Home from BC and lots of catching up to do in terms of e-mail as well as other domestic chores. Back to work next Tuesday and the two weeks I had off for Pace's birth have passed way too fast, especially with a three-day detour in the middle of it.
It was fitting that I ended up sitting beside two mothers on the flight home - one with an 11-month old and a 2 year old from Kelowna to Edmonton then a first-time-flying-with-kids mother with a 5-month old from Edmonton to Regina. You should've seen me swapping parenting tips and tricks like an old pro!
If you compare it to the original version, you'll see how far it came through the revision process of the Partnership Journal.
I've said it before but it's worth submitting an article to this journal, especially if you have ambitions to become an academic librarian someday. Some people probably don't see an online publication as being as legitimate as a print one but if anything, I'd say that the editors are aware of this perception and are more stringent!
Quinn did a brief post with a link to a longer article recently exploring the subject of why publishing with open access journals is better than publishing via traditional methods.
(Oh, and the quote that gives this post its title is from an unsolicited e-mail a librarian I just met a couple weeks ago sent me after seeing my article. I'm expecting the hate mail from Alberta librarians to come flooding in any day soon so it was nice that my first feedback on the article was so positive. )
I'm sitting at the Kelowna Public Library using a temporary barcode and password (do all public libraries have this option for visitors? They should!) to check e-mail after a very long day. (I start to shake if I don't check e-mail at least every second day.)
The funeral was good - the Royal Canadian Legion did a very moving tribute (my grandfather was a WWII veteran who drove a tank in Holland) and to finish, three couples who used to dance with my grandfather and his wife regularly danced everyone out of the auditorium to the sounds of Anne Murray's "Can I Have This Dance."
The eulogy went over amazingly well - I got a big round of applause (which I don't think I've ever heard at a funeral before!) and the Funeral Director came up to me after and said "I would say that was the best eulogy I've ever heard here." (I thought about quipping "Well, you mustn't have been open very long then" but didn't.)
I'll likely post the eulogy when I get home (though after a build-up like that, it might also disappoint!) But yeah, this is the third eulogy I've done for a grandparent (my other grandfather died when I was 7 or I might've been able to do that one too!) so I've got some practice. Plus, as much as I hate to admit it, all of those presentations at library school probably helped me improve my public speaking quite a bit.
Anyhow, I fly out early tomorrow and will write more when I get home...
Mike T. sent this along and I'm reprinting it with his permission (though technically, I only asked if I could reprint the list - I hope he doesn't mind me reprinting the whole e-mail.)
Enjoy.
I know that you probably won't believe me, but the first month is
actually really easy compared to months 2-18. They sleep an awful lot
in that month and are darn cute while doing so. I know that you are
enraptured by his eyes and smile right now, but take the opportunity to
take lots of pictures of his hands and feet. You won't believe they
were that small in even a few months.
I
don't know if I gave you my fool-proof checklist for dealing with an
upset new-born/infant, but I'll give it to you again just in case.
If the baby is fussy or crying check:
1. Is he hungry?
2. Is his diaper dry?
3.
Is there something physically bugging him? (a tag on his sleeper, a
bunched up blanket under him, a toy looking at him funny, etc.)
4. Does he have a fever?
If
taking care of those four things doesn't work, then you are probably
dealing with colic, teething, or some other unusual circumstance.
Those four things will take care of it 99% of the time, though.
And always remember that worse people than you have raised wonderful kids, so don't worry too much.
Cheers
Mike
There's that old saying that when it rains, it pours and that's the situation for us right now. In addition to the birth of our son, Shea's had a few (minor) complications from her c-section so that needs to be dealt with on a daily basis.
Then, a week to the day after Pace was born, I got a call that my last living grandparent, Grandpa Peet, had passed away. So I'm flying out to Kelowna tomorrow, the funeral's on Wednesday and I'm back Thursday morning.
I've been asked to do the eulogy (the third of my four grandparents I've had the honour of doing this for) so I might post that eventually.
No need to post condolences or anything - Grandpa was 88, he'd been in ill-health for the last month so, as much as these things can be, it wasn't a huge surprise. He went the way I want to go someday - he was still living at home, still driving, still playing cards nearly every day (but had to cut back on the dancing a bit!), both mentally and physically sharp.
