"Height"

From my favorite bizarro comic strip, xkcd - A Webcomic, by Randall Munroe, here's a marvelous(ly huge) chart of the "Observable Universe," from the top...

...to the bottom....

[Note: the image is waaaay too tall for Blogger to display, so you'll have to see it at the original site here.]

Cool!

Note: The disclaimer at the bottom of this web page reads

Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

The tiny, tiny print below this reads

We did not invent the algorithm.
The algorithm consistently finds Jesus.
The algorithm killed Jeeves.
The algorithm is banned in China.
The algorithm is from Jersey.
The algorithm constantly finds Jesus.
This is not the algorithm.
This is close.

I love this guy!

Library Blogging by Karen Coombs and Jason Griffey

There's a new book, Library Blogging by Karen Coombs and Jason Griffey, which is highly recommended by Michael Stephens in Tame the Web.

I haven't looked at it myself, yet, but I value TTW's opinions. Here's a little of what Stephens writes:

If you are starting a blogging project in your library or teaching blogging, I’d recommend this one for sure as an up to date choice. I’ll be using it as a classroom resource in my teaching.

For more, visit Library Blogging and add the feed to keep up with additions to the examples used in the book.

Mike

Gorilla Librarian

Thanks to Tame the Web, I've stumbled across this sign on a pillar of a library:


Turns out it's from this Monty Python sketch:

Kinda like the notion....

Al Behrman / AP file

Mike

The bookless librarian?

I've been a Rachel Singer Gordon fan for a number of years, ever since I reviewed The Accidental Systems Librarian for Public Libraries magazine (pp.60-61) back in 2003.

Her LISjob.com is a good source for job-searching, and Info Career Trends is a good online newsletter for library staff to subscribe to.

More recently I've subscribed to the RSS feed of her blog, The Liminal Librarian. Gordon explains the title in this way:

Liminality, the state of being “in between,” is inherently unsettling, yet full of possibility. Liminal librarians are on the threshold, mindful of their in-betweenness, taking issue with absolutes, and excited about what the future may hold.

Note: She also has a second blog, Beyond the Job (articles, job-hunting advice, professional development opportunities, and other news and ideas on how to further your library career) which I've just started to look at.

Gordon's latest post on The Liminal Librarian is "The bookless librarian." You should read the post itself, plus the posts it links to, but here's a quick summary and some reaction.

Gordon writes:

I know intellectually that people process information, and prefer their entertainment, in different ways, yet it always gives me pause to hear librarians talking about how they don’t tend to read a lot of books, or about how they’ve never personally liked to read. So, I was interested lately to see a couple of higher profile librarians mention this.

She then quotes from John Berry’s most recent LJ posting:

I never “loved” reading, the way so many people declare they do. It is especially true among those you encounter if you spend your life around libraries, books, and librarians.....

In this new phase of my life, I have begun to view the progress of media and information technology as advancing my liberation from reading, or at least from much of the guilt and drudgery I associate with it….

Gordon voices her own concern:

I spend a lot of time reading (and, obviously, writing!) online, but couldn’t imagine ever giving up my books. Not only do different media serve different purposes, I think they also feed different parts of our soul

But then she says,

the less knee-jerk part of my brain wonders if we actually do need different types of librarians to match up with our different types of patrons....

[Do]we need more librarians like me, who entered the profession in large part because of...a love for the physical book? Or, do we need more librarians like Jenny Levine, who has greater insight into, say, gaming than I’ll ever possess....

As anyone who knows me or has read The Surly Librarian knows, I'm in the former group.

Nonetheless, I vote for All of the Above.

Mike

Librarians' Internet Index

I don't think I mentioned this blog in any of my earlier posts, but Librarians' Internet Index: New this Week is an excellent RSS feed to subscribe to.

Each week you get about twenty or so links to professionally vetted websites, with annotations. Great reference resources.

