Eliza has learned to say “What’s that?” and now we’re doomed. It’s not the dreaded “why,” but it’s pretty close. Because she asks all the time, about everything, even when she knows the answer perfectly well. “Eliza, it’s a spoon. You know what a spoon is. You’ve said it since you were 13 months old.”
She’s not saying “Who’s that?” yet, but instead points to strangers and asks “This one?” as in, what’s this one’s name? She doesn’t yet realize that mom and dad don’t know everything.
And my second presentation from my trip to San Diego, on Mobile Technologies:
Here’s my presentation from this morning on the Realtime web for the San Diego Law Library Fall conference. First time I’ve done this one, and I’m really happy with the way it came together.
I think the most fascinating process in Eliza’s growth and development so far is watching her learn about emotions: what they are, how to talk about them, and how to recognize them in others.
Every morning, daddy says, “How do you feel?” And she always says, “Happy!” She also reports on the well-being of her classmates at daycare. So-and-so cries. So-and-so sad. And she knows the word “scary,” and uses it more or less correctly, like when she pointed at the covers of some of Jason’s videogames and said, “Mommy, that’s scary.” So I moved them. She looks carefully at the faces in her books, and tells me which ones are angry, sad, happy, surprised.
But the best of all is hearing her say, “I love you,” which comes out more like “I duv u.” But we know what it means. And it’s awesome.
Entry sign at MTSU Library
Eliza has been going through what some call a “sleep regression.” Probably due to some crazy developmental stuff that’s keeping her body and brain too jacked up to settle down properly, she has decided she hates going to bed. This is the same child who was “Ferberized” at 6 months and has gone to bed easily and happily since then and slept through the night with no problem. All of a sudden, she is afraid of the dark, or doesn’t want to be away from mommy and daddy, or simply doesn’t want to go to bed. So for a week, bedtime has become traumatic for everyone.
We tried a nightlight. It made things worse (creepy shadows). She has plenty of “lovies” in the bed with her and her “bankie,” which is the same one she’s always had. We use the same iron clad (and, until now, successful) wind-down routine: bath, books, singing, bed.
Last night was a little bit better. I’m not sure what made a difference, though. Hopefully every night will get a little better until this phase is finally over.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks monkeying with different looks and feels for a homepage update. For a long while, I’ve had my homepage set as a lifestream, running SweetCron, but decided awhile back that with my tenure dossier coming due that I would like to rework it into something more polished. Also, the lifestream presented me as what I’m doing, and didn’t adequately represent either what I’ve done, nor what I’d like to do in the future.
So: redesign!
I wanted something clean, without a ton of design overhead, but also something that was flexible enough to take whatever I thought to throw at it. I also decided that I wanted to try using a pre-existing framework, specifically as CSS framework, and then tweak it to my needs. After looking around a bit, I decided to use Blueprint, a lovely CSS framework that allowed me to not worry about positioning, other than to figure out how Blueprint does it. Blueprint is extensible, and I wanted tabs, so off I went to the Blueprint Tab plugin.
The basic icons for my “social” tab were found here, and I took the look/feel and created a handful that they didn’t have using Photoshop. I also created the “rollover” images for everything using photoshop, and am using a clever little javascript simpleswap to handle that bit. I also had to install jquery for the first time, for the tab fade effect.
Other tools used in putting this together include: Blip.tv and slideshare for the presentations and videos, scribd for my CV, FriendFeed for my Lifestream, and Meebo and Google Voice for the Contact page.
After getting all the pieces in place, it took some time to work out the bugs. My wife convinced me to stick with the black/green scheme that I’ve been using for years…I’ve used it since graduate school, and I like it because it reminds me of the good old days with the green phosphor CRT terminals.
See what you think, and I’d love to have any feedback, especially if it’s broken in some way. 🙂
Incredible article in Wired this month on the Good Enough Revolution, which explores and explains a set of emergent economic principles that I think are equally applicable to information seeking. There’s a degree to which we really need to start looking hard at economic models in library and information science…I think they can really inform the creation and distribution of the services that we offer. Check out this quote, for example…
…it happens to be a recurring theme in Good Enough products. You can think of it this way: 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment often delivers 80 percent of the value to consumers. That means you can drastically simplify a product or service in order to make it more accessible and still keep 80 percent of what users want—making it Good Enough…
At the OITP panel I was a part of at ALA, I think that Eli and I shocked a few people in the audience when we asserted that quality of information doesn’t matter. That isn’t to say it NEVER matters…I want my doctor and my lawyer to have the best information possible. But for the vast majority of information need, good enough is good enough.
Think about the services in your library, and the amount of effort and resources poured into making your services as good as they can possibly be. What if good enough is really enough, and instead we should be expanding our range of services instead of seeking perfection in any single one? How does that change the way libraries operate?
