Hammer Time

This evening as I was riding home, I caught up with another cyclist just as I had taken a turn into the 15 mph west wind. I'm still riding my beast of an ancient mountain bike and was wearing my nylon shells, so I was basically a big sail. The cyclist I caught was wearing a nice kit and riding a nice bike, so I figured I'd tuck in behind him and let him pace me into the wind for a bit.

Drafting another cyclist is remarkably effective. That's why you see pros do it in the races all the time. The thing is, in order to get the benefit of the draft, you have to follow fairly closely. There is some skill involved in doing this, but generally people won't try it unless they're pretty comfortable on the bike. There's also a lot of etiquette around what you should do if you catch another cyclist, but generally you should just acknowledge each others presence and then offer to take turn on the front after a while.

So as I fell in behind the other cyclist, I saw him look back at me and I gave him a nod and a smile. He kept looking back at me though, so I said "Hope you don't mind if I catch your draft for a bit while we're heading into the wind." Instead of responding, he slowed down and waved me around saying something. I pulled up alongside and said, "What?" He said "You're too close, I'm not comfortable with that."

"Okay, sorry." I said. But I'm thinking, you're on a nice Giant road bike. You're kitted out in race-cut spandex. And you're not comfortable with someone drafting you? If you were some kid on a fixie or another commuter I would understand, but a roadie in full kit?

So I did what any self-respecting cyclist would do. I put my head down over the handlebars of my 40 pound tank of a mountain bike, dialed it up into the highest gear-- a paltry 44x13-- and proceeded to put the hammer down, leaving him in my dust.

Moral of the story: if you're going to wear the kit, learn the rules.

10 Random Things

One of our administrators added a bonus challenge onto our 23 Things: Tell everyone 10 random things about yourself.

That's wonderful, really. But I have 2 minor problems. First, I have an unfortunate habit of thinking that everyone already knows everything about me. After all, since I know it surely everyone else does too, right? The other problem is that I like to tell stories, so I've totally lost track of which stories about me everyone's already heard and which ones are new to people.

So chances are I'm going to bore you with at least half of this post. Hopefully the other half will make up for it.

1. I was born in Cincinnati but moved to New Hampshire before I was a year old, so I'm a New Englander at heart if not by birth. It's a complete coincidence that I'm back in Ohio.

2. I've been a Red Sox fan since I was at least 6 (my favorite player was Jim Rice). My mother is a professional singer, and sang at an annual charity event where she was able to get me autographs of many former Red Sox greats (including Ted Williams), and also sang the National Anthem at Fenway park.

3. I started ringing tower bells at my home parish in Concord, NH when I was 9. I still ring the chime at Trinity Episcopal Church on the corner of Broad and Third and was written about in the Dispatch for it.

4. My father and I have climbed all 48 mountains in New Hampshire over 4000 feet elevation, and most of them we did together. This started when I was in junior high school and first got into hiking and woodsmanship and my father realized this was something we could do together during my teenage years. I know this went a long way to making my teen years much better than they might have been and bringing us closer together. We finally finished in 2003 when we climbed Mt. Moosilauke.

5. In college my summer job was working as a tour guide at Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, NH.

6. In college I was very heavily involved in the theater: so much so that even though I graduated with only two half credits in drama, I co-won the departmental award. By the time my senior year rolled around there was literally no dramatic production on campus that I wasn't involved with. In addition to acting, I stage managed, directed, built and designed sets, hung and designed lights, and co-founded an improv comedy group that performed professionally (twice). I even used those skills to work as a master carpenter for Actor's Company of Pennsylvania for a few months after leaving college.

7. I first met my wife while she was still married because her ex-husband was friends with my best friend in college (it's not as much of a soap opera as it sounds).

8. I have a 19 year old stepdaughter who's currently attending Rochester Institute of Technology. When I moved in with them she was 6. So to all of my older colleagues who currently have teenage children or children in college, even though I'm younger than you I've actually already been there!

9. I moved to Columbus to enter the doctoral program in Philosophy at OSU. 4 years later I failed my candidacy exam, quit the program, started working at the library and wondered what I had been doing for 4 years.

