Coffee Klatch

Web 2.0, social networking, the social web… all different terms for the Internet phenomenon that is promoting greater interactivity and connectivity between people of similar interests. It’s also my term for what’s going on in Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas. With SPIDERS!

Tonight on the way home from work I was listening to NPR’s All Things Considered and heard this story about spiders in a Texas state park. The spiders have teamed up to build a huge communal web that covers some very large trees and stretches for several hundred yards.

Instead of relying on what could be caught in their individual webs, these spiders have created what amounts to one gigantic web. The main trees in question form a curve around a pond which is a breeding ground for mosquitoes. They said that when you walked by these spiderwebs, you could hear this buzzing sound from the mosquitoes trapped in the webs. The spiders were eating so well that they weren’t getting to all the new mosquitoes getting caught in their webs.

Testimonial to the benefits of the Social Web!

Okay, it’s time to help spread the news. “Recent polls have shown that a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map.” A Miss Teen USA contestant was told this and asked why she thinks this is. I’d think by this time she could put together a halfway well-reasoned answer to such a basic question by this stage in her contestant career. The problem here is not just an issue of public speaking, but of it really makes me thinks she’s ONE of those 20%.

Check out her response:

Here’s the transcript if you didn’t catch it in her response (which is quite possible) or if you just want to follow along:

Questioner: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?

Miss Teen South Carolina: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.

And we wonder why the rest of the world thinks we’re idiots!!

Anyone for some fantasy football? The first game of the regular NFL season is next Thursday, September 6. Since I’ve been doing this for eight years now, I’ve started a Fantasy Football league for this year. If you’d like to join, here’s the link: http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/f1/register/tos?league_id=100703&password=java

In order to join the league, follow the link above or go to http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/f1, click the “Sign Up Now” or “Get Another Team” button and follow the links to “Join a Custom League”. When prompted, enter the League ID# and password below.

League ID#: 100703
Password: java

We’ve still got room for more people to join up. If you’re at least semi-interested in professional football, playing fantasy football can help keep you interested throughout the season. You don’t have to know much about specific players or anything; that kind of comes as you play. You’ll just pick players from your team each week and you get points based on how well they do (as individuals) in their games. Plus, it’s always fun to have a little healthy competition.

Sound like fun? Then click the link above and sign up. We’re having a “live draft” this Saturday at 9am. If you have questions or are new to this, ask away.

Have you ever heard a koala? I had no idea they sounded like this. Here are some links to audio files of koalas. Give ‘em a listen!

http://www.junglewalk.com/popup.asp?type=a&AnimalAudioID=623

http://www.sound-effect.com/sounds1/animal/Bears/koala[1].wav

http://www.pulseplanet.com/archive/Jun07/3981.html

The third movie in the Pirates of the Caribbean series finally hit the cheap theater near us. The whole family went to see it for $5 TOTAL! Gotta love that. And I think this last one is my favorite of the three, but I blogged about that when I saw the movie opening weekend.

Well, the first partial week of classes is over and I think I got just about everything caught up. We had three days of classes this week, which meant three days of partially staffing the Reference Desk. We’ll begin our evening desk hours Sunday night. Much of my week was scrambling to make tons of last-minute changes on the library website. Just an extra page here, a few links there… nothing ginormous (yes, that’s officially a word now–gotta love neologisms!) but the cumulative effect was that much of my free time was spent on website changes. That and getting everything ready at the Reference Desk for things like tracking our reference transactions (various types of interactions with people at the desk) and keeping statistics on which books in the Reference collection are getting used (we scan the barcodes in the books and reshelve them ourselves, so I had to get the interface ready for entering that data).

So things are going to start settling into a regular Fall routine this next week. Preliminary stuff is out of the way, we begin evening Ref. Desk hours next week, and we’ve got students using the library again. It’s always nice to have them back and see the library busy and being used!

On a personal note, my three boys all finished their first full week of school now. Things have started settling down for them, too, which is nice. They’re all at new schools and in regular public schools for the first time. Before this, it was either Christian schools or charter schools (which functioned almost like a poor man’s Christian school). Alaric’s in 8th grade now, Blaise is in 5th, and Camber is in 1st, and they’re all riding the bus to school. “The only thing that is constant is change.”

It’s funny how technological innovations eventually become commonplace and then forgotten. My six-year-old was doing his homework last night and had to write the first and last letters of things that were pictured on his worksheet. When he got to a typewriter he asked me what it was.

Isn’t that funny? He asked me what it was and when I looked at it, it was clearly a picture of a typewriter.

And then I found myself EXPLAINING to him how a typewriter works. My ten-year-old got into it then, asking if each letter hit at the same place, so I explained how the roller moves each time you hit a key.

Who’d have thought it?

This is the week that classes begin here at Butler University. Classes start Wednesday as do our hours for staffing the Reference Desk in the library. So things are pretty busy with all the preparation tasks and scheduling and making sure everything’s ready. Making last-minute changes to web pages, getting procedures in place for things like Blackboard usage or Reference statistics, and communicating necessary things to the faculty are just some of these last-minute tasks that have me hopping this week.

A few weeks into the Fall semester and things will settle down into a somewhat regular routine, which will be nice.

Over a year ago, I blogged about FindYourSpot.com, which asks you questions and gives you a list of ideal cities for you to live in. It seems to be a really good survey with accurate results. I decided to take the quiz again and see if my results had changed. Here’s the comparison:

I think the biggest difference was that this time I didn’t rule out any particular areas of the country. They say that doesn’t make too much of a difference, but there are more places in Tennessee this time than last time, as well as a South Carolina and an Oklahoma. Very interesting. I like how each city in your results list has a link to a page that tells you more about that city.

Check your own recommendations at http://www.findyourspot.com/.

We’re a little more than a year away from our next presidential elections. Many people are longing for that day because they’re discontent with the way things are now. (Like that isn’t ALWAYS the case to some degree or other.) This morning I found a website that allows you to pick your stance on a variety of issues and then see how the candidates compare with your views. It’s quite enlightening. Make sure you click on the issues to see just what it means to support or strongly support (or oppose) the issues. Clicking the issues brings up a new window with the details about each issue and what supporting or opposing it means.

Take the VoteMatch Quiz now.