Walt at Random

I’m going to make a prediction, based on very limited observation.

The space provided for each Gmail account will reach seven gigabytes (or, rather, 7,000 megabytes–I have no idea whether Gmail’s megabytes are “disc megabytes” or “true megabytes”) on, let’s see now:

The Fourth of July, give or take a week.

Actually, if they’re adding space at a steady rate–which is a huge “if”–then it should be either July 4 or July 5, 2008.

If I’m wrong, I will double my monthly payment for Gmail for the course of one month. That’s as much money as I ever put behind my predictions.

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“Disc megabytes” as used in almost all advertising and specs for hard disk space (and, I believe, optical disc and flash drive space) are based on the decimal system–thus, a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes, and a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes. “True megabytes” (or “RAM megabytes” if you prefer) are based on the binary system. Thus, a megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes or 1,024×1024 bytes, and a gigabyte is 1,024×1,024×1,024 bytes. It does start to add up–in this case, to roughly 73.3 million characters. You still sometimes see tiny little footnotes on ads because there have been people who sued because their hard discs didn’t have as much storage as was advertised.

Things get confusing because OS tools, at least on the Windows side, usually return “true megabytes” sizes–so, for example, the primary portion of my notebook’s 250GB drive is reported as “238,113,628,160 bytes” and also as “221 GB.” (There’s a secondary partition for recovery–”11,943,071,744 bytes” but also “11.1GB”) So do I have a 250GB hard disk or a 232GB hard disk? The only plausible answer is, of course, Yes.

Walt at Random has the most readers of any blog in its class.*

That seems like an appropriate way to begin this little poke at a full-page Chevy ad in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. The ad’s announcing an increase in incentive money, and features three different models. The highway EPA estimate appears for each model–and for two of the three, it’s accompanied by “Best-in-class highway fuel economy” (in one case followed by “with manual transmission.” And, oh yes, there’s a footnote for each of those claims.

The mileage figures aren’t bad, but they’re also not great. Not that I’m a skeptic, but, well, I was pretty sure that the Chevy Cobalt didn’t get as good mileage as a number of other compact cars.

So I did what most readers never bother to do: I read the footnotes.

Here’s the footnote for the Cobalt:

Based on 2008 GM Compact Car 3-Door Coupe segment.

And for the Impala:

Based on Impala with 3.5L engine and 2008 GM Large Car segment.

Isn’t that great? GM’s defining “class” based entirely on cars it manufactures. I don’t know how many “compact car 3-door coupe”s GM makes, but this definitely nicely avoids comparisons with all the compact cars from Honda, Toyota, Kia, Hyundai, Mazda…and even Ford and Chrysler.

Imagine if libraries had advertising budgets and the same approach to facts vs. truth. Every library could really be a star, without much trouble:

Mallsville Public Library answers more reference questions than any other comparable library^

Followed by more promotional material, followed by this substantially smaller footnote:

^Based on libraries that are not part of larger library systems, that serve between 2,000 and 2,500 people and that are located within 10 miles of the Mallsville River. Phone and IM reference excluded for purposes of comparisons.

Fortunately, libraries really aren’t businesses in some key respects…

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* Based on library-related blogs written by semi-retired male non-librarians between 60 and 65 years old, living in California.

Time to do a few real posts, not the stuff I’ve been doing…but maybe not quite yet.

This one’s a good Friday post–but it may give some of you ideas.

To wit: Over the last month or so, I’ve seen most web pages (and nearly all blog posts) as a little more elegant than they were in the past–and found myself ready to read more before I click to the next post or the next site.

The specific choice I’ve made isn’t one I’d recommend for anyone else (and it wouldn’t be available to 99% of you, I’d guess), but the approach will work for most everybody.

I’m reading more of your posts because they’re in a typeface I find both elegant and readable, even though it’s really not very well suited to the screen. Namely, you’re writing to me in Berkeley Oldstyle. (Not Berkeley Book–that’s even more print-oriented, a little too light for the screen. Also, there’s no boldface in Berkeley Book, so it winds up “emboldened,” which is a little strange. You see Berkeley Book in Cites & Insights and in Cites & Insights Books publications, using Berkeley Bold when boldface is needed.)

What’s that you say? When you look at your own blog, it’s in Arial or Helvetica or maybe some other, slightly more interesting, sans serif face? Probably–and I’d guess 90% of all blogs and websites are in Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Tehama, or one or two other sans faces. I just got tired of all that sans. Even on-screen, I much prefer serif. (You may note that this blog uses serif type–but not Berkeley, since you have to pay to have Berkeley on your computer and almost nobody’s likely to do that.)

