A reflection on the week

Maybe a nice hot cup of something is called for as I muse.........




Had scheduled tete a tete with son vis a vis twitter.  Maybe I should be studying French instead, n'est-ce pas?   I am now clear in my mind what it is all about and am even clearer that it is not for me.  Also had not been aware that you could set privacy rules as to who you  allow to follow you.  My request to son was pending for a few days, and had to assure him that I had no intention of following him in real life - Stalker Mother strides the Earth.  Still, interesting to know that you can do that.

Also had a chat with LinkedIn user.  Can see that some people will benefit from this but there are also lots of other professional fora and lists.  Again, not for me.

Facebook - yes - you are my friend. You make it easy to keep in touch with family spread over the country and check that they are OK. I can see photos of them and send them messages quickly and easily which I know they will pick up within an hour or two. I know how to set the privacy settings and how to block people.  If only I could prevent some of my Friends from drivelling on about nothing most of the time, life would be sweet!

Thing 12

LinkedIn.  Five minutes was enough.  Another Thing that is just not going to happen in my world.  Sorry to all those who find it useful, and I would dearly love to know just how useful it has been for those on it.  Really and truly - please get in touch. But it does not rock my world and I can't help thinking it smacks of desperation.  I can fully understand small independent companies or free lance people using this for contacts - completely.  For them, it is a brilliant idea and necessary - I do see that.  But for those already employed in large corporations, the only message I am getting is "Look at me, I need another job.  Please give it to me because applying through the usual routes is not working."  I am sure this is unfair, but the purpose of this job is to reflect on our thoughts as we use these Things, and I am afraid that those are my thoughts.  I am happy in my job and do not feel the need to broadcast my status to the world, so will not be signing up.
My chocolate of choice here may appear strange as I do love Easter Eggs, but only those with yummy chocolates inside them, otherwise what is the point - it is just overpriced chocolate.  These are all hollow, enough said.

Thing 11

I have been a Facebook user for a long time now.  There, I have said it.  It has been roughly 6 years.  In that time I have enjoyed keeping in touch with my scattered family and keeping up with old friends.  I have spent time searching for old school friends and marvelled at how the intervening years have transformed them.  I have been privileged to allow to see my children's post ('Friend') and also my nephews.  I have even been added as a Friend by my daughter's best friends so I can keep an eye on things at a distance and enjoy their banter.  I have played games on Facebook and owned farms.  It has been a real pleasure, and for that I award them my highest accolade of salted caramel chocolate, who cares what make - they are all so damned good



HOWEVER.  For me, and certainly for many young people - it is a 'social network' - a way to keep up with friends.  I do not want to look at the Library site when I am on Facebook, and nor do many others.  Sorry, but it is true - you would go to the website for that surely.  Similarly, I object to Tesco popping into my feed all the time just because I entered a competition.  Why do I want to know what Tesco is doing?  For heavens' sake, these large corporate beings have web sites, they are not my friends.  It feels like everyone is jumping on the bandwagon, whether it is appropriate or not, it is deemed to be 'cool'.

Another problem is that if you go to your 'Friend's' website - you enter in on their timeline - a complete patchwork scrapbook of unrelated bits everywhere which I do find annoying - I tend to stick to looking at the Feed only on my page.  So when I dutifully visit our Library page, and others - it is just a confusing mish mash of info and rubbish posted by recruitment agencies, current students complaining about the heating and old students reminiscing. The information is much much clearer on the official website.  I did prefer Southampton's page because of the lovely large snow picture, but is this a good enough reason to look at it?  Not for me that is certain, but we cannot all be the same.

A day late, but a very appropriate email for my site from Credo:

http://corp.credoreference.com/


Three Reasons Our Greenwood Love and Courtship Collection Beats a Box of Chocolates on the Reference Desk for Valentine's Day

1. Users can't cite a Ferrero Rocher on their history term paper. They can cite the six interdisciplinary works published by Greenwood that are included in this collection. 

2. This collection won't give your users a toothache. These titles cover human love, courtship and many other "sweet" topics in a variety of contexts from the Ancient World up through the 21st century but won't prompt a visit to the dentist.   

3. Dark chocolate truffles won't connect your users to your library's other subscription resources. Credo's combination of authoritative content with innovative, customisable technology links users of this collection through to all of your library's relevant resources. 

 Though I think I am still leaning towards the chocolate option to be honest.

