Most of my posts this semester have been about things I've experienced at my non-library job. Each semester I have been surprised to learn just how much of the stuff we cover in SLIS classes actually applies to the "real world" and not just libraries.

I've also realized that I love reading blogs but hate writing for them. I don't feel like I could keep it up or stick to a topic. My energy for posting and all-things-technology is certainly waning.

I am now more aware of my posting habits and those of others as well. In one of my other classes, we have to post our responses to the assigned reading each week, and then reply to classmates’ posts. In the gradebook, the instructor notes how well our “voice” came through that week. I think that’s an interesting way to think of a person’s internet presence.

I read message boards from time to time, like on Runnersworld.com, but rarely post. I’ve noticed that some people post daily, sometimes multiple times a day; their “voice” is coming through loud and clear. It makes me a little more conscious of how others might interpret my online "voice;" then I start to overthink things, and sometimes that prevents me from posting. It's something that I've become more comfortable with this semester, but I still waver a little bit.

I've taken a few technology-heavy classes in the past, so I really didn't think I would learn a lot of new material this semester. However, I did try something totally new for me: I finally broke down and bought a microphone/recorder for my computer (actually, for my iPod b/c it was cheapy and because I thought I might actually use it outside of class too). In other classes, I avoided audio projects and only worked with video because that's the kind of equipment I had. I narrated the screencasts my group put together for our training materials, and it was actually kind of fun--other than the fact that I hate hearing my own voice, but I got over it.

2 weeks left, everyone! hang in there!

So we had a scare at work on Tuesday this week. For months, my company has been talking about the process for moving all of our documents—personal and shared—from our C drives and LAN folders to our own SharePoint sites. I have a few LAN folders that I work in daily, along with a few other members of that team.
Now we’ve been told to “put our important documents in “migrate” folders and wait for further instruction"—(because they haven’t quite figured it out yet). Anyway, March 31 was a former cut-off date for this migration to happen. We’ve known for months now that the cut-off date has been pushed back several times, but I’ve been here long enough to know that I should probably back up my important stuff somewhere anyway. Too bad I didn’t do every folder…

Another part of our migration instructions were to only “clean up” the folders we were responsible for. A co-worker and I went through the 3 folders we use for our job a long time ago. However, our folders are quite a ways down the folder structure inside bigger folders, and exactly what I feared would happen sure did—someone moved our folder because they didn’t know what it was. After a few phone calls to the tech people to try to recover it and doing a little digging ourselves, we found the folders that we work out of EVERY DAY in a new folder called “(compound#) nonspecific docs.” Ok, they may not have been “specific” to whoever decided to move them, but they were specific to other people.
When you have many people working with files in an electronic environment, version control and document storage can be big problems.

Last weekend I spent a long weekend in Kentucky with my family. I should have known I would have some technology issues...

1. cell phone
We stayed at a cottage on a lake not too far from Louisville, but still in a pretty rural area. Cell phone service was nearly nonexistent. I had no service inside the cottage and had to walk up and down the road in order to find a spot where I got a signal so I could check my voicemail. On Saturday I planned to drive over to Lexington to visit my college roommate, and I needed to call her to find out what time she'd be ready for us to come over. I found a spot in the road right in front of the cottage where I could get a signal and make a call. I left my friend K a message and went back into the house. A few minutes later my phone beeped that I had a message (although it didn't ring). I went back outside but couldn't get a signal. After about 10 min., I gave up on my cell and went back in to use the land-line to get my message. I found that I couldn't charge long-distance calls to the cottage and I had to use a phone card in order to use the phone. Luckily, I've had a prepaid phone card kicking around in a pocket in my dayplanner since, oh, 1999. So that was a bit of a hassle.

2. online class rant
I was the 'discussion leader' in my online class this past week. This meant I had to find an extra article for the group to read and post in on Oncourse by Tuesday night, post my response to the regularly assigned readings by Thursday night, read and respond to classmates' posts (and "keep the discussion going") by Saturday night, and post a summary of the week's discussion by Sunday night. I am really glad this is my last online class--while it has been convenient to get credits out of the way without having to spend another night a week on campus, it seems that the workload is so much worse--and I really don't like being on such a rigid schedule, especially since I had NO internet access on Sunday to post my summary (see below). I think I just resent having to be "connected" at all times. 5 weeks left...

3. car trouble=Sarah doesn't finish her homework
My boyfriend's Jeep overheated on the way home today--the thermostat (?) was stuck open and the car wouldn't cool down. We had to wait for his dad to get a trailer and drive down to pick us up and drive s-l-o-w-l-y back up I-65 towing the jeep. Not. Fun. So, we didn't get home until very late and I just went straight to bed. I thought I would just post my summary Monday morning, but I was busy at work. Oops!

