Final ruminations

I feel the urge to offer some final thoughts on the CPL 2.0 technologies assignment to provide a sense of closure for myself.

For one thing, this exercise gave me the motivation, structure and deadlines I required to overcome the procrastination that plagued my good intentions to embark on such explorations myself. And just as promised in the CPL 2.0 blog header, I certainly do feel more "tech-savvy and web-smart." I can see how many of these technologies are useful tools to recommend to library customers, and to utilize in order to get the library's message out there in less traditional ways.

I was already using some of these tools before this assignment began. But, the most exciting discovery for me is blogging! I love having a venue to write down my musings for anyone who cares to read them. And I think I might continue doing just that, on random topics of my own choosing. So check back here - you never know what I might be rambling on about!

I've thoroughly enjoyed following the journeys my colleagues have been on. Everyone had such different approaches to the exercise, and unique writing styles. I feel I know you all just a smidge better than I did before March 15, 2010.

I've come to a few conclusions about the role of technology in my life. In selective, controlled doses it can enrich my relationships, help me connect in a variety of ways with more people more often. It can provide access to a "wealth of information and ideas" - not unlike the library!

But technology can easily overwhelm me and consume my time in all sorts of unproductive ways. Part way through the exercise, I started feeling the weight of all the possibilities threatening to pull me under. More is not always better! I will intentionally remain a techno-peasant in certain areas, so as to preserve my sanity.

Now for the heavy stuff...

I'm concerned that the way we are inundated with such a plethora of information and entertainment options may distract us from what is really going on in the world around us. Maybe we think we're more closely in tune with things because we're following newsfeeds and friends on a minute-by-minute basis. But maybe we're so busy Facebooking, tweeting, and LibraryThing-ing, that we're not really paying attention to important issues in our families, our communities, our workplaces, our world. Just something to think about...

Bitter about Twitter

Twitter was the technology that I thought I was the most curious about at the beginning of this assignment. Turns out, I was wrong. Maybe it's CPL 2.0 blogging fatigue setting in. But I'm not curious enough to try to dissect the anatomy of a tweet. I'm not interested in acquiring a new vocabulary of hashtags, retweets and hovercards.

"Twitter asks “what’s happening” and makes the answer spread across the globe to millions, immediately" - according to the website.

I understand there are situations where this is fun, handy, maybe on rare occasions a necessity. But as a rule, I don't need to know the instant that Al and Tipper Gore have decided to separate. I can wait until I watch the "news" to find out about important, earth-shattering tidbits like that.

"Twitter is a rich source of instant information." - advertised on the website

Instant information = unreliable, gossip, not the full story. Reading tweets on Twitter is like getting your news from reading only the headlines in a newspaper or tabloid - it doesn't give you any context or background. So while I may have more information coming at me, I don't have more knowledge about what's going on in the world. I have the illusion that I'm well-informed, well-connected. Don't any of us have the time and patience, the desire to look beyond a 140-character micro-blog to get the whole story?

"Friends and industry peers you know. Celebrities you watch. Businesses you frequent. Find them all on Twitter." - from the website

Industry peers and businesses = advertising, doesn't it? Why would I voluntarily sign up for more of that? And celebrities! Why would I value Ashton Kutcher's opinion about something any more than I'd value the opinion of a complete stranger? I am unavoidably inundated with advertising and celebrity gossip in so many other places, I can't fathom why anyone would want more.

Surprise, surprise - I'm giving Twitter two thumbs down.

I've got just the thing for you - LibraryThing

"Library what?" my husband asked, thinking I'd forgotten the complete title.

"Thing. LibraryThing. That's actually what it's called," I said, trying to explain that I wasn't substituting "thing" for the real word that I'd forgotten.

I know I didn't have to, but I couldn't resist signing up for an account. Not that I needed yet another place to keep track of the books I read. I already use at least two other social networking sites centered around books, and I still haven't been able to relinquish my hand written Book Lovers Journal that I keep on the shelf by my bed.

And there's the rub. The question isn't whether or not such sites are useful - the answer to that is obvious to any bibliophile! The question is which site or method for cataloguing my literary conquests is best - most complete, easy to use, fun.

I use the Visual Bookshelf application to display the books I read on Facebook, although as FB has modified over time, I've become increasingly disillusioned with it. I was forced to turn off the "publish" feature because whenever I finished reading a book, about 4 notices to that effect would be posted to my friends news feeds. Now I know my friends are all incredibly interested in my literary life, but I felt that was slight overkill!

