Slán go fóill Shiobhan

or Pink Bag theme day.


Can be bags

Or outfits












Not forgetting that men can wear pink,
and carry bags.







Even if the bag isn't pink it can be
the perfect match for your pink suit and hat.

Friday Theme

I know that it is the main reason you wanted me back. Yay for Friday Themes!!!


Saturday, September 19th, is Talk Like a Pirate Day, so we'll celebrate on Friday as best as we can.


Sadly, I haven't packed for this theme, so you'll all have to really make an effort to compensate.


There are lots of great Pirate examples without resorting to those movies.


Ching Shih a Chinese Pirate














The Dread Pirate Roberts, one of the more gorgeous pirates.














And then some random pirates from history and elsewhere.

Will BING replace GOOGLE?

Not yet, is my reply. Who knows if it will in future.

I've done a little bit of exploring while sitting on the Help Desk and thought this was a good topic to kick the blog back into gear. Have a play with it yourselves and see what you think.
BING - http://www.bing.com/

I've added images to this but they don't come out very clearly. Take a test yourselves and see what you think of BING. Add some comments of what you've found.

First complaint.

It's too busy. The search screen has wallpaper. Today on IE is a seaside scene and on Firefox a night city scene.

I haven't tested BING on my home (very slow connection) computer yet but I suspect that with a busy picture like that BING is going to be a much slower page to load than Google.

Second complaint:

I have a few favourite searches I use to test new search engines. BING doesn't do well on either of them.

I searched for the name of my Hampden property, Kurinui. We have a very old web site which quite a number of people link to (to our embarrassment) and our property gets mentioned on a number of other web sites. There is a school in NZ called Kuranui which some people spell incorrectly.

Bing finds 73 results today, our web site not included. Google finds 572 and our web site comes in tops.

Then I tried an obscure ancestor: "Walter Mowbray Johnston". He appears on a number of genealogy web sites and a couple of Google Books (is it unfair to expect BING to find a Google Book result?)

BING found no results. Google 9.















Google has a wild card function I find very useful. Instead of searching for "walter mowbray johnston" I can search for "walter * johnston". Google replaces the * with any word or character, so I get results of "Walter Lee Johnston" or "Walter H. Johnston". Using the * in a phrase in BING gave me results of "Walter Johnston", no middle name or character.

The help section and advanced sections of BING don't mention wildcards. So I'm guessing they don't have this feature, yet.

BING has one cool feature in Firefox. Hover over the picture in the main search screen and see what pops up.

BLING

The last and hopefully most spectacular theme of my residency at The Billy Bob is:

Here's a little bit of inspiration.

Thanksgiving

In the USA Thanksgiving falls on the 4th Thursday in November.

Because we are ahead (in time) of the rest of the world (except Fiji I think) while we are having a TGIF, Americans will be tucking into

Or maybe

According to wikipedia Thanksgiving started in America in 1565 with the Spaniards who gave thanks to God when they first arrived at what is now St Augustine, Florida.

In 1619 the first 'official' Thanksgiving was held at Berkely Plantation in Virginia.

Painting of "The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" By Jennie A. Brownscombe.

In 1621 the Pilgrims who had colonised Plymouth were taught how to catch eel and grow corn by Squanto, a Patuxet Native American who resided with the Wampanoag tribe. The Pilgrims set apart a day to celebrate at Plymouth immediately after their first harvest.

How brilliant we are at communication.

• How have we communicated this year?

• How well have we communicated this year?

Add a comment with some examples and thoughts on communication and how great we are at it.

Or, maybe an example of some communication gone wrong.

Here's my 2 cents worth:

The reference staff are members of a OT Postgrad Blackboard discussion group. The aim was to have one place where OT postgrads (most of them aren't in Dunedin) could communicate and discuss issues. We had hoped many of the questions that we get over and over could be addressed in one shot. But it has also raised our profile with off-campus OT students.

Melbourne Cup Hat Day

Hip Hip Hooray for Hats

Someone else can organise a sweepstake, I'm going to wear a hat.

I'm a huge fan of hats, every day would be hat day if it wasn't so damn windy.

Here are just a few to tempt and inspire.

The key to my collection is that they meet all sorts of criteria. Beautiful, useful, for girls and boys.
Surprise us all with your hat choice.