Foursquare Information for Fairfield Public Library

I’ve been talking a lot about Foursquare but never fully explained it, and now that everything is finally in place, I shall do so now, but just a quick version. (I was hoping to make a video, but that won’t happen til much, much later.)

So, Foursquare is a location-based social network. What’s this mean? It means that you connect with your friends just like you would on Facebook or Twitter, and the only thing you do on Foursquare is you “check in” to locations as you are visiting them. This means your friends can see where you are at all times. It’s a handy tool for stalkers – Stalking Made Easy 101. Note that Foursquare requires a GPS-enabled mobile device. It can be done with regular texting, but it’s not that fun or practical…

Why on earth would you want to let people know where you are, you ask? Funny you should ask that! Well, it’s a neat way to try to meet other people – when you check into a location, you can see who else is currently checked in. Or, you can see who else is in the neighborhood near you. For example, last month I was up at the Sports Authority in Milford, then I went to the Stop & Shop next to the Mall. As I checked into the Stop & Shop, I discovered a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in a long time was right next door at the mall – so I sent him a quick text and said, “hey! I’m next door, got time for lunch?” (He ate already.) Just some examples of the benefits of Foursquare.

Also, you earn points, and you can earn badges and chances to get specials, or become Mayor of a location for checking into locations. Foursquare hasn’t figured out what to really do with the points yet (they had a special once where you could turn in points for a charity cause), but the badges are fun to earn and the specials and Mayorship perks can be pretty neat. Also, when you’re checking into a location, it will also show nearby specials – so for example, if someone has checked into the Chase Bank next door, it will pop up with a special about the Fairfield Public Library too!

I know your next question will be privacy concerns, so here’s what people can do to alleviate those concerns:
A) Don’t use your real picture.
B) Don’t use your real name.
C) Don’t allow anyone other than your friends to see where you’ve checked into (much like Facebook privacy options).
D) Don’t allow Foursquare to post to anywhere else other than Foursquare (there are options to post to Twitter and Facebook as well).
E) Don’t check in until you’re almost leaving -this is what I do. As a warning, this can sometimes backfire. For example, I had checked into the aforementioned Sports Authority as I was getting in my car to leave, only to discover that they were giving a $10 discount to anyone who checked in! So like a jerk, I went back inside, asked them to return the stuff and make a new purchase. (They were nice about it.)

What the heck does this have to do with the library? Well – both the Main Library and the Branch Library are on Foursquare. It’s finally been made possible for me to become manager of the Main Library on Foursquare, and I have finally been able to set up the specials. We haven’t been able to properly announce it for a while, but here are the specials we have: for every 5 checkins, you get a free reusable Fairfield, Connecticut shopping bag. If you become mayor, you will get a 1GB USB thumb drive.

Now, this falls on the staff to verify the patron checkin. If a patron comes in and says “hey I checked into the library! Gimme my bag!” you say “hooray! go to the reference desk!” If you are at the reference desk, you say, “hooray! show me your checkin!” At that point, the patron should whip out their nifty cell phones or whatever they have, and they should be showing you the Foursquare app that says “you’re now checked in to Fairfield Public Library” or something similar. Then you can hand them a bag. At the Main Library, the bags and the USB drives are down where the disks for sale are kept (patrons can purchase a USB drive for $10, just fyi). If a person becomes Mayor, which will take a while, it will say “Congrats! You’ve just stolen the title of Mayor of Fairfield Public Library from Lauren B.!” or something similar. The person checking in will then have a crown next to their name.

Phew! Just think, this was only a brief overview.

To see more of the library on Foursquare:

http://foursquare.com/venue/501417

http://foursquare.com/venue/1415396

If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Actually, don’t ask me until November, since I’ll be in California until then. I will likely hold a class and/or make a video to help clarify what Foursquare is about in the future. But for now, remember to say “hooray!” to people checking in, and send them off to the ref desk for their prizes. Two weeks ago we did have someone checking in, and he was quite delighted to have received a bag from us. Hopefully the trend will continue!

