Well, it appears to be widget day here – I am just loading up the right side of this page with all manner of badges and doohickeys. Today I added:
Of course, in an RSS reader, none of this stuff appears on the right, and I’m just crazy. Go figure.
Via gl, I took the Which ancient language are you? quiz (who the hell thinks this stuff up) and got:
You are Akkadian, a blend of the incomprehensible symbols of the Sumerians with the unwritable sounds of the early Semitic peoples. However, the writing just doesn’t suit the words and doesn’t represent everything needed, so you end up a schizoid mess. Invented in Babylon, you’re probably to blame for that tower story. However, crazy as you are, you’re much loved and appreciated, and remain actively in use by records keepers long after schools have switched to other languages.
| Link: The Which Ancient Language Are You Test written by imipak on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test |
Normally I skip the “Which Dr Who Plushie Are You if Dr Who Plushies Were Star Trek Characters Climbing Mount Doom”-type quizzes, but this was quirky.
Linux Tip: Smooth out your fonts in Ubuntu – Lifehacker:
Ubuntu Feisty users: Improve the look of your fonts in 2 minutes flat by installing a few packages.
Ah, that’s what the futzmonkey always says. Three hours later you’re sitting in a pile of config files with a headache and no job or family. But you have extremely smooth subpixels.
Technorati Tags: futzmonkey, geek, linux, ubuntu
New iPhone features (kottke.org):
John Gruber remarked on the lack of a clipboard on the iPhone and I found myself missing that feature this afternoon. Steven Johnson suggested a double-click of the Home button as a shortcut to the phone favorites screen to shorten initiation times for frequent calls. Both of these observations beg the question: how are new capabilities going to get added to the iPhone? A bunch of you are either interaction/interface designers or otherwise clever folks…how would you add a feature like a clipboard to the iPhone?
I really appreciate you all working out the bugs on this thing so that when my Verizon contract runs out next year I’ll be able to get the cheaper, better, faster results at the low cost of some early adopter whuffie. Thanks.
The talk went well and was well received, though I am not nearly as good a speaker as Martin or Robert; I need to read from the script. I was actually sad I couldn’t spend more time at ALA. I had wanted to go to the bloggers’ salon on Sunday night, but my train was stuck outside Washington for over an hour. Quite frustrating. The engine overheated; we eventually had to cram ourselves onto the next train to DC. By the time I finally made it to my hotel I was exhausted and just wanted a beer and sleep. Next year. I’m thinking of going to LITA Forum in October, though. Now back to packing books to be shipped out for scanning…
Links to the Powerpoint and Word doc.
Beautiful Jack Kirby comic adaptation of 2001: a Space Odyssey. A lot of comic artists use big blocks of black well, but Kirby was also a master of whitespace. And I’ve always loved the way he drew hands since I was a kid.
Scanners the last time, this time it’s presentation software. Or is that digital library software? Collection management software? Our original pilot project went up on a very old version of Greenstone, and again I am having trouble turning up anything more than Greenstone and CONTENTdm (Perhaps the google-fu is weak in this one.) Our Herbarium uses KE Software’s kEMu for its collections, and while it seems strong in some areas, I have some reservations about its use for digital library collections, mainly that I can’t find a whole lot of libraries using it. (Also, it doesn’t appear to have any MARC support.) Again, is there something I am missing? Are people just using LAMP stacks for this?Are most installations just homegrown? Lots to learn…
Well, after complaining about ALA, it tuns out that I am going to be giving a brief talk on Monday at the Smithsonian. NYBG is a member of the Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, and Monday morning there will be a brief program about the consortium at the Smithsonian. I am going to be speaking about NYBG’s digitization planning and some of the issues and challenges we are facing. More info is available on the BHL blog.
I had originally written this as a comment on kgs’ ALA: what is to be done? post, but since it kept getting longer, I thought I’d post it here instead.
First, some background: I graduated lib school in 93, worked in software/web development till 2005. Started in a systems librarian job in April of last year.
That said, ALA makes me nuts. A few random things come to mind:
1. I joined ALA at a student rate when I was taking classes towards possibly getting school media specialist certification. (Dodged that bullet.) Despite contacting them to tell them I was no longer a student and even though I now pay non-student (read: full) membership fees, every single piece of mail they send me (at MPOW, no less) is addressed to “John Mignault, student.” This irritates me anew every time I see it.
2. The organization is enormous. I find it byzantine and incomprehensible, and I’ve programmed in PowerBuilder. There are too many fee-requiring sub-associations, divisions, councils, round tables, kaffeeklatsches, cells, and jamborees. There is too much crap to wade through, and most people don’t have the contacts that would make navigating the oranization easier.
3. WRT #2, it’s insane that so many publications (I am looking at you, Library Technology Reports) are outrageously expensive, and not included in a LITA membership. 63 bucks for a single issue of a magazine? I work in a botanical library, fer Chrissakes. We’re strapped enough as it is – I can’t ask them to pay some outrageous sum of money for these publications, and I’m already into ALA for enough dough as it is. Why isn’t this stuff online? How can anyone take ALA seriously with regards to Open Access when they act like Elsevier?
4. When I saw the absolute fetish librarians have for listservs (three letters. R. S. S), I decided I better get my subscriptions out of my personal gmail account and into another for mailing lists only. I’ve been trying to unsubscribe from LITA-L for a couple weeks now, only to continually get errors from the lisetserv processor.
5. Elections. ALA bugs the crap out of me to vote in elections. They send me postcards. They send me e-mails. Great, now I can vote for a bunch of people who I’ve never heard of whose position papers require a much greater degree of knowledge about the organization than I have. I can go by the biblioboogersphere, but they say things like “Vote for J. Random Librarian, because he/she *gets it.*” Well, I’m glad someone does, but I need more, you know?
6. Just read this passage from kgs’ post:
Council elects an Executive Board, which theoretically runs ALA, but delegates to the Executive Director of ALA, currently Keith Fiels (a good guy, but he also isn’t going to steer ALA anywhere EB isn’t taking it — and that’s correct behavior). Council nominates and elects EB. With a majority on Council, you theoretically have control of ALA (since you can elect the EB). There are just under 200 Councilors, so elect a slate of 100 Councilors and you have a majority. Yet it’s not that simple, either, because as the ALA website notes, “Council, the governing body of ALA [is] comprised of 183 members: 100 elected at large; 53 by chapters; 11 by divisions; 7 by roundtables; and 12 members of the Executive Board.†It’s not impossible that a slate couldn’t include chapter, divisional, or roundtable candidates, but it would require more effort, and since not all Councilors are elected at the same time, you can’t just run 100 at-large candidates. More likely than electing Councilors from chapters and divisions is first, to build a reform Council over several years, and second, that a strong Council EB slate would pick up additional votes outside the original reform slate.
My head hurts.
Anyway, that’s a start.
Well, I dunno if this revokes my geek credentials, but at the moment I don’t feel like putting in the time and effort to upgrade this WordPress installation. I did the prep up to downloading the release, but then having to pick through individual files instead of just doing a nice tar overlay isn’t doing it for me right now. If not installing will mean that the terrorists have won or can use my blog for mind control, let me know. Otherwise I’m just writing for a while.
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