Category: The Rest

Tag… I’m it

Out of fear that I will have 100 years of bad luck, here’s my response to D’Arcy’s tagging me:

Four jobs I’ve had
– dishwasher
– burger flipper
– knowledge carpenter
– strawberry picker (not in this order!)

Four movies I can (and do) watch over and over
– Taxi Driver
– Cool Hand Luke
– Slapshot
– My side of the Mountain

Four places I’ve lived
– Montreal, Quebec
– London, Ontario
– Cardiff, Wales
– Banff, Alberta

Four TV shows I(‘ve) love(d)
– James Burke’s Connections
– Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective
– Made In Britain (Tim Roth’s first part)
– reGenesis (oh please bring it back!)

Four places I’ve vacationed
– the canyons of Utah
– the mountains of Wales
– Prague
– Australia

Four of my favorite dishes
– Pad Thai (almost anywhere, just love the stuff)
– the medallions of Buffalo tenderloin at the Banff Springs
– my Mum’s roast beef and yorkshire pudding
– my wife’s mac and cheese

Four sites I visit daily
– bloglines
– google
– umm, is there anywhere else?

Four places I would rather be right now
– right here
– right now
– the forest
– the ocean

Four books (or series) I love
– Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle (though I actually think Cryptonomicon said it better, in less words)
– anything by Richard Powers, but especially The Goldbug Variations (and Gain!)
– Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
– Don Delillo, White Noise

Four video games I can (and do or did) play over and over
– never really played video game except for an intense period of blowing things up in Doom

Four bloggers I am tagging
– NOT! This dies here.

Ariadne Decennial Issue Out

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/

Plenty good reads in the latest Ariadne magazine, the 10th anniversary edition, including pieces by Lorcan Dempsey and Clifford Lynch. Although Ariadne aims to be a “web magazine for information professionals in archives, libraries and museums” I always find at least a couple of articles directly relating to (if not directly referring to) issues in elearning. – SWL

NV2006 – Best conference giveaway yet!

Like Alan, I have fairly low expectations of the shwag you get at most conferences, but props (and a link, so my tarrif paid in full) to webnames.ca for one of the best giveaways yet – a nalgene bottle (yeah, I know, if I was really cool I would have a photo embedded here of the nalgene bottle, but you do know what one looks like, right?). There are water fountains everywhere, and after the night last night, what a godsend! – SWL

Northern Voices – The night before and the morning of

What can I say, even if I get nothing from the enitre conference, which seems extremely unlikely, having dinner last night with D’Arcy and Alan at Brian and Keira’s place (and making a new friend) has made the trip more than worthwhile.

The festivites continued on into this morning (literally) as Alan, Brian, D’Arcy and I hosted a bit of an open discussion on ‘blogs and education’ (check Brian’s blog for the resulting wiki and likely a recording too). In honor of the edubloggers hootenany I performed a little live set of blogging ejaculatives – you can hear El Guapo’s revenge on the 3 amigos at a file I hosted on my ELGG site (which I was going to discuss but the discussion had so much steam there ended up being no time or need to!). Enjoy (or cringe as the case may be). – SWL

BC ELN Using Blogs to Brainstorm their Strategic Planning process

http://bceln.blogspot.com/2006/01/
about-electronic-brainstorm-wild-ideas_31.html

Kudos to the BC Electronic Library Network for trying the interesting experiment of using Blogger as a mechanism to facilitate collectively brainstorming by their members. As I understand the model, staff from the participating partner libraries are invited to either comment on posts, or log into Blogger using accounts that ELN has set up for them that can make new posts on the main brainstorming blog, all of which will be fed into the larger Strategic Planning process. Nice model for a consortia to use as it keeps it open and public but hopefully still provides some autonomy and flow. Will be interesting to see how it works, and at the very least may be a step in exposing some additional librarians to the technology (not that most of them need this, we are lucky to have an amazingly sophisticated bunch in our province.) – SWL

LibraryLookup Greasemonkey Script for Victoria Public Library

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/GVPL_LibraryLookup.user.js

O.k., o.k. already! I am showing my age/lameness. In my exuberance over learning that my local library’s catalogue was now searchable via Jon Udell’s famous LibraryLookup bookmarklet (and trust me, I can get pretty exuberant), I forgot how terribly passe and 2003 that was. Apparently time has moved on since then; last year Udell released a small Greasemonkey script that searches your libraries catalogue in the background and adds a link if the book is available right on the Amazon page.