Erm

I swear I’m writing a new post soon. Someday. No really.  There’s so much to be said!  I still have to blab a little about my BlizzCon, Internet Librarian, Gaming Learning and Libraries Symposium experiences, and most definitely, Wrath of the Lich King. However…I’m busy levelling (Miriella is 80 and gearing up as best she can before Naxx, and Springroll is 72). And I’m enjoying REAL life as we know it, too! I’ve had a lot of big-ticket life-changing experiences in 2008 – new job, new apartment, new life status. There’s still a month left in 2008, but I’m hoping that’s it for the big crazy changes for now.  It’s been a whirlwind of chaos for me this year, and for the most part, it’s all been extremely positive. I’m working on settling down and enjoying the company of me, myself and I – and for the last few months I think I’ve done okay.  I’ve done a lot of things that I thought I’d never do, thought I’d never get the chance to do, or thought about doing.  I’ve met tons and tons of new people in 2008; my networking web has expanded exponentially. I’ve made a number of new friends as well, and amazingly, I’ve met an astonishing number of once-faceless friends. Thanks to Twitter, FriendFeed, World of Warcraft, Facebook, and more, our small world became even smaller for me.  I seem to have inadvertently started a small ”reflection on 2008″ post, so I’ll simply end with kind wishes to you and your dearest for a blessed, healthy and joyous 2009.

Madonna Tickets, anyone? in a moment of desperation

Tonight

I’ve got two extra tickets to go see Madonna in NYC at MSG tonight – floor tickets.  Section 7. Face value is $375 each – if you’re interested, please let me know.  Will take the best offer I get by 3pm EST today.  I’ll meet you there at the concert.

There’s GOT to be someone out there who wants to see Madonna at MSG on Opening Night!!!!!!!

The set list looks AWESOME, by the way:

• Candy Shop
• Beat Goes On
• Human Nature
• Vogue
• Die Another Day
• Into The Groove
• Heartbeat
• Borderline
• She’s Not Me
• Music
• Rain
• Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You
• Spanish Lesson
• Miles Away
• La Isla Bonita
• You Must Love Me
• 4 Minutes
• Like a Prayer
• Ray of Light
• Hung Up
• Give It 2 Me

Cheers!

Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Are ye celebratin’ TLAPD? Swashbucklin’ and drinkin’ some grog, me hearties?
Some neat resources for our pointless enjoyment:

The Original Talk Like a Pirate Day site: http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html

Pirate Speak Translator: http://www.fissio.com/pirate.pl

Translate Facebook into Piratespeak: http://www.new.facebook.com/translations/

Pirate Quiz – get ye pirate name! http://www.piratequiz.com/
Mine:

My pirate name is:

Dirty Mary Vane

You’re the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean — not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. You tend to blend into the background occaisionally, but that’s okay, because it’s much easier to sneak up on people and disembowel them that way. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

 

Have fun! Avast!

Yoga

Strength. Grace. Balance. Flexibility. Stamina. Power. Elegance. Yoga. It makes me feel beautiful, ugly, fat, skinny, flexible, stiff, pliable, sexy, not-so-sexy, stressed, and relaxed, all at once, all at the same time.  It’s exhilirating and intimidating. I love every second of it; I love challenging my body to balance, twist and turn in ways that few others can achieve.  I’m getting back into the swing of life, and one of the things I’ve enjoyed most is yoga.  As I was doing yoga last night, for the first time in months, I thought of all those aforementioned emotions and feelings I felt during my session.  I just needed to pass that along, thanks for listening.

For my faithful readers wondering where I’ve gone off to, well, my life got quite the upheaval in 2008, and completely turned upside down a few months ago.  I don’t want to jinx anything, but so far, it seems for the better.  I haven’t been able to bring myself to blog, even though I should have, because I’ve had so many emotions, thoughts, feelings rushing through me all at once.  I couldn’t quite figure out how to express it all in one sitting, so I didn’t even try.

I’ve got a few passing thoughts though, and perhaps down the road I’ll elaborate more. For one, there’s quite a debate about getting a master’s degree online, and getting one IRL – that is, In Real Life – in-person, if you will.  I have had the fortune (but currently paying it back…) of experiencing both. Contrary to what most may think, I actually had a closer-knit group of classmates getting my library degree online than I did with my classmates in person while getting my computer science degree.  While part of it can be attributed to the nature of the classes themselves (you can’t have as many lively discussions and debates on how your animation is portrayed during your Flash presentation as you can with say, a banned book), most of it is, quite frankly, what you personally put into it.  Much like anything else in life, your results are the product of your efforts. 

