This Month
| June 2008 |
| Sun |
Mon |
Tue |
Wed |
Thu |
Fri |
Sat |
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
|
8
|
9
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
13
|
14
|
|
15
|
16
|
17
|
18
|
19
|
20
|
21
|
|
22
|
23
|
24
|
25
|
26
|
27
|
28
|
|
29
|
30
|
|
Friday, June 6
Friday Fun Link - Read at Work (and an unrelated story of why Shea is a computer genius) (June 6, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 06 Jun 2008 10:10 PM CST
Read at Work
is a site from the New Zealand Book Council that allows you to read classic books, poetry, samples from selected New Zealand authors and more, online and formatted to look like either the Windows XP interface and Powerpoint presentations. Very fun and cool (though I do not, of course, advocate performing non-work activities such as this while at work! Of course, if you work in libraries, this *is* work related...sort of.) (via Reddit though I don't have the original link handy - you can search if you really need it)As for Shea being a computer genius, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Swift Current right now. We made sure the room had an Internet connection as I've brought my laptop with me. I plugged it in when we got here, checked e-mail then trundled off to the pool with Pace and Shea. When we got back, Shea went to the computer and asked, "How come it won't turn on?" I pushed the power button, sure I'd left it running when we left. Nothing. Again, holding it a few seconds. Nothing. "Oh fuck" is the non-paraphrased thought that came to mind. I ran through the checklist...did the screen give out? The motherboard? The hard drive? Hopefully the motherboard - that's the least bothersome major error. The hard drive has a full back-up but would be PAINFUL to redo everything. We're in a poolside room...maybe the humidity just temporarily short-circuited it or something? Wishful thinking but maybe it'll work tomorrow if I crank the air and say a prayer to the techno-gods before I fall asleep. So I'm laying in bed with Shea and Pace and Shea goes, "How long were we at the pool? Do you know if the plug in you used was working? Maybe it wasn't and the battery died?" My battery life is down quite a bit from when it was new (now I get maybe an hour whereas back then, I got 3-4 hours) but w weren't at the pool that long...were we? I plug the laptop into a different outlet and...voila...it boots no problem. So I must say my wife is a brilliant computer-engineer level of intelligence that I am daily in awe of. (Also, I was up and out of the house by 5am today to go do weeding in a distant community. So I drove 3 hours round-trip, did six hours of weeding, then drove another three hours to get here. So hopefully that's an excuse for being such a moron at why my computer "died" tonight.) God, I need sleep... (Oh yeah, I didn't plan to get up at 5am but I had a dream about being at the library weeding and the branch librarian had got her whole board of 10+ people there to help - but in exchange, they wanted me to help them move their entire library...which is in reality a big part of the reason why I was going out - to do a major weeding to help them prepare for an impending move. But yeah...I dreamt about weeding. I think I've reached the next level on the Librarian Nerd Scale!  )
Friday, May 23
Friday Fun Link - Spectra Visual Newsreader (and Some Thoughts on Some Other, More World-Changing Future Technologies) (May 23, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 23 May 2008 11:39 PM CST
Spectra is a new visual news reader from MSNBC. I haven't played around with it much but it looks cool, mostly because the news spins in a circle instead of the old-fashioned columnar approach. Whoo-hooo! On a much broader scale, I've recently come across a couple lists predicting of technologies that will change the world put together by groups that know a thing or two about cutting-edge technology. IBM has posted their second annual "Five in Five" list and MIT's "Technology Review" journal has posted their list of "10 Emerging Technologies for 2008".
What's especially cool about the MIT list is that you can click to past lists going back to 2001 (excepting 2002 when their super-secret crystal ball technology apparently broke down) to see if their predictions have come true yet or not.
Here's the 2001 list and I won't be so presumptuous as to pretend I have a clue as to where the world is at with most of these (or even what some of them mean!).
Brain-Machine Interface
Flexible Transistors
Data Mining
Digital Rights Management
Biometrics
Natural Language Processing
Microphotonics
Untangling Code
Robot Design
Microfluidics
But some, like data mining and DRM are definitely ones people involved in the information world are struggling with now.
One final thought...my own bold prediction for the future.
At some point in the very near or not so near future, people will begin to wear a small recording device that constantly captures the video and audio of every moment of their lives. This will be stored by some sort of advanced system (think Google on crack - voice recognition, natural language processing, high level artificial intelligence) that allows people to search for pretty much any type of information about their lives instantaneously: "what did I have for lunch in that cafe in Montreal in 2009?", "where did I leave my sunglasses?", "how much have I spent on gas in the last 12 months?"
I recently heard about U of T engineering prof Steve Mann during Michael Ridley's presentation at the SLA conference and he's been on this path for, oh, almost thirty years already.
