Today was the first day of school at UIC. The weather was great.
The first picture is of the East Campus at around noon. The second picture is later in the day of new student Alex (son of friend Aaron) sampling local delicacies -- including a polish sausage with grilled onions and fries from Jim's Original Maxwell St Polish and an authentic piece of original baklava from the Pan Hellenic Pastry Shop on Halsted.
I had a great time at the Illinois State Fair. I was there on Tuesday and Wednesday. Usually the first day, I hang around the city and the second day, I hang out at the fair.
It's a pretty city.
Of course, I was bummed out to see that Boone's Saloon had closed. The backyard patio was a perennial stop for me.
One thing you absolutely must do when you're at the Fair is see the Butter Cow in the Dairy Building. This year, the Butter Cow was joined by a youngish Abe Lincoln, this being the 200th anniversary of his birth.
Finally, I kind of liked the message from the Illinois Pork Producers. Porkchop-on-a-stick is a favorite of mine.
Make sure your students have a copy of your syllabus just in case the frickin' server breaks down.
It's 2009 and the Chicago Tribune has only now figured out what it takes to design a website. Still, you have to hand it to them, it's a vast improvement over the previous iteration. They even went back to the old letterhead.
You know, as someone living in the city who doesn't drive a car, I've been feeling kind of left out lately with all this talk about 'Cash for Clunkers'. Who should run to the rescue but local furniture retailer Walter E. Smithe?
In a pretty funny commercial I just heard on WBBM radio, they announced they were offering cash discounts of several hundred dollars on new purchases if you bring in your old couch or armoire.
As store owner Walter Smithe explained in this comment to Furniture World:
"While not everyone has a clunker car, almost everyone has at least one piece of clunker furniture they'd like to replace with something nicer. This is a great opportunity for consumers to trade their old furniture for new furniture."
The clever company even has a twitter account where the latest tweet is about -- what else -- their 'Cash for Clunkers' deal!
Here's something interesting. Andrew Sullivan, on his blog, The Daily Dish, has been featuring a series of user-submitted photos called, 'The View From Your Window'. And wouldn't you know, Saturday, he ran a picture from DePaul!
You can look up the image and then compare it to the one above. They're both from the Garden Terrace in the 'DePaul Center' on Jackson and State*. The only difference, strangely enough, is that Sullivan's copy seems to be reversed. How'd that happen?
[h/t Brian]
---------- * Family Tradition: The building, formerly known as Goldblatt's is where my Aunt Shirley for years used to work part-time in Notions & Lotions on 1 and where I continue to toil in Reference on 10.
The ever-wonderful, Smashing Magazine features a good introduction by Tim Wright, called "HTML5 and The Future of the Web". The links and references following the article are particularly helpful.
Even more 'hands-on' is an interesting tutorial called, "HTML 5 and CSS 3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using" from the site, Nettuts+. The goal is to redesign a blog page using, as the title would suggest, HTML5 and CSS3 tagging. This approach is a wonderful way for those familiar with the current state of tagging (say, you and me) to begin grappling with the new system.
It was a bit rainy but that didn't dampen anyone's spirit at the Evanston 4th of July Parade. The first shot is just before the parade with Gov. Pat Quinn and DPOE President Daniel Biss getting their picture taken by Daniel's wife Karen. The second shot is a group shot taken afterwards.
[h/t CapitolFaxBlog]There are lots of ways to improve failing schools. Charters are one way, but so is investing in traditional schools by offering smaller class sizes, better teachers, financial incentives for teachers and a longer school year. There is no single solution. Pretending otherwise is just as harmful as pretending that scores have gone up miraculously when we know they have not.
When people think of content management, initially they think of blog posts and calendar entries and schemes for keeping the content current.
That's what you'd expect any system to deliver. But what I've found, once you get beyond that point, is that the kinds of problems you routinely have to deal with often require customization. And that's a good thing!
I'll give you an example.
In Registration (my other job) we need a way to get students back into the system after they (usually mistakenly) drop all classes for the semester. All that's required is their name, student ID and the semester when they want this to happen. The Registration people call this 'reinstatement'.