10. Speaking of Ohio coincidences, I found out only after I moved here in 1996 that my grandmother's family was from Columbus, and that 4 generations of that side of the family had lived in Central Ohio. If you go to the Cardington cemetery, I'm related to any Maxwell you see there.

Well, that's ten. I'm sure there's plenty more, and like I said I like to tell stories. Ask me sometime and I'll probably yak your ear off!

The End

We have come to the end of the 23 Things, although hopefully not the end of Learn & Play @ CML. There's no question in my mind that this is one of the best things the library has done to train staff. Not only did it take much less time in the long run than it would have to bring every employee into a classroom to be spoon fed this information, it also brought so many staff across the system closer together. I constantly hear about how people felt like they got to know their co-workers better and felt closer to staff at other locations than they ever did before. Since CML has been battling some provincialism among the branches for years, this alone could have made the entire project worthwhile.

I can't help feeling that there are a couple of things missing, though. Unfortunately, to get this project to work we couldn't make it mandatory. What sort of "play" experience is required? But staff who didn't participate have lost out in so many ways. Not only did they lose a chance to find out more about their co-workers, they lost a chance to discover how their work has changed and gain skills that will be absolutely necessary working in libraries as we move forward. No matter how much you try to ignore all the "Web 2.0" stuff that's out there, it's not going away and it's only going to increase and spread. People and organizations who don't get on board are going to be left behind. This goes far beyond simply being jaded about how the library has changed and mourning the "loss" of books. The way information is organized and delivered has fundamentally changed, and people who don't understand this risk finding themselves without prospects very quickly.

The other element I think wasn't quite right was the scope and size of the assignments. The reality of our work now is that we must spend a great deal of time in the public space. This only makes sense, since our primary job is public service. But this makes it much more difficult to find time to explore a lot of these things in the depth required. I'm not sure if there's any easy way to pare down the assignments into more manageable chunks, or maybe make the tracking requirements simpler than a blog post for each item (a daunting proposition if you feel compelled to write more than a few sentences). But I think a lot of staff won't finish or didn't even start because they felt that devoting as much time as would be necessary to do these assignments well would take them away from the floor for too long, and that's a shame since this project can only help them in their work.

But regardless, this project has been great. I've gotten to know so many people so much better. I've found new tools to help me do my work more efficiently. Tools that I was already using have now been adopted by more of my co-workers, making connecting with them easier. And everyone who participated has a better understanding of how the world has changed and how their jobs are changing as a result. This can't be the end, because we've only just begun.

Lend Me Your Ears

After our video Thing, we come to our audio Thing: Podcasts.

I don't know why, but for some reason podcasts make more sense to me than video blogging. Maybe it's because I was raised on NPR, so audio broadcast of information just clicks with me. I'm also used to listening to NPR while I'm doing other things, and podcasts let me do that as well. So I'm a big fan of podcasts, even though I've never used them in the truest sense of the term-- that is, automatically downloading them onto my iPod. Usually, I just stream them as I need them.

Naturally, being raised on NPR, my most common source of podcasts is NPR. Not only can I hear articles that I missed and share articles that I especially enjoyed, NPR also offers other streams that I really like, especially their "Song of the Day." This has helped me discover all sorts of new music that I might not have checked out otherwise. The other musical feature that I really enjoy is the full-length streaming concerts that they have archived on their site. I wasn't going to spend $80 and drive to Cleveland to see Radiohead this past year, but lo and behold I can listen to the entire concert on NRP for free!

In addition to this, I'm also a podcaster myself. A year or so ago, the rector of my church asked me about podcasting the sermons from the church, since I'm the resident audio guru. I only knew how to record and edit the audio, but the church's webmanager could take care of uploading the MP3 once I had put it together. Initially this involved me taking my laptop to church every week and plugging it into the PA, but eventually we obtained a digital recorder, making my life much easier. The whole editing process takes me less than hour every week, and that even includes introductions and the occasional musical offering edited into the podcast as well. My favorite so far was a special sermon delivered by Mike Harden of the Columbus Dispatch on the Diocese's Appalachian Ministries Sunday.

Finally, no post on digital audio would be complete without mentioning the library's forays into the medium. For some time now, CML has participated in the unfortunately acronymed Mid-Ohio Digital Library Initiative, or MOLDI. MOLDI makes use of a service called Overdrive, which is used by libraries all over the country for delivering digital content. Not only can you get audio books and music through this service, there's also a selection of digital movies available as well.

