My view for the last 3 days.
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Tag: Personal
We’re over at a friend’s house this past Saturday for his birthday party, and Betsy and I and a friend are just lounging in the yard eating. Beautiful day, with maybe, oh…30 people eating in various places around the yard.
Guy walks up to us and says “Don’t freak out, but there’s a big snake just behind you.” I don’t think anything of it, really…country boy, seen plenty of snakes…so we stand up to take a look.
That’s the “after” photo…it was at least a 4 foot timber rattler. Biggest one I’ve ever seen, hanging out right at the edge of the yard. Lots of kids, boys playing football…I shudder when I think about one of them tossing the ball just a little too far.
See if you can spot him in the “before” shot on flickr. Or how about just the head (again, an “after” shot).
One other shot, from a different angle:
After discussing the book today with some friends on Meebo, I came up with the perfect turn-of-phrase for the collective sadness enveloping all of us who have spent 10 years following these characters. We all suffer from:
Post-Potter Depression
Thanks everybody, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
We’ve put off an official blog announcement until now, but it just can’t wait any longer:
It’s a girl!!!
🙂
This is an older scan, but I haven’t had time to put up the newest ones, so…this will do as a placeholder. Betsy and I are expecting a little girl, due Dec. 19th. We are both so completely thrilled, and excited, and scared. But mostly thrilled and excited. 🙂
Here’s the rules: No Pink. No Frilly dresses. No dating until she’s 25. Got it?
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Why ALA will never learn
Good job on the unconference. Just one fairly serious problem, at least to me. The Wiki has almost zero mention and absolutely no logos for LITA. The only LITA mention is in the text of the About BIGWIG wiki page.
This is a portion of an email that BIGWIG received as a result of being featured in the ALA Direct email after Annual, getting a bit of press for the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase.
I have lots of things that I’d like to say about this, but they all boil down to this: when, as an organization, we are more concerned with how we are portrayed than with results, I believe we’ve seriously lost our way.
I have also been thinking a great deal about the various fronts that have began mobilizing to make active change in the ALA. BIGWIG has obviously been working to move LITA in directions that we feel are important, but I admit that the bureaucracy of the whole endeavor takes some of the wind from my sails. If we ran our libraries the way we run our organizations, our patrons would be in real trouble.
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BIGWIG popularity
In doing a bit of research tonight, I discovered that the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase is now the 10th result of over 700,000 for the single search term “Bigwig” on Google.
Pretty amazing for something sprung from my, Michelle, and Karen’s brains just a few months ago. That, plus the mention in AL Direct today, David Free’s analysis of the attendance of the Showcase, and I think we might just have a winner on our hands. 🙂
Going to turn on Twitter2Blog for the extent of the ALA conference, to make it easier for me to post/keep up with things. If it falls apart and I don’t notice, someone let me know. 🙂
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Griffey @ ALA 2007
If anyone is interested in catching up with me at ALA 2007, here’s my calendar (still being edited, but it’s a live calendar):
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Smartphone choices
I call upon the wisdom of the Intertubes: Help me decide on a smartphone. Our cell contract runs out this month, and I need to get a Smartphone of some type.
Needs:
- Obviously, it needs to be a good phone
- IM, SMS, and email must be solid and easy to use (bonus for gmail & outlook both working well)
- View Word and PDF, edit would be nice
- Must be a Cingular phone, due to coverage in our area
Here are the contenders:
- Samsung Blackjack
- Cingular 8125 Pocket PC
- Palm Treo 680
- and of course, there is the iPhone
I like the form factor of the Blackjack, but both it and the Treo lack 802.11 support, and I’d like to be able to browse/IM/Email via wifi if I’m somewhere with a signal. Hell, I’d love to be able to Skype with it if possible. The 8125 has wifi, but is the largest of the bunch…on the other hand, the slide out keyboard is pretty great. As much as I lust after the iPhone, Apple is not known for flawless first-gen products, and the $$ is a bit to drop in the foreseeable future. I like the Treo because I’ve always had a soft spot for Palm, and the secondary software support is huge, but Palm is, frankly, dead.
So I’m torn, Intertubes. Anyone use any of these phones? Got a recommendation for me for something I haven’t looked at?
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Collaboration and writing
So, Karen put up some of her thoughts on our collaborative adventure in writing a book over at LibraryWebChic, so I thought I’d follow up with my take on the ongoing quest to write.
We are a long way apart. Thankfully, we have leveraged online tools like nobody’s business. Here’s a short list of the whats and hows:
- Google Docs: for initial writing, for sharing, for co-editing each others work. I’m quickly forgetting how I ever got things done without Google Docs.
- Flickr: for the sharing of screenshots for insertion into our final documents. We’ve created a private group with only us as members, and that way either of us can just upload/download the pics we need. Flickr used to raise a stink about screenshots, but they actually have the option to label something a screenshot in the advance settings of their website upload tool now.
- IM: for lots of communication, and logs that allow me to go back and check what I agreed to do. 🙂
- del.icio.us: I’m using it for bookmarks to things I’m referencing, so that I can go back and build a more formal bibliography later. I’ve also thrown links at Karen that I think might be useful to her sections.
One of the more interesting things that I’ve found out has to do with personal communication style. I don’t like the phone, and prefer text-based communication (mainly because I can review it when I need to refresh my memory). Karen likes to talk on the phone, and hash things out that way. This far, we’ve done a combination of the two, and it’s worked well…I keep bugging her to upgrade her PowerBook to a MacBook so that we can iChat when we have questions, but so far, no go. 🙂
As Karen mentioned, the biggest problem we’ve had so far is the transporting of some of the “finished” chapters, with really large images inline and such. What I think we need is basically on online drop-box that we can both use, preferably with a fast pipe and a pretty ajaxy drag and drop interface.