Walt at Random

And for the last post of the year (I do believe), why not pick up on a semi-meme/blog theme I’ve seen a couple of other places: Either the first post of each month (with comments) or the “best” post of each month.

No way I’m going to actually evaluate all of the year’s posts looking for “best,” but first–that I can do.

January

One small New Year’s Resolution (thanks, Dorothea)

The complexities of “hype email” and appropriate responses.

February

Civic engagement

On voting (the presidential primary) and civic engagement. I still won’t say who I voted for, but will say that I’m entirely satisfied by the outcome…

March

Does anybody (still) use Windows Me?

To my considerable surprise, the answer was “yes.”

April

Three years!

Since I started this “exercise in randomness” on April 1, 2005 (thanks to WP’s postdate capability), it’s reasonably predictable that this would be the first April 1, 2008 post.

May

Many distinctive local libraries

My grump about the “One big library unconference” and the idea of “one big library”–an idea I found dystopian at best. The post drew an interesting set of comments. (I just wrote but have now deleted a somewhat longer grump. Let’s just say I still don’t buy the idea.)

May was unusual in that there weren’t many posts–they all fit on a single WP archive page. (OK, so I was on vacation for the last week or so…)

June

Academic Library Blogs: Still available

Still true, still not selling worth a damn. So maybe it wasn’t a great idea…

Another month where all the posts fit on one archive page–and this included the end of the vacation and some rinkydink little library conference somewhere… Somewhere near Disneyland, if I remember right.

July

Back, sort of

A post-conference post, trying to recover from low preconference morale. Which I seem to be suffering again…

August

From awareness to funding-and more at PLN

An echo post. The next one was Part 1 of “Projects and rejects,” an extended navelgazing process.

September

Wikis and blogs-and more at PLN

Another echo post, and September was another “one-page month.” Not sure why (no travel), but maybe I was focused on, well, PLN and the book.

October

Liblog landscape: Opinions requested

I asked a question. I got good and consistent answers. I followed your advice. Good thing, too: the book would be unwieldy otherwise.

November

Listening and speaking, and challenges at PLN

A third echo post–and yes, you really should join PLN and use its resources!

December

Visibility and the larger blogosphere (Liblog Landscape 10)

You have 16 more days to buy Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 at the early bird price! (Yes, the download price will also go up on January 16.)

Oh, and happy new year…

When you’re writing a column or article, you’re likely to have an assigned word count.

Which is odd, because words vary so much in length, and you’re really dealing with an assigned space limit: A one-page column can’t be 3/4 page or 1.25 pages, for example. Still, “Zoroastrianism” takes up a lot more space than, say, “I.”

So it’s good to have some idea of the likely character count, as well. Sure, characters vary in width (W widest, i narrowest…) in any typeface likely to be used for publishing, but still…

I’ve always been led to believe that 6:1 was a pretty good estimate for the character:word ratio in most typical English-language writing. (Set aside scholars dealing with specialized vocabulary, those enormously proud of their polysyllabism…and, actually, morons like me who don’t use many long words.)

For a variety of reasons (mostly having to do with planning for splitting or combining existing articles and plotting out future articles, based on what seems to get read), I wanted to know how many words are in each essay at the PALINET Leadership Network. The byte length of each essay is trivially easy to find, since it’s a MediaWiki wiki: Special Pages, Long Pages, First 500…done.

Since I have Word Count Plus installed in FireFox, finding word counts wasn’t a lot more difficult, just a little slower: go to article, highlight article, click on WCP icon.

There are three confounding factors, to be sure, although one of the three only affects one article:

1. There’s a variable amount of overhead in each article–article links, URLs, etc.–that increases the byte count but not the word count.
2. I decided that the word counts should not include the “Related Articles” set of links at the bottom of most articles–and that can range anywhere from zero (rare) to a dozen or more articles (and a hundred or more words).
3. The longest article, by far, is actually stored as two templates plus an article because it was too unwieldy to edit as a whole. The byte count only includes the article; the word count includes all three pieces. (That one came out as 2.8 characters per word, which is clearly impossible under any other circumstances. It’s an article that may be on its way to archival status…)

So what did I find, given that #1 and #2 mean that these results won’t be entirely typical for regular text?