A few weeks ago I created an account using GoodReads. And of course, a few days ago, I jumped into LibraryThing. Honestly, I haven't used either of them long enough to compare and contrast their various features. I'm open to being wooed by either, but I think I'd be most likely to commit to the one that most of my friends use, or the one that has the best Facebook application. Which means I could go either way at this point, as I know one person who uses LibraryThing devotedly, and two people who use GoodReads infrequently. And while GoodReads already has a Facebook app that I downloaded, I can't get it to work properly. LibraryThing on the other hand, is only in the beginning stages of interfacing with Facebook, meaning you can only publish your book reviews there and nothing else.

So, until I overcome my fear of commitment, I'm compelled to quell my obsessive compulsive tendencies by keeping all three sites up to date. And there's just something about flipping through the pages of my journal, counting up the titles I've read so far this year...

Oh! Did you all notice? In the column on the right? I managed to embed a LibraryThing widget on my blog! You can see what I'm currently reading and click on the link to visit my profile on LibraryThing. How technologically advanced is that, eh? I might have to change the title of my blog from Techno-Peasant to...hmmm...what's the next rung up from peasant...

Online Productivity Tools: taking longer to make your life "easier"

Maybe six years ago, I spent some time setting up my schedule on Yahoo's Calendar. Entering my work routine and creating a Tasks list made me feel very organized, although I could probably have used that time to actually be productive, instead of planning on being productive. I don't recall ever using the calendar again. It's not practical for me as I don't have a mobile device on which to consult my calendar. And it's usually when I'm out and about being mobile that I need access to a calendar most, not when I'm at home in front of my PC. Besides, I challenge anyone to a quick draw: you and your mobile device, me and my trusty 2-year pocket daytimer. I'm sure I can whip that out of my purse, flip to the month I need and pencil in my next hair appointment way faster than you can!

So I chose to explore Google Documents instead...

I can see the usefulness of creating and sharing documents online. Especially for someone like myself who doesn't have the convenience of a laptop, being able to access any document from any computer is an attractive feature. And I can also imagine a number of scenarios in which people could share and edit documents collaboratively. There's no question, the idea is a very good one.

Except...I didn't like it. A few minor irritations presented themselves rather quickly. I couldn't see what page of my document I was on unless I went to Print Preview. And the comments that were present in the document I uploaded didn't display on my home computer, although they did on the computers at work.

But the big drawback is the speed. While it uploaded a Microsoft Word document from my PC in a jiffy, it slowed to an absolute crawl when I tried to edit it. The same thing happened when I created a document in Google Docs from scratch. Slooooow! So slow that I had to stop typing every so often and wait for it to catch up. And if I used the vertical or horizontal slide bars, clicked elsewhere in the document to reposition my cursor, or used the arrow keys to manoeuver around my document...well, let's just say you've got time to brew a cup of coffee, clean the cat's litter box, or maybe even phone your mother between moves! I'm assuming this happens because it's in constant saving mode. And admittedly, my computer at home runs at snail speed to begin with, but the same thing happened when I tried using Google Docs on the computers at work.

So, what I've gained in convenient access, I've lost in speed, and therefore in productivity as well.

Flickr and YouTube: You're a star! I'm a star! We're all STARS!

Now would be the appropriate time to discuss the exhibitionist and voyeur that lives inside us all. But I'm not going to because I think I made that speech somewhere back in the excessively long post about Wikipedia. Ha! Fooled you, didn't I, hmmm?

As I believe I've confessed previously, anytime I encounter a new technology that I like, I go through a period of "enthusiastic use." Some might also refer to this as addiction, abuse, misuse, overuse...

When I first discovered YouTube, this meant that I was occasionally found watching concert videos of Pearl Jam at 2am. While that phase has now passed, I still use YouTube primarily for the same sort of entertainment purposes. I have infrequently used it to find "how-to" videos to assist my resident handy-man in his endeavours to do such things as finding the correct method of removing the uncooperative bathtub drain stopper.

I have never felt the need to create a YouTube account. I have not subscribed to any channels. I'm not a big fan of the video links I'm sometimes sent of people's cats flushing the toilet, their dogs singing "Silent Night," or their kids reciting all the U.S. presidents in reverse chronological order. And I have never felt compelled to upload any of my own videos - those 15 second masterpieces containing riveting footage of my husband sitting on the beach in the fog.

