I Thunked about ThinkFreeOffice

A Recipe for Butterfly Cakes


Preparation Time
30 minutes

Cooking Time
25 minutes

Makes
18

Ingredients

* 250g butter, at room temperature
* 330g (1 1/2 cups) caster sugar
* 2 tsp vanilla essence
* 4 eggs, at room temperature
* 450g (3 cups) self-raising flour, sifted
* 250ml (1 cup) milk
* 100g (1/2 cup) raw caster sugar
* 80ml (1/3 cup) water
* 125g unsalted butter, at room temperature
* 315g (1 cup) raspberry jam


Method

Preheat oven to 180°C.

You will need 18 paper cup-cake cases.


Beat the butter, sugar and vanilla essence in a large bowl until very pale and creamy. Add the eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition, until combined. Use a large metal spoon to gently fold in half the flour alternately with half the milk, until well combined. Repeat with remaining flour and milk.


Spoon the mixture evenly into the paper cases. Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centres comes out clean. Place on a wire rack to cool.


Meanwhile, combine sugar and water in a saucepan, and stir over medium-low heat until the sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and set aside for 20 minutes to cool to room temperature. Use an electric beater to beat the butter in a small bowl until white and creamy. Add the sugar syrup in a thin, steady stream and beat until well combined.


Use a sharp knife to cut a shallow V-shaped piece out of the top of each cake, about 1.5cm deep, leaving a 2cm-wide edge. Cut the piece of cake in half crossways to form 2 semicircles. Fill centre of each cake with 21/2 tsp of raspberry jam. Arrange 2 semicircles of cake in jam. Place mock cream into a clean piping bag fitted with a 1.5cm diameter fluted nozzle and pipe down centre between the "wings" on each cake.

Enjoy.

Which is more than I did ThinkFreeOffice. Lord above!! It's so *slow* & *clunky*.
I loaded up a macaroni cheese recipe from "My Documents" & shared it with another 23 Thinger but decided that life is too short & am returning forthwith to Google Document.

Google Document builds spreadsheets for you from your questionaire answers - I'm in *love*

Goggling at GoogleDoc.

Intuitive & easy to use. I've shared a document & made a Form





And I also made a Presentation






Scarily, I remember corporate mainframes *&* dumb terminals. When I first started working on-line the mainframe inhabited its own *floor* of the building - does this make me a candidate for display in a museum? :) (Don't answer that:))

Just a Quickie Wiki

Did some OULS hunting on the Oxford Web 2.0 Wiki & edited this article from OULS to Bodleian Libraries. very easy to do & I liked using my Twitter access rather than having to gain *yet another* usename/password.

Wicked Wiki

I've had a look at the Oxford web 2.0 wiki & it's interesting to see what's on there, particularly which social networks Oxford libraries are maintaining a presence on. Haven't seen a page that I would want to edit yet but will carry on exploring.

I'm already a fan of Wikipedia & it's one of the gadgets that I've put on my I-Google page. I find it particularly useful for interpreting internet slang for example "lol" or "Rickrolling". It's thanks to Wikipedia that I know that "Rickrolling" is a "viral internet meme" :) It's important to always remember that Wikipedia is user created & I would not use a Wikipedia entry as a source for anything I was writing without verifying the information elsewhere. I appreciate that there have been some awful examples of false entries but, interestingly, the current "scandal" concerning the French president & his wife is alleged to have been started by a young journalist who was interested to see whether he could create a news story by starting a rumour on *Twitter* - so there you go. Having worked in newspapers for years I have tattooed on my heart the number one rule for all research - *check your sources*

Above, you can see (tho you'll probably need a magnifying glass:)) a Wikipedia page for the novelist & short story writer Liam O'Flaherty. I've just added 3 further book titles to the information.

