Thing 1: Introduction to '23 research things'; Thing 2: Getting your blog started

This blog of mine was begun in 2010, when I took part in the Cambridge librarians' 23 things programme.  So in using it for my coursework in the 2016 '23 research things' programme, I'm taking it back to its roots.

What do I hope to get out of participation in '23 research things'? Not a nostalgic wallow in the joys of the first time round.  Firstness can never be recreated, by definition.  Instead, my hopes are these:

• to update my knowledge of things I tried in 2010 and didn't adopt
• to get a fresh perspective and fuller understanding of things I've used, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, since 2010
• to expand my knowledge of things I really ought to have adopted by now, and make myself more useful

In 2011, a second Cambridge series of  '23 things' was aimed mainly at people who'd not done such a thing before, but some extra posts were included for participants who were veterans of the 2010 round.  I confined myself to those extras.  Time will tell whether, in 2016, I follow the entire course, or blog only about those things that are new to me.

Blogging reflectively will be quite an exercise.  I managed it in 2010 and 2011.  But my most reflective writing since then has been in the log I keep for my MCLIP revalidation, and that is not public.

Wish me luck in this balancing exercise!

Thing 1: iGoogle

I made iGoogle my home page, both on the home computer and at work. I can't report quite the degree of physical pain that Sarah found from carrying out the same operation, but perhaps that reflects lesser experience and lower expectations on my part. I was unable to add the Uni's front page or the log-in page for my bank. So far as I could tell, I was following the same procedure for those resources as for the ones I did succeed in adding, but maybe I was being hasty or had ignored some important difference between resource and resource.

It's fair to say that iGoogle has not yet given me the sense of liberation, of "Why didn't I do this earlier?", that I've had from other applications. I remember when I first took to using email and MS Word, back in 1991-1992. A couple of years earlier, I had struggled with learning to drive (a renewed attempt this year reminded me how completely I lack any aptitude in that direction); my driving instructor, 8 years my senior, had been amazed to find that I was younger than he was; the experience had left me fearing that premature middle age was making me unteachable. But when the Haddon joined the Union Catalogue, and all the other applications came sweeping in, I found I took to these new skills as a duck to water. The spinning of disks was associated in my mind with the spinning of the wheels on the larger, lighter pushbike I graduated to at the same time.

And I have had other computer liberations since then, such as the discovery of TransportDirect and the late lamented Mosuki calendar in 2006 (thanks to Phil Bradley for those), and last year's discovery of Twitter. iGoogle hasn't done that for me yet. But I was on Twitter for a couple of months before it came to life for me. How was it for you?