So here’s what I did–and you can do it, too. Should you? That’s your choice. In my experience, FireFox 2 and IE7 both render well enough that doing this radical thing shouldn’t screw up too many pages. Usually, this choice will also affect printouts, although not always.

Here’s what you do. I’ll use Book Antiqua (probably Palatino on the Mac) as an example, since it’s commonly available, but you can use any typeface that suits your fancy:

• In Firefox: Click Tools, then Options. Select your preferred typeface as “Default font” in the Fonts & Colors section. Then–this is the vital step–click on Advanced and uncheck “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above.” Click OK. Click OK on the Options box. Shazam! Most of the type on your webpages–not quite all–will be in the typeface you prefer. You may need to change the size option a little (I use 17), as some typefaces set smaller than others.
• In IE7: Click Tools, then Internet Options, then Fonts. Choose your preferred proportional typeface as “Webpage font:”. Click OK. Then, back on the Internet Options page, click Accessibility. Now check “Ignore font styles specified on webpages.” Click OK. Click OK on Internet Options. Shazam!
• For IE6: First, upgrade to IE7… (actually, pretty much the same options apply, but seriously, upgrade to IE7 or to Firefox, or Opera if you prefer. I don’t have Opera, but I’m sure it has a similar override capability).

You could say this is ignoring the “design choices” made for pages–but do you really believe that everyone consciously chooses the same boring typefaces? Most of the time, that design choice is a default.

You can have fun with this, although you probably want to get to something that suits your preferences (which could very well be Arial or Verdana or Lucida–or just letting the “designer” specify the typefaces).

For current MS users (that is, Vista), there seem to be quite a few nicely readable serif typefaces, e.g., Cambria, Calisto, Constantia, as well as the old standbys Book Antiqua (used for this blog), Bookman Old Style (not my fave), Goudy Old Style and Georgia.

You could even use Comic Sans. Just don’t show me.

Or you could get silly for a few minutes, using something like Rockwell, Mistral (or another handwriting typeface), Corsiva, Matisse, or if you want pages to look like stock certificates, Copperplate Gothic or Engravers. Or, ahem, University Roman. But I can’t imagine spending much time with those typefaces…

Am I serious about this? Well, I normally leave these overrides on for my own web use, unless I’m investigating sites in a way that requires respecting their typography. You might find any such change horribly distracting. Heck, you might just love the standard typefaces that everybody uses. It’s your computer.

I hear from semi-reliable sources a grotesque rumor that I was “on” LSW Meebo (is that like being on drugs?) during a presentation on LSW at CiL.

LSW? CiL? What are all these initialisms?

I can only say this to that: I’m as likely to be found on LSW Meebo as I am to post mini-reviews of old movies.

I would note that any LSW participant (I hear from those deranged types who actually frequent whatever-the-heck it is) can set their screen name to be anything. Michael Gorman, Edgar A. Poe, waltcrawford, you name it…

TLI? Well, LSW isn’t an acronym (at least I can’t think of any reasonable way to pronounce it as a word), so TLA doesn’t work. Besides, I’ll be at TLA (or TxLA, if you prefer) next week…in the flesh, not in some crazy person’s impersonation of me in a room talking about…well, no I’m not going to repeat that. And since LSW Meebo is passworded, you can’t get it from the buffer anyway

23. And still it didn’t crash. Not that I was there to see it, of course..

1. I’m 62. I don’t consider myself a “senior citizen.” I doubt that I’ll consider myself a “senior citizen” at 65, or 66 for that matter. Nor do I plan to go away and hide when I become a “senior citizen.” But I promise not to go take a librarian job away from some young person scolding people for not retiring when they should.

2. I’m not a professional librarian–both because I lack the degree and because I don’t work as a professional librarian. (I haven’t worked in a library since 1979, and even then I was in a systems office functioning as a programmer/analyst.) On the other hand, call me a “paralibrarian” or “paraprofessional” or “support staff” or “sublibrarian” and I might get snarky about it… Oh, and suggest that awards for service to the library field should be limited to those with the proper degree (which, I suppose, means I should turn mine in–not M&S, which I’ll probably never have, but some others), and I might sneer a little.

3. On the other hand, I’m a little astonished to find non-librarians scolding libraries for failing to run out and buy books that don’t have ISBNs, that apparently haven’t been reviewed in print media, that aren’t available through distributors, and that have titles that more than a hundred other books have. Oh, and that were free downloads before they became print books, and are still free downloads… Maybe I underestimate the omniscience that good librarians should have, and maybe I underestimate the extent to which libraries are funded for and expected to handle universal digital preservation.

