Crotchfruit
n. A derogatory term for children coined by staunch advocates of child-free public spaces. Breeders (aka parents) have now embraced the epithet and call the anti-crotchfruit zealots the real crybabies.
– from Wired magazine’s Jargon Watch
(with apologies to my friends who have crotchfruit of their own … or on the way)
Ryan North has beefed up RSSpect, which was a quality service to begin with.
We’ve just added a brand new type of feed: AnySite feeds, which allow you to turn almost anything online into RSS, even websites you don’t control! All you need is a URL.
We’ve just added a new feature called Web Alerts. Now your RSS feeds can double as a mailing list, and you don’t have to do a thing. Your mailing list is activated as soon as someone signs up for it, and we’ve given you the code to let readers sign up right on your site.
AnySite feeds apply to documents as well, which I think is the great part. If you want to know if a certain pdf file gets updated, or an mp3, or anything else for that matter, you can snap an RSS feed onto it and get notified when it changes. Neat!
Concerning the quote two posts ago.
I think part of the reason I like that quote is because I once tried to explain the exact same thing in a completely different way when I was with Emily, and I don’t know if I ever got it to make sense. In visual terms, my explanation was something like this.
Alone, | is a solid, balanced existence. If you’re alone and you’re / or , you’re bound to fall or tip over at any moment. You can’t support yourself. I think it’s important to be able to be | when by yourself (i.e. relationship independant).
/ and people tend to thrive in relationships because they can lean on each other. The problem is that they require that support. Rather than it being a bonus it’s a neccesity. | people have a very difficult time leaning, but I think it’s important that they learn to depend on someone outside themselves in some respects.
Having a relationship that is || is all well and good, but even || does not create as strong a base as /. The / foundation is stronger, both people are showing that they are committed to making it work.
Even here I muddle this explanation, which is exactly why I liked that quote so much. It says very simply what I just botched in a very complicated fashion. People should learn to stand up on their own, but just as important is that they learn to commit.
Another meme stolen from kottke.org based off this list by Jim Emerson of the 102 movies you should see before you consider yourself “movie literate”. I have a feeling I’m not quite as movie-literate as I’d like to think…
I did okay on Hitchcock (3 out of 4) and Welles (2 out of 2) films, not so great on other “classics”. I’m tempted to make a more modern list of movies that everyone in my generation should see. Hmmmm. In the meantime, I need to watch at least one more of these movies so I can claim 50, or two more so I can say I’ve seen half of them.
Every once in awhile, I like the quotes that Starbucks puts on its cups. Aside from the McSweeney’s “Rejected Submissions” entries, I think this is my favorite to date.
“The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.”
— Anne Morriss
Starbucks customer from New York City. She describes herself as an “organization builder, restless american citizen, optimist.”
I Left My Head
by Lilian Moore
I left my head
somewhere
today.
Put it down for
just
a minute.
Under the
table?
On a chair?
Wish I were
able
to say
where.
Everything I need
is
in it!
Tuesdays are my Mondays, so perhaps that makes sense. Still.
Both my go-to techie guys are gone today, which makes ME the go-to techie guy, which doesn’t help me at all get other things done. On top of that, I tried to walk through a closed door earlier and jammed up my hand, I’ve decided to take a break from dancing for awhile, and I just want to play outside in the sun.
/le sigh
Alright, I’m done now. Time to go stew on pirate fiction, and a comic for tomorrow. Or …
go lay in the sun. But first I have a swing class to teach.
There’s been a lot of buzz about Google Calendar since it’s recent release, and for good reason. It integrates with Gmail, boasts robust nlp (natural language processing), and will make you happier and file your taxes for you (all Google products will, right!?). I’m a Googlehead as much as the next guy, and probably a whole lot more.
Still, I came across Spongecell today, and I have to admit that it seems pretty slick. It’s draggable, textable, nlp-powerful free software. I don’t know if it’ll do your taxes for you, but they have a live demo version up, so you can always go see for yourself.
by Ernest Hemingway
The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.
The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung.
The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.
