explodedlibrary.info

On Vox: I have magical powers over computers

 

   
   

In my job, I am frequently called over to investigate various sorts of computer glitches. Often it's do with our library automation software, or it might just be something with Word, Excel or Windows. I don't know how often it's happened that my very presence seems to fix the problem. The logical explanation would be that maybe the user wasn't doing something right beforehand but did when I showed up to investigate. Of course, it's much more fun to think that I have a special magnetic field which causes computers around me to work better.

   

» Read more on Vox

   

back blogging

It's been nice to have a break. It's been a real break - I haven't even been reading  all but a handful of blogs. I'm now looking forward to getting back into my regular blogging habit. The complication is that nothing stays the same, and resuming normal service cannot meant the same thing today that it meant a month ago.

I'm quite excited to see that librariesinteract.info is up and running. I've been curious about being involved in a group blog for some time, and am looking forward to contributing to this one. I've been thinking about how my contributions to  librariesinteract.info will be different from what I do here. I'm pretty sure that the explodedlibrary is a place where I'll discuss (sometimes rant about) things in more detail. I expect that in the group blog, I'll be announcing things more succinctly and with a little more objectivity - or least less bias. This also means that I'll have somewhere to palm off my collection of Australian library-related blogs.

Another difference is that I'm still quite happily experimenting with Vox - sorry, I'm out of invites right now, but I'm sure that will change. It's likely that I'll be doing most of my more personal blogging in there, which includes my photos and books that I've read. This explodedlibrary blog will refocus slightly to be both more practical (refining information that's useful for me in my work) and theoretical (pondering ideas that I'm interested in).

Breaking news and being an earlyish adopter of tech toys is not really my thing, but I do have a little of this tonight. I've been mucking around with some of  the widgets I can use with TypePad. One of the more interesting ones is the Rollyo widget which is current near the top of my left sidebar. It allows you to search the Australian library blogosphere. Use the drop down menu to access the custom search, ozliblog search, which searches this blog and most of the other more active Australian library blogs. It still needs a bit of tweaking, I set up the current configuration in less than five minutes. It will be helpful to me if no one else, because it will help me refind old posts when I only have the vauguest idea of what I had written.

I'm also trying the category cloud, which I like so far and will probably keep. There's also the opinmind widget, which shows little quotes from this blog. I wasn't sure if it's more interesting or annoying, so I'm testing it here.