• 16 articles had fewer than six characters per word, including the one in #3 above.
• 59 articles had 6.00 to 6.49 characters per word
• 84 articles had 6.50 to 6.99 characters per word
• 64 articles had 7.00 to 7.49 characters per word
• 28 articles had 7.50 to 7.99 characters per word
• 21 articles had at least 8 characters per word (most of them special cases, basically sets of links)
• The median was 6.78 characters per word
• The overall average–all characters divided by all words–was 6.59 characters per word
• 98 articles were in the “around 6.5″ category: 6.25 to 6.8 characters per word.

If you look at the first six bullets, that’s a classic bell-shaped curve with a very slight lean to the right. “About 6.5″ is a pretty good figure. Which, given the overhead, means that “About 6″ continues to be right for a broad range of non-scholarly nonfiction writing.

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The text above the line is 3,337 characters and 567 words: 5.89 characters per word. I told you I tend to use short words…

Quick invitation

Deadline January 4 or thereabouts:

Got terms or short phrases that you believe would make great new candidates for a five-year update of the C&I “discursive glossary“? They do need to be terms or short phrases where you think I might have something either worthwhile or amusing to say…

Leave a message, send me email. I can’t promise I’ll use it/them; I can promise I’ll think about it.

Small change

There’s a change in Walt at Random, although you may only notice it if:

• You’re running Windows Vista (or, I suspect, Office 2007/2008)
• You’ve flushed the cache recently…

Anyone want to guess what–specifically–the change is? Leave a comment. (Or I’ll come clean in a week or so.)

Here’s this week’s post on PLN Highlights, always your best way to keep up with what’s new on the PALINET Leadership Network.

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Last week’s post said there probably wouldn’t be a post this week, since the holidays hit us all. But log stats suggest that some of you are catching up on PLN during these slow weeks, so…

• As promised, Coping with conferences–a relatively brief set of suggestions for making the most of traditional conferences–is now in place. Additional suggestions welcome, as always. While most (not all) of the tips appeared in a 2007 Cites & Insights article, this PLN article is reorganized and much more to the point–it’s effectively a PLN original.
• Peter Murray raised some questions about the future of face-to-face conferences in a comment exchange on the Walt at Random copy of last week’s post (indirect enough for you?). With his permission, I’ve edited the four-part exchange as an initial Talk page for Conferences and presentations–why leaders should care. You might read that exchange, consider your own sense of what’s happening, and feel free to add your own comments as well. (Just click on the “+” tab when you’re on the talk page–adding new content doesn’t get much easier.)
• After that exchange, I added some new copy to the article itself, encouraging new submissions (or pointers to likely sources) on conference alternatives and pointing to a new PLN forum topic on replacing face-to-face conferences.
• There’s a new overview for one of PLN’s mostly-original clusters: Blogs and wikis, a lightweight publishing overview. It’s very brief, mostly offering definitions for “lightweight” and “publishing,” noting that there are many more options, and providing an organized set of bullets pointing to the remainder of the cluster and some related resources.

And that’s it for the last full week of 2008, as we end the first year of PALINET Leadership Network as a fully-public, fully-available resource for leaders of all kinds.

Best wishes to all of you for the new year. May your 2009 be much better than 2008–and may you and your colleagues find PLN useful and help to make it even better.

Just as I promised I’d post links to any reviews/comments on the two library blog books, without arguing over the negative comments/reviews (unless there were factual errors), so I should do the same for The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008.

And what better way to start than with “Initial thoughts on The Liblog Landscape” at Corporate Librarian? Steven provides a generous commentary on the first portion of the book and raises some interesting questions. (I really was striving for transparency, and that comment is greatly appreciated.)

As soon as I spot them (and remember), I’ll add to this post with other comments/reviews, positive or negative.

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December 30, 2008: Jennifer Macaulay offers this commentary at Life as I Know It. Naturally, I’m delighted…and I really will have to think about “Walt’s Big Book of Liblogs”… Also good to hear that Lulu does as good a job for buyers as they did for me as an author: I too was surprised by how rapidly they moved.

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January 12, 2009: Constance Wiebrands (CW) offers this commentary at Ruminations. Again, I’m delighted–and with reasonable sales or some form of sponsorship, I’d love to keep this process going on. I think the answer to CW’s questions is that probably at least half of those actively blogging now will still be doing so in two years (“actively blogging” being a tricky term, but one I’ll address in the February C&I and at OLA), and that the medium will still exist in five years. Beyond that…well, who knows? Interesting times.

Sorry about that…

Notice the total lack of “T”s there, and while one of those “F”s does turn into a four-letter word-part, it’s clean.

Based on the rapid and surprising feedback and consensus here, I have, with mild trepidation, opened a FriendFeed account.

