Testing ScribeFire for Chrome

Lets see how this goes.

Obama wins the Nobel Prize

It is cool that Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize (there must be a "shows most improvement" category) but I have this idea that the committee is just messing with us: 1st Selector: We should totally give Obama the prize. Can you imagine what those right wing nut jobs in the U.S. will do? 2nd selector: You're so mean.... Read More 1st Selector: Their heads would totally explode... 2nd Selector: Its going to get ugly -- Lets do it. And now they're just sitting back, laughing their butts off, in Swedish

An Autumn Poem in the Spring

I saw the poet Mark Strand read last night - really great! I hadn't been to a good poetry reading in a long time. One of the things he read was the first two sections of this "Five Dogs" poem - but it was the first section that really stuck with me, so I looked it up:

Five Dogs

I.

I, the dog they call Spot, was about to sing. Autumn
Had come, the walks were freckled with leaves, and a tarnished
Moonlit emptiness crept over the valley floor.
I wanted to clmb the poets' hill before the winter settled in;
I wanted to praise the soul. My neighbor told me
Not to waste my time. Already the frost had deepened
And the north wind, trailing the whip of its own scream,
Pressed against the house. "A dog's sublimity is never news,"
He said, "what's another poet in the end?"
And I stood in the midnight valley, watching the great starfields
Flash and flower in the wished-for reaches of heaven.
That's when I, the dog they call Spot, began to sing.

--Mark Strand, from Blizzard Of One

Synchronicity

It was beautiful out today and I got to go out running at lunch. since this was the first time I've been out this Spring, I thought I'd take my phone along and snap pictures as I went. The path that connects the Bowdoin Campus with the Brunswick town commons goes past the old Bowdoin observatory -- I've always thought it was pretty cool looking, so I took a couple pictures of it. Back in my office, I was playing with our new Sony e-book reader, and experimenting with adding Google Book content. I did a search for 'Bowdoin' and starting browsing around in the results. One item was an old copy of the "Bowdoin College Library Bulletin" so I downloaded that and put it on the device. When I started paging through it, I was surprised to find a description of the new Bowdoin College Observatory:

Google Voice

I just got my e-mail to upgrade from Grandcentral to Google Voice -- it all seems to have gone well. I created a 'call widget and added it to this page, so if anyone actually reads this, try it out. The widget here goes straight to voicemail, so you don't actually have to worry about having a real voice conversation with me (Oh the horrors...).

disqus commenting

I just installed the external disqus commenting system - seemed like a social thing to do. Lets see how it looks...

Flock This

Just installed flock - after hearing about it for quite a while. A little overwhelming at first, but looks like it could be pretty cool once you get used to it.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

My Bike Commute

In honor of 'Commute Another Way Week' I brought my camera along on my bike ride to work this morning, taking a couple pictures a minute. At lunch I dumped them into iPhoto and exported the slideshow to iMovie to add some titles, etc. I even found a song on ccmixter.org to use as backing audio. So - here's the result:

Test

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required. Visit www.apple.com/quicktime/download to download the free player or upgrade your existing QuickTime� Player. Note: During the download process when asked to choose an installation type (Minimum, Recommended or Custom), select Minimum for faster download.

Passion Quilt Meme

It is easy to over-plan things... sometimes you just have to go for it: Original Photo from: http://flickr.com/photos/60445767@N00/116257562/ Technorati Tags: passionquilt

RSS Awareness Day

According to this site, May 1st is RSS Awareness Day. In one sense, pretty silly, but still - could be a chance to highlight some of our current awareness tools...

It's all good: Today's most e-mailed article from the Chronicle of Higher Education

According to the "Its All Good" blog, The Chronicle article including Bowdoin was the number one e-mailed article from the Chronicle site on Friday: It's all good: Today's most e-mailed article from the Chronicle of Higher Education

WiFi as a shared resource

While I'm thinking about Computers In Libraries I'll mention one of the less - positive experiences of the conference - the wireless networking situation. It became a running undercurrent to the rest of the conference content. I think it is something that there should be more discussion about, in a number of areas:

• In one strange sense, I was happy to experience the frequent network outages / instabilities. I know I, and probably most of those in attendance at the conference, come from situations of bandwidth luxury: A private home wireless network connected to a good DSL line, A research grade internet connection at work. It is probably good for us to be in the position of access scarcity every now and then, to remember that for many people that is till the norm.
• In one sense it would be easy to blame the conference organizers for the instability of the networking situation, or the hotel facilities. But realistically - it is a big job to provide wireless infrastructure for a potential userbase of over 2000 people. From what I could see, ITI was making a real effort to accomplish this, and often succeeded.
• The real issue for me is a question of "netiquette" - of social behavior. Often, the problem seemed to be that people could see the wireless network and connect, but couldn't talk to the outside world very well. I don't know what the bandwidth of the connection from the conference routers to the internet as a whole was, but it is obviously a limited resource. And yet, when people could connect, I'd see them browsing aimlessly, watching You-tube videos, looking at facebook pictures... etc. etc. -- not that there is anything wrong with that in the abstract, but when at the same time presenters are having to scrap their live demos because the network is so slow and unpredictable, it seems at best highly inconsiderate, and possibly mean spirited and a form of sabotage.
  

With all the talk of building community, of collaborating, of "sharing online" etc... etc..., I'd like to see more explicit discussion of this aspect of "social networking" - more consideration of the basic norms of appropriate behavior around a shared, limited resource.

More and more the digital world is ushering in a new form of economics, not based on the old paradigm where scarcity equals value, but where value equals abundance and ease of access. But wireless networks are not part of that world yet.

Okay, I'll take off my curmudgeon hat now. :-)



Technorati Tags: cil2008, wireless, networking, behavior, economics, sharing

Home from "Computers In Libraries"

I had a great time at the CIL conference. Of course I've got pages and pages of notes with ideas, web sites to look at, tools to try, powerpoint slides to review, etc... I don't think I"ll "blog" those as such but I'll probably put them online somehow to share with colleagues, etc... (As a note-taking device, I installed MediaWiki locally on my MacBook - to get some experience thinking in mediawiki markup. Seemed to work pretty well, and makes the case for putting the results up on a wiki somewhere, either my own or of the conference / library related ones).

What stands out for me, though, is more the emotional content of the conference. I hadn't been to a library conference in quite a while, and had forgotten the feeling of the shared passion and excitement that is generated by that many people getting together. The three keynote sessions were well chosen - each expressed the passion in a different way, and I did find myself relating the ideas presented to later, more technical, sessions. The Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Shanachies Tour sessions were obvious choices to me before the conference, but I was dubious of the "Gaming" related keynote going into (and probably for the first 15 minutes into it). I understood the interest in gaming and (some of) the values of integrating it into (some) library programs -- but I realize now I didn't really "get it". So this session was one of the bigger epiphanies for me at the conference, and really made me re-evaluate a lot of the other sessions I attended. Its not about the gaming per se - its about being engaging and interactive, about helping people be self-motivating through entertainment and social incentives.

My favorite example is was the "Pecha Kucha" Web 2.0 technologies session. For me it in a way embodied a lot of the themes that other sessions talked about. There was good information there, and useful stuff to be learned, but the whole presentation became more than the sum of its parts in the way that the different presenters related to each other, and the panel related to the audience. There was more synthesis and synergy than is achieved in most conference presentations - especially by the time Greg Notess made his "skeptic" presentation. (But I have to add that - in spite of what I said about my gaming epiphany later, I thought that turning the Pecha Kucha into a competition took something away from it - for me at least. Even though it was done at an audience member's suggestion, I felt it re-established a bit of the division between panel and audience that had been broken down. I suddenly felt uncomfortable and self conscious - I didn't want to judge between the panelists. So anyway, that is my $.02 worth for whoever may be listening).

I don't really feel like I've explained myself here - maybe I will write more as I continue to go through my notes and find examples. I think the Pecha Kucha thing was at the front of my mind from working on this, which was my attempt at putting into practice some of the "infotubey" goodness:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcmikedermott/2406106770/


Technorati Tags: cil2008

Buying Music Modularly

This seems like an interesting direction:

Radiohead, iTunes and GarageBand are giving you the opportunity to remix the band's new single "Nude".

To make remixing easy, the separate 'stems'* from the song are available to purchase from iTunes _here_. The 'stems' available are bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums. You can mix them in any way you like, either by adding your own beats and instrumentation, or just remixing the original parts.

http://www.radioheadremix.com/information/