Officially a librarian!
Well, its finally official! I got to add a few letters after my name on Wednesday. Convocation was a bit chilly, but well worth attending. I must say, this graduation has felt like a bigger deal to me then my undergrad convocation, and not just because I got a master’s this time around. I think its because I may actually be DONE now (at least for a while), whereas for my undergrad, I knew there was more to do, and it was just a step on the path. The ceremony was good as well. Not too long (which was impressive considering I think there were about 600 or so people graduation from the Faculty of Education), and the speeches were decent. There were a lot of my classmates there (more than I was expecting) so it was good to see everyone.
Anyways, I’m mostly posting to just let people know about a few housekeeping issues. I will be on holidays (driving home to Edmonton, via Halifax. The direct route, I know!), so I will probably not be posting very much since I suspect I won’t have all that much access to the net. I’m also going to be fixing both of my websites (this site and the Colchester Stables site) to get them up to proper web standards. They are both pretty awful, since prior to this last semester, my site building experience was entirely self taught (the Colchester site is full of table positioning. bleh!), and I really didn’t know that there WERE standards, let alone know how to follow them. I figure that since I want to apply for jobs that are tech related (ideally anyways) I should at least have my own websites done properly!
Just a few quick notes on other things, since I mentioned in my last post that I’d talk about Windows 7 once I had used it a bit more:
1) My ancient computer has NO PROBLEM running it. Its fantastic! And there is no way I’d be able to get Vista to run on here, so microsoft has clearly listened to people when they said to make something that can run with less RAM.
2) Its taken me awhile to get used to the organisational system (The whole “libraries” thing). I have only used XP before this, and they have changed quite a bit about how things work. One thing that has annoyed me somewhat is the left hand menu bar doesn’t seem to have as many options as XP does. I’m really missing the “File and Folder tasks” menu where you can click to move files or copy them to different locations right on the one window. With Win7 I find I have to keep a lot more folders open to move things around.
3) When I first installed it, transferring files to usb sticks and my external hard drive took forever. However, this was pretty much completely solved by getting rid of AVG and installing Avira. AVG is fantastic for dealing with viruses, but it made my computer sooooo slllloooowww. I tried to install Trend Micro (as students at McGill have free access to the complete program), but it wasn’t compatible with Win7. So back to Avira.
4) The bubbles screen saver makes me happy.
5) As does the desktop background settings. You can have your desktop background automatically change every 30 minutes.
6) Windows Media Player 12 is driving me nuts. Its a bit buggy, and they changed it too much. ggrrr. I can’t play dvds with it at all (it locks my whole computer up), so I had to buy new dvd software, which was somewhat annoying. Also, they’ve gotten rid of the mini player in the task bar. If you hold your mouse over the WMP icon, a little screen does pop up that you can then use to skip tracks and play/pause things, but that extra step is annoying me. Its not a huge deal, but it worked just fine before! And it seems silly to me to INCREASE the number of steps it takes to do something instead of DECREASING them. Usability fail. Oh yes, and editing playlists is also giving me trouble. You used to be able to click a button that said “edit in list pane” which would move your playlist over to the right hand menu bar, and then you could search for music to add in the main window and click and drag to the right hand menu to add stuff. I can’t for the life of me find that “edit in list pane button”. So you basically have to right click on the tracks you want to add, select “add to playlist” and then go and reorganise the playlist afterwards. Again, usability fail.
7) Its super easy to install drivers and things on the computer. I didn’t need any of my software for my printer or external keyboard. For the scanner Windows couldn’t find a driver directly on whatever they use to find drivers, but it popped up a website that had a link that went right to the Epson site. It even went right to the page that had the drivers for my exact model of scanner!
I like what they’ve done with the task bar (besides the WMP thing). The buttons are bigger, and the way it shows when you have multiple windows open works well.
9) Office 1997 looks really funny on an OS that is 12 years more advanced, however it works just fine! haha.
But I should get going. I have a pile of things to do, because its the CLA conference this weekend. I also have a couple friends from Edmonton staying over (one of whom was presenting at a pre-conference this morning. I hope it went well for her!), and I have to finish packing because I’m leaving Montreal on Monday. That is going to be really strange. I’ve LOVED living in Montreal, and I’m really going to miss it. But life goes on, I guess.
Tags: CLA, grad, library school, tech, windows7