FriendFeed, For What It’s Worth

Thus, FF,FWIW.

For those readers who can’t guess what my moniker might be or don’t know my email address (both of which should be null sets, but who knows), waltcrawford is the nickname (and email name) and gmail is the email domain.

My feed, such as it is, is public. Initially, it gulps down this blog and PLN Highlights. If I start a Facebook account–and based on that same set of comments, I’ll think about that one for a few days–it will, to be sure, be fed there, as would any potential Twitter account.

Without any of those, there are only three plausible reasons for me to open a FriendFeed account:

1. To reach the universe of people who would love to read Walt at Random but (a) have never heard of it, (b) are among the seven million FriendFeed users. Estimated increase in readership: Zero, give or take five.
2. To post direct questions/comments in FriendFeed, when they’re too short or strange to post here.
3. Mostly, to see what else is happening–it’s clear that some worthwhile conversations among colleagues are happening there.

My comment at the end of the comments on that other post said I wasn’t going to subscribe to anyone up front. That’s just silly. I went back, took the “gmail contacts” possibility, and selected most of my 81 Gmail contacts who are on FriendFeed. Looks like it’s easy enough to unsub people later if it’s too much traffic, or to move them to a special room. (Or, conversely, to move a few hotshots to a special room and go there most of the time.) I also looked at the resulting “recommends” and chose a few. I seem to have 51 subscriptions and four rooms at this point.

Don’t expect me to be there that often–rarely if ever in the evening, not very often on weekday mornings, maybe two or three times during the day. If I ever find myself coming within one-seventh of Scoble’s time-on-this-stuff, I’ll stop.

My guess

…Is that if you subscribe to me, I’ll probably subscribe to you.

…Is that I won’t find this overwhelming, and that I won’t be a pillar of the virtual community either.

Thanks

To those who responded so quickly. I think Steve, Dorothea and Laura were enough to convince me (I’d pretty much decided by the time Iris joined in and Daniel changed his original suggestion). These are all sensible folks, not bandwagon-jumpers (at least I believe that’s true)…

Thanks also to those who responded to this post (the kind of thing I might ask on FriendFeed as well in the future). The glossary revision is actually going quite well and will, I think, make a fairly good issue. I’m three-quarters of the way through the first pass (doing then-and-now on existing glossary items, deleting “personal name librarian” items, trimming some of the “then”).

Of course, I should be working on finishing that pass (and starting the next pass, and starting research for my talk at OLA SuperConference, and…) instead of messing around with FriendFeed, right?

Facebook? Twitter?

Again, we shall see. Not this year, I don’t think, but that isn’t much of a promise.

…very little seems to happen. Liblogs quiet down, LSW Meebo’s essentially dead, “we are all” dealing with The Holidays, one way or another.

So let me wish you and yours good cheer and a better 2009. (If you’re one of those who had a great 2008–well, I still wish you a better 2009.)

I don’t expect I’ll blog all that much between now and then, although who knows? I doubt many people are reading, in any case. (Not that I’d ever suggest most of this “social media” stuff actually happens at the workplace…but in any case, it’s a good idea to focus on family and friends during this period.

We don’t do the season in a big way, even though our anniversary (31 years as of 1/1/09!) coincides with the peak secular holiday. We’ll spend part of tomorrow with my family. We’ll spend part of January 1 with one of our dearest friends. We’ll probably watch Desk Set (an old S-VHS copy of a broadcast version) tomorrow night (there’s a Christmas-themed Bones rerun tonight…). That’s about it.

We don’t decorate the house (and we’d never have a live tree in a house with two foolish indoor cats), and fewer houses on our block are decorated this year than last. (Last year, quite a few houses were really overdecorated.) There’s one true oddity:

Across the street, a house has a big white angel with bright transparent yellow wings, which is what it is during the day. At night, though, it’s lit from inside with the blue-white LEDs that are probably the most efficient and cheap LED variety. Those lights, essentially the color of a glacier’s face, are great for icicle strands. In this case, however…well, the phrase “angel of death” somehow came to both of us quite naturally. That, and the feeling that the decoration belong at Halloween.

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OK, for both of you who made it down this far, a mild question.

I’ve been toying with joining Facebook and/or Friendfeed…and maybe even restoring my Twitter account.

Working at home may be making me more of a hermit than I’d really like. I’m never going to be a social butterfly, and I’m not going to spend Scoble’s seven hours a day with Twitter/Friendfeed (or even one hour a day, if I can help it), but I’m wondering whether I’d find these worthwhile, used in moderation.

