I had the pleasure of presenting the keynote at the GLA Midwinter meeting this past Friday morning, where I gave a talk I entitled “Experiences become Expectations.” The thrust of the talk was one that I’ve written about before; that our patrons expectations of libraries are influenced by the experiences they have with technology in the world. I’m really pleased with the way it turned out, and will be continuing to explore this idea for the next few months in various ways. If you’re interested, take a look at my slides below for some idea about the sorts of things I talked about.
Month: January 2011
Here’s my annual take at a tag cloud for the 2011 State of the Union address. The amount that these have changed in the last 5 years is immense…go back and take a look at the previous ones to see how the focus of our country has shifted over the last half-decade. Here’s 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010, linked for your convenience.
Here are the slides that I used for my portion of the TechSource webinar today…I’ll link to the archive of the presentation as soon as it’s available! Archive of the entire presentation now available…if you missed it, go take a look!
TechSource ALA Midwinter Wrapup
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow! Join ALA Techsource in their annual Midwinter Wrapup webinar! Tom Peters, Kate Sheehan, myself, and Marshall Breeding will give our analysis of the new technologies and technological questions that emerged in the last 6 months. More information available over at the TechSource Blog.
1:30pm Central/2:30 Eastern Time! Come listen and participate.
My interview with Vernor Vinge
I was thrilled to be able to meet and talk with Dr. Vernor Vinge at ALA Midwinter 2011, and am incredibly happy with the way that our interview went. Here it is, in 2 parts, for those that missed it live.
Part One
Part Two
Holy cow, Eliza’s three!
So this photo isn’t great, because in addition to awesome gifts, she also got a sinus infection for her birthday and wasn’t feeling well (Dec. 15th).
But in the tradition of this blog, I wanted to give a quick overview of what Miss Eliza (“Princess Eliza,” if you please) is like at the ripe old age of three.
Likes: playing dress-up, books, made up stories, playing in parks or at the gym, Disney movies of all kinds (even the scary ones), playing games on the iPad, playing with “lovies” (stuffed animals), playing in the dark (no kidding), cooking with mom and dad, role play of any and all kinds, singing, dancing, talking, asking questions.
Dislikes: too much noise, kids who hit/push and other social no-no’s, wearing clothes that she doesn’t deem “fancy” enough, eating breakfast, falling down.
Favorite toys: Calico Critters, anything related to Disney’s Ariel character, Disney figurine sets, baby doll that talks and cries, dress up stuff and jewelry, her billions of stuffed animals, especially her beloved “kitty cat babies.”
Favorite media: changes quite a bit. Right now she prefers long movies over TV shows. Current favorites are The Wizard of Oz, Jungle Book, Emperor’s New Groove (yuck), Nightmare Before Christmas, and Monsters Inc. What can I say…she likes dark things. I think she likes to be scared a little bit. That explains her love of Halloween, too.
Milestones and changes: Can tell stories, narrate in the past, ask complicated questions, use huge words (she LOVES adverbs), and carry on a conversation about anything with anyone. Is finally wanting privacy in the bathroom. Can run like the wind, but still falls down quite a bit. Is managing her anger / frustration so much better these days; she even has invented her own technique for calming down (it’s a visual thing, I can’t really describe it). Can recognize quite a few letters of the alphabet, count up to about 18 or so and do some simple math, knows all colors, most shapes, can tell you where she lives, understands family relationships.
She is absolutely amazing. One of the most observant kids I’ve ever been around, and she simply stuns me with her sense of humor, deep thoughts and questions, and her love of life. She’s so much fun to be around. I can’t wait to see how she keeps growing up!
The next week or so for me is completely insane, as I’m attending both CES2011 and ALA Midwinter 2011, even though they actually overlap. I’ll be flying from Nashville to Las Vegas on Tuesday for CES, hopping from Vegas to San Diego on Friday for ALA Midwinter, and then taking the red-eye late on Monday night to get back to Nashville and then home early Tuesday morning.
Then I’m gonna sleep about 20 hours.
There are a lot of things I’m excited about for both trips…CES is a bazaar of tech, and I’m attending a number of exciting Press Conferences from Sony, Lenovo, ASUS, and other major tech companies. I’m going to be doing reporting on the trip over at Perpetual Beta, including (if the wifi holds up) some livestreaming. I will send a tweet out when I start a livestream, so if you are interested, follow me over at twitter and you’ll get the head’s up when I go live with anything.
At ALA Midwinter, there’s also a lot to be excited about. I have two favors to ask of anyone that happens to read this and will be in San Diego:
The first: if you are a LITA member, consider coming to the Saturday morning LITA Board of Directors meeting at 8:00am in the SDCC Room 11b. It’s early, and I don’t begrudge anyone their sleep, but if you want to see how LITA works, and help to make it better, come hang out with the Board for the morning.
The second is: Come see me stumble over my fanboy self while I interview Dr. Vernor Vinge, on Saturday in the SDCC at 1:30pm in room 29 A-D. Go to that link and leave me a question you’d like to see Dr. Vinge answer, check here and at LITABlog for a live stream of the interview, and help make this an awesome event for librarians everywhere. Dr. Vinge is a 4 time Hugo Award winner, and his writing has within it possible futures for information, libraries, and books that we should really pay attention to.
I hope to see a lot of friends as well…if you see me, please wave me down and say hello.