Anyway, it's about as simple a set of requirements as you can get. The student fills out a brief form, the form data goes into a page that only certain staff have access to and, just to be extra careful, a copy of the results is also sent to the person who normally handles these requests.
Sound easy?
Depending on your CMS, this can either be a breeze or a nightmare. Drupal, I'm happy to say, can handle this out of the box -- not as the result of some awful API that only a programmer can understand -- but as part of its default feature set that anyone with good administrative skills can master.
Now maybe other CMS's can do the same. I certainly hope so. But the moral of the story is that I get requests like this all the time. It's to be expected, encouraged even, because content management isn't just about blogs and calendar entries but about solving the particular needs of the particular department where you happen to work.
Librarians for example have all sorts of strange and exotic content types -- things like 'citation' and 'resource listing'.
As I told people at both programs where I helped out this year at ALA (Drupal BoF & BIGWIG), if you're going to work with things like citations and resource listings, you might as well make sure that the CMS you're getting is flexible and robust enough to handle them -- in as easy and accessible a way possible.
That's the true 'power and glory' of content management. In my view, it's pretty much a basic requirement.
Robert Reich has a problem with manufacturing. At least he does when it's practiced in the U.S. For some reason, he thinks that actually making things has gone the way of the horse buggy and 45rpm record player.
It's not a new argument. We heard it all the time during the Clinton Administration. The problem is, the people promoting it could never come up with an alternative that wasn't some form of temporary bubble.
America still needs its washing machines and flat panel displays and we can't pay for them with CDO's and IPO's.
Reich seems to think that increases in productivity and greater automation are something new. This is America. We invented the assembly line. We've always had innovation -- only until now we never used it as an excuse to move our operations off-shore.
He talks about "Technophobes, neo-Luddites and anti-globalist" and warns against being on the 'wrong side of history'.
We've been living on his side of history for twenty years or more and all we have to show for it are vast areas of devastation as entire industries move off-shore.
Alderman Tom Tunney welcoming guests at the Young Chicago Lakefront Annual Mtg. & Elections Party held at Trader Todd's on May 19.
Conservative historian Niall Ferguson looks at the growing cry to (re-)regulate financial markets and for some reason only thinks of the Seventies:
My concern is that we're going to get the 1970s for fear of the 1930s.
Naturally he's cherry-picking here. In fact, the same regulations also operated in the Fifties and Sixties -- or in other words, the greatest period of economic expansion the country ever knew.
New York University is closing down its for-profit electronic learning operation, NYUonline, and moving some of its curriculum and staff into its School of Continuing and Professional Studies.U of I Global Campus (2009):
[University of Illinois] trustees meeting in Chicago voted to follow a faculty task force plan to scrap much of the current version of Global Campus.NYUonline (2002):
In two and a half years of operation, NYUonline received nearly $25 million from the university, but enrollment remained anemic at best: just 500 students at its peak.U of I Global Campus (2009):
The $10 million program had only attracted about 360 students as of last month.NYUOnline (2001):
The university blames last month's closure of the distance-learning company, called NYUonline, on the economy.U of I Global Campus (2009):
...[Prof. Nick Burbules] said, a global recession has changed conditions under which the older initiative was established.NYUonline (2001):
"I believe that the value of our work -- some of which will continue to be carried on by the university, and some non-academic portions of which may be acquired by third parties -- will become even clearer with time," [NYUonline CEO Gordon] Macomber said in the release.U of I Global Campus (2009):
Burbules said the 2.0 model draws from the UI's experience with the initiative. "I think what is driving this process is the belief that the mission of expanding the online offerings is important," he said. "I give [U of I President White] full credit for inspiring this work, and I personally believe it is the future of higher education."
Note, there were significant differences between the programs, though stated goals tended to shift over time. Nevertheless, what the two shared was an inability by the people in charge to truly understand what the technology was capable of and what it wasn't. Decision-makers themselves had no strong background in online content development for higher education. This lack of background made it hard to evaluate alternative strategies. Instead of identifying successful initiatives already in place and extending those, they chose to concoct their schemes out of whole cloth.
The outcome should come as no surprise.The dark ages are over...
