#10 Big Generator

Ten points to anyone who gets the obligatory daggy music reference in the blogpost title.

So, since blogs and librarians are apparently all about cute kittenz, I figured I had to play around with the LolCat Builder. And here are the spectacular results:

It's kind of funny, I remember once creating a little icon the hard way, in Photoshop, adding text layers and painstakingly aligning everything. God it was a pain. (Insert crotchety "In mah day..." tone). This was way easier.

I also remembered a superhero generator I read about on Librarian Avengers and decided to give that one a whirl, now that I have a blog to put my creation into. This one is pretty sophisticated and way customisable; there are options for all kinds of paraphernalia, and the colour is a nice touch, too. The only bad was that I accidentally cleared my pic halfway through and had to start over again.

(Keep in mind that I did this on the desk, so if the TEMP directory gets cleared, so will all of these beauteous pics.)



You can make your own at HeroMachine. They have boys, too.

And finally, because it has been a long and mostly unexciting desk shift (great way to limit the time I spend playing), have some shocking (!) graffiti created at LetterJames.

#6 flickr again

You'll notice that uploading a photo that I've saved to my hard drive causes me no problems. This is the proof of me mucking about with Mosaic Maker. The obligatory credit code is as follows:
1. Verve 501 - blue hour, 2. BHP Biliton prefab concrete slabs, 3. Mirror of the World bookmarks, 4. State Library Victoria front lawn, 5. Pigeons attack the State Library of Victoria, 6. State Library Victoria reseeding lawn, 7. State Library across Swanston, 8. State Library Victoria reading room, 9. Dome at State Library, 10. Ned Kelly Jerilderie Letter, 11. Jerilderie Letter, 12. Shakespeare, 13. Early morning in the dome., 14. Shakespeare window, 15. Cowen Gallery, 16. Mirror of the World banner, 17. Painting in Cowen Gallery, 18. Keith Murdoch Gallery, 19. Art of the book, 20. How I entered there, 21. How I entered there I cannot truly say, 22. Bookshelf above the Dome Gallery, 23. Redmond Barry Reading Room, 24. Newspaper Reading Room, 25. Shaving heads, 26. Leukaemia Foundation, 27. Nova broadcast, 28. Dylan Lewis, 29. Nova van @ SLV, 30. Footpath Fragment at SLV, 31. dragon slayer, 32. reading room, 33. leather light and wood, 34. Sinking Library35. Not available36. Not available

More proof of how much time it's possible to waste on flickr, I played a game of Matchr. Besides taking me 3 and a half minutes to match the tags of sometimes incredibly different photos, it made me think about the whole tagging thing with relation to libraries. There have been some discussions here lately about user-contributed content and how to incorporate it into the revamped website.

Although I've previously been cautiously optimistic about the possibility, I'm no longer sure. I mean, let's face it, libraries have been "tagging" things for years—that's exactly what subject headings are. But the advantage of library systems are that you've got a controlled vocabulary which is actually organised and makes a modicum of sense, unlike "folksonomies" (could there be a more irritating coinage?) in which users can apply tags that are so general as to be meaningless—in which case, why bother having them? I know I never did very well with the whole LCSH exercises in Library School, but at least I could tell that it made some kind of sense. I mean, I could tag this post "fish" even though it has nothing to do with fish. It might be a meaningful label to me because it makes me think about metaphors with giving a person a fish and feeding them for a day while if you give them a fishing pole you feed them for a lifetime. Until the fishing pole breaks.

I'm sure I have a point there and I'm pretty sure it's that I'm grumpy. And need to get away from the computer.