I was going to write a brief post mentioning poetryfoundation.org, which is a massive poetry website from the Poetry Foundation in Chicago that includes handy searching tools, but then I got distracted by all the other neat stuff on Design Observer, as well as by a crazy guy doing guerilla-style video-posts, and of course by bee-keeping (and the related Eddie Izzard skits that clutter my mind).
It’s Saturday. It’s sunny. I’m inside, at work, and easy distractable. Go figure.
But there you are, poetry. Now, onward to more distractions!
One of the things that first drew me towards librarianship, and that draws me still, is that it is a profession that encourages a multi-faceted, eclectic range of interests. The more things that fascinate you, the better. This aspect of being a librarian is perfect for me because, honestly, there’s not anything that I’m not interested in. Perfect that I found a job that encourages that. Now if I could just put down my other interests enough to focus on it. On a daily basis, I do my actual job very well. I get things done, I go the extra mile, and I try to anticipate things that need done before they become an issue. That’s not a problem, and I enjoy it. The aspect of my job that I wish I could focus more on is this, this blog, these thoughts about librarianship (or even future librarianship, in my case), technology, information, and the internet. I’m focused in spurts, perhaps, but obviously I’d like to take this blog to hand and create a consistent, interesting webspace that people will seek out and enjoy. Consistent is the key word, there.
Wednesday I was lucky enough to go to a pre-conference for the Washington Library Association (WLA) up in Tacoma. The workshop I attended was called “Rev Up Your Online Services: Blogs, RSS, Wikis and Other Dynamic and Low-Cost Technologies”. Jenny Levine and Michael Stephens, of The Shifted Librarian and Tame The Web respectively, presented it, and they did a phenomenal job. I’ll post a full write-up soon. The reason I mention it here is that it really gave me a burst of inspiration to get back to this blog and write, and even moreso to participate in an online community of libraries and librarians that is growing and thriving, and even further to do my best to participate as a librarian with the non-library community and spread the library word. It inspired me to do all that and also, evidently, to write really long sentences.
It’s been a busy week, and not long since Wednesday, but one thing I’ve been working on is to keep up better with what other librarians out there are writing. I’ve got some catching up to do, so I’m taking things one step at a time. Since I attended their conference and found it inspiring and insightful, I figured it only right that I keep up with Jenny and Michael, at the least.
So, to prove that I’m paying attention, and because it is absolutely post-worthy in its own right, I join both of them in welcoming Mary Ghikas to the world of blogging (I’m on the fence about the word: biblioblogosphere). Mary is the Senior Associate Executive Director (or SAss E Director – a much better title) of the American Library Association. I agree with Jenny that the new generation of librarians don’t feel very connected with the ALA, and I think that including the sort of personal transparency that is a blog could do a lot to help with that. The blog is called The Green Kangaroo, which is a great name with an even better explanation, and I’m looking forward to (hopefully) keeping up with it.
It appears as though this may be part of a larger campaign to launch multiple ALA blogs (you’ll notice that The Green Kangaroo is, supposedly, blog #10). However, of the others listed, the YALSA Blog is the only one that seems to have been active (since Jan. 2006), but they do have some content worth checking out. I’ve just recently heard of the Alliance Library System and the Second Life Library project, and of course I find it totally fascinating. Between these two blogs, I think the ALA is off to a good start in becoming an association to which the next-gen librarian will be able to relate.
During a recent interview, director Werner Herzog was shot in the leg. He continued the interview, quietly bleeding, and said:
“It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid.”
I don’t think you can get more fucking badass than that. I hope I can be that tough when I’m 63.
Saw this at kottke.org, and wanted to do it. The list is of the 50 best book to film adaptions. [B] means you’ve read the book and [M] means you’ve seen the movie.
That was fun. I feel like I need to read more books now, though.
On a daily basis I question the wisdom of having so many sites to update / projects to work on that I end up neither updating nor working. I’ve been fairly consistent with one, the webcomic. It’s not up today on time because Theo got a ‘Disk Boot Failure’ error that prevented drawing last night and somehow fixed itself by this morning. It’s an unintentional cliffhanger, and not a spot I would choose to keep our audience hanging on purpose.
