Cycho Librarian

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 w...

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...

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 st...

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 wer...

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 thi...

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 constit...

Yeah, so I was hit by a car Tuesday night. I was going through the intersection at Broad on Grant when I suddenly see a car turning left right into me. I had no time to react. All that stuff you hear about time slowing down is absolutely true, and the further away from the event you get the more you can parse out what happened. I remember seeing the hood of the car just about to hit me and thinking "You stupid..." I remember rolling onto the hood of the car and then somersaulting over the top of the car. I later found out that in doing so I caved in her windshield. As it happened I didn't notice the pain of hitting it though, just rolling up and over. I remember feeling my arms tossed around like rubber as my backpack came off. Then I remember landing on all fours in the intersection and collapsing. My first thought was "is anything broken?" I sort of did a system check and gingerly pushed up off the ground and thought "holy crap, nothing's brok...

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of liberty; Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet, Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered; Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way; Thou who hast by Thy might, led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. L...

Things 15 and 16 bring us to "wikis." Once again, we have a term that's probably become so over-used that it will eventually be meaningless. But the concept behind it is brilliant. Everyone knows about the biggest wiki out there, Wikipedia. Wikipedia has generated plenty of controversy on its own, but one thing that seems to be constantly overlooked in the criticism is the fact that it's actually pretty effective. So why is Wikipedia effective? Surely if we turn the entire world loose to edit an encyclopedia however they see fit we'll have information anarchy! But as with all things Internet, the answer lies in the scale. For every vandal, there are hundreds of people who care enough about the entry to fix it. Basically, why would a vandal want to waste their time messing with an entry that will be reverted to its original form seconds after it was altered? In this large example there are several clues as to why wikis are a good idea generally. First, any...

It's that time of year, folks! Time to make the Internet explode! That's right, it's time for NaBloPoMo! Okay, I admit it, I just like saying that. National Blog Posting Month is another one of those Internet oddities that grew up seemingly out of nowhere, sort of like International Talk Like a Pirate day . A couple people get a crazy idea, a few more people like it, and next thing you know it's everywhere. I do remember, however, that's it's awfully hard to post something every single day. Fortunately, this year I have my 23 things to spur me along (since I have to finish by December 2nd). Flash drive here I come! In the meantime, I challenge all you Learners and Players itching for an even bigger challenge to join up with NaBloPoMo. C'mon, everyone else is doing it!

So for Thing 13 we're investigating the revolution that is tagging through del.icio.us . I remember when del.icio.us first came on the scene, and the extent of my thoughts at the time were "isn't that a clever way to use a .us domain name." I really didn't think anything of it until we were changing computers at work and I was worried I'd lose my bookmarks. So I created a del.icio.us account and moved all my work bookmarks in there. Turns out my bookmarks all transferred anyway, so I haven't really used my account since. Once again, this is largely a matter of convenience. Since I'm at the same computer at work each day and the same computer at home each day, I almost never have to access the bookmarks on one computer from another. So I never really had the need to use del.icio.us. I could see myself using it instead of bookmarks if Firefox has a del.icio.us add-on that functions like the bookmarks do, but until I need to access my bookmarks fr...

I always knew that by this time I'd be sick of the election. There was no way that the campaigning could go on for this long and still have me engaged and interested. What I wasn't counting on was how utterly disappointed-- and frankly upset and angry-- I'd be with the way things have fallen out. This election has gone far beyond normal negative campaigning. This election has gone so far beyond normal negative campaigning that as far as I'm concerned it's verged into outright libel and slander. Where the disappointment comes in is that it's come entirely from John McCain. There was a time when I thought he had a conscience. There was a time I thought he had the courage of his convictions. But what has become clear is that he is a petty, angry, vindictive, and at best Machiavellian bastard who clearly doesn't care if he drags the entire country down with him. My problems with the McCain campaign really fall into 4 groups: Muslim, Terrorist, Socialist, ...

Now a month behind, we come to Thing 12 : Twitter . I honestly can't remember when I discovered Twitter, but the first time I tried playing with it was to see if I could find a way to quickly share information across the entire library system. Twitter seemed like an ideal way to do this. If we created location-specific Twitter accounts and then had everybody follow each other, then when we needed to share information quickly between locations we could just "tweet" it. Power goes down at some location? Our infoline tweets it and everyone knows. Staff member goes home sick and you need emergency coverage? Tweet it and someone who can spare a person rides to the rescue. You get the idea. The catch was that there needed to be a way to see the tweets other than on the Twitter website. The Twitter website doesn't automatically refresh, and it's not sitting on top of your desktop. So the whole "quick notice" idea kinda goes out the window. I played w...

