The Old Man and Fish Story

You know the one: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a life time.

How about this: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for his life time. Teach a man to read, he figures out how to fish, where the best place is to fish, how to cook the fish and how to write long stories about fishing! The big plus is, you don't get slimy teaching him how to bait the hook.

Wrapping up L & P with 10 Random Things

1. It's a good thing that February only has 28 days.

2. Leap day should not be added to February. Why make a bad month longer? Let's add it to June. In that way, each summer month would be 31 days in a Leap Year. Much better, no?

3. I will always prefer reading books to cleaning my house.

4. If it weren't for audio books, I'd never get any cleaning done at all.

5. I would really like a job that paid me to read more. Let me clarify. I do get paid to read reports and email and stuff like that. I would like to be paid to read novels.

6. With winter coming on, I wish we had valet parking at my branch. When I leave at 9 pm, I hate having to clean and defrost my windows.

7. Thank heaven for seat warmers!

8. I'd rather make my own vitamin D, thank you! Keep that sunscreen away from me.

9. Oh yes! I'd also like to be paid to travel.

10. Give me a good book, my passport, a ticket to a warm climate, and I'm out of here!!

The End of Learn and Play

For the most part, I have enjoyed Learn & Play. I've been introduced to some very useful tools (I especially like Wikis) as well as some fun sites. Through helping co-workers, I have definitely improved my own skills, as usually happens.

If CML should decide to have a similar intiative in the future, I think we have all learned that there is a need to allow more time for completion. After all, we know we're one of the busiest library systems around!

MOLDI books

I have downloaded MOLDI audio books to my laptop. Unfortunately, that isn't very convenient for listening purposes. I am looking forward to being able to load these books on my Ipod, since I spend a lot of time listening to books while exercising or driving.

Podcasting

I checked out Google Podcast directory and Podcast alley. While it appears that there is alot of podcasting going on, several of the podcasts I investigated were from 2007 and earlier. I did add one feed to my bloglines account, but I don't think I'll add any more.

As for the library, I suppose it might be kind of fun to promote events using podcasting. Using podcasts for that would give them a limited shelf life. Perhaps they could also be used for tutorials.

YouTube and MyTube

I looked at some of the political junk and decided it was all too depressing. So I looked for fun and found ...Corgis!!!

I can now add Corgi to my language expertise.

Tooling Around the CML toolbox

I was familiar with most of the tools in the toolbox but I had fun playing around with the ones I hadn't encountered before.

StumbleUpon was the most fun, although it might really be more fun to stumble upon the sites by myself. Of course, that would require much more time than I want to devote to the search.

I like that the content in Digg seemed to be refreshed quickly.

MAKE and TechCrunch would be favorites of mine if I were more techie inclined.

All in all, CML has collected a pretty interesting, useful and fun "tools" for the toolbox.