Now, while Flickr looks like an easy enough site to use to edit and share photos, the fact is that I already do that someplace else. I do the editing part on my computer at home using the software that came with my camera. And I do the sharing part by creating photo albums on Facebook. I find this arrangement very convenient as most of the friends and family that would be interested in my photos already use Facebook, and those who don't can still view my photos when I send them a link to the album.

This is in keeping with the New Year's resolution I've just made, despite the fact that it's mid-May: 

To prevent myself from being completely overwhelmed by technology and crawling into a tiny dark crack in the earth where I can ignore it all, I will strive to use the minimum number of technologies, websites, portable electronic devices as possible to do what I need to in order to maintain contact with friends and family, keep up with my job, and not feel like a complete Luddite. 

RSS: Really Simple (to get overwhelmed) Syndication

I managed to set up my RSS feed successfully despite having a few problems, which I muddled through. 

BUT...

I have this distinct feeling that I'm following too many things in too many places:

• on Facebook I'm a fan of certain pages and get updates posted on my newsfeed
• on Blogger I'm following other people's blogs and get updates on my Dashboard when there's a new post
• I have a list of Favourites on my computer at home which are websites that I check frequently
• and now on Bloglines I'm accumulating a list of websites and blogs that I think I might possibly want to follow regularly...perhaps.  

And there could be more! I could also have a Delicious account with a list of my favourite websites, and a Twitter account with updated tweets.

To add to the mayhem, most things you can follow by more than one method. For example, I've subscribed to CBC's RSS feed, but I could also be a fan on Facebook, and get Twitter updates.

Too much! Too much information to be gathered. Too much gathering of information. It's just TOO MUCH! Convenient - yeah, if you're stuck for ways to waste time!  

By the time I check my Yahoo email, my Outlook email, my CPL email, log into Facebook and see what all my friends are up to, check Blogger and Bloglines and catch up on all my favourite technology, restaurant and book reviews, I will have precious little time left to......write about ME!

No Refolding Required: Navigating Google Maps

I spent the past week sipping wine amongst the vineyards and orchards of the Okanagan's Naramata Bench, so I guess it's time I took a sober look at how far behind I am in my blogging assignments.

Google products I use: YouTube (which I didn't realize belonged to the Google universe and which is a whole other assignment!), Blogger, Image search, and need I even say it...Web search. I also use the product I've chosen to discuss here - Google Maps. And I'll use my recent vacation to illustrate - maybe it'll help me hang onto my holiday bliss a little longer...

I ain't no gadget gal, so while I've heard wild rumours that all of this can be accessed via mobile devices, I'm still rockin' it old school on my desktop PC at home! For the rest of you tech savvy folks out there, I'm sure this is mostly old news, although you may find some small entertainment value in observing my lack of savvy-ness...

Off the top, I like the variety of search options available depending on the information I have at hand and the information I'm looking for: I can type in a specific address, the name of a road, the name of a specific business or attraction, the name of a town, or something quite general like "library naramata." As I'm typing, Google offers a helpful list of suggestions on a drop-down menu that I can also choose from to save precious time and key strokes.

Then I get a hit list and an accompanying map which I can view as a simple street map, a satellite map with a street map superimposed on it, or a 3D Earth view (which I haven't downloaded). My favourite view is the satellite map as I find it helps me get the lay of the land a lot better than just a street map when I'm looking something up that's in completely foreign territory. Included on the map are other nearby landmarks, businesses, towns or roads that help me get my bearings.

If I click on one of the items in the hit list, I have access to a raft of useful information such as: a complete address, a photo and a link to a website if one exists, directions, links to reviews if there are any, the option to save my map to my Google account, and the option to "search nearby" for whatever other amenities I might need.

At the bottom of my hit list, each successive search is saved and can be added to the map using colour-coded dots. So my search for restaurants, wineries, hiking opportunities, and a library, can all be added to my initial search for accommodations and I've got the necessities of my whole trip mapped out before my very eyes in no time at all!

If I've looked up a place that's located in an urban area, I've also got the option to look at a "street view" of it, which essentially looks like someone stood outside and snapped a photo of it. (Kind of eerie when I look up my own residential address - brings my "big brother is watching you" paranoia out!) This feature helps to prevent having to drive around the block multiple times trying to spot that little hole-in-the-wall amazing restaurant that only the locals know about! And when I access the driving directions, I can see a split screen street view and corresponding satellite map for each intersection. Guess that's not such a handy feature if I'm not viewing it on a mobile device...hmmm...might have to get me one of those! 