Good idea? Bad idea? All three? Just Facebook? Just Friendfeed? Why? Why not?

I do plan to prepare my skeleton schedules for ALA Midwinter and the OLA SuperConference before the new year and probably post them somewhere, in case anyone wants to get together. If I do restore Twitter, I’d probably have it feeding to my pay-as-you-go cell phone during the conference(s)…but I wouldn’t have it on all the time, and either Virgin or Twitter seems to clump some varieties of text messages in a way that makes them less immediate. I think.

Anyway: Your comments welcome, and they will be read. Even if they’re variants on “foolish old man.”

Here’s an odd little story…

Background

My wife’s working on a two-volume family history–more specifically, doing touchup work on old pictures and maps to include in the books.

She tried GIMP. Hated it. (I just find it incomprehensible.) So…well, I had an 11-year-old copy of Corel Photo (8, I think); it came with Corel Ventura. Amazingly, it loaded under Vista (although there’s no help, since it uses a Windows Help file, which Windows has since abandoned)–and runs just fine. She’s been getting good results from it, but I do keep thinking…well, geez, it’s 11 years old, there’s no help, and there must have been a lot of progress since then. And at one point, she accidentally saved a modified picture over the original; the program didn’t ask for confirmation.

But we’re also on a budget…and she was reluctant to spend $80-$90 for Adobe Photo Elements or Corel Paint Shop Pro, which I’ve been led to believe are the two appropriate products on today’s market.

Last week, Best Buy had Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 on sale for $49. We talked about it. I bought it. (She hasn’t loaded it yet…you know how it is when you’re working on a project… But she will. I’m sure it will offer more help; I suspect it will be a lot easier to use; I hope it will be more powerful–but PhotoPaint was a pretty good program for its time.)

Story

But that’s just background. The package itself had three interesting characteristics:

• There’s actually a user manual–a paperback book, and a decent sized one.
• Although the box says “CD” and the system requirements panel mostly talks about RAM and hard drive space, the software doesn’t come on a CD: It comes on a DVD. Fortunately, both of our notebooks have DVD players (and burners, actually)–but is it really a safe assumption that every PC these days has a DVD drive?
• Included in the box as a free extra: A Corel-branded 2GB flash (thumb) drive.

That third one is the story. In a $50 software package was a 2GB flash drive…as a freebie.

It’s hard to pull up a good recent price history, but I could locate a couple of price points:

• In August 2005, a 2GB flash drive would cost about $200
• In August 2006, it looks as though you could buy one for something like $60
• In December 2006–and this is an actual price history–a no-name 2GB drive had a median selling price of $40.
• I was really pleased to buy a 2GB Sony flash drive at Target in early 2008 (or maybe late 2007) for $20.

I remember that a 256MB flash drive was one of the benefits we received for giving Microsoft a day and a half of free consulting during Search Champs v4 in early 2006. (Oddly, my notebook doesn’t recognize that drive…although it recognizes all of the assorted low-capacity drives that don’t have Microsoft branding. Hmm.)

So in December 2008, a 2GB flash drive is…a freebie. In a $50 software package. (Yes, I know it lists for $100. I doubt that Best Buy is taking a loss on it.)

Moral

Times change.

John Scalzi posted this–and it got me thinking about just what I do and don’t pay for as online subscription/recurring-fee items.

Not much, it turns out:

• Netflix, at the two-disc level. Yes, I could go to the library (our library has a huge selection of DVDs), but the Netflix process has led us to a number of interesting flicks we would never have seen otherwise…
• AT&T for broadband (DSL, lowest level ’cause we’re too far from the switching station for faster service–but it’s fine). One question my wife raised as we’re looking more closely at moving: “Do they have robust, affordable broadband?” (For the area we’re considering, the answer is almost certainly yes–and, equally important, there’s competition to keep prices low.)
• 1&1 for domains. They seem solid on making sure you’re reminded well before the auto-renew; they don’t seem to be in the “Oops. You didn’t renew, so we’re replacing your site with a bunch of ads” business, their domain pricing used to be rock-bottom and is still reasonable.
• LISHost for hosting. Personal service, no explicit limits, and a very reasonable price for the domains I host here. Besides, Blake’s a good guy. Highly recommended for library-related websites.

And I think that’s it.

What about you?

A few days ago, I posted something about PC Magazine going purely digital after the January 2009 issue. They see it as a transition, not the death of the magazine, and will only refund subscribers’ money if requested (but have offered to do so on request). I see it as the end of the magazine, although what continues on the web might be more valuable than what was left of the magazine at this point.

