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Library Journal Techblog

It’s alive!

Today Library Journal put up the new Techblog as part of their whole site revamp. I’m lucky enough to count myself among the nine or so contributors, who you can read more about under the ‘about us’ page on the blog.

We’ve even got our own RSS feed and everything. Posts are a little scarce at the moment, but given time I’m sure it’ll fill up.

The LJ Techblog is my first experience with group blogging, and I’m really excited to see how it goes!

I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this in coming times. But for now, I just wanted to get the word out there – the blog seems to be rather buried and not linked from the front page. Again I’m not sure how permanent that placement is; any new site has its share of growing pains.

Weekend at Library Instruction’s

I was really stretching for a pun in the title, give me a break 🙂

I had my first ever weekend class over the last couple days. To be honest, I thought I was going to hate it. 6-9 on a Friday night, and 9-5 on Saturday do not sound like a recipe for fun. But the topic of Library Instruction sounded too interesting to pass up on registering. I’m so glad I gave it a chance! I learned more this weekend than in some of my entire semester ‘normal schedule’ classes.

Friday night kind of surprised me – we ended up talking mostly about entering the job market. Resumes, portfolios, web presence, interviews, etc. Very practical, and very appreciated by me. I’d never really considered the need for a portfolio of my work to show employers before. It seems a little more focused towards the academic library jobs, which I’m not as interested in as public, but pulling one together can’t hurt. I’ll add it as a link in the upper right of the site when I’m done; probably in a few days. I also got the idea to put a link to this site on my resume, which for some reason hadn’t crossed my mind before.

Friday night concluded with some discussion of different user groups and how their needs from library instruction differ. We departed, and returned the next morning.

Saturday was a wonderful intro to running library education sessions. We covered the basics of lesson planning, some public speaking issues, more about user groups, had a guest speaker from a school library, and a number of smaller topics.

Saturday was one of those occasions where I walk out of the room entirely fired up about being a librarian and helping patrons out. Both professors are practicing library instructors, with a wealth of experience to impart to us. 8 hours is a long time to sit still on a Saturday, but they made it worthwhile.

P.S. Does anybody have any tips on surviving a few days without hot water? My good ‘ol landlords have struck again.

P.P.S. My brother has started blogging! He’s still working up a theme for the content, but the site is up: www.DeuceNet.com

iPod reviewed

As I mentioned briefly before, I got an iPod as an early birthday gift! Its a standard 20GB model, no fancy photo features or anything which I probably don’t need anyway. And I love it!

I’m primarily amazed at the usability of the interface. Everything I want to do with the unit is right where I expect it to be, even if I’ve never used the feature before. Putting music on it via iTunes is a breeze as well. Much simpler than I expected it to be, given my past experience with using proprietary software to transfer files.

I also got an FM transmitter/charger for the iPod, and utilized it to great effect on my 5 hour return trip to Pittsburgh yesterday. Much more powerful and better sound quality than my previous attempts at such devices.

One thing I haven’t figured out so far: is there a way to delete songs from my computer, but leave them on the iPod? My main laptop hard drive is only slightly larger than the iPod’s, so if I ever reach the 20GB mark of music it would get quite cramped in here for other software.

I really only have two complaints.
First: the mirrored finish on the back of the iPod is far too easy to scratch and mar. The unit looks so nice aesthetically that the accidental marks are really a shame.
Second: the included headphones (despite being a status symbol) rather hurt my ears while resting in place for more than a few minutes. That problem was easily fixed with a replacement pair, but I’m surprised Apple hasn’t redesigned the earbuds since I’ve heard others complain as well.

Now I’m off to dig up the blog posts I saw a couple weeks back about various things to do with your iPod!

Unplugfest 2k5

I think I’ll be largely unplugging myself this weekend. Cell phone off, limited computer checks beyond coursework issues, less gaming time, etc. Just enjoying plenty of time with family and friends.

I’ll probably have a big (for me anyway) announcement here sometime soon.

Oh, but of course I’ll make an unplugged exception for my shiny new iPod 🙂

Mount Washington

It was sunny and all around beautiful out today for what might be the last time in a while. I felt the need to do something outside, and settled on a trip up Mount Washington. The view of downtown from there (though at night) was ranked the #2 most beautiful place in the country a couple years back by USA Weekend. It still looks pretty during the day too.

Pittsburgh has these things called “inclines” that go up the big hill. There’s two of them, the Duquesne Incline and Monongahela Incline (or “The Mon” as locals know the namesake river). I rode the Duquesne, which has been in operation since 1877!

I took tons and tons of pictures. If you want to see them all, go here. But I’ve filtered down the best:

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Inside the Duquesne Incline, looking out over Heinz Field and the three rivers.

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Exterior view of a Duquesne Incline car. The Mon cars look very different both outside and inside.

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View of downtown from the top of the Duquesne Incline. Imagine it all lit up at night.

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There’s all these neat observation decks scattered around the top.

WordPress 1.5.1 RSS bug

The RSS problem I mentioned the other day was not limited to just me. The WordPress 1.5.1 upgrade had a major RSS bug. If I understand correctly, the RSS feed was only generated for 24 hours after a new post was made. After that, it just returned a blank page.

Official bug fix:

Replace your wp-blog-header.php in your root WordPress directory with this one.

I ran across this fix here. Thanks for the pointer!

More Gaming in Libraries

Over at Walking Paper, Aaron details his library’s initiative to build up a gaming program.

Exciting stuff! I’d love to work at a library that embraced programs like this.

A few thoughts that one of the comments brought to mind for me:

While I love the idea of library-sponsored video game tournaments, I would be reluctant to let patrons use library consoles online – keep the tournaments local instead.

I don’t think Aaron was suggesting allowing internet play, but just my 2 cents. My experience with Xbox Live has been that anonymity does bad things to people. A good chunk of players are unfortunately out there mainly to swear excessively and cause trouble for others.

If you allow the public online gaming privleges via consoles, this will become an issue sooner or later. One patron being unsociable (or cheating on a game) could easily get the account banned and ruin things for countless other patrons.

Star Wars vs. Hidden Peanuts

A while back I posted links to a couple of leaked Episode III images. As we approach the release date of the film, I notice more and more referrals to that entry from Google Image Search. They all go to the thumbnail of Darth Vader that I used. Today alone saw dozens of hits, a growth from one or two a day a couple months ago.

My rudimentary referral tracking unfortunately doesn’t capture the search string used to find the thumbnail. I’d be curious to know what it is.