Do you subscribe to this blog through RSS?

Did you know that July 1st, Google is discontinuing Google Reader? You should know, of course, as it hasn't been a secret, but just in case you didn't, you might want to start looking for some alternatives. I've chosen Feedly as mine, as it has both a web and mobile application version, is free, and allows you to migrate your feeds very simply. You might find one that better suits your needs, but it does really well for me. There are some alternatives listed at: Goodbye, Google Reader. Here are 5 alternatives. I hope you keep reading this blog, and if for some reason RSS is dead to you, there's always the web version or mobile version of this page to look at as well. If you go to this page on your phone, it should automatically bring up the mobile version, although you can choose the web version by the link on the bottom of the mobile page. Or, you can scan the QR code to the left on the sidebar to bring up the mobile version and bookmark it. Enjoy, and as always, I'd love to have feedback on how to make this better. I'm nearly at 9,000 posts and in October I'll be starting my thirteenth year of blogging. Thank you to those of you who read this.

Yay, got to the bottom of my Google Reader

Some of those posts were from the end of June. That's it for tonight. Hope I have Internet tomorrow night. If not, thank goodness for smart plans and an unlimited data plan (on special, no less). Good night.

PS I am on Google+ (+Elisabeth Eilir Rowan) but so far haven't really done anything with it. Who do you follow? How do you use it? Just wondering.

I have winnowed

My Google Reader feeds from 1000+ to 186, leaving mediaeval and library-related posts till last, so you may see some of them tomorrow. Every dish in the house is now clean. For now, I'm taking my insulin and heading to bed, as I have physical therapy at 8 in the morning and have to get up early. Good night.

Happiness

is scraping the bottom of your news reader and realising that you have no more items.

Joy.

This is the first time in about two weeks I haven't had over 1000 items. But now I'm caught up. Yay!

Geekery at its finest

Do you know about Ninja Mode for Google Reader? Watch this video if you're interested:



The ninjas and the hearts are kind of cute. Thanks, Buffy, for sharing.

I got home about 10:30 tonight

It's almost 2 am. I've been going through stories in my news reader--there were over 500. Plus I went through some of my e-mail, too. I should have done my laundry during that, but instead I'm going to try to get up at 7 am to do it. Thankfully, I've been rather perky today and so I haven't been sleepy yet. I got a lot of rest last night. I'd taken a friend and his husband out for his birthday at Masala and had vegetable pakora, pishwari naan, and vegetable korma that was hot (but not 'Indian hot'). It was quite possibly the best food I have ever eaten. I would have had gulab jamun, a dessert, but the korma and piswari naan are already sweet. I got home about 9:30 pm. I went straight to bed and didn't get up until this morning, which is no doubt why I've been so productive today.

Today was interesting, being back to work at the library after taking off Wednesday-Monday. I discovered I was sorely missed as the colour copier went down the second day. It was something I had fixed in fifteen minutes, and everyone was grateful. A couple of other things had come up over my absence as well, and I have to admit, it was nice to be missed. One drawback to being a solo librarian is there isn't really anyone to act as backup for much of what I do.

I found out that I got the grant for inter-library loan funding I'd applied for. Yipee!

then I went to work at the store to find out that the manager I've had since April has been moved to the store down the street and a woman whom I have met before has taken his place. Gee, I wish they'd give us some advanced warning. Also, the grocery has started digging for its own gas station. I don't know what our status will be soon. We own the building, but the grocery store owns the land. I think our lease is up in December. If the store does close, the fact that my former boss is up the road may make it easier for me to transfer there; it's the best place in terms of riding the bus between the two jobs.

What I really hope, though, is that the application I'm working on will go through. It's for a full-time medical reference librarian position. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Day after tomorrow I'm going to Bardstown's public library for a meeting of the Kentucky Medical Library Association. It should be an interesting meeting--we're hashing out criteria for membership.