Here are some of the ones I've saved recently:

• The Politics of Satire - This small slide show features a "collection of political covers by New Yorker illustrator Barry Blitt," including the controversial July 21, 2008, cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama, and others addressing topics such as the George W. Bush Administration, global warming, and Hillary Clinton. From the New Yorker.


• Listen to Nature: The Language of Birds - "[A]n introduction to how, why and when birds communicate, illustrated with sound samples, including Alex the famous talking parrot." Features essays and sound clips on topics such as songs (including vocal appropriation and duetting), calls (of young birds and as deceitful mimicry), bird to man communication, birds that talk to themselves, nature or nurture (including "talking birds"), and human appreciation of bird songs. Includes a short bibliography. From the British Library.


• Water Calculator - This site helps you calculate residential water use per day. Covers source of water supply, and water use in the bathroom, kitchen, and outdoors (including landscaping, washing a car, and swimming pools). Results include suggestions for reducing water use. Also includes links to water conservation tips and related material. From the National Wildlife Federation.

A great tool!

Mike

Summing up

I decided I could finish this project in time if I came in to Main as a customer on Sunday.

My home PC is allergic to the Internet. I can log on, but the browser claims it cannot find any servers.

>:-[

So...here I am in the Grand Reading Room, the first one to arrive!

I've already been using Bloglines, del.icio.us and PBwiki for several years, because I like their functionality and they are directly or indirectly relevant to my daily routines.

Of the new things I tried, it was good to finally experiment with Flickr, though I rarely need to post or share images outside of my blogs. I can see the values of Technorati, LibraryThing, podcasts and OverDrive, but again not stuff I would usually use much myself—though I definitely am glad to have learned about them for the sake of helping customers.

The most interesting in terms of potential personal use is Zoho Writer. Second to that—though I haven't had time to explore it yet—is the notion of online desktops in the Web 2.0 Tools.

The project gave me enough of a nudge to overcome enertia and actually try out apps I was curious about...but told myself I didn't have the time to try. It has generated a short list of things I want to go back to for further exploration and potential use. A good follow-up to the NEFLIN-sponsored "Social Software in Libraries" course in 2006.

Re improvements: I agree with Carol Bailey's critique.

• The actual time commitment needed was much more than a lot of staff could spare.
  
  This sort of learning is essential for JPL staff, as is other e-technology learning. Although I think self-guided work on one's own timetable is crucial for the subject (everyone's learning curve is different), I also think the training needs to have a mandate analogous to the one for Destination: LEADERSHIP.
  
  In other words, supervisors can fit time for participation into their overall scheduling needs, but they must fit it in for every employee.


• In addition to Carol's concern about inconsistent links, I found that occasionally instructions were incomplete or incorrect. For example, see the description of my problem subscribing to a podcast using Podcast Alley.
  
  I managed in each case—eventually—because I've been doing this sort of puzzling out of online software apps for years. And because I'm a stubborn curmudgeon who won't give up.
  
  I share Carol's concern about much of this being "very confusing to [newbies] who didn't know their way around a Web site." We want to encourage JPL folks to keep exploring, not discourage them.

I would definitely participate in another program, and I urge JPL to increase the amount of e-tech training it does. I'd like to see the time when more of these skills become part of job descriptions, or at least part of core competencies which we would expect probationary staff to gain.

I'd also like to encourage the discourse about "what all this means" in terms of the public library mandate to serve the "immigrants" and the "refugees." As you've seen, I've added a number of my own rants along those lines. It may not be the sort of discourse for the 'Net, but JPL should build more safe venues for that sort of discussion behind the scenes.

All in all: Excellent program! Thanks very much to all of you who made it possible.

Mike

OverDrive

Okay. I've never tried to use OverDrive myself for a few simple reasons:

• I still have only dialup at home


• My 'Net connection has been on the fritz for months. I can login, but my browser can't find any sites. :-(


• I don't listening to books. I read books.

Guess which one is my main reason.