I guess I was expecting that the final print edition would be something special–maybe a thicker-than-usual edition with some closing thoughts.

It arrived today, and the title of this post gives you a clue. What a pathetic final issue! The thinnest issue I’ve ever seen, and actual articles (as opposed to “First Looks” and columns–with another reminder of why I won’t miss John Dvorak) don’t begin until Page 57 of 98, and are done by Page 72.

Sad. Maybe not surprising, but sad.

A few years ago, I’d have to devote two or three evenings to getting through the wealth of material in each issue of PC Magazine, and there were 22 such issues a year. Lately, one evening’s been more than enough (and they dropped to monthly last year). I guess that leaves another evening for books (or a shorter lag-time on other magazines); that’s OK by me.

A few months ago, I posted a couple of pictures of Oz, our kitten, and his remarkable yawn.

Oz ain’t that slender any more, but still has the damnedest yawn I’ve ever seen.

But I’ve neglected Sam (sometimes Samwise, sometimes Sam as in Samuel Pickwick or some other Dickens character, mostly just Sam), who’s now our older cat. As with any cat we’d have, he’s a “rescue cat” and certainly not purebred, although he appears to be largely Maine Coon, including the remarkable Furry Feet (lots of fur under and between the toes).

Well, my wife the librarian and photographer has been using her Nikon digital camera from time to time, and caught Sam in these two pictures, which are wholly unretouched:

and

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He’s 10-12 pounds, and has lost most of his paunch as Oz has gained one. Yes, there’s a connection…

What’s new at the PALINET Leadership Network, PLN?

We’re fleshing out the Conferences and presentations category to make it a useful (and largely original) set of resources for all current and future leaders:

• Presentations has more good advice on traditional presentations–and focuses entirely on traditional and semi-traditional presentations.
• Presentation alternatives has (and will have) a growing set of commentaries on new forms of presentation such as Pecha Kucha, fishbowls and lightning talks.
• Conference-speaker arrangements discusses ways that conference arrangements and invited speakers can work together to make “outside” speaking be as comfortable as possible for all involved.
• Conferences and presentations–why leaders should care serves as an overview to the whole category.
• Coming soon: Coping with conferences, the last currently-planned article in this cluster–but the overview includes areas where we’d love to have contributions or pointers to likely source material.

There probably won’t be a post next week; the holiday season hits us all.

Best wishes (and here’s to a better 2009!) to you and yours from the PALINET Leadership Network.

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That’s this week’s post from PLN Highlights.

Not a subscriber? You should be–although, admittedly, I always echo the PLN Highlights posts here.

Not a PLN member or active user? You’re missing some great resources for anyone who is or aspires to be a leader of any sort (manager, director, project leader, thought leader, association leader…).

Why not make it a New Year’s resolution: Join PLN, tell a friend, use it–and help make it better.

I won’t call it a meme; it’s more in the nature of a chain letter (but with no curses on anyone who doesn’t follow the chain, and you don’t get back 96,428 copies of your responses…)

I saw this on Ruminations (Hi, CW) and am just in the mood, for some reason…maybe it’s the (silly) season. Notice the utter lack of “tagging.”

THE 99 THINGS MEME

Things you’ve already done: bold
Things you want to do: italicize
Things you haven’t done and don’t want to – leave in plain font

1. Started your own blog.
Really hard to participate in this blogchain if you haven’t…

2. Slept under the stars.

3. Played in a band.
Last time was clarinet in a Modesto marching band of some sort. Four miles of a July 4 parade with that reed moving back and forth against my teeth, coupled with a singular lack of serious musical talent, cured me…

4. Visited Hawaii.
But, oddly, we’ve never stayed Honolulu. First time was around the islands via cruise ship (also our first cruise); second time was a week on Molokai. Third…well, one of these days.

5. Watched a meteor shower.

6. Given more than you can afford to charity.

7. Been to Disneyland/world.
Three times to Disneyland–once as a child, once by myself as an adult, once as a married couple. Always wanted to visit EPCOT, but never have.

8. Climbed a mountain.
Well…I’ve certainly climbed in the Sierra Nevadas, and those are certainly mountains, but I’ve never done serious mountain-climbing and don’t plan to. Sliding nearly-uncontrollably back down loose shale at Camp Jack Hazard as a youth was more than enough for me…

9. Held a praying mantis.

10. Sang a solo.
Hmm. Maybe at some point I did. In the Berkeley Community Chorus, I shared the bass “solo” part on one major piece (Verdi’s Requiem? Handel’s Messiah? Bach’s B-Minor Mass? One of those…) with another bass because neither of us had enough projection to do it alone.