It's my own selfishness but I'm telling myself that part of the reason he held on as long as he did was to hear if we had a boy or a girl and to see pictures of the baby (which he did.) Whatever gets you through the night, eh?
Anyhow, posts might not happen for the next couple days but we'll see. I definitely want to get down to Kelowna Public Library (actually Okanagan Regional I think) and ironically, that's where I sat to write my Grandma Peet's eulogy way back in 1999.
I don't do a lot of link dump posts but I've had a few things sitting open in tabs for the past couple weeks that had the potential to be full-fledged posts...except now, the baby has all but wrecked my ability to write anything for an extended length of time so this is what you get...
Facebook Facelift - in addition to Facebook's recent re-design which is getting mixed reviews (I tend to like how it streamlined things for the most part but it didn't address some of the core problems with the site that I've blogged about elsewhere - search my blog for "Facebook" and you'll find a couple entries on the topic), Facebook is beginning to enter into partnerships with third-party sites to allow widgets of various types to be integrated into the site. The article I link to mentions that MySpace is way bigger than Facebook but that Facebook is growing more rapidly so I suspect this will only accelerate that.
reCaptcha - here's a cool idea. You know how you have to type a few random letters when you leave a comment on this (and many other) sites as a spam guard? Somebody's come up with a way to have those characters represent parts of public domain books so that everytime one of these "captcha"'s is entered, it helps digitize these books.
"[We]
estimated that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day. Assuming
that each CAPTCHA takes 10 seconds to solve, this is over 160,000 human
hours per day (that's about 19 years). Harnessing even a fraction of this time for reading books will greatly help efforts in digitalizing books."
Google Introduces Universal Search Between the Google toolbar, Firefox's Google Search Extension and various other options and plug-ins to give me direct access to it, I rarely go to the Google home page anymore (even if I try to, I get redirected to the Google Canada home page.) So I had to hear about their biggest redesign in their history via the media before I saw it with my own eyes. Universal search is an attempt to combine all their various search options (Internet, news, photos, blogs, books. etc.) into one interface. I still don't like how it won't "pass" a search string if it's not in the main menu at the top (you can switch to a search for "Jason Hammond" in Images but not in Books if that makes sense.) But it's a good start and puts Google that much farther ahead of everybody else in the search wars.
The Beatles Useless Pop Culture Trivia 21st Century American Politics Nonfiction Potent Potables Opera (because there's always that one category where you go, "ah, crap"...even when picking for yourself, I guess!)
Three posts in a row? Wow - I must be catching up on my e-mail backlog a bit! (Don't worry, the baby is right here, sleeping on my chest helping me type the entries. )
A friend passed this along. I know we're going to get all kinds of tips and advice in the coming days but this seems to make sense on first glance.
Cool...congrats to you and Shea. Good lungs ehh...sounds like you two
need a copy of the happiest baby on the block DVD...the 5 steps to
stop a crying baby. I believe the guy's name is Harvey Karp...our
doula and her collective swear by it. The premise is that a new born
baby is in a fourth trimester and as a result he suggest five tips
(the five Ss) that kind of recreate the prebirth experience.... That is why he
enoucrages the use of a snug swaddle, sshhhushing (white noise from a
radio will do but babies are used to a lot of noise being in the
womb), a gentle rocking he calls swinging, holding a baby on its side
and the last is using a soother.
When you watch the video, swaddling the baby (ensuring the hands are
bound) and turning them on their side seems to calm most of the
babies down. If not, incorporate the other 3 Ss.
And from the Amazon description...
When you bring your soft, dimpled newborn home from the hospital, you
may think your nursery is a peaceful sanctuary.... To him, it's a
disorienting world part Las Vegas casino, part dark closet! Karp
recommends a series of five steps designed to imitate the uterus. These
steps include swaddling, side/stomach position, shhh sounds, swinging
and sucking.
With the CLA conference coming up (already on? What day is it again???), the New Librarians Interest Group is doing a survey of students and recent grads to explore why (or why not) they attend the annual conference.
I think this one is well-worth filling out as this is a pretty important topic and depending on the results, could lead to a resolution being introduced at the CLA conference to make the conference more accessible for students.
The grandparents bumped into somebody in the elevator at the hospital this weekend who mentioned that Pace also means "peace and harmony" in Italian (if you follow this link, click on the volume icon to hear it pronounced) as well as Middle English. We didn't know that but that's cool too.
