Here is a picture of my beautiful girl in the snow!

But so far this has all been pretty harmless I even had a go at the colour picker and montager which is quite clever one thing I did really like is this which took me back to my youth.

And then I manged to do a Worlde of my blog up to now:

Which I think is rather pretty! And I like the fact that it is pretty Now!

This is where I used to live in Glasgow

in a one bedroom flat with the kitchen in a cupboard (literally).

looks cold, but it is making me feel a bit homesick.

Well, that’s me, or least I think it’s me – because to be honest, I’m not quite sure who I am anymore. I am suffering an electronic identity crisis, I simply can’t keep track of who I am and I never know what the password is.

Take this morning, I have just employed 45minutes trying to log into Flickr.  Now, I already have a Flickr account, I even caught up with a long lost friend from the UK through Flickr (now living  in Sydney, with a wife and two girls, one called Rosa (a bit similar to my Rosie methinks)) and did a mini session all about Flickr for a group of Reference Librarians. But that was in November 2007.  That was the last time, I felt any need or desire for Flickring (it was a brief affair,  once the initial excitement of finding people and places I knew had waned ,the flame of passion died).

Now,  I have tried to be the same person to all electronic hosts (with one of two passwords too  – although I have needed to add a number at the end sometimes,  as words are not enough for some sites).  I am Babygrem at Flickr (just like WordPress etc.), so I tried all the password variants, and all the email variants (coz some sites seem to want this rather than your user name)  (this is very tricky, home or work email? this work email or work of 3 years ago? etc..). No luck – the “help” told me that my registered email address was ************@k*******.com  but this wasn’t really useful, I couldn’t think of any email account I have had in NZ (the last 7 years) that it could possibly be. So I sent off an email for help where you get a real person and I await their response.  Then it dawned on me that I wasn’t logging in to Flickr per se but Yahoo and I do have a Yahoo identity that I remember (and the password too!) . But it is not Babygrem. It is babgrem2000 an identity I created in 2000 (complete with typo)  in a fit of pique after being unable to log into my original yahoo Babygrem account.

So I tried it, and it worked and now I can access my Flickr account and even see all my uploaded pictures (um, one!).

Next task,  create my Picasa account – which goes through Google (since Google  works on your email address – I seem to have 2 (a home one and a work one – I don’t think I even realised I had one when I set up the second)).  But I manage to log in to Google so that I can create my Babygrem Picasa account. But wait, Babygrem has been taken (Who on Earth? Me? Possibly? When?)  Apparently I can be Babygrem27  or Babygrem53, oh Great!

Not only do I not know who I am, but I keep meeting ghosts of myself whose passwords I don’t know and whose password resets will be sent to email addresses I no longer access.

 I feel there should be some kind of deep meaning or motivational message to all this (like on the board outside the florist).  But you know what? There isn’t!

You spend your whole life just trying to work out who you are and when you finally know, you realise that someone else is already you.

So anyway – I though I would try this Poddy thing for myself. I have manged to add the Archers link to bloglines and it tells me that I have 10 episodes to download. But when I try to download anything it says:

 ! FILE TRANSFER BLOCKED

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/archers/archers_20090705-1920a.mp3 has been blocked in accordance with our Internet Usage Policy

Looks like I will have to try this at home (or maybe on the public PCs downstairs since our computer at home threw a wobbly last week and won’t work now!)   I wouldn’t want to contravene the council Internet Usage Policy now – Would I?

Well, this makes sense, it is Residual Sum of Squares (or Really Simple Statistics- easy peasy!)  But now RSS seems to mean Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication  (this bit changed on Wikipedia overnight – weird huh!) and it is anything but.

I added the RSS feed link for the new books at CCL  into my browser while at Massey (fully aware that I was using 1 public machine from about 500 – so that it was a bit pointless) But then I expected something to happen – but nothing did – just the stripe at the top disappeared. So I completely closed down the browser and then couldn’t find the link to the feed anywhere until I trawled through the help file and found that it was listed if I clicked on the little star on the left (right along with the favourites - so why didn’t I add it as a favourite in the first place?? and what is the difference? I notice I can’t do this in IE 6 anyway)

But more perseverance, I already had a bloglines and Google Reader account. The first I had created a couple of months ago on a course with Paul, so I decided to add to it. I have now got something called Chocolate and Zucchini and some news feeds from England and New Zealand and a Dilbert Cartoon Strip and umm, call me thick (but what am I supposed to do with them, exactly??).  When I have time and want to look at the news – I go to a news site (of either country), I have these marked as favourites in IE – I also now have them on my IGoogle page (which is not quite an RSS feed apparently (becuase it only shows 3 items at a time??)). I quite like IGoogle, and having the little linky things there, but it is a bit distracting – I can easily end up wasting 20mins through a tempting headline which invites me in for a cup of coffee and before I know it, I’m brushing the breakfast croissant crumbs off the duvet.

I tried to add everyone’s blog into bloglines,  (including blog idol – Moata’s) but just got the message  “No feeds were found. Please verify that the website publishes an RSS feed.”  But then I managed to add Claire’s Blog and it worked – so hurray – perhaps I am not a total imbecile!

PBwiki looks much more user friendly and you can seem to do more stuff!  So it would probably be my tool of choice (if I wanted to create a wiki – which given my last post – I think I need way more convincing of!) 

Please add some comments and convince me! I am feeling like a web 2.0 curmudgeon here, which is making me feel really, really old!

I realise that is has many flaws and is subject to mischievous hoaxes and misinformation and limitations and I kind of love it even more because of this.  It’s a bit like the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” – which “despite its many glaring (and occasionally fatal) inaccuracies, has outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper...”"

I can see that using a Wiki might be quite a good thing if you are working collaboratively with people who don’t share the the same network and are incapable of CCing in an email (or using reply all).  (Although, as an aside and disappointingly – as a learning tool for doing distance learning through several papers at Massey I have found Wikis to be more than useless. The only people who seem to add anything are:   the tutor with an initial welcome message expressing their delight at using “new” technologies to deliver their teaching  and looking forward to seeing how it goes,  2 or 3 “hellos” from other students, and about 3 items from me with maybe 1 response from someone else before the Wiki becomes a barren wasteland of neglect with tumbleweeds rolling across the plains.)

So for my discovery exercise, I took a look at the Library Success – wiki and thought, great - here is everything I ever wanted to know about the profession all in one place – what a fantastic idea!! Wikis are wonderful!  Then I took a look at the public PBWikis page and hmmmm, there are lots of libraries all with their own wikis, all providing information on Readers Advisory or Children’s services. And hmmm, I think there might be some duplication here. Everyone wants to contribute to a Wiki, but it seems like they all want to contribute to their own Wiki (and get others to join them) not add to existing ones.  Then I read Meredith Farkas piece, and her mention of the Wiki about the librarians 2005 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago and all the restaurant and accommodation reviews etc. I thought about the IT Consultant’s 2006 Annual Conference in Chicago’s Wiki, and the Govenment PA and Executive Officers 2007 Annual Conference and their Wiki,  and the American Medical Association Alliance’s conference, and the International Salvation Army conference, and even the XXVIth International Symposium on Cerebral Blood Flow and  Metabolism (950 delegates no less). And I wondered how many wikis were being written all with almost exactly the same information.

I ask myself – does the World need another Wiki?  Why does Wikipedia work? Because all the information is in one place. But what if there are lots of Wikis everywhere?…

But wait there is more… I already have an iGoogle page it looks like this:

And now I have a Netvibe page too (Except I don’t actually, as it didn’t send me my email verification link for some reason). But if I did it would look like this: