feel the burn

the county has a program called HeartSmart that i started this week. for two weeks you get a free membership to gainesville health and fitness. you get 2 points everday you come to work out. you get 2 bonus points for extra activities, like group excercise classes, health lectures, and checking your blood pressure. i signed up on sunday and have worked out everday. oh i'm sore, but feeling great! i did street walkers on monday and wednesday from 8:30-9:30am (yes i got up that early, and no street walkers does not involve prostitution). i did yoga on tuesday morning at 8:15, the getting up early was yucky but the yoga felt great. i've also done 'the line' which is sets of weight machines for arms and legs, 30 minutes on the elliptical, and stretching excercises. today i went to the ktk wellness van (bonus points!) and had my blood pressure and cholestorel done. i'm on blood pressure meds that i'm always forgetting to take, but the number was scary and lets me know i must take my meds everday. my coworker told me to put my pill bottle on top of my toothpaste, that way when i brush my teeth each morning i'll take my pills then.

i'm also doing this online calorie counter with girls from work and its really helping me keep up with what i eat and how much i'm burning through exercise. its http://caloriecount.about.com/ and the best part is that it's free! my tennis shoes gave me a blister on monday, i got stuck in some muddy cement and they shrank, so i got new shoes last night. this morning was much more comfortable. i like this gym thing and feel good. i tend to get gunho with dieting and exercising and then slack off. hopefully that doesn't happen this time. i've got lots of family and friend that are supportive, which helps. i might join the gym when the program is over, but the money is the big issue. we'll see.

sniff, hack, achoo, waaaaa

so i was all looking forward to my three day weekend, when i started coughing on thursday. friday i went to the olustee festival in lake city with my sis, bro, and mom. they block off several streets in downtown lake city and have booths of crafts and jewelry and art and lots of yummy fair food. i had a sore throat all day, but otherwise felt fine. i had a corn dog and a crab fritter, which was really delicious. plus a blue rasberry slushie to cool my throat. it was a beautiful day and i got to see some people i grew up with and see their kids (some taller than me!) i got several pair of earrings and my mom bought tons of stuff. i went home and took a nap. the next day was bad.

it was valentine's day and i had baking to do to take goodies to work and i had made up little bags to take to my sisters and friends. that did not happen. i stayed in bed for the next four days. i ventured out once to see my sister on her bday, luckily the other sister who had a bday this weekend (yes two in a row) came to see me. i finally made it back to work today. i'm starting to not feel so hot, more drugs please!

Thing 7 - Generators are Sucking the Life from Me

I have persevered through 5 frustrating, agonizing, laughing at myself, hair pulling, feet stomping, silent cursing, air punching hours working on Thing 7. I am extremely excited that I finally got what I wanted, mostly. This is the mosaic representing the tools I've used during my time with 23 Things.

I went to BigHugeLabs.com first, saw the Mosaic Maker, and tried doing that. It didn't like any of my photos, so I tried The Generator Blog. I looked around there, tried Collage, but all the pics turned out fuzzy. Although, I did have fun doing my Mormon name and typing on an Absolut Vodka bottle. Image Chef had nothing that caught my eye. My friend did a cartoon of me on Toon Do about my frustrations with the computer (see http://crazycanuck-esj.blogspot.com/) so I didn't want to repeat. I decided to try Mosaic Maker again. After three hours I finally got results.

I made an account with them and with Flickr. I tried every option they give to upload photos. I uploaded all the photos I wanted into Flickr so they'd have a flickr url, no. I tried putting them all in a Flickr set, no. I tried tagging them all, no. Then I broke down and looked for all new photos on Flickr and marked the ones I wanted (not exactly what I wanted) as My Favs. Eureka!! A few pics might need explanation. I wanted NEFLIN's logo, but couldn't find that on Flickr, so I put NEFLIN into Flickr and got pics from a recent meeting. In one of the pics is my friend and NEFLIN people I've met. The girl trying to pull her hair out, is a little glimpse of what I've looked like while doing this Thing.

