The end is near

I can't believe how quickly the summer has flown by. All in all it's been a good semester. I've always liked the shorter term in the summer (although, fortunately our summer term isn't as short as a normal summer session - they can be a little intense). I feel like I've really learned a lot and definitely gained some valuable experience. I am looking forward to taking the entire second week of August off from work to hopefully get a few house-related projects taken care of. We were hoping to take an actual vacation this year, but it looks like a "stay-cation" is in order once again. Neither Derrick nor I will be in class at that time, so hopefully we'll be able to tackle some of the things that we have been neglecting thanks to work and school. That has been the biggest downside of school and work - we have this great old house that we really want (and in some instances, need) to fix up [hole in the dining room ceiling, I'm talkin' to you], but after work and school it feels like there isn't any time or energy, not to mention money, to actually do anything. I am relieved the end is in sight (even if it is only for a few weeks).

Quiz 2

Well, I'm glad that's out of the way. For some reason, even though this one was open-book, I thought it was harder than the first one. It was definitely more technical, and maybe that's the problem. I was going to do my links to my fragment tonight, but I think that's going to have to wait until tomorrow. I've done enough thinking for the day.

Computing fees

Am I the only one who is annoyed that we pay for computing fees, but we had to do all of the work in UNIX to set up our accounts to prepare them for our web pages? Not cool, Pitt. I have a freakin' degree in English Lit, not web development. Dr. Tomer even said, "the accounts creation program is faulty." I couldn't really hear the class discussion, so I'm not sure if that was the point of some of the conversations, but while I was suffering in the absence of coherent sound during the lecture, it hit me that the help desk should probably be a little more accommodating to those of us who need help. Just a thought...

Inline style assignment

I just uploaded my web page with the Dickens' excerpt. Wow - I feel such a huge sense of relief. That was seriously the hardest I have had to work on an assignment for as long as I can remember. I did find the W3Schools site super helpful, though, and I never could have finished the assignment without it. I now feel completely exhausted. I am not what you would call "looking forward" to the next assignment.

FastTrack Weekend

I'm so excited for FastTrack weekend. Since I didn't take classes last semester, it has been since October since I've been to Pittsburgh. I'm really looking forward to it, especially since I don't have any tests/midterms to take this time. I think it's going to just be a fun weekend. I seem to lose some steam at this point in the semester, so the on-campus visit couldn't come at a better time for me.

Koha was a piece of cake after I got past the initial challenge of figuring out where all I needed to navigate to complete all of the steps to add an item to my list. Glad to have that over with; now I have an authority control assignment to finish by tomorrow at midnight. I just went to brew a pot of swiss mocha coffee, and to my utter horror, we have apparently broken yet another coffee maker. It's a sad, sad day in the Cunningham household. Somehow Derrick got our old coffee pot to brew some though, so that's pretty great. Planning on a late evening tonight...

"No SIM installed"

We got our iPhones Thursday. They are very cool, however, mine arrived with one of the glitches (of course). From the time I turned on my phone, I have been getting a message that there is "No SIM installed." So, we tried simply rebooting the iPhone. Success! (for an hour). Then we went to the AT&T store Friday to see if they could help. The salesman took out the SIM card, cleaned it off, because he said it had a giant oily fingerprint on it. I was good for about a half hour, then the message appeared again. We returned to the store. They replaced the SIM card thinking maybe that would help. It did for about an hour. We called the store hoping that I could just get a replacement, but they can't do that, so they directed us to Apple's iPhone hotline. So we called Apple for support. Derrick spent about an hour on the phone with a very helpful person who is going to send us a new tray for the SIM card. So, essentially, after waiting a very long time to get a smart phone (I have had the 1st generation RAZR for over 5 years now), having spent $300 on said smart phone, and increasing our monthly cell phone bill by about double, I can't make or receive a call or send or receive a text to save my life. What an awesome deal! I'm not exactly what you would call a happy camper right now. We'll see what happens when I get my new tray....

Darn! No ePrints assignment

After what turned out to be a very hectic weekend, I just logged into Blackboard in order to start the ePrints assignment, and to my pleasant surprise, found out that the assignment has been waived due to some technical issues. Thank goodness! I can use the spare time to do the reading for this week. Yikes. I will likely go back and play with ePrints eventually just so I can gain the experience, but for once, it's nice to just get a break. Thanks, Dr. Tomer! You made my Monday!

iPhone 4 coming my way

I'm so excited - we just preordered our iPhone 4s today. Now that's a smart phone. That phone is smarter than I am. I can't wait till the 24th (or 25th) - it's sweet that I'll have it in time to go to Pittsburgh for FastTrack weekend. We were kicking around the idea of waiting until the new Droid Shadow came out, being big Google fans and all, but this phone is way too cool to not buy. I think I'm going to have to go on a trip just so I can call my husband and use FaceTime. Oh, and I'm gonna have so many HD videos of my gorgeous pug I can't even stand it.

Omeka

Well, I think I'm done with the Omeka assignment. I liked that one. I'll probably go back in tomorrow and tweak some stuff. I'm not sure if we have to indicate an item type or not, but that's a job for another day. It's midnight, and I need some sleep.