Of course there are inevitably flaws and glitches with technology like this. Google Maps states clearly that "Placement on map is approximate" which can definitely be a big problem. If I'd used only the Google map to find our accommodation in a rural area of the Okanagan, I'd have been camping in the bush near the local landfill a few kilometres from the bed and breakfast I'd reserved! I have the option to move a marker on the map if it's not in the right location, although if it's moved more than 200 metres from it's existing location, the change will not be posted immediately. I tried moving the marker for the Bed and Breakfast we stayed at, but the change has not been posted yet. But editing the map after I've returned from my vacation doesn't really help ME - only the next B and B guests maybe!

Another thing that one needs to be aware of is that both street maps and the satellite maps appear to be out of date by at least a couple of years. Residential areas where I live that have gone from cow pasture to fully built out communities are still showing up on the satellite map as pasture!

All in all, I still think Google Maps is a useful tool, as long as the user is aware of it's potential shortcomings.

Now, where's that stash of wine I transported illegally across provincial borders...
  

I'll show you mine, if you show me yours! Thoughts on social networking...

I just climbed down from last week's soapbox, and I'm trying desperately to prevent myself from climbing right back up while discussing this week's theme of social networking sites.

But really, I think the same things attracts us to both social networking sites like Facebook, and freely-edited content sites like Wikipedia: we all want our chance to be heard, to see and be seen, to connect or re-connect with others. I've come to the conclusion that we're all voyeurs and exhibitionists to varying degrees!

I've been a Facebook participant for three years, and as with any new technology that I embrace (such as blogging!), I was seriously addicted for the first while. I was excited to fill in my info tab with what I consider to be interesting tidbits about myself, couldn't wait to create photo albums of my adventures - guess that's the exhibitionist part. And I was hoping to find or be found by some long lost friends. This was tempered by my concerns about security and privacy, and second thoughts about what exactly I wanted other people to know about me. Am I being completely honest, genuinely myself, or am I creating a persona to present to the social networking world?

The answer to that question is...it depends. I feel completely comfortable posting almost anything with some of my FB friends. But with others, I feel more compelled to edit or censor myself. I fight this urge, but it's undeniably there. Perhaps this is due to the fact that my FB friends cover a wide range of political, environmental, social and religious views, and I'm loath to offend anyone.

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon on Facebook. I've managed to re-connect with friends and relatives that I haven't seen or corresponded with for 25-30 years! At first, there's a flurry of emails flying back and forth, each of us trying to summarize the intervening decades of our lives in a few short paragraphs. Then the emails gradually decrease in frequency until we reach the point where we're not actually corresponding anymore, but merely observing what the other person is doing by reading their status updates and viewing the photos they post. Why does this happen? Has too much time elapsed, are the divergent paths our lives have taken too far apart to be bridged by the wonders of a social networking site? Have we really "connected," or are we just indulging out voyeuristic tendencies?

The people I stay in touch with most frequently on FB are people I saw, talked to, and emailed regularly before the advent of such sites. Now I sometimes feel that I have less personal contact with these friends than I did before we became FB friends. Where previously we might have gotten together for coffee to hear about their latest vacation and see their photos, now I just read a daily status update and view their photo album online - kind of a more distant connection. Maybe a lazy substitute for the effort that's required to actively maintain a friendship through other means of communication.

Then there's the whole issue of Facebook etiquette. What if you don't want to be FB friends with someone who sends you a friend request? Will they be offended if you ignore their request? Would you be offended if someone ignored you? I had an acquaintance from my jr/sr high school days send me a friend request. We hadn't been close friends back then and after perusing her FB profile, I was quite sure her interest in vampires and werewolves was not something we shared in common, and so I decided to ignore her request. But what if you do friend someone and then feel the need, for whatever reason, to un-friend them later -  what are the consequences of that? What about the people who send you friend requests which you accept, and then there's no communication from them at all - no status updates to read, no emails, no photos posted - just eerie silence and the feeling that they're watching you. Are they just collecting friends? It all gets very weird and complicated sometimes.

And now there's yet another place I have to check for emails - in addition to my Yahoo email and my Outlook email and my work email! Hmpf!

Well, I've once again established that it's impossible for me to post a brief blog entry, haven't I?!

  

Wikipedia gets me up on my soapbox...big time!

