Death of a Chimney Sweep by M.C. Beaton

I love the books by M.C. Beaton. That being said this is probably one of the weaker ones. Yes, I still enjoyed it immensely. Maybe I read it too quickly. Maybe I didn't pay a lot of attention to the plot (entirely likely).

But maybe, also, the plot wanders a bit.

At the start a couple moves into a nice home in Drim, a dull and dreary town in Hamish Macbeth's beat. They eventually need a chimney sweep, who does of course die. A blortload of other people die too. We wander the world watching people die as a result of the original murder.

But the epilogue is great. I thought that was the best part of the story.

Thing #23, thoughts on this project

Overall, I really liked this project. I learned a lot.

One thing I learned was to try new things on the internet - most of them are easy to use. There are so many new applications popping up and we as librarians should be on the look out for the ones that we can use in our work and lives.

#22, Teach someone

I really like Library Thing and thought my mother in law would too. So I taught her the basics of it. It took less than 10 minutes and she was thrilled. I taught her how to log in and out, how to add a book and the different ways of viewing and organizing the books.

She wants to use it to catalog her entire collection of books!

Thing #21, tools for locating podcasts

Of course, iTunes is the place for finding iTunes podcasts.

I looked at Yahoo Audio which was useful. I liked the fact that you can look for online music stores, or on the web, or at podcasts.

I thought podcastalley.com and its directory to be a bit more useful. It wasn't incredibly inuitive to use. But I liked what I was able to find.

Thing #20, YouTube and other such sites

I looked at YouTube, the most popular site for videos that people upload. I also looked at google video which not only is a site for uploading videos, but it also lets you seach for "all videos" on the net. I liked metacafe.com's slide preview option. You don't have to watch the video in order to get an idea what it is about. Metatube says it searches 100 video sharing sites. But mostly I just got results for YouTube.

Thing #19, My Maps on Google Maps

This was the hardest thing for me so far. I could easily make a map on Google and save it. I could upload a picture to Flickr.com. But putting the 2 together was agonizing for me. P. had to help me - twice. I made 2 maps: one for the library and 1 for my house (the one for the house is private - email me if you want me to put you on the list of people who can access it). I had to make sure I at least got the concept.

As for use in LibraryLand: well, it is nice that people could see what the lbrary looks like if they use google maps to find it.

Thing #18, Google Docs

So I looked at google docs and created a document. I want to be to share the document with my computer classes volunteer. (It's a document saying when the classes are.) I think it's great because they'd never be able to use the excuse that they lost the paper version as a reason not to show up.