How could I have possibly not known that Wikipedia has a Reference desk?
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Google @ ALA
Here’s Google’s video relating their experience at ALA 2006. Included are shots of the booth in the exhibit hall, a little video of the party they held at Muriel’s, and snippets of interviews they did with librarians at the party. You can see the swanky glowing drinks that I talked about earlier.
I was interviewed, but evidently didn’t make it into the video…but they did put up a picture of myself and Charles at the booth:
The most amusing thing to me about the picture? Google put these up as a Picasa Web Album, but I’m linking to it from my flickr account. Why? Picasa doesn’t give you easy linkability…I could copy image location and paste in the URL, but that’s not a friendly user experience. Flickr EXPECTS you’re going to hotlink their images, and gives you the URL to do so.
Picasa also doesn’t give you an easy way to browse to a specific picture…this was pic 166 of over 200, and when I went back to find it, I couldn’t be bothered to click next picture 165 times. There must be a jump to picture option for usability, guys. What else…oh yeah…no multiple sizes to pick from, so the resolution you get is just what’s there. I love Picasa as a local picture manipulation solution, but Google is a long way from flickr for online experience.
So, a bit of an update.
CMS? Check.
Install? Check.
Template? Check.
Got the rough template design done earlier this week, and while there will be lots of updates to it, the very rough structure is in place. Now it’s all about verifying the migration plan. We’ve got a test server that I’ve been doing all the experimenting on, and the question is now do we do content addition on the test server, or go ahead and move on the production server, with the risk that entails?
In the spirit of answering the question, I’m going to attempt to move my current Joomla installation to another spot on the server…fresh install, and then move the database over. We’ll see if that works, and that will answer the above question, I hope.
Next week? Actual, honest-to-god content migration begins! (I desperately hope…)
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Valleyschwag #3
My Valleyschwag showed up late last week, and it was a great one:
But the best schwag was this:
One of the rockin’ messenger bags! The poster was also a neat surprise, and very well done. Very happy with this month’s schwag…here’s hoping that it keeps up! For anyone who loves the Web 2.0 explosion and is a tech-head, this is a fun once-a-month surprise.
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Next Step Blogging, take two
A very nice writeup of my ALA presentation from Karen Schneider via LITABlog…it was just a ton of fun to do, and Karen is entirely too mum about her involvement in the process. She was the instigator that got Steven, Karen C., and myself together to do the thing in the first place. Thanks, Karen! I hope to get the chance for a repeat performance next year.
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Google Cubes
Another pic I’ve been meaning to get to…these are little promo items from the Google Bash at this year’s American Library Association Annual meeting in New Orleans. They were at the bar, and when you ordered a drink the bartender would pop one in along with the booze and ice. When you do that, they light up:
They have a couple of electrodes on the back that need to be bridged with some conductive item before they light up. Clever, and they gave the party a decidedly sci-fi aura, with everyone walking around with different colored glowing drinks.
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Turn it up!
I’ve got a ton of leftover stuff I still want to talk about from ALA Annual. Here’s my favorite vendor sign from the exhibit hall at ALA in New Orleans…
Large Print Audiobooks? Do they just talk louder?
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Blue in Kentucky
Most people have heard “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, but few have probably heard of the blue people from Kentucky. Seriously. Blue. People.
They’re known simply as the “blue people” in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests. That was the pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black.
There was always speculation in the hollows about what made the blue people blue: heart disease, a lung disorder, the possibility proposed by one old-timer that “their blood is just a little closer to their skin.” But no one knew for sure, and doctors rarely paid visits to the remote creekside settlements where most of the “blue Fugates ” lived until well into the 1950s. By the time a young hematologist from the University of Kentucky came down to Troublesome Creek in the 1960s to cure the blue people, Martin Fugate’s descendants had multiplied their recessive genes all over the Cumberland Plateau.
I grew up just north from Hazard and Perry County, and heard about these genetically interesting folks growing up. I never met anyone with this genetic quirk, but there are still some in the area. Here’s a really well-written story about them, how they came to be so blue, and how they’ve dealt with it. Story is old, but fascinating.
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Monkey Tuesday!
cue the theme music
From NPR, a fascinating story about a bonobo that seems to have linguistic skills far beyond any other non-human in history. From the story:
Savage-Rumbaugh made a decision; She would stop trying to teach words and sentences to apes. She would give Kanzi a reason to talk, and something to talk about.
“What I had to do is come up with an environment,” she says, “a world that would foster the acquisition of these lexical symbols in Kanzi and a greater understanding of spoken human language.”
…
Before long, Kanzi was doing many of the things humans do with language. He was talking about places and objects that weren’t in sight. He was referring to the past and the future. And he was understanding new sentences made up of familiar words.
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Website update #X
Well, we’ve decided to use Joomla in the library website redesign, and I’m in the process of messing with a raw template and pushing it into the direction we want to go. Found a really excellent template that is pure CSS…too many of the ones we looked at used Tables for structure. But I’ve got a pure CSS one that seems to render well in IE, and if I can just move it over to variable width rather than fixed, I’ll be set.
But the next week or two will be me = coding hell. Send cookies.