Thing 10

Twitter.  Was really not looking forward to this.  I have never seen the point of twitter and felt very strongly that I did not want to use it.  However, it would be good to know if my experience justified that feeling, so log in I did.  It felt like I was pressing the Destruct button and I was betraying all my instincts, which was to scream and run.  I expected this:



which to my mind is some of the most boring chocolate in the world.  No names.  I expect I am in enough trouble as it is.
However, after successfully registering and trying to think of people I wanted to "follow"  (nobody), I feel I am really struggling to comprehend what is going on.  I thought I was doing it right, but could not see my post on the feed and did not find Twitter Help much help either.  Obviously my difficulty is at such a basic level that even an idiot would not expect to seek help with it.  After an hour of feeling I was drowning in mud, and still unable to get my posts to show on the sot23 page, I gave up, went home and doodled a meeting with my son who is a twitterer of long standing.  Oh, how I love thee, Doodle - you  are so easy to use and so useful!
I feel a one to one to iron out my inadequacies is called for.  The harmless looking chocolate pieces had become distorted in my fractured mind:



Each twitter from another user taunting me with their ease and confidence.  And yes - boring me too (Sot23 excepted of course!)

I battled again this afternoon on the Enquiry Desk, and actually glimmers of light are beginning to come through, but am still looking forward to my one to one. Yes, dear Enquirer, that was indeed me with the hunched shoulders and haunted look.  I was right.  I shall never twitter again after this week.  And Hugh Jackman never replied to me.

Actually it is a very different experience at home, I realise over the weekend.  My default browser here is Mozilla and I very rarely have any problems with it at all.  It also obligingly updates itself every now and then, improving my flash player and speed of access considerably.  However, if I log on to Internet Explorer, I have to wait for ages, annoying messages about things appear which never go away, and the flash player crashes after a few minutes.  So I avoid IE like the plague at home.  The difference is that our version of Mozilla at home is up to date and supported, and I miss that at work.

Thing 9

Browsers.....At this point I have to confess to being a very shallow person and that, like my choice of car, it all comes down to colour and appearance.  For years I was a fan of Netscape, despite the cruel jibes of my colleagues, and I continued with it until it fell over and died.  Why?  Because the logo was my favourite colour - a sort of eau-de-nil.  I was never a huge fan of Internet Explorer - a blue e - how boring is that?!  But then I was introduced to Mr Mozilla and the love affair started - the bold orange and swirly blue planet - you roped me in hook, line and sinker, despite the same cruel colleague (now left) who taunted me for my pronunciation every time I spoke his name.  I vowed never to desert Mozilla, but fate had a cruel trick up it's sleeve.  First it started with My View when it refused my log in.  It turns out that My View does not like Mozilla and refuses to play ball.  This happened with more and more applications - "Yes - I am afraid if you are using Mozilla we have had problems....." and in the end I turned to that blue e in desperation.  But I was not happy, oh no.  I now have a new love and he is called Google Chrome - that bright interesting swirling circle of fun.  Although I do occasionally get things that refuse to work on Chrome and have to go back with my tail between my legs to IE, which unfortunately does appear to be the most robust of them all, certainly for the things I want to do.  But that blue e has to go.  I choose my browser on its appearance first and secondly its ability to do the job.  As I said, I am very shallow. Even as I write this on Chrome, I am getting warnings that an error is occurring.  This would not happen on IE, darn it.

Thing 8

Grrrrrrrrrr- frustration for the first time.  Not so fun now.  Tried following the link to install Doodle by looking at sheet of instructions which contained a link to Uni of Warwick instructions?  Don't know how up to date these were or if we were meant to look at them, but that is where the instructions led.  None of the pictures or instructions remotely fitted what I was looking at - then noticed it was to install on iGoogle not Netvibes which would have been more logical.  Asked for help and help was promised but never arrived.  Wasted an hour, then found more instructions to install on Netvibes instead.  Lost the will to live.  Went home.  Came back this morning and after 20 minutes of trying to log into Netvibes (I now have a serious memory issue with all my new email addresses and passwords), finally manage to do it, though it seemed longwinded.  And why is it called a 'widget'?  Is this in the OED - why not just say it is a link?  Quite cross now and snarly, but maybe it is because I have not had any chocolate all week.




It might be twisted, or it may be me, but I still love you Creme Egg, and I love Doodle too.

Thing 7 

I think today that the novelty of trying out new things is beginning to wear a little thin.  I have now so many log ins, passwords, tabs open that I yearn to bang my head on the desk.  It started off reasonably well.  I overcame the torpor that descended with the start of a new working week, and tried out Doodle - scheduling a knitting meeting with fellow knitters.  I was actually amazed how quick and simple this was to do, and how effective.  A couple of days ago, I had tried to set up a social gathering with 5 other people outside the University, and this would have made it amazingly easy and less time consuming - going backwards and forwards with emails.  So hats off to Doodle - short, sweet and could prove to be very useful indeed, like this little beauty - a couple of bites of loveliness.......