Here was the Mastodon thread of what I read last year and here’s my 2024 booklist. This is the thread of the books I am reading this year. This was a slightly challenging year of navigating some health stuff (which has been working out well; nothing serious just getting some age-appropriate attention) which meant a LOT of reading. I didn’t mind it but I might have liked being out doing more other things. Most of the non-fiction I read was graphic novels (my library tends to like “graphic memoir” formats). I started 137 books and finished 135. I finally managed to read a majority of female and non-binary authors. I tried to get ChatGPT to tell me how many pages I’d read in 2024 and it could not, so I’ll just say it felt like a lot!
Totally a homebody this year; seventy library visits and most of them within a half mile of my house. I liked working at my library. I didn’t feel the need to go to other libraries with my free time. Amusing side note, I use Daytum to track my library visits and I have a display that show’s “this year’s” visits. However, I didn’t change the display over LAST year and somehow didn’t really notice (I mostly just add visits, don’t look at the pie chart). All fixed now!
Kimball (67) – I worked here nearly every week and did a few sub shifts.
Rochester (1) – I did one drop-in shift here just like last time.
Kilton/Lebanon NH (1) – Parked here and took a hike out behind it, there are some neat trails.
Hartness/Randolph (1) – I continue to think that I should go by this place more often, it’s such a nice library.
I got an ISSN for no real reason. Richard pointed out on Mastodon that you can get an ISSN for a blog as long as it’s not a personal blog. I have a personal blog and it’s not this one. So I got an ISSN for this, partly just to learn the process. It was very simple, just walking through some steps on an LOC website. I applied on November 24th and received my number today.
My drop-in time work used to be a lot of teaching basic skills. “Here’s how to click. Now here’s how to right-click.” Then for a time it was teaching people about software. “Here’s how a menu works in Microsoft Word.” Then it was more about social media, then mobile phones. Lately it’s still a bit of all of those things, but the major thing I do is something I call “How do I connect this to that?” Continue reading “Connecting this to that”
I was reading this post by my colleague Alex talking about digital decluttering. Like Alex, I can get stuck into a hyperfocus jag where I am doing nothing but cleaning up data and I enjoy it a lot. My email archives go back to… 1996 which was actually further back than I was expecting. I periodically archive my websites. I’ve had the good fortune to have suffered no major data losses other than a few months of pictures between backups once, before I got good at doing those regularly. I like doing digital tidying tasks.
Most people I see at the library for tech help are not like me. They don’t enjoy messing with tech just to mess with it. They’d like to spend less time fussing with technology and more time using it to do the things they want to do. But they feel stuck in a rut. They know they have “deferred maintenance” on their tech lives and are not sure how to start tackling the problem.
When I am helping someone with a computer issue, it often only takes me a few minutes of looking at their device to see if their problem is technological in nature or not. Sometimes people need help doing a thing, learning a task, or understanding a concept. I can help them with that and then they wander off and do okay on their own. Sometimes people have memory issues and we can talk about memory strategies: using password managers, making lists, setting reminders. Other times people are just disorganized, and this both is and is not a tech issue. Continue reading “be organized from the very beginning”