11. Bungee jumped.
I won’t say “there isn’t enough money in the world,” but that’s close.

12. Visited Paris.
We’ve been in Orly, but I don’t believe we’ve been in Paris.

13. Watched a lightning storm at sea.

14. Taught yourself an art from scratch.
The closest I really come to art is writing, and I certainly had help there…

15. Adopted a child.

16. Had food poisoning.

17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty.

18. Grown your own vegetables.

19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France.

20. Slept on an overnight train.
On the California Zephyr, from Oakland to Chicago and back, four nights in all, on the way to/from ALA in 1978 or 1979. In a compact compartment…but the food was good and the scenery was better, and there’s nothing like the rocking of the rails to put you to sleep.

21. Had a pillow fight.

22. Hitch hiked.

23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill.

24. Built a snow fort.
No–but, oddly enough for a Modesto boy, I did help build a two-foot-high snowball on the one day in 50+ years that we had snow (two inches?) stay on the ground, in the winter of 1961/62. We (the Honors class, on our early-lunch break between two hours at Modesto Junior College and five at high school) rolled it into the Honors home room. The teacher was not pleased. But, of course, since we were the graduating Honors students and all but three of us (me and two others) were children of the town’s elite, nothing happened…

25. Held a lamb.

26. Gone skinny dipping.

27. Run a marathon.

28. Ridden a gondola in Venice.

29. Seen a total eclipse.

30. Watched a sunrise or sunset.

31. Hit a home run.

32. Been on a cruise.
More than two dozen so far. And certainly intend to take many more of them…as (if) time, money, health and itineraries allow.

33. Seen Niagara Falls in person.

34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors.

35. Seen an Amish community.

36. Taught yourself a new language.
Sure. PL/I, COBOL, BAL… Oh. You mean human language? Nope. No facility for it. I’ve tried.

37.Had enough money to be truly satisfied.
For a while, at least…

38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person.

39. Gone rock climbing.
But only very casually.

40. Seen Michelangelo’s David in person.

41. Sung Karaoke.

42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt.

43. Bought a stranger a meal in a restaurant.

44. Visited Africa.
Albeit only Morocco and Tunisia (on very different occasions).

45. Walked on a beach by moonlight.

46. Been transported in an ambulance.

47. Had your portrait painted.

48. Gone deep sea fishing.

49. Seen the Sistine chapel in person.

50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling.

52. Kissed in the rain.

53. Played in the mud.

54. Gone to a drive-in theater.

55. Been in a movie.

56. Visited the Great Wall of China.

57. Started a business.
Technically, yes. Realistically, no.

58. Taken a martial arts class

59. Visited Russia.

60. Served at a soup kitchen.

61. Sold Girl Scout cookies.

62. Gone whale watching.

63. Gotten flowers for no reason.

64. Donated blood.
I had scarletina as a child, and I’m a fainter: I’ve been advised more than once, by doctors, not to try.

65. Gone sky diving.

66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp.

67. Bounced a check.

68. Flown in a helicopter.
Once, many years ago–and never again if I can help it.

69. Saved a favorite childhood toy.

70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial.

71. Eaten Caviar.
Didn’t care for it. My wife loves it (in very small quantities). By the way, California produces sustainable “caviar.”

72. Pieced a quilt.

73. Stood in Times Square.

74. Toured the Everglades.

75. Been fired from a job.

76. Seen the Changing of the Guard in London.

77. Broken a bone.

78. Been on a speeding motorcycle.
Motorcycle, yes. Speeding, no.

79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person.

80. Published a book.

81. Visited the Vatican.

82. Bought a brand new car.
Oddly, given that we treat cars as transportation, I’ve never owned a used car.

83. Walked in Jerusalem.

84. Had your picture in the newspaper.

85. Read the entire Bible.

86. Visited the White House.

87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating.
But I’ve certainly watched it done at close range.

88. Had chickenpox.

89. Saved someone’s life.

90. Sat on a jury.
Twice so far. Foreperson both times. I recommend it.

91. Met someone famous.
Talked to Grace Hopper, shared a first-class airline compartment with Shirley Temple Black, had lunch with Brewster Kahle, shared drinks (on several occasions) with Cliff Lynch… I suppose it depends on your definition of fame.

