Tuesday, September 15, 2009

#12 ROLLYO

My adventure with Rollyo got off to a slow start. The podcast did not work. When I searched the linked searchrolls, only two of them interested me. At Books in a Series I typed in Hannah Arendt, but got nothing. Then I entered The Hardy Boys and was provided some links.







At Readers' Advisory I had a good experience. I entered Sacramento Public Library, then was given a list of links. The link I was impressed with is www.yelp.com/c/sacramento/libraries. A list of local libraries is provided. The searcher may rate local libraries.







When I went to Rollyo, I forgot that the user is to enter a short address for the blogs to be used in one's search engine. I found some great sites, but they have long addresses. When I entered the long addresses into Rollyo, it deleted most of the information to the right of the slash mark.







The addresses that remained did not provide links to the addresses I liked.







I chose baseball. A book I read a long time ago is at www.indiebound.org/book/0195059131. The title is Baseball: The Golden Age by Harold Seymour. It can be purchased through links at the site.





My favorite baseball site is about Curt Flood. The address is: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~class/am483_97/projects/brady/flood.html.






The Walker

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

A Break from 27 Things

Hi Everyone: I have been reading about the Spanish exploration and settlement of California. I'm reading translations of original documents.







A diary entry I enjoyed was written by Fray Juan Crespi while he travelled with Gaspar de Portola in 1769. Two descriptions of the same event are contained in two of Crespi's revisions to his diary. The revised descriptions can be read at http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/hnn/crespi.html.







Below is an excerpt of the description from Crespi's first revision. Following it is an excerpt from a later revision.



"We went the whole way over dark friable very level soil, very much clad with very





fine grazing and very large clumps of very tall broad grasses, burnt off in some spots



and not in others; the unburnt [grasses] were so tall that they topped us on



horseback by about a yard. All about are very large tablelands with very large tall



live oaks- I have never seen larger- and a great many sycamores as well. We have





come upon such vast quantities of rose bushes that in many spots the levels were full





of them here. We went two good leagues across this soil, which is so good it cannot be





bettered. On going the two leagues we came to this spot, so fine and pleasant a one





that it is the best of all that we have come across."





Here is the second revision: "...over the same level, all of it very dark friable soil and very





grown over with very tall broad grasses. It had been burnt off in some spots and not





so in others; the unburnt [grasses] were so tall that they topped us on horseback by





about a yard. We then started over talbelands, equally grass-grown and very much





grown over with a great many large live oaks. On the plains here are so many rose





bushes that in some spots nothing was to be seen but grass and roses. On going two





hours over level land, we came to the watering place, a populous town where there is





a large inlet that, viewed from afar, seems a lake, and has good fresh water; here we





made camp, and it was a two leagues' march."





It seems that in the first revision, Crespi writes fast and passionately. In the second revision he seems to write fast because he is in a hurry, or wants to be read quickly and easily.





The second revision lacks the poetry or sense of urgency of the first. The later revision reminds me that the Illiad is not as powerful when told in prose.





If you go to the site I entered above, do not expect to find Crespi's complete diary. One of the frustrating things about the web is that many works are only partially available.





The Walker

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Hi Everybody: This is step 11 for '27 Things'. Doing this step was the easiest task for me so far. I am not really enthusiastic about 'LibraryThing', so rather than state what I am reading, I put five titles by Mark Twain in a catalog and gave them tags.



The titles in my catalog that I have read are The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In high school I read Puddin'head Wilson and loved it. I did not think of the last book until now, so it isn't in my catalog.



The widget I used was 'animated'. Here is my address: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/thewalker

The Walker

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Hi Everybody: This took forever for me to figure out. Ann Owens gave me my final instructions.





This is a gif image that I loaded to the desktop at a telis computer.





To place your image from the desktop to your blog, start a new blog post. Then click the photo icon next to the spell check icon. When the new page comes up, click browse. Choose your image from the menu. On the next screen, choose what size you want your image to be and what side of the page you want the image to be on. Click upload. Then click done.


Yeah!



The Walker

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Library Blogs

Today I am working on exercise 9- Library Blogs.



First I went to Library Garden http://librarygarden.blogspot.com/. There is a list of other blogs. The thirteen blogs I linked to did not interest me. The 14th did. It is Blog on the Side by Darlene Fichter. I like the photograph of birds.



On the right is a list of posts called Top Posts - PostRank. I linked to '10.0 Show and Tell: 3 Web Design Misconceptions by Luke Wroblewski'. He wrote four pages of explanation, then added four pages of comments.



His blog is very professional.



The Walker

Monday, June 15, 2009

Gathering Information

Lately I have been working on RSS feeds. I opened a reader subscription with my e-mail.











There are two sites I subscribe to. One is 'Our Surprising World'. The other is 'The Washington Oculus'. The web addresses are too long to put here.











'Our Surprising World' shows photographs of architecture and sculpture from the Pacific Rim and Indian Ocean. 'The Washington Oculus' posts photographs of skyscrapers in American cities.











I saw no photographs of Sacramento's buildings. Then I left the reader page and went to Google. I entered 'City of Trees' and 'Renaissance Tower Sacramento'. The list for 'City of Trees' contained a lot of sites for cities other than Sacramento. One of the cities is Boise.







The site about Sacramento I liked was http://www.pbase.com/quest21/sacramento. There are photographs of the Capitol and of the city's skyline. The Renaissance Tower is included in some of the photographs.





At SkyscraperPage.com are thumbnail sketches of skyscrapers. The Renaissance Tower was constructed in 1989. It has 28 floors.





A lot of people do not like the Renaissance Tower. They call it the Darth Vader Building. I think the building looks great from far away, but not up close. It does not have interesting light play, and there is no setback to the building.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Natural Light at Work

This post discusses a report about office lighting printed in the Bee's Sunday Business section on April 26, 2009.



The author, Jim Downing, interviewed Michael Siminovitch, Director of the California Lighting Technology Center at UC Davis.



Mr. Siminovitch talked about current indoor lighting and the future of indoor lighting. He said that buildings (I assume he means new buildings) do a good job of using sunlight to light buildings. However, he also said that "We do a terrible job of what's called 'daylight harvesting'."



Daylight harvesting is a procedure that reduces the use of electrical lighting as daylight increases. When this procedure is used, the amount of glare in an office is reduced.



Siminovitch predicts that offices will be lit to the specifications of the office user. Not only will a light come on when someone enters, as in some offices now, the light will be a type of light that makes you feel comfortable and allows you to be your most productive.

Mr. Siminovitch claims that in 25 years, lighting systems might not be visible. He states that when one enters their home, a path might light up and the walls of a room might light up. He says, "Well, it could be that the wall pane, the wall surface itself becomes a conductive membrane which actually glows."