I also came across an article (which I didn't bookmark and can't find now but maybe it was in Wired?) about somebody else who was doing something similar - wearing a computer that could OCR things he looked at like his hotel and flight reservation then transfer it into a database for easy retrieval later. I think there was also a web site that performed this function for him or that was trying to do something similar for people mentioned in the article but again, can't remember the name of it. Not keyhole.com but maybe something like that? [Edit: Found it. Twine.com]
Oh, and I'll
also predict that the natural reluctance people feel towards this
privacy-destroying, possibly society-altering device will be no different than the acceptance rate for any other new invention.
[2008-06-29 - Edit #2 - I don't think Twine was what I was thinking of. Here's the article from Salon about someone using a technology called Evernote that I think was what I was looking for originally. And while I'm adding stuff, here's a story about how new technologies will eventually allow us to add 1 TB of data on a thumbdrive. Doesn't this sound exactly like I what I'm talking about: ""All the current limitations in portable electronic storage could go
away. You could record video of every event in your life and store it."]
Tuesday, April 15
Randomness from the ALA e-newsletter and elsewhere
by
Jason
on Tue 15 Apr 2008 07:00 PM CST
I may have mentioned before that the person I'm replacing at work is a member of ALA and, since he had his subscription to their e-mail newsletter, "American Libraries Direct", coming to his work e-mail address, it's been forwarded to me for the past year. I don't get to look at every issue but have been very impressed with the ones I have read. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's one of my favourite e-newsletters that I've ever subscribed to happened to have land in my in-box - a nice mix of topics, a section specifically for library-related technology news, a very intuitive layout, nice use of photos. I'm trying to minimize the number of association memberships I buy (currently, only CLA and Sask Library Association) but might have to consider an ALA membership just to get this newsletter when I move on. (Hmm, how does this auto forward feature work in Outlook again?  )I glanced through a couple of the most recent issues and here are some things I came across (as well as a few other articles/stories/posts I have come across that make a good fit for a "housecleaning" post like this one)...
"10 Great Libraries" - chosen by Nancy Pearl of Librarian Action Hero figure fame.
"20 Things To Watch" (PDF) - Stephen Abram in prognosticator mode. (On that note, I still have a $75 CLA gift certificate from getting runner-up in their student essay contest last year. I have to use it by the end of this month and Stephen Abram's book is one thing I'm looking at. Any other suggestions?) "Amazon's Cookie Tax" - does Amazon charge different prices based on the previous buying history attached to your membership? MetaFilter discussion covers "From Static to Dynamic" - a science library makes the long overdue move from static HTML pages to a dynamic CMS. Here's the blow-by-blow of the process, the hurdles and the outcome. "Visting the Most Modern Library in the World" - the Shifted Librarian visits a library in Holland someone jokingly calls "an IKEAbrary" in the comments (and they mean it in a good way.)
"You Call It Being A Professional, We Call It Being An Asshat"
- a fairly opinionated discussion (no, really? With a title like
that?) about the librarian vs. paraprofessional issue and what to call
each other (apparently "asshat".)
Monday, February 4
We Get Questions, Lots and Lots of Questions
by
Jason
on Mon 04 Feb 2008 05:19 PM CST
Just finished trying to help someone update their profile on VampireFreaks.com (half successfully, half not - I figured out how to add a background image rather than a solid colour and to add an embedded music player as well. But I couldn't figure out how to place the music player where the person wanted it on the page.)
I sort of regret that I didn't keep a list of all the computer & Internet reference questions I've been asked over the past month as it's been pretty amazing in terms of the range of what people come up with to ask me (as the VampireFreaks.com shows!) - from the most basic beginner questions to quite involved advanced stuff. With a glance at my list of communities visited so far to prompt my memory, here's a list of some I remember...
- how do I do better Google searches?
- how do I print a selection of a web page instead of the whole thing?
- what are the advantages and disadvantages of high-speed satellite Internet?
- why does my high speed cut off sometimes?
- how do I erase errors when typing in Word?
- how do I change the font in Word? In my e-mail program?
- how do I hook my DS to my wireless system at home?
- does your library have wireless access for my laptop? (Librarians often mention that patrons ask this as well but unfortunately, we don't at this time.)
- what are the "F" keys for?
- how do I change a document I've saved on a CD-RW?
- is AVG Free Edition good? Should I update it when it pops up saying I should?
- how do I erase a contact from my e-mail?
- why did someone not receive a message I sent even though it's in my "Sent" folder?
- can you help me install my Bridge game from 1999 on my new Vista machine?
- what do each of these icons mean? (The patron had pencil-sketched every single icon on her task bar!)
- why does my monitor flicker?
- why are there pop-ups as soon as I start my computer?
- how do I play an MP4 movie on my portable video player?
- how do I recover the e-mail address book from the CD-ROM that was created after my hard drive crashed?
- how do I get pictures off my digital camera? (I've been asked this one a few times.)
