Cycho Librarian

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...