Other than La Casa, I’ve been glorious at not updating exlibrius, the livejournal, or starting any of the new projects I want to work on. What the heck? Well, I’ll work on it. But enough of that.
I got to attend a conference in Tacoma on Wednesday about using online services to promote libraries. Services like blogs, wikis, IMs, and even Flickr. It was really, really cool, and really inspiring. When I got back, my boss asked me to take one of the things they talked about that would have a practical implementation in our school and get it going before I leave. Starting a blog for the library, and getting people to post to it, would be fun, but perhaps not entirely practical. Right now, I’m leaning towards syndicating an RSS feed of our new materials, by subject, to the department websites. The only issue with that being that I really don’t think anyone ever goes to look at the department websites, so it might not actually be the most practical project. Making an internal reference wiki would be fun, or a schoolwide policy/documentation wiki, and both could be very practical. I have to do a write-up of the conference yet, and hopefully when I’m done I’ll have some more solid ideas to work with.
On the dance front, I’ve been taking some classes in Tacoma on Wednesdays that have been kicking my ass (in a good way). Last month was mostly moves, and it was fun and I learned things, but it didn’t kick my ass. This month is called “The Art of Lindy”, and it focuses on musicality and fundamentals (advanced fundamentals – is that oxymoronic?). I spent twenty minutes learning how to shift my weight from one side to the other, and even after practicing for a couple weeks I’m still only starting to get it right. That sounds weird, and I feel like it should be easy, but somehow it’s not.
One of the coolest parts about taking these classes the last couple months is how much it has helped my teaching. I’m thinking about Lindy a lot more technically than I used to, and I’m beginning to understand a lot more of the physical dynamic involved, which has been really interesting. Some people become total lindy-heads, which I can understand, but I don’t think I’ll ever get to that point. One girl I was talking to this last week says that she makes a direct corrolation between good dancing and good sex. I blushed. It makes sense, in a way, but for me dancing isn’t inherently a sexual experience. It certainly CAN be, but that needn’t mean that it always is.
Blog catch-up may be lame, but it’s better than no new content at all. I’ll make an effort to keep this, and all my other projects, updated more often. Ciao for now.
Library Journal article about the tendancy of academic libraries to fill their positions with non-librarians.
Academic libraries now hire an increasing number of individuals to fill professional librarian positions who do not have the master’s degree in library science. Instead of appointing librarians with the traditional qualifying credential, they hire staff to fill librarian positions who hold a variety of qualifications, such as advanced degrees in subject disciplines, specialized language skills, teaching experience, or technology expertise.
As a future librarian aspiring to work in an academic library, I’m obviously a little worried about precious professional positions being taken by non-librarians. However, I agree with Mr. Neal in his summary that integrating ‘feral professionals’ into the academic library is bound to incite a certain amount of revolution in the way academic libraries, and librarians, view themselves and the services they offer. Read any article out there today on the modern librarian, and it becomes fairly obvious that it is a role that is constantly changing and re-evaluating itself. Libraries have to offer new services in new ways to new patrons, especially academic libraries who are consistently thrown against new, young, and tech-savvy patrons.
In comparisn, I’ve read lots of stories about librarians who go out and use their degree to find non-library positions. I’m curious how the ratio compares between non-librarians taking professional library positions vs librarians finding professional non-librarian employment. I imagine that, somewhere, it all evens out.
If you’re interested at all in online social networking (well beyond MySpace), you should check out this extensive bibliography of articles and links published by WWWtools. Aside from the more common and well-known applications such as MySpace and Facebook, you’ll find links to social networking sites with a more educational bent, as well as links to interesting articles on the past, present, and future of online social networking applications.
Last night, Microsoft announced its beta release of Windows Live Academic Search, an academic search engine set to compete with Google Scholar. From the press release:
The Windows Live Academic Search beta is designed to enable consumers to search through thousands of academic journals, serving as a powerful research aid. Key innovations in the user interface and sorting functionality have been designed to help consumers find information faster and truly give them an advantage in their research efforts.