92. Joined a book club.
The Science Fiction Book Club. Many years ago. For about a year.

93. Lost a loved one.
It would be extremely difficult to make it to 63 without ever losing a loved one…

94. Had a baby.
Hmm. There seems to be a gender bias here…

95. Seen the Alamo in person.
With San Antonio being the best venue for ALA Midwinter (sigh: it seems to be off the list) and having attended TxLA in SA, how could I not? It’s smaller than you might expect, and eminently worth doing. (And it’s only two minutes from the Riverwalk.)

96. Swum in the Great Salt Lake.

97. Been involved in a law suit.

98. Owned a cell phone.
Reluctantly, on a pay-as-you-go basis, and it’s usually turned off and in my wife’s purse.

99. Been stung by a bee.

Did you know about the LibWorld series on Infobib.de?

Libloggers from around the world wrote essays about the state of library-related blogs in their nations.It’s been a fascinating series. (I think it’s still ongoing–for one thing, despite the “.de” in the domain name, Germany isn’t yet represented.)

Thirty of those essays have been revised and combined into a book, LibWorld – library blogs worldwide. It’s a 211-page trade paperback. The Infobib people have priced it very reasonably–$16.96 (plus shipping) for the paperback, and you can download the PDF for free.

I’ve read most of the essays as they came out. (They’re all in English.) The editors asked me to write a Foreword for the book; I was pleased to do so. I think quite a few of you will find it (the book–and maybe the foreword) worthwhile.

That’s a trick question, as the emphasis here is on heard; only you can decide what constitutes “good” in your case.

Or maybe the question is, “Depending on how and why you listen, do you know what you’re missing?”

Don’t worry–I’m not going to get into Audiophilia Extremis. I don’t have that kind of money or those kind of ears. I’m talking about differences that I really believe almost anyone who cares about music will hear–at least subconsciously and probably consciously.

Background

I recently decided to upgrade my 2GB $40 MP3 player (Sansa Express) to a 4GB $50 player, at a total upgrade cost of $10. Which is to say, Office Depot had house-brand 2GB microSD cards on sale for $10, and the Sansa Express has a microSD expansion card.

I long ago reripped all my CDs at 320K MP3, the highest quality for MP3, because I thought I could hear the difference between 192K (which I’d originally ripped at) and 320K–and I was certain I could hear the difference between 128K and 192K, without even paying attention.

So I was going to choose something like 450 tunes to fit into 4GB (at 320K, music typically uses about 2.3 megabytes per minute; figure right around 28 hours of music for 4GB, or around 420-480 songs, given that lots of the songs I like are 4-6 minutes)

But I remembered, before I started in, that I’d planned to do some selective editing of some cuts, and two cuts could be dealt with very easily. (There are quite a few where I’d like to do a bit of editing, but that takes time…) Namely,

• James Taylor’s version of “Walking My Baby Back Home” has an inexplicable 50 seconds of pure silence at the end of the song–probably a CD mastering error of some sort.
• The Beatles’ “Hey Jude”…well, I find the last 2+ minutes excruciatingly repetitive, and I can actually do without John’s yelping.

So I downloaded Audigy (again–I’d had it on my old desktop, although I’d never used it) and the MP3/Export plugin. (There’s apparently now a good free competitor to Audigy, which I haven’t investigated: I don’t do a lot of sound editing, obviously.)

And opened “Walking My Baby Back Home,” confirmed that the last 50 seconds were in fact a flat line on the audio visualization, and deleted all but the first three seconds. Then saved it.

And played it in Windows Media Player…and, well, ugh. It was lifeless, a little muffled, uninteresting. Then checked the filesize. Hmm. 2.2MB for a 2.5 minute song.

Whoops. The MP3 export defaults to 128KMP3. I hadn’t checked that.

So, reripped the file (at 320K–I’d set Windows Media Player for that and it’s a sticky setting), redid the edit in Audigy, and saved it again–after changing the MP3 setting to 320K.

It sounded great; pretty much identical to the CD, and worlds better than the 128K MP3.

This should come as no surprise

128K MP3 is somewhere between AM and FM quality, at best. You’re throwing away 90% of the data in the original recording: How can you expect that the results won’t be damaged? (And, of course, “restoring” 128K MP3 to a CD-R as .WAV files does not do anything to improve the sound quality. “Lossy” means just that.)