I think I’ll leave the links out of this post. I’ll probably get in enough trouble as is…

In the last three days, two more people have started following me on Twitter.

I’m flattered, I guess, because this means these are new readers–people who don’t know that I’m, well, not on Twitter.

I’ve been told that Twitter is no longer Hotel California software–that you actually can leave now. So I logged in (turned out I actually did remember my password), for the first time in months, and tried closing my account again.

This time, there’s no obvious sign that it didn’t take. So maybe I’m officially off Twitter (but can apparently recognize the error of my ways within the next six months and return…)

I guess I’ll know, if I don’t get more “followers.” And, yes, I am flattered that people chose to follow my twitters, even if there aren’t really any to follow.

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There’s a really interesting article on Slate today (2/26/08) on which is greener: Print newspapers or online newspapers. It’s not as obvious as you might think.

Lifecycle issues are complicated. Probably always will be. Take, for example, “which is better for the environment? Disposable diapers or washables?” The answer is, apparently, “It depends”–mostly on where you live.

At first–here, I believe–I read the post, found it interesting, and went on by. The second one (if I’m not mistaken) isn’t in my aggregator, so I missed it. Then Rochelle encouraged others to play.

I’m not going to call it a meme. I think that term gets overused in blogging, and Rochelle hasn’t suggested that it is or should be. I’ll call it a discussion. I didn’t participate early on, mostly because my list of “TechNOs” is so long and mostly pretty transparent.

But Steve Lawson took things in an interesting direction and made me think, at which point I printed out some of the posts for later consideration. I see ten posts from nine sources; I’ll keep tracking the discussion for a little while, and might comment on it in Cites & Insights at some point.

What makes it comment-worthy is not that some bloggers, all of them techies or geeks at least to some extent, own up to being “low-tech” in some areas. As far as I can tell, everyone involved in the discussion has a life–and attempts to strike some balance between tech-oriented stuff and other stuff. Different people have different interests and needs.

What I find interesting is the contrast with an earlier set of discussions rolling around a few liblogs: The lists of skills that every library person must have, the universal tech competencies. So far, I haven’t chosen to talk about those lists, partly because I don’t work in a library. But I think there’s something to be said there. If our strengths and weaknesses in general technology areas can be complementary, why can’t–why shouldn’t?–the strengths, weaknesses, skills of staff members within a library be complementary?

Well, there’s something else that’s interesting about this discussion, and it’s something that I’m finding more of as time goes on (or maybe I’m ignoring the gaps). Civility–and, with very few exceptions, the lack of any need to tell people how to “get over” what they didn’t care about or understand. The whole discussion has been charming and positive–and, I think, useful.

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So, in the interests of ‘fessing up (although most readers already probably know most of these things about me), I’ll at least list the “TechNOs” that I share with others who’ve participated.

• I’m not a gamer or Second Lifer.
• I’ve really tried to listen to podcasts, but find it nearly impossible, probably because I don’t have a commute.
• I only use a cell phone in very special circumstances, and I’ve never even tried the camera in the cell phone we own. (When I hear about a $99/month unlimited calling and texting plan, I add up all that we spend on cell phone, landline phone, long distance, DSL, and cable TV: That still doesn’t add up to $99/month!)
• Tried Twitter. Didn’t like it. Can’t really leave. People still follow me–but they sure don’t get overloaded with messages!
• I do follow ebook developments (and am writing this when I should be working on a Kindle/ebook essay for C&I!), but not as something I’d personally use.
• Skype? I only use landline phones when necessary, and with PG&E, I’m not about to give up a phone that doesn’t require household power…
• When I wanted to help my Dad with an iMac problem, I found the Mac wholly unintuitive–because I wasn’t used to it.
• My wife (the photographer in the house) still uses an excellent compact 35mm film camera–but we might go digital for our next vacation.
• I didn’t own an MP3 player until this year, never owned a PDA of any sort or a pager or… –and while I now own a notebook, it’s essentially a mini-desktop, with no plans to carry it anywhere or even run it off battery power.

None of which should come as a surprise to anyone who reads my stuff.

A few weeks ago, I posted this request.

I got some good advice. I did some looking. I wasn’t convinced I’d found an answer. I was reminded of why I shop at Fry’s reluctantly and why I’m even more reluctant to shop at the big-box electronics chains (but really like our neighborhood Office Depot).

Looking at that post again, I can see that I ruled out an obvious choice–but my wife, who’s the smart person in the household and didn’t read the post, offered that obvious choice. To wit, she redefined the problem:

“You want a quiet computer? Why not buy a notebook?”

Consider the reasons I gave in the post for requiring a desktop and expansion slots:

• I wanted to keep using my wonderful wireless MS Natural Keyboard and mouse.