Ars Technica compares the WLAS to Google Scholar:
One of the advantages of coming to the market second is the ability to learn from what your competition has already done. Microsoft has clearly taken a slicker direction than Google Scholar, which sticks with what is essentially the tried and true Google interface. That’s not a knock on Google, per se, but the initial wow factor is slightly higher on WLAS. Of course, in the long run, usability will probably determine which is more successful.
For the moment, Windows Live Academic Search only supports a handful of subjects. Google Scholar has a little more meat, but it’s been out longer too. In any case, both products are still in beta (which seems to be the perpetual case with Google products in any case), so it will be interesting to see how they develop. I don’t find that I use Google Scholar very often, but I do like their integration with OCLC’s WorldCat, and I’m curious to see if Microsoft will, eventually, offer something similar.
This related article by John MacColl talks about applications such as Google Scholar and what challenges they pose for Academic Libraries, made even more pertinent now with Microsoft in the market as well.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services issued a press release today concerning reshaping libraries for baby boomers. The forty-four page report, co-sponsored by the IMLS and the Americans for Libraries Council, details an extensive plan for understand and adapting to the needs of baby boomers as they retire and seek out new and creative enterprises in their lives.
Public libraries are uniquely placed to help mediate the great social transformation signaled by the growing proportion of healthy, active older Americans. Recent research documents the desire of older Americans to remain engaged in the broader world and to continue their learning opportunities. These adults are resources for our communities and our libraries – if librarians can transform their practices and their institutions to provide opportunities and connections to support lifelong learning and civic participation.
On September 26-27, 2005, Americans for Libraries Council (ALC) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) convened a Library Leaders Forum, Designs for Change: Libraries and Productive Aging, to examine key issues relating to the aging opportunity. The meeting was held as part of ALC’s Lifelong Access Libraries initiative, which seeks to foster fundamental changes in how librarians provide services and opportunities to active older adults.
Friday’s make a nice day to sit back, drink some tea, and look at art. Here are some of my favorites that have crossed my path this last week.
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello is a highly-awarded animated short done in a beautiful silhouette style. For plenty of info, including plot summaries, check out the Wikipedia article.
Directed by director/animator Anthony Lucas, the DVD has a runtime of 26 minutes, which looks to be a very well-spent near-half-hour. You can buy the DVD from their store for $24.95.
(link via Drawn!)
Dennis Brown uses vivid colors and soft lines, but most appealing is how much character and emotion his work portrays. Along with the paintings, he has some first-class sketches to look through, and a book available if you like his work.
(link via Drawn!)
Lines and Colors has been mentioning some really great artists lately. So many, in fact, that it is difficult to keep up. So here’s a list of sorts of artists that appealed to me.
If you haven’t seen Dragon, the wonderful, essentially wordless, animated ad for United Airlines in which a father tucks his son in bed and flies off on the back of a bird to meet with knights at a round table, defeat a fire-breathing dragon and bring home the rewards, you’ve missed the most beautiful 64 seconds of animated television in recent memory.
The drawings were lively, fresh, slightly cartoony but highly rendered and with delightfully realized and very imaginative backgrounds and settings. I was immediately taken with the visual joie de vivre and went home happy with my discovery, but disappointed that I couldn’t carry home a stack of Barbucci albums with my Moebius, Beltran and Gillon.
Grounded in traditional drawing and painting techniques, Dixon now prefers to work entirely digitally. Professionally he does concept art for the gaming industry.
So as not to copy out their entire archives (bear in mind I’m catching up and in the future I’ll ‘appear’ more selective), I also really like: Craig Mullins (pirates!), Gilles Tréhin (autistic savant), and Tsukahara Shigeyoshi (more animation).
If you’re interested in buying some nice art prints:
The Foundation Gallery has some beautiful silkscreen prints for $25-$40 in very limited editions. It’s sad, thematic work involving war, violence, capitalism, and heroism.
Penelope Dullaghan has a lovely thumbnail gallery of her work. She only has a few prints available, as well as a tee shirt and two original paintings, but they’re certainly worth checking out.
