The city of San Leandro unveiled a new website a few weeks ago, and I’m already frustrated with it. For one, it can be really slow. Unfortunately like so many others the city chose bells and whistles instead of basic functionality. But my real beef is with the library website, or, more accurately, websites. There are two of them.
If you do a google search for “San Leandro Library”, the first hit, under the title “San Leandro Public Library” is http://www.library.ci.san-leandro.ca.us/. Here you find the full catalog of the library as well as access to your personal library account, allowing you to see what books you’ve checked out, renew books and place holds. It’s very useful and quite functional.
But that website is of no use whatsoever if what you are looking to do is find out library hours, services, activities or talk to a librarian. To do so, you have to go to: http://www.sanleandro.org/depts/library/default.asp – but to find this page, you either have to go to the City website and look in the “Departments” folder for “Public Library”, or go to the second page on google, which few people do.
Now, just HOW HARD would it be to put a link to the Public Library homepage from the catalog page? Not that hard, I’m sure – and yet, they haven’t done it. Just in case it was an oversight, I just e-mailed the head librarian about it. Let’s see what happens.
On the plus side, the Public Library homepage now has a chat tool with the information desk which you can use to ask your questions and even request books! Of course, someone has to find this webpage first 🙂
Author: marga (Page 23 of 158)
As I mentioned in my last post, yesterday I went to the flea market and one of the things I got was the Chicken Socks: How to Make Pompom Animals book/kit
The kit is aimed to the younger crowd (4+ yo) and the animals are simple enough to be able to be made by kids without any help. The kit basically consists of pompoms of four different sizes and a bunch of woogly eyes, as well as some cardboard die cuts for wings and things of the sort. All a child has to do is glue the things together. The kit comes with a glue stick, but, perhaps because the kit was used, we didn’t find the glue sticky enough for the pompoms. Regular glue didn’t do it either, so we resorted to using our glue gun – that works very well, though it gets a little messy with strings of glue going everywhere and there is always the risk of burns. I wouldn’t recommend it for kids younger than 5.
In all, Camila really enjoyed making the animals and she’s looking forward to playing with them (let’s see if she actually does so). Would I pay $10 for the kit, what it retails for? Maybe for a gift, it seems to expensive for a bunch of pompoms otherwise – but I’m got we got what we got.
Tomorrow is my birthday and I’m celebrating it today, Sunday. We started by going to La Note for breakfast, and followed it with a visit to the flea market. I was planning on giving myself a home spa in the afternoon, so I was very happy to find a Conair Body Benefits Bubbling Foot Spa
There is a lady at the flea market that sells fun toys very cheap – I mostly go to the flea market to check out what she has. This time I got a Chicken Socks: How to Make Pompom Animals
In my quest for putting Christian beliefs in perspective, I have been teaching Mika about Ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology – I figure, the most she knows about gods, the more she’ll realize that it’d be too arbitrary for any one of them to be real. We’ve been reading ancient myths, which is always fun, and now we’ve discovered a new, great resource for solidifying and expanding whatever knowledge we’ve acquired: the History’s Channel’s Clash of the Gods
The shows are great. Like typical History Channel productions they are shamelessly dramatic and sensationalistic, with vivid, dramatic and cartoonish recreations and a thundering voice leading the story. A little bit annoyingly – to me – there is a bit of repetition, things being told twice or thrice, but I think that’s probably good for children. Most importantly, the content is excellent. The stories are told mostly lineally, with cuts to actual historians and university professors, who (also very animatedly) provide clarification not just on the story but on the symbolism and meaning of the story. These are not very deep analysis, but enough to give you an idea of /why/ the ancient Greeks might have believed on what they believed. And indeed, why /we/ believe what /we/ believe. For example, Mika and I just watched the episode on Hades last night. I was clearly totally ignorant about Hades myself, as I didn’t realize that the Christian conception of Heaven and Hell (at least the post-Dante conception, I don’t know if the one before Dante was different, yet another hole in my knowledge base) is right out of Greek mythology. It’s no wonder, as Christianity is a product of Hellenistic culture – but I’d never made the connection before, even though I’d often wondered where the Christian concepts of heaven and hell came from (as these were not existent in the Old Testament, if I well remember).
While watching this show, I have come to realize that I have not been good about telling Mika about Hebrew and Christian mythology and beliefs – which is a problem, as she then ends up believing the idiocies her school mates tell her. I guess they get in many “theological” discussions, and as the other kids’ knowledge of religion(s) is null, they end up confusing themselves and Mika at the same time. For example, Mika seems to have talked to them about Zeus being the king of the gods, and the kids have thus appropriated him saying that he is Jesus’ father. I love playing Eris – but then again, you knew that 🙂
Anyway, going back to the show. I fully recommend it as great watching for parents and school-age kids together (I think it’d be a bit beyond Camila’s understanding, though she did like hearing about Medusas’ story when I told it to her, sans the pornographic parts). I’m certainly looking forward to watching the other episodes – and so is Mika.
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