ADD, OCD, the Internet, and Nerd Passions

[naturegeek]

I am more ADD than usual today. I need extra arms to try to do all the things I am trying to do at once. I need to make several clones of myself. Maybe one of them should be the responsible one and do the stuff that needs doing that is not getting done while I'm off on all my tangents.

Birdwalks. That's what someone once called those - you know how birds sort of walk in loopy circles? Yeah, that's the way my mind works.

I have so many links to share, it's impossible - and when I start looking them up to post them here, I'll get sidetracked and start a dozen other things before I remember that I was writing a blog post...

I think that's why I love ellipses so much. Ellipses are the punctuation equivalent of what's going on in my brain, like, "wait, I just thought of something else... brb" hours later I may return to complete the thought. Or start a new one.

I even have an ADD Cheer:

Give me an "A"!!!

Give me a "D"!!!!

Give me a - LOOK! A SQUIRREL!!!!!!! [runs off chasing squirrel]

So, here is where I'm going to share my latest bird walks, rabbit holes, tangents, fractal descents toward getting completely lost in the internet... at least the ones I find so rapidly upon finding others that I don't have time to make up a topic for a separate blog post about them.

Please feel free to share your favorites here as well!!

This is what prompted me - I laughed so hard!
http://www.coudal.com/regrets.php
BTW, I ~am~ a birdwatcher :) I'm a nerd birdwatcher, too - I made this website about birdwatching for my XHTML/CSS class (all hand-coded - yeah baby!).
I found that (funny video) from looking up fieldnotes brand notebooks, which I found out about from reading randsinrepose, whose blog is awesome (and maybe I should call this NADD instead of ADD), who I found out about when Zeintz posted a link to his Nerd Handbook a while back, and who, when I checked out his Twitter page, had linked to Lucy and Bart, who are amazing...

Before that I was on a TED safari - TED Talks are great - more than great - amazing!! Inspiring. "Ideas Worth Spreading" indeed.

What led to that was a post by Mel, "Is Dumb the New Smart?" which got me started - uh, today, anyway!

Nerdfighters have been the stimulus for quite a few of these expeditions into wonder and amazement, actually! Thanks so much, to all of you!

So how about it? What's your obsession du jour? What has distracted your attention lately? What wonderful things have you "wasted" your time with? What have you been learning that is awesome? What are you passionate about? What has made you laugh? What has inspired you? Piqued your curiosity and sent you off on a quest? Recently (or not - whenever, whatever you think of is okay!)

[naturegeek]

Okay, this isn't exactly nerdy, but it's fun!! Now you can really MEAN it when you say More Cowbell!!! http://www.morecowbell.dj/

[Evangeline]

PS I had wanted my Tshirt to say "Frodo lives!", but alas, not enough room. ;)

[Evangeline]

Lots of good stuff to catch up on, as always NG.
DH had emailed me about the Face your Manga thingy awhile ago, and we all made them. Here's mine:

Not an astounding resemblance, but fun to do.

[naturegeek]

oops... that should have been "And Another" for the title - doh!!

[naturegeek]

An Another: Social Bookmarking

And speaking of diversions... I've been trying out social bookmarking sites - my current favorite is Diigo, but they just did a major back end upgrade and are not fully functioning quite yet - so wait a couple days and check them out. You can highlight and annotate web pages - great for research, or just sharing or saving the good bits!

Here's me:
http://www.diigo.com/user/naturegeek

I'm also on Delicious and Magnolia, but with mostly the same bookmarks. Some more on Delicious, because I imported my browser bookmarks and have been slowly sorting through all the teaching, science and environmental education sites to see which ones are worth saving and which ones are defunct, etc.

There's also StumbleUpon, which is a great source of surprises and great new sites, but my surfing tends to be more purpose-driven these days.

If you don't do it, you may wonder, "why social bookmarking"?

At first I saw it as a way to back up my bookmarks and have access to them from any browser or computer. Which is enough reason to use online bookmarking in itself, but doesn't explain the "social" part of it. More on that later. I tend to switch between two different browsers: Safari and Firefox. Each are good for different things - I love all the add-ons that Firefox has, but sometimes they slow it down, and so I use Safari as my default browser for when I click links in email or on Twitter or the like. I can have lots of tabs open in Safari and it doesn't slow it down. If I want to examine a page more closely, or use an add-on, or save it, I open it in Firefox. Also, I tend to use Firefox for my classes and for Web Design stuff, since I can use the Web Developer Toolbar and Firefox works better with the Moodle course management software my college uses. So anyway, I could never keep track of which browser I'd saved stuff in, so online bookmarking made all kinds of sense! Especially since, in Firefox I can view my online bookmarks in the sidebar.

Another reason is organization - once you have many (too many) bookmarks on your browser (on your computer), it gets harder to remember where you saved them - I have folders, and folders in folders, etc, which works to a point, but gets too clunky and overloaded after a while. With online bookmarking, you use tags to organize your bookmarks - or rather, the tags you add to your bookmarks help them to organize themselves! It becomes much easier to find the pages you saved this way. PLUS, they have other ways you can organize your tagged bookmarks - in Diigo, you can manually create lists, and when you bookmark a new page, regardless of what tags you use, you can add it to a specific list. In Delicious, you can create "bundles" for your tags, for example, you can put the tag "HTML" into the Web Design bundle, and all bookmarks you tag with anything you've said goes in that bundle will automatically show up in that bundle. Both systems (automatic tag bundles and manual lists) have their advantages. I think I like the lists on Diigo better, though, because of the control you have over what you want in the list.

Now for the social part! You can find (or invite) friends to share bookmarks - I'm in a group of web design students and teachers at my college and we share useful links to the group. You can make a "group" of two, and you can make it private, so if you want to just share and keep track of bookmarks with one other person, that works, too. You can find like-minded people who save bookmarks that you may not have found on your own - there are various ways to do this on these sites, but that part is definitely a great source of new places to surf, new things to learn, new amusements, and new insights.

You could do a search on YouTube on "social bookmarking" and find some great videos explaining the phenomenon, if you want to know more!

Enjoy!

[naturegeek]

New, Slightly less brainy, Diversions: Avatar Makers!!

So now that I'm on every social network there is (okay, exaggerating just a bit), I have had fun making different avatars. I already shared the Lego Mini-Mizers from Reasonably Clever, which are fun (see my mini-naturegeeks in my little box of fun on my page), but here are a few more:

Hero Machine - not technically an avatar maker, but I had fun making one and then did a screen shot and cropped the head part for an avatar (from JeninLB)

Face your Manga - Anime/Manga-style Avatar Maker (it's all the rage on Twitter right now) Here's mine (and yes, I realize that's not a peace sign - hehe):


Mii - online Mii-maker (Mii is for the Wii, but I don't have a Wii... :)

Have fun!

[naturegeek]

Deb, Tom Lehrer was big in the 60's! I am not sure when he wrote the elements song, though. There is very little Tom Lehrer on the internet - he was pretty much pre-web for most of his career. One of the pages calls Roy Zimmerman, who I learned about from Mel, the new Tom Lehrer, and I have to say that's a good call! If you haven't, check out Roy Zimmerman on YouTube! Great stuff.

[serenity]

yay for nerd music!!!

[Deb S]

Where was this song when I took Chemistry!? Don't say it. I took Chemistry in the Sixties! But I've always said I/we could memorize anything if it was put to music. Now I'll go back and click on some of the links. Yay!

[super librarian]

great song! my husband knew who it was and also what song. he is a musician and a nerd