Transcript:
THE PRESIDENT: Dan from CNN.
DAN LOTHIAN (CNN): During the campaign you were criticized by some within your own party for perhaps not being able to be tough on foreign policy matters. Now you’ve had this friendly interaction with Mr. Chavez. Are you concerned at all about how this might be perceived back in the U.S. as perhaps being soft? Already one senator is calling this friendly interaction irresponsible. And as a quick follow-up, if I may, when you got the book from Mr. Chavez, what did you really think? (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: I think it was a nice gesture to give me a book; I’m a reader. And you’re right, we had this debate throughout the campaign, and the whole notion was, is that somehow if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us, that that somehow would be a sign of weakness. The American people didn’t buy it. And there’s a good reason the American people didn’t buy it — because it doesn’t make sense.
[Courtesy of the Orange Satan]
I'm just as happy as the next person to be paranoid about huge corporate entities trying to dominate our lives but this attack on Google by UK Observer columnist Henry Porter is pure insanity.
In it he identifies Google as a "classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits." You either agree with Google, he says, or you feel "the weight of its boot on your windpipe."
He then goes on to blame Google for the demise of newspapers. He hints darkly that in some future time of "profound challenges", Google may decide to cut newspapers off from their audience. The company is "delinquent and sociopathic", a "nightmarish 11-year-old" which "needs to be stopped in its tracks" etc.
How silly can you get? We're talking about a search-engine here. Its bread and butter are links and snippets of content. It's no more illegal or immoral for Google to use content in this way than it would be for you or me.
Indeed the thought of putting a restriction on this use is far more worrisome than anything Porter can come up with.
But the truth is, Porter really doesn't come up with much. Once you sweep away the invective, you're pretty much left with nothing other than Google is big and successful at what it does.
If this is the best a 'journalist' can produce, it explains the plight of newspapers far better than anything Google allegedly has done.
[h/t Keith Teare]
With opening day tomorrow, it's good to know where the Cubs stand on ketchup, mustard and paper cups.
So yes, everybody and his mother has sent me a message about the Conflicker Worm that's supposed to strike on April 1.
All I can say is, April Fools to you too! ***
___*** I mean, some of us remember Y2K.
I find it amusing that there's so much buzz (some of it manufactured?) about the Amazon Kindle. The real revolution is all around us (which is what you'd expect for a revolution): it's people using smart-phones or netbooks to text each other, send email and photos, and otherwise access the Internet.
Now we have a report by the Pew Research Center which reflects pretty much what anyone taking a train or bus home can observe every day:
Cast a glance at any coffee shop, train station or airport boarding gate, and it is easy to see that mobile access to the internet is taking root in our society. Open laptops or furrowed brows staring at palm-sized screens are evidence of how routinely information is exchanged on wireless networks.
The report goes on to look at the roll that "mobile internet access" plays in various user groups. It concludes that the tech bar "has risen":
In the past, having tech gear such as broadband at home generally placed people on the cutting edge; that is no longer the case in this edition of the typology. Our new study shows that mobile connectivity is the new centerpiece of high-tech life.
[h/t ResourceShelf]
We had a wonderful turnout of close to 20 librarians from all parts of the Chicagoland area. Knowledge and skill-level ran from seasoned veterans to people being introduced to Drupal for the first time.
Project Demos & Participation
We had a number of people show us projects they're working on, including Mikael Jacobsen of Skokie Public, Brian Smith from PALS and Colin Koteles from the College of DuPage. We also had healthy contingents from Loyola, Oak Park Public, [the 3 people sitting next to Mikael?], and the ALA.
Module & Technique Discussion
Questions or issues that came up included transferring a Wiki to Drupal, customizing Themes (in this case the Zen Theme), use of Panels and a short (and conflicted) demo on my part of CiviCRM.
Resources
I was happy to see that at least two other people had read or were reading the O'Reilly Drupal Book. We agreed that it was very good. I added that it was very hands-on and that you really wanted to have a working copy of the CMS in front of you as you went through the chapters.
Other resources that people recommended included, Learn by the Drop, some of the instructional material from UMich, and this interesting site bitnami.org where you can download all the apps you need (Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc.) to get Drupal up and running locally.