Next Monday is a holiday, and I'm off at both places. Maybe I'll get around to doing some of the stuff I didn't get around to doing this time, like the housework. But it was really nice to get so much rest and spend a great time with friends watching movies, playing the game, and eating Indian food. All in all it was a great vacation--I just wish I could have taken off from the store as well.

Okay, that's enough blogging for one night. Good night.

Random news stories from my reader

Ireland Criminalizes Blasphemy

Were We Smarter 100 Years Ago...? The 1909 Copyright Hearings

'Angela's Ashes' Author McCourt Dies in NYC at 78

Google Reader Improves Link Blog Discoverability, Security, Adds Likes

DNA Differences Observed between Blood and Organs

Crafts for (the) Retarded? [Awful Library Books]

Amazon Erases Orwell Books from Kindle

Down Days for Baghdad's Antiquities Dealers

Chocolate Just Got Better!

For Fish, It's More the Merrier

Good night!

I found an interesting blog

called Voyages Extraordinaires. Here is their description:

Voyages Extraordinaires is a weblog for people of intelligence and good breeding who enjoy Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances and Retro-Futurism, Victoriana and Neo-Victorianism, Voyages Extraordinaires and Imperialist Romances, Gothic Horror, Pulp Fiction, the Golden Ages of Hollywood and of Travel, silent and early films, points suprêmes and real life adventures into places exotic and historic.

That website also led me to the Guild of Scientific Troubadours, Frankensteinia: the Frankenstein Blog, and Curious Expeditions. All piqued my interest.

I've been expanding my news reader subscriptions beyond library/tech/news to include history, primary sources in European history, and Latin language (I'm rusty in my Latin; I found a podcast series of readings of Latin lessons from a public domain book).

Anyway, that's what I've been doing for the last hour or so; checking up on my reader and finding new subscriptions. I liked the Voyages Extraordinaires blog so much I'm 'following' it through Blogger's system.

Now I'm going to go to bed. I have to get up early to work on game notes and then I'm looking at possibly a 12-hour workday, since no one was scheduled as a second person for tomorrow night and our truck was delayed to Saturday. I'm going in tomorrow at 10 am. I was supposed to leave at 6 pm, but I said I'd stay as long as I could. Depending on how I feel, that might be as late as 10 pm. Then there's grocery shopping of doom to do, followed by more work on notes. Sunday morning will come early, and then the game (yay!) I don't know if I mentioned that we started back up last weekend after a hiatus for remodelling, but we did. I really enjoyed being back together and the campaign continues. My character is badly hurt and I don't know if I'll be able to continue the adventure per se. I'm a little low on characters now. One is on maternity leave with a month-old baby, one is in the belly of Yog Sothoth (don't ask how that happened--it was sheer stupidity), one is away at training, and the rest are in a bubble reality technically not on earth, unable to leave without great danger. My last character created before the one on this mission sacrificed himself to save the world on the Antarctica campaign. Whew!

Speaking of Antarctica, did you see that an ice shelf is about to break away from Antarctica? There's a nice time-elapsed slideshow in that article.

In the slightly-Cthulhoid-or-at-least-vampiric-sci-fi/horror-medicine category, there's also something I came across in the general news, but it was also commented upon by the Guild of Scientific Troubadours. A biotech team in Canada have created a yeast-powered fuel cell that feeds on human blood. Now, the thing is, it was a story that 'broke' on April 1st, and one of the researchers is named Chin-Pang-Billy Siu, which seemed a bit improbable (no offence meant), but the story is apparently legit. This could help power implants in humans eventually.

Speaking of implants, there is also an interesting story regarding a telescopic eye implant the size of a pencil eraser that can help people with macular degeneration see. (Thanks to ScuttleMonkey on Slashdot for the link.)