But, I think it's excellent that JPL makes this resource available for customers.

In order to try it out, I've downloaded the OverDrive console onto my workstation in the Call Center workroom at Main. It took a while to get through all the downloads and updates and googaas, and whatchmacallems....

But then I searched for a scifi/fantasy book I hadn't seen yet.

This collection doesn't have much at all by my favorite authors: Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Bear, William Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Robin Hobbs. It's looks like it's more classicals and maybe a few best sellers. Oh, well....

I chose Christopher Priest's The Prestige, since I missed the movie and wanted to get a sense of how this technology works.

Catch is: I'm at work. When am I going to listen to 12+ hours of someone reading a book?

I'll try it out, at least. Then I'll know better what customers are dealing with.

Neat idea...at least in theory.

Mike

Podcasts

Not at all sure about this one. Not meaning I'm not sure it's well-designed or valuable, generally. Just meaning I probably will not use it much.

That's only because I'm no longer someone who listens to audio media much...except for All Things Considered on the way home from work, and Car Talk during Saturday morning chores.

I decided to try Podcast Alley, partly because I didn't want to wait 20+ minutes for the iTunes download.

I liked the search feature...except that it wasn't very good with exact phrase searching...and I also liked the clean look of the website.

My search was "science fiction reviews," since that's my favorite fiction genre. Got lots of false hits, and lots that weren't very well annotated.

After looking annotations and show lists for several, I picked Science Fiction Book Review Podcast, since it gives reviews of specific titles.

Subscribing in Bloglines was a bit awkward, because the URL Podcast Alley gave me, http://www.sfbrp.com/?feed=podcast, wouldn't work. Knowing how Bloglines usually works, I shortened it to http://www.sfbrp.com/, and that did it.

Here's the link to a podcast review of Greg Bear's Moving Mars, a book I really enjoyed.

We shall see.

Part of my disinterest in personal use of podcasts is the same as my disinterest in downloadable music, video, etc., generally. I just don't use audio/visual media much any more.

In my 20s and 30s I bought LPs every week. When CDs came along, I was losing interest in popular music and not listening to radio as much.

Since the late 1980s, my partner Jim and I haven't had a TV!!!

So....

Nothing against this stuff. It's just not where my interests are.

Mike

Maurice Sendak

I've always admired the work of Maurice Sendak. His stories are delightful, and his artwork is so clear, friendly and beautiful.

This week, in his eightieth year, he came out as a gay man. Patricia Cohen's New York Times article on 9/9/08, "Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are," says of Sendak:

Maurice Sendak’s 80th year — which ended with his birthday earlier this summer and is being celebrated on Monday night with a benefit at the 92nd Street Y — was a tough one. He has been gripped by grief since the death of his longtime partner; a recent triple-bypass has temporarily left him too weak to work or take long walks with his dog....

The article reviews his career, talks about the "originality and emotional honesty" of his children's books, and explains that he is not, as many expect, a cheery grandpa type.

“I hate people,” he said at one point, extolling the superior company of dogs, like his sweet-tempered German shepherd, Herman (after Melville).

He is, at heart, a curmudgeon, but a delightful one, with a vast range of knowledge, a wicked sense of humor and a talent for storytelling and mimicry.

The key for me, as a gay professional, is this part of the story:

Was there anything he had never been asked? He paused for a few moments and answered, “Well, that I’m gay.”

“I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business,” Mr. Sendak added. He lived with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst, for 50 years before Dr. Glynn’s death in May 2007. He never told his parents: “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”

Children protect their parents, Mr. Sendak said. It was like the time he had a heart attack at 39. His mother was dying from cancer in the hospital, and he decided to keep the news to himself, something he now regrets.

A gay artist in New York is not exactly uncommon, but Mr. Sendak said that the idea of a gay man writing children books would have hurt his career when he was in his 20s and 30s....

After Dr. Glynn’s death, Mr. Sendak said he was “still trying to figure out what I’m doing here.”