As with the nickname "Peso", I thought we might've ended up with another unexpected but fitting Mexican/Spanish connection since Italian and Spanish are such similar languages.
No such luck (although the Spanish meaning of Pace is very appropriate these days too! )
(Man, it's going to be hard to get away from calling him Oscar! Also, thanks to everyone for the e-mails, blog comments, Facebook posts and even the occasional phone call! It's going to take me a long time to catch up on the backlog (and I might never) but we do appreciate all of the kind words and wishes! Also, more photos will likely be forthcoming eventually too.)
Anyhew, we went out the same way we went in to this weekend's adventure - with some complications. This time, they were of the bureaucratic rather than the medical kind but in the end, we were able to get out of the hospital yesterday around 6pm (instead of late morning/early afternoon as we'd hoped.)
Now, I will admit that I have been known to exaggerate for the purposes of the tale on this blog. But I swear on a copy of "The Origin of the Species" that when I asked Pace what he thought of his new house, this was his exact reaction:
He has also discovered that he has lungs and they are fun to use...all night long. (Pace and mother are sleeping right now - her from exhaustion, him to save us the energy to do it again tonight, I suspect.)
How can something that little make that loud of a noise? Anyone who picked "Heavy Metal Singer" as future career in our baby guess book is probably on the right track.
Just whipped home to pick up a few things, fill up the car, charge the cell phone (we have Shea's mom's since that's one piece of techno-geekery that hasn't engulfed me yet) and so on.
It's only been a couple days but I've been trying to come up with an analogy for what parenthood is like so far.
Is it like work where the baby is the boss whom you're responsible to, trying to keep them happy while they have certain expectations of you based on the job description of "parent"?
Or is it like a holiday with lots of fun times, photo-taking, joy and wonder (and maybe the occasional vomiting due to over-indulgence)?
Or is it like University with all-nighters (case in point), constant learning of new facts and skills, and the realization that this is going to be more expensive than you expected!
Or is it 4am and I'm rambling madly as the lack of sleep begins to affect my brain (no comments from the peanut gallery on that one, please!)
My dad was testing out the baby's name at lunch today and inadvertently came up with a nice nickname for the new guy (although it's still tough for all of us to stop calling him "Oscar".)
I'd being using "Pacer" as the somewhat obvious derivative "Pacey" doesn't do it for me. But dad was playing around "Pace Owen Hammond...Pace Owen...Pace O." and it hit me "Pace O." pronounced like "Peso"!
Shea and I have an affinity for Mexico for some reason - we've visited three times and even got married there so this is perfect in that it gives a nickname that will have a personal connection for us, just as the girl's name we had picked would've. (We're not telling in case we have to ue it someday but I've subtly mentioned it on this blog - so if you want to read a year's worth of entries, you might find it!) "Peso" sums up our baby perfectly - something a bit smaller than the typical Canadian equivalent but full of value anyhow.
Okay, back to the hospital (are hospitals missing the boat by not having Internet access available in this day and age? We've had people come by to offer us phone, television, photos. But no WiFi at the hospital. We made about five phone calls to relatives but will likely let most people we know hear about the baby via e-mail, blogs and Facebook posts.)
Okay, gotta go. Li'l Peso will think I've abandoned him!
...and his name is "Pace Owen Hammond" (Pace being the Middle English word for "Peace" and Owen just being a name we liked.)
Pace was born on May 19, 2007 at 12:33am at the Regina General Hospital. He weighed 6lbs 6ozs and was 18 1/2 inches long. The Apgar tests of his reflexes, awareness, etc. at one minute and five minutes after his birth saw him scoring 9/10 both times - Pace's first A+'s!
We did end up having to have a c-section at the end of a long day of labour as baby ended up being in the breech position, having decided to do one last somersault in the last couple weeks. Both mother and baby are doing extremely well and we should be home from the hospital Monday or Tuesday if everything goes as planned.
The timing was perfect - we'd come into Regina from Weyburn for our second last pre-natal class and four hours after class ended, we were at the hospital. Talk about inspiration!
We were sent home for a few hours and returned the next day at noon having had a leisurely morning at home, taking a few last "belly" pictures, doing some last minute house-cleaning (the baby was full-term but came about three weeks before the official due date so we're feeling like we're not ready - although I guess you probably never are truly ready for a baby.)