Once again I'm behind in my 23 Things , but this time I think I have a decent excuse ... Thing 11 is to investigate Library Thing  (I know, that's an awful lot of things for one sentence).  Well, according to my profile I apparently first investigated Library Thing on July 24th, 2006.  I have a sneaking suspicion I found out about it in one of my graduate school classes.  Apparently I went in and cataloged seven books that I had read recently, and then abandoned it.  It's not that I didn't see how this could be useful, it just didn't grab me for some reason. As I'm looking at my account now, I think I know why that happened.  First of all, the interface is really complicated.  There's too much to do on the main page of your account, and no obvious way to isolate just your books, or just your friends.  It puts everything that you can do on the site out there at once.  The thing is, I'm not using this site for all those other things.  I'm using it to t...

A quick post today on image generators for Thing 10 . First, my lovely new logo courtesy of CoolText . Next, just like everyone else in the world I created my own manga avatar . But I'm so attached to my current Triplets of Belleville avatar that I couldn't bear to replace it. So here's an excuse to share the manga one (since it came out so well, IMHO). Moral of this post? There's so many ways to manipulate images and text online, why bother with the software?

On we plunge into the wild and wonderful world of RSS feeds! I first discovered RSS feeds about 4 years ago when I was recommending an online comic I had discovered to one of our tech folks at the library. I was looking for library-related cartoons for a PowerPoint presentation and stumbled across a fun and quirky daily cartoon about a library called Unshelved . It spread like wildfire through my branch, with several of the staff going back and making our way through three years of archives to get caught up on the misadventures of the Mallville Public Library staff. After shooting the ones that we found especially funny back and forth by e-mail for a while, I thought it would be cool to share it on our staff intranet, so I sent the information off to the person in charge of the intranet. She responded saying that it looked like we'd be able to embed the RSS feed into the intranet. I had no idea what that meant, so I poked around. Turns out RSS is a Really Simple way to Syndic...

I've now fallen a week behind in the 23 things, so in a desperate attempt to catch up I'm going to try to write the three posts I need to catch up over this weekend. First off, I'm supposed to write something, anything about technology. I've actually been thinking about writing this post for a while. A few months ago it dawned on me that cell phones are no longer just phones. The first inkling I had about this was the first time we took my stepdaughter to a rock concert about 6 years ago. When the obligatory slow song came along, instead of lighters all over the arena, everyone held up their cell phones. My initial reaction was to laugh, but then I began to think that it made a lot of sense. Smoking isn't allowed indoors in most places anymore, and only 1 in 5 people is likely to have a lighter on them, so why not cell phones? I started wondering who the first person was to do this, especially since only 6 years before that I distinctly remembered being at a ...

Ever since Friday I've been alternating between mocking derision and panicked fear. What in God's name is McCain up to? Is it really as simple as looking to snatch up the Hillary voters? Or is there something more insidious going on? I sincerely hope that the only reason Sarah Palin was chosen as the Republican vice-presidential nominee was to snare Hillary voters. If that's the case, there's little question that it will backfire, and do so in a very dramatic way. But that makes me wonder, is that the only reason? Is there something more to this? Unfortunately, a couple things have led me to think that there may be. First, an offhand comment from a co-worker that this will energize the Republican base. At first I couldn't figure out what she meant, but then I got it: the Dems have their revolutionary candidate, now the GOP has their own! And short of nominating Ann Coulter, this is probably the only woman they could find that could seriously pull off the f...

Here we are at the end of week 3 , and I'm just getting around to posting now! In my defense, I've been a little busy since last week with getting my stepdaughter off to college. Conveniently, our task this week is to investigate and play with Flickr, which I was doing anyway in order to document the move in. I've been a little slow to get on board with the photo-sharing movement. Mainly that's because I don't normally have a lot of photos to share. I've been aware of Flickr for some time though, so when my brother and sister-in-law had their baby, I immediately went to Flickr in order to share the pictures from her christening. Since then I've mainly been using it to keep my family up-to-date on what's happening. So conveniently, here's what I've been busy with since last week: Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR . The only downside to Flickr is that there's a monthly limit on how much you can upload unless you pay. I suppose th...

I admit I've gotten a bit behind in the 23 Things . Technically I was supposed to blog about this last week, but I figure since the things for this week are to create and register my blog (which I've already done) that I can avoid any penalties. Our task for last week was to view a tutorial on lifelong learning. I'll be honest, I hate the term "Lifelong Learning." It's another one of those catchphrases that gets overused to the point where a lot of people start tuning out. That certainly doesn't mean I don't think it's important. I've always tried to live by a statement Socrates made in his last defense before the Athenians: This is usually translated as "the unexamined life is not worth living." But the Greek is actually much more interesting. The direct translation is more "the unexamined life is no life for a human." In other words, what it is to be human is to constantly explore and examine everything about the...

Women's gymnastics takes silver to China? Men's gymnastics takes silver too, but in an upset? Michael Phelps breaks every record there is? No, this is what I care about: Fabian Cancellara rides the time trial of his life to win gold after taking bronze in the road race, and Levi Leipheimer brings it home for the USA with a bronze. Even though the road race was boring, the boys came through with one hell of a time trial event . The Olympics are never well suited to the 100+ mile road race format, but time trials provide just the right mix of brevity and a close race to make them exciting. Too bad the men's time trial is only online or on MSNBC. Apparently they're going to broadcast the women's tonight, but the men's is where the excitement was this morning. Thanks to Pez Cycling News for great coverage where the American press falls flat as always.

