photo: ice blue
Karen has the smart-sexy-funny thing going on, but that doesn’t stop her from eating donut after donut or beating Will and me in every white-knuckled kart race we ran last weekend.
Drivers sit only an inch or two off the ground in karts that are said to go 40 miles an hour. Eight minute races may [...]
There is, supposedly, some historical meaning to our Thanksgiving holiday, but all I can figure out is that I wasn’t there and it probably didn’t go as I’ve been told. Thing is, Thanksgiving isn’t so much about what we were, but who we are. Thanksgiving celebrates the two most important things in life: food and [...]
My wife Sandee cringes at the suggestion that she’s a geek. She writes poetry and teaches English, she cooks fabulous meals and dances all night long. Surely you’re mistaken she’ll say. But she does have a laptop, a digital camera, and an iPod. And she immediately saw the value of having a computer in the [...]
According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:
On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.
Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a [...]
We’ve had snow on the mountains for a while now, but this is the first accumulation in my yard.
tags: holiday season, november, snow, snowfall, snowflake, snowflakes, winter
stock.xchng has nothing on Flickr for searching, finding, sharing photos, except that they’re uploaded with the express intention of offering them for re-use. Some are available free, others free for non-commercial use, others with their own license terms.
But stock photos aren’t really the bottom of the barrel. No, for that you have to look at [...]
Everybody likes documentation. The Zend folks posted this overview and SimpleXML introduction The O’Reilly folks at ONLamp offered this guide to using SimpleXML. Of course, there’s always the SimpleXML docs at PHP.net.
Two problems: I haven’t encountered CDATA in my XML yet, but I do hope to develop a better solution than offered here when I [...]
I’ve been getting spam, a lot of spam; 3400 spam comments and trackbacks in the last two months or so. So it was a relief to find Akismet, a networked spam blocking plugin for WordPress. They claim to have blocked 318,825 spams since its release, and I’ve been pretty happy with it.
tags: akismet, comment spam, [...]
Aaron Schmidt’s 10 points about IM in libraries include:
Instant Messaging is free (minus staff time)
Millions of our patrons use IM every day.
For some, not being available via IM is like not having a telephone number.
There are three major IM networks (AIM, Y!M, MSN)
Y!M and MSN will be interoperable at some point.
Trillian is a multi-network IM [...]
It’s amusing how retailers will try to capture a trend. So retro gaming fans have been building their own arcade cabinets for years now, but I just saw that Target is offering a Midway Arcade Machine for the holidays. The 96-pound machine is described as “full-size” and offers Joust, Defender I and II, Robotron, [...]
Dick Porter, of Onset MA, has been building his collection of over 5000 thermometers since the mid-80s, though the collection has nearly doubled since 1998 when it was just over 3000. He calls it the world’s largest and only thermometer museum. He’s certainly passionate about them, and he’s been an invited speaker at more than [...]
I learned of Harmon’s Lunch from a mention on The Splendid Table a few weeks ago. I wrote down the following quote from the show from memory, so it may not be entirely accurate:
They have two things on the menu, and nobody ever orders the other one. They serve hamburgers, and the only option is [...]
I’m here at NEASIS&T’s “Social Software, Libraries, and the Communities that (could) Sustain Them” event, presented by Steven Cohen.
He’s suggesting we read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.
Surowiecki first developed his ideas for Wisdom of Crowds in his “Financial Page” column of The New Yorker. Many critics found his premise to be an interesting twist [...]
First, Josh Porter, the first speaker of the day has a blog where he’s posted his presentation notes and some key points. Josh spoke about Web 2.0, and ended with the conclusion that successful online technologies are those that best model user behavior. “I think Web 2.0 is about modeling something that already exists in [...]
I’m here at the NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference at the College of the Holy Cross today.
The conference is titled “Google vs. the OPAC: the challenge is on!” and there’s quite a lineup of speakers.
My presentation is on “the social life of metadata.” My slides are online, and below is some background.
The Library Catalog…
The catalog is [...]
