Walt at Random

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…

So what have I been doing during this two-week break? Not writing those five meaty posts on my list, for sure–but some of those may turn into C&I essays in any case.

In addition to clearing out some mental cobwebs and tossing away old regrets, and of course writing for the next C&I and working on the Academic Library Blogs book (if it ever happens), I’ve been seeing how a future schedule might work and make sense. Here’s what I see so far.

• Given that the new position is explicitly part-time, I’m aiming for a total of 40 to 45 hours a week for professional activity, both “work” and writing. That would be a significant reduction from the 60 to 65 hours I’ve been averaging, and leave time to get back to reading more books, getting a little more sleep, and thinking about some of the writing a little more. (Since another very-part-time gig may yet turn up, I’m actually aiming for 35 to 40 hours total at the moment. We shall see.)
• I’d picked up a cheap pedometer (unfortunately, way too easy to reset inadvertently) about six weeks ago and started checking out what I’d need to add to my daily routine to reach 10,000 steps a day (roughly five miles). Turned out adding a daily walk of roughly a mile did it–and given the lovely scenery out at the old workplace, it’s a shame I didn’t start doing that years ago. (Key factor: I’d been doing at least 1.25-1.5 miles a day on the treadmill.) But…
• Working at home could be a whole lot more sedentary. That’s a danger. So I’m taking preventive action, and I hope to keep it up. Two parts to that. First, I’m replacing the 40 to 60 minutes a day I used to spend driving (to and from work and to and from lunch) with something like 1.4 to 2 miles a day of extra walking–either walking to a nearby strip mall to buy a sandwich, or walking to the same mall to mail letters, or just walking. That takes 18 to 30 minutes, since I walk at around 4mph on a level surface. And I’m upping the average treadmill time, from 18-25 minutes to 25-30 minutes (watching old movies in fewer but longer segments–currently, two segments each for more of the old one-hour oaters). Those walks also make good, effective breaks, getting out of the house as well as off the computer. I expect to live for a good while longer; I’ve always been a fast walker who enjoyed walking; I’m hoping that doing it long and often will help assure that I can keep doing it. (And, to be sure, keep my weight down.)
• Yes, I’m sleeping in a little later, but I’m still a morning person–but morning now starts around 6:15 instead of 5:30. So I sit down at the computer somewhere between 7:20 and 8:00, instead of the old 6:55 to 7:15.
• Right now, a “typical” schedule of 7:30 to 11ish, long lunch/walk/errands break, 12:30-1ish to 3-4ish, then exercise, shower, and *maybe* a short computer session roughly 5 to 6:15, will work nicely. That’s actually more than enough time, but it looks like a workable overall schedule, particularly if I skip the late-afternoon session many days to read or dream instead. And, to be sure, the computer almost never goes on after dinner: That’s been true for a while, and I intend to keep it that way. Added note: That leaves out weekends, of course…which used to amount for maybe 8 of those 65 hours. I’m trying to keep that down to 6, and to use it as overflow as needed.

Changing work habits so substantially is a slight shock to the system. I’m sure these patterns will vary over the next months and years (and, of course, will be wildly disrupted before and after conferences and vacation trips). But I think the general parameters make sense–for me, for now. More walking, a little less working, and maybe a little more focus.

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About the apology. On this post at Information wants to be free, I added a comment that overgeneralized what Dorothea Salo was saying. I conflated several different posts (not all from her) and got it at least a little wrong.I attempted to add a comment today at that post, apologizing to Dorothea. Apparently my comments are being trapped as spam. So I’ll do it here. I still think there’s too much “exclusion of the middle” in the field, but in this case Dorothea was not saying what I heard. That happens. Sorry.Oh, and I certainly agree that librarians must be willing to take some initiatives in trying out new things, at least some new things, at least some of the time. Stagnation helps nobody.

