Category: Personal

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MPOW Personal

I can haz class!

The proposal that I put forward for a 1 hour class for incoming freshman at UTC was accepted! Here’s the title and description:

COURSE TITLE: Digital Revolution: Everything is different than everything before

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
The rise of the Internet and the conversion of popular media to digital forms (TV becomes YouTube, CD’s become iTunes) does far more than just make information portable. It effects the way we interact with it, create it, share it, and use it in our daily lives. This class will help you understand the ways that digital information changes the world you live in, and how the future might look given these changes. The class itself will be driven largely by student interests, but topics will include why the Internet is different than everything before it, what social information does to traditional publication models, and how the world is changing (or not) to meet the new information revolution.

Awesome! Can’t wait to get back into the classroom, even just a little.

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Library Issues Personal

Philosophy of Librarianship 2009

As a part of the reappointment process at UTC, we’re required to be reviewed yearly by the Reappointment and Tenure Committee to ensure that we’re on the path to Tenure. One of the pieces of paperwork that they ask for is a Philosophy of Librarianship statement. I’m not sure how common this is with other academic institutions, but I thought that if anyone was wondering what something like this looked like, well, here’s mine.

Philosophy of Librarianship 2009

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Resumes & CVs librarian librarianship
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Personal

Pseudoscience and vaccinations

WARNING: No library content is involved in this post. Thank you.

Nothing gets my hackles up more than the current fashion in the US of denigrating science as something to not be trusted. The list of absolutely insane beliefs that people cling to here in the US would take hours to enumerate, but for parents to threaten a scientist because he is doing good science is just…*boggle* Read this article in the NYT about Paul Offit and see what I mean.

It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for parents who have autistic children…I do. My heart breaks, and if I discovered that Eliza had a genetic disease I would be destroyed. But my emotional reaction to it doesn’t change the science, and the science says that vaccines don’t cause autism. On the contrary, vaccinations are arguably the single most important development in children’s health of the last 100 years.

There’s a lot of emotion around this subject. But the fact of the matter is that vaccinations save children’s lives. If you are a parent, please, please, please: Have your children vaccinated.

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Personal

Want. Seriously.

This isn’t a new video, but it just recently made the rounds again on the ‘net. This footage makes me want to quit my job, devote myself to getting in shape, and just do nothing but jump off things with a wingsuit. Wow.


wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

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Personal

Goodbye, 2008

While 2008 wasn’t always easy, in looking back at it, it really was an outstanding year for me. Personally, of course, I had my amazing wife Betsy helping me survive the first year of Eliza’s life… easily the best thing that’s happened in any year of my life. Professionally, I hardly know where to start. At MPOW, we rolled out a new OpenURL resolver, and worked like crazy in planning a new library for the UTC Campus. And in the larger professional community, my year was just nuts: my first book was published (well, half-mine, anyway…Thanks, Karen!), I spoke at a ton of conferences, and made my international speaking debut. And I had a great year writing both here and over at ALA Techsource.

I can’t imagine having another year as full as this one. I’m not sure that I even want to try. But 2009 is shaping up to be pretty interesting already. Working on a second book, signing a contract for another big writing gig for the later part of the year, and I’m sure that even more exciting things are around the corner.

My best hope for the new year is that I can find even more great friends, write things that people want to read, help push MPOW into a few interesting places, and continue to be the best father and husband that I can be.

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Personal

Caga Tio

I thought that I had blogged about this before, but I can’t seem to find it in my archives, so maybe I’m wrong. One of my all time favorite Christmas traditions is from Spain, specifically from the Catalan region around Barcelona, and it involves something called Caga Tio.

I couldn’t make up a stranger Christmas tradition if I tried. Seriously.

Catalan families go into the woods and find a Christmas Log (Tio de Nadal) to bring into their home. It’s painted or otherwise decorated with a face, and wrapped in a blanket. Over the weeks before Christmas, the Caga Tio is fed sweets and other treats, in order to get him ready for the command performance on Christmas. After weeks of being fed, the Caga Tio is ready. He is then beaten with sticks by the children of the family until he poops out treats for the children, usually in the form of the Catalan treat called turron. Yes…the log poops out the children’s treats, which they then consume. Caga Tio literally translates into “Pooping Log”.

For whatever reason, the Catalan people are somewhat obsessed with scatology and Christmas. Their other big tradition involves the Caganer, a figure that is included as a part of the traditional Nativity display. As you can probably guess from what you now know about Caga Tio, the Caganer is literally a “pooper”, a figure that is caught mid-defecation. It’s actually considered an honor to be made into a Caganer figure, although it made news when President-Elect Obama was so honored in Spain this year.

There are dozens of videos of the tradition up on YouTube, but here’s one that is nicely put together that illustrates the tradition.

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Personal

Balancing time and effort

I have been a bad, bad blogger. So little content here recently, but I have an excuse! Well, several, actually, but this one is in video form. I’m actively trying to be more focused with my time, as well as learn how to direct my somewhat fractured attention span. To learn more about the sorts of things I’m trying to shape and redirect, here’s Merlin Mann speaking at Google:

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Personal Technology

Obama’s Acceptance Speech as cloud

Been awhile since I did one of these, and this definitely captures something special. I love the way that the cloud came together to say “new america yes”.

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Personal

Obama wins

Barrack Obama has won the presidency of the United States. I have hope for my country again, and am almost deliriously proud of my fellow Americans.

Thank you, all of you, who voted.

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Personal

Vote Obama

Progress

I hesitated to blog politically, but this election is just too important to the country and the people within it. It was the essay by David Sedaris in the New Yorker entitled Undecided that finally put me over the edge and into blogging about my feelings:

“To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”

Now, I have never been undecided in this election. McCain is just another round of pampered yuppie, a third-generation military brat who is a just not a nice person in any way. His record is anything but (*yuck*) “maverick”, and his choice of running mate in Sarah Palin is frankly still bewildering. She’s just a laughingstock of a running mate, tasked with fueling the fires of misinformation and racial bias that this country can no longer tolerate or afford.

Obama is what this country needs. A new, fresh voice, with good ideas and the willingness to see them through. He gives me hope that in 4 years, perhaps we won’t be scorned in international discussions, involved in wars that are being waged for no good reasons, and on our way to recovering the basic rights that have been flushed away by the Bush administration.

So: for those of you in the US: Vote. Vote for hope, and change. Vote for the first racial minority presidential candidate. Vote for a different America for our children, because I don’t want Eliza to inherit the one we’ve got.

Vote Obama/Biden.