“I wanted to take his place,” he said. “His death became a demarcation.” He added that he lost touch with many of his friends, unable to return phone calls and reply to e-mail messages.

After 23 year with my own spouse, Jim, I recognize how deep such grief could be. Sendak's loss, and his choice to come out, move me very much.

One of my Sendak favorites is his 1970 book, In the Night Kitchen. It gives us such a sweetly bizarre, comical dream voyage of three-year-old Mickey. But, of course, this book brought out our culture's obsession with censorship of children's books, because Mickey tumbles through the pages naked.

I suppose now that Sendak is out as gay, some folks will want to drag all of that craziness back out of their closets. I pray that this won't be the case, yet at 58 I've seen too much willful ignorance among my fellow Americans.

More difficult, more profound, and more beautiful still for me, is Sendak's 1993 work, We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy.


As Pamela Warrick wrote in "Facing the Frightful Things" for The Los Angeles Times:

[Never] has he assumed more about what children know than with his latest book, a book even author-illustrator Sendak calls "an in-your-face book about homelessness." And if that weren't shocking enough for the faint-of-heart, the book...also touches on such '90s issues as AIDS, starvation and the horrors of life on the street.

Such subjects make grown-ups cringe even when they are not lavishly illustrated in a children's book. (Grown-up guilt, Sendak believes, probably has something to do with this.) But it's a different story for children. What most interests them, it seems, is how the kids win out in the end.

And that's what interests Sendak. In the world of children's publishing, he has been everyone's favorite enfant terrible, always causing a rumpus over this or that.

"Solving the problems of homelessness, or any other social problem, isn't the real purpose of this book," he says. The purpose of this book is the purpose of all Sendak books, he says: To examine how children get through, how they get by.

"These are difficult times for children.Children have to be brave to survive what the world does to them. And this world is scrungier and rougher and dangerouser than it ever was before. . . . "

As a gay man who as gotten through the alienation of the closet, I can appreciate Sendak's mission to show children—and those adults who have the courage to read his works to them—how we all can get through the serious challenges of life.

I admire this man.

Mike

YouTube...and a tribute from a fan

No question about this one. It's one of the most valuable things to come along since the 'Net got started.

Even given the importance of respecting the intellectual property of those who create videos, the whole idea of "civilians" being able to broadcast is excellent.

Also no question as to my choice for what to link here. I went to YouTube, searched Acrentropy, my favorite blog by a JPL librarian (guess who), and searched the three video clips created by "Alonzo Mosley (FBI)."

The first one, "100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers," came out last year and got international acclaim, deservedly so:



The second one, "Getting drunk and losing all your money ... at the Movies," is less well known:



The third, "100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers: The Centennial Edition," is new:



Great work, Alonzo!

Mike

Web 2.0 Tools

I thought for this exercise that I would look at several categories and mention or discuss those which I use, or which caught my eye.

• Bookmarking: I already use de.licio.us, though mostly as a quick storage for URLs of sites I stumble onto and might want to get back to later
• Books: The one that really caught my attention is Lulu. I'm a life-long writer who wants to have an audience but is less concerned about making a living from writing. I write stuff which may not have a large enough readership to attract conventional publishers. Lulu might be the way to go...whenever I'm ready to publish more than blog posts. I like their slogan: "Our hope has been to have 1 million users that sell 10 books instead of 10 authors that sell 1 million books."
• Content Aggregation & Management: I've written elsewhere that I already use EditGrid. Wufoo looks like another tool I will be using.
• Education: Because Carol Bailey recommended it, I looked into Mángo, trying out the first few slides of the German lessons (since I knew German way back in ancient history). I like what I saw and heard for starters. I will explore this one further.
• Hosted Wikis: Already use PBWiki.
• Online Desktop / OS: Gonna have to come back to this. The ideas is appealing, but I'll need more time to explore.
• Organization: Since I liked Zoho Writer, I'm bookmarking Zoho.
• Web Dev: I'm curious about Pipes, but I don't have time to explore right now.