Hmm. Funny thing about connecting keyboard/mouse combos through a USB port: On any properly-built notebook, it adds them to what’s already built in.

• I wanted to go to a dual-screen system, sooner or later, which with most inexpensive desktops (might?) (would?) require adding a dual-head graphics card.

Hmm. Most contemporary notebooks have VGA ports–and at least with Windows Vista, the ability to define the internal screen and an external display as a two-screen system (as opposed to showing the same image on both) is supported at the OS level.

I also said I wanted at least 2GB RAM (the minimum for high-quality Vista Premium operations) and that I’d really prefer 3–and that I wanted at least 400GB disk space.

My wife really didn’t know about that last requirement–and when I thought about it, I had no idea why I wanted so much disk space. After all, in 5 years and 7 months, I’ve barely managed to fill half of my old computer’s 80GB drive, and the bulk of “my” files are 320K MP3s of my entire CD collection. And, you know, if I did start to do something requiring lots of storage space–well, external drives are really cheap and getting cheaper. Chances are, if I needed another (say) quarter-gig quarter-terabyte a year from now, it would cost less than $100 even as an external drive (that may be true now, for all I know).

So I broadened my search–and raised the price point to “around $800.”

That did the trick. While this is typed on my old computer, I’d guess I’ll finish shutting down that computer within the next week. Office Depot introduced a new “store-exclusive” notebook last week and, for some reason, chose to offer a $150 rebate up front, bringing the already-reasonable $850 down to $700–for a notebook with 15.4″ screen, Core 2 dual-core CPU (1.67GHz, but that’s fast enough, I think), the usual Intel integrated graphics–fine for the kind of work I usually do, 3GB 667MHz RAM, and 250GB disk.

And enough USB ports (3), a built-in webcam (dunno if I’ll ever use that, but it works just fine), 802.11 a/b/g/draft n (but I’ll be using it as a pseudodesktop, so the ethernet port is more important, since it’s one foot from our router/wifi/DSL modem)… Oh, and a startling garnet case. It weighs about 6 lbs., but this isn’t what I’d use on the road anyway.

Took it home to test the three critical factors: Was it quiet? Would it drive my desktop display as a second workspace? Would it recognize the wireless keyboard and mouse? Yes, yes, yes. I still have 12 days to return it–but since I’m just finishing the “easy transfer” of files and settings (21GB worth, and it seems to have picked up pretty much everything except Firefox bookmarks, which was an easy catch), it’s pretty certain I won’t be returning it.

Definitely not a technolust notebook–the CPU’s contemporary Intel technology (Core 2 Duo) but near the bottom of that range (1.67GHz), it would be a terrible gaming system, the display’s just fine but not quite as good as my wife’s Toshiba. But a technolust notebook would definitely be in the four-digit range, and the fact that I’m only anxious to replace this aging beast because Friday-afternoon virus/spyware scans slow everything else down so much suggests that I don’t need a high-end notebook.

I did a little due diligence: I tried putting together a comparable configuration at Dell and looked for closest Toshiba and HP models. A comparable Dell system would run around $1,100, as near as I could tell; same for the others. So, well, here’s another cow box. I guess that’s really Acer these days, and that’s OK with me.

Now comes the fun part: Checking everything that matters, so I don’t get rid of the old machine too soon. As soon as that’s done, I’ll have an odd dual-screen system (1280×1024 on one side, 1280×800 with considerably smaller pixels on the other) that should be highly productive and suit me just fine.

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Updated to change “quarter-gig” to “quarter-terabyte,” since that’s what I meant. Working at two computers simultaneously = the worst form of multitasking. Instant confusion.

And, just checking, I see that even relatively pricey chains do, in fact, already sell name-brand 250GB external 7200RPM drives for (just) under $100–but they also sell 500GB name-brand external 7200RPM drives for $110 to $150. So much for keeping up with the continued price efficiencies of that obsolete electromechanical device, the hard disk.

I made that pithy statement in an informal discussion of a range of recent liblog posts, mostly having to do with either Library 2.0 (a set of tools, techniques and attitudes) or “Library 2.0″ (a movement/ bandwagon/ overall rethinking of libraries/ whatever).

One could also say that attitudes sometimes swing like pendulums –and after going (possibly) too far in one direction, may then swing too far the other way.

I’ll just say this — of course, I’ve said a lot more in that widely-circulated Cites & Insight where I drew the distinction, a long follow-up essay, some notes here and there, and Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change..