It's difficult to ignore Wikipedia. It's right there, all the time, the first or second entry in my hit list when I search for almost anything on the internet - musicians, authors, places, wines, philosophers. My general impression of Wikipedia at the beginning of this assignment was that it was ubiquitous but unreliable and therefore not very useful.

Of course, it's hard to talk about a thing without comparing it to something else. So here's what I did:

I searched the following terms:
Edward Abbey - American author and environmentalist
Jesse Cook - Canadian flamenco guitarist
Cochrane Alberta - where I live
Tempranillo - type of Spanish grape/wine
Arthur Schopenhauer - German philosopher
Marc Atkinson Trio - Canadian gypsy jazz musical group
West Coast Trail - famous hiking trail on the west coast of Vancouver Island

Places I searched:
Wikipedia
Google
Britannica Online
Canadian Encylopedia Online

And the winner is...Wikipedia!

And here I was, all prepared to trash talk with a hastily scribbled list of negatives. Well, I'll get to those in a minute, but first...

What I like about Wikipedia

Truly encyclopedic, it's a great first place to begin searching for almost anything, from grapes to guitarists, towns to trails. While there was an exasperating dearth of hits for most of my searches using Britannica or the Canadian Encyclopedia, and Google overwhelmed with a profusion of results that frustrated and distracted me, Wikipedia strikes a nice balance, providing an initial hit with lots of options to expand and explore. Entries are usually written in straightforward simple language, and where I happened to encounter words like anthropocentrism or rubato or aphoristic (I keep forgetting that one!), there was always a handy hyperlink to enlighten me.

The Contents box lets me see what's included in the article and allows me to jump to a particular section if I don't wish to peruse the entire thing. The See Also, References and further reading, and External Links offer access to interesting tangents, discographies and bibliographies, but also primary source documents that are important for research purposes.

The discussion and history tabs are interesting as they allow a glimpse into any behind-the-scenes controversy that may be taking place regarding various aspects of the article, and these could be used as cues to do more investigation on those points.

What I don't like so much about Wikipedia

Where'd my scribbled notes go? Oh, yea...

I nearly drowned beneath the apparently infinite ocean of information available in About Wikipedia. Unlike most Web 2.0 technologies that I've explored via concise Help, About, and FAQ pages, Wikipedia's introductory information is...what's the word...well, it made me feel hopeless of ever grasping the intricacies of how it worked. I'd read for a bit, then click on a link of particular interest such as administrators, researching with Wikipedia, or reliability of Wikipedia and end up in yet another labyrinthine article with even more links. This is not a good place to be for someone with obsessive compulsive tendencies (like me), who feels compelled to read all the introductory material before using the technology!

My other beef with Wikipedia is more a general dispute I have with the idea it seems to put forward that openly-edited content is better than non-openly-edited content. I'm not sure I buy that, always. (Warning! I'm climbing up on my soapbox here.) Call me crazy, but sometimes I like to know that the person who wrote the information I'm reading is an actual, qualified, certified, recognized expert in that field, not just a self-described expert. Go to Wikipedia:Administrators and scroll on down to the History section where you'll find this quote by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder:

I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the aura of "authority" around the position. It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.

Hmmm. Argh! There's so much that I take issue with in those three sentences. Let me summarize by saying that it's not a statement that inspires trust and confidence in the system about which the person is speaking.

Or how about this line from Wikipedia:How to edit a page: "After your first edit, you will be a Wikipedia editor!" Really? Can I put that on my resume? Like it's some sort of important achievement. For me, it's somehow tied into our current preoccupation with: I've got to tell the entire world what I'm doing every second of the day on Facebook or Twitter, I've got to post all these videos about my riveting life on YouTube, I deserve my 15 minutes of fame on a "reality" TV show, I should get to add my two cents to any forum discussing anything I'm remotely familiar with, oh, and let's not forget...I've got lots to wax eloquent about on my blog! Obviously, I'm being slightly hypocritical and facetious here as I'm frequently on my FaceBook account, I have thrown in my two cents in forum discussions (mostly on travel issues), and well, here I am blogging...  

Assignment

In keeping with the previous rant, I don't fancy myself enough of an expert on anything to feel comfortable editing Wikipedia. I found quite a few links with no pages attached that I suppose I could have written a brief entry for, but decided to make a small spelling adjustment my first time out. Under the History section of the article on the West Coast Trail, I changed the word Pacheenaht (with an n) to Pacheedaht (with a d). Although the "n" spelling is not incorrect, the "d" spelling is certainly much more common, and is found in many places including the Parks Canada information on hiking the WCT and the BC government website.

