Thing #10: Good Reads wins

It was Abby who first introduced me to Shelfari and also Abby who told me about Good Reads just couple of months ago. (Abby is usually way ahead of the rest of us in terms of that sort of thing.) I have been distracted by much bigger life issues of late so I haven't been spending as much time there as I did initially, but I can say that so far, in my comparison of the two, Good Reads definitely wins. There are several things about the setup that appeal to me more.

One thing is I noticed right away is that it's faster than Shelfari, which is a big plus. At times it seemed to take an eternity adding books on Shelfari. It's also easier to do basic things like tag and classify your books and edit comments or shelves on Good Reads. I have had a lot more success finding the exact book with their search option because I get a bigger variety of results. I guess they have more search engines for finding books than Shelfari has, which is nice for people like me who have a lot of obscure or foreign-bought books. Call me anal, but I like to have the right edition of the book on my shelf. I noticed that there's a way to import your entire bookshelf from Shelfari to Good Reads, which would save me some time, but I haven't figured out how yet. Has anyone done it?

I have perused the GR explore option quite a bit. I love reading the reviews! Which is also probably why I have been too intimidated to write more than one tiny review. I, like Abby, have noticed that the caliber of review writing on Good Reads is pretty high. I wonder if these people have jobs? Maybe they have jobs as reviewers or write synopses of books for magazines and book covers? I used to be much better at that sort of thing, but I'm out of practice, and it never came very quickly. In any case, it's nice to read them--especially when they come from the Fontana group. I really love the fact that I can see what fellow Fontanites are reading and recommending.

I must also confess that I frequently get sucked into the Never-ending Book Quiz. I just pick up where I left off and the next thing I know an entire hour has passed. I wouldn't recommend going too far with it, though. I've noticed that the longer you follow the quiz the weirder the questions get. Some of them aren't even complete questions, just words or phrases with a question mark tagged on like : "Blue bunnies?" HUH?

Thing #9: the Escher Egg, and me in a museum

This was fun, too! I played around with several different image generators through flickr and dumpr. Kristina is right, this could get very addictive. I kept trying this and that picture, in this or that image generator. In the end it was hard to choose a favorite. I liked the museumr a lot. Though it feels a bit weird to imagine people in a museum looking at an enormous picture of me in my shrimp colored uber-turtleneck. This is a picture of me on my way to visit a monastery on the island of Île Saint-Honorat which is off the coast of Cannes. It has to be among the most beautiful places I've ever seen. : )


I also liked this world map with all the countries I've visited. I'm still lacking a trip to Asia!!

There and Back Again

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

And last, but not least, here is my M.C. Escher "Three Worlds" easter egg. I don't know why, but I really love those easter eggs. I made a lot of them...

Thing #8: Mashups

I found checking out different kinds of mashups to be a lot of fun! I saw quite a few interesting ones, but I only explored two in detail. First I played around with Blubbr where you can create comics from images or search for tags in their archives and see what others have been made. Check out these cute dogs.

But the one I really loved was a travel mashup called The Shady Old Lady’s Guide to London, where I learned that St. Bride’s of Fleet Street with its tiered spire (see the above right photo) was the inspiration for the first tiered wedding cake. Who knew? And while browsing the “medical” category I also learned about Martin Van Butchell, an “eccentric dentist” who put his dead embalmed wife on display at his place of business at 56 Mount St. in order to attract more customers:

When his wife Mary died on January 14 1775, he decided to have her embalmed and turn her into an attraction to draw more customers. His teacher of surgery and anatomy Dr. William Hunter and Dr. William Cruikshank agreed to do the job and injected the body with preservatives and color additives that gave a glow to the corpse's cheeks, replaced her eyes with glass eyes and dressed her in a fine lace gown. The body was then embedded in a layer of plaster of Paris in a glass-topped coffin.

When he remarried, his new wife wasnt fond of it, and it went to a museum where it was destroyed in a bombing raid in WW2.

I wish I could go back to London and do a Shady Old Lady tour!

Thing #7 : Flicker is fab

I have visited flickr numerous times to see my friends’ photos, but this is the first time I have ever actually taken the time to explore flickr in more depth and it completely sucked me in! There is some truly astounding photography to be found there. I love the search options available through explore, especially the interestingness and world map option.

I did two searches, one for seashells and one for pictures of Brazil. It was hard to find a really nice picture that I could also copy into my blog, but I did find this picture of an old shell by Thomieh. I love shells that are all beaten and worn like this one.

I also browsed Alexandre Tinoco’s photos. He is a Brazilian photographer living in Paris and has photos posted from his travels around the world, including these flawless pics taken in Minas Gerais, Brazil:
menina
fofoqueira

Thing #6 (Technorati=Feh!)

As lukewarm as I have been about google reader, in the end it appears to be more useful and cleaner to use than Technorati. It seemed to take me a long time to find what I was searching for through their page. And though I’ve been playing with it off and on over the last week, the whole set-up is still a little tedious to me.

Here are some discoveries:

The Seattle Public Library blog, Shelf Talk, which I discovered through Technorati, has a has a great piece about librarian authored/themed memoirs and fiction. So go release your inner librarian. I also found a fascinating entry there on random books being read on the local Seattle Buses.

For those of us who don’t get Facebook—an Idiots of Ants interpretation found via Library Garden.

And best of all... look out for the Library Ninja!
Because sometimes books are better.

Of Things (see below for Thing #5)

Apparently we are supposed to be referencing the number of the thing we are covering in the title of our blog entry in order to make it easier to determine what has been completed. This makes sense to me, but I have not been doing it. Therefore let it be known that the below entry "Fear of Change" is Thing #5.

Fear of Change

As a neophyte blogger it seems to take me sloth-like amounts of time to figure out how to do even the simplest things on this blog! Grrrr. But I am tweaking here and there and I have managed to add links to the blogs of some of my MCPL “peeps” and to share some interesting bits (including one about disgruntled employees pacified with free pizza!) via my google reader feeds.

Ahh, google reader.

I have only recently begun experimenting with google reader and rss feeds. And though in theory I can see the practicality of it, I haven’t been won over yet. Maybe I just fear change? Yes, I am sure it could save time, especially for people who have huge amounts of blogs to keep track of. And for those blogs that are only updated every 4 months, I can appreciate its usefulness. I know the disappointment that comes with checking a favorite blog/fotolog/flickr account to see what’s new, only to find that it’s the same post that was up a month ago. Otherwise, I think I prefer the old way. It could grow on me I suppose. I don't like the fact that I can't read/leave comments through the reader. I really enjoy interacting with the the actual pages themselves, so I usually end up just going there anyway if I am interested. In the end, what I've noticed is that it basically doesn't save me that much time. And if that's not the point, then what is?