Anyhow, as I said earlier, both mother and baby are doing well (and dad's not doing too bad himself although he realises sleep is now something that will be a distant memory.) Thanks to everyone for all the kind words and wishes over the past nine months - more photos and fun to follow in the weeks, months (and years!) to come. Here's a personal favourite shot - Pace seems to be saying "Please tell me this isn't my twin!"
LibrarianActivist has highlighted acouplesites in the past that offer free e-book downloads but this page has a comprehensive list of all the options online for getting free e-books and tree-books.
(I
love that the title of the post where I saw it on MetaFilter is “The
Best Place To Get Free Books” and the first comment is “…would be
libraries.”)
Someone re-posted a mini-review I did on my blog of the Hawksley Workman concert we went to in London last May. They posted it on a message board dedicated to Hawksley Workman but some of the commentors who responded to the post apparently got the impression I was a new fan for some reason.
This is quite far from the truth and since it's a pretty funny story, I thought I'd post the true history of my Hawksley fandom going back to a concert in Waterloo in 2000, probably when some of the posters on that board still thought Raffi was the biggest thing in music </grumpy old man>
(Oh, and nobody ever posts when I put out blatant calls for comments but if you're so inclined, I'd love to hear your stories of how you got into your favourite bands or memorable concert experiences.)
Okay, on with the story...
Through my work, I was sent to a conference in Toronto in June 2000. The person who did the same job as I did but for the Book Publishers Association of Alberta instead of the Saskatchewan Publishers Group, wanted to go to a concert by some guy I think she says is named "Hawkeye".
One catch is it's in Waterloo and we're in Toronto. I keep putting her off all week, trying to get her to find somebody else to go, saying "it's Toronto - there must be ONE band we could see here instead!" and making various other excuses. Finally on the day of the concert, she really starts hammering me. We'd seen LouReed at the Hummingbird Centre the night before and she goes "Okay, that was cool. But now imagine seeing LouReed when he first started with the Velvet Underground. That's what going to this concert will be like. And in twenty years, when Hawkeye's doing a tour like Lou just did, you'll be able to say 'I saw him when...'"
Hmmmm... Maybe she's serious and it's not just some singer she's got a crush on after seeing him once in Edmonton? (She had earlier admitted to me that she tends to do that sometimes!) But now, it's getting later in the day and once we've fulfilled our conference obligations, we get the hotel concierge to help us figure out what we should do - we could take a bus to Waterloo but have no way to get back (unless we happen to find someone driving back to TO), paying a cab a lump sum but that would be WAY too expensive. I even ask the concierge what time he gets off and if he owns a car/wants to go to a concert? No dice. Sophie wants to rent a car and I have to admit this is probably the best option. But another catch - she doesn't drive which is why she's so insistent about getting someone to go with her. "At all?" I ask, seeing maybe an ulterior motive for why she wants me to go so badly. "Okay Jason, here's the deal. If you say you'll drive to the concert, I'll pay for the car rental. I'll pay for the gas. I'll pay for your ticket to the concert. I'll buy you a beer when we get there. And I swear, you will not regret this!"
Holy crap, I think - she's willing to spend somewhere north of a hundred bucks for a $7 concert. Yep, she's serious all right! I finally give in and agree to go with her. By now, it's past 6pm and all downtown car rental locations are closed. (I'm secretly glad because one of the reasons I was so resistant is that I was nervous about having to drive in downtown Toronto and also on the 401 in a rental car. Up until then, driving in Calgary once as part of a long wedding procession was the biggest driving challenge I'd faced. Otherwise, my experience was limited to dirt roads and "Regina Rush Hour" ie. three cars at a stop light at 5 p.m.)
We catch a shuttle to the airport where the car rental agencies are still open. She rents a car no problem and we head off - for Hamilton. Oops, wrong turn immediately after leaving the airport. Finally get to a gas station and get straightened around. Hit the highway and the 401 (with a line from the Tragically Hip running through my head: "You don't fuck with the 401") is everything I'd heard - 120kph is the average speed, people are whipping past me even as I do that, the traffic is super heavy, tons of semis (which I've since learned that people in Ontario call "transports") even on a Saturday night and when we finally get to Waterloo, I somehow manage to miss the proper exit - twice! - and have to keep backtracking.
We're not even sure exactly what time the concert starts and it's now 10pm. Neither of us say it but there's a good chance this whole adventure will lead to us (maybe) just catching the encore. Or worse, turning around when we get there because the concert is over.
