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I’d really like to attend the Computers in Libraries 2005 conference in March in DC… I think it would actually work with the spring break schedule, too.
One problem: Attendance for all three days is $379 before even paying for a hotel room ($185/night) and travel expenses. Oh well. Welcome to the professional world I suppose. Maybe once I’ve got a job something like that would be affordable. Or even better, an employer who would send me….
ButtonMashing.com linked to me today (thanks by the way!) as a new blog he found that comments on gaming from time to time. Made me realize that its been far too long since I have. So I present a roundup of what I’ve been playing recently. Or more accurate, what’s been taking time away from Halo 2 online play.
KOTOR II has sucked up 95% of my gaming time. Amazing game, though I do admit to being a bit disappointed in the difficulty level of gameplay. The first couple planets are somewhat difficult, but after that it levels off quick. I think because you can play the planets in any order, the difficulty level of them all is set low. Each planet has to be beatable should you go to it first and unexperienced. Last night I blazed through Korriban in maybe half an hour. The fights should have been much harder. Or maybe I just spend too much time leveling up, I dunno. But the plot is A+ and makes up for any shortcomings. I also appreciate some of the finer details of play; gaining influence and converting your party members to Jedi has a certain satisfaction to it.
Burnout 3: Takedown was a fun rental last weekend. I normally hate racing games. I end up trying to cause the biggest wipeouts possible rather than complete the races. Finally, someone made a game where that’s the main objective! Burnout 3 is one of the most addicting games I’ve played in a while, particularly crash mode (wherein you try to cause the biggest dollar amount of damage possible in an intersection). I just gotta remember to drive a little easier if I go out right after playing… The online component was a mess though. I tried it once and after failing to join games 6 times in a row, and getting booted from one that finally worked, I gave up. Really makes me appreciate Halo 2’s implementation of Xbox Live.
Katamari Damacy remains top on my list of games I’d like to play. If only I had a PS2… I might buy it anyway just to get a copy before it disappears.
Once again the governor of New York is ignoring public opinion.
Funding for libraries was cut by 5 million dollars last year. State library funding is now back at 1994 levels. Despite repeated votes by the legislature and a public letter writing campaign to restore the funding, Pataki still refuses. This time he’s left the cut in his proposed budget for next year.
Libraries provide amazingly valuable services. Yet the state can’t even find one tenth of one percent of the total budget to fund them.
Not that it matters too much I suppose, I mean the state budget hasn’t been passed on time in 20 years. Quite often it is many, many months late too. Grumble grumble.
How Pataki continues to get re-elected baffles me.
Forgot the whole camera itself this time. Looks like another day for an interior shot, since I don’t feel like going out in the bitter cold again. Apologies. I do so wish I had a camera phone. Hard to beat my $30 every 60 days deal with Verizon Freeup though, even if it does only supply a “Brick Phone”. I’ll get some actual new content-based entries up here sometime soon too.
And I should mention a thank you to Tame The Web, which linked me the other day!
edit: yeah well that didn’t work… supposed to only have my own pictures. hmm.
edit again: Apparently it works correctly in the sidebar, but not in a post. Odd. So in the sidebar it will remain! It looks boring for now, but once I add in more pictures (another week or so worth probably) it should look rather neat.
Found via slashdot:
…that it almost makes me want to take up drinking coffee. All the way up to 11 at the moment, wind chill still well below zero.
I watched the bus drive by my apartment this morning 10 minutes early, unfortunately. So walking to work was the backup plan. Even so, I was planning on taking a picture of the Cathedral of Learning on the way to work this morning for the Flickr project. I brought the camera, but somehow forgot the batteries. Oops.
Now I’ve gotta come up with something good to take a shot of; I’d rather avoid another interior apartment entry.
My introduction to Flickr, combined with Nick‘s comments on tags and Technorati’s addition of searchable tags, have really got my brain moving.
(For the novice, tagging is the practice of assigning identifying keywords or ‘tags’ to a document stored online. Pictures on Flickr, links on Del.icio.us, blog posts on Technorati, etc. Even my ‘category’ assignments for each post could be considered tags. Metadata use in tag form makes searching for documents much more practical.)
My first thought was a knee-jerk reaction: metadata in this form would be much more useful using a standardized vocabulary. Something more along the lines of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, for example. Wouldn’t you rather know that searching for ‘China’ returned everything relevant, and you didn’t miss out on results tagged with ‘Chinese’ or something similar?
But then I got to thinking: The amount of human effort required to make such a standardized vocabulary useful would be staggering. Using an interface like Google Suggest might help in implementation, but wouldn’t solve the issue of creating a definitive tag list in the first place.
So let the creators of content do their own tagging. Yes it’s freeform, but it’s better than nothing. It’ll take time to develop, but perhaps harnessing the power of a group in this manner is the solution. And isn’t a librarian’s job to sort through information and organize it into a useful form? Doing that with tags is no different than other sources.
In the end, the idea of tagging documents has re-introduced the concept of metadata to a wide audience. And that can’t be bad for organizing the web.
Later today when I’ve got a bit more free time I’ll look into adding technorati tags to my own posts.
Now that my computer has (finally) settled down, I’m launching my aforementioned Big Photo Project:
“2005: A Year (almost) In Pictures”
Catchy and original, no?
I’ve signed up for an account at Flickr, a neato photo uploading and sharing service along similar lines to what del.icio.us does for bookmarks. My plan is to take a picture a day for the rest of the year and post them all to my Flickr account. If I was smart I would have started this on the 1st and gone through December 31st, but I’m not. 🙂 So thus the (almost). Plus I can almost guarantee I’ll let a day slip here and there.
I won’t promise that every picture will be notable or interesting or anything of the type. Today’s view of the street is a good example of that fact. I just think it’ll be interesting to see the results come next January.
Once I have a few more pictures up there, I’ll try integrating their neato Zeitgeist feature into the sidebar here.
This is a rare cause where I wish I had a camera phone. It would make snapping a picture each day much easier, instead of having to make the effort and remember to bring my camera with me. Who knows, maybe by year’s end I’ll have one…
This is about as artistic as I get, so enjoy it while it lasts.
