Thursday, February 28, 2008

Tattoos... How Touching!

From Stephen's Lighthouse... Tattoo Touch Screens
"Imagine! A touchscreen on your arm as a subcutaneous digital display powered by your own blood. It could be a video phone, a calculator, or more.

Just think - spam, phishing, and begging phone calls delivered directly to your body. Here's one idea I hope never comes to fruition. (Of course the technology that drives this could have excellent medical uses that do make a difference.) I don't even want to speculate about what the upgrade path looks like. Imagine aging gracefully but having the tattoo equivalent of a rotary dial phone permanently inked on your arm."
I'm with him. This is one scary, albeit obsessive, invention.

At the RSS Luau


Feed me!! Surfing along for RSS news feeds, my first stop was the Bloglines search tool. A bit of stumbling was involved, as the beginning of my search somehow yielded only feeds already existing on my own blog. Once I determined how to go about searching RSS feeds on the entire Internet, I was off and running!

After posting a couple of feeds from Hawaiian newspapers (go figure!), I took a walk along the beach to the next cabana: Topix.net. There I did a search for the word "retro", and lo and behold, one of my hits was that of yet another Hawaiian newspaper, the Star Bulletin. I loaded them into the old list of feeds. On Topix, I found that I was able to search phrases in quotes, as may be true of all other rss feed search tools. But with the hits I received from Topix, on some I never could locate the actual link to a feed on the site. And quite by accident, the Topix site automatically provided me with a feed just sitting there on the page for Scottsdale News. I gobbled that one up.
I liked searching Bloglines and Topix for rss feeds, but Syndic8 was a whole other story. Not a fan. Aesthetically unpleasant, not a big performer with results. Yucky in general. And finally, Technorati, yet another search tool for these links. Useful, easy to use. On that site I indulged myself and searched, located and posted a link to the blog of an American Idol fan. Go Daniel Archuleta!

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Feeding at the information trough

RSS feeds. Hmm. What can I say? I agree with the statement on the Learning 2.0 site that this is the most difficult of all of the sections. While working with my new Bloglines account, I was somehow under the mistaken impression that I'd be able to store all of my RSS feeds on my blog, thus having easy access to those feeds. But NO-O-O. Storing them on Bloglines is a bit more of a pain, since I can't see myself opening that on a regular basis. Oh, well.

It sounds pretty fun, though, the way that people have RSS feeds streaming right into their cell phones. Very cool.

If you're interested, here's a link to my bloglines account:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/USERNAME

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

A Different Sort of Surfboard... made of paper

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's time for a brief commercial interruption. Heck, we've gotta pay the rent!

My Little Grass Shack Library in Kealakekua, Hawaii

Yes, I'll bet you didn't even realize it... I have a little library down on the beach. I've got lots of great books, all pertaining to activities in Paradise. There's Hawaii by Michener, Body Surfing by Anita Shreve, How to Play the Hawaiian Ukulele, Hidden Hawaii, and so many more!

How did I catalog my library's collection? It was a snap with Library Thing. Here's a link to my little bookstore...

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/kfiske

Enjoy! Remember, in the Hawaiian (and japanese) tradition, please remove shoes upon entering the store. Mahalo for shopping with us.

Hang loose!!

Off to Paradise. AloHA!


Okay, Sherlock (my kitty)... we're off to the big breakers at Makaha!!!

Well, considering my kitty's forlorn plea in that last post, I thought I ought to get movin' on purchasing a ticket to the land of sunshine and waves... Honolulu International Airport!

I utilized the Airline Ticket Generator image generator site to accomplish this. And heck, this plane ticket to Paradise didn't cost me a cent!!

Catnap's over. Wake up, Daddy!!! It's time to "shoot the curl" at North Shore, Oahu!!



This little animation will be most understood by those of us whose lives are ruled by our kitties. :-) I originally spotted this on the blog of my friend, Stream of Consciousness.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

A Whole Lotta Shushing Goin' On - Right Here in River City

Ah, Marion and Harold Hill. What is there left to say about one of the best musical films of all time?

Vacationing on the shores of YouTube was such fun. And what a powerful search engine! Some of my favorite search terms were gumby [over 1500 hits], before they were famous [yielding some interesting surprises] and educational film [featuring some of those great old classroom films to which we all paid such close attention].

Which Way to the Beach?


For all you cats out there who might not have a GPS, here's the latest low tech offering. Who said technology has to be tiny and easy to use? This kitty knows that's not always the case. She lives with one of your coworkers at this great address in the blogosphere: http://upstream-streamoconsciousness.blogspot.com/

Maui Meow-ee


Alo-o-o-o-ha!!! Shall we check out (get it?) another one of our friends from work? Here's Sera de la Sera reading Michener's Hawaii.

It's so nice to relax on the beach with a good blog. And if you have no beach, no waves, and no cool breeze, do what she does... Light a "tropical breeze" scented candle, turn on your "crashing waves" ambient noise cd, and pull up a great blog. http://www.seradelasera.blogspot.com/

Monday, February 4, 2008

Troubled In Paradise


Nancy insisted that I create a trading card for her. And far be it from me to say no to Queen Librarian. So here she is!

I, of course, created this using the Flickr mashup Librarian Trading Card Maker. Fun! I tried out a couple of the other Flickr mashups, but they were finicky and not all of them ran properly. Here's a page with links to several of them http://www.webmonkey.com/06/08/index4a.html

Friday, February 1, 2008

Leilani and Uke


Leilani and Uke
Originally uploaded by thebarefootlibrarian
Here's my good friend Leilani doing what she loves best, playing "I'm going back to my little grass shack in Kealakekua Hawaii" on her uke... at Waikiki!

I'm Walkin' on Sunshine, Whoa-oh, and It Makes Me Feel Good!

In order to post these photos (of a few of my friends in Hawaii!), I read one of the tutorials, but then I hunted around flickr (and on Blogger) to figure out things a bit more myself. Doing things by trial and error sometimes helps me to better understand concepts, and it helps plant the steps into my brain. I didn't find the whole thing to be particularly intuitive, though. The procedure seemed unlike that of other applications that I'm used to. But now I'm glad I learned how to do this! And tags now make sense!!

Leo on Kauai


Leo on Kauai
Originally uploaded by thebarefootlibrarian
Here's Leo, feeling inspired at the beach. Mona's taking a break... she's out there surfing (but Leo's worried and keeping an eye on her!)