I've also been crazy-busy at work. Last week I went to a training session to learn more about the Sharepoint system we're going to be using exclusively at the end of June. I also met with the women who are in my same role in the other therapeutic areas in the company to discuss how we can do our jobs more efficiently...that was a trip. I'll share more about that in another post...

Ugh…my energy for blogging is seriously waning at this point in the semester. I do have some thoughts about blogging in general that I suppose I could share here.

Over “break” (ha) I did read two teen books with blogging as a general theme. Working with children/teens/schools is at the very bottom of my list of library jobs I would consider after graduation, so I’m not familiar with lit. for those age groups. Let me tell you, right now I’m not too impressed.
Issue #1: In Grace Notes, Grace has a part-time job at the local grocery store to earn money to pay for the server where her blog is housed, and her “genius” junior-high stepsister set up and maintains the blog for her. The book was published in 2006—does the author really believe that kids wouldn’t have discovered applications like Blogger that are FREE and relatively EASY (no genius stepsisters required)?
Issue #2: In The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriguez, Raisin starts a blog and gives the address to two friends from home after she moves across the country. She debates whether or not to let her friends make comments on her entries, because it is her “personal space.” So, she wants her friends to read her entries but not give her feedback and support. Eventually she decides she would like her friends to comment; isn’t that the point of a blog: you share your views and open them up for debate?

In both books, the girls use their blogs as an outlet to complain about the other kids at school and are sort of oblivious to the fact that blogs are public; inevitably, the wrong kids find their blogs and turn their lives upside down.
The fact that I randomly picked 2 books off the shelf that dealt with the same theme makes me realize that kids really don’t understand that whatever they post on the internet is most like public information. Maybe this type of book will help kids understand there may be consequences when they post personal info on the Internet? To its credit, in the back of Grace Notes, there is a page with “Internet Safety Tips.”

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At the end of May, my boyfriend M will begin hiking the Appalachian Trail, heading south from Maine to Georgia. It should take about 5-6 months for him to hike the 2175 mile trail. A few years ago, a woman from my hometown hiked the AT and kept a blog along the way; the local newspaper linked to it and even included some excerpts so people could follow her journey. I suggested that M create a blog before he leaves, and then he could update all of us at home when he stopped in towns to resupply. M thought that was a great idea—except he wants to email me what he’s doing and then I can post it—he wants someone to “edit” his posts and he says he won’t have time for that while he’s out there.
To me, the point of a personal blog is that the content is raw, unpolished, and very real. If I “clean up” what he emails to me and post it on his blog for him, that’s kind of defeating the purpose of blogging about his AT adventure.

Wow, I thought last week was busy. This week has been terrible. In honor of my terrible week, and since I can't get my thoughts together to do one coherent post on a single topic, I'm going to do a bulleted list of technology deep thoughts:

• If I had planned better, I would have taken a half day at work today, driven up to my parents' house (where I'm spending the weekend) and joined the South Bend class in VIC land, but planning is not always a strong point for me). Instead, I am NOT looking forward to my 2+ hour drive north after class tonight so I can be at my 8 am dental appointment tomorrow (see--planning is reeeeaally not my strong point, at least not recently).
  
• At work, we are getting rid of the LAN and moving all of our shared departmental files over to a SharePoint site. I hate this because I have to go through 3 drives and decide what we should keep and what we should delete. Most of these files are old versions of PowerPoint presentations and pdf copies of journal articles and book chapters used for reference. So far I've found 3-4 copies of the same articles, all labeled differently, in different folders, on 2 LAN drives. Yesterday I probably deleted about 500 MB of "duplicates." Talk about electronic waste.


• I hate microwaving oatmeal, but sometimes you do what you have to do to get out the door in time. This morning I discovered my microwave is broken, as in, did not cook my oatmeal AT ALL, which is gross. I dumped it, drove to work hungry, and here I sit eating my cold bagel that I did not want.


• I have a 3+ year old Samsung cell phone, Verizon service. I know they offer a 2-year update deal, but I'll refuse until my phone falls apart and is absolutely un-fixable: I love my phone. It is a tank. I've dropped it in on pavement; my cat batted it across the floor of our loft and it ended up sliding down the stairs; once I dropped it so hard on the wooden floor of my apartment that the battery went flying across the room, but I popped it back in and it worked just fine. My boyfriend has a different brand of phone, and it is a flimsy piece of crap. I think he's on his 3rd cell in 2 years. It probably weighs half what my phone does; it just feels too lightweight and fragile to be any good. They just don't make them like they used to...
  
