Thing #23 Drum roll, please ...

I'm at the finish!  

Although I am a slow starter, once I got going, 23 things really pulled me along.  I like the way it is set up.  Had I gone through it with the group last summer, the experience might have been enhanced, but I rather liked doing it on my own.  I did periodically check out other completed blogs to see what other people had thought about various "things."  Interesting how differently each person reacts, with opinions ranging from "love it" to "hate it" to "yawn."  

I would definitely participate in a similar program, although I might wish for one that was a little shorter: a dozen things?  Yes, I know that there is that 43 things list ...

As with everything, there were the good, the bad and the ugly.  Let's focus on the good, shall we?

Flickr is ok, Librarything is ok (I can see that it's fabulous for hard core bibliophiles).  I really liked Rollyo and Del.icio.us.  I will use them and promote their use.

I enjoyed the learning, and particularly learning that my belief that my ability to learn was still intact, was not unwarranted.  (How's that for a murky sentence?)  A little creaky, a little flaky at the edges, but intact.

Thanks for the run; could we do just a 5K next time?  ;-)

Thing #22 Audiobooks

Since our library has Overdrive, I looked at that first.  In watching the tutorial, I became alarmed that it might not be available for Mac users, but in going to Maryland's Digital eLibrary Consortium, I was pleased to see "Announcing OverDrive Media Console for Mac!"  Apparently the tutorial was created a while back and the Mac development is quite recent.

I also discovered that there are now titles, both audio and video, that are always available!

No limit on the number of copies.  How cool is that.  I guess they may be ones in the public domain?

I checked out Project Gutenberg and thought the computer generated audiobooks quite odd.  That technology is miraculous for those who cannot speak but not appealing to one who loves words, written and spoken aloud.

What really drew me in, or perhaps sent me off, were the links  to LiteralSystems.org and Librivox.org.  They're looking for volunteers to proofread and also to read/record, and of course, donations to keep going in the quest to make everything in the public domain available to everyone.

As someone who loves to be read aloud to, (I used to show up in my sons' third grade classrooms when Mr. Jeff came to read), I love audiobooks.