ALA in July
We also discussed plans for ALA in July. We'll be meeting as part of the LITA Drupal4Lib IG meeting. People expressed an interest in hearing from a speaker who could discuss where Drupal is heading in the near future -- with the next release. Happily, we have a number of excellent Drupal Developers in the Chicagoland area who could talk on this subject.
Most Embarrassing Moment
In an attempt to show beginners how easy it is to set up Drupal using cPanel/Fantastico (just to play around and experiment with), I completely flubbed up, ending with one error after the other. So yes, I will be leaving town and changing my identity. (Here's how it should have gone...).
Thanks to All
First thanks to the wonderful people at DePaul for letting us use their great Instruction Room.
Then thanks of course to everyone who came! I was so wonderfully surprised by the number and variety of people who came. It really energized me as to ideas and activities we can do for using Drupal for library purposes in the Chicagoland area.
Feel free to leave comments and hope to see everyone again!
Next Meeting(s)
We'll be getting together as part of the LITA Drupal4Lib IG meeting either on the Saturday (7/11) or Sunday (7/12), depending on conflicts, room availability etc. We then have a scheduled meeting in September at the downtown office of the MLS on September 25.
Note: Mikael Jacobsen is also organizing meetings for NSLS.
The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook has just come out. The Chronicle of Higher Education points to the considerable effort the publishers have made to give this "bible of the undergraduate paper-writing process" a substantial web component. They have a password-protected website that contains the full text of the manual along with a whole ton of support material.
Good for them! It's great they're making such an effort. But what I want to know is why they still refuse to acknowledge that 'website' consists of only one word. Doing so would be a sign of true progress.
I think Amazon is taking this community thing way too far. I mean, the 'Inkjet Community'?
Made it over to the early voting station at the Lincoln Park Branch of CPL during a break. It's for the Primary to replace Congressman Rahm Emanuel. The last time I had been there was in October for the General Election. Needless to say, the one or two people waiting to vote this time round in no way matched the scores of people all packed in and waiting just a couple of months ago. Instead of close to an hour, it took maybe 5 minutes.
Am I the last person on earth to realize that Obama writes with his left hand? You know us 'lefties' feel a kinship for one another. Notice he's wearing his watch on his left hand as well. A true lefty might wear it on his right -- to afford mobility to the dominant hand.
Apparently until the following legislation finally passes, if you're dead in Mississippi but don't meet the "residency requirements", your chances of getting a pauper's grave don't look too good:
MS HB 1316, 2007-2007, Holland; An Act To Authorize Counties To Waive The Residency Requirement For Determination Of Pauper Status To Qualify For Burial Costs; To Provide That Counties And Municipalities Burying Paupers May Use County Or Municipal Employees And Equipment, Purchase Necessary Materials And Contract For Necessary Services For That Purpose; To Provide That Those Provisions Do Not Authorize Public Funds To Be Used For Ceremonies Associated With Burials Or Funerals; And For Related Purposes.
No doubt, the current requirement is in place to prevent Mississippi from becoming a haven for transient dead people.
[Found while searching on a demo of Serial Solutions 360 Search for "keyword contains burial and materials"]
I'm pleased to announce a Chicagoland Drupal4Lib BoF on Friday, 3/20 (1:30p-4p) at DePaul's Loop Campus, 1 E. Jackson (10th fl., Rm# 10028), Chicago.
The Chicagoland Drupal4Lib BoF will be an opportunity for librarians to get together and discuss how they use (or would like to use) Drupal in a library context. We'll ask people to present projects they're working on and we'll field questions on problems and approaches to implementing Drupal. All levels of knowledge from expert to n00b are welcome.
Also, since we're the 'host' city for the ALA Convention in Chicago in July, we'll have an opportunity to think about what we might want to do for that.
This Chicagoland Drupal4Lib BoF is a follow-up to our successful get-togethers last year at the Metropolitan Librarian System and at the wildly sold-out Chicago Drupal BarCamp in October.
We'll be doing one of these on a quarterly basis -- or at least that's the intention. The people at DePaul have kindly made their location available for March; We'll be meeting at McCormick Place as part of ALA in July; After that we'll be meeting at the downtown offices of the Metropolitan Library System (MLS).
