Jason is on his first trip away from home since Eliza was born. I know he’s missing her. She’s missing him, too. He’s usually the one who gives her baths, but yesterday I had to do it. I think she was a little confused.
She’s sleeping like crazy now that all of our company is gone. She was out like a light at 10:15 last night and slept until 7:30 this morning! That’s a new Eliza record!
As an experiment, I created a Google Calendar for Computers in Libraries 2008 and asked a number of my friends to help me fill it in with the schedule. Why? Because Google Calendar is an open standard, and allows people to do all sorts of sharing. People can add the calendar, overlay it with their personal calendar, copy events off….it’s just a much better way of dealing with this sort of information.
If you are interested, the calendar can be found here: HTML – iCal – XML
If you want to be added as an editor, just drop a comment to this post with your gmail address, and I will add you. If this is useful, we’ll see about doing it for other, upcoming library conferences.
Friends Tim and Brian came down from Ohio for a few days, so Eliza got to meet yet more people! She and Tim have the same attention span and bubbly personality, so they got along great!
Many of the librarians that I admire have chimed in on the ITI/Computers in Libraries/Otter Group debacle. I’ve read over lots of the documentation provided, including the FAQ that was mailed out to attempt to assuage our concerns.
On the surface, the idea of a consolidated site for information on the conference seems like a good idea. So why the enormous pushback from the liberati? Several reasons:
The first is the one that David Lee King and others pointed out…the licensing agreement for SWIFT was onerous, to say the least. While they have said the agreement is changing, there is no evidence of said changes yet.
The second is more substantial. It harkens back to Tim Spaulding’s discussion of the difference between tags in LibraryThing and Amazon. Why did the tags in LibraryThing work, and in Amazon they did not? Because the tags in LibraryThing are my tags, they are your tags, they are tags that are used to describe things that are important to you, things we/you own. They are personal.
The tags in Amazon are not…they are potentially things you own, but they are not personal in the same way. There is a low ownership consideration with Amazon…as Tim points out, they don’t even have a way to export your tags.
SWIFT, in its way, is similar. It is a service asking for users….not users asking for a service. It is not personal, it is not needed, and it is not ours. Some of this is an issue with the method in which SWIFT was presented (poor marketing) and some of it is simply that it is a tool that no one needed.
Identify a need, then present a tool. Not the other way around.
Here is Eliza with her cousins Kelsi and Drevin, whom she met for the first time a few days ago. Everyone fell in love with “little E,” as my family calls her. She seemed to have a great time, too, but was totally exhausted by the time they left!
For those that use WordPress, just a note about the upcoming 2.5 release: it rocks on toast. I’ve been using the Release Candidate 1 for WP2.5 for a week or so now, and the improvements in the admin interface are enormous. Better organization, more ajax interaction, just much, much smoother. Every time I’ve gone to do something in the last week I’ve been surprised at the ease.
This isn’t to say that you won’t have to update your plugins, as always…but WP2.5 finally has one-click automagic updating of plugins. This isn’t quite ready for primetime, but it’s very close.
I haven’t dug into the hardcore coding changes yet, but if the things I have noticed are indicative of the things I haven’t yet, I’m really looking forward to this release.
It has been a big week for Eliza: a visit from Nana and cousin Parker, lots of playing with Aunt Chrysty, hanging out on the porch in the warm weather, and several outings for lunch. She’s feeling a lot better, playing more, and working on rolling over every chance she gets. We might get some more visitors later this weekend, if Aunt Kimberly and cousins decide to make the trip from Kentucky.
I guess the ear problems are gone…or she’s outgrowing her fussiness. Or she just LOVES our friend Chrysty, who is in town for a visit. Whatever the cause, Eliza has been a bundle of sunshine lately. Happy, happy, happy. Giggling, smiling, cooing, thrilled to be alive. That’s not to say she doesn’t still get upset when she’s tired, but when she’s awake, she is like a new baby. And she is napping like an absolute champ, in her crib, and for 30 minutes or more at a time. No more little cat naps while in the swing or bouncy chair! Nope, real, honest-to-goodness naps. Aaaaahhhh. Mom breathes a sigh of relief. For now, at least.
Here is a tag cloud for Library Blogging, the upcoming book from myself and Karen Coombs…this is the top 100 terms, ignoring common English words. If you’re wondering what the book is about, here’s a good sampling:
