Hi. I’m in the in-between phase of this year’s job and next year’s job which are really the same job except that the odd nature of grant funding means that I had to apply for next year’s job all over again. At least they didn’t make me pay the $26 to get myself fingerprinted again. So my “new” jobs starts on January second and I suspect it will be a lot like the old job. It lasts until September. I’m leaving for a quickie trip to Alabama on January 4th and, surprise surprise, will be giving a little talk about technology and libraries to the UA folks. If you happen to be in Birmingham next Friday the sixth, I’ll be at the Mervyn H. Sterne Library, Room 158 at 2 pm.
Tag: me!
hi – 20dec
Hi. Anyone who reads this site at its web address instead of via an RSS reader will notice that the default stylesheet has changed. I modified a freely available theme because I wanted something with different levels of navigation. Thanks to another freely available plug-in you can choose the way you would like this site to appear to you. Just check the list of options under the Themes heading in the sidebar. If you’re interested in the other modifications I’ve made and plug-ins I’m using, feel free to check out this page about WordPress on librarian.net. Feel free to pick the stylesheet you like the best, or if there isn’t one that does what you want, let me know.
In other fancy design news, you’ve already seen it but I thought I would show it off: Michael’s Tame the Web blog has broken out of its default stylesheet thanks to the help of the Movable Type Style Generator and some little extra haxies, including the last.fm listing on the righthand column of the ipod blog and the custom sidebars on a few other pages. We’re still bringing the old URLs into line with the new ones and a few other things, but overall I’m really pleased with how it turned out.
hi – 18dec
Hi. Posting has been a bit sporadic here because my old iBook had its fourth logic board fail. So, this is a short story about technology for you. My iBook had left me in the lurch three times thanks to its faulty logic board. This is a known flaw and has been repaired for free each time it has happened. This last time, when I started seeing signs of impending logic board death, I called Apple and said “I have put up with this long enough. Please send me a laptop that will not need replacement of vital parts every eight months” To my suprise, they agreed to send me a new G4, one G faster than my last laptop. I mailed back my old laptop, after wiping the drive. This meant that I had to backup my entire hard drive locally before getting a new laptop. Fortunately in this household that is not difficult. Since so much of my personal data is online, this was less onerous than it would have been maybe a year or two ago. Calendar, contacts, booklist, websites, bookmarks, are all backed up redundantly online in various places.
I got the new laptop about two weeks later, which is longer than I would have preferred, but I can’t see Apple being really gung-ho on sending me a new free laptop. Yesterday I began the long process of re-downloading and re-installing all the software on my old machine. It took about 4-6 hours, including system updates. If I had dial-up it would have taken weeks, literally weeks. Backing up my home directory meant that I saved my system preferences, my desktop images, my email configuration information and yes, my bookmarks. Being tech savvy meant that all this took me was time. The few times I stumbled in my file restoration [I accidentally removed the mechanism for keyboard entry and couldn’t type on the thing for a little bit, ha ha!] I had the know-how to straighten it all out. I know sometimes listening to my “But what about the information poor…?” harangues can be tiring, but a situation like this which was complicated but manageable for me might very well have been the end of someone’s online life in the community that I work in. For every senior that is happily clicking away at some AARP websites, there are others with computers and Internet subscriptions who have hit some sort of wall, usually just a know-how wall and don’t have a solid plan B. In my librarian utopia, libraries can help be that plan B.
hi – 09dec
Hi. I was interviewed about the digital divide, camel librarians and the Gates Foundation on Moby Lives yesterday. You can grab the podcast here.
hi – 28nov
Hi. I went to the Somerville Public Library on Buy Nothing Day (this past Friday) and it was closed up tight. As I sat outside enjoying the sunshine, I must have seen fifteen people go up to the front door and try to open it. I understand why the library is closed on Thanksgiving, I would have been concerned if it hadn’t been. But, except as an extreme cost-cutting maneuver, being closed the day after Thanksgiving seems to be a bad customer service move. People are home from work, kids are home from school. Everyone is out and about. Balancing a happy staff with a happy patron base I’m sure is always a challenge, but I was still sad to not be able to go to the library on Friday. More on my holiday weekends, my haircut, and some digitial divide hurdling on my personal site.