It’s really past time for me to do some “regular” posts–posts that have nothing to do with job searches and new books. I’ve got a list of candidates; maybe I’ll get to them as time goes on. Meanwhile, here’s a few random thoughts that don’t deserve individual posts. One bit of context: This is the second week of a two-week period of deliberate unemployment, intended to clear my head and refresh my energies so that I can do a great job for PALINET. So far, I think it’s working.

• If you’re waiting to hear more about my departure from OCLC RLG Service Center, don’t hold your breath. I never planned to write memoirs (and have now discarded most of the papers that could go toward memoirs), for the perfectly sound reason that I’m not in the pantheon of celebrated people. If I ever do write memoirish things that are more than casual posts, they’ll almost entirely concern my non-work library life. I had 39 years in the library automation game, most of them good years. That life is over. I’m focused on the future.
• I’ve now realized just how odd it was to state publicly that I was leaving a position not because “it was a bad fit” or “to explore other opportunities” or whatever, but because the position was being terminated. That’s almost as bad as admitting that I stopped writing “The Crawford Files” in American Libraries not because “three years was long enough” or “it was time to explore other kinds of writing” or “I was running out of appropriate topics” (which is, indeed, the actual reason I stopped writing “PC Monitor” for ONLINE at the end of 2006), but because the column was dropped by the publication. Oops. I did that too, didn’t I? Clearly, I was raised badly, never learning that “honesty is the best policy” has a big escape clause “…except when it could make you look bad.”
• Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve come to the conclusion that when somebody writes a post noting various problems that they’re having–problems that legitimately deserve some sympathy or empathy–and says they don’t want a pity party…well, most of the time they do sort of want a little tiny pity party, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
• When someone says “Nobody ever said…” with regard to some statement currently viewed as extreme, what they usually mean is either “Nobody ever used that precise set of words, although some people definitely wrote things that reasonable people would interpret that way” or “You shouldn’t actually look at the history–nobody should be held accountable for what they said two years ago.”
• There’s a big difference between not picking up on every tool that comes along and being unwilling to use new tools when they make sense. To my mind, for many people (myself included) the former is a way to maintain some kind of balance–in fact, we do not all need to know X intimately, whatever X happens to be. (I don’t need to know how to modify a Second Life avatar. Neither do most other librarians.) But being unwilling to adopt a tool that makes sense for a real-world application you have because you’ve never used it before: That’s a sign of rigidity and impending retirement that I hope never to suffer from.
• What? You want a real-world example? I never created a wiki–because I had no problem for which a wiki seemed to be the best solution. My new job will make heavy use of a wiki–actually, the wiki is the fundamental medium. I knew that before I applied for the job, and it appears to be the right tool for the job. So I’ll become a whole lot more familiar with the intricacies of one kind of wiki software–because it’s the right tool for the job.

That’s six little items, more than enough for now. I do plan to do more substantive posts. There’s no question that PALINET knows about this blog and about Cites & Insights–after all, the press release on my hiring mentions both of them. There’s no question that PALINET assumes I’ll continue blogging and publishing C&I, does not intend to censor or guide the content of either one, and assumes I won’t violate internal confidences or otherwise violate unstated blogging guidelines.

I would say blogging might be irregular as I dive headlong into the new situation come next week–but when has blogging at this here blog ever been regular?

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering: Yes, I will be at Midwinter 2008. Annual, too. Always barring various disasters, to be sure.

Meredith Farkas just posted the results of her request for people’s “three favorite librar* blogs.”

It’s an interesting list; I’ll have to check it out at leisure to see which blogs I need to add to my already-bulging Bloglines list.

Oh, and this here blog came in #9, next to last of those actually listed in descending order (a thoughtful choice on Ms. Farkas’ part). “Favorite.” Hmm. I’m pleased and a little surprised.

That’s one lower than in the OEDb post that convinced Meredith to do her survey.

If either of these means a lot, I’m much more pleased by this #9 than by the other #8.

A key point here, though, is one of many excellent ones Meredith (or Farkas or Ms. Farkas–so I’m inconsistent…) makes about “favorite,” particularly for people like me who don’t have clear favorites (but did respond):

When forced to pick only three favorites, though, we pick the ones that mean the most to us at that particular time.