It goes without saying that your participation and suggestions are welcome. The format is free and open enough to accommodate a ton of different ideas and needs.
You can sign up here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/18820
Feel free to leave a comment there or email me directly -- and everyone start planning for an informative and rewarding event -- on 3/20!
And the winner is: a cornstarch laced brown foamy liquid that apparently is supposed to appeal to easily distracted (and hallucinatory) teenagers. [link]
Current Cites for January 2009 is out! You can find the issue here...
I wrote about an interesting article in Portal that looked at the search habits of undergrads where the authors not only analyzed 100 freshman comp term papers but conducted follow-up interviews and focus groups as well.
Former NYU Reference Associates Leo, Andy and Mariana get together in NYC, first for a tour of Andy's current gig and then for din-din at a local restaurant.
Wow, here's something I haven't seen for a while: It's a clip called, "The Sisters Zilla" [archive.org] that I did as a final project for one of my classes at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program -- almost 10 years ago! It's kind of funny, especially near the end. What's more amazing: the link still works (requires RealPlayer):
Here's the original description for the piece:
The Sisters Zilla (in RealVideo). Emotive blockbuster combining the best of "The Three Sisters" by Anton Chekov together with "Godzilla" by Sony Entertainment plus a shot or two of ITP thrown in for good measure. Done with Debbie Tarjono for 'Digital Video'. (Premiere 5.0, AfterEffects 4.0; Summer 1999).
Reading my copy of Connect Magazine, which the IT People at NYU are kind enough to still send me, I notice that they're discontinuing Dailup Service as of January 20, 2009.
That's a shame though probably long overdue. NYU Dailup service was my first gateway to the Internet way back in 1994. I had had a modem on my laptop since the late Eighties but the only time I actually used it was to dial into a special government number to download some unexceptional data. Dailing into specialized phone numbers was about all you could do with a modem back then -- that and then a bit later on, connecting to proprietary networks like AOL or CompuServe.
It's when I got to NYU in '94 and was able to connect to their Dailup service that this strange unfamiliar network called the 'Web' became accessible. This was the era of GIF images and Netscape 1.0. In fact, just before I got there, the Library at NYU had completed an initial effort to make content available online -- in Gopher.
Oh well. I used Dailup till sites like Napster started getting big, at which point I switched over to DSL from Verizon. Ah, the days of 28kbs and 56kbs connectivity!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
It's practically an institution on the North Side of Chicago. The Hot Dog Stand 'Wieners Circle' has been closed down by the Board of Health due, according to a sign on the door, to problems with their "hot water service". In other words, the pipes have burst.
I remember going there as an undergrad after a late night on the town. We'd first go to Neo's (then in its 'New Wave' phase) and then hit Wieners Circle for a Polish with grilled onions. This was way before they developed the schtick about swearing to customers and concentrated instead on the quality of the food.
Anyway, the sign on the door says they'll be back to continue their "love affair with Chicago" once they've completed some "needed re-modeling".
Generally you make resolutions for the New Year but this is something I want to get done in the day or two I have off prior to January 1: Convert about half a dozen Drupal sites (like this one) to 6.x. It's about time! [Note: old site used Drupal.]
A fascinating scandal on Facebook, uncovered by blogger Brad J. Ward, points to both the strengths and weaknesses of Social Networking tools.
The scandal revolves around an attempt by at least two companies, CollegeProwler.com and MatchU to corner the market, so to speak, on as many College 'Class of 2013' Facebook groups as possible using non-attending individuals to set up the groups and serve as Admins.
Once they were found out, representatives of these two companies, possibly sensing a public relations disaster, left comments on Brad's original post, apologizing for their actions and promising to vacate the groups they had so improperly created.
Many commentators called this 'squatting' and appropriately identified the need for Colleges and Universities to stake out prominent roles for themselves in social networking sites so that vacuums like this don't occur in which case marketers (or even worse) inevitably come in to fill the void.
But that's only half the story.
The other half is the casual almost breathless use of collaborative technology that went into uncovering this scam.