The Blue Fox by Sjón

The Blue Fox by Sjón, translated by Victoria Cribb - Times Online

This is *absolutely* the best book I've read this year (yes I know it's only March) so I'm sharing it with you but also demonstrating the joys of picking something up in Twitter & then saving it to my Delicious list on I-Google (that's the link above to the book review in The Times) - ooo00, I've *really* revised my ideas about Delicious - *loving* it now :)

Tweet Tweet

I already had a Twitter account so I could follow Yoko Ono - as you do - but hadn't used it very much. Have found it to be radically improved since I used it last, in fact I think it's great. Best thing is that the posted links work now, they were very unreliable before. Still exploring finding Tweets to follow, which still seems a bit obscure. A bit unsure about hashtags as yet
I've had a lovely time customizing my background so have included a screenshot for your delight. I've tweeted to #ox23 & I've gained a follower, I've also Retweeted a lovely Yoko Ono quote.
A definite plus, meaning that I will use Twitter a lot more than previously, is having the Twitter gadget on my I-Google page meaning I can see updates without having to log into a website.
Now off to find lots of other exciting Tweets to follow & to start a conversation.

Springtime pic. & Delicious hits the spot !

Here are some sunny spring flowers because I've gone on too long on this blog without a picture.
Also, I hearby confess that..... *I've decided I quite like Delicious* !!! Having found the Delicious tool for I-Google & discovering that Delicious is one of the few article savers that "Le Figaro's" website will accept, I can now have all my lovely Paris articles to hand whenever I need a bit of cheering up :) "Les toutes dernières boutiques gourmandes de Paris" does it for me everytime :)

Here's the link, beware, it'll make you hungry :)

http://www.lefigaro.fr/sortir-paris/2009/12/09/03013-20091209ARTFIG00004-les-toutes-dernieres-boutiques-gourmandes-de-paris-.php

Linking with LinkedIn

I've joined LinkedIn & had a good look at it. I was alarmed to discover that, unless you actively make your profile private, everything you put on this site can be Googled. I am very wary of placing personal information on the Web & I would have liked to have had it made very clear at joining that this would be the case unless I actively disabled the function.
LinkedIn is obviously a networking tool for professionals, very oriented towards the United States, & not something that I would use myself. I didn't find it particularly easy to navigate but I can see that the networking groups would be useful for librarians working at the level where world exchange of ideas is necessary & useful eg. the groups concerned with developing E-books.
It would seem to me that the audiences for this & Facebook are very different & that LinkedIn is aimed very much at professional to professional contact rather than aiming for a user audience.
My view as we go on with "23 Things" is that the multiplicity of inofrmation exchange points is ultimately self-defeating. Either you keep every single link valid & up to date or you lose users of links which aren't kept current & you then move into the realm of where on earth the time comes from to do all this updating.
Even scribbling this Blog during the busiest weeks of term has been difficult enough for me.
Also, it seems to me (from the little I know) that information provision is moving more & more towards "Apps" on portable devices (eg. I-phones) & that libraries should be moving more towards creating & providing their own "Apps".
Case in point: were there to be bad weather & a need to inform users of altered opening times, posting a message to, for example, a Bodleian "App." rather than to Delicious, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, E-mails, Web-site etc. etc. would seem to be the simplest, most straightforward thing to do.

Facial expressions, happy or sad?

I really don't like Facebook. I did have an account & got so fed up with the whittering & triva- frankly, I don't *care* if you're doing the ironing- coupled with the weird e-mails I started getting from people claiming to be "followers" that I de-activated it. Big plus about this week's "Thing" is that I can do it without having to rejoin.
I've been very good & looked solemnly at good library sites on Facebook - & very nice some of them are (Folger Shakespeare Library, New York Public Library)& thought hard about a plus for a library presence.
My feeling is that Facebook is too much of a social site for serious library presences. Excellent as the above mentioned are, the profiles should be available on the library web-site without having to go through the Facebook channel to find them. Also, "fan" figures suggest that the percentage of people following the Facebook profiles are not high.
Folger Shakespeare Library only has 2038 "Fans", Yale University Library 1,225 & New York Public Library 12,621. These may seem like a lot but these are American sites of very high profile libraries & I would expect figures to be much higher.
In an Oxford context, the student number figures for 2008 were 19,002 full time & 1,328 part time undergraduates & post-graduates. There are currently only 172 "fans" of the Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book & 176 "fans" of the Bodleian Law Library pages on Facebook.
So, yes to Facebook as a great tool for people to keep in touch with loved ones worldwide, a big fat *no* to updates about your life every 10 seconds (hello to a nameless relative of mine :)) and no to Facebook as a primary engagement tool with library users. Too much work for too little return when resources could be aimed at developing a really stunning library website.