It's not book related but nothing says Freedom of Expression like the newest buzz site of the Internet, ChatRoulette. The site is exactly what it says - you hit the site and you see a chat window for yourself and one for a random person somewhere in the world. As soon as you get bored (which is usually fairly quickly - basically as soon as you see the other person's face...or they see yours), you click a button and see someone else. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
(I did it just now and got hung up on about five times in a row, had a brief chat with two guys who were watching the Canada-Russia game and saw one set of fingers making hand puppets. Contrary to my previous experience with web cams way back in the late 1990's - and frankly what I was expecting here - every second person wasn't trying to show me their penis which was nice. Perhaps if I was female?)
So it's not all people freely exposingexpressing themselves as you might expect - there's humour, love and even puppets! Oh, and you might see the occasional vagina as well.
If you're fortunate enough not to know, Glenn Beck is the latest TV talking head in the US in the Bill O'Reilly/Rush Limbaugh mould (mold?). He's getting a lot of attention recently, posting the largest viewership gains of any cable news host and being the driving force behind the Tea Bag protests ("Hey Bevis, Heh, He said Tea-bagger. Heh-heh. Heh.")
This article talks about Beck's attempts to have the site taken down (and why that approach may backfire) as well as providing some deeper thoughts on web memes, trademark law and what is permissible in terms of satire of public figures.
[2009-09-17 - Edit: "b" and "c" aren't that close on the keyboard so I wonder what sort of a Freudian slip it was to type "Facecook" in the subject line of this post originally?]
A minor trend I've noticed lately is people posting screen caps of funny Facebook threads they come across...
Instead of doing literal translations (word X in English is word Y in some other language), I read somewhere that Google Translations uses its massive processing power to analyze words, phrases and other elements of language in different versions of the same works that are provided on web sites, in scanned poems, essays and books that have multiple translations and so on.
This super-crunching does tend to provide a better "first pass" translation than traditional online word matching techniques. But it's still not perfect.
A game that people like to play is to send a phrase into Google Translate and have it returned in another language. Then send it back to the original language. Then repeat this process until the phrase sees no more variations as its passed back and forth. (Here's an automated way to do it using English -> Japanese -> English)
For the last year or so, there's been a web meme going around where people replace the sub-titles in the bunker scene from the German movie "Downfall" with their own interpretation - whether it's "Hitler Finds Out Michael Jackson Died", "Hitler Finds Out The Ending of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" or the following meta-joke, "Hitler Finds Out He's a Joke on YouTube"...
[Edit: A loyal reader has informed me that edarem, the man who made the video below, is a registered sex offender in two states and has a variety of other creepy habits and histories. That makes this video about a million times creepier if that's possible.]
I did a "Seven Things You Don't Know About Me" mini-meme but I haven't succumbed to the pressure to do the full "25 Things" meme that's going around. Apparently neither has this guy...
And you know a meme has jumped the shark when Time magazine is weighing in with their own snark. So there's no way I could do an expanded version now, even if I wanted to. Maybe I'll come back to this in like, eighteen months, with all those trivial stream of consciousness details I know you're all hungering for.
Amy was good enough to a) admit no one tagged her but she was doing it anyhow then b) tag me for the "Seven Things You May Not Know About Me" meme that's going around.
The only reason I mention that first part is because that's similar to my own approach to web memes - if I come across something that catches my attention, I do it whether I've been tagged or not. And I don't bother tagging people (though I'm glad Amy tagged me - always fun to be touched, if only virtually, by a Library Journal "Mover and Shaker"! ) working on the assumption that if anybody comes across a meme I post on my blog, they'll either do it themselves or they won't.
So, with all kinds of unnecessary explanation out of the way, here's seven things you might not know about me, pretty much as they pop into my head...
1. I've been married three times...to the same woman. (I did detail the explanation behind this but that was one of my first-ever blog posts so most people probably haven't seen it.)
2. I have an irrational fear of things blowing up in my face - everything from when I light a BBQ to boosting a car battery to opening a bag of microwave popcorn. It's not a debilitating fear and I do manage to do all three of those things (plus other tasks of a potentially explosive nature) on a regular basis. But each time I do, I always take a *really* deep breath.
3. I just read an entry in my personal journal (ie. non-blog) from about fifteen years ago when I tried to guess where I'd be in twenty years. I was (surprisingly) pretty close for most of it except that I listed about ten different types of work I might be doing and "librarian" was nowhere on the list.
4. If I had to work a retail-type job, I think I'd be pretty happy in Staples. In fact, I love Staples the way most men love Home Depot.
