Bookplates: What I Got for My Birthday!

My silly plastic figurine, bought years ago because she looked a lot like me (combination of her haircut and vintage coat), came out to party on my birthday a full year ago. That's my cocktail on the table with her, not hers!

If you’re a book lover, perhaps you’ve admired a bookplate or two in your time. I certainly have. These little paper stickers that identify the owner of a book have a long and honorable history, and many a great artist/designer has turned a hand to this medium, if only for friends. (There are some lovely and really interesting books about these, by the way. Insert a plug here for your local public library, where you should be able to find them.)

In any case, my graphic-designer husband has started designing some of these, with what I consider great success. Most recently, he surprised me with my own personalized bookplate for my birthday. Click on that link to take a look at it; it’s the one on the left, an homage to a silly little plastic figurine we picked up many years ago in a vintage toy shop (see photo above). Hubby also brought that same figurine to my birthday party last year, so I guess she’s becoming a birthday theme for me.

Check out the picture here and compare to the full-size bookplate image over on my husband’s blog. See the resemblance? Oh – be sure to let me know if you want to borrow a book; now that I have bookplates, I’m ready to open up my lending library!

 

Why I Love Instagram

These shoes were left abandoned outside my office building a while back. They sat in the parking lot for days. I'm so glad I noticed and took this picture.

My “One Moment” this week

One of my friends asked a fascinating question recently on Facebook: “I’ve noticed that Instagram has become the default picture-taking/sharing app. Why do you who use it love it so?”

The question alone shows how amazingly popular this app has become. It’s only available for Apple devices at this point, yet already some see it as the “default” photo-sharing app. Instagram officials announced recently (at SXSW Interactive) that they have 27 million registered users — a number some predict will double when the app is released soon for Android. (Android users, you won’t have to wait long; you can now pre-register with Instagram for the Android app.) Continue reading

Worry About What’s Real

There’s a lovely little post on Kiki L’Italien’s Acronym Soup blog, in which she advises people to “stop extrapolating” and live in the moment in order to be more productive. “You can’t ‘do’ when you are always and forever dwelling on one detail or planning too far ahead,” she writes.

I have a corollary to Kiki’s rule — one I’ve tried to live by for years (with varying degrees of success): “Only worry about what’s real.”
Continue reading

Suggestion for Google Analytics: Better Integration of Feedburner

I love Google Analytics, and I love Feedburner. I especially love the new “Basic Blog Dashboard” custom report put together and shared by Justin Cutroni as part of Google’s rollout of its new custom dashboard sharing functionality.

But there’s one thing missing. I don’t believe Google has provided a way for me to pull my Feedburner subscriber data into a Google Analytics dashboard. This isn’t the same thing as seeing Feedburner-driven traffic within my analytics. Continue reading

What You Can Learn from Nerdy Science Geeks

This video has been making some rounds this week, and I think it’s worth sharing. I saw it first on the Sched events blog, whose author called it “simply awesome and one of the most interesting promotional videos I’ve come across in quite some time.”

I watched it; I liked it; I re-shared it on Twitter, and then other people started chiming in that they also had seen this video and loved it and could not stop watching it.

I’m going to be honest. Their praise went way beyond what I thought when I first saw this vid. Continue reading