- how do I create a Facebook account/should I create a Facebook account/what is Facebook? (This one has come up a few times as well.)
- how do I listen to Internet radio? Is there a way to pick a song or artist and have it play automatically?
- how do I download music/movies from the Internet? (I've gotten this one a few times, usually asked rather sheepishly as if I'm an undercover cop instead of a librarian dedicated to sharing information with the world!  )
- how to log-in to the SaskTel webmail service
- why this is an advantage if you're on dial-up and want to preview message sizes before starting downloading huge attached photos, powerpoint files or movies.
- how to attach a photo to a Hotmail message
- how to save photos that are attached to an e-mail to a hard drive
- what a hard drive is
- the office metaphor that Windows uses - folders, files, desktops, etc.
- how to upload photos to Picasa. What Picasa is. Stepping back, what "upload" means. 
- how to find census information online
- the difference between Hotmail and "regular" (ie. SaskTel) mail
- why does my mouse move so fast? How can I slow it down?
- how do you log in to TutorWorld.com?
- does having a bunch of shortcuts on my desktop slow down my computer?
- how can I speed up my computer?
- how to view Powerpoint files that someone sends as an attachment
- where people find "those funny forwards" that everybody sends. (This is maybe the only time I've actually tried to disuade a patron - "are you really sure you want to do that?" But I did show her some sites where these types of things can be found.)
That doesn't capture everything I've been asked but hopefully provides a good overview of what types of things I'm being asked.
Saturday, February 2
Silent Banker Trojan?!?
by
Jason
on Sat 02 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST
So I was giving my standard "these days, buying online or doing your online banking is as safe, if not safer, than doing it via a real world transaction" line during a public Internet session the other day when some old guy puts up his hand and goes "What about that Silent Banker virus they were talking about on the news the other night?" I've been on the road for most evenings lately and hadn't seen that particular report so I admited I hadn't heard about it, bluffed some answer about making sure you have your anti-virus program up-to-date and quickly changed the subject. But after doing some research with the librarian's best friend it sounds like this is a very nasty little program.
Anybody have any more details? How does it get on your computer? Are most anti-virus programs able to catch it with their latest updates? Is there a program out there yet to specifically check for it? The people of rural Saskatchewan (including me!) need answers!
Oh, and speaking of the librarian's best friend, in my training sessions, I always point out that Google isn't the be-all-and-end-all and that there are other search engines that often have vastly different results - Ask.com, MSN Live and Yahoo! being the other main ones right now.
I also get my branch librarians to do a "vanity search" for their own name, first without quotes then within quotes then with a relevant keyword related to themselves ("Saskatchewan" or their community name or "librarian") to illustrate how to use different techniques to improve and refine a Google search.
Even though this is part of the training, I hadn't done a vanity search on my own name for a long time and guess what I realised when I did - "Jason Hammond", even without quotes, brings up my blog as the first result in all of the search engines I listed above EXCEPT Google.
I can't figure it out - before starting my blog, my regular web page used to be the first result for Jason Hamond as well. Now, even though I've submitted my new site to Google via their own URL submitter, it's just not showing up at all - even in the first few pages of results. Using quotes doesn't help and even a search for "head tale" only brings up my site via a third-party listing service called MyBlogLog.com. Very weird.
Monday, January 21
A Couple Funnies From The Field
by
Jason
on Mon 21 Jan 2008 10:28 PM CST
So I'm on the road doing computer & Internet training and I thought I'd pass along a couple humourous moments from the past couple weeks...- tonight, a woman wants to know an Internet radio station she can listen to while doing housework. I say that Accuradio is one of my favourites and after loading it up, I semi-randomly click on the station "Classic Soul" . What's the first song that starts in a roomful of elderly women and me? "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye.- I've ranted and raved about the end-of-term evaluations at FIMS before so it's a bit of payback now that the shoe's on the other foot and I'm being evaluated by people who come to the sessions. I got off to a bad start on my first night when I'm pretty sure it was the elderly couple who looked fairly confused no matter what I said who gave me all 1's (the lowest score out of 5) and all 2's on the anonymous feedback form (the rest of the feedback ranged in the 3-5's and one generous soul gave me all 5's) . - whoever gave me all 2's on the four or so categories we ask for feedback about (instructor's knowledge, material covered, length of session, etc.) ended up giving me a 3 on the final line - "overall rating of session". Go figure.- Shea made a good point that those low ratings could just be people misreading the grid and I saw how easily this can happen when I heard one elderly lady at another session murmuring to herself as she filled out her form: "Length of session - oh, it was about an hour I think" and promptly checked the "1" box which, as I mentioned, is actually the lowest rating we have. (I guess she was just happy she didn't get the 5 hour session!)- an elderly woman (notice a trend here?) had a Facebook account that her grandkids had set-up for her but didn't know how to use it so I logged in to give her a guided tour of the site. Who's listed as one of her few friends? One of Shea's relatives! I guess not too surprising given the theory of six degrees of separation (in fact, I'm sure I read that Saskatchewan is so small that it's actually only two degrees of separation for anyone from this province.)- I taught did not teach anyone how to use BitTorrent after they mentioned that they used Limewire at home. That would be wrong. - I realise now that calling the one-on-one help session "Ask The Computer Guru" instead of "Ask The Computer Expert" was maybe a bad idea. A person at my first session spelling out "What's a G-U-R-U?" was my first clue. But in the end, it's all good and I'm loving this assignment so far. Someone wrote me the other day and mentioned that some library should "invent a "visionary" tech and public service sorta job for you."Hey, I'm not arguing and if anybody out there reading this is in a position to make that happen, I'm willing to talk! 