• The tools haven’t failed. They’re just tools. Applied thoughtfully when they’re appropriate, they can be powerful. (I didn’t spend a few hundred hours putting together the two library blog books to document a running disaster…) Used “just because they’re there” or with unrealistic expectations, they can be useless and possibly even damaging. (Or they can be small experiments that do no harm and may provide experience.)
• Expectations for wholesale rethinking or revolution may have been a wee bit too ambitious. Fact is, I don’t believe most librarians think public libraries or most academic libraries are on the brink of disaster and need wholesale rethinking, as opposed to continual improvement. (I’m one of those who believes most public and academic libraries are fundamentally healthy and have strong community support–that they should build from strength, usually an iterative process.)
• Many of us were oversold on the extent to which “they would come” if we “built it.” By now, we should know better. It’s not easy to get active community involvement–and if a library blog lives or dies based on the number of comments, it’s likely to be in trouble. (If a library catalog started making user tags, from that library’s community alone, the primary means of access, with cataloging strictly secondary…well, need I finish that scenario?)
• Now, read that bullet again. I’m not saying “Nobody will comment” or “Library blogs are useless” or “Don’t allow user tagging.” I’m saying that you’re better off with slightly more modest expectations, and planning such that growing interaction will strengthen a good system, but the system won’t fail if interaction is weak.
• Example: We now know pretty conclusively (read my two books!) that most library blogs won’t receive many user comments–but that doesn’t negate the usefulness of (many, probably not all) library blogs, nor does it mean that no library blogs will have worthwhile community feedback.

I’m not high on bandwagons or evangelism. Neither am I high on dismissing something because it’s been part of a bandwagon or because it’s had evangelists.

Heck, my morning job now revolves around a wiki. But I’m not ready to assume that I can just spend my time editing all the articles that will populate that wiki because it’s a neat idea…

‘brary web diva points to a new blog about wine, from a former library worker. One of the first posts at that blog discusses the many “hidden” Gallo wines.

As a wine drinker (and as one whose family home was eventually purchased by Gallo to make part of a parking lot, allowing my parents to move to a nicer place), I’ve been aware of the Gallo-created regional brands such as Anapamu for some time, and certainly aware that Gallo–and especially Gallo of Sonoma–makes a lot of excellent wine, along with some cheap stuff (the really cheap stuff such as Carlo Rossi never saying Gallo on the label). Gallo’s also picked up a surprising number of well-established wineries through the years, including Mirassou.

I also knew one “trick” to identify some, but by no means all, Gallo brands that don’t say Gallo: UPC codes starting with 85000. (”Modesto on the label” is a particularly bad way to locate the best Gallo wines, since most of them have Healdsburg on the label, that being the headquarters for Gallo of Sonoma.)

Turns out there’s a much easier trick. Gallo’s not trying to hide its brands. This page leads to descriptions of all Gallo-owned wines, broken down by category.

So, for example, Gallo doesn’t hide the fact that Burlwood and Copperidge (and Liberty Creek) are hotel/restaurant brands; you may have been poured Copperidge at Midwinter receptions (or at Embassy Suites, for example). Nor do they hide the fact that they import Black Swan, Ecco Domani, Red Bicyclette and others. And in the premium category (other than the ones with Gallo on the label, some of which are world-class wines), there are the ones I knew about–Rancho Zabaco/Dancing Bull, Anapamu, Marcelina–and a couple I didn’t realize Gallo had acquired (e.g., Louis M. Martini).

Yes, the page also lists the cheap stuff…but only ones that are more-or-less varietal wines, not the fortified and fruit stuff. So you’ll find Carlo Rossi and Peter Vella, but not Thunderbird. (Ripple? Gone. Not missed.)

Living it up in the Hotel California…

No snow (well, probably on the hilltops nearby). No ice (around here, at least).

Also no power…intermittently this morning, then for three solid hours. Now it’s back. For the moment.

Something about 50+ MPH winds, driving rain, and PG&E’s usual tendency to have lots of power losses at the start of a storm system…with, cross fingers, fewer later on.

You find out very quickly that a five-year-old Uninterruptible Power Supply is essentially a noisemaker, beeping as the computer shuts down as soon as there’s power loss. And, for when you replace the UPS or the battery, you think about the desirability of having the display, PC, and DSL/router/wifi all plugged into it. (Which, with the old UPS and my older CRT, was an overload. With an LCD, maybe not. And, maybe, with a more powerful contemporary UPS.)

You learn to reply to emails very tersely so your post gets sent before it gets lost…

And, on days (or mornings at least) when you don’t really want to drive out to a store that might not be open anyway, you appreciate knowing that–if need be–you’ve got an earthquake kit with a reasonable supply of food (and water, and…)

Mountain View really is a wonderful place to live–and maybe the general lack of weather is one reason we don’t have undergrounded/ruggedized electricity. I couldn’t cope with ice and snow. Lack of electricity–yeah, for a while, we can cope. Although I’m hoping it stays on now…reading by natural overcast light is great, but only goes so far.

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Update: Friday was the worst of it–the even larger storms either didn’t materialize or moved elsewhere. Some tens of thousands of PG&E customers on the ocean side of the Peninsula still lack power. Turns out our local Safeway (.7 miles away) didn’t lose power–but the other two Mountain View Safeways, much further away, did. Meanwhile, Saturday was rain & tstorms now and then, but not high winds; Sunday was partly sunny…

I’ll say this for the local press: They’re calling this “the storm of every couple of years,” not hyping it…

I don’t think this will be a blind item for anyone on Web4Lib, and I’m not going to get into that discussion directly. After all, I’m not a Code4Lib person: Never was, and am really not likely to be now.

[Note added 12/20: I'm not a Code4Lib person because that's not where my interests lie. That has nothing to do with the nonsense, which came from a non-Code4Lib person in any case.]

Nor, for that matter, is the Tailhook candidate who said something offensive, made a truly offensive joke of it later…and then proceeded to keep refining modifying that stupid joke. (I’m sorry, but “refining” is the wrong word. No matter how much gold leaf you apply to excrement, you’ve still got…well, you know.)

I don’t intend to apologize on behalf of my entire gender. I sure don’t intend to apologize for people of primarily Northern European ancestry. There are schmucks of all genders and all ethnicities. There are people who just don’t know when to shut the fark up.

They should, maybe, learn.

I was doing some backchannel communication as this thread went on, looking for someone who might be acquainted with the primary offender and could tell him to put a lid on it. No luck. Too bad.

I would make a comment about Neanderthal attitudes, but I see no reason to insult Neanderthals.

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I will say this: Any time there is a professional gathering at which any group–whether it’s women, blacks, Jews, short people, old farts like me, or people with fashion sense–is made to feel uncomfortable for who they are (where they are), something’s wrong. “You’re not one of us“–usually not said–is a powerful and dangerous message. Steps taken to write those wrongs, particularly steps that don’t directly harm other groups, are usually good things. Objections to those steps ought to be thought about long and hard…and resorting to asinine humor is rarely the end result of long, hard thinking.Oh, and claims of indirect harm because of positive steps for others that don’t directly benefit you: You might want to think that through a little better as well. There are substantial indirect benefits when more groups receive equitable treatment and feel as though they belong–unless, of course, you’re insecure enough to need others to look down on and exclude.(Remember back when I said I couldn’t understand how my marriage to a woman could in any way be lessened by same-sex couples being able to formalize their love? Different example, but maybe the same situation. And yes, I still believe that.)

Dear [name of nonprofit/charity goes here]:

Oh, goodie, another request for money. Maybe it’s the fourth reminder about “membership renewal” I’ve received in the past six weeks…roughly one every two weeks since I actually sent in a check that was intended to cover “membership.” Those letters seem to come a lot more often in November and December–but it’s really a year-round plague.

Maybe it’s another tchotchke, most likely something made of outgassing/stinky plastic that winds up in the garage (with or without a “b” after the “r”), followed by repeat letters reminding us how lovely your advertising gimmick is and why we should send you ($300? $200? $150? More?) out of sheer gratitude.

Maybe it’s a letter saying that you’d really appreciate it if we upped our contribution by (50%? $100?), and not-so-subtly implying that we’re cheapskates if we don’t come through.

Now, this time around I’m only talking to/about some of the groups that we do support…or at least have supported. And I can tell you that we’re getting more than a little tired of it.

Somehow, Second Harvest (which gets incredible value for every dollar contributed) manages to get by with one or at most two mailings a year. No unwanted crap. No real guilt trip: They lay out what our money can buy, they lay out–succinctly, without horror stories or grotesque photos–what the problem is. It’s a pleasure to write a good-size check.

Somehow, Recordings for the Blind & Dyslexic manages to raise funds without driving us crazy with repeat mailings. The same is true for Doctors Without Borders and a couple of others.

Oh, and it’s a funny thing: We’re not “members” of Second Harvest or Recordings for the Blind or Doctors Without Borders. We’re just contributors. So we can’t possibly forget to renew our membership.

Nature Conservancy–well, they’re not bad, although they could be better. The quarterly magazine really is informative. They’ve gotten the message that offering tchotchkes is one thing, but sending them unrequested is offensive litter. I think we average four fundraising requests from them a year, two from the Northern California chapter, two from national. We can live with that, although two would be even better.