What did come as a surprise was how obvious the loss was–and this wasn’t through some fancy stereo system or even the lovely Altec-Lansing PC speakers I used to use. It was through $10 Sony clipon semi-earbuds. (I’m not sure what to call them. They have loops that go over your ears; the speakers themselves sit sideways into your ear, but they’re not really in-ear phones. They’re a damn site better than the usual earbuds that come wih music players–and that certainly includes iPods, from everything I’ve heard, but come on: They’re $10 devices!)

Other voices heard from

I was reading an anecdote where someone’s son, home from college for the holidays, happened to listen to a CD of music he enjoyed–and had been listening to on a portable music player at a typical bitrate (probably 128K-164K). And suddenly exclaimed about how much better it sounded, how much more music was there.

True golden-ear readers (if there are any of you out there) will be appalled that I’m listening to MP3 at all, or that I even consider CD to be good sound quality. (Even worse, I believe that some of the CD-Rs I used to record, consisting of 320K MP3 expanded back to WAV, may just possibly sound better than the original CDs–which turns out to be at least theoretically possible, given jitter issues. Let’s not press that point.) Understand: I don’t claim to be golden-eared, and may not be too far away from hearing aids. $500 headphones and $50,000 speakers would just be wasted on me, I suspect.

I was using the $10 Sonys, which are great for travel (the Sansa Express is an unusually compact player–basically a fat flash drive–and it and the Sonys fit into a little zipped change purse that I can drop in my pocket), because my old home headphones (a $30 Radio Shack set with titanium elements, probably made by Koss) fell apart: the cheapo plastic hinges just snapped after a few years of use.

Since then, I’ve acquired some surprisingly decent headphones–Sennheiser PX100, oddly-foldable on-ear (but not circumaural) phones that cost $37.50 at Amazon. (They just arrived today. The first time I’ve ever purchased audio equipment based on Consumer Reports’ recommendation. They’re excellent by my standards, but headbangers and bass fanatics won’t like them. They’re designed to travel well.) I’m sure the differences would be even more obvious on these, to say nothing of anything like high-end equipment.

Try it yourself

If you have even halfway decent headphones (or speakers, for that matter), and if you’re listening to low-bitrate downloads or rips, and if you have a CD with any of the music you’re listening to…well, give it a try. Actually listen to the same songs (particularly songs with voices and acoustic instruments, e.g., guitar, piano, whatever–folk, jazz, you name it) in both forms. Pay attention.

I think you’ll find there’s just more music than you’ve been hearing–maybe not more notes, but a lot more to the notes. You’ll hear the instruments more clearly, you’ll get more out of the singers.

There’s also a subconscious aspect to this, at least for many (most?) of us. If you find that you stop listening to your digital music after half an hour or so, you may be suffering “digital fatigue”–the nature of the loss and artifacts in low-bitrate digital music tends to be tiring. I love Pandora, but I really can’t listen to it for more than 20-30 minutes; it makes my ears hurt. That’s true of almost all streaming music.

Maybe you’ll find that you don’t hear a difference or don’t care about the difference. Maybe you’ll find that you do.

If you do, there are steps you can take:

• Rerip your CDs, either to .WAV (if you have loads of disk space and devices that can handle it) or a lossless format such as FLAC (again, if you have loads of space and compatible devices), or at least to high-bitrate MP3 (I’d suggest 256K or high VBR at a minimum; 320K is the max). After all, disk space is cheap these days–surely you can afford a gigabyte for every seven hours of music?
• If you use a portable player, think about the tradeoffs. Do you really feel the need for 2,000 songs on your 8GB player? Personally, I’d rather have 450 songs I really care about than 4,000 songs that I may never listen to more than once a year. But that’s me. (I wound up with 463 songs, after going through the 2,200 I have on hard disk and informally rating them. I could squeeze a few more in, but this is good. If I wanted to include all the songs that I rated at least as “pretty good” (3 stars) instead of just “very good” (4 stars) and “excellent” (5 stars), I’d need an 8GB player. Maybe next year. Maybe not: The very good/excellent playlist is both varied and quite wonderful.)
• If you’re still using the earbuds that came with the player–no matter how much the player itself cost–try something a little better. $10 will get you semi-decent devices; $20 will buy fair sound; $40 will buy pretty good sound. From what I’ve read and heard, most name-brand players (including iPods, Sansa’s devices, Muze and Creative’s players) will produce much better sound than the default earbuds provide; they just need better earphones.

I won’t tell you what kind of music you should enjoy. I will suggest that some of you may not be really hearing the music you love–and that you’ll enjoy it more when you do. (And you don’t need to go for broke to do that: Note that my “stereo system” at this point cost $87.50 total, and is very satisfying.)