Reason #326 for subscribing to your own blog in a feed

Almost every time I write a post, I spell check it, then preview it, scanning it for errors. But invariably there is the occasional mistake, and I've found the best way to catch such mistakes it to read the post in my Google Reader. That catches about 98% of them. Another 1% are caught by my friend YKWIA. But since I usually have Google Reader open at home, I get the early warning fairly quickly so that I can change the text before too many people see it. So if you see a glaring (or not-so-glaring) error in your reader, chances are it either has been or will be fixed shortly (I can't blog at work, so I have to wait) on the actual blog. But if the mistake's still there, feel free to comment. I hate making grammatical or spelling mistakes because I'm such a card-carrying grammar police member. Misplaced apostrophes and typos bother me quite a bit. I'd rather admit the mistake and fix it as soon as possible than to have it staring out into the aether of the Internet for years and years.

I have high hopes for tomorrow

in terms of getting some of the things done during vacation that I meant to when I took it. I don't have to work at job #2 until four and have no plans with anyone prior to then. The general plan for the rest of my 'vacation' (subject to change):

Thursday 10/2

9:00 Wake up, breakfast
9:30 Begin notes
12:30 Finish notes (3 hours), Lunch
1:00 Clean kitchen (incl. taking out trash and cleaning refrigerator)
2:00 Clean Living room (incl. finding a place for boxes of books on floor)
3:00 Clean Bath
3:30 Get ready for work
4:00 Work
10:00 Off work, go to friend's
10:30 Do reading
12:00 Get other friend
1:00 Go home, sleep

Friday 10/3

8:00 Wake up, get ready
9:00 Catch bus to horse farm excursion
12:30 Back at hospital, check on detail for report, finish report and submit
1:00 Go to friend's
1:30 Errand with friend
2:30 Watch Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day with friend
4:30 Go to work
5:00 Work
9:00 Off work, back to friend's
9:30 Do reading
12:00 Get other friend
1:00 Go home, sleep

Saturday 10/4

9:00 Wake up
9:30 Do notes
11:30 Finsih notes (2 hours), get ready for work
12:00 Work
10:00 Off work
10:30 Do notes
11:30 Finish notes (1 hour), sleep (unless I'm not finished with notes; if that's the case, do extra)

Sunday 10/5

8:00 Wake up
9:00 Prepare for game
1:00 Game
8:30 Finish game
9:30 Do notes
11:30 Finish notes (2 hours)
12:00 Sleep

Monday (10/6) back to work at job #1...

Somewhere during the weekend there is the task of taking and/or picking up a friend to/from work, but I don't know his schedule yet. But that would be late at night or early morning--generally midnight, 3 am, or 7 am).

Also at some point, I have to catch up on my RSS news reader (Google Reader) because I have over 500 stories on it. Gack!

I got off from work early today

because I already had my hours in for the pay period, which is good, because I have a 2:15 podiatry appointment, then I have some other things to do running around town. I couldn't make physical therapy appointments for next week because he was booked up when I wasn't working, but I have a couple the first week of August. My first appointment went rather well, mostly assessment. To give you an idea of how my elbow is affecting things, I can grip 65 lbs with my left hand when my arm is stretched out, and only 45 lbs on my right, which is bad because my right should be stronger because it's dominant.

I'm glad the weekend is here. I do work tomorrow, but not a 10-hour shift, and I think I get off at 6 pm, which leaves some time to do other things.

I've been happily starring items in Google Reader to share with you. Some have already made it to the box at the top of this page, but I'd like to write about them, so I hope to post some tonight, depending on when I get home. Last night it was 4:30 am before I came in, and I had to get up at 9 am, so it's a little iffy in predicting.

Okay, I'm going to go now. Hope you have a good weekend.

As part of this whole Library 2.0 thing

with the webcast and the class, I finally got around to using Google Reader as an RSS aggregator to subscribe to different blogs without having to go to each and every one. Google Reader allows you to 'share' particularly interesting posts with others, and then list some of them on your blog, which I have done up above. So, if you're wondering what I'm reading, that's a snippet. Click on 'read more' in the widget to get more posts. Most of what I'm reading through the aggregator is library-related. So if you'd like to get a snippet of library literature and I haven't posted about a story here, you may want to try that.

I'd like to blog more tonight, because I have several things to blog about, but I'm tired and should probably head on to bed. Perhaps tomorrow....