Sometime in the last few days, evidently my newest book hit the data streams, because it now shows up on Amazon, in LibraryThing, and on the publisher’s website! It won’t be out until March or so, but it’s still exciting to see.
Category: Personal
On this blog, I don’t often wax poetic about my family. On Twitter and over on Brand New World, sure, but I usually keep this area for stuff about some aspect of my life outside of my wonderful wife and amazing daughter…professional, if you will. But today, Eliza turns two, and I thought I should pause for just a moment and just make sure that everyone knows:
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She is fucking awesome. |
I hope that someday she’ll be able to look at the things that I’ve written and the photos I’ve taken and that she can feel even some of the love that I have for her. She’s my monkey, that daughter of mine, and she gets more amazing every day.
Daddy loves you, Eliza Rhea.
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More of me online
So for the last week or so I’ve been playing with feeding various content into this blog, testing some new tools, and trying to find a way to integrate a new Tumblr blog with Pattern Recognition in a way that I liked.
I’ve failed completely.
I’m just not happy with any of it, as non of the WordPress plugins that I’ve tried (FeedWordPress, Wp-o-matic) treat my Tumblr blog RSS properly, and after hacking away at custom post setups, I’ve just decided that I like the idea of having two “blogs” on the net for now.
And so, here’s my plan: PatRec is staying the same…I like it as my occasional posting ground, and it’s going to remain my main blog headquarters. But there’s a ton of other stuff (personal, funny, or other) that just doesn’t fit in here. So for now, that other content is going to live over at Tumblr: griffey.tumblr.com, RSS available here http://feeds.feedburner.com/Griffeylog. I wanted to call it Apophenia, but someone already has all the Google Juice for that. Pareidolia is close enough. If you have any interest in the minutia of my sense of humor or just want to see another side of me, that’s where you’ll see it. Expect lots of silly pictures, youtube videos, and short bits of personal reflection.
It may take me a few days to work out the information flow (what goes to Twitter, what goes to Friendfeed, etc). I’m still using Friendfeed as a “master feed” for my stuff online, so everything I do gets there eventually. One of these days I should post about my digital ecology….the flows and connections between all the stuff I have online. I’ll save that for my Top Secret new writing experiment, coming in January. 🙂
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SANDALL – Realtime Web
Here’s my presentation from this morning on the Realtime web for the San Diego Law Library Fall conference. First time I’ve done this one, and I’m really happy with the way it came together.
Realtime Web
View more presentations from griffey.
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Homepage Update
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks monkeying with different looks and feels for a homepage update. For a long while, I’ve had my homepage set as a lifestream, running SweetCron, but decided awhile back that with my tenure dossier coming due that I would like to rework it into something more polished. Also, the lifestream presented me as what I’m doing, and didn’t adequately represent either what I’ve done, nor what I’d like to do in the future.
So: redesign!
I wanted something clean, without a ton of design overhead, but also something that was flexible enough to take whatever I thought to throw at it. I also decided that I wanted to try using a pre-existing framework, specifically as CSS framework, and then tweak it to my needs. After looking around a bit, I decided to use Blueprint, a lovely CSS framework that allowed me to not worry about positioning, other than to figure out how Blueprint does it. Blueprint is extensible, and I wanted tabs, so off I went to the Blueprint Tab plugin.
The basic icons for my “social” tab were found here, and I took the look/feel and created a handful that they didn’t have using Photoshop. I also created the “rollover” images for everything using photoshop, and am using a clever little javascript simpleswap to handle that bit. I also had to install jquery for the first time, for the tab fade effect.
Other tools used in putting this together include: Blip.tv and slideshare for the presentations and videos, scribd for my CV, FriendFeed for my Lifestream, and Meebo and Google Voice for the Contact page.
After getting all the pieces in place, it took some time to work out the bugs. My wife convinced me to stick with the black/green scheme that I’ve been using for years…I’ve used it since graduate school, and I like it because it reminds me of the good old days with the green phosphor CRT terminals.
See what you think, and I’d love to have any feedback, especially if it’s broken in some way. 🙂
From the LITA listserv, and because I’m doing a preconference that should be a lot of fun:
The early bird registration deadline has been extended for the 2009 LITA National Forum, October 1-4, 2009 in Salt Lake City. Now is your opportunity to realize excellent savings on registration for the forum. Registration rates are $50 lower through August 31– Register Now: http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/registration.cfm
Keynote Sessions Feature Dynamic Speakers:
http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/keynote.cfm
On Friday Joan Lippincott of Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) will kick off the Forum with her talk Mobile Technologies, Mobile Users: Will Libraries Mobilize? Lippincott will discuss what roles libraries can and should play in delivering content for mobile devices, developing services for mobile device users and configuring physical spaces to respond to their needs.
Saturday, David Weinberger will present Knowledge in the Age of Abundance. Weinberger will examine how our new connected age is one of abundant and ready access to knowledge and how this is bringing a change in the nature, shape, value and role of knowledge itself.
Liz Lawley of the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology will close the Forum on Sunday with Technical/Tangible/Social. Lawley’s talk will cover the growing importance of “social objects†in technology implementation, and how those objects serve as a focal point for cohesive social interactions.
Preconferences Offer In-Depth Examination of Topics:
http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/precon.cfm
Choose between two full-day workshops, spanning Thursday afternoon and Friday morning:
Jason Griffey of University of Tennessee, Chattanooga will present The Future of Mobile. The workshop will examine the future of mobile technologies and their impact on libraries, including how service models in libraries change with ubiquitous computing and how content delivery becomes different. Attendees will look at specific tools that are currently available that model the direction that mobile is moving.
Accessibility Update: Section 508 and WCAG in a Library 2.0 World, presented by Nina McHale of the University of Colorado, Denver will provide an introduction to Section 508 and WCAG Web accessibility guidelines and how they relate to online library tools. The workshop will include demonstrations of popular assistive technologies and guidelines for optimizing library resources to comply with Section 508 and WCAG.
Visit the LITA Web site for more information on the Forum including concurrent and poster sessions, travel and lodging, and complete Forum schedule.
http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/index.cfm
Be sure to Connect with Forum participants on Facebook and the Forum wiki:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php??eid=34666759559#/event.php
http://wikis.ala.org/lita/index.php/2009_LITA_National_Forum
Categories
Seen on campus today
A new use for a figure 8 descender. For those who haven’t seen one, that’s an aluminum figure 8, used in rappelling. Or, in this case, an umbrella holder.
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Get in the f’ing sack
Best bit on homeopathy and other quackery I’ve seen in a long time, courtesy of BoingBoing and Dara O’Briain. Fabulous, and I’ve got a longer list of who to put in that sack he’s talking about…
This is a panel that I was a part of at ALA 2009 on the future of mobile….phenomenal panelists. I was especially geeked to finally get to meet Eli Neiburger. Anyway, we all had something to say about the future of mobile, and what libraries need to be worried about. Watch it, and let me know if you have any feedback. I’m always interested in what other librarians think about things like this…the future isn’t certain, and it’s always possible that I’m remarkably wrong. 🙂
Here’s part one:
And part two:
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Blogging for Nonprofits and Libraries
On Thursday, August 6th, I’ll be taking part in a TechSoup webinar on Blogging for Nonprofits and Libraries, along with Allyson Kapin. It will be at 11AM Pacific/12PM Mountain/1PM Central/2PM Eastern in the US (adjust for your particular global timezone), and I hope that anyone who’s wondering how to get started blogging joins us for a fun discussion!
The webinar is free, and you can sign up here if you are interested.