But for some of you…actually most of you, though tchotchkes aren’t the problem they used to be (with one awful exception, a society I’m feeling less humane towards all the time, not to give any clues)…

Well, here’s the truth. We give to causes we care about, where we’re reasonably certain our money is well spent and where we don’t see a huge philosophical difference with the organization.

We don’t like being annoyed with repeated mailings. We really don’t care whether our “member” status is on the line. And we really, truly aren’t fond either of unrequested merchandise (we’ll make an exception for a really good calendar) or the guilting of sending stamped return envelopes.

Yes, it would be nice for you if we increased our giving by $100 or 25% of whatever each year. Fact is, though, that our income’s heading in the opposite direction. For us to even maintain giving levels next year will be a considerable stretch. That’s not your problem, of course, but it makes us a little less tolerant of heavy-handed fundraising efforts.

For every nonprofit/charity we support now, there’s another within the same general sphere that we could substitute. Given some of the examples we see now, we’re inclined to suspect that some of those will nag us a whole lot less–and most of those will spare us the trinkets.

Maybe it’s time to do what we thought about last year. Just a simple spreadsheet (or another page on the donations spreadsheet we already have). One number per group. Add one for each mailing we receive. Add five for each unrequested trinket we receive. When giving time comes around, subtract two from the total, multiply by five, and modify last year’s donation by the resulting percentage. In other words: Send us three letters, lose 5%. Send us six letters and two trinkets, lose 70% of this year’s contribution. (Send us just one letter a year…and the contribution goes up 5%.) There are always worthwhile places to send that freed-up money.

Sounds like a plan.

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Of course, this is just idle musing. We’re really not ready to take such a drastic step. Yet. Or are we? Writing a group of checks last week was fun. Recycling stacks of repeated requests, typically for ever-larger amounts: Less fun.

I’m thankful for many things–family, friends/colleagues, health, the new position…

I’m also thankful that I’m not really writing about ebooks and ebook devices these days. ‘Cause then, you know, I’d probably want to write something about the Kindle (do you really need a link?). Which would probably mean offering opinions about it.

And, well, I don’t particularly have them–except for the obvious ones: The Kindle no more spells the end of print books than any other ebook reader has. (Nor, I’m pretty nearly certain, does Jeff Bezos imagine that it would or should.)

Beyond that? I wouldn’t buy one–but I’m not much for portable electronics anyway, so I’m not a good case study. I haven’t really seen it or used it, any more than I’ve really seen the last sure-fire ebook device from Sony.

The wealth of commentary in various sources is amusing. Gee, textbooks-as-ebooks might make a lot of sense! (I’ve been saying that for something over a decade, so I’m hardly likely to disagree.) DRM-heavy ebooks take away practices that book readers are familiar with, like lending books, giving them away, buying them used and selling them back to used bookstores. (True. Not, to be sure, a death sentence for DRM or ebooks.)

Then there are the really peculiar ones. I’ll name two, the second one bringing us back to the title of this post:

1. Given that some day, some ebook device really will function well and sell well (which I don’t regard as a certainty, but let’s assume it for the same of this argument), you shouldn’t be negative about this ebook device because you’ll eventually look silly. Some syllogism: The Palm Pilot worked, therefore people were wrong to be negative about the Apple Newton. Huh?
2. The conversion of all print to digital form is, once again, inevitable. Why? Just because, apparently–I guess because “everything goes digital.”

I’ve seen one interesting rejoinder to that second claim–namely that most of us still don’t eat bytes and are unlikely to do so in the future. That rejoinder as it stands is nonsensical, to be sure.

But let’s modify it a little. I certainly remember some years (decades?) back when some futurists assured us that we’d all eat food pills in place of regular food, assuring us balanced nutrition and saving us all the time and effort of meal preparation.

Food pills (or meal bars, if you will) would theoretically save a lot more than that. Assuming that food pills were prepared where food itself was produced–in farm country, that is–you’d have enormous energy savings because you’d just be transporting those little pills/bars instead of all those raw ingredients and packaged foods. You could probably package a day’s diet (say 2,000 calories) into half a pound of meal bars–not a whole lot less, since as far as I know you can’t get more than nine calories per gram and it’s hard to make a balanced meal of pure fat.

Still, that’s a lot less transport. And, of course, a whole lot less wastage and garbage, with the food being processed once, period.

So isn’t it odd that we aren’t all eating food pills or meal bars. Some of us may eat “meal bars” (most of which are much less than a meal’s worth of food) but not exclusively.

Why not? We choose not to. And, oddly enough, very few futurists now suggest that we will ever switch to eating wholly processed pseudofood, or that it would be desirable to do so. Instead, if anything, the momentum is toward “slow food”–buying as much locally-sourced food as possible.

