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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Category: Personal
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Vote Obama
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?â€
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.
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Blogging via twitter again
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:
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Off to Monterey
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. 🙂
Photo and information originally found here.
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A new, new homepage…and Sweetcron
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.
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Which Timbuk2 bag for me?
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!
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Jailbroked!
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.
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So long between updates
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.