Conclusion

My revised impression of Wikipedia is that it's ubiquitous, maybe unreliable, but a very useful jumping-off point.

Stuffed on Delicious

Back in the day when Best Websites first emigrated to Delicious, I did a tiny taste test to try to get a flavour for what exactly a social bookmarking site was, and I've used it periodically to answer the fairly bland questions we seem to get at Memorial Park. This time arriving for my second helping, I sampled the "Learn More" and "Help" features to try to acquire a more detailed understanding of all the ingredients that are blended together in order to serve up such Delicious-ness. And of course in the meantime, I've been fed a diet of terms like "tags," "tag bundles" and "clouds," so it was much more like home cookin' this time around, instead of the foreign cuisine it appeared to be at first.

You'll never starve for options on Delicious. With a buffet of 646 tags linking you to 492 bookmarks, there are many ways to find just the dish you're looking for - we don't all have to follow the exact same recipe.  I can see how it is so much easier and faster to attach multiple tags to one bookmark, than to attach a link under multiple folders or subjects.

I can't even remember now if we had a search option in Best Websites or if we did, what it was like. Searching on Delicious is easy and I like that you can see your search path at the top, related tags on the right side, and you can also click on a tag you see listed under individual bookmarks.

However, the Delicious smorgasbord might be a recipe for disaster, if the one thing you're looking for is swimming obscurely in the goulash of tags. Six hundred and forty-six is a lot of tags to look through if it becomes apparent that your topic is not contained in one of the 37 tag bundles, and I assume that number could bloat infinitely larger, at some point becoming too unwieldy to be useful. Hopefully, there's a master chef out there somewhere making sure this doesn't happen!

Also, I keep getting distracted by all the numbers floating around and what they are meant to indicate. To me, these numbers are like empty calories - tidbits of information that fill me up, but aren't necessary for actually finding what I need. I have to continually remind myself that the numbers to the right of the tag bundles are not the number of bookmarked websites found under that heading, but the number of individual tags which make up the bundle. Then, when I click on one of the tag bundles and bring up a list of tags, I have to tell myself that the number to the right of the tag is now the number of bookmarks, which is what I was expecting in the previous step. And let's not forget about the numbers to the right of the bookmarks which indicate the number of people who have saved that bookmark, and the date the bookmark was added displayed to the left of the bookmark.

Delicious would absolutely be a useful recipe box for organizations or businesses that have a lot of information they need to organize and access. But I don't think I would use it regularly enough to justify creating an account of my own. 

I think I've spit out just about all the cheesy metaphors I can cough up in relation to Delicious, so...I'll stop now. Besides, all this talk has made me hungry. It's time for a snack!

Dust Bunnies vs. Blogging

I should be vacuuming up the cat hair dust bunnies that levitate momentarily everytime I swish past.
I should be folding the laundry that's been entombed for days in the dryer.
I should be shovelling a winter's worth of gravel from the floor of my car.

But I'm not...

Instead, I've thrust aside all these pressing domestic crises in order to offer you a rare chance I know you've all been anxiously awaiting ... the opportunity to follow at close range as I attempt to navigate the techno-jungle. The chance to guffaw at my mistakes. To cheer wildly at my successes. To shake your head in bemused bewilderment at my ineptitude.

Adventure One - add a scenic photo to the background of my blog header
Problem - photo ends up being gargantuan, humungous
Solution - resize it before uploading (according to the help page)
Status - incomplete, awaiting arrival of personal IT troubleshooter (a.k.a. my husband)
Consolation - successfully changed the colour, font, and size of the type in my header! Small victories...

The obvious impetus for this exercise is to be better equipped to help customers at work, of course. To embrace a progressive image and to put the proverbial hair-in-a-bun, shushing, glasses-on-a-chain (sorry Josie!), cardigan-wearing librarian to rest. But what else might I discover on this journey?

• I'm curious how addictive all these new technologies will be for me - will I find a personal application for any/all of them?
• will these new ways of connecting with people actually make me feel more connected?
• will I be more informed, or just more confused by the amount of information I have access to?

Alas, you'll all have to wait to find out. Another crisis has encroached upon my adventure: supper must be made, wine must be drunk, husband must be hugged.