on his way to an almost 300 game.

As for embedding youtube videos, it took me about 30 minutes or so. A google search suggested to use the "edit html" tab and then voila! -- video.

Turkey Bowling

2007-11-21T11:42:00.001-08:00

Okay, now I'm linking to Youtube. Let the good times roll.

Turkey bowling

Thing 2: Blogging (Part 1)

2007-11-19T14:15:00.000-08:00

I learned that it is very easy to create a blog -- no wonder there are so many of them out there! I also learned that it is difficult to place a diaeresis over a vowel; my solution was to cut and paste it from a Word document. I look forward to adding video in future blog posts. I do wonder how much space do I actually get for this blog, and am pleasantly surprised that so much is available for simply having a gmail account.

Pleased as punch with the trading card application. Not frustrated, as of yet. And the whole site is intuitive.

Genesis

2007-11-19T11:51:00.000-08:00

Nature abhors a vacuum, and I was shocked to discover that not one blog exists detailing the hybridization of librarians and bowlers. My niche blog rectifies this situation, thereby appeasing Nature.

The birth of this blog is the result of an official mandate. To read more about our 10 simple rules for dating my library blog, click on the following: http://ucilib10things.blogspot.com/

The rest of this blog will be a record of my learning curve in the 2.0 world, as well as detailing awesome bowling news of note. So as Tobias Fünke says, "Let the great experiment begin!"