Thursday, July 17, 2008

A Day in the Life #4

Before I get rolling on my day today, let me say that I FINALLY made it to an episode of Uncontrolled Vocabulary last night. I've been wanting to dial in and be a part of this live podcast done by Greg Schwartz using TalkShoe, but 10pm is pretty late for me. I really enjoyed it, but I don't know if I'll be able to do it again. I usually listen to the archived podcast of the show. I stayed pretty quiet; in fact, I didn't really do much more than introduce myself. I was hoping to just sneak in and mute my phone, but Greg caught me and I got pulled in. It's pretty heady dialog for me, but I learn so much from it just by listening.

So, today - Thursday - Day 4 - has been pretty exciting. I did my first official screencast today because so many people are having trouble with logging in to our intranet wiki called LILLY. You can see what I did here. I had Jing bookmarked as something to try and I finally downloaded it today. My only gripe is that I had to install Microsoft's .NET frameword for it to work, but it works so easily. I had it done within 20 minutes after download. Their blog has great how-tos with videos of it all (of course). I still don't think I'd use something like this for official online tutorials to put on our OPAC or anything like that, but for quick and dirty stuff it was great.

Got caught up on email and finally devised a system to keep track of sites I want to review and videos I need to catch up on, archived webcasts etc. Tried tagging in del.icio.us as dowhentime, but never got around to it. So I started sending myself emails with the links, but they were just piling up in my inbox. So I created 3 folders in Outlook (since I don't use gmail for my work email, bummer, love the labels in gmail)- "Links to listen or watch when time" (which means over my lunch hour), "Links to look at when time" and "Links-suff to blog". Whew, that cleaned up my inbox as it was all very confusing. I use very detailed subject headings on these to help me know what's what. This really seems to be working well.

After that I received word from WebJunction that my ppt for tomorrow's webinar had been loaded and polls added where I wanted them. So, we're ready to roll. I'm a little nervous about the start of tomorrow's web conference. I used to do these all of the time at my last job with Spectra Marketing, but that was almost 5 years ago now. Wimba is really easy to use so I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about getting everyone in to the conference. I remember that was always the hardest part. If they haven't run the test wizard; if this is their first webinar; if they aren't real tech savvy; don't have admin rights, etc it can get kind of hairy. I'll let you know how it goes.

Worked on my new "Links.." folders in Outlook over my lunch hour as I couldn't go home for lunch yet again today. Hubby and daughter off to a playdate at the Choo Choo Barn today. Again, severe jealousy! My husband and I had one of our very first dates there. I knew I would marry him when he leaned in for a kiss as the lights went out and the mini train display mimicked evening with twinkling Christmas lights on the ceiling as stars. Come on, it doesn't get more romantic than that, right? LOL

Next I got cracking on the survey that needed to be finished today in surveymonkey. Got it done. Then I had a request to help someone create a complex list in our ILS system, Millennium, using the Create Lists mode. That ended up taking almost 2 hours, so here I am at the end of the day. Until tomorrow...

2 comments:

Greg Schwartz said...

You bring up something that had never occurred to me: That someone might call in on their cell phone only for the purpose of listening to the show live. I guess it's the way that TalkShoe labels callers as participants that had me thinking narrowly. Now I know to be a little more aware of that and perhaps ask new callers first. Thanks for the taking the time to write about it.

Stephanie Zimmerman said...

I really enjoyed the show Greg. It was a whole different feel being a part of it "live". Although I didn't say much, I was glad for the opportunity to be a part of it! Keep up the great work.