Brinley does the Running Man dance
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Ten career lessons learned the hard way
I’m approaching 20 years of working in the library and information science profession. Here are some of the career lessons I’ve learned in that time.
Lesson #1: Your career is NOT your life. If it is, you are guaranteeing yourself a life of unhappiness and disappointment.
Lesson #2: Being a leader in your field or organization is not a position.
Lesson #3: It is more important to have the respect of your coworkers and those who report to you than the favor of your management.
Lesson #4: You will hardly ever get the compensation and recognition that you deserve.
Lesson #5: Find a work environment that values your strengths and abilities instead of one that expects you to change who you are to fit in.
Lesson #6: If there is no opportunity to grow and learn new things in your current work environment, look elsewhere.
Lesson #7: Workplace values are extremely important. In this regard, actions definitely speak louder than words.
Lesson #8: It is vital to treat coworkers as real people and to care about them.
Lesson #9: Many, perhaps most, career promotions are not given on the basis of merit.
Lesson #10: Balance is everything, particularly balance between work life and personal life.
Overdrive nonsense
The Overdrive nonsense continues. Overdrive, for those who may not be aware, is a vendor that provides access to ebooks and audiobooks for library patrons to check out, similar to print library books.
I’ve been pretty critical of them in the past. I wish they had improved enough to warrant some good words. One of the biggest criticisms I have of them is that their site does not allow users to automatically search or browse available ebooks or audiobooks. In other words, there is no easy way to just look at ebooks or audiobooks that are available to check out. Instead, this inane approach of theirs forces users to check each and every ebook or audiobook to see if it is checked out or not. Think of a “real” library experience where this issue doesn’t even exist.
Well, imagine my pleasant surprise when I noticed that their mobile site recently was enhanced to include this feature. The photo below is a screenshot taken from my iPhone to show what this looks like. My pleasant surprise quickly faded to irritation when it became obvious that this feature was implemented only for keyword search, not browse. How lame is that? It is hard for me to comprehend how the persons who thought this up and implemented it could possibly think this was a fix? Overdrive, if you are listening, please, please put more thought into feature enhancements in the future. Especially try to think of how regular library users might use your service. You have clearly not done your homework.
My kids
This the latest photo I have of my kids. We were at Lincoln Park Zoo last weekend. They all look so grown up!
Mobile access should not be an afterthought
I’m a heavy user of mobile devices including an iPhone 4 and a first generation iPad. I am also a very heavy consumer of news and information. Most of that consumption these days is via one of these mobile devices. So a long overdue realization really hit me, finally, this morning as I sat on my couch, trying to pore through as much news coverage of the huge, multiple tragedies in Japan as I could. Why on earth should articles, media, and other online information content still be created for the desktop PC browser first, and mobile devices as a distant afterthought?
I know, I know. There are many good reasons why this is the case. but frankly, I don’t care. As a mobile device user, I am fed up with the poor user experience I am forced into when consuming information that is not created with mobile devices in mind. I think that content creators and providers should by now think FIRST about making their content friendly for mobile devices and THEN for desktop PC browsers, not the other way around.
Every recent technology trend or study about adoption of mobile vs. desktop devices supports this. Mobile devices, broadly defined, are the present as well as the future. We need a sea change NOW in terms of content creator/publisher thinking! It is crazy, from a user perspective, that we are building and distributing content, still, based upon what is quickly becoming the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve experimented with lots and lots of different methods that try to ameliorate this situation: apps like FlipBoard, Zite, Google’s Mobilizer service, Readability, and many others. Each one is clever, inventive, and useful, but each has its limitations and doesn’t present a complete solution. I believe that the real answer lies in building for mobile first and primarily. Only then will the user experience improve.
Like many others, I am quite used to dealing with a poor user experience when trying to consume information, news, etc. on my mobile devices. But increasingly I ask myself, why should I have to put up with it?
Little man
This little man turned seven yesterday. Cohen is a sweetie and I can’t believe he is the ripe old age of seven already!
Some thoughts on e-books
E-books are everywhere these days. I’ve tried just about every platform and delivery variation that exists, and there are a lot of them. I like the concept of them; it’s the delivery and packaging of them that I despise so much.
Last year was arguably the breakthrough year for e-books in the conscience of the general public. Millions of e-book readers were sold (think Kindle, Nook, iPad) and there were widespread reports that e-book readers were one of the most popular Christmas gifts. The most popular e-book provider for libraries to provide e-books for their patrons — Overdrive — reports that it is overwhelmed by demand as a result.
Overdrive, to me, is the poster child for what’s still very wrong about the packaging and delivery of e-books. In terms of criticism, where do I start? The incomprehensible user interface? The complicated process of figuring out what your local library has actually subscribed to? The horrible experience (which has only recently been improved a bit) of trying to check out and download an e-book on a mobile device like the iPhone 4 that I use? And here’s another criticism that is exacerbated by the huge increase in demand that I previously mentioned: the inability to limit one’s search/browse to just those e-books that are available for checkout. Last night as I lay in bed I used my iPad to try to find a new e-book to read on Overdrive. I limited my browsing to e-books available in ePub format. There were about 125 pages (each with about 20 results) of books to choose from. I spent half an hour painstakingly paging through the results to find an e-book — ANY e-book — that was avaiable to check out. I wasn’t even bothering to search/browse by subject or known author or anything sensible like that. I just wanted to first see what e-books were actually available and then see if any of those looked interesting to read. But could I do that? NO, of course not.
