Categories
Library Issues Personal

More from CiL2008


Griffey

Originally uploaded by dwfree1967.

Today was my last day at Computers in Libraries 2008, even though the conference itself goes on through tomorrow. I fly out tomorrow early, in hopes of getting back to TN before dinner.

CiL is always a great conference. Like most conferences, it’s all about the people and the hallway conversations…not that the sessions weren’t great. For instance, the the Academic Library 2.0 preconference was amazing. 🙂 In all seriousness, there are a lot of very smart people doing very clever things, and a lot of them were at CiL. I’m honored and humbled to be able to hang out with some of them.

I’ll try and do a wrap-up post linking out to all the things I found most interesting later this week after I’ve had a chance to decompress.

Categories
Digital Culture Images Technology

Product Review: Eye-Fi

As a part of having a new Eliza around, we went camera shopping for a new digital camera. I asked for feedback from a bunch of friends as to what digital camera they used and liked, and took those suggestions and matched them against my list of requirements. I wanted something that would do both still and video well, preferably HD video for future-proofing, and had a decent pocketability.

After a failed attempt at locating the Sanyo Xacti model that I wanted, I discovered the Canon TX-1. We’ve loved our Canons from the past…our last two cameras were Canon; one of the original Elphs, back with they were APS film based, and then our immediate past digital, a 4 megapixel Elph. With our history with Canon, plus the TX-1’s optical image stabilization, we decided to give up on the Xacti and just go with the Canon.

But that’s not the product I wanted to sing the praises of in this post. No, I’m beyond thrilled with the memory card I bought to go with the TX-1. Yep, the memory card…if your digital camera takes SD cards, you should immediately buy one of these:

eyefi

A brilliant little piece of tech, the Eye-Fi combines a 2 gig SD card with built in wifi, giving any camera the ability to automatically upload pictures that you take to your computer, to any of dozens of web photo sites, or both. The card comes with a little USB dock, and has the software necessary to tie the card to your computer and website on itself. You plug it into your computer, and it walks you through linking the card, your wifi point, the computer you’re on, and the website in question.

Once it is set up, the process is simply take a picture, and…that’s it. You take a picture and as long as your camera stays on it will upload your pics to your computer and to the web automagically. Now there are limits, and ways that I would love to have the product behave that it doesn’t.

For one, the card attaches itself to your wifi point…not to your computer. I would vastly prefer the card to attach via an ad-hoc network to my computer, and then have the computer do the heavy lifting to the web. That way it would work even when I was traveling, without having to logon to the Eye-Fi manager website and manually change the settings. You can make it work now, but it’s less easy than I’d like.

Still, if you do most of your uploading from home, it doesn’t get any easier than this.

Categories
Baby

New Favorite Picture

Little Griffey in Profile

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

I promise not to turn this into a baby blog, but I had to share.

Categories
Digital Culture

Holiday picture 2006

Here’s my favorite pic of myself from holidays 2006…its just happy!

IMG_8315

Categories
Digital Culture

Photos and licenses

Twice in the last two months, I’ve found myself re-examining my Flickr account and my photos. I’ve had two instances of people wishing to use my some of my pictures for various things. One, a website about Sewanee, and the other a publication about the Immersion program.

All of my pictures are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and in both cases the first two criteria are fine for the uses. The Share-Alike is where stuff starts to break down…people seem unwilling to ensure that the resulting work is licensed in the same way. In some ways, it’s a sort of educational issue…most people are still not aware of Creative Commons.

So I’m torn. On one hand, I certainly do want people to use my photos. On the other, I also want to push the Creative Commons message, and requiring that the resulting works Share Alike is the right thing to do, I think.

Has anyone else dealt with this friction? How did you resolve it?

Categories
Library Issues

Jessamyn @ Flickr

Jessamyn & SisJessamyn

Check out Jessamyn on the Flickr Blog’s Then & Now. Great photos!

Categories
Digital Culture

DragonCon

I’ve spent the last 24 hours in Atlanta, GA at DragonCon. I thought I would share with you the single picture that is the essense of all things DragonCon:

IMG_7707

Categories
Images Library Issues

Hot Library Action

From The Nonist, some Hot Library Smut:

Yesterday I came across a truly gorgeous book of photographs by Candida Höfer titled, Libraries, a title which pretty much says it all, because that is just exactly what it is, one rich, sumptuous, photo of a library interior after another. It’s like porn for book nerds. Seriously. They are gorgeous photos, nearly all without visitors and just begging to be entered. (ha. sorry.)

And boy are they some pretty pics:

BNF-PARISRIJKMUSEUM-AMSTERDAMHANDELINGENKAMER-TWEEDE-KAMBIBLIOTECA-DE-LA-REAL-ACADEREAL-GABINETE-PORTUGUES-DE-STRAHOVSKA-KNIHOVNA-PRAHA

If you want your very own library porn, you can order it from the publisher.

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

Google @ ALA

Here’s Google’s video relating their experience at ALA 2006. Included are shots of the booth in the exhibit hall, a little video of the party they held at Muriel’s, and snippets of interviews they did with librarians at the party. You can see the swanky glowing drinks that I talked about earlier.

I was interviewed, but evidently didn’t make it into the video…but they did put up a picture of myself and Charles at the booth:

me @ ala

The most amusing thing to me about the picture? Google put these up as a Picasa Web Album, but I’m linking to it from my flickr account. Why? Picasa doesn’t give you easy linkability…I could copy image location and paste in the URL, but that’s not a friendly user experience. Flickr EXPECTS you’re going to hotlink their images, and gives you the URL to do so.

Picasa also doesn’t give you an easy way to browse to a specific picture…this was pic 166 of over 200, and when I went back to find it, I couldn’t be bothered to click next picture 165 times. There must be a jump to picture option for usability, guys. What else…oh yeah…no multiple sizes to pick from, so the resolution you get is just what’s there. I love Picasa as a local picture manipulation solution, but Google is a long way from flickr for online experience.

Categories
Books Library Issues Media

Turn it up!

I’ve got a ton of leftover stuff I still want to talk about from ALA Annual. Here’s my favorite vendor sign from the exhibit hall at ALA in New Orleans…

Large Print Audiobooks

Large Print Audiobooks? Do they just talk louder?