Finally finally finally, we get to the Jane Bond Cafe (to my memory, a small house converted into a pub/hangout-type place with seating for maybe 50? Someone who knows it can correct me or expand a bit.) Some performance artist from Montreal is on stage talking about masturbation and why men should have breasts and other similar topics. "What have I gotten myself into if this is the opening act?" I remember thinking, still a fairly sheltered prairie boy (unlike the well-educated world traveler I have become six short years later! )
I'm hoping she's the opening act but who knows? I go up to the bar to ask but Sophie doesn't come with me. I'm already a bit steamed thinking this whole trip was for nothing and this makes me even madder. Now she's embarrassed of me or something?
I order a beer and ask "Has Hawkeye played yet?".
"No, he's up next," the bartender replies, looking at me strangely.
I look back and Sophie is standing by a pillar, just sort of staring at me. She's probably PO'ed, thinking that my hesitation about whether to come or not means we missed the concert. I smile and give her a thumbs-up to show that Hawkeye is still to come.
As I sip my beer, I look around at the crowd in the packed venue. Mostly college-aged kids filling every seat in the house. The performance artist finishes and after a brief intermission where people shuffle around, buy more drinks and the room gets even more full if that's possible, Hawkeye comes out on stage (such as it is - not even a raised platform at the front of the room if I remember correctly) and introduces himself. "Hello, my name is Hawksley Workman..."
I'm carrying my camera (film, not digital in those days). This is a photo of what he looked like that night:
And it hits me - why Sophie didn't join me at the bar, why the bartender looks at me funny when I ask if Hawkeye had played yet. Hawksley was standing at the bar right beside me and probably even heard me! Sophie held back because she was too intimidated to come near her idol so I was left to bask in my own naivity (as usual.)
I don't remember what songs he played first - I think it was "Maniacs" - but from the first notes, I was like "whoa! Sophie wasn't lying. This guy is amazing." The theatrics of early David Bowie. The originality of LouReed. The vocal range of Freddie Mercury. The romanticism of Sinatra. All rolled into one.
I'd never heard of him before but the assembled college kids in the overflowing cafe obviously knew Hawksley well. They sang along to every word and he often stopped singing to let the crowd carry the tune. He went off on wild tangents about the stars and his father, make-up and exit signs, cellular phones and silence. Sophie pointed out her favourite song "Don't Be Crushed" when he played it and I was taken by "Safe and Sound" which perfectly captured for me the feeling I often get on a long drive at nightfall on the prairies with Shea in the passenger side asleep beside me.
Magic - there's no other word. He finished and to top it off, Sophie ended up bumping into somebody she knew from Edmonton and I still remember their exchange.
Sophie: "Isn't that wild that we'd bump into each other here at this show a million miles from Edmonton?"
Him: "Well, when you think about it, not really. You and I are similar ages, we have similar tastes, we have similar backgrounds. Of course we're going to bump into each other - it's not as big of a coincidence as it seems."
(As somebody who's really interested in the concept of coincidences, that's stuck with me.)
So anyhow, we sat and had a drink with him and his friends, gaining entry into this tightknit group of people. We left at closing, me buying the Hawksley CD on the way out. We listened to it all the way home over and over (thanks, rental car with full options!) and even the fact that we get totally lost trying to get back to downtown Toronto to drop off the car (if we'd gone directly, I think we would've been okay. But Sophie's friends gave us "shortcut" directions which are probably great on a weekday to avoid all traffic but not so good at 3am in the dark with no real map in the car) and we ended up driving around till 6am, stopping at more than one gas station and/or doughnut shop to get directions. But this only served to prolong the night (plus I didn't care - Sophie had to work at 9am, I didn't!)
Since then, I've seen Hawksley probably a half a dozen times at various venues - fairly intimate venues like the Aeolian Hall in London and the Exchange in Regina to big folk festival and bar settings. It's always great but I think of a friend who talked about the thrill of going to see a movie "blind" - having heard no publicity or reviews, good or bad, and what a thrill that can be if the film turns out to be a good one. That's how I first saw Hawksley Workman - I had no preconceived notions (you'd think Sophie's raves would've influenced me but until he stepped on stage, I honestly thought I was just being a chauffeur.)
