Tag: Digital Culture

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Digital Culture

Year Zero

One of my favorite bands has taken an interesting route in publicity for their new album, Year Zero. The album is a concept album concerned with government takeover, corruption, the drugging of the populace, and the downfall of the US.

In promoting the album, they’ve set up a sort of Alternate Reality Game that people are in the middle of now. It began with a website address encoded in the letters on the back of the latest tour shirt, and has continued from there. Last night there was a USB key discovered in the rest room of their latest concert stop that had on it an apparent cut from the new album…and it was determined to be authentic because someone decided to analyze the spectrum of the song and discovered a hidden image in the spectrum, something you couldn’t get by simply encoding an MP3 in a normal fashion.

The best initial discussion of the mystery is taking place over at Echoing the Sound, but there is a wiki that should take over soon, and as always, wikipedia is up on things.

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Digital Culture

Looking for a book

9AM Tell Me What You Think a ‘Book’ Is

Patron: Ummm, I’m looking for a book.
Librarian: Okay, well, do you know what it’s called?
Patron: No.
Librarian: Do you know who wrote it?
Patron: No.
Librarian: Are you just hoping that we have some sort of book?
Patron: Yeah.
Librarian: You know you’re in a fuckin’ library, right?

Austin Public Library
Austin, Texas

from Overheard at the Office

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Digital Culture

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo Pipes

If you haven’t looked at Pipes yet, it’s a visual programming site that allows for logical linking of sources and then provides output of your logic. Take a feed, and find Flickr photos based on the most used terms in the feed. Search Yahoo for a phrase, combine it with geographic location, and find the nearest hits on a map. It’s basically a programming language for RSS and web searching…powerful, powerful stuff.

Anyone out in library land using Pipes for anything fun? It’s quite an interesting little tool…I’m playing with it, and have a few concepts that I’m going to try and work out. The only library-related Pipe I found looked like something Meredith was putting together (and was something I was thinking of) that just mashed up the feeds of all the library bloggers I read. But that’s a relatively low-level use of the service…anyone out there pushing the possibilities of this thing? I’m certainly going to try…but will have to play to learn first.

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Digital Culture

Eating my way through Vegas

The highlight of our trip to Vegas was, without doubt, the food. Living in Sewanee and being foodies, we don’t often get to have really great food. In Vegas, we had Really. Great. Food.

Case in point:

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Betsy and I had Saturday brunch at Bouchon, the Thomas Keller property in Las Vegas. Keller is the chef behind the French Laundry, and is widely regarded as perhaps the best chef in the US. We were not disappointed. (for details on French Laundry, check out the food porn from Justin)

The meal included my Steak and Eggs, both perfectly prepared…simple, and lovely. But it paled in comparison to Betsy’s Croque Madame…an amazing amalgam of brioche, salted ham, cheese, egg, and a sauce that was pure decadence. But the absolute top of the meal was, believe it or not…pommes frites. Yep, french fries…but the most perfect, tasty, crispy yet soft, absolutely perfect fries ever. No joke….these were perfection written in potato.

After the meal, we chose a pastry sampler that included maybe the finest single pastry ever…a pain chocolat that was by turns crunchy and flaky, with a custard and chocolate filling, toasted almonds, powdered sugar, chocolate sauce. Absolutely over the top, and a wonder in flour and sweet.

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Digital Culture

Chainsaws & Toasters

So what happens when they run completely out of ideas for slot machines?

You get this.

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My absolute favorite machine in Vegas…just seeing it makes me chuckle.

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Digital Culture

WANTED: TWO LIBRARIANS

Below you’ll find the formal announcement of two tenure-track librarian positions at UTC, but I wanted to just add a note about the Web Technologies librarian position. This is a position in my department, and I am looking for someone willing to push the boundaries of library services…I am serious in the long description when I say that I want someone willing to push UTC into the future of services. The hiring committee may disagree, of course, but my goal is to build a team that can move forward with innovative patron focused technology.