5. I was a massive fan of professional wrestling growing up and though I don't watch it regularly anymore, I still try to at least sort of follow the storylines and comings and goings of wrestlers via various wrestling web sites and watching when I catch one of the various programs on TV. (And yes, "something to do with pro wrestling" was one of the items on the list I mentioned in #3.)
6. I've personally only known one person who made the NHL. David Karpa was a tough-guy defenseman who had a 10-year run with the Quebec Nordiques, Anaheim Mighty Ducks, Carolina Hurricanes and New York Rangers. He was a couple years older than me but because we grew up on the same street, I'm proud to know that I've stopped an NHL-level player's slapshots of a frozen tennis ball with my testicles!
7. I've also seen this meme going around as "25 Things You May Not Know About Me" but I often struggle to write longer blog posts these days with the constant interruptions of the Spaceman. (Actually, that may not be a secret to anyone who's paying attention to how many one-link blog posts, photos and videos I'm relying on lately! )
(8. Okay, that last one was pretty weak so a bonus one: Shea and I first met as college roommates. My family owned a townhouse near the University and her mom heard that we might have a room available when talking to someone from my hometown at a funeral. To this day, a running joke is that Shea's mom doesn't know when Shea and I went from roommates and actually started dating! )
I did this in 2006 and again in 2007 so once again, here's a quick summary of my 2008 in meme form:
What did you do this year that you’d never done before? This is a bad start but nothing jumps to mind - I mean, I know there were professional things like teaching computers & Internet for three months in a row at a bunch of rural Saskatchewan libraries and personal things like "holding a first birthday party" or "carving a turkey at Christmas". But in terms of out-of-the-ordinary stuff? It's been a pretty straight-forward, boring year I guess.
Did anyone close to you give birth? Tons of people and I can't help wondering if there's a mini-baby boom going on (I read somewhere that there were more births in 2007 than anytime since the end of WWII) or if I'm just more plugged into hearing about it since I'm part of it? Probably a bit of both.
Did anyone close to you die? Again, I'm going to feel like a tool if I'm wrong on this but nothing's jumping out at me - last year saw the loss of my last living grandparent, Shea's grandparents are all gone so there's a feeling that the next ones to go will be aunts and uncles (my dad's from a family of 10 so some of his eldest siblings are up in their 70's and 80's.) [2009-01-06 - come to think of it, there was a death of someone who wasn't close to me but which hit me pretty hard anyhow.]
What countries places did you visit? Last year, we got to the States a couple times but again, continuing the "boring" theme, we didn't get out of country at all - not even to Minot North Dakota which is the destination of choice for Saskies looking for cheap American deals. I think I'm going to change this question from "countries" to "places" as we did get to Calgary for a very enjoyable week this summer, I got invited to an HR Summit for Canadian Libraries in Ottawa for four days this fall and as unexciting as it probably sounds to most people, I did really enjoy all the traveling I got to do with my job at Southeast Regional Library to rural branches across the SE corner of our province.
What would you like to have in the next year that you lacked this year? With Shea being back at work (still part-time rather than full-time to try to maintain a nice work-life balance), our finances will be a lot less tight and I'm looking forward to that.
What date from this year will remain etched upon your memory? Aug 30 - finish my contract with Southeast Regional Library Sept 9 - start a position as Organization Development Specialist with Regina Public Library (and could've started immediately after SRL one but asked for a week off to help get re-settled in Regina)
What was your biggest achievement of the year? Very indirectly, I played a small part in helping secure five million dollars in funding for a single integrated library system for the province by managing an advocacy campaign for our library region. Word from the grapevine was that it was the support from rural areas that pushed the government over-the-top in support of this project (though it shifted slightly in our most recent election, our current government still gets most of its support from rural areas) so to be a part of that push was cool. More directly, I set-up a staff photo directory on the RPL intranet that has been very well received (including one staff member dancing a jig when I told her about it!)
What was your biggest failure? There's probably a long list of things I wish I could've accomplished at Southeast Regional Library that I didn't get to which I regret (to the point that I was contemplating going on their board of directors to continue working with them!)
What was your biggest surprise? I was genuinely surprised to get the RPL job offer as the interview was a hard one to read - I wasn't sure if I'd done well or not. And let's just say "Organizational Development" wasn't a course I took in library school!