The thing was first mooted on a blog, screen-shots were put up on Flickr, a screencast was created using Jing. Brad and others searched LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and even Craigslist eventually nailing down the companies responsible for this.
They communicated with each other on his blog, through Twitter or using a group spreadsheet on Google Docs. The spreadsheet itself which has since been taken down for privacy reasons, quickly incorporated the work of at least 30 volunteers listing more than 400 schools.
And all of this happened within the space of a day or two!
Communication has been instantaneous for a while now but the variety of ways we can communicate and the number of formats we can employ is truly remarkable.
Current Cites for December 2008 is out! You can find the issue here...
I focused on a couple of interesting articles, one having to do with site optimization and the other with data preservation, from the December issue of Communications of the ACM.
I almost forgot about this but it's been a year (give or take a few days) since I started the Drupal4Lib ListServ.
I sent out the word on December 5 and within two days we had 200 subscribers.
As I said on a post that I sent out to the group, the original motivation for starting the List remains the same now as before, namely to provide an easily accessible environment to get helpful and reliable information on Drupal in a library context.
I'm pleased to say we now have 474 subscribers -- almost all who have been wonderfully 'helpful and reliable'.
So thanks to all the subscribers and happy holidays!
UPDATE: One of passages that totally knocked me over when reading this as an undergrad:
... Full soon
Among them he arrived; in his right hand
Grasping ten thousand Thunders, which he sent
Before him, such as in their Souls infixed
Plagues; they astonished all resistance lost,
All courage; down their idle weapons dropped;
O're Shields and Helmes, and helmed heads he rode
Of Thrones and mighty Seraphim prostrate,
That wished the Mountains now might be again
Thrown on them as a shelter from his ire.
-- John Milton, Paradise Lost, VI.
So remind me again, who's going to pick the utterly drab and uni-functional Amazon Kindle for $359 when they can get this baby for the same price?
Courtesy of MiniNote User.
UPDATE (1/5/09): Not to make this sound like the GadgetBlog but HP just came out with an update to its top of the line model, the HP Mini 2140. Faster chip, bigger lcd panel -- Hoo Baby!
How do you 'lose' settings like this?
Why did AT&T (and others like Verizon) have to make changes to it?
Why can't they just leave it as it is as the Touch Pro? I can't stand the fact that they had to change the keyboard to be different!
No tab and Ctl key.....come on!!!!!
The guy has a point.
First there's the load of AT&T crapware that's included. You can't escape this since the good folks at AT&T thoughtfully re-engineered the default interface to include a prominent link to it. It mainly features fee-based services that ordinarily can be found elsewhere for free. Did I mention that you have to hack into the system to get rid of this stuff?
But back to the above lament.
The keyboard on earlier versions of this phone only had four rows. This allowed for larger keys. By squeezing in a fifth row, HTC, the manufacturer, had to reduce the size of the other rows and hence the keys. This made the keyboard slightly more difficult to use but no doubt HTC felt this reduction in functionality was justified since consumers now had a 'full qwerty' keyboard including a row of numbers.
Unfortunately when AT&T got its hands on the device, it simply said, 'qwerty, schmerty' and replaced the top row of numbers with punctuation marks. Worse, it replaced the normal function of certain keys on the lowest row with (surprise, surprise) yet more links to its fee-based proprietary services.
There is a conflict of goals here. The consumer wants a device to communicate with while the company wants a gateway to its proprietary fee-based services. This conflict results in interface decisions that alter how hardware and software traditionally function.
To the question then, what would a keyboard or operating system look like if it were designed by a telecommunications company, we now have an answer. For those of us concerned with the results, working towards a regulatory framework that separated the two -- i.e. the provider of the network from the provider of the network device -- might be a safe option.
Former assistant Cook County state's attorney Joe Roddy on the changed environment then and now for the Chicago Police Department:
"The difference is this -- when I grew up in the 40s and 50s, if a police officer asked you to get out of the park, you couldn’t get out fast enough. Now, people say, 'F**k you' -- pardon my Irish -- and spit at them...." [Mick Dumke, "The City That Pays Out", Chicago Reader, 11/27/2008]
Doing my Current Cites at the Reference Desk in between patron traffic.
