Reflecting on 27 Things

Now that we've completed the final lesson for the 27 Things Project, we were asked to reflect upon the experience. There are a few things I feel compelled to comment about.

• Sometimes the lessons sounded so easy, but when I arrived at the website to fulfill the commands of the 27 Things -- it wasn't quite as easy as it sounded. I found that I had to repeat several exercises several times in order to understand what was being asked of me. I think there was an assumption that it would be "intuitive" -- and sometimes it was. But for a beginner, there were challenges.
• Password Overload - Is it my google or my flickr, should I have used the same one for everything? Nearly every site wanted me to register, create an identity and unique password. Eventually, I was in the midst of an identity crisis. (But recovered by going to MySpace, where I found who I really was!)
• There was lots of fun stuff, and some cool stuff and then there was the way cool stuff. I plan to review the lessons now that I have more time, and will learn more about many of the things we were introduced to.
• I manage to impress folks with my profound knowledge of the internet. They think I'm so cool and tech-savvy. I chat with my friends and family via MySpace, send photo montages of my trips to friends, use tags on de.lic.ous and brag about all the books I'm reading by stacking them LibraryThing. I have a blog. Best of all, I have my very own SouthPark character.
• Would I do it again? Yes-sir-ee. (maybe we can develop a website with that word, something reassures people when they have to make a decision, yes.sir.ee.com, when you feel confused!)

It was fun to learn new things, and now my goal in life is to learn more new things. But it will require that I forget a few old things, so as of today, I am wiping the theme song from "Beverly Hillbillies" from my memory.

Dean Koontz Was Cursed!

I've thought for a long time that one of the best uses we could make of the web would be to connect our readers to authors. I found a series of podcasts by one of my favorite authors, Dean Koontz.

http://www.podcast.net/show/86121

He talks about his books and writing. The best program so far is his talk about his early career and how nearly every publisher he signed with went out of business. He calls it the "Koontz Curse". It's always great for new writers to learn about all the hurdles the NY Bestselling authors went through in their career.

A great way to promote our author events would be to put the podcast address on our webpage along with the information about the program. Even better would be a blog too that let the author interact with our patrons for a few days before an event.

YouTube

More Google

I visited Google Labs and immediately found the Notebook. This could really be helpful to me in my writing life. I have tons of notebooks (real ones) around my house that hold notes, webpage references, character sketches, etc. for my fiction writing. I could actually have on-line notebooks that store all the information, which would not only be easier to store (and free up shelf space at my house) but would be easy to access.
In theory -- but I'm not sure I've figured out exactly how the program works. I've tried to cut and paste into my notebook, and I can't make it happen. As with all of the things we've done so far, I can get just so far, and then probably because this stuff isn't intuitive to me, I struggle.
But, I don't give up.
I could also see that putting program notes for the library into a file might be helpful, but since I already do that in Word, I'm again not sure how much time it would save me. Also I rarely work on any different computers. But, if I did travel around and work from different sites -- this would be very useful.

I also really like the on-line word processing. Again, for my writing this would allow me to post things and then have my critique partner read them, make comments and never have to sit down in the cafe again to talk about the stories.
This could also be a "downside" of cyberspace. It's fun to sit down in a cafe and talk about books, writing and stories.

Google - My Way

This is my custom search engine, and when I finished I found that I did get to several websites I was very interested in knowing about. I love google, use it every day and in many different ways. I'm excited to discover there are even more things to do.

South Park Rocks!

I hate to confess how long it took me to figure this out, and this was the FUN exercise. I just couldn't get it to load. And now when I look at this image... I scare myself.