As you may have noticed, I’ve started including a daily Twitter log again. I decided that since I’m using twitter not only for conversation but also for micro-blogging and interesting things I find around the web, that it bears inclusion here.
If anyone finds it distracting, or just thinks it’s out of place, please let me know.
My recent article in NetConnect, Stranger Than We Know, is garnering a little attention online, although I haven’t heard any feedback directly. I’d love to know if the digiterati think I’m just wildly off base with some of my crazed ramblings.
Mentions thus far in:
In just a couple of days, I jet off across the US to lovely Monterey, California, for Internet Librarian 2008. I’m presenting on Sunday as a part of a preconference called Academic Library 2.0 with a host of really amazing people. As it turns out, I’m ALSO doing a preconference on Sunday with my old friend Karen Coombs as a last-minute fill in. So if you see me Sunday night, I’m likely to be exhausted.
On the other hand, I’m so looking forward to seeing friends, and seeing what the rest of the remarkably talented librarians bring to the conference. I always learn an extraordinary amount at these conferences, and I can’t wait to see what’s out there.
The Brothers Griffey in the late 1930s. Picture taken on Griffey Branch, Olive Hill, KY.
Left to right: Milton Griffey Sr., Van Gordon ‘Jack’ Griffey (d. 10/18/1970), James Morgan Griffey, Clay Griffey
Clay Griffey was my Father’s Father’s Father, or my Great-Grandfather…Eliza’s Great, Great Grandfather. Clay had a son that he named Van Gordon after his brother (who no one in my family knew as other than “Jack”…even his gravestone simply says Jack). That Van Gordon was my father’s father.
I had no idea this photo even existed until my aunt was googling for some genealogy information and found it online…amazing the things you can find online these days. đŸ™‚
Photo and information originally found here.
So not that long ago, I decided that I wanted a homepage that more accurately tracked me online, and so I posted about hacking together a FriendFeed widget that fed my homepage.
Then, earlier this week, I discovered Sweetcron. A self-hosted php/mysql lifestreaming solution, that supports themes and all sorts of customizations. I had to give it a try, so here it is: my new, new homepage.
There are still a TON of things to figure out. I’ve not wrapped my head all the way around how Sweetcron is handling the feeds, so I’m not happy with the way it’s dealing with things like delicious. But I did more-or-less get the skinning, and was able to create custom feeds for my blog, claimid, and a few others. I’ve not added all my feeds yet, because adding a feed requires futzing with the code to make it display properly, and to make it look nice you have to write some custom css for each feed as well.
So why do it? Well, the big deal for me is that now I have the data…my lifestream is ending up on my server, in my mysql database, that I can backup. Maybe after messing with this for awhile I’ll head back to a simple solution like friendfeed. But I’m hoping with the plugin architecture and such that this garners a little development community and they starting building really cool things for it.
Take a look, and see if this solves any problems for you or your library.
I’m seriously considering getting a Timbuk2 Laptop Messenger bag for my forthcoming travels. I love my current laptop bag (a Waterfield sleeve with strap) but I’m needing something with a bit more room. The only thing I’m undecided on, really, is the color/pattern. So, blogosphere: which of the below do you like best? It’s clear that I like the dark orange, and earth tones…but I just can’t make up my mind. So: which do you like best? Vote in the comments!
So I took the plunge and decided to Jailbreak my iPhone 3G, just out of curiousity as much as anything. I wanted to see what apps were available outside the app store, as well as see what customizations were out there for the phone. What I’ve found is that I haven’t found a lot of apps that I would consider truly worth Jailbreaking. There are two or three real standouts that I’m playing with, but mostly the apps on the App Store are pretty amazing on their own.
The three things that I am having some fun with that aren’t available via Apple: Qik, Tunewiki, and Winterboard. Qik everyone is probably familiar with, and I think will eventually make its way thru the actual Apple vetting process. The camera on the iPhone will only do around 15 frames per second in ideal conditions, and streaming live to the net you are looking at only 6-8 even on wifi. But I’m going to take my phone with me Internet Librarian and play with the live streaming some, if the Jailbreak lasts that long.
Tunewiki is an amazing app that will, I think, never make it to the app store. It takes your music, and in realtime finds and displays lyrics for the song…timed to the song itself. I have no idea how it works, and its awesome.