The Web Evangelist article is interesting. I'm not so concerned about whether or not online apps replace Microsoft. I'm just glad so many, many people are sharing their apps.

This might be going overboard, but I think this opening out of the Internet, of open source software and of online apps might turn out to be as revolutionary a technological development as the printing press was. Though the corporations are always trying to retain enough control to bring in the revenue they need for the work they do, the free online revolution allows millions of people to "jump the gun" on them.

My reason for the printing press analogy has to do with what happened when people could print relatively inexpensive copies of translations of the Bible from Latin into the various languages of the day (beginning with Luther's German translation). Once that happened, there could no longer be a hierarchy of control over people's exploration of scripture, religious language, belief, etc.

I'm not gaga about all the vast and silly flood of toys. I'm definitely skeptical about the fragmentization and "niche-ization" of society and the marketplace.

Nonetheless, when anyone who is computer and software savvy can invent and share information or apps, what a marvelous leveling of the world that is!

Mike

Zoho Writer: Using online apps

For some reason, my first few attempts at using Zoho Writer were bombs. I couldn't figure out how to get a new document started. Even though I was clicking the New button, it didn't work right.

However, anything I'm trying to do online while at the REF desk is likely to blow up. All those pesky customers interrupting. (See "Customer Service for Curmudgeons.")

Having now gotten a document started, I think I'm going to like this. I'm a bit wary of saving my stuff online...but, of course, all my blog posts are online...including the blogs you folks don't know about...so....

Anywho....

Let's see what it does with images.

Hmm....

A lot of trial and error here, trying to figure out how to get the image where I want it on the page...in a way that makes the text wrap to the left of the image.

However, being a trial-and-error sort of person, I've gotten at least some of it figured out.

That, by the way, is perhaps the key criterion for success using computer applications—especially online apps. You have to be willing to figure a lot of it out for yourself. In other words, you have to spend a LOT of time...a lot a lot a lot...playing around, goofing around, trying this and that and the other.

It's not for the timid...or the impatient.

But, as I used to tell the senior citizens to whom I was teaching Beginning Computers ages ago, "You can't break the hardware or the software unless you really know what you're doing. The worst that usually happens is you lose your work and have to start over."

I'm going to try one other toy for the moment. I put an anchor up at the start of this post. If you click the word "anchor," it should take you back there.

Now let's see if I can publish this to my blog.

Hold onto your hats.....

Mike

PS: WOW! I'm impressed! It did pretty well...although, once I saw the blog post, I had to come back to Zoho and edit the size of the image. The big plus was, I could click Publish again and get the option of updating the post I had already published.

I like it!

One complaint so far: If I use Zoho in 800x600 pixel resolution...which I need to use in order to read text on a screen...the popup editing windows overlap the edge of the screen, and I CAN'T USE THEM!!! This is a major pain, because I have to toggle back and forth between 800x600, which I can see, and 1024x786, which I need in order to use the popups. Grrr....

PPS: Another couple of problems:

• When Zoho Writer publishes to a blog (i.e., translates into HTML code), it reads each keyboard Return as a paragraph break. That means if I do Return + Return, as I normally would to put a blank linke between paragraphs in a MS Word document, I get two blank lines in the HTML. So...one has to remember the formatting differences between word processing and HTML coding.
• Even though I've saved this document in Arial font in the Zoho Writer, when it publishes to my blog, the font isn't saved. I get Times New Roman instead.
• As you will have noticed if you clicked on "anchor," the link didn't take you to anchor but, instead, to the login for my blog.

All this means that one may still have to clean up coding in a Zoho document after it's published to a blog.

Still, the app is probably worth it, since one doesn't have to carry around a flashdrive or get be at one's own PC to work.

PPPS: There's another excellent app I've mentioned elsewhere: EditGrid.com. Great for publishing Excel spreadsheets.