I know, I know, the whole "2.0" thing is way over the top at this point. It seems like just about anything new with the web has to be 2.0 or it's just not cool. Well, bear with me on this. My library has embraced the idea that if we don't get on board with all the innovations that the constantly changing online world provides us, we're going to get left behind. If you read back through some of my entries you'll see that I've been preaching this for a while. How we create, get, and interact with information is changing drastically, and if libraries are going to survive we need to adapt to this new world. So what are we doing about it? For the next 9 weeks staff at my library are encouraged to try all the different things that are available online that are changing the world of information. There are 23 things to do over these 9 weeks, and if you do them all you'll have a much better understanding of how the world is changing and how libraries can...

I've seen a lot of the liberal bloggers wringing their hands over Obama's perceived lack of response to early Republican attacks. Lord knows they have reason to be concerned. There have been far too many instances in recent elections where an attempt to take the high road and not respond seems to have led directly to the Democratic loss. Maybe Kerry was completely unelectable, but surely a more direct and angry response to the foolishness of "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" would have been better than not saying anything and letting the mistatements and outright lies stand. I'm trying to remain positive, and I recognize that we still have a long way to go. But I recently noticed the convergence of several different items that seem to point to a larger strategy. Am I the only one who noticed that, at about the same time: Obama went on vacation to Hawaii, The Olympics started, and Edwards admitted an affair. The timing on this is way too convenient. The Olympic...

I’ve been thinking a lot about consumption lately, and not just because of the current state of the oil market. Two things on our recent vacation got me thinking about it. First, when having my usual very enjoyable intellectual discourse with my backwoods friends , the idea was put forward that essentially all that humans do is consume and that there’s not really anything we can do to stop our inevitable consumption of all the resources in the world short of ending the species. This really gave me pause. I still think that there’s more to humanity than just consumption, but I have to admit that there's something to this idea. Pretty much any example of what we do or what we need to survive comes back to some sort of consumption. On top of that, so much of our history was spent trying to figure out ways to make consumption easier, and then when it became easier so much of our society seemed to be aimed at making us consume more. This is where the state of the oil market comes into...

… signs that you may be Cycho. 10. You regularly show up at work with chain marks on your pants legs. 9. You look at the wind speed and direction before leaving home or office. 8. You get aggravated by red lights not because of the wait but because you lose momentum. 7. An average speed of 18 mph on a ride is frustratingly slow to you. 6. You can think of no better way to spend July in France than in a camper with satellite TV on top of a mountain. 5. You’re just as likely to have your head turned by a nice bike as a member of the opposite sex. 4. You’ll change in restrooms in order to ride to work and meetings. 3. When driving up a 10% grade you think, “This would be a great climb.” 2. You look at your 23x700c’s and think “My tires are too fat.” And the number one sign that you may be Cycho… 1. “Man, if VdV hadn’t crashed on la Bonnette he would’ve had a chance” actually means something to you.

For those out there who for some inexplicable reason think that it will be better to switch their vote from Clinton in the primaries to McCain in the general, here's another reason not to: Note that while McCain may have a legitimate complaint in saying that he doesn't remember the vote and will have to look up the background on it (that is, maybe he had to oppose it for reasons other than this specific issue), that isn't what the reporter is asking. She asks if it's fair that some insurance companies cover Viagra and not birth control. How hard is it to say "No, it's not fair" unless you're in the pocket of the big insurance companies? Not to mention the fact that he obviously doesn't recognize the tacit misogyny of the difference; namely that it's okay for old men to fuck around all they want, but women can't unless they want to risk an unwanted pregnancy. If you were a supporter of Clinton, especially a female supporter, and are now su...

As evidenced by his exchange of the "Terrorist Fist Bump" with what is clearly a foreign agent in the pay of Al Qaeda!

I've always been a Science Fiction fan, although I've noticed that the older I get the less tolerance I have for the more frivolous Sci-fi and the more I appreciate "hard" Sci-fi. For those of you not familiar, "hard" Sci-fi is based out of current scientific theory, attempting to remain as close as possible to what can reasonably be thought possible based on that theory. This is not escapist Sci-fi, this is Sci-fi that really makes you think about where we're headed and what life will be like in the future. So I was pleased to discover that in a recent poll by the Sci-fi channel, other fans of the genre came down firmly on the side of hard Sci-fi, especially with regards to books. Not only that, but the number one thing you can do to save the world? Read. 1. 1984 by George Orwell 2. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells 3. Dune by Frank Herbert 4. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells 5. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov 6. The Stand by Stephen King 7. Fahrenhe...