UPDATE: And hot off the presses, here's the latest issue of CurrentCites for November...
Courtesy of Jeffrey Zeldman:
Announcing the second annual Blue Beanie Day! Show your support for Web Standards and Accessibility. Please join us on Friday, November 28, 2008 in celebrating Blue Beanie Day.
Friday, November 28, 2008 is the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.
It's easy to show your support for web design done right. Don a Blue Beanie and snap a photo. Then on November 28, switch your profile picture in Facebook and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group at Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/bluebeanieday2008/
Every once and a while I come across an article which pretty much declares any device larger than a cellphone as dead because cellphones are what the teens are using and hence everything else is on the road to extinction.
This is silly.
I use my smartphone/pda/call-it-what-you-like -- all the time but even I know it doesn't replace my need for larger devices depending on what I'm doing.
I'm not going to write my research paper on one, for example, for the same reason that I wouldn't do the same, twenty years earlier, on the back of an envelope. You choose the tool to fit the job.
This is still a while off but I thought I'd put out an initial request before the holidays officially begin. It's a request for ideas and suggestions for the meeting of the LITA Drupal4Lib Interest Group at the 2009 ALA Conference in Chicago.
Feel free to leave comments either here or on the LITA Blog at:
http://tinyurl.com/Drupal4LibALAchicago
LAST JUNE/JULY IN ANAHEIM
Last June, we had a pretty nice BoF with librarians discussing Drupal projects they were working on. We also had a round-robin Q&A with librarians new to Drupal who were thinking about maybe using the CMS but wanting more information.
Here's my write-up of the event:
"Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Anaheim"
ALA 2009 IN CHICAGO
So next year, happily enough, we'll be meeting in Chicago (my hometown) and I wanted to poll people to see what they thought.
A BoF is pretty nice but we could just as easily have a speaker or two, or investigate an interesting theme or topic.
Time-wise, I don't think we’d get more than an hour and a half -- two hours max. Fun things might include specific modules for library application, using Drupal in a library environment -- anything really.
So if you have any ideas or suggestions, if you'd like to speak or would like to see someone else speak, if there's a theme or topic you’d like to investigate, please leave a comment either here or on the LITA Blog at:
http://tinyurl.com/Drupal4LibALAchicagoWith just a little work, I'm sure we can arrange something that our fellow Drupal4Lib'ers would look forward to.
Thanks for any help,
LEO
(2008-09 Chair of the LITA Drupal4Lib IG)
I had a very pleasurable time at the Garfield Park Conservatory on Chicago's West Side several weeks ago. Finding it however included a mishap due in part to this extremely poorly constructed map which I found while wandering around looking for directions.
You can see a larger version of the entire billboard here -- plus a close-up of the map itself.
I was at the "Gold Dome Fieldhouse", looking for the main Conservatory building. Can anyone guess why I started heading (incorrectly it turned out) west?
Time's up: You can make a map in a thousand different ways (just look at mass transit maps from various cities), but one of the few conventions is that the top generally points north, the bottom south, the left west and the right east. That's how maps are laid out.
Unfortunately, the person who designed this one, decided to ignore the convention and turned the thing 90 degrees counter-clockwise. This way, it may have been easier to fit in with the rest of the information on the board -- that's probably why they did it -- but it's really going for convenience of composition at the expense of comprehension.
Nobody looking at this is going to instinctively tilt their heads sideways to figure it out. Instead they'll do what I did and head off in the wrong direction.
I was saved by friends who, lucky for me, drove over and picked me up. Others might not be so fortunate. The whole point however is that bad design happens when it doesn't take user assumptions into consideration. The result can be not simply making things harder to find but causing users to make incorrect and possibly disastrous decisions. Just ask the person who designed the "Butterfly Ballots" in Florida.
Net Advocate and UMICH Don Susan Crawford has been named a "FCC Review Team Lead" by the incoming Obama-Biden Administration. Maybe the 'Net has a future after all...
[h/t TechPresident]
They're selling Obama hats at my local 7-11. I know 'business is business' but this is the first time I can recall when the 'swag' from a presidential campaign was thought valuable enough to hit the retail shelves.
