Just a question for the intertubes: is anyone else having problems with Firefox and Flash on OSX? I’m having this REALLY weird issue where flash content (Youtube, blog badges, etc) doesn’t display except when it is near the top/bottom of the Firefox window. Yes, you read that right…if the content overlaps the bottom/top edge, it displays. Get off the edge, and it doesn’t display (the content just goes invisible, it doesn’t un-render or anything, just goes away/becomes invisible).
WTF?
I am so outing myself right now.
Hi…my name is Jason, and I watch professional wrestling.
Not only do I watch pro wrestling, but I have for years. I even do some work for a company that makes the WWE Collectible Card Game. I realize this ups my geek-score into the stratusphere, but I can no longer commit this lie of omission to you, my readers.
So, I spent this last weekend helping to run the 6th World Championship of Raw Deal, and then went to Wrestlemania 23 on Sunday, April 1. Had a phenomenal time, got to see a ton of friends I only see once or twice a year, but am now so far behind I can barely see the horizon.
If there’s radio silence the rest of the week, that’s why. In the meantime, enjoy this wonderful youtube video.
In one of my few recent real musical finds, I give you Silversun Pickups (or sspu as they’re known online). I picked up their album Carnavas after randomly hearing Melatonin while browsing in a record store (yeah, they still have those!). I recommend you head over to amazon or youtube and give them a listen, because I’m not sure that I can give their sound a good description. It’s like….Smashing Pumpkins meets Toad the Wet Sprocket, or what Coheed & Cambria might sound like if they partied with The Doors. Melody and guitar effects merge with cosmic keyboards and a great sense of rhythm to create a wall of sound that I’m finding addictive.
The amazon reviews all talk about how they’re part of some grunge revival (ummm….ok, now I feel really old). That I’m not so sure of, but I do know that I’m digging on them more than any band I’ve heard in some time.
Here’s some more info on them from their label. Evidently I’m just not plugged in to pop culture anymore, since they’ve played the Tonight Show and Carson Daily. But even so, they’re really great…check them.
Woot! I finally got my hands on a Wii, and I must say, I’m enjoying the heck out of it. Nintendo has completely revolutionized living room gaming with this thing.
I’ve got a lot to say about the interface and the control system (short form: they ROCK) but for now I just need Wii friends. Anyone out there wanna be my Wii buddy? If so, I’m:
4523 9501 6905 5000
Add me as a friend, and leave your number in the comments and I’ll add you.
My hands have been far from idle these last few days. In fact, they’ve been nearly frantic…you certainly wouldn’t know it was Spring Break around here. I know that my life has gotten overly full when I realized that I didn’t realize that I hadn’t written here in days. Days!
In no particular order, here’s some of what’s keeping me up at night.
The complete overhauling of our Database pages at UTC. We’re moving away from this organization eventually (going to be aiming for a more holistic presentation of our informational sources) but for the interim we still needed to update to the new website look and feel. While I was at it, we worked up some better ways to present the information, like collapsing the database descriptions using javascript. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. The pic is of the old page, the new one can be seen here. Throw me some feedback if you have any.
The LITA election podcasts have started, and over at LITAblog things are getting good and busy. Some really amazing content in the podcasts…I’m thrilled with the way they turned out. I heartily recommend people head over and listen or subscribe to them before voting for LITA officers. Congrats go out to Jane, Karen, and David for helping make this a reality, and to the existing LITA officers for supporting it. More podcasts to come from LITA, so stay tuned to LITABlog for those…we’re hopefully going to seriously up our audio/video capture of portions of ALA Annual this year.
The launching of the first official Lupton Library blog. I’m not linking to it, and it’s not google-able, because it’s designed to be an internal communications device…we’re trying to reduce the number of emails that get sent around updating people on status of things. Plus, its handy that it’s searchable and categorizable and such, so that we can return to it and see that, for instance, our printing system has been down 3 times this week. The goal is to get people familiar with seeing/using a blog, and the move forward more aggressively with a public one.
On top of the above projects, its Goal/Evaluation time around the old UTC. This is a hard year for me to evaluate, as I’ve officially had three positions this year, and my goals I wrote 12 months ago seem less than appropriate now. Oh, and, of course, today was the application review date for our two open positions, so I have stacks of applications to look at.
