A World in a Grain of Sand

I’ve finished the course that necessitated the creation of this blog, but I want to continue / start? sharing my thoughts—the ones that seem so interesting to me as I lie awake at night and slip my mind when I sit down to a computer. I think I want to talk about books and the themes that connect them. I’ve been playing with LibraryThing and trying to decide if I want to include books that I have read, but don’t own. Or books that, having read them, I no longer need to own. Using this blog for bad books means I can save LibraryThing for the good stuff. Of course, then this blog becomes a source of cautionary reviews and that doesn’t seem fair either. But if I put everything that I really like in three places—here, LibraryThing, and my wiki, Not Just for the Young—then I risk having the same control problems that make spreadseet-style databases so much worse than Access-type databases: I.e., if you list the same address for each member of a family and they move, you have to make changes in more than one location.

Mood: perplexed.

I am quoting from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence (http://www.bartleby.com/236/60.html):

and hope I am not infringing on anyone’s copyright.

I picked this quote because I like finding deep meaning in apparently trivial things, especially children’s picture books.

I also like fractals, with their repeating patterns at every magnification of the object (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal) and recursion.

Hello, world. This is my first blog. My name is Rose Myers.

Who I am (as a student): I am taking my 11th of 12 courses towards my MLS at Southern Connecticut State University. I work very part-time in a very small private school library. (Both the library and the school are small.) I also volunteer in my local public library, mostly reading shelves in the children’s department. (I find it soothing, challenging, good exercise, and a way to select books by judging their covers.)

I am somewhat comfortable with technology, especially older technology: I learned to program using punch cards, our VCR always has the correct time, I have used ftp and kermit to share files before there was a Web, I remember using “hello, world” as sample text when testing software, and, as of this week, I can make a phone call to someone not pre-programmed in my cell phone and even hang up without having to turn the thing off! (I only recently acquired a cell phone.) I have a website, but putting things on it is hard for me. I do not regularly use any Web 2.0 tools; I occasionally read people’s blogs and recommended YouTube stuff. But I am looking forward to learning a lot about Web 2.0.