Winterboard is a theming app for the iPhone which gives you control over certain visual aspects of the display, as well as reskinning the whole thing if you download appropriate skins.
All in all the phone has been running well since the Jailbreak, although I would say it is slightly less stable…I’ve had to reboot it a couple of times to get it unfrozen after an install or the first launch of a new program. With that said, it’s neat to have a no-longer black box phone…like they say, it’s not really yours if you can’t open it up.
I’m just stopping in to make sure this still works. Feels like a month since I posted, but I know it hasn’t been that long.
I’m working on a couple of videos, though, that should explain why I’ve been so busy. Look for them here, soon.
The last two weeks have been not the most pleasant with our telephone provider, Vonage. We’ve been using Vonage as our land-line now for something like 2 years, with great results. I’ve been terrifically happy with the quality and features. But now, given my first run-in with their customer service…well, there’s an interesting outcome to this story. Stay with me for the payoff:
So, two weeks ago we came home after a trip to KY to find that something was seriously wrong with our house…cable out, no internet, and because of that, no phone. So we contacted Charter, and they were there the next day to fix the cable and our internet access. But even with the ‘net back…no Vonage.
So I put in an email to support, and that started a 2 week long exchange where they suggested fixes, I tried them, and then they suggested new ones that didn’t work either. It finally came down to the fact that they Vonage router seems fried. Here’s where it gets interesting.
So a new Vonage device on their website starts at $49.99, plus shipping, for the most basic of their boxes. The one I had was a wireless router as well, which pushed the cost up a considerable amount. I asked about the cost for a replacement, and was told that as an existing customer I could get a one time credit of $50. This was where I got interested in the actual customer service aspect of this…they weren’t offering me credit for the fact I’d been down 2 weeks, which seemed an obvious step to me. As well, isn’t it in Vonage’s corner to provide me with equipment, if need be, in order for me to continue being a customer? Even cell-phone companies will give you a reconditioned phone if yours gets broken, and by and large they have the worst customer service in the world.
To make matters worse, they were offering on their website a $79 retail router for $9 to new customers. So a new customer gets a $70 subsidy, but an existing one gets $50. And only after spending two weeks trying to fix the equipment.
So I got aggressive, more from a desire to see what the outcome would be than anything. I told customer support that I found the situation unfair, and that I was unhappy with the outcome. I gave them a chance to step up…and they didn’t. So my next letter, expressing my displeasure, was crossed to the CEO, the Chief Marketing Officer, and the Senior Vice President of Customer Care. How did I get their email addresses? I didn’t…I guessed. I found the emails of other Vonage employees online with a simple Google Search, and noticed that the format was always the same: Firstname.Lastname@vonage.com. Finding the names of any public company’s CEO and such is pretty trivial, and with those two pieces of info, we were off!
So what do you think happened? Not even 12 hours after I sent the email I received a phone call from a Customer Service rep. Said CS rep assured me that I would be receiving, at no cost to me at all, a new Vonage device…the $79 dollar one, as it turns out. Free shipping as well, all credited to my account, device shipping today. Huh.
What’s the moral of our story? That is shouldn’t take complaining to the CEO of a company to get results…the front-line people who are dealing with the public need to be enabled to make decisions like this and engender goodwill. This is even more true in the library…don’t force a patron to wade up the chain of command in order to get something done. Empower your workers, and hire people that have good judgment and can make these calls themselves.
Yesterday, in a fit of frustration at MPOW (well, not really MPOW, but the larger University), I started poking around some feeds, and found someone who had made their FriendFeed into their homepage.
“How did they do that?” I asked myself. Turns out that it’s an embed feature of FriendFeed that doesn’t look like it’s particularly well documented.
The code for the embed is:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget/USERNAME”></script>
There are at least two variables that seem to work with this string: ?num=VALUE after the username, where value is the number of entries you want to show up, and ?source=VALUE, where value is the source of the feed in your FriendFeed account (Twitter, Last.fm, etc).
So I decided to redo my own homepage, and do something similar, where the FriendFeed just fills the page, with navigational links to my other, more robust online presence. I’ll probably convert it into a two column layout at some point, but for now, it’s a nice lifestream that’s always active and gives a decent accounting of my day-to-day online.