• Man, I have been crazy-busy this morning at work--probably because I won't be back here until Wednesday. Right now I am listening to a podcast and looking up journal articles for 2 physicians. I wanted to listen to an audiobook from my company's library (since I've been on their website all morning). Here are some of the titles that turned up when I clicked the "Browse our titles! link:

1. How to think like Einstein [electronic resource] : simple ways to break the rules and discover your hidden genius

2. The power of a positive no [electronic resource] : how to say no and still get to yes

3. What got you here won't get you there [electronic resource] : [how successful people become even more successful]

Are you laughing yet? I sure am. I get a kick out of corporate culture. I think this attitude keeps me sane.

• On Sunday I picked up a few blog-related books to read over spring break (they are quick reads! I'm not a masochist!):

The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriguez (teen)
Ex-rating (also teen) and
No one cares what you had for lunch: 100 ideas for your blog

Book choices based solely on what the branch I worked at on Sunday had on the shelves at that time.

I think that's enough for now. Hope everyone enjoys a week off from classes next week!

Yesterday I received an automated email telling me that “Christina would like to connect with [me] on Goodreads.” I had to think: is this spam? (apparently not). Do I know "Christina?" (yes). Do I know what Goodreads is? (kind of...it's coming back to me now...).

I went to college with this person, so we’re friends in “real life.” We’re Facebook friends. I read her blog every once in a while since she’s doing some sort of Americorps project in Texas and I haven’t seen her for a year. Now we’re “friends” on Goodreads.com. Yet another online social network. I had forgotten all about Goodreads—a quick glance at my profile shows the last time I added books was in July of last year--probably because another friend sent an email "inviting" me to join, and I was compelled to fill out a half-assed profile and promptly forget about it.
I had to create a LibraryThing account last fall for a class, which I haven’t updated since I was required to do so. Pretty much the same thing as Goodreads--maybe each has a unique feature or two, but the idea is the same.

It made me wonder how many profiles and accounts I have floating around out there in the void, with various amounts of personal (or fake personal) information attached to them. That thought prompted me to type my name into Google (come on, you've done it too) to see what else I might have signed up for and forgotten about.

I wonder about the people who create new online social networks. Do they think can offer something that’s not already out there?

When can we say, “enough is enough?”

Monday night our wiki team held our initial meeting via Breeze. At this point, we haven’t heard from our client (we thought she was going to email us with a list of topics she wanted us to cover on the wiki) so I felt like we still had a lot of uncertainties re: the project.
I’m not new to web meetings—at work we use AT&T Webmeeting a few times a week to meet with telecommuters.

There were some points, thought, that I just didn’t get what someone was talking about. When you’re meeting in person and you don’t understand something, you can say “Wait a minute—what do you mean?” When you’re meeting via electronic communication, you have to 1. type your problem, 2. wait for that person to read your question, 3. let them think of how to better explain themselves, and 4. type a response. With written communication, something will always be lost—the person’s tone of voice, facial expression, etc. It’s just something you deal with when communicating this way.

While we were on Breeze for a little over an hour, I doubt that we would have needed that much time to go over what we did if we met in person.

It also reminds me of communication issues I’ve experienced at work due to the availability of technology. We use Microsoft Communicator (a more professional version of MSN Messenger) quite often—since most people have it set to sign in automatically when they log in to their computers, it’s a quick way to tell if someone is in the office yet, if they are away from their desk, or if they are available to talk. However, I think some people use it as a crutch.

One of my co-workers had an issue a few months ago when she was working on an informed consent form for a drug study and had questions about how to format the footer (I know, it kind of seems nit-picky, doesn’t it? It was an issue involving version control of several amendments, so it actually was a legit problem). She needed to talk to an associate in the Regulatory division. She called and left a voicemail for this person, even though her Communicator status was “online.” Not even a minute later, this person instant-messages my co-worker and proceeds to type out WHOLE PARAGRAPHS explaining the solution to her problem. Now, this is only my opinion, but I don’t think IM is very supportive of long strings of text—like paragraph-length text. It’s harder to read and comprehend, especially because, depending on the size of the window of the IM system, you might have to scroll down to read the entire message, take time to think about it, and then form your response. I think it’s much easier to read and respond to short messages.
I understand that there may be times when, for some reason, you can’t use the phone, but for complex questions, I think it's more effective to discuss the problem over the phone and then, if necessary, follow up with an email. In my co-worker’s case, the IM conversation did not solve the problem—it took several phone calls (when the other person eventually did pick up the phone) and emails. Meeting in person was an option, but not a good choice, since this other person works in another office complex about 30 min away.

Looking back over my last few entries, I probably seem like a big technology-hater. Not true. I just get irritated when certain applications are used inappropriately.