I've used MOLDI once before, when my stepdaughter had to read "Frankenstein" for summer homework a few years back and was having trouble actually reading it. She was about to leave to visit her father for the summer, and we didn't have enough time to get an audio book from the library, so MOLDI to the rescue. We downloaded and burned the audio book that night, and she was good to go.

My only problem with Overdrive is the ongoing issue of digital rights management. Once again, the legal mess over these issues only winds up hurting everybody. The books people really want aren't available through Overdrive because the publishers want tons of money for them. And on top of that, only recently did the publishers decide to play nice and let Overdrive put up audio books in MP3 format despite that being the industry standard at this point. Essentially, they'd much prefer you pay for your audio books through iTunes. But once again, all this fighting over cash is only hurting the industry. The more difficult they make it for customers to get what they want, the more customers are going to seek other outlets, even if those outlets involve copyright violations. The only reason there isn't a "black market" in audio books like there is in music is because there's not enough demand for the audio books. But it's still a symptom of the larger problem.

So a final word on all this before we end our 23 Things: the world isn't changing, it has changed. Self-generated and free digital content is already here, and producers of content who don't realize this and get on board are going to die out.

Tubing

YouTube is awesome.

I know, a lot of people see YouTube as the next great time waster on the web-- people spending hours poking around for videos of bikini-clad exhibitionists or public brawls. But as with so many of the complaints about the Internet, the salacious anecdotes overshadow what's truly remarkable about this sort of website.

Many of my views about sites like Flickr and Wikipedia and YouTube have been influenced by Clay Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody." The overall theme of the book and what links these sites together is a sort of economy of scale. Whereas in the past it took a great deal of energy to spread any sort of information, now it's easy for anyone to put any sort of information out into the public square. These sites are essentially information aggregators on a scale that has never been seen in human history. The scale is so vast that we tend to miss what it is accomplishing. In the past, it would have taken the few people who were able to put this sort of thing together days, weeks, or even months to compile this much information. Now one person can post one small clip very easily. But when 1 million people post one small clip, suddenly you have more information than you ever thought possible.

I primarily use YouTube when I want to see something that has been broadcast that I missed. This could range from news reports to historical events to TV shows to movie trailers. I have not yet been unable to find a clip on YouTube that I was looking for. Seriously.

I know a lot of people complain about copyright at this point. Distributing the work of the people who produce these clips without their being fairly paid for that distribution is a violation of our copyright laws. But again I come back to what I have said time and time again on this issue. Our current copyright laws don't work. If they worked, sites like YouTube wouldn't exist. Publishers, producers, and lawyers simply have no conception of how their world has changed on this issue. There is no way for an artist or producer to be paid for every broadcast of their work anymore. As soon as you take down one offender, the economy of scale kicks in again and if it's something people want to see, it's back up.

A perfect example of this was the recent leaking of the trailer for a new movie based on the Alan Moore breakthrough graphic novel "Watchmen." A friend who is much more of a comic book geek than I am sent out a tweet that the trailer was on YouTube, with a link. I clicked the link only to find that Warner was on the job and the video had been pulled. But I thought, "it's on the Internet, it's gotta be there somewhere." A few minutes of searching later and I had the clip.

So what's the point? You can't stop the flow of information. Artists and producers will still get paid, primarily for live work. People will still pay to go to a movie theater or a concert. People will still pay to own a physical copy of their favorite book. And, as Radiohead showed us, people will still pay to support their favorite artists' work. But we need to let go of the idea that you can control every instance of your work. YouTube is just one symptom of this, but undoubtedly the best way to share video information currently available.

Apply Yourself

Yes, I need to apply myself. I've consistently been behind on my 23 Things, and now I have less than a week to complete them all! So I'm going to knock out Things 17, 18 and 19 all in one post.

Shocking, I know.

