Friday, August 29, 2008

Ae Fond Kiss and Tam O'Shanter - how they should sound

I had a bit of a fright when I went looking for recitations of these great Scottish poems. Initially all I found was some AMERICAN doing a recitation of Ae Fond Kiss - nearly passed out! They don't even do well at English, never mind Scots!!

Then I remembered YouTube and found that there's heaps.

Below is Karen Dunbar reciting the exciting tale of Tam O'Shanter (click for the words). Set in Ayr where I went to boarding school, this is the story of a man who gets chased by witches and warlocks one night on his way home from the pub. We used to get learning verses of this as punishment.

This is one my Mum would approve of, a rendition of Ae Fond Kiss (again, click for the words) by The Corries.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Now I know I'm working too hard . . .

I haven't officially 'done' week 4 and RSS feeds yet but I've had a feed going for a little while. One of my feeds is the Guardian newspapers books blog. I was initially intrigued by the post Heading: Classic Poetry gets the Jackson treatment. Can you imagine my horror however, when I followed the link to an article entitled Michael Jackson goes into studio with Robert Burns. According to the article, poems W Jacko is going to have a go at include Ae Fond Kiss and Tam O'Shanter.

OMG, it's going to take a while to recover from the thought. Where are my smelling salts?

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Holy Snapping Duck Do!

Holy Snapping Duck Do! I just had a terrible scare when I thought I have not updated this since petrol was cheaper than a bottle of Grange!... You would not believe that my hands were chopped off and I was waiting for bionic ones. I hope they bring chocolate!.I am lost in a sea of pseudo-olde-english with discovering time doesn't stand still, a ticking crocodile, just generally being a nuisance to anyone unfortunate to cross my path, my day is passing in a blur from the second star on the right, straight on to I am begging my kid to go to sleep or so help me God that kid will be decorating my wall, 'Duct tape still life'. I am avoiding recapture. perchance.I swear on my mother's grave I will blog about it when I find my way home. What? Assuming I don't get distracted by counting my chest hairs..

Post created courtesy The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator

Monday, August 25, 2008

About tags in Flickr

My mother has just set up her own Flickr site (she and my almost 8 year old nephew in Edinburgh have just set up their own blog too) and I've just been helping her get out of a little pickle.

If you intend to have slideshows on your blog you will need to take care when adding tags to your photos that you use tags that allow only your photos into the slideshow/photostream. For example, Mum and Dad have recently had a holiday to Egypt and Mum put a slideshow on her blog with the tag Egypt. She was then thoroughly miffed and frustrated when photos appeared in her slideshow that she and Dad had never taken!

When I tag my photos I use "Springwood Colquhouns" as one tag on everything then add "Springwood Colquhouns XXX" for a specific event/set of photos so they can be shown on one big slideshow or on topic-specific ones. Photos may end up with half a dozen tags. I find using an Excel spreadsheet helps me remember what I've used before.

Flickring


Again I've been uploading photos into Flickr for a little while now.
It's a great way to share photos with family without having to send multiple emails with half a dozen picture attachments. I can also use it to create slideshows on the blog I share with family - one big Springwood Colquhouns one or separate ones for different events such as holidays we've taken. And sites like Flickr allow a little bit more security for your photos as an offsite storage - won't have to worry about everything going up in a puff of smoke next fire season.

Yes I have privacy concerns, especially since I put pictures of my children up there but if you close your photos off too much some of the people you'd like to have viewing them won't be able to because they aren't very technology savvy. I figure we're obscure enough not to worry about getting lots of people looking at our photos, although did get asked to allow co to use our pics a few months back - I told them no.

Ha!

Got around the blog roll problem by creating a new one and copying all the blogs into the new one before deleting the original. Now I just have to wait and see if that upsets anyone else's access?????

Blog frustrations

Blogging can be such fun, but also immensely frustrating.

I'm not sure what's happening or why, but I haven't been able to post any new blogs on the blog roll on the BM Library Manager's blog since I posted my own. Sometimes I can do from home things that I can't at work but that's not the case this time round. I note that Snow, Good Oil, Silence and Our new home have been added so I'll have to find out how they have done it.

Grrrrrr!

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Here we go . . .

This is the blog I have to do for the Learning 2.0 SLNSW course.

I actually went through the american web 2.0 thing late last year and have been blogging for a while now. It was the blogs part I really took off with and think they are a really good tool for libraries to communicate with their customers/borrowers.

I have a private blog for sharing news with family and friends oversees. It's a lot of fun keeping it updated and I got my sister and her husband and my Mum and my nephew at it too so I have links to their blogs from mine. I was hoping my children would also post but I can only get a few words off them at most.

I also set up a blog for one of my book groups. I tried them on a Yahoo group but most of them found the signing up bit too hard. I figured that with a blog set on view by everyone any of them can see what we are reading next and where to meet up. The more technologically literate can then also contribute posts.

I've had a look at the other blogs on the Learning 2.0 week 2 page. Isn't brown a popular blog template!! I am particularly impressed by the Sutherlandshire blog - those 'child' pages hanging off the main blog page - just what we need to de-clutter. I fell over it last week or so and immediately put in a call to find out how they did it. The wonderfully patient and generous Martin very kindly sent instructions but so far getting tabs eludes me - so far . . . I will persist.