Secondly, Apple’s released some new iPod stuff – one of which is the purple Nano.  And yes, it’s being shipped on its way to me now.  And Dell also has a 15 inch laptop available in a very girly purple/flowery cover.  So it seems the business world is hearing my pleas of “TAKE ALL MY MONEY NOW!” and bringing the purple out. 

I had a few more thoughts that I was thinking, but they seem to have gone into hibernation for the evening.  It is, after all, almost 3am – an early night for me!

It seems I gave myself an early birthday present – I swore I’d blog again, for my birthday – and my own present’s arrived a few days early.  How thoughtful (and surprising) of me to treat myself so early!  Happy Birthday to me! And to you, my dears, thanks for reading on with me.

Chef Miriella, at your service

If you know me at all, then you know that I’ve never cooked a moment in my life.  I do not classify adding water to Cup O’ Noodles, sticking a Celeste pizza into the toaster oven, or scraping ravioli out of the Chef Boyardee can and popping the dish into the microwave as “cooking”.  So when (finally!) Lothiriel and I moved out of the good comforts of living at home with each of our ‘rents and ma’s delicious cookin’, we didn’t think I had a chance in hell in the kitchen.  I spent last Sunday cleaning our kitchen, and unpacking and washing all the pots, pans and utensils that we bought.  I had no idea what this particular thingo was that I had in my hand – turns out, it’s a garlic press.  And now that I know what it is, why the hell doesn’t my mom use one?  I still don’t know why I have so many different knives of all different shapes and sizes, but I can figure that out later. 

The time I spent in my kitchen on Sunday was probably more time than what I’d spent in the kitchen in my over 2 decades of life.  Yet somehow, I have this overwhelming urge to cook and make food and all kinds of crazy stuff – so voila, the inner chef inside of me has emerged!

And it was almost as yummy as it looks. I let the noodles cook for too long though, and they started disintegrating into skinny noodles (they were supposed to be the long flat kind…they originally started that way), so that was a total bust. But everything else went really well. So yay me! Now you know that when you come to visit us, you won’t starve to death or be forced to live on McDonald’s food.

Too friggin’ cute to not share somewhere

 Awwwwwwww.

How Not to Provide Excellent Customer Service

I need to rant about this a little bit before I forget about it completely.  When you work in an industry that’s all about the customer, noticing how other places do customer service becomes magnified.  I find myself thinking – “ooo, that’s a neat idea for us to do”, or “bleh, that cashier was just awful”, or “wow, I can’t believe she just did that for me!” Most people do this anyway – but as a librarian and one who always desperately strives to make every person leave my library happily, the little things (and big things) that other people do become more amplified.  I find myself wondering how the baristas at Starbucks are soooooo sweet to me every single day – I wonder, am I *that* cool (prolly not) or is the Starbucks Customer Service Training really *that* badass (prolly so)?  There’s about 10 of them at this Starbucks that know my name, tell me my new haircut looks great, ask me how my trip to CiL was, recommend me getting the espresso chocolate brownie (nuked, by the way…it’s heavenly), practically have my drink waiting for me the instant I walk through the door, and sometimes give me drinks on the house.  In fact, I love them so much I haven’t been able to bring up the fact that I’ll be moving two towns away in two weeks and will only be able to come back to this Starbucks on rare (but special!) occasions. 

The last time we visited Foxwoods Casino was to see Peter Cetera (shut up) in concert, which was January 2007 I think, and the time prior to that, probably a couple of years before that.  Mohegan Sun, on the other hand, – everything is great there, and we visit it probably once every couple of months.  We always say we’ll never go back to Foxwoods, but we try to take a peek at least once every couple of years to see if it’s gotten any better.  And it hasn’t.  I spent last Sunday at Foxwoods and regretted being there as every moment passed, the exchange I witnessed while trying to redeem my Wampum Rewards was the clincher, and it sealed the deal for me that I’d swear I’d never return. 

I won’t bother getting into details about how the self-service kiosks for swiping your Wampum Cards make absolutely no sense.  Why do you give me buttons for coupons and tickets just so that when I click on them, you tell me there’s an error and in fact, I have zilcho?  Why can’t I just swipe the damn card and get my entry into your stupid sweepstakes (get a clue from Mohegan Sun – they got their act right) – and NOT have to enter my pin and then hit another button to actually enter it in?  I know I’m not going to win anyway but you could at least simplify the process so I can get disappointed more quickly (and thus, head to the freaking slot machines faster. Cha-ching!). 