Sunday, January 20
Four Things You Should Never Do To Your Users
by
Jason
on Sun 20 Jan 2008 09:33 PM CST
It's a short list but it cuts to the core with a list of the essential things that are part of successful online usability. 1. Make Them Log-In By Account NumberThis is a huge one for libraries. How many libraries have databases and other electronic resources but require patrons to memorize a lengthy barcode or dig in their wallets/purses for their library card everytime they want to log-in? Then we wonder why Google gets all the attention and no one uses our expensive paid resources?2. Enforce Complex Password RequirementsThis was something I hated at UWO and which also kept me from setting up a MySpace account until long after that site had jumped the shark (which was probably a good thing in retrospect.) But yeah, if a person wants to make their password their middle name or their pet's name, more power to them. If you have fears that a password being compromised will possibly compromise your entire system, you've got bigger problems on your back end than whether somebody wants to use "Snoopy" as their password. 3. Make Them Confirm Their E-mail Address To Register I think the reason sites do this is to confirm that somebody is a real person as opposed to a spambot. But as with the last point, offloading your security requirements to your users is bad policy that makes for a bad user experience. 4. Make Them Opt Out of Being SpammedOn top of some sites "helpfully" checking the box for "send me offers from third-party vendors", I hate that you have to read the fine print with a microscope to know if the site requires you to check the box to get out of being spammed, uncheck the box to get out of being spammed, check the box to receive the offers or uncheck the box to receive the offers. I'm surprised they don't alternate the boxes from page to page (wait, don't tell them I said that! )
[Edit: I noticed that someone in the comments added "#5 - Don't make the user change their password in a greater frequency than they use the site." This is a personal pet peeve of mine. We have to change our Dynix password at work on a monthly basis which is a pain but okay, fine. I'm on there everyday. But I bet the easiest way to find all the personal information on anybody in our library system is to break into one of our branch libraries - which are all in small towns and few with an alarm system - and look under the mouse pad or in the top left drawer since the librarians are all changing their passwords so frequently when they're only open a couple days a week - that I'm fairly certain they write the passwords down to keep track of them and also so others with access to the system - assistants and occasionally board members - can also log-in. It's beyond obvious to point out that any password system that encourages people to write down their passwords defeats the purpose of having passwords!]
Thursday, January 17
"My computer crashed and I have a CD with all the files - how do I get my e-mail address book back?"
by
Jason
on Thu 17 Jan 2008 09:40 PM CST
In homage to RefGrunt, here's a sample of some of the topics I addressed and questions I helped people with during my two "Ask The Computer Guru" drop-in sessions and two "Everything You Want To Know about the Internet" presentations today...- how to restore the e-mail address book from a crashed computer to a new computer's email program when the patron has a CD of recovered files- how to login to SaskTel's webmail service- why you would want to do this instead of just downloading the messages- using Cyndi's List to find census information- show a 77 year old woman how to sign up for Facebook so her kids and grandkids will stop bugging her to join- www.ratemds.com- the difference between Hotmail and "regular" (ie. SaskTel) mail- reasons E-Bay is especially useful for people in rural areas- reasons why SaskTel e-mail might not be downloading for a person - is Facebook safe?- Google's latest "coolest" products including Google Book, Google Earth and Google StreetView- www.soople.com- how often does Canada411.com
update their directories? (I guessed annually with the release of the
new phone books but the woman asking the question claims that her one
son's new phone number never showed up while his old one has been
listed for three years even though he's moved multiple times since then)
- how to get pictures off a digital camera to a computer then onto the web...
Thursday, January 3
The 5 Most Annoying Programs on Your PC
by
Jason
on Thu 03 Jan 2008 06:35 AM CST
Download Squad ranks them as follows:
1. Acrobat Reader2. iTunes3. RealPlayer4. Internet Explorer 5. Microsoft OutlookYet how many libraries rely on two or three of these programs, both for their PAC's and for their staff computers?
|
|