If you like creepy pictures of weird children in weirder costumes, you should certainly go check out Misery Children. All the prints are $50, but it’s just what you need if you’ve been looking for art featuring a squid baby in a bear suit with a bluebird.
(prints links via weheartprints)
I’m a PC-user, and I will remain so until the day that I die, no matter how they try to subvert me. In my last post I cited Eric’s snark regarding running City of Villains on his Macbook Pro. Evidently the dual-core intel processor coupled with the innate powers of Mac video-processing made the game practically purr with a sparkly ebullience. A fair amount of people mention that the new Mac desktop may run two (2!) dual-core processors. And of course, EVERYONE in the Mac corner mentions how gosh-darn pretty they are. Despite all this, I don’t see Mac taking over the computer-gaming arena, and I even have a few decent reasons:
Macs are expensive. With the iMac starting at $1299, the PowerBook G4 at $1499, and then MacBook Pro at $1999, you’re automatically spending a lot of money on that fine gaming machine. Oh right, and don’t forget that to run those games you’ll need to spend at least another $100 to buy Windows XP. For $1299 I can put together a nice PC with all the parts I would reasonably need to run any current game without a hitch. I mean, I should know because I just put one together for my friend Theo, and it’s gorgeous. For $1999, I could build a gaming god. And I wouldn’t have to dual-boot the damn thing. But the biggest cost issue is that Mac’s are difficult to upgrade. When your Mac gets old, you buy a new Mac. If your PC gets old, you can seperately buy the parts that are getting dated, and maintain your machine’s performance even on a meager budget.
No matter how easy Apple makes it to run Windows, dual-booting is a pain that won’t be worthwhile to a majority of people. Sure, you can run a Windows “window” in OS X, but if we’re talking about gamers (and I am, currently), they’re not going to get the performance the machine is capable of, and gamers are interested in nothing if not performance. In a way, the Apple Matters post I linked to previously has a point that if people are consistently running Windows on their Macs, simply because it allows them to play the games and run the apps that OS X doesn’t support, eventually they may get used to Windows, and wonder why they need OS X at all. Which is not at all to say that Windows is better than OS X, but it’s compatability is a juggernaut that may be hard to overcome, and a great many of us “PC users” not only use it, but enjoy it. There must be something to that, right?
If you buy a Mac, you’re pretty much buying whatever specifications that Apple happens to be offering. In the case of the MacBook Pro, you have a mind-blowing two options. I can’t even begin to think of how many options there are for building a PC between $2000 and $2500, but my god there are a lot, and by PC I mean laptops as well. Do-it-yourself laptops are possible, for the hardware afficianado, and the process for building one was even outlined very clearly in a recent edition of Maximum PC. But even if you don’t want to build it yourself, there are a thousand websites out there, at least, that give you a ton of options on everything from screen size to memory to video cards to processors. Bear in mind that Macs don’t hold the patent for dual-core intel processors. Heck, they just switched to a processor-type that PC-users have been enjoying for years. And PC-users have something Mac doesn’t have, which is AMD. Right now AMD has dual-core 64-bit processors for the PC, and they’ve announced the release of the same for laptops in the near future. Also, and contrary to the Mac “we’re so pretty ideology”, you can customize the look of your PC. A pretty case? There are a ton of them out there.
So my question, then, is this: Why buy a Mac as a gaming rig running Windows when the PC offers so much more in the way of cost and customization, with less hassle? The answer is that you won’t; not unless you’re already a Mac enthusiast, and hey, there are plenty of you out there and that’s great. But for the rest of us, PCs make a whole lot more sense in a lot of ways. Apple’s “Boot Camp” may pull a few people to the dark side who were previously on the fence, but the people that have chosen their sides likely won’t be swayed.
As for me, the next computer I buy will likely be a laptop and a PC, and will probably come in pieces. They’ll be small, complicated, fragile pieces that will need to be carefully nurtured and placed into the appropriate places at the appropriate times with an extreme amount of care. I’ll nurture them, place them, build a machine out of hopes, dreams and expensive parts from very particular namebrand retailers, and I’ll be damned if I won’t enjoy it. I’m a PC-user, hear me roar.
