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Brand_New_World Uncategorized

Holy cow, Eliza’s three!




IMG_2516

Originally uploaded by griffey

So this photo isn’t great, because in addition to awesome gifts, she also got a sinus infection for her birthday and wasn’t feeling well (Dec. 15th).

But in the tradition of this blog, I wanted to give a quick overview of what Miss Eliza (“Princess Eliza,” if you please) is like at the ripe old age of three.

Likes: playing dress-up, books, made up stories, playing in parks or at the gym, Disney movies of all kinds (even the scary ones), playing games on the iPad, playing with “lovies” (stuffed animals), playing in the dark (no kidding), cooking with mom and dad, role play of any and all kinds, singing, dancing, talking, asking questions.

Dislikes: too much noise, kids who hit/push and other social no-no’s, wearing clothes that she doesn’t deem “fancy” enough, eating breakfast, falling down.

Favorite toys: Calico Critters, anything related to Disney’s Ariel character, Disney figurine sets, baby doll that talks and cries, dress up stuff and jewelry, her billions of stuffed animals, especially her beloved “kitty cat babies.”

Favorite media: changes quite a bit. Right now she prefers long movies over TV shows. Current favorites are The Wizard of Oz, Jungle Book, Emperor’s New Groove (yuck), Nightmare Before Christmas, and Monsters Inc. What can I say…she likes dark things. I think she likes to be scared a little bit. That explains her love of Halloween, too.

Milestones and changes: Can tell stories, narrate in the past, ask complicated questions, use huge words (she LOVES adverbs), and carry on a conversation about anything with anyone. Is finally wanting privacy in the bathroom. Can run like the wind, but still falls down quite a bit. Is managing her anger / frustration so much better these days; she even has invented her own technique for calming down (it’s a visual thing, I can’t really describe it). Can recognize quite a few letters of the alphabet, count up to about 18 or so and do some simple math, knows all colors, most shapes, can tell you where she lives, understands family relationships.

She is absolutely amazing. One of the most observant kids I’ve ever been around, and she simply stuns me with her sense of humor, deep thoughts and questions, and her love of life. She’s so much fun to be around. I can’t wait to see how she keeps growing up!

Categories
ALA Books Digital Culture LITA Personal presentation

CES and ALA Midwinter 2011

The next week or so for me is completely insane, as I’m attending both CES2011 and ALA Midwinter 2011, even though they actually overlap. I’ll be flying from Nashville to Las Vegas on Tuesday for CES, hopping from Vegas to San Diego on Friday for ALA Midwinter, and then taking the red-eye late on Monday night to get back to Nashville and then home early Tuesday morning.

Then I’m gonna sleep about 20 hours.

There are a lot of things I’m excited about for both trips…CES is a bazaar of tech, and I’m attending a number of exciting Press Conferences from Sony, Lenovo, ASUS, and other major tech companies. I’m going to be doing reporting on the trip over at Perpetual Beta, including (if the wifi holds up) some livestreaming. I will send a tweet out when I start a livestream, so if you are interested, follow me over at twitter and you’ll get the head’s up when I go live with anything.

At ALA Midwinter, there’s also a lot to be excited about. I have two favors to ask of anyone that happens to read this and will be in San Diego:

The first: if you are a LITA member, consider coming to the Saturday morning LITA Board of Directors meeting at 8:00am in the SDCC Room 11b. It’s early, and I don’t begrudge anyone their sleep, but if you want to see how LITA works, and help to make it better, come hang out with the Board for the morning.

The second is: Come see me stumble over my fanboy self while I interview Dr. Vernor Vinge, on Saturday in the SDCC at 1:30pm in room 29 A-D. Go to that link and leave me a question you’d like to see Dr. Vinge answer, check here and at LITABlog for a live stream of the interview, and help make this an awesome event for librarians everywhere. Dr. Vinge is a 4 time Hugo Award winner, and his writing has within it possible futures for information, libraries, and books that we should really pay attention to.

I hope to see a lot of friends as well…if you see me, please wave me down and say hello.

Categories
Media Personal

His punishment was harsher…

Merry Christmas!

Here’s 39 Degrees North’s adaptation of a wonderful poem by the fantastic Neil Gaiman.

I posted the text to this very short story way back in 2003.

Categories
Personal

PatRec from Christmas Past – Caga Tio

Way back in 2008 I wrote up my absolute favorite Christmas tradition, from Cataluna in Spain: Caga Tio. If you don’t know about this _awesome_ tradition, you really should click through and read about it:

Catalan families go into the woods and find a Christmas Log (Tio de Nadal) to bring into their home. It’s painted or otherwise decorated with a face, and wrapped in a blanket. Over the weeks before Christmas, the Caga Tio is fed sweets and other treats, in order to get him ready for the command performance on Christmas. After weeks of being fed, the Caga Tio is ready. He is then beaten with sticks by the children of the family until he poops out treats for the children, usually in the form of the Catalan treat called turron. Yes…the log poops out the children’s treats, which they then consume. Caga Tio literally translates into “Pooping Log”.

Love this tradition, mainly because it’s sounds so crazy to Americans.