Quiz 1

Wow. That quiz was kinda tough. Some of the questions were cake, but there were a couple that I felt like I sort of had to wing it on. And part of #6 I seriously have never heard of. Did we talk about that? I think not. I guess I should just be thankful it's done.

Jing kinda rocks

I just embedded my Jing presentation on how to install and configure the Zotero add-on to Firefox. First of all, that was crazy liberating for some reason. I have never used anything like Jing before, and I am not exactly one for public speaking or giving presentations. Once I got past the idea that I had to speak and it was going to be online for everyone to hear, it was not that bad at all. I did a lot of looking at the Help menu on Jing before I started this project because I knew from some discussion board posts that sizing was an issue when one embeds it on one's blog, and Jing's Help feature had several ways to deal with it, and they all made perfect sense (again, I'm not a tech person, so that's huge!). I saw one solution that included editing the HTML code, and I was like, well, I might as well just go crazy with this tech stuff. It was super easy - all I had to do was reduce the size to 25% of the original 1680x1010, edit the code in four different places, and I was good to go. Assignment 3...CHECK! Now, back to studying for the quiz.

Installing Zotero

I hate RefWorks. Why can't it just cooperate and list the data source, like I've told it to do about 75 times now? Tomorrow's another day, right. I have 24 hours.

Well, I finally figured out the Scopus thing last week. It was just something dumb I missed in the video. The issue turned out to be that I didn't realize that you could click on the word "Scopus" in the database list. I thought I had to check the box beside it. Oh well. That project is nearly finished now. I'm looking forward to actually using that for a paper the next time I have to write one. I'm hoping the citation creator works well for me. I've had good luck using the citation creator in Windows 7, though, so I'm wondering if RefWorks will just be one extra step. I missed my second post last week, because we went camping for the weekend, and I meant to post Friday afternoon before we left, but I got caught up in making sure we had everything (and then some) that we needed for the weekend. If I would have had a smart phone, I would have been fine, because I actually had two bars of cell service, but no one else had any bars. I could have blogged from where we were camping. Oh well, I'll just have to try to squeeze in an extra post this week for penance. We are getting smart phones, soon though. It's just such a huge commitment with the cost of the data plan for two of us; it's hard to make that leap.

RefWorks - more like not really workin' for me

Despite having watched Dr. Tomer's tutorial on using RefWorks with the Scopus database for our first assignment like 5 times now, I simply cannot get to a search function in the Scopus database. I've been at it for well over an hour now, hoping to get my assignment started at a reasonable time, and once again technology is not working for me. I checked the discussion boards to see if anyone posted how to actually make this happen, but I haven't found any posts that solve the problem. I did find, however, posts from people who were having the same problem as me. I'd love to continue this fruitless pursuit, but I'm off to dinner and Quizzo. Wish me luck.

Is this class going to be the end of me?

So, last week I was so proud of myself for installing all of the requirements for "Getting Started:" Xmarks, Zotero, pittcat+ toolbar, etc., and today using my shiny new Firefox 3.6.3 browser I logged into Blackboard and attempted to watch the lecture from May 18th only to be prompted to install Silverlight. That really confused me, because I thought that once I had installed it that it would work in any browser (I mean clearly I've watched stuff on Blackboard using Silverlight before). Is it something that you just have to install with every new browser rather than just downloading it onto your computer? I was given two options: "Save" or "Cancel" and instructed to restart my browser. For obvious reasons, I clicked "Save," closed out of Firefox and then logged back into Blackboard in hopes of watching my lecture only to be served with the same message that I needed to install Silverlight. "I'll show you!" I thought, so I decided to bypass Firefox (just this one time) and logged in using IE8, which I have used previously to watch lectures. Well, guess what - IE8 was "Not Responding," so that was awesome, and I must have screamed some profanities or something, because my husband came running back the hall to the office to be of assistance. Lucky for me, he IS a techie and an applications developer by profession (bite me, Silverlight), and kindly instructed me that simply saving Silverlight, which -pardon my tangent- I erroneously referred to as an "application" (it's a web application framework, duh! Oh, and thanks Wikipedia for ending our argument and proving him right), isn't enough to actually make it work. Apparently, there's this little step called "Run" that Microsoft was so kindly keeping a secret from me, and it turns out that clicking "Run" is a fairly important step. I don't know where he found the window with the Run option; all I know is that I started this adventure at exactly 3 p.m. today, and it is now 53 minutes later, and I am finally getting ready to watch my lecture...

My first post

So, who knew that going to library school would entail mandatory blogging? This feels kinda weird, because I totally don't see myself as someone who would have a blog. I am not particularly tech-savvy (my degree is in English Literature, and I made it through high school and college without ever having to step foot in a computer class). In fact, I don't think I have ever even read a blog until about 15 minutes ago when I was researching other people's blogs to see what they looked like in preparation for this assignment. Having said that, I am sort of looking forward to this Information Technologies class. I think it will be good for me, and maybe it will even help me to embrace my inner computer nerd or something. I am sure that I am going to be learning a lot this summer, and I really hope that I can keep up with everything.