Searching

I now know way too much about the various search engines that are on the web. Lest you are a Google Unitarian, as I was before tonight, let me enlighten you in the other, often inferior, options. I feel like I should have some Tom Lehr melody accompanying this (the guy who sang the entire periodic table of elements). You can pretend you hear some cheesy, rip-roaring piano accompaniment: Metacrawler, Dogpile, Ixquick, Metaeureka, Alta Vista, Excite, Ask.com, HighBeam Research, Lii.org, Yahoo, Infomine Scholarly Internet Resource Collections, BUBL Link, and Blingo.

Don't you feel educated now?

Welcome to my world of Bibliography Class Homework.

Besides online searching, my brain has been wandering around a couple other subjects today. First up was Outreach, a class that helps us learn how to perform in schools, retirement homes, and other community areas. I love this class; these performances are the most rewarding to me. I really hope I can make outreach a significant part of my professional life. Today, we reviewed our scripts for next week, which is when we'll be heading into elementary schools. I'm taking my old friend, "La Romance d'Ariel". More on that next week.

The next class was theory, in which we talked about musical "sentence structure". In a piece, there are sections called "phrases", and they end with "cadences", which are the equivalent of question marks or periods or ellipses. A couple phrases can be joined together to make a "period" - sort of like a sentence. We worked on identifying and classifying them by looking at a score and then by just listening to musical excerpts. There are several types of periods depending on whether the melody reoccurs in the second half of the period, what kind of cadences are there, and whether the key changes from the beginning to the end.

The afternoon was filled with all kinds of errands and practicing. And now I'm working on Bibliography homework.

Well, enough procrastination. I'd best dive into the other 200 search engines on the list to ferret out their advantages and disadvantages.

~Hope