Categories
Digital Culture Gadgets Technology

Google ChromeOS Cr-48 Review

Cr-48

I ended up writing about 2000 words over at Perpetual Beta on my experience with the Google ChromeOS Cr-48 laptop thus far, and see no reason to duplicate all that info here at PatRec. Here’s the review, linked up in 5 parts:

Categories
Brand_New_World Uncategorized

Birthday Cousins



IMG_2612, originally uploaded by griffey.

Eliza and Parker are now 3! It’s a cliche, but it doesn’t really seem possible. Eliza is growing into a really amazing girl…happy, vibrant, and just smart as hell.

Happy Birthday, my awesome girl.

Categories
ALA Library Issues Media Personal Writing

Privacy and Freedom of Information in 21st-Century Libraries

CoverI’m really priviledged to be a part of the latest ALA TechSource Library Technology Report, Privacy and Freedom of Information in 21st-Century Libraries. When I was given the opportunity to contribute to an issue with Deborah Caldwell-Stone, Sarah Houghton-Jan, Barbara M. Jones and Eli Neiburger…well, I said yes.

I wrote the chapter entitled “Social Networking and the Library”, and the general thrust of the chapter can be seen in this excerpt:

The central tension between libraries and social networks is simple: a social network gains usefulness when you are identifiable (people know who you are) and you share information about yourself (people know what you like). Libraries have, for years, operated under the general guideline that both of those pieces of knowledge are no ones business but yours….Taken at face value, as they relate to social networks, library ethical policies can be interpreted as directly contradictory with…privacy statements. Libraries have chosen, at times, to value privacy over access to social networks when these are in conflict. If the privacy of the patron is compromised via social networks, one possible answer is to attempt to limit access to those networks, which flies in the face of open and free access to information.

If you’re interested in the topic of Freedom of Information and how difficult holding on to library’s traditional values becomes in the 21st century, this issue is a great read. Head on over to Techsource and pick it up.

Categories
ALA Books LITA Media Personal presentation

Interviewing Dr. Vernor Vinge

Dr. Vernor VingeIn one of the more surreal occurrences in my working life, I will have the opportunity to interview one of the titans of the Science Fiction world, Dr. Vernor Vinge, at the ALA Midwinter Meeting 2011 in San Diego, CA. The interview itself will be on Saturday, Jan 8th, from 1:30-3:30pm Pacific time in the San Diego Convention Center Room 29 A-D.

Plans are in place to livestream the interview at the LITA Ustream channel, and in addition to a set of questions from myself, I’ve decided to set up ways to take questions from just about anyone who wants. At the bottom of this post is an embedded Google Form where you can ask your question of Dr. Vinge…I’ll sort through any in the next 2 weeks and pick the best of the bunch for inclusion. In addition, during the interview itself, we will be taking questions not only from the live audience but also from Twitter (use the hashtag #alamw_vinge) and from the Facebook Event page.

So: hit the form below, and ask your question now. Watch the interview live on Saturday, January 8th at 1:30 Pacific time, and ask your questions as they occur to you. I, along with several awesome librarians, will try our best to collapse all of these streams into an entertaining and informative couple of hours for all.
**********

Categories
libraryblogging Media Personal Writing

1500

This post is the 1500th here at Pattern Recognition, a monstrous amount of content by any measure, and easily the longest writing project I’ve been a part of. The first post to my blog was on February 10, 2003…2858 days ago. That’s better than 1 post every two days, or conversely, half a post a day, every day, for almost 8 years.  I decided to dig in and see how many words this thing has. The number left me gobsmacked: 189,299…at least 3 decently sized novels worth of text.

Blogging has been very, very kind to me over the last decade. From the early days when a post about my Master’s Paper was picked up by BoingBoing, to being asked by Karen Schneider to take part in a panel about library blogging at ALA Annual 2006 in New Orleans. Another member of that panel was Karen Coombs, and it was after that presentation that she and I were approached to write Library Blogging. Being introduced to Karen C. and working with her on the book was how I met Michelle Boule, and the three of us joined forces to create the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase in 2007. The vast majority of any success that I’ve had in my career, I owe in part to these three amazing librarians.

So happy 1500th post to this crazy blog. It’s been on BoingBoing 4 times, made the Digg homepage once, and has generally been the place I’ve gone to vent, to think, to critique, and to speak my mind on all sorts of things. My attention may have wandered to other pastures (thanks, ALA TechSource and Perpetual Beta) but the home for my writing is here.

Thanks to everyone who has ever read my writing, and thanks to those for whom Pattern Recognition was my introduction. I hope that I can write another of these at 2000, 2500, and 3000 posts.

Categories
Digital Culture Legal Issues

Copyright change in Spain pressured by US

Here’s just one example of why the Wikileak cables are important and deserve to be released, analyzed, and that transparency in government is valuable. From BoingBoing:

Spain’s Congress is about to vote on a new and extremely harsh copyright/Internet law. It’s an open secret that the law was essentially drafted by American industry groups working with the US trade representative.

….

The first 35 of the 115 cables have been released, and they confirm the widespread suspicion: the Spanish government and the opposition party were led around by the nose by the US representatives who are the real legislative authority in Spain.

Here’s a link to an English translation of the El Pais article.