WANTED: TWO LIBRARIANS COMMITTED TO THE USER-FOCUSED LIBRARY

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Lupton Library invites applications from energetic, collaborative and forward-thinking professionals to fill two tenure-track vacancies on our team.

Reference and Instruction Librarian
The Reference and Instruction Department is seeking a creative and student-centered librarian to join an engaged and progressive 7-person team with a strong customer service focus. The position reports to the Head of Reference and Instruction Services. The position’s responsibilities will include: regular reference desk shifts, user instruction both in the classroom and one-on-one settings, active participation in the development of teaching materials and research guides, creation and maintenance of website content, subject-specific collection development responsibilities, and participation in faculty liaison and outreach activities.

Web Technologies Librarian
The Information Technology Department is seeking an innovative and web-savvy librarian to join its growing technology services team. The position reports to the Head of Library Information Technology. The position’s responsibilities will include exploring, testing, and implementing new and existing web based services in the Lupton Library such as: a new dynamic PHP/MySQL based library web site, blogs, wikis, hacking the library OPAC to better serve our patrons, web-based media for podcasting/vodcasting, developing digital repositories, and using browser based technologies to improve our patron experience and push Lupton Library to be a leader in library technology.

A review of applications will begin March 15, 2007 and will continue until the positions are filled. Interested applicants should submit a letter of application including the position of interest, vita, and the contact information for three references including the professional relationship of applicant to reference. Send materials to: Anna Lane, Lupton Library, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 615 McCallie Ave, Chattanooga, TN 37403; fax materials to 423-425-4775 attention Anna Lane; or email to anna-lane@utc.edu.

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Digital Culture

A week between posts

It’s been a week since I last got up the gumption to post here, mostly due to the ongoing issues with WP2.1. I’m a HUGE WordPress fan, and have been using it for this very blog since 1.3 or so. The additions to 2.1, for the most part, are welcome and needed, especially the auto-save feature. But it required far too much of my time figuring out how to get my links back into shape (they killed certain php calls in the code), and I still haven’t gotten my byline happy.

The byline on my site was being ran by having a random named link called from the links function of WP…things like “where no one notices the contrast of white on white” and “it’s the one that says Bad Motherfucker on it” were randomly inserted below my title. But now, because they’ve broken the title_li php function in their code, I can’t surpress the “Byline” heading of the category when I try and place the links there.

In all, it’s been very frustrating.

But, good things are coming. I’m on the way (tomorrow!) to Vegas, Baby!, for a much-needed vacation. So expect some pics and stories (well…some stories). Also, I’m working on an interesting analysis of the first foray into Podcasting by myself and my buds over at LITABlog…some cool stuff there as well.

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Digital Culture

What does a BoingBoing look like?

Just a few days ago, a post showed up on BoingBoing. For those of you who haven’t had this happen, it can be great (lots of people reading my stuff!) and terrible (the /. effect, aka: melty servers). I just looked back over my raw hits to see how much of a difference BoingBoing made. Here it is, in all its naked glory:

boingboing'd

So I went from around 3000 hits a day to about 65,000 hits in a day. If your server isn’t ready for that, it can come as quite a shock. Luckily for me, Blake Carver and LISHost are amazing, and kept my blog up for the entire process.

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Digital Culture

WordPress 2.1

Well, I upgraded to the latest WordPress release, and it brought with it broken. I had used the php function get_links for a TON of customizations on my blog…my sidebar, my random byline in the header, a couple of pages…and what did they do? They killed it. The call is now wp_list_bookmarks, and the options are less straightforward and I’m still not sure I can do what I want with them.

Just as a warning to anyone else who might be upgrading, if you’ve done a lot of customization with the links, beware the upgrade. And if anyone has any thoughts on getting the new system to behave like the old, let me know.

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Digital Culture

Prior art

As many people in the comments of my State of the Union Tag Cloud post pointed out, there’s a FAR better example of this over at chir.ag, with his slider-based interface of all of the presidential addresses since 1789.

I don’t think I’d seen this before, but it’s entirely possible. So props to chir.ag for coming up with the idea way before I did…and with a better interface. sigh