Did you suffer illness or injury? I'm suffering right now, thank-you for asking. Managed to get through Christmas even though we held it late on the 27th. But then on the 28th, I woke up with a brutal sore throat which my doctor informed me yesterday may be just a sore throat, may be strep throat or may be mono. At any rate, it hurts like hell and my current position is: "any treatment/remedy/strategy that someone suggests, I'm trying it, whether it's Tylenol/Advil/throat spray/lozenges/steroids/Oil of Oregano extract/hot tea/cold water/honey/lemon/Vicks vapo-rub/etc."
What was the best thing you bought? Finally took the leap and bought a MacBook Pro when my beloved Acer laptop died for the final time. The transition wasn't as smooth as I hoped (sure, having a bunch of password-protected WordPerfect 8 files on your old computer will do that to a guy but I mean, no ability to cut & paste files on a Mac? Really?) but overall, I think it's been a good move.
Whose behaviour merited celebration? The whole Obama phenomena was amazing to watch at all levels and as it progressed from "long shot minority candidate with a Muslim name" to "wow - American just elected its first African American President - pass the hankies please!"
Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed? Stephen Harper. "No! I'm not going. I don't care what the rules are. I'm changing them!" Lots of gall, even by the standards of a high-level politician.
Where did most of your money go? We have an absolute lemon of a second car that always seems to especially delight in breaking down right before Christmas. This year, it was a nearly thousand dollar touch in early December that semi-kaboshed our plans to join the ranks of the HDTV owning world (probably not a bad thing in the grand scheme really.) And I guess deciding to buy a MacBook Pro meant we spent 2-3x more than we would've had we gone with another PC laptop.
What did you get really, really, really excited about? US politics in the big picture and the entire Obama campaign in general. Pace's continuing milestones on the more local level - his communication abilities and the connections he's making just blow me away. A small one - this computer defaults to a slideshow of our pictures when it's not in use and there was a picture of an empty lake that came up recently. Seeing that, Pace goes: "Boat!" even though there wasn't a boat in the photo. Or he knows what a dog is and what a dog says. But the other day, I go "What does Snoopy (Shea's parents' dog) say?" and he knew the answer was "Woooof!"
What song/album will always remind you of this year? Not listening to or buying a lot of new music and was disappointed with new releases by two of my usual favourites - "Between the Beautifuls" by Hawksley Workman and "Tinderbox" by Fred Eaglesmith. I guess the songs I'm singing to Pace most nights at bedtime will remind me of this year more than anything.
Compared to this time last year, are you:
Happier
or sadder? Definitely happier now that we feel fairly settled in terms of our home, our careers and our life in general.
Thinner or fatter? Fatter, unfortunately although I did start playing rec hockey again this year after a seven year layoff so that's a small step in the right direction.
Richer or poorer? Richer since it was a pretty big jump in salary from SRL to RPL and also with Shea being back at work after taking an extended maternity leave of 18 months (but only receiving EI benefits for 12 months meaning we lived off savings for six months to cover the difference.)
What do you wish you’d done more of? We took lots of pictures of Pace but I'm starting to realise that we should've been taking more video as well.
What do you wish you’d done less of? Being on the road for three and a half months to start the year probably didn't help my case in terms of health/diet/weight as I would frequently grab fast food so I could eat on the drive home rather than stop and eat a (slightly) healthier meal.
How will you be spending did you spend Christmas? We hosted Christmas for Shea's and my parents plus an aunt from BC. I carved a turkey for the first time in my life and where's that list of "50 Things Every Man Should Know" - that's another one to check off the list.
Who did you spend the most time on the phone communicating with? As
I said last year, we literally do not use the phone anymore. So this question gets a tweak as well to focus more on communication in general. I guess one big shift was starting at RPL and after working for organizations with staffs of between 3-15 people my entire life (SRL had ~100 staff in total but they were dispersed geographically and mostly part-time so I always thought of the core 12-15 people at HQ as the "staff"), it was (and is) an adjustment to try to get to know the 200+ people who work for RPL (which is a big part of the reason why I pushed to get a staff photo directory up and running!)
What was your favourite TV program? Especially with the US election, "The Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" were even more vital. Luckily, we bought a PVR so I never miss an episode now (PVR could probably be a runner-up in the "What did you buy that was worth it?" question above.)
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? This question is pretty dumb. I can't think of a way to tweak it but maintain the gist like I have for a couple others so I might just drop it next year.
What was the best book(s) you read? Another Mac to PC issue means that I have my list of books read this year in an Access database on my desktop PC in Regina. So I'll have to fill this one in later. [Edit: "Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting" by Carl Honore was the perfect book for me to read at the moment I read it.]
What was your greatest musical discovery? I listen to a lot of streaming Britpop on Accuradio and "She and Him" is one of many bands that caught my ear this year. [Edit: except that She & Him aren't British and I probably heard them on the new releases-based "Listening Post" station which is also where I frequently end up.]