And then there is the issue of Adobe’s idiotic DRM that goes with checking out ePub format e-books on Overdrive. Users are required to create an Adobe ID before they can actually read an e-book they have checked out. I have a problem with that, first of all, because I resent having to created a superfluous account with Adobe and risk having to be on their registered list for marketing of other Adobe products that I couldn’t care less about. But it gets worse. I had an e-book that I was reading on my iPhone 4 and I had verified my Adobe ID. Unfortunately I had a problem with my iPhone 4 that required me to restore it to factory settings, wiping out everything on the device and starting over from scratch. I restored everything on my iPhone include the Overdrive app. The e-book I was reading was still checked out to me so I downloaded it again. However, in the meantime I had forgotten my Adobe ID password and had to reset it. When I tried to access the e-book and was asked to verify my Adobe ID, I was told that basically I couldn’t read the e-book because it was already assigned to a different user. Argh. Adobe’s DRM is apparently very stupid.
I don’t have a Kindle although I’ve used one a little bit. I don’t have a Nook but I’ve seen and held one for a little bit. As previously mentioned, I do have an iPhone 4 and an iPad. I think both devices easily and clearly trump Kindle and Nook in terms of e-book reader capability. I particularly despise Amazon’s proprietary Kindle e-book format; kudos to Barnes & Noble, Apple, and others for pushing the ePub format instead. I have to say that of all of the e-book reader software I’ve used, though, Amazon’s Kindle software is probably the best.
Lots of other important issues revolve around e-books, including what their popularity means for public libraries, which are still heavily tied to the print — or, as I like to call it, the “offline” — world. There is a big impact on booksellers too, especially independent booksellers. I was interested to read an online article about this very issue in today’s Daily Herald, which mentioned my all time favorite independent bookstore in St. Charles, IL: Town House Books. (Interestingly, the owner of this bookstore sees no noticeable impact.) Other complicated issues about e-books include copyright, DRM, etc. Overall I am happy about the rising popularity of e-books and I plan to continue to read them. But e-book providers — Overdrive in particular — have a long way to go to make the user experience palatable.
Ten years ago today…
…our son, Tristan, was born. Hard to believe he is already that age! Happy birthday, Tristan!
Christmas is the season for stress
I haven’t written anything here of any substance for a very long time. I’m not exactly sure why except that I haven’t felt the need or compulsion to do so. One of the thoughts that has been distilling inside for a long time is that this whole Web 2.0 / social media / whatever-you-want-to-call-it thing is becoming more and more obviously a giant exercise in self gratification and self glorification. And I have participated in that for a long time, including in this blog. It’s ironic that I am therefore expressing that thought here, but oh well…
It’s the season of Christmas and like most of the last ten years of our married life, Michele and I are at the stage where there is way too much to do, too little time in which to do it all, and we’re really overwhelmed and stressed out. There is so much to do just around the house, for example. We are real people with normal kids. Translated: Our house is a big mess. Our garage is a mess, too; so much so that we can’t do the usual thing and shift messes from inside the house to the garage. What, oh, what, are we going to do? And how on earth are we going to get it done in time for Christmas and New Year’s?
Why is it that this season is so stressful, always, always, always?! Ugh.
Yesterday was a prime example of this. We had plans to do lots of things, starting with dropping off one of our cars to have the transmission fixed at a place that’s about 40 minutes away. I drove the van to be fixed, while Michele drove the other one. We succeeded in dropping the van off and then I noticed that the van Michele and Keegan usually drive was way overdue for an oil change and tire rotation. I thought it’d be best to get that done right away so we went to the nearest Wal-Mart, figuring we could drop off the van to have that stuff done while at the same time, doing some needed shopping for groceries, stocking stuffers, and whatever else. When we arrived at the store, we were told that they were short-staffed and that something that would normally take at most an hour would take two to two and a half hours. We decided to go ahead and wait. I won’t go into all the details of what happened except to say that our experience was nightmarish due to incompetent Wal-Mart staff. What was supposed to take two hours stretched to twice as long and we left that store over four hours later. Talk about the ultimate nightmare: to be stuck in a Wal-Mart store during the busiest shopping time of the year, for hours on end! I’ve often said that if (and I don’t buy this personally at all) Disneyland is supposedly the happiest place on earth, then any Wal-Mart I’ve ever been in is the saddest place on earth.
As I write this post, winter weather has us in its grip. Snow has covered the ground, more snow is on the way, the temps have dropped dramatically, and the wind has really kicked up. I’m trying to think of how nice it is to be inside with a cozy cup of coffee, relaxing on the couch. But I’m too stressed and overwhelmed to enjoy it. ‘Tis the story of the season.
Boundary Waters
All of us except for Keegan spent last week in a remote cabin near Ely, Minnesota – one of my favorite places on Earth. We had such a great time! We saw lots of wildlife that I would not have expected to see, including a fisher (a type of large weasel), many bald eagles, a sable fox, and even a moose. I have been wanting to see one of those in that area for many years.
Check out the photos on my 2010 photos page.