I can still remember the Sears Catalog Wish Book from when I was younger – the excitement of flipping through and marking off all of the toys I wanted Santa (or his stand-in) to bring. When I was a bit older I remember looking through LL Bean and the funkier puzzle and tchotchkes print catalogs that I thought would produce the best – and most unique – gifts for loved ones.
Paper catalogs certainly haven’t gone away (as one glance at the recycling bin reminds me) – but the growing number of emails coming from companies I’ve purchased from has certainly increased, especially this time of year. Honestly, as long as they aren’t too frequent, I much prefer an email highlighting some pieces that are statistically relevant based on my past purchases (maybe it’s a bit creepy – but sometimes actually useful).
I’ve enjoyed SplitReason’s occasional emails. While some of their products are, at best juvenile, I do appreciate the sense of humor of many. The site’s tag line says a lot “Gear for Geeks and Gamers,” both about the site and the site – in turn — says a lot about the pop culture awareness of their audience.
I’m particularly intrigued by this for my husband:
Wai So Srs t-shirt design @ © SplitReason.com
and this one for my brother
Run R2 t-shirt design @ © SplitReason.com
This past Saturday (October 24th) I shared a booth with my friend Anne and her lovely custom bags of Bagatelles (New York).
I sold a couple pairs of fingerless gloves (or should I say fingerless mittens since there aren’t individual) and got some terrific ideas. It was interesting to see what everyone else was selling and what shoppers were interested in buying.
When I got home I went to sleep by about 7 p.m. because I had stayed up until 5 a.m. Saturday morning getting ready for the fair. So I postponed taking pictures of and posting the mittens on Etsy left after the craft fair until Sunday.
Fuzzy Help With the Photoshoot
When I did take pictures Sunday I had a good helper in my little gold fuzzy. He kept the background cloth from blowing away – at least I think that was his plan…
My Etsy store: http://goldieashe.etsy.com
This summer I started a business called Goldie Ashe. What is Goldie Ashe? Well, for now it’s web design, coding and crafting. It’s rather broad – but it will be refined in time. Mostly it’s an avenue for my passions.
Right now, I’m focusing on my crafting passion – knitting mostly (although I really want to jump into crocheting, creweling, embroidery). I’ve been furiously knitting mittens and fingerless gloves in lovely roving (everything from pure wool to wool/acrylic blends) in some of my favorite colors. I’ll be selling my creations this Saturday at the Niskayuna High School PTO Craft Fair
Details:
Niskayuna High School
1626 Balltown Road (Route 146)
Niskayuna, NY
HOURS: 10AM-3PM
Parking is available
Directions: http://www.niskayunaschools.org/district/Athletics/directions.htm
I’ll be sharing booth #68 with my good friend Anne Siddall a.k.a. Bagatelles – New York. Anne makes lovely fabric bags.
My next steps are to shape up this web site to reflect my business and to open an etsy shop.
Pictures of my knitted accessories coming soon.
Here’s to excitement!
Or at least gives me a nice distraction…
I find myself drawn to music in these crazy times. Will my job last (do I even want it to)? Will my husbands? Are we living beyond our means? How did our economy get into this mess? Are we all really that surprised that it has become this messy?
Maybe I’m feeling particularly reflective because “It’s Love” by King’s X just came on my mp3 player – if only “love will keep it all together.” Well, it is nice to know family and friends are there for you.
Phew – Clutch just came on, I need their louder, angrier music right now.
I have to mention this NY Times article – I “blogged” about it on my work’s blog briefly. But here I will mention my ambivalent feelings about the article. It makes me feel at turns vindicated and awkward.
The article is called “A Hipper Crowd of Shushers.” Now, I think it’s cool that an article is written about younger librarians (young is kind of relative because you have to have received your masters – and the time frame in this piece seems to be mid-20s to late 30s) – a demographic I fit into – and that it’s one of the more emailed articles at NYTimes.com. But, are we just becoming cool? Does going to bars make us cool? (Don’t get me wrong, I like bars fine, particularly with bands.) And why don’t I feel as cool as this article outlines? I’m young, have immersed myself in technology, my husband is in a band – I even have a nose-ring! I guess it’s that state of mind thing…
Altogether it’s cool that librarians are getting recognition. It underscores the fact that trained people are not obsolete in this technological, library or web 2.0 world – and the more the world at large sees that, the better. (And librarians need to look at the world of information in the larger sense – and I think they are working toward that.) But I would argue that librarians have been cool for some time.
Posted in librarians
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Tagged nytimes, work
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My brother and I went for a nice walk/jog on Saturday and got ourselves motivated to get in gear for a 5K. So we signed up for Silks & Satins in Saratoga Springs in late July – just enough time to use Runner’s World’s “5 Weeks To Your First 5-K” guide in their July 2007 issue.
Pete writes about it on his journal – hey Petesy, where’s your log of walking/running you talked about putting up? I did mine – so now you have extra pressure. (Loving your blog btw)
Besides being a mouthful to say – I’m curious to explore this site (which I haven’t fully). I must say I like how it is structured lesson-wise – something that, in my experience, can be very difficult to present in a manner that is quickly meaningful to students. There are two main tracks: Web Development and Windows Development, which are further broken down into Tiers 1-3 (depending on student initial experience) and has various lessons within those tiers. The lessons allow students to either read the them online or print them as a PDF.
Check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/beginner/default.aspx – I know I’ll be researching it further.
Fascinating web site called techPresident (http://www.techpresident.com/). It’s a great example of pulling different web technologies together in order to present a view of how candidates are doing in the world of the Web.
techPresident scrapes how many friends each candidate has at his or her MySpace page, shows Flickr photos relating to the race and investigates how politicos are using the technology.
I had been reading about Yahoo Pipes in at least a cursory manner at the O’Reilly Radar blog (highly recommended for those interested in the newest web tech talk – http://radar.oreilly.com/ ). Well I decided to explore them today, especially since they involve using RSS feeds.
So I got myself a Yahoo profile and visited the beta Yahoo! Pipes™ (http://pipes.yahoo.com/) site. I then cloned one pipe someone created that pulled all 20 official Yahoo! blogs and sorted the entries by date. I turned it into a pipe that pulls about 1/2 dozen library-related blogs (from my own set of Firefox Live bookmarks aka syndication feeds) and sorts them by date – I added the extra filter of limiting them to the 10 most recent items from the blogs (so it doesn’t appear overwhelming). My Pipe can be viewed at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ds67iHm72xGKkszYe_gC8A. Take a look around at some of the neat pipes created, many interact with Flickr and other web services, making for some fascinating compilations of pieces of information from throughout the Web.
Update: I’ve been tweaking the pipe I created of various library blogs and have discovered that because they use different feed types (various flavors of RSS, Atom, etc) the variable for publication date is not universal. So now I’m creating a hierarchy and unioning all of the different feeds together. I’m sure there’s a more elegant answer, but I want to pull just the two most recent posts from each blog. to be continued…
