Pattern Recognition » LITA

Interview the LITA Presidential Nominees

griffey — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:53:59 +0000

LITA has amazing people on its ballot this year, but you don’t need to take my word for it…you can help make sure that the issues you think are the most important for LITA and ALA at large are put directly before the two candidates for President, Cindi Trainor and Aaron Dobbs. How, you ask? Go to this Google Moderator page and put your question there…Andromeda Yelton will be organizing these and getting them to the candidates to be answered. All of their responses will be put up on LITABlog.

Help us make these elections the most transparent and communicative in LITA’s history…ask your questions!

Goin’ down to New Orleans

griffey — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:58:56 +0000

I leave today for ALA Annual 2011 conference in New Orleans. My schedule is a hot mess…I would normally throw it here on the blog, but it really wouldn’t do anyone any good. I’m triple-booked for most of the weekend, so I’m not even sure I’ll know where I am most times. The only guarantees are that I’ll be at LITA Happy Hour, the LITA Board meetings, and defending my crown at Battledecks.

However, if you’re there, come say hello! I’m looking forward to seeing friends and learning things. Not so much looking forward to hours of meetings, but that’s the price you pay for trying to fix things.

Hope to see you in NOLA! Laissez les bons temps rouler!

3D printing video for Top Tech Trends

griffey — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 03:02:08 +0000

I was asked by the LITA Top Tech Trends committee to help them test out a new idea for TTT…having a Trendster talk about a single tech trend on video, and throwing it up on YouTube. I agreed, and the result (after a little editing on my part) came out really well. Take a look:

If this is the sort of thing you’d like to see more of from LITA, please…leave a comment! Let us know what you think.

My interview with Vernor Vinge

griffey — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 17:31:52 +0000

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

CES and ALA Midwinter 2011

griffey — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 04:31:36 +0000

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.

Interviewing Dr. Vernor Vinge

griffey — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 05:24:57 +0000

In one of the more surreal occurrences in my working life, I will have the opportunity to interview one of the titans of the Science Fiction world, Dr. Vernor Vinge, at the ALA Midwinter Meeting 2011 in San Diego, CA. The interview itself will be on Saturday, Jan 8th, from 1:30-3:30pm Pacific time in the San Diego Convention Center Room 29 A-D.

Plans are in place to livestream the interview at the LITA Ustream channel, and in addition to a set of questions from myself, I’ve decided to set up ways to take questions from just about anyone who wants. At the bottom of this post is an embedded Google Form where you can ask your question of Dr. Vinge…I’ll sort through any in the next 2 weeks and pick the best of the bunch for inclusion. In addition, during the interview itself, we will be taking questions not only from the live audience but also from Twitter (use the hashtag #alamw_vinge) and from the Facebook Event page.

So: hit the form below, and ask your question now. Watch the interview live on Saturday, January 8th at 1:30 Pacific time, and ask your questions as they occur to you. I, along with several awesome librarians, will try our best to collapse all of these streams into an entertaining and informative couple of hours for all.
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Kindle 2 for $89 on Black Friday

griffey — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:19:28 +0000

I posted this first over at Perpetual Beta, but I felt the need to repost here.

Amazon announced today via Facebook and Twitter that one of their Black Friday deals was going to be blowing out their inventory of the Kindle 2 (the last generation of Kindle) for $89. These are new units, not refurbs, and include 3G access with the device.

This deal is going to get pounded, and who knows how many they have left in stock. If you want to try and grab one, the deal starts 11/26 at 9 am PST.

While I feel that one-day sale prices don’t quite get me where I thought we’d be when I made my < $100 eReader prediction back at ALA Midwinter 2009 as a part of the LITA Top Tech Trends panel, I’d like to think I could take this as partial validation of the prediction.

LITA Top Tech Trends – ALA Annual 2010

griffey — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:58:17 +0000

Here’s the video of the LITA Top Tech Trends panel from ALA Annual 2010. My impressions of the panel were mainly “OMFG I’m on stage with Lorcan Dempsey” and “How big IS this room?”…was very hard to concentrate on the content being put forth while actively involved in it. But I think we all had very interesting things to say. I’ll see about cleaning up my notes and putting them up in a post in the next few days.

My ALA Annual 2009

griffey — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:19:29 +0000

Here’s a short little audio summary of what I’m up to at ALA Annual 2009.

Listen!

Direct link to the AudioBoo, in case you have a problem with the above.

Midsummer update

griffey — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:33:59 +0000

It’s been, unfortunately, another big gap in my blogging here. But I’ve been busy!

I finished my new book manuscript, and sent it merrily off to Neal Schuman for review.
I worked overtime trying to ensure that our new Academic Library got included in the state of TN budget.
I’m trying to, if not revolutionize, and least evolutionize the program planning process for LITA.
And I’m preparing for what looks like 3 different presentations at ALA Annual 2009:
- Unconference on Friday at 9:15am at the Palmer House Hilton, Northwest 5 Room
- OITP Libraries and Mobile Devices Public Policy panel on Sunday at 1:30 in McCormick place West, room W-192a
- BIGWIG Social Software Showcase on Monday morning at 10:30 in McCormick place West room w-184

If you are attending ALA Annual 2009, please come join me at one of the talks above. I promise not to be too boring.

That, and a real job, will keep anyone busy, I think. But every time I fail to blog for a week or so, I feel guilty about it. I keep expecting to log in to PatRec, and have it be passive-agressive that I did so: “Oh, so glad that you could visit…no, no, it’s no problem that you’ve been gone so long. Here, let me just warm up the “add new” link for you. It’s not a problem, really.”