"Ann Seidl’s full-length feature documentary, The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians on Film, will premiere at the ALA Annual Conference
in Washington, D.C., on June 22. The film shows the realities of
21st-century librarianship, including stereotyping, censorship and
intellectual freedom, and the impact of librarians on society.”
How good does this film look? Wow. There are a couple other clips on YouTube about the movie if you click on the embedded vidoe above then look under "Related" to the right of the video.
Driving into pre-natal class tonight, I realised that we've spent more money commuting to the class in the last few weeks than we did actually registering for the class. Gasoline is still one of the cheapest liquids available for purchase but yet another recent jump in Regina (to $1.17 a litre I think) means that summer's almost here. Funny how gas prices always seems to jump in summer...
We interrupt our regular tech/library/baby-related news for an agricultural report. Heard on the news tonight that it is the 100th Anniversary of Marquis Wheat, an early-maturing hybrid that is pretty much the entire reason that Saskatchewan is known as the bread basket of Canada. They're doing a bunch of special celebrations at the Experimental Farm in my hometown of Indian Head including planting one plot using 1907 technology. (Oh, here's something I didn't know - the inventor, Charles Saunders, was from London, Ontario.)
I was talking to a friend who refuses to join Facebook. They said that part of the reason they didn't want to join was how competitive it seemed: "I have 46 friends." "I have 87 friends." "I have 99 friends."
And what's the first line of my Feliciter article about Facebook? "I have exactly 159 friends online."
In my defense, I was trying to illustrate the power of Facebook to link disparate groups - I have friends from high school, undergrad, grad school, professional colleagues. Plus probably 1/3 (?) of those friends are people I've never met in real life but who friended me because I created a group for people from Saskatchewan (the first on Facebook - yay me!) and blatantly invited anyone who joined the group to friend me.
This was back when I first joined Facebook a year ago and not a lot of other people I knew were on there so it was more of a way to have something to look at when I logged in.
Now that I have lots of "real" friends on Facebook, I actually regret having so many "Facebook friends" and sometimes think of blocking them or un-friending them. But that seems very un-Saskatchewan of me somehow.
Plus I may or may not been un-friended for the first time as well (that I know of.) Facebook doesn't notify you if someone you add never adds you or if someone who has added you as a friend later removes you.
But I was paging through one of the many UWO FIMS groups' member lists the other day, I saw someone I thought was already a friend with a "Add To Friends" link beside their photo.
Hmm, what to do? Did I just mistakenly think I'd added them? If they dropped me, do I dare risk the humiliation of re-adding them? Part of me hopes they did de-friend me so I can send an add request just to see what they do (yes, I know that would be verging dangerously close to that guy who sends 50 Add requests to someone without getting the message, "We were never friends in real life, we'll never be friends on Facebook.")
The friend I mentioned above related another funny story - two friends had a massive falling out but never dropped each other as Facebook friends. Then one day, one of them got an invite to a party that the other was having. "Oh, I guess we're friends again!" the person thought happily and responded that they would attend.
"You stupid ass," the reply came back. "I just invited everybody in my Facebook friends list. We are *definitely* not friends again." Ooops!
Oh, one other embarrassment. I started a group called "Saskatchewan Mafia" and can't believe that its grown to nearly 1500 members. I put in a bit of time (but not a lot) changing the group's default photo, adding questions for discussion, etc. But soon after I started my group, a group dedicated solely to the topic of "bunny hugs" (hoodies to anyone outside Saskatchewan) was started and has grown to nearly 5000 (!) members. Isn't that crazy? It would be un-Saskie of me to be competitive (I joined that group too - it's hilarious. All kind of anecdotes about the reactions former Saskies get when they say "bunny hug") but unreal that they're lapping me by so much.
So that's my daily Facebook-themed post. In other news from the real world, I'm going to be a father in less than a month.
Here's my impression of me during the last eight months:
Here's my impression of Shea during the last eight months:
(The tongue sticking out during month two represents morning sickness. "What's that Shea?" Ooof. )
I'd seen this before but a friend sending it to me last week inspired me to get it up on the blog. It's a Flash video making some conspiracy theorist claims about Facebook - the people who run it having CIA ties, the abuse of its data-mining abilities and so on.
I'm not sure what to think - it could be true, it could be time for somebody to put their tinfoil hat back on. But the way I look at it, if there is
a secret cabal controlling the world, they're operating at such a
higher level than my day-to-day reality, that it's as if they don't
exist anyhow (if that makes sense.)
I especially like how they claim these shady links to the Department of
Defense when really, that's who created the Internet and so by this person's
rationale, everything on the Internet is a military-industrial complex
conspiracy (including this blog. Watch out! I'm tracking you!)
Okay, it's a bit more blatant than that when some of Facebook's top executives have direct DND connections but at the same time, you do ultimately have control about how much (or how little information) you put up on that site.
I have Facebook friends who have their first name, their last initial and not a whole lot more. That's not the spirit of the place (in my opinion) but again, if you worry about how your information is being used, go ahead and make it a bit harder for the Illuminati to track you if you think it helps.
But other than perhaps listing your political and religious beliefs, I'm not sure if it's something to really worry about. The Flash video says stuff like:
"With
Facebook, you can see people's favourite books. Or the Top 10 Movies
in any University community." Oooh, look out, the CIA is going to
dicovery that people actually like Tom Cruise and hate JK Rowling!
And of couse, there's the fact that anything will sound ominous with a deadpan delivery and some creepy background music.
I think there's a deeper issue of how willing (young and/or tech savvy) people are to put up personal details online which is something that came up a lot at the Sask Library Association conference this weekend.
I get called on this by friends all the time. Obviously, if you're reading this, you know that I'm someone who has decided to be fairly open about my background, my interests, and my personal beliefs online. I don't know why teenagers do it but it made me wonder, why do I do this?
I think there are a few reasons: - I believe that society, as a whole, is better when you are open with any and all information rather than secretive. This can probably backfire and there are times when discretion is required but I think people err on the side of keeping information private and guarded too easily and too often.
- I believe in a collaborative society and part of that deal is that you have to put your own information out there if you're going to be accessing other people's information - their blogs, their photosets on Flickr, etc. Peer-to-peer networking, in all its forms, makes for a better world.
- I want my blog and Facebook profile and other outlets to be interesting and there are a couple easy ways to do this:
1) talk a lot about other people (the "this is what I think of Classmate X, this is how I feel about co-worker Y" school of blogging)
2) talk a lot about yourself (also know as the Golden Rule of Writing: "Write What You Know").
I choose the second option (for the most part) because besides being the subject I know best, the responsibility for what I write, if I say too much, only (hopefully) comes back on me.
I know there could be people whose opinion of me changes because they know my political or religious views or even because of some off-hand comment I make on this blog about some little thing. But I think most of the people reading this are educated, critical-thinkers who are able to deal very well with differing viewpoints and worldviews.
Here's a semi-related anecdote to this whole topic. I bumped into Michelle D. at SLA and we were standing at the registration desk when a classmate of mine from high school who works in the Sask library community came up. "What was Jason like in high school?" Michelle asked. "I was a nerd!" I blurted. "No, not really, Jason was pretty much the same as he is now - somebody who was always friendly and got along with everybody."
It's rare that you get some kind of true insight into other people perceive you so that was kind of nice to hear. And to bring it full circle, I think that's the final reason I feel comfortable with being so open about myself online. I hope that I'm secure enough with myself and who I am that I don't mind being open about that via my online presence.
Okay, I gotta go find out what all these strange charges on my VISA are...
We've got a bit of a break before the evening events at SLA so me and a couple of my co-workers came back to our suite to relax.
It's been a great day - seeing lots of people I know from my former life (SPG has a booth here staffed by a former colleague from the Sask Book Awards as does a publisher called the Canadian Plains Research Centre), people I know from my current/very recent life (a couple FIMS friends are here) and meeting lots of new people (all kinds of librarians from all kinds of sectors.)
Went to sessions on The Public Library as Social Hub, The Use of Google in Academic Settings and one on Web 2.0 and the library. All filled with lots of good information and thought-provoking ideas.
What else? I guess that's about it for now. It's always nice when hotel rooms have complimentary WiFi rather than gouging you for $10/day or whatever like some others do.
This is one of the craziest things I've ever seen online.
Digg,
the community web site where users can upload stories and then
other users vote them up or down with the most popular stories forming
the highly trafficked home page, had a major revolt yesterday.
It
began when an article that contained the encryption key for the DRM
protection scheme of the new HD-DVD technology. The article was
removed from the site with an explanation from a site official that
they were complying
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