The daily life of a Middle School Library Media Assistant.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Lions Rampant vs. Computer Virus

I head in early today and open up to collect textbooks. We have about ten classes come by during the two periods students are in class today and get the books organized and all back on the shelves. I pull out some The Stage and the School and Mythology to repair before they get back on the shelves. Various students come up and hand in books. I decide to go through the school library page curriculum links the Alphabet list of sites and notice that the Channel One link is wrong - since I'd like to stay at my desk to be available for kids, I check all the sites and come up with 2 pages of links that are no longer working, very outdated (one hadn't been updated since 1997!) and a few redirected links. There is some really great stuff in there. A teacher brings by a cart of books he collected in class. My computer goes crazy and says that I have mega viruses popping up and I need to take care of them. I check out the boxes. Now I have McAfee on my computer, but this says to download some other program with a warning that this program may not be compatible with my computer - so I go back into McAfee and start to run their program. Mrs. T(ech) races by and I halt her and she says that someone else has that coming up on their computer also and to do what I had already done. She clicks cancel on the pop-up windows and I run the McAfee. They send out emails and I was good in not clicking on the pop-ups and just checking with McAfee that said I had no virus. If I'd clicked on, they'd have to reghost my computer. The teacher edition German language books are on a cart so I withdraw them and box them up for surplus. Process a couple of magazines. A student wants to get two lions for a project he's doing. He asks about publisher vs. just a regular word document so I show him some of my stuff I have done. Then he has a picture of a shirt with two lions up around the logo and wants to know how to get just the lions - I muse a brief moment and tell him I think that he's looking for Lions Rampant - the old medieval coat of arms, flags, etc. that was the term in use for that and so we hit google images and voila! There they are! He also asks if he can take an image that he likes and reverse it - of course! It turned out very nicely. He didn't have time to print before the buses left, so he will print it in the morning. Mrs. H is all excited about Neil Gaiman winning the Newbery Award for The Graveyard Book - and I'm excited too, he's one of my favorite authors. She's tried a couple of times to get a copy of this book (not only to read herself, but for our library as well!) and will try tonight to pick one up. We have an amazing copy of Stardust by him that she got as a memorial to a student that passed away last year. We also need Neverwhere!

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