Thursday, August 30, 2007

Barcelona, eh?

For whatever reason, I decided to look at the OpenOffice.org website to see if they ran any conferences or training sessions that I could somehow talk the library into letting me go to ;-) I don't think I know enough about OO, but it's such a frustrating (and boring) thing to just sit down and read help files, discussion boards or wikis. Anyway, they're having some crazy conference in Barcelona, Spain. ahha, Who thinks HCL will send me?!

I need to start using OpenOffice Write more often. I never have much of an occasion to use it, so I don't get a lot of experience with it. I used Calc a lot recently while playing with some hourly call statistics we've been keeping to figure out how to staff the call desks, and that was helpful. Certain things in OO are just different enough from the Microsoft programs to throw me off for a minute, but I'm stubborn, so I have to sit there and figure it out before I let myself do anything else.

Another note on technology - I have Ubuntu on my laptop, and for a while I was just sort of skating along, using it as I'd use any other operating system. But now I'm getting a little more adventurous and figuring out how to do things. This is the perfect reason for me to start researching Linux and figuring out how things work because I have the ability to change things - to learn while doing - which is a good thing for me. It's one of those challenges that's so much fun to overcome. I installed a program called Wine on my laptop today (it's a program for Ubuntu that lets you run some Windows programs). It took me what felt like a year to figure it out, and even though it didn't help me run the program I was trying to run (haha, failure!), I was still proud that I figured out how to do it in the first place.

I like to teach. Teach myself, teach other people.... it doesn't matter. I think that's maybe the most fulfilling of the seven and a half habits for me.

I don't like RSS feeds, however. For other people, they're great... but I don't have much use for them. I don't read many blogs except the ones on my friend's page in Livejournal, I don't keep up with news all that regularly... I'm just one of the few who doesn't feel like they're wading through a sea of information and need a easy way to sift through it all before they can absorb anything. I'm swimming in all of this information all the time - I'm on the internet more than I sleep, I have plenty of time to read everything I need/want to read (even if every piece of information is on a different website).

Meh. I didn't know about MERLIN, though. That's pretty sweet. Maybe I'll have some blogs to add to my bloglines account now... ?

1 comment:

Jeanie Pfefferkorn said...

Hey, Rachel,
If you need a tourguide for your trip to Barcelona, I'll brush off my Spanish. When do we leave?
Jeanie