Is Mouserobics Dead???!!??
To my horror, I discovered that the trusty mouse tutorial, Mouserobics, did not work when I needed it yesterday in my Absolute Beginners Computers for Seniors class yesterday. Today, when I checked hopefully, I discovered that the URL does not exist on that server.
This is not good news. This is bad news. I fudged my way through learning the mouse yesterday, and it was okay, but Mousercise certainly does it prettier than me. Tomorrow morning is the practise session (same seniors back again, reinforcing what they learned), and I don't really have a back-up plan or time to figure out anything else (aside from more fudge).
Can't wait until Sprout tries fudge for the first time. I suppose by then he will speak a bit better. If he tried fudge today, he would say, "Mo' fuzsh, peas, mo' fuzsh!" It would be too funny.
Okay, cute Sprout mini-break over. What to do about Mousercise?? Have sent plaintive e-mail to Mousercise creator. Have cried crocodile tears. Now must find new tutorial or build my own. Zut alors!
Don't want to be mouse tutorial creator. This is not the sort of megalomania I had in mind (last week when all was going well with teaching computer classes, I imagined myself jet-setting all over the country as a librarian database trainer).
My kingdom for a mouse tute.
7 Comments:
I love/hate technology.
Is it shareware? Can you get it by begging people on a listserv somewhere? ...darnit...
I hate when things disappear off the InterWeb for no reason. (Or the World-Wide Net.)
Okay, I googled mouserobics, and there are actually several of them out there on other library sites. Some say they are based on the Chris Rippel one, so I don't know how close they are to what you were using before...
I wish I had read your comments before I went to sleep last night! Sprout still wakes me up often, and so every time I rolled over to nurse, I'd think, "Now, maybe I can teach them with online solitaire..." Anyway, happy ending - this morning before the class, I did find one of those other libraries who had loaded it onto their site, and it worked great. Reading the fine print, I have discovered that the creator says it's okay for a library to adapt it and repost it. I'm going to try to get our own version up on our site so it works when we need it. Thanks Liz, for your sleuthing. You'd make a good liberrian if you ever want to make a change from the gendered food studies.
The funny thing is, about ten years ago when I took an assessment to see what careers I might be suited for, the top two were "librarian" and "private investigator." (Various science-y things were right up there, too, of course.)
Those assessments are pretty cool--they compare your answers with the answers of a normed group of people in various jobs (presumably happily employed?) and see whose answers yours most resemble. Then you get a percentage-agreement score. (It's filed away somewhere at home, but I don't remember the percent agreement offhand...)
Almost as much fun as the Religion Selector!
My friend from library school got disgruntled with librarianship at one point and took a whole bunch of Myers-Briggs and surveys like the one you described. In her top three occupations at the end of it all: librarian.
I have concluded that I was cursed at birth into librarianship because of my name: there are a thousand Gwens who are librarians. I probably knew two Gwens in my lifetime before library school, and yet at my library school of 80 students, there were three of us!
Mmyess...I suppose based on my name I should have been queen, but that position always seems to be filled!
Mouserobics is not dead.
CKLS' Web site is shifting to a new Web server with a new Internet provider. For reasons I still do not understand, our IT guy is having trouble getting our new Web site to work. So I have not been able to load any Web pages or documents on the new server. It has been frustrating and embarrassing.
Liz is correct that fortunately some other libraries have Mouserobics on their computers and they can be found with Google searches.
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