Monthly Archives: February 2007

I thought it wouldn’t come to this

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I thought it wouldn’t come to this…but I have decided to make the switch from Bloglines to Google Reader as the web-based news aggregator of choice. I have been experiencing too many delays in post updates in Bloglines lately (see a recent post by Walt Crawford on his blog along with the lengthy set of comments about this very issue). I don’t know why this is occurring but I am tired of waiting for things to get better. I have used Bloglines for a long time and although I waffled a bit when Google Reader first came out (I wrote a post about it some time ago), I decided to stick with Bloglines because of some annoying features, or lack of features, in Google Reader. Bloglines also made some good changes to their interface and that helped keep me a faithful user. When I began having persistent problems with delays in Bloglines, I thought I’d go back and have another look at Google Reader. I am glad I did, because in the meantime, Google has made a lot of fixes to the interface and improved it a lot. One of the things I most liked about Bloglines was its intuitive interface and support for keystroke shortcuts which are easy to use. Google Reader has had that from the beginning, too, but they weren’t as intuitive to use, I thought. And keystroke shortcuts are a big deal for me when it comes to using a news aggregator. It has taken me a few days to become accustomed to the Google Reader specific shortcuts, but I think I’m pretty proficient with them now and I am quite happy with the whole interface. Sorry, Bloglines, but for a service that is built upon the premise of timely delivery of information, I just can’t stick with you when I can’t rely upon you for timely delivery.

WorldCat Identities

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Like many others I am really intrigued by the recently unveiled WorldCat Identities project (http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/). Just for fun I entered a few family members’ names. For example, works by or about my grandfather, Stanley McCallum, are mentioned here and ones by my brother, Kevin, are shown here. Ok, maybe it’s just a librarian-geeky kind of thing, but I think it’s cool.

Just snow you know

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We are having lots of snow fall here and I am thankful to be looking at it from inside the house rather than having to go out there and drive around in it. It is appropriate that I am currently reading the three little ones The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder when I put them to bed each night. I doubt I’ll ever experience a winter as severe as that one, although it seems to me that winters back when I was growing up were much more severe than they are now. I especially remember the winters of ‘77 through ‘79, when snow piled up so high on each side of the streets in our little town that we joked about how it looked like Moses parted the Red Sea.

The Dixie Chicks + The Simpsons

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We were able to watch part of the Grammy’s last night. I normally don’t pay a lot of attention to award shows like this, but last night’s show stood out to me for negative reasons. Make it three negatives: the three women who make up the Dixie Chicks. It would be really difficult for me to point to a musical act in recent memory who behave as childishly and with such little grace as the Dixie Chicks. I thought it fitting for Natalie Maines — their chief mouthpiece — to quote the Simpsons in her acceptance speech for one of the five awards they were given last night. What better way to describe them? Do I differ from them in terms of political leanings? Sure. Do I disagree with their “platform” and their victim attitude? Sure. Do I think they are incredibly gifted, amazing musicians and vocalists, some of the best, possibly ever? Sure. Do I like many of their songs? Sure. Do I agree that they should have the freedom to say what they like? Sure. The Bible says, “Out of the heart, the mouth speaks.” What Emily Robison, Natalie Maines and Martie Maguire choose to say reveals much of what they are like inside. Based on what I’ve seen and heard from them, I hope some day the Dixie Chicks will grow up.

Thoughts on the future of e-journal management and access

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“Thoughts on the future of e-journal management and access” is the title of a book chapter I wrote and submitted late last year for a book edited by Wayne Jones entitled E-Journal Management and Access. It is the concluding chapter of that work, which will be published sometime this year. My piece will also be published in the Journal of Electronic Resource Description and Access (JERDA), also edited by Wayne.

I turned in this contribution so unbelievably late, and didn’t do as good and thorough a job on it as I should have, that I am still trying to get past the guilt I feel about the whole thing. I will investigate the possibility of linking to a pre-print version sometime soon.

No teaching this year

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Yesterday I made a decision to not teach a graduate course this year. I was asked again to teach Technical Services Functions in UIUC GSLIS’s LEEP program (http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/leep/), and I was grateful to be asked. But given the situation with Michele, she and I both felt it would be wise to not do anything extra for the foreseeable future. I am struggling just to fulfill my regular job duties at times and I feel quite distracted as it is. My boss told me she would fully support me if I wanted to teach again, which was nice.

This was a difficult decision to make. Although I know I have failed at it in a lot of ways, I enjoy teaching very much. Each time I teach this course, I gain more experience and become a bit better at doing it. The interaction with students is invigorating and it forces me to think in greater depth than I usually do about the whys and wherefores of technical services librarianship.

I am feeling kind of sad about this situation, yet I know it is the right decision. I hope some day I will have another opportunity to teach this or another course.

Photo features in WordPress

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During the last few days I’ve been working on some enhancements to FML. One of them was to upgrade to the latest WordPress release, and unlike the last time I upgraded, the process went off without a hitch. Another thing I added to FML is better photo features, thanks to a wonderful plugin developed by Joe Tan of tan tan noodles (http://www.tantannoodles.com/) called Flickr Photo Album. I had tried using an earlier version of this plugin a while ago and wasn’t quite satisfied. The latest version, compatible with WordPress 2.1, is stellar. The most visible part of the plugin for FML readers is the new “Recent Photos” section in the lefthand navigation. A link at the bottom of the recent photos will take you to a new photo page where you can browse through all of my Flickr photo sets without leaving FML. I am still trying to figure out how to make the photo pages look better via CSS tweaks, but I like the functionality that is there.