Cat Twilight

I am not a Twilight fan...never read the books, never saw the movies, but I have to say, I came across this while working on my 2000 essay, and it was a fun little break from work : ) So for all of you Twilight fans out there, enjoy this little parody!

My Mind is in Fragments!

I (think) I just finished my fragment assignment for 2600. It took me almost 5 hours to get the whole thing done. Most of the time was just playing around with Kompozer and FileZilla in order to get something to appear on my personal website. Hopefully it's correct...I don't know if the margins are right, but I think it looks pretty dang good!

On the Fast Track

I had my one and only Fast Track class today: Storytelling, 8am. I've only been in school for 2 semesters, and last semester's Fast Track weekend wasn't so exciting. This one, however, was pretty cool. We each had to pick a story to tell from memory this weekend. The class was divided into 2 rooms and there were about 15 people in each room. I heard 14 different tales, and they were all unique and interesting. Most had some element of humor and it was a great stress reliever to laugh along with my classmates to some of the stories. It also made the nerves a little calmer when it was someone's turn to tell their story. One woman in our group told a heart-wrenching personal story about domestic abuse--many of us were practically in tears by the end of the story. It was so great though, to see how sharing a personal story such as the one this woman told, can aid in the healing process. So powerful!

After class, I went (along with many of my classmates) to the puppet show that was performed by 2 MLIS students in the SIS library. It was pretty good! The girls made some great voices for their characters, and the play (which they wrote themselves) was funny and well performed. I even got a free puppet kit, so now I can make my own puppet!

When the puppet show was over, a group of us--about 10 girls--went out to lunch. We ate a Lulu's Noodles, and it was so good. I love Thai food, and their Pad Thai isn't too bad. The girls I went to eat with are a pretty rowdy bunch, but it was amusing nonetheless. Then I had a hot hour ride home and more homework to look forward to.

I didn't sleep much last night either, so I am pretty beat. I couldn't fall asleep and then couldn't stay asleep, and all night I had dreams about storytelling! I wasn't too nervous to tell my story...I think I was more nervous that I wouldn't get the ending right...but I have been having trouble sleeping for some time now. I'm not sure if I'm just stressed out from school and work or if it's just that my sleep schedule has been really crazy the past few months. Whatever it is, I hope I get it figured out by August so I can rest up before another crazy semester starts!

And one last comment before I start working on some assignments...I went to the library in town today to find out if I could do a field placement in their children's library. I talked to this really nice old lady who works in the children's library, but she couldn't really tell me what I needed to know. She was so cute though, and talked to me for a long time about the library and was interested in the MLIS program at Pitt. I'm going to go back on Monday to talk with the library director. I hope they are able to give me a field placement! It would mean a couple less days traveling into Pittsburgh in the Spring, and would give me some public library experience before I (hopefully) get a job in the real world!

Straight from the Prince's Mouth

This blog post is fairly ridiculous.

Oh, Koha

Happy 4th of July everyone!!

I just finished my Koha assignment, and I have to say, (if I did the assignment correctly) it wasn't too bad! I ended up leaving and coming back to working on the assignment multiple times because of dinner, fireworks, Frisbee, etc. but in the end, it didn't take long and I actually had some fun looking for books to put into my list. My list was made up with books about the Yeti and his other mysterious cousins Bigfoot and Sasquatch. While I don't really believe in the Yeti, and this list is all in good fun, I am actually thinking about reading a few of the books on my list! During our month or so off in August, I am highly considering going to the library or perhaps (gasp!) purchasing some of the books on Amazon and filling my "lazy" summer days with some solid scholarly reading material!

(I'll edit this post later to include the titles which I plan on reading. I still need to peruse the reviews and summaries of the books a bit more.)

The Audacity!

In one of my other classes this semester, Storytelling to be exact, one of our assignments is to tell a 7-10 minute story to the class during Fast Track weekend. In order to prepare for the telling, one of our other assignments was to record ourselves (either using an audio program or a video program) and practice telling our story. Even though I have a web cam on my laptop, I have never used it and I'm still a bit technologically impaired (I'm hoping this improves greatly by the end of the semester!) so I decided to just do an audio recording for my "practice run" of telling my story. The program I used to record my story is called Audacity, and I used the newest version of the open source (I know what this means now!) software called Audacity 1.3.12 (Beta). It is a pretty neat program and for someone who is as "low tech" as I am, it was so easy to use! I am hoping that in the future I'll be able to play around with it a little bit and get to know it a little more. I could see myself using the program for some fun projects and maybe even for another class assignment, should the need arise. If anyone would like to check it out, click here.

Earliest Evidence of Gaming?

Being that I spent my undergraduate career studying archaeology and anthropology and also having tried my hand as an archaeologist, I found these articles quite interesting. I especially like the suggestion in the second article that cave paintings were an early form of video games. I can just see it now, cavemen calling our various instructions: "Make Thag ride giant sloth!", "Make Thag get shiny rock!" "Thag have much magic. Now Thag battle Cro!" And later, "Ugh, Thag feel he need close eyes for long time. Thag also have strange thing inside...feel like me want to talk loud at friends with good words!" Who knows...their storytelling skills and instructions were most likely much more sophisticated than I can imagine...but it is fun to think about!


You can check out the scientific article here. You can check out the Kotaku article here.