Noting one of the comments–Cool Librarian is in my Bloglines list; I do read it; I do enjoy it. It just wasn’t one of the three that sprang to mind as having been most thought-provoking over the two or three weeks prior to the survey. (I don’t remember my response, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be the same today.)

Yes, I do plan to check each link in that list, and I’m sure I’ll add several of them to Bloglines–at least for a while.

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What? Two posts on a Sunday afternoon? Well, you know, this is the second day of a 16-day weekend for me, so…

OK, that’s not quite true. I like the idea of doing absolutely nothing for two weeks but clearing my mind, becoming one with the universe, going for long walks, etc. But in the real world…

• Tomorrow: Put in hotel requests for Midwinter (yep, I’m going to Midwinter…); send in final paperwork for OCLC; deal with contract stuff for new position (I think).
• Later in the week: Probably make travel arrangements connected to new position. Certainly go back to MVPL and start checking books out again.
• Realistically, get at least one or two essays done for the November C&I–since I haven’t done any so far.
• Do at least a couple of dozen blog analyses for the academic library blog project, to keep that moving.
• Probably come up with topic for at least one column, maybe write the column.
• Rearrange home office space to clear out old crap and leave room for new important stuff.
• And, yes, take enough time to relax, clear my head, do even more walking than usual, and get used to a different pace.

I’m most assuredly not complaining. But taking two weeks “between jobs” isn’t quite the same as a two week vacation. Fortunately, we’re planning one of those too…for next spring or summer, that is.

If you’re wondering: I took the supplies back to the store where I purchased them, told them the exact situation (the truth and the whole truth)–and they took back all the fresh-stock supplies (hey, I’m a regular customer, and the refund is in the form of a store merchandise card…), amounting to considerably more than $50–more than twice that, actually.

I don’t do commercials, but it’s fair to say I’m happy with Office Depot.

John Scalzi’s daughter just made a shiny dime by knowing the answer to that old question,

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

The answer is not 42. The answer, as explained in a fascinating earlier post at Scalzi’s Whatever, is 35 cubic meters or about 700 pounds–and, according to Cornell, woodchucks do chuck wood, if you give them wood to chuck.

That wasn’t the trigger for this post, though. That trigger came down in the comments (Scalzi gets great comments), to wit a followup to the question

Yes, but what’s the difference between a duck?

The answer, which you should memorize, is:

One of his feet are both the same.

Have a good weekend.

Or, “what I did for fun over Labor Day weekend.”

Yes, there is a musical version of Emma–and my wife and I both thought it was first rate. It’s not a beat-you-over-the head, huge-cast musical; the cast numbers roughly a dozen and the orchestra all of four. But that works very well here. The book and score are by Paul Gordon, who did the Broadway version of Jane Eyre in 2000. The songs vary from good to showstoppers (the title song, sung by Mr. Knightley, is a stunner)–and they make up the bulk of the two-hour musical. About 70% of the dialogue and lyrics come from the novel.

You’ll find the San Francisco Chronicle’s review of the musical here and a background piece here

This is the world premiere of Emma (TheatreWorks has premiered 50 plays and musicals), and the run ends September 16. It’s not clear where it will go from there. TheatreWorks is a fine company (and yes, it’s an Actors Equity company). The acting, direction, musicianship and stagecraft all worked well. We had what should have been awful seats–the furthest left in the third row–but the theaters of the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts (next door to the library) really don’t have bad sightlines or acoustics, so we were happy.

I won’t go into great detail; you can read the review. Well written, well played, charming, funny, and (I believe) reasonably true to the novel. It wasn’t cheap (TheatreWorks productions never are, particularly not musicals on weekend matinees), but well worth it. [To tell the truth, I have no idea whether it was cheap or not. Two tickets plus handling cost us $136. That strikes me as reasonable for a professional performance, but what do I know?]