Widget Gadget

I've gone widget happy. Or gadget happy, whichever you like :) I knew I liked my widgets on my phone (I have a Droid, until I get an upgrade soon) but nobody told me I could have them on my desktop and my blog! I have a total of five blog widgets now, two desktop gadgets, and I don't even know how many on my phone. I truly don't know about my phone, though, because it went and freaked out at me. I had to do a factory reset, and haven't had the heart to try and reinstall all my old stuff when I'm just going to get a new phone in a few weeks. But anyhow, you can see I've added music to Epic Things, and in an effort to keep the appearance clean I stuck it at the bottom of the page. I felt that this was a little cruel, though, because I hate sites that make you search for the source of the noise that suddenly starts playing when you go to the page. I could just turn off the autoplay, but then would anybody really give my music a shot? :) That's why I added the text ticker, just to give you all a heads up about where the player is, and it should be gone soon. My dad says scrolling text "went out with IE 3" so I'll probably take it down after about a week. 

At least my blog doesn't look like this!

As the ticker says, the music is really just a test right now, although I can tell you I'm loving it. I've started just opening a tab with my blog and letting my music play while I do other things; I could do the same thing with a youtube playlist, Pandora station, or even the music on my computer, but I just really like the fact that it's connected to my blog :) The test portion comes under two heading: a test to see if anybody else likes it, and a test to see if anybody will tell me one way or another! Yep, it's that again... I know I've said it before, and it's working with a few, but I really do love feedback. I'd like this to be less of a monologue and more of a conversation. But that's all I'm gonna say! You don't want to hear me talk about how I want to hear you talk :D

I'm sure everyone has something to say :)

What I'm sure you'd like to hear about is my new job, which I adore! I've officially completed two 4-hour shifts, and man is my body feeling it XD Lots of squatting and standing and lifting (with the legs, not the back!) is a great workout, but because I have been otherwise sedentary for many months, it's pretty harsh for me. So glad I have nice short shifts for now :) I get to do lots of fun things: pulling books, shelving books, processing and shelving holds, checking books in... It's lovely! And I really like everyone I work with, too: they're all very nice and friendly, and make me feel very much at home. This morning was crazy busy, but I love having lots to do. Working quickly is hard to do when I'm still learning but I don't think I did too badly at all, for my second day :D

Cute pic, but not an efficient way to work!

Oh! Back to my little spiel about widgets :) I wanted to share my sources, again, since I think the little things I find are really cool. The music widget is from Mixpod, and the reason I chose this particular player was because it doesn't make me find and put in a bunch of mp3 urls, like most of them do. Instead, it lets you search for songs on youtube and plays them from there! What this means for you: anything on youtube is a possibility, unless the owner of the content has "disabled embedding" which means most popular thing don't work. However: cool covers and more obscure stuff totally works :) As you can tell by my playlist, there's still a ton to choose from, even if I can't play Journey or Il Divo (sadface). The playlist creation interface is super slick, but a caveat if you make your own: there are a bunch of skins to choose from, but they don't work. The skin titled "Mixpod" is the only one that supports the youtube videos, and since youtube insists that the video be played with the audio... yeah. But there is an option to add urls for the other skins, so that's cool! I would totally use the little bear if I had a good source for urls. The websites I can find all look so shady...But yeah! Mixpod: lots of color options, settings, all of youtube to work with = good stuff in my opinion.

Tunes: you know you want them :)

My desktop gadgets are also pretty sweet: I have two now, as I mentioned :) The first one is similar to my verse-a-day widget... well okay, it's basically the exact same thing XD It has TONS of different Bible translations available, and you can choose different sizes. I like the medium and small versions because they just have a clean dark blue background, whereas the large has some pictures (which are nice, but I have a theme going, so, y'know). The weird thing is, I've tried all three sizes and for some reason, longer verses don't fit on the medium gadget. Wha?? The large, obviously, has plenty of room, but I'm looking at the small right now and Acts 20:35 fits just fine: not true of the medium! So now you know :)

One last gadget and I'm done (for now), I promise. Since my phone is on the fritz, I've had hard time keeping up with my email, because I use Windows Live Mail and for some reason, it runs slow on my computer. I don't like checking email in a browser, either. So tonight I had the bright idea to look for an email gadget: nothing fancy, I just want it to tell me when I get an email so I can decide if it's important without opening WLM. Ta-da! I found this neat little guy and set up the account and options in about 2 minutes (it only took that long because I got a little confused in the middle). No missing important emails, and no sluggish loading of the entire inbox just to see what I got. On the plus side, it does tell me the total number of emails in my inbox, which encouraged me to clean everything out into folders or delete it. I went from 288 messages to 31 :D Hopefully I'll get it down even more, but I didn't want to look at any more emails X)

Now that's service!

Music, widgets, works... Seems like there was something else I wanted to mention, but I'm sure I can cover it in another post, when I remember :)