Here’s a case where the high-tech solution really would have demonstrably good consequences–along with some demonstrably bad ones and a whole bunch of unknowns. Inevitable? Not even likely, now or in the future.

Will print books ever be replaced entirely by ebooks? I think it unlikely–but since I’m certain I won’t be around long enough to see it if it ever does happen, I’m not worrying about it one way or the other.

Will the Kindle do brilliantly or fail? I have no idea. Is it a great device or a terrible one? I have no idea.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Doing my daily blog scan, I ran into a fairly odd post at a consistently odd site, but in this case the oddity was compounded.

This post at Improbable Research (blog of the Annals of Improbable Research, the folks who bring you the recently-awarded Ig Nobel prizes for “research that makes you laugh…then think”) includes the text of a letter to The Guardian.

Here’s a bit of the letter, but you need to click the link above for the full outraged flavor (or flavour, in this case):

I’m thinking that to make fun of these efforts is to belittle them unfairly. This is hurtful and insulting to the researchers; and might possibly do actual harm by inhibiting future grants. Not funny. Not funny at all. The IG really seems to stand for the IG Norant morons who are “awarding’ these prizes without thinking their consequences through.

The writer–Mark State–says the Ig Nobel awards “spoof” research and that the group hides the “actual information” about the research papers (and researchers) it honors. Given that the awards PR accurately states the nature of each paper or research effort and provides bibliographic information and links when available, that’s pushing the truth.

The reality is a little different than this outraged letter suggests. Most Ig Nobel award winners attend the ceremony. That would suggest to most reasonable people (I believe) that they understand that the Ig Nobels are joshing, not attacks–and that, in fact, Ig Nobels help to humanize what can be pretty arcane fields by making a little friendly fun. I’d be astonished to hear of a case where a researcher couldn’t get a grant because and earlier paper had won an Ig Nobel; I would not be surprised at all to see Ig Nobel recipients include the honor in their vitas. (I’d be surprised if they didn’t!)

I mean, would you go to an awards ceremony if you felt the award was actually an attack that could do you harm?

I was going to point back to a post I’d written about an Ig Nobel-award winning paper by a librarian–and then realized that it wasn’t a post; it’s a brief section of Trends & Quick Takes in the next issue of Cites & Insights (not out yet, and the essays aren’t edited; some time in the next two weeks, for sure).

Here’s what I wrote:

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The Trouble with The

Once in a while, something jumps the queue—such as a librarian winning the Ig Nobel prize for Literature. That happened this year, and Glenda Browne (of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia) managed to attend the ceremonies. The award was for “The definite article: acknowledging ‘The’ in index entries,” which appeared in The Indexer 22:3 (April 2001—the Ig Nobel people need time to recognize worth).

It’s a four-page article—well, actually just over three, plus references. It’s also a legitimate article—Browne explicates some of the bedevilment caused by The as an initial word. In “indexing” Cites & Insights, I drop “The” in every case—and that sometimes yields slightly odd results. (I used to invert them, but that’s even stranger.) But…

Where does The Hague belong? (One answer: Use the proper name of the city, Den Haag—but I jest, of course.) It belongs in the T’s. And if you’re indexing first lines of poems, all those lines starting with “The” also go in the Ts—but not corporate names. Or do they? The Los Angeles Symphony goes in the Ls, not the As…see The Hague. Isn’t this fun?

Browne’s discussion of “The nature of ‘The’” is excellent and might itself justify the Ig Nobel—you might laugh, but you’ll also think. Browne suggests double-indexing as a solution and offers reasons for doing so—and also reasons for ignoring the The.

Of course, if you use most any PC-based system that sorts (for example, music organizers), there’s a pretty good chance you’ll find The Beatles and all those other groups down in the T’s—but some systems are clever. Sometimes.

I love the last sentence: “Similar arguments apply to ‘A’ and ‘An’ but these are beyond the scope of this article.” Indeed.

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Of course it’s a serious paper, albeit done with some recognition that it’s a tough topic to keep an entirely straight face about.Had it not been for the Ig Nobel awards, I wouldn’t have heard about the paper. Oh, and by the way, Glenda Browne attended the awards. Somehow, I don’t believe she feels she’s been damaged or belittled.

Sidebar: The IR post can’t be sure which Mark State wrote this letter, but suggests the possibility that he’s a 2006 candidate for the Toronto Mayoralty–State signs himself as a Toronto resident. State must have run an interesting race: He seems to have come in last in a field of 30+ candidates, with 194 votes out of 584,484 cast. I guess that would leave me feeling a little peevish too…