Cycho Librarian

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 ...

This is wrong on so many levels. It's so wrong I wish I could embed it, but I'm afraid you'll have to just click the link: Okay, aside from the fact that it's a marketing gimmick for Microsoft that looks like a children's book, and apparently you can actually get the book on Amazon, the book itself is just wrong on so many levels. I mean, did you notice that the one laptop is dead because the dog peed on it? Sadly, I think that it's most likely aimed at people like myself who appreciate the subversive humor, but the problem is that people like me can also see through the marketing. And I for one kinda resent being played to so blatantly. I'm also a little disappointed in the consumerism of it. "Here, you already have three computers in the house, why not get a server now too?" I've already got our computers networked, and while my wife sometimes complains that she has to turn on the upstairs computer to print anything, I don't really ...