November 14th, 2009 Brian Herzog
This entertained me, so I thought I’d share - Huffington Post collected some funny responses to questions asked on Yahoo Answers.
I wouldn’t call them the “funniest of all time” - most of them were snarky answers or just really bad questions. But the one about the sandwich did make me laugh out loud.
Occasionally I use Yahoo Answers to help with a patron’s question, but like with any traditional or crowd-sourced resource, it needs to be evaluated critically (and enjoyed).
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Posted under Random, Reference Question | No Comments »
October 10th, 2009 Brian Herzog
I was asked these two questions back-to-back one day this week:
I want to sell my car on craigslist, and I want to be able to email people an info sheet. I’ve already created an Excel spreadsheet with mileage and other statistics, including a couple pictures pasted in. Can you show me how to put arrows and text on the pictures, and how to convert it to a pdf file?
…and…
I’ve been on Yahoo for a few months now. I know that I can get letters from people, and I can reply to letters people send me, but, can I send people letters too?
Of course, both of these are legitimate questions. I was just struck by such different technology experience levels from two patrons who walked up to the reference desk at about the same time.
And the answers are:
Excel’s Drawing Toolbar (View > Toolbars > Drawing) allows both of these things. Click the icon that looks like an Arrow to draw an arrow on a picture, use the Line Style to make it thicker, and the Line Color icon to change the color. Then, click the Text Box icon to create a text box wherever you want words to appear. Use the Fill Color and Line Color to make sure it’s legible against the picture.
To create a pdf version, we installed PDFcreator on our public computers. It shows up in the printer selection dropdown box, and creates a pdf file patron can then save to disk
…and…
Just click the “New” button in the upper left corner of the Inbox.
Tags: arrows, comfort levels, computer, excel, extremes, help, libraries, Library, new message, pdf, public, Reference Question, tech, text box, yahoo See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question, Technology | No Comments »
June 18th, 2009 Brian Herzog
Even though I use Google for web searching most of the time, I do use other search engines, and I wonder how the results compare.
With the launch of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, a Microsoft employee must have been wondering the same thing - so he created a neat Blind Search tool (and states this is not a Microsoft project).
Type in a search term, and Blind Search shows you the results from Google, Yahoo and Bing - but without telling you which engine produced each list. So without brand bias, you decide which results list includes the most relevant websites.
And the best part is the reveal, when you “vote” and see which search engine the results came from.
I played a bit, and surprisingly, Google didn’t always provide the most relevant results. As the creator states, this seems most useful as an observational curiosity, but it certainly is fun and interesting (or, it gives people a way to find pron three times faster).
via Closed Stacks
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Posted under Technology | 3 Comments »
February 3rd, 2007 Brian Herzog
A patron came up asking for help setting up an email address. He said he’s never had one before, and never wanted one, but realizes that to buy things and make reservations over the internet, you pretty much need one.
So, as is our unwritten rule at the reference desk, I took him to Yahoo to set up one of their free email accounts.
(Historically, the free Yahoo email has been the provider-of-choice for me at the reference desk, because it seems more stable and easier to use than others. But lately, I am becoming disenchanted with Yahoo overall. They seem to be falling further and further behind Google, and as a consequence, are relying more and more heavily on advertisements. They seem to be forcing more ads at customers, and are also worse than Microsoft about automatically installing toolbars and other programs. This bothers me.)
He understood the basic principle of having to fill out the registration form to sign up for an account. However, it was during the signup process that we ran into trouble.
When I help people sign up for an account, it is extremely rare for someone to get their first choice of their Yahoo ID (the alias part of alias@yahoo.com). Usually the patron types something in, finds that it already taken, and then either tries something else or uses one of the IDs that Yahoo suggests.
In the case of this patron, though, he was astounded that someone had already taken “george.” And “george1.” And “george2.” …and “george39.” So I showed him how to type in additional words, such as his last name or his wife’s name, to get additional suggestions.
He found this fascinating. He thanked me for my help, and said he’d finish it himself. The patron then proceeded to sit there, trying different aliases.
I checked back on him after a half an hour, and he was still trying different options. I looked over about twenty minutes after that, and he was gone. I don’t know if he actually finished signing up for an email address or not, or if he just got frustrated and left. When I checked on him, he seemed to be enjoying himself, as if it were a challenge to find the perfect email account.
It made me wonder how many Yahoo email addresses are out there, and how long a typical address needs to be now to be unique. And since I help people about two or three times a month set up an email account, I feel I need to come up with some strategy to more quickly find an available address. If anyone has any ideas, I would sure appreciate hearing it.
free email, libraries, library, reference question, yahoo, yahoo mail
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