The Bookmobile See it NOW

One of my mom's friends has this fab movie on YouTube called The Bookmobile. I know I may be biased, but I think they did a great job. I think David should win an Oscar or something for his wonderful portrayal of a madman. Go here to see!

Mom speaks on a sad subject

Hi all! Lily's mom here. We had a tragedy in our house last night. Lily's little sister Karma had to be put to sleep. I got home and she was dragging her back legs in pain. We took Karma to the vet, but she was sinking fast so we made the decision to put her out of her misery. Karma was also a black cat I found in the parking lot about five years ago while I was a reporter for the Herald Newspaper. I had come back from taking pictures at a 4th of July parade in Garden Ridge (they have one every year) to find a black kitten hiding in the shade of the pot all the smokers used for their cigarette butts. It was about 98 degrees outside and she was hunkering down in the only bit of shade around. Karma was so skinny so I took her inside our office and fed her some of our office cats' (Miss Kitty) food. She curled up in my lap and started purring. Now I didn't want ANOTHER black cat (I already had Lily) but Karma melted my heart (and suckered me like all kittens do). So I took Karma home and she became a part of our family. Karma was a little more wild than the others. She hated being picked up, but liked to sit on laps. She would try to play with Lily by backing her into a corner and clawing at her. They never did get along. About two or three years after she came to us, Karma suddenly started peeing on everything. I think she was mad when we left the cats in care of our neighbor for a week to go to California. So Karma was banished to our back enclosed patio at night and outside during the day. She remained affectionate as ever and I spent many afternoons petting her while sitting in an old chair. I just have to be happy that I took her in and that we had a chance to love her.

Wiki's

I don't have time for your pathetic human wiki because I am much too busy on my own wiki's like Black Cats United. We plan ways to refute the claim that we are unlucky. I'd ask you to join, but you don't have enough fur. My mom also uses a wiki all the time for one of her committees. Wiki's are very useful for exchanging information kind of like the old school message board only better.
I really can't say enough about that Google presentation maker. How great you can access something like that if you can't afford a copy of Microsoft Office. Does Bill Gates know about this?!

Presentation with Google

I made this presentation. It's about my favorite subject.

Pirate Christmas?!

I knew my parents were crazy, but this is really too much. This year they are celebrating Pirate Christmas! Enough with the pirate stuff already. I mean, how many times can you watch Pirates of the Caribbean?! Apparently about 513 times.

Web/Library 2.0

Fancy psuedo-high tech name for old concept. New technology. Love it, hate it, face it new stuff isn't going away so you may as well embrace it......or don't. The car is still here, the telly is still here and so the computer is here to stay until we can plug in directly to our brains and control everything with our thoughts. Maybe not in our lifetimes (certainly not mine, being a cat) but our children or grandchildren. Although we are still waiting for that hovercar. I am not in favor of technology just for the sake of it. I am not going to use technology I don't need. My mom wouldn't have made a myspace for her branch had it not been for the simple reality that she could not update a page on the SAPL site. That is the real beauty of technology, you need a Web site to advertise something and voila! you can have one today. AND you can update it every hour if you wish with a few clicks. Mom can remember when people paid hundreds of dollars for Web site development and now it's free to anyone who can borrow a computer.
Here's one problem I see. Online is great for some things, but not everyone is online. Even my friend who works at MICROSOFT doesn't have a home computer! So as far as the library is concerned, I think we need a good Web presence, but we need to balance that with other forms of advertising to reach our audience. We also need to watch that we don't alienate anyone with our site by making everything too cool for older computers to deal with.
The library should embrace change and technology, but look at what kinds will really enhance our services like computers to download media onto ipods, mp3 and other media players in-house. Computer classes to teach patrons how to use our Web services like Ebsco etc. Even mini-classes on how to use our catalog to find items seems very useful to me. You'd need a real live person for these classes in case of questions but you could also do videos online to walk patrons through the catalog.
I do love technology and all the fun things it can do, but I also love technology for all the useful things it can do.

Trying to catch up

Look people, I'm a busy cat. I got food to eat, sisters to harrass and humans to love. I don't have time for superfluous stuff. Sadly my mom works at the busiest branch in town and doesn't have time for lots of things like tagging blogs or bookmarking with delicious. We only use the technology we actually need. I guess if you work at a really slow branch (yes, I'm talking to you Landa) or have A LOT of free time, you may find tools like delicious or technorati useful and may actually want to tag or label your posts. Also, technology I find unamusing (not hilarious) or difficult to use (re. flikr), I just won't go any further with it. Either give me something indispensible or make me laugh people!