But there is a consistent theme here: Apps. Especially with the iPhone we've all been hearing a lot about Apps lately, but what's most interesting to me is how the concept of apps has completely taken over computing. When I first started using computers, it was all about just running individual software. You bought the program, stuck the disk in the computer, and ran whatever program you wanted to run. Windows began the change away from this restricted view of what the computer was capable of. Suddenly you could run more than one program at once! What's funny is how much this seemingly simple change began to change how we thought of the computer. Computers stopped being tools that could only do one thing. They started being nexuses where many things came together in one place.

I think that this greatly influenced how the Web developed. While initially the web was simply pages that displayed static information, people were trying to figure out how to get them to do more right from the beginning. Platforms like Java and Flash only helped develop this trend, and now it's to the point where you almost don't need to have anything actually installed on your computer other than an Internet browser.

I first found out about how far this had gone about 4 years ago. At that time the library only offered Microsoft Office products on a small handful of computers at each location, and managing time on those computers was an unbelievable pain. I actually was yelled at by a customer for asking someone to vacate one of those computers because she was "only" using it for Internet and another customer wanted to use the Office products. The reason for the restriction at the time was licensing, and fortunately we eventually saw the forest for the trees and ponied up to have it installed on every computer.

But I digress. Around that time someone pointed me to a beta site called Writely, which was an online word processor app. I played around with it and was floored. Why were we monkeying around with licensing and software costs when this was available for free on the web? Now Writely has become Google Docs, but we still have Microsoft Office hanging around.

But for how much longer? There is an app for just about everything you would want to do on the computer available online now, and many of them are completely free. From family trees to maps to games and even the Operating System and hard drive itself! I used to or currently have software for all of those apps, and now all I need is my browser. Even Google Docs can save your file in a variety of formats, so compatibility isn't an issue, and on top of that multiple users can edit the same document with an efficiency that MS Word can only dream of.

This really is the direction we're headed in. Everything comes through the browser, and the browser doesn't have to be limited to a desktop. It can be in a lap, in your hand, or even strapped to your head. So if we're going to be involved in this development, we need to be there too.

Fortunately, CML has begun to incorporate this sort of functionality by offering some tools for everyone who's constantly plugged into their browsers. Right now this is just a toolbar that allows you to access common features from our website through the tool bar and a search plugin for the ever-present corner search box. But I know more widgets will be coming! We are there now, and this will only help us connect to customers and show just how much we can do for them.

Apologia Gamhon

I've recently had a number of conversations about homosexuality and Christianity, probably because of Prop 8 in California, and I thought I should put down my thoughts on the matter for everyone to see. Honestly, I've never had any problem reconciling my beliefs as a Christian with acceptance of homosexuality. Like most heterosexual men I went through a period of mild homophobia until I had been around gays long enough to realize that 1) they weren't interested in me and 2) they were a lot of fun to be around. But I never had any conflict between my religious beliefs and homosexuality.

The obvious question then is why do so many others have this problem? Ultimately it comes down to a few key passages in the Bible. I'm not even going to get into the fact that we are obsessing about three or four passages in a text that contains hundreds if not thousands about poverty, forgiveness, and peace. What follows is my reasoning about why these few passages do not constitute a condemnation of homosexuality for Christians.

As a caveat, I should mention that what follows will most likely not convince someone who believes that homosexuality is a sin that it is not. Any of these arguments can be written off by the other side as "rationalization," or ignoring the word of God.

So be it.

One of my most strongly held beliefs is that we have been given reason in order to apply it, even to our religious texts. To not do so is to deny one of God's greatest gifts. The Bible is a guide that should be carefully thought about, not a dictum that must be blindly followed according to whatever interpretation is fed to us. But for those of you who are not religious or who are open to these considerations, here is my understanding of this issue.

Sodom and Gomorrah
The first passage that is typically held up as a condemnation of homosexuality is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. The key passage is:

"But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.’" (Genesis 19:4-5).

Sounds pretty mild, eh? Of course this is "know" in the Biblical sense, literally. Consider what Lot's response was:

"‘I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.'" (Genesis 19:7-8).

Nice father, right? But in this passage is the key to understanding what the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah actually was. It was not homosexual sex. The sin was violation of the stranger. Most early cultures, especially in the Mediterranean, held the tradition of the "guest-friend." That is, if a stranger comes to your house and seeks shelter, you are obligated to offer them protection and treat them as an honored guest. This is the only way humanity could survive in a world where spaces between people were distant and travel was dangerous. The people of Sodom violated this by threatening to gang rape the strangers in order to exert power over them. And Lot was so dedicated to the protection of the guest that he offered his daughters in exchange.