If you happen to live in Victoria, you can grab my ever so-slightly modified version of that script at the URL above and install it in your Greasemonkey-enabled Firefox browser. And turns out this post isn’t so out of date after all – if you are really keen, Udell released the extra souped-up version of the script (which requires you to get your own Amazon-API) on January 26th. Soo coool! All praise Udell. – SWL

Finally, “LibraryLookup” bookmarklet for my local library

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/
2002/12/11/librarylookup.html

Hard to believe, but it’s almost 3 years since one of the first really cool Web2.doh! mashups, Jon Udell’s ‘LibraryLookup’ boomarklet, first hit the streets. You remember this one (maybe you use it everyday?), it allowed you to query your local library’s catalogue with one click from any book-related page that had an ISBN number in the URL (like an Amazon listing, for instance).

I remember being very excited when I first found this, only to become frustrated that my local library, the GVPL, was using a library catalogue at the time that couldn’t be queried via ISBN, so the bookmarklet wouldn’t work.

So I forgot about it, until the serendipity of the blogosphere brought me back to Udell’s site today, and I thought maybe I would try it out again. And it worked!

This is very cool – I actually keep my ‘things I’d like to read‘ list basically in Amazon’s wishlist and this provides a nice tie-in for me to easily folow up now into my library catalogue to see if the book’s there. Not groundshaking, maybe, but I know this will actually increase the number of these books I end up reading and not just wishing for. – SWL

Why del.icio.us doesn’t suck (but I do, and Firefox Quicksearch definitely doesn’t!)

O.k., so while I still think it sucks that I can’t currently import my old bookmarks into del.icio.us, Greg Ritter (yes, that Greg Ritter, he’s still alive, just lurking but not blogging) quite reasonably pointed out that there is no time like the present to make the shift to del.icio.us, and that the lack of an import feature doesn’t need to be reason not to. He recommended just starting to use it regularly, and then setting up a quicksearch shortcut in Firefox to my FURL collection. It’s not perfect (something that quickly searched across both collections would be even better) but as an interim solution until the cats at del.icio.us fix their import feature, it seems pretty good. (Though if it wasn’t obvious, my post was less a cry for a workaround and more a public challenge to del.icio.us to get off their duffs and fix this!) Still, thanks Greg, as the Firefox quicksearch feature is a nice suggestion in and of itself. – SWL

Why del.icio.us sucks

That got your attention, didn’t it. Actually, it doesn’t suck at all, in fact my complaint is that I want to use del.icio.us because of all the cool tie-ins it has spawned, but I am not going to abandon 18 months worth of FURL’d links, and del.icio.us refuses to fix their import feature. There has been a message on the import page for del.icio.us for going on at least 4 months that says “Our import feature has been turned off for a few days while we fix some bugs. Sorry!” and the reply I got to my email back in November was “Should be done soon. We are removing the last final bugs.” Gee, thanks. If there is anything worse than not responding to potential customers, its responding to potential customers and lying to them.

Maybe this is what a rapid infusion of cash does to a company. Oh well, I guess this is what I get for backing the wrong horse in the first place, but sheesh, they’re only links, how hard should it be to export and then import these things? – SWL

Wayfinding at UBC

http://tinyurl.com/dac35

I’m lucky to be invited out to UBC tomorrow to give a little talk and meet with a few folks. I’ve been there maybe a half-dozen times but I really don’t know my way around the campus that well – it is truly immense! I was about to email my contact there to ask for direction, but then thought to check the university’s own website for maps.

Wow! Was I gald I did. I would have felt foolish to be asking after what I found at the Wayfinding at UBC site. The link above points to the final map I produced and printed – what I loved was the ability to plot not one but at least two distinct locations (and get directions between them if need be) and to add or subtract information to my final printout page (like closest parking, local details) if I wanted. I also loved they way they tied into Google where needed or where more appropriate.

Perhaps I don’t get on to enough campuses and the quality represented by this site is commonplace elsewhere and I just don’t realize it. But I think not – apparently the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education were also impressed enough to award it the 2004 Gold Prix d’Excellence for ‘Best Department or Program Site on the World Wide Web.’ And well deserved at that; the gold standard as far as I am concerned for helping people find their way around campus. (Have I just inevitably damned myself to be driving around downtown Surrey while my talk is going on though, I wonder 😉 – SWL