Even though I was frustrated for most of this, I did learn a lot about these programs and now know more about the things that are out there. I could see using this in advertising programs for the library, but I won't be trying that anytime soon. My knowledge of Web 2.0 has definitely risen, but with it so has my blood pressure. Where are those pills? On to the next Thing.

dumpster diving, you should try it

i tell you the adventures never end. wednesday after work i had to run the backpack i borrowed for my arizona trip back to my friend for her trip to disney. when i got home i decided to get the few cups and bags out of my car and put them in the dumpster. so i grapped my keys and the garbage and tossed them in the big green dumpster next to my apartment. yes, i tossed everything in my hands, keys and all. i've done weird things with my keys before, locking them in the car, locking them in the car with it still running, leaving them in the outside of my apartment door all night, putting them in the freezer, etc. i have key issues and i got it from my mom.

so luckily my apartment complex just said no more outside furniture so a nice sturdy wooden bench was next to the dumpster. i dragged it over and climbed up. i could see the stuff i threw in and figured my keys were under that. i got a flashlight from my car, that wasn't locked but my apartment was and my roommate was mia. i was able to reach the garbage i put in, moved it and saw my keys, but i couldn't reach them. i needed a hanger. i thought about asking my neighbor who is a library patron, but his car wasn't there. so i hauled myself over the dumpster edge and made sure to land on a big black bag. this knocked the keys down and wouldn't you know it rained the two days prior and there was lots of cold, gross, water in the bottom. and where do you think my keys fell? oh yeah. at this point my neighbor came home. i'm hoping he doesn't see me in the dumpster. luckily he is on the phone and doesn't notice me. i threw the flashlight on the ground and put my hand in the muck. i got the keys and threw them on the ground. now how to get out. i'm a big girl and my upper body strength is lacking. but the thought of being stuck in a dumpster was enought incentive to pull myself out of the stinking container.

i got the door opened, washed my hands, my keys, my flashlight, the doorknob and light switches i touched and changed my clothes. my roommate arrived home 10 minutes later, perfect timing. what i learned: the clicker on my keys still works, i do have some upper body strength, and put your keys in your pocket before you put things in a dumpster. plus i got a funny story out of it.

a - r - i - z - o - n - a, the place to be

So many things to post about. My trip to Arizona was wonderful. Getting up at 3am to catch my plane, not so much. I must thank my wonderful brother-in-law for driving us at 4am and for picking us up at midnight on Sunday. When you don't have a man of your own, its great to steal your sister's!

I went for my friend Julie's wedding, a former roommate, and was excited to meet her fiance. I was even more happy to find he is as wonderful as she said. I also got to hang with her family and they are soooo much fun! So many little kids and lots of baby holding. My friend Carrie and I went and it was our first flying trip together. We've done Tampa for a weekend twice, but flying is more stressful. It was good to know we are good traveling buddies. Although we started saying the same things by the end, definitely meant it was time to separate.

We stayed with Julie's cousin Elizabeth and she was so nice and accomadating. She gave up her room, made us breakfast, and took us to the best pizza place in the Valley. I really liked the area, I'm such a Florida girl and have a really hard time imaging living anywhere else, but I felt very comfortable in the Mesa/Tempe/Phoenix area we were at. Maybe the fact the the streets are straight, well marked and its easy to get around helped.

The trip home was long, oh so long. However, we had a movie on the first flight, "The Secret Life of Bees" which I enjoyed as much as the book. Then are layover in Atlanta was perfect to watch the second half of the Superbowl with strangers. I was one of the few Steelers fans, so I cheered quietly, but it was a great game. These distractions definitely helped make the trip not so horrible. I got home at 2am Monday morning, very exhausted, especially after those teeny tiny seats on Delta. Luckily I have no more trips until my annual pilgrimage to Alabama to see my friend Susan. I've gone every year for the last 8, sometime between May and August, except for the year she lost her house in a hurricane. Those are easy trips though, just a 5 hour drive away and fun, comfortable normal, hanging out time with Susan and her adorable son Michael.

Thing 6 - Mashups are What?

That's what I think of this mashup thing. The only thing that made some sense was "An example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source" from Wikepedia. Perhaps because my sister is trying buying a house and I've been doing the whole real estate, google maps thing. I don't really understand how some guy making a program that takes photos from flickr and spells stuff is a mashup. I guess because one source is taking something from another source to make something new. But you could just go to flickr and do it yourself, granted it would be more work. Maybe I do get it. By this guy making a program on his site, to take something from another site, he's made something new that makes my life easier. That is, if I ever use it.

Well in my trying to use this, I got a little frustrated. I didn't know how to get the HUH? into my blog. I tried copying the html and putting it straght into the compose box of a new post. That didn't work. I did it in the Edit Html box and it just pasted the goobly gunk that I'd copied. I was expecting it to just paste the letters HUH? The only reason I thought of copying the Html, since there weren't any easy insturctions on the Spell with Flickr, was because the few times I've done stuff to my MySpace page I had to do that. Anyway, I tried just copying and pasting the word HUH? and of course that didnt' work. Then I tried putting it in the Edit Html box again and clicked Compose. Ta-da! The HUH? appeared. I never have understood how to make a link or Html very well. I need to take a class.