What did you want and get? A
job after my SRL contract ended without too much delay or disruption in my life. It was a big gamble to even take the SRL contract over a FT permanent offer nearly two years ago. But in the end, the timing for getting hired by RPL couldn't have been any better. I actually had a conversation with a senior manager at RPL the other day and she asked if I was glad to be at RPL and I said "yes, and more glad about the path I took to get here. I think I'd have been a totally different, lesser librarian if I came to RPL immediately after library school." Last year, I mentioned a mini-van in the next question as something we wanted and did not get - guess what? We got one - and based on our experiences with that lemon of a car, this one having EXTREMELY low mileage (it's a 2006 model but we doubled it in six months!) and an extended warranty until 2013 brings great piece of mind.
What did you want and not get? Okay, with the knowledge that what I listed last year came true, let's put "new patio made of rubber paving", "new backyard fence" and (possibly) new big screen TV as things I wanted this year to varying degrees but didn't get.
What were your favourite films of this year? We're finally getting out a few more movies here and there and also still renting/downloading lots. I'd say, even with all the hype, going to "The Dark Knight" on opening night didn't disappoint at all.
What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? See last answer. That the movie happened to open on my birthday and became this year's birthday movie just added to the fun factor. I turned 35 this year and as I said to a classmate who I met up with over the holidays, it's not so much that we're 35 that kills me, it's hearing that your "little" brothers are 27, 29 and 33 that freaks me out more!
What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? It was a pretty good year overall. More time off/more time at home is something I'm always looking for. It'll help once I get some holidays built up again since I've only been at RPL for a few months right now.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept this year? "I really love Eddie Bauer clothes." (Especially when I hit upon a sale of deeply discounted wrinkle-resistant shirts which means I get $350 worth of shirts for $100.") I should probably also mention that I got, not one but two cardigans for Christmas. Live the stereotype I say!
What kept you sane? I had a real debate about going back to riding the bus after a year away from it but once I got in the swing of it, have grown to enjoy that twenty minutes of reading/relaxing/waking up time each morning and reading/unwinding time at the end of the day on the reverse route home.
What political issue stirred you the most? I keep coming back to the US election but it took up so much of my time and attention throughout the whole year - from the first primaries to the final vote on November 4. (I love the joke about who gets to be the brave person to tell GW Bush: "Your Presidency was so bad that they elected a black guy with a Muslim name to be President. Good job, sir!")
Who did you miss? Finding a couple long lost friends from my 1995 semester exchange to England brought back a lot of good memories and made me miss people I hadn't thought a lot about in a long time.
Who was the best new person you met? It's been great getting to know the staff at RPL (and having a job where doing this is a big part of my role.)
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned this year. "Much of what seems important now won't matter in a year. Much of what doesn't, will."
Quote a song lyric that sums up your year? "Hello everybody and how are you? How are you? How are you? Hello everybody and how are you? How are you today?"
(This song was our welcome song at baby story hour this year. We would sing it at the start of every week, including the name of every baby in the circle. Needless to say, this song will NEVER leave my brain.)
What do you hope the next year brings? As always, continued health, happiness and fulfillment for myself and my family, both immediate and extended.
First lines of my blog posts for each month of the past year...
January From the people who brought you the endlessly fascinating, Baby Name Wizard's "Name Voyageur" web site which shows the popularity of various names during the past 100 years, a new web site called Nymbler - Your Personal Baby Name Assistant which provides baby name recommendations.
March Author Nicholson Baker takes a look at Wikipedia and includes a critique of the number of articles being deleted for less-than-solid reasons.
April Amy Buckland (who was recently named a 2008 Library Journal "Mover and Shaker")
has passed along the following notice which is also a great opportunity
to highlight some of the emerging leaders in the library community. May I'm sure you've
heard that JK Rowling is suing an encylopedic fan site dedicated to her
novels for daring to publish a 10 000 print run book based on the
site's original-but-based-on-the-novels content June I wrote about this when it was first announced. July A few years back, Canada ranked #1 in a UN survey of the best countries in the world to live in. August Author offers IPO to raise funds to help him write his second novel with 60% of royalties as the reward. September Holy shit. October Five Things That Will Probably Happen When I Play With My Old Rec Hockey Team For The First Time in Seven Years Tonight November [Photo of Pace at Halloween]
Glenn Beck Rapes and Murders Web Memes
) working on the assumption that if anybody comes across a meme I post on my blog, they'll either do it themselves or they won't. 
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