I also won’t bother getting into (more) details about driving around on the joint.  Somehow I was driving along and looking for a different entrance and I wound up in a mysterious administrative area, I think.  I came to a four-way intersection with absolutely no signs.  I turn right and wind up heading towards a secure, gated area.  U-turn!  Back to the intersection.  No signs.  Fine.

But what really bothered me is what happened when I was leaving.  Sunday night; it’s 7:30ish. I am tired of Foxwoods and I want to leave.  The ambiance of the place has sucked the life out of me and the slot machines have sucked the cash out of me.  But before I go, I want to redeem all the $$ I’ve accumulated on my not-so-ubar Wampum Rewards card.  So as I’m walking out, I check my balance – it gives me two numbers, one is some point accumulation crap which I don’t get (it’s like 13), and the other is $4 cash rewards.  So I figure I have $4 to spend, and I head over to the little Pequot Trader convenience store.  I get a $2 bottle of water, and I can’t decide between Altoids mints or the king size Snickers, so I get both, knowing full well I’ll go over the $4.  I stand in line.  There are two groups of folk in front of me.  All of a sudden this commotion ensues.  There are 4 asians at the front of the counter arguing over the 4 cigarette cartons; I assume they are trying to decide what to purchase because the woman behind the counter is screaming “I HAVE A LINE! You need to make your decisions NOW!” They continue arguing.  What’s the woman do?  She – I kid you not – snatches the ciggy boxes out of their hands, storms over to the other counter, slams them down on that counter, and says – sadly I must paraphrase but I’m sure I’m pretty damn close to what she says - Here! You decide over HERE what you are going to do, I have a line here and I can’t be waiting for you all day! She then tells the other clerk behind her to stand there and watch them while they decide.

Why?  Whyfor did you need to be a massive bitch like that?  Do you just assume – or do you hope - they’ll probably never come back and you can get away with treating people who probably just dumped a buttload of money into your casino like crap?  The woman in front of me turned around to me, totally wide-eyed, and said “I have no idea what just happened there but that was really rude.”  The clerk (in fact I think she’s a manager) gets the line going again, all the while having an argument with the four folks over on the other side telling them they can’t use their coupons together.  The whole fracas of this situation continues for another 5 minutes or so.   The woman did slightly redeem herself by not being a total brat when they finally decided what to do – and even made an adjustment to how she rang up the purchases so that they could use all four of their coupons (why the hell didn’t you just do that in the first place and avoid the whole gd 20 minute situation that made you look like a complete ass?) 

Part of me wanted to drop the stuff and leave, but the other part of me wanted to make sure I got my whole $4 that I so rightly earned on the stupid card, so I sucked it up and stood in line a bit longer.  And when I finally got to pay, it turned out to be $7.35, and I had my $3.35 in cash extra ready to go, but the other clerk hands me the card back and says I’m all set.  So what the hell just happened there?  I had more than $4 on the card but nowhere did it tell me that.  Was it the points then?  If so, what the hell is the “cash rewards” then?  And, why didn’t you ask me for my pin number when I went to make that purchase?  Your stupid machines gave me all this grief at the self-service kiosks to just look at the balance, and even on the slot machines themselves you force me to put in my pin number just to see my balance, and yet, I didn’t need a freaking pin number to make a purchase?  You must have a clue as to the number of cards that get left lying around the entire casino – so it would be okay for me to just run around and collect all of those and make a purchase?  I don’t care if it’s just a twenty cent purchase – that’s just asking for trouble.

Now I’m on the Foxwoods site.  I’ve got three numbers: one is my total points balance which is 10.74 points.  Then it tells me the points that are available for cash rewards: 9.00.  Then it tells me my cash rewards balance is $4.50.  I don’t get it. At all.  Maybe I’m too lazy to figure it out.  But I shouldn’t *have* to figure it out, should I?  Maybe if Foxwoods was the only joint in town, I’d make more of an effort to care.  But since Mohegan Sun is around, and everything they do makes so much more sense, I don’t care for Foxwoods’ style.  I’ve been spoiled by Mohegan Sun and its simplicity and friendliness and cleanliness and up-to-date-ness and great customer service.

Icky.

Do not want!  The brown is just so dull…and…why does she have two tails? 

On the bright side, I think I took a pretty nice picture!

This sign brought tears to my eyes

Ohhhh yes.  Right down the street from me.  I love you Nine West!