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

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

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!

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.

In the spirit of this personal branding – here’s an interesting entry on the NYTime’s Shifting Careers blog from last November http://shiftingcareers.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/while-were-talking-about-branding/

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.

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)

Check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/beginner/default.aspx – I know I’ll be researching it further.

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.

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…