I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to technology usage. While we are using a blog (WordPress, of course) as an alert system, I made some concessions to existing technology usage and comfort. For instance, rather than teach everyone in the library the blog interface, as simple as it may be, I set up the blog so that it can be posted to via email (and only from the email addresses of our faculty and staff). In this way, there’s no learning curve for use…simply add the blog to your address book, and send away. It’s a bit of a hack (using Postie for WP and a cron job to force Postie to grab the pop email) but it works.
My question is: when does helping people move into the realm of enabling? Is there a point where, in moving forward, you risk leaving people behind, and how does that get managed in your organization? Libraries haven’t had to deal with this issue for very long…as I said to someone today, prior to the online catalog, libraries really hadn’t changed significantly in a long, long time. There are plenty of librarians who made it through that change…how was that handled, and did you have people who just refused to move away from the card catalog? Did you just have to remove the catalog to get them to move on, and how was that handled politically?
And after all that, what I should have really been doing was writing my due-all-too-soon book chapter. *sigh*
I got on the Galactica bandwagon well after most everyone I know…I watched the first few episodes, but never really got sucked in.
Then I got tired of everyone I know talking about it around me, so I just decided I’d catch up on the fraking thing and see what the buzz was about. I’m still not caught up (just finished Season 2) but it’s a good show. There are tons of things I have serious issues with, and I’m just not quite able to get the complete suspension of disbelief going like for Firefly or Heroes. But it’s good, solid, sci-fi TV.
One of the reasons that I decided to start watching, believe it or not, was the coolness of the show’s creators and promotional team. They just launched a Battlestar Galactica VideoMaker page that has on it clips and sound effects to use in your own Galactica videos…amazingly forward thinking of them, and a great way to garner my respect. They were also one of the very first shows to include podcasts of commentaries, which is an amazingly great way to interact with your audience, and add value to your product.
I definitely appreciate the willingness of the Network to involve the audience in new ways, and think this is one of the few ways that commercial video will survive. We are quickly moving into an entertainment era that is post-consumer, and the really interesting shows are providing alternate means of interaction beyond the passive. It’s a brave new world out there, and we’ll see who’s around in 10 years.
So I managed to convince a friend to get me into the Joost beta. Joost is the Interweb video project formerly known as The Venice Project from the developers who brought the world both Kazaa and Skype. They clearly know their stuff, and Joost has some interesting things going for it.
Pro
Con
The interesting thing about Joost is that it will be much, much better than television in execution. Channels you choose, playing content you want when you want it, for free. The problem with this is, of course, TV has already lost…Joost has to compete with bittorrents of nearly everything ever put to video or audio, YouTube, and new forms of entertainment like ARGs and Second Life. It might become better than TV, but that’s a little like saying that the telegraph is better than the Pony Express. Neither really matters anymore. I look forward to what they have up their sleeve, but I’m cautiously calling this a yawn so far.
Gonna be doing a bit of template hacking over the next couple of days…Ive just had really not good luck in finding a template that doesn’t bork poor LISHost. So on to another, trying to find one that I don’t have to manually debug.
I haven’t talked nearly enough about the 5 Weeks to a Social Library project. I mentioned it long ago, and then never followed up with more information, so I’m fixing that today.
I just finished my presentation for 5 weeks, and it was a complete blast! It was only my second time doing an interactive webcast, and it was amazing…fun and informative and just great. I absolutely adore the multiple conversations aspect of most webcast software, where I’m presenting and doing visuals and voice, but the rest of the class is having a conversation completely separate from me via text on the side. Just amazingly info rich!
My presentation was entitled Make Your Library Del.icio.us (warning: full screencast IE only), and focused on the what and how of del.icio.us. If you want to listen or take a look at the slides and such, all the content can be found at OPAL.
Let me just say that the organizers of 5 weeks (Meredith, Dorothea, Michelle, Karen, Amanda, and Ellyssa) have completely knocked it out of the park. If this isn’t an exemplar of how to do an online learning experience, I haven’t seen one.