This interpretation of this passage is further supported by Jesus himself in Matthew 10. When giving instructions to the disciples about how to conduct themselves in spreading the good news, he says:

"If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgement than for that town" (Matthew 10:14-15).

By drawing the connection to Sodom and Gomorrah, Jesus is confirming that the sin for which they were punished was rejection of the stranger.

Leviticus
Ah, Leviticus. If you ever want to feel like a sinner, read this book. This is one of several books that lay down the law for the people of Israel. We all know about the Ten Commandments, but Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy elaborate on those 10 simple rules and turn them into a full-fledged legal system. In all honesty, there are many fascinating laws in Leviticus, many of which underpin laws that we still have today (modern property rights, for example). But let's get to the meat of it (no pun intended!):

"You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination" (Leviticus 18:22).
"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them" (Leviticus 20:13).

Whoo boy, that's pretty black an white. But as always, we really need to look at the passage in context. Consider some other passages:

"you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a labourer until morning" (Leviticus 19:13).

So apparently getting paid weekly is a sin.

"You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your animals breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of two different materials" (Leviticus 19:19)

There goes mules, mixed crop farming, and poly-cotton blends...

"You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard. You shall not make any gashes in your flesh for the dead or tattoo any marks upon you" (Leviticus 19:27-28)

No tattoos, and apparently no haircuts or beard-trimming.

We could go on, but the point is you can't highlight one passage and hold people to it while ignoring other passages. Now, there are plenty of religious groups that try to hold to every law in Leviticus-- Hasidic Jews for example-- but what about Christians? Jesus actually had a quite a bit to say about the Jewish law, but two passages stand out. First, when confronted by the Pharisees for the fact that his disciples did not keep strictly to the Kosher laws, Jesus said:

"Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile’" (Matthew 15:17-20).

Here as he does elsewhere, Jesus's point is that by following the letter of the law they are ignoring the heart of the law. This culminates in the only "law" Jesus gives to his followers:

"‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets’"(Matthew 22:36-40).

In other words, if you do these two things you will be following the law. The question we must then ask is, is it loving your neighbors as yourselves to condemn homosexuals?

Paul
The final passage that is used to condemn homosexuality comes from Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth.

"Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

In accepting this passage as identifying homosexuality as a sin you first must accept that everything Paul wrote was the divinely inspired word of God. Paul himself actually makes distinctions in the same letter between that which he receives from the Lord and that which is his own opinion, but in this particular passage he doesn't specify. So it is left to our interpretations.

But even if we accept that this is the divinely inspired word of God, what is the point Paul is making here?

"The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body" (1 Corinthians 6:13).

In other words, obsession with physical things distracts us from spiritual things. I think we can all get behind that sentiment. But also note that Paul is condemning fornication. That is, unrestrained, unthoughtful, unloving fucking. He later says:

"To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion" (1 Corinthians 7:8-9).

In fact, all of chapter 7 gives very detailed thoughts on how to conduct oneself in a relationship.

Clearly, Paul had issues with any sort of sexual relations, but he acknowledged that some concessions had to be made in light of human nature. I don't think there's any question that he found homosexual relations repugnant, but it is possible that the repugnance was more due to the unrestrained giving-in to the flesh than the particular act. Keep in mind that Paul was writing at the same time the Epicureans were promoting a philosophy that the pursuit of pleasure was the highest we could achieve in life, and he needed to explain to the new churches
(especially Greek colonies like Corinth) why that philosophy was wrong.

All of this brings us to the final point. The ancients simply had no conception of a homosexual relationship such as exists in our society today. Any homosexual relationship back then had to happen outside of marriage because if you were an adult you were most likely married. In other words, any homosexual relationship was necessarily adultery, and therefore disruptive to society. But today we do not have to get married to survive. Thus a relationship between two people of the same sex is not disruptive in the way it was 2000 years ago. And furthermore, just as a man and woman can join together in a holy union that helps each one understand the love of God, so too can two men or two women. The larger point was and remains:

"Love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12).