Three world events have affected me in my life. The first was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I was there, had been there since '84 and knew what it was like to have a police state just a block or two away. I was working construction in those days. I had finished up and had taken a nap. When I woke up one of the people living in the house told me the extraordinary news that while I was asleep, the Wall had come down.
Of course, the person exaggerated. The Wall which surrounded the entire western half of the city hadn't come down. Rather an opening had been made at Checkpoint Charlie and also at the Brandenburg Gate where people from East Berlin -- the 'Ossies' -- could cross over. What followed were three days of absolute euphoria as tens of thousands of East Germans came over, swamping the local public transportation, waiting in long lines in front of banks to pick up their "Begrüßungsgeld" (i.e. welcome money) of 100 DM with which they bought items absolutely unavailable in their part of the city such as cassette radios and bags of oranges.
The downfall of that Wall and the regime it represented was the most positive experience of my young adult life.
More than a decade later, I was living in New York City. When I first heard that a jet had struck one of the World Trade Towers, I thought maybe it was an accident, albeit of horrendous proportions. When the second plane hit the second tower, I like everyone else in New York knew otherwise. I can remember walking north to work, up 1st Avenue, and seeing the emotions of people looking past me in the direction of Lower Manhattan. I finally turned around to see what they were looking at and there the towers stood, clearly visible as always, but now smoking and about to collapse. The ruins continued to give off smoke for weeks.
Now I'm in Chicago. Just three days ago, the eyes of the world were focused on our city. It was the final act of a series of events whose beginnings, I would argue, stretch back to the turmoil of the election in 2000. It was a period of abnormal excesses, exacerbated in reaction to 9-11, where we as a nation didn't always come off as a preeminent force for good. In fact, in many ways, we lost ground.
So after an unbelievably long campaign that could have ended in any number of ways, we all gathered in Grant Park, not wanting to risk fate by putting into words what so many of us were hoping and some of us had worked for. Pennsylvania was declared, then Ohio. The polls in California and the rest of the Pacific-coast states were closing at 10pm Central Standard time. At 10pm the people in the park started counting down from 10 to 0. Exactly at that point on the large TV screens, Wolf Blitzer from CNN said he had an important announcement to make, that CNN now projected Barack Obama to be elected President of the United States. The crowd in the park, all 250k of them, went wild.
It's a moment, like the two others, that I'll never forget.
Carole Guevin's NetDiver, a portfolio site for aspiring web designers, is celebrating its 10 year on the web. You can get the "Official" poster here...
Carole Guevin was a voice of (cutting edge) sanity during the early days of the web and it's great to see her site still going strong. She even has a Facebook Group...
So I came up with the brilliant idea of ducking out from work to go to the Early Voting location at the Public Library just across the street.
Bad move. After filling out the form and giving them my ID, I was led into a waiting room with more than 60 people! This is going to take a hundred years. My colleagues at work probably think I skipped out of town.
[Note: the above was written while I was marooned in the waiting room. And yes, I finally got out and was able to resume normal reference services.]
Hoo baby, they got a big crowd for the Drupal Camp Chicago. Easily over 100 attendees!
We had so many people at the Library BoF -- most of whom weren't librarians -- that I had to shift into "presentation" mode -- with a wonderful assist from PLA Webmaster Doug Dawson, Brian Smith from Palsnet.info, a librarian from Brookfield Public and the owner of a development shop creating a website for one of the regional library organizations in Washington State.
If I missed anyone, please forgive me. We really could have gone on for another hour.
They were taping the session plus a couple of people had cameras so hopefully I'll have some photos or clips in a little bit.
In any case, hats off to Kyle and Matt and the rest of the CDMUG.org crowd. What a great event.
Registration is now open for 3rd annual Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) taking place on November 2–3, 2008 at U. of C.
This is an event I really enjoy attending. Last year, it was at Northwestern; this year it's at U. of C. It brings together all people interested in Digital Humanities with a scholarly bent. Unfortunately this year I'll be out of town. Darn!
In any case, you can register by going to: http://dhcs.uchicago.edu/