I like sharing photos online, I think it would be fun to have pics from our programs online so people can see what they missed and try to make it next time. Unfortunately, we have to get permission from the people in the photo and have them sign a release form and its all just too much work. But I don't think this part is really about sharing, its about making something cool from pics you steal from somebody else. I guess I just don't really see the point.

Thing 4 - RSS is Cool!

So I just realized I hadn't posted about Thing 4. I did it and liked it, but must of run out of time and didn't do a post. So here it is! I have a friend who does Google Reader and love love loves it, so I picked that one. I got the blogs I follow on there and I went through the list of worldwide library blogs and added a few about young librarians, children's librarians, and utah librarians (checkin out what the Mormons are doing). Then went to the news. I did the local paper, and it gave options for which sections you'd like a feed from. I did local news, cause the rest is too depressing. Turns out that can be depressing too. Scanning the things it put on Reader, I discovered that a boy in my brother's high school was killed two nights before in a car accident. Very sad, but at least now I know and being informed is always good. Then I did Unshelved, cause sometimes its funny. Looking through the new ones put on Reader, they all deal with snow, which is fun since FL doesn't get any. Then I did LDS.com, my church website, so I can keep in the know. One of them had the option to add using Google Reader and the other two had me cut and paste the url into Reader's Add Subscription. It was super easy and now I don't wonder what RSS stands for. Wait, I think I've already forgotten. I know what it does, so I guess that's what counts. I don't really go to much else, just weather.com, floridastateparks.org, mapquest.com, my credit card websites, my bank website and facebook. I'm not sure how I can incorporate RSS into my job. I think RSS would be great on my library's website for the news section. Then people in our community who added it would know what's going on without having to visit our website. Wait, don't we want people visiting our website? Hmmm. I probably won't use it everyday, but I can see the value of such a tool.

Thing 5 - Flickr v Picasa

So I've use Flickr a tiny bit, because when one of our branches was being expanded the manager put photos of the progress on Flickr. It was okay. My way of sharing photos is Facebook. That is the main reason I use it. I like it for keeping up with friends, events, bdays, etc. too, but mostly its for sharing photos.

So I decided not to get a Flickr account, just to do Option A. I went to Flickr and looked around. The 7 days had nice, beautiful photos, but really I need personal significance to really enjoy a picture. I use Google Images a lot when I need a photo, usually of covers of books for the book lists I make. But now that I know I have another option for looking up photos in Flickr, I might use that too. I really like the way the Clemens library used Flickr for its displays. My library's public relations person reminded us that each branch has their own Flickr account if they choose to use it. However, since my branch has a blog, we've been doing pics there. This weekend I went to Arizona for a wedding (I'll blog about that next), so I looked up 'mesa temple' and got like 1000 results. Lots of them were by one guy MatthewPHX. He has a lot of editing tools and does cool things to the pics. But my fav was one by midiman. I liked it because it kinda looked like it did the day I went, I just had more sun.

The interesting thing is, that I just started using another photo sharing site. My dad, a computer guy, just gave me a new CPU and I lost my photo editing program, but luckily not the photos. So he told me to try Picasa, because he heard others say it was good. I finally got around to trying it two nights ago, because I wanted to edit some of the photos I took in Arizona. First I got the WebAlbums, which isn't what I wanted. I was talking out loud and my roommate came in and told me she uses Picasa all the time and that's not what it looks like, so she brought it up on her laptop. I realized I'd downloaded the WebAlbums and not just plain old Picasa (not old apparently, version 3). So I had the free program scan my computer for pictures and it uploaded all of them, and I'm talking thousands, in about 5 minutes. Then I started editing and oh my gosh you can do the coolest things!! I only had cropping, red eye and lightening on my other program, but there's like 50 options of things to do to these photos. The lighting wasn't good on the reception pictures becase the only lights on were white twinkle lights, but Picasa made the pictures wonderful, bright and clear. I'm in love! Also, I've been really worried about losing my digital photos, in case of a fire or my computer crashing. I have lots on Facebook, but I don't put them all there, so now I have them on Picasa and can access them from any computer. I feel safer and can't wait to hook up my Christmas present (color printer/scanner/fax/copier) so I can scan the old paper photos in those albums no one looks at (I love those Common Craft Show videos) and have them safe too. When we kept having those hurricanes in 2004, I kept all my albums in a laundry basket so I could just take them with me when a hurricane was on its way and I went to my parents bunker-like house. Now I needn't lug them around (well I won't when I get around to scanning them, hopefully I'll have it done before next hurricane season).