Kimbooktu visits Las Vegas!

One of my favorite bloggers is kimbooktu. A couple of weeks ago she visited Las Vegas and discovered the wonderful Reading Room. It's a great bookstore at the Mandalay Bay.

Nevada Library Association

I will be giving a presentation at the Nevada Library Association in Carson City on October 4, 2007. I am part of a panel and my section is on "Access Denied: Government Web Sites: the disappearing act?" I will be putting up my presentation on this blogsite after the conference.

Carson City is a great town. There are about 50,000 residents but every other year the legislature meets and the population swells. Many of the houses in Carson City are Victorian and have been kept up. Fall is a lovely time to visit as the leaves are turning and there's a crispness in the air. It's a nice place to take long walks.

UPDATE: Here is the link to my powerpoint: http://kendallpapers.pbwiki.com

Spring Mountain Ranch

About 30 minutes from Las Vegas is the state park of Spring Mountain Ranch. During the summer, the Ranch offers outdoor theater. We went to see Jesus Christ Superstar. It was a great production. The only thing that marred total enjoyment were 3 teens next to me. They talked the entire performance -- yes, they talked 90 minutes straight. You would have thought they would stop talking during the crucifixion scene. Oh no, they just kept talking away. I was going to ask them not to talk, but decided that they would have kept on and just made it more miserable for me. Fortunately the sound system was loud enough to keep their talk at the buzzing level.

New fangled thing in Vegas

I know this is really lame. But at the District -- a nice shopping / restaurant area in Green Valley Ranch area, they now have solar powered trash compactors. This picture was taken from a camera phone.

Spamalot in Las Vegas

IMG_7190.JPG
Originally uploaded by FroggyMonkey.

Enjoyed Spamalot in Las Vegas at the Wynn Resort. John O'Hurley was the star and was great. The cast was terrific and the play is Monty Python silliness. We all laughed a lot. The Theater at the Wynn was very comfortable and seemed as if there were no bad views.

Number 14 update on Technorati

Well, I looked at Technorati -- again. I can see the point of tagging, but so many inconsistencies. The lack of a thesaurus really causes many items not to get the same tag. I tried Learning2.0 on all 3 types of search, it was interesting to see the "by the hour" that a person had posted. And I searched other subjects. One thing was the ability to pull up blogs in other languages. That was easy to do.

Number 23 - Thoughts

1. What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
I liked playing around with the image generators. I always wondered how those things were done.
2. How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
But for work, the google word processor was a find. I was thinking of articles that I've done at work and then at home and wished I had saved it to a disk or attached to email, so I can work on it. The google thing would really help in productivity.
3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
Some of the sites were not user friendly, but then again, they were free. Once I was able to work out the glitches, I felt rather empowered.
4. What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
Maybe an "L2 lite" with a few key exercises? I am doing these from home and using a dsl line. Sometimes the connection is very slow which is frustrating.
And last but not least…

5. If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate
Yes -- you can read and read about all of the new technologies, but until you actually do it, you really have no idea of the accomplishments that these programs can do.