Book recommendation: Don't make me think, Steve Krug

The instructor of my Library Software class had a few book recommendations for us when we began. At the time, I was also taking a Reader's Advisory class, so most of my reading time was spent on books I'd selected for that. I got the e-book of Steve Krug's Don't make me think and kept it until I could choose what I was reading again.

I F'd my blog a little more. It was always pretty F'd up. 

This is a great book! If you are at all interested in web design or in software, grab this book and give it a read. It's not long - the author stated he wanted to write a book that could be read during one plane ride - and it's pretty funny, or at least I think so. The concept is pretty simple: web navigation should be as easy and intuitive as possible; don't make the user slow down to think. I'm not finished it yet, but I've already made a small change on this site because of this book: I've changed the colours of the links so they're brighter and more obvious. I'm pretty happy with the rearranged sidebar, too, though I shifted that around before reading the book - that was a result of one of the LS classes, too, which touched on the F-layout design.

Open cover letters

I recently had to write a cover letter. I don't particularly enjoy writing them; I don't like to toot my own horn. Despite that, apparently they were impressed by the cover letter and it may have been what got me an interview. Anyway, here is a site with cover letters from anonymous cover letters from hired librarians and archivists. I may have snagged this from Only connect a while ago.

Thing 8 - Google Calendar and Eggs in Baskets

It's a civic holiday today, and you know what that means! It means I go to my grandmother's and help move stuff around. It also means I can catch up on my neglected little blog.

Thing 8 for CPD23: Google Calendars! They seem pretty useful. I'll admit I've tried to use them now and again but they never stick. Google Calendars do remind me a little of the shared calendars I use at work now. I have to put any meetings or training seminars I'm going to into said shared calendar. It's not the most intuitive name to look up, either, but it'll do. It also flashes little warnings when meetings are coming up, which would probably be more useful if I was actually at my computer and not in a file room.

And now for a cautionary tale: do not put all your eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is Google.

You may have heard that Google+ has been deleting accounts. There are a few reasons, but some people are being locked out for not using their real name, or at least what Google thinks is their real name. This is not so good news for people with screen identities, but the greater problem is losing access to your entire Google account if you have been storing all your data there. DON'T DO THIS.

Keeping all your stuff in one online 'cloud' is an interesting idea. Access it from anywhere, blah blah blah, but always keep backups. Actually, make the cloud your backup. Think of all the things Google can manage: calendars, correspondence, contacts, documents. Now think about what would happen if you suddenly lost access to that data.

On July 15 2011 you turned off my entire Google account. You had absolutely no reason to do this, despite your automated message telling me your system “perceived a violation.” I did not violate any Terms of Service, either Google’s or account specific ToS, and your refusal to provide me with any proof otherwise makes me absolutely certain of this. And I would like to bring to your attention how much damage your carelessness has done.

My Google account was tied to nearly every product Google has developed, meaning that I lost everything in those accounts as well. I was also in the process of consolidating everything into my one Google account. (…)

While the long post the article quotes the paragraphs above from has been taken down, there are other examples of this happening.

I would like to introduce you to something. That black box to the left is an external hard drive. Anyone who's ever had a computer meltdown and lost their data can tell you how much that stinks. This external hard drive allows me to back up all the files I would very much mind losing. It is small, portable, and has a lot of space. This is where you put the kinds of things you don't want to lose.

To the right is something called a day planner. They are also small, portable, and come in a delightful array of styles and colours. You write down your appointments and notes in them. These are both very useful tools.

Please remember, if you hand all your data to Google (or any other one 'place'), you may rue the day.

10 Reasons Geeks Should Blog

Last one for today, I promise! From Geeks are Sexy, 10 Reasons Why Geeks Should Blog.

If you are interested in library studies, there is a good chance you're a geek. Or at least if you're a student there's a good chance you're a geek, from what I can tell from my fellow classmates. And by 'geek' I don't necessarily mean video-game playing, t-shirt wearing, socially awkward Star Trek fans - I mean people who get really excited about atypical things, like puzzles or Elvis memorabilia or, say, books. Anyway, guest blogger Chris Garrett provides the following ten reasons, which apply to library bloggers, too:

1. Clout from search engines. Google your name, get your website right up there in the results.
2. Career – "Once you have a good archive of wisdom to share, it can be of great help for your career, for furthering your job opportunities or getting freelance work."
3. Education - Stay up to date with industry changes and news.
4. Opportunities – Getting your name more well-known and your thoughts spread brings a wealth of opportunities, from startup gigs, freelance work, to speaking engagements and book deals.
5. Gadgets – "It is not all business and careers. Many bloggers get sent free gadgets to review. In my case, the freebies tend to be books, but hey… it’s all good!"
6. Attention – If people listen to what you say, people will want you to say more.
7. Communication – Yay interpersonal skills!
8. Networking – Who you know! Maybe you're better online than you are in person, but it still helps.
   
9. Writing – A geek who can write is a more valuable geek.
10. Money

Okay, numbers five and ten are in the realm of fantasy. I like how the author says he mostly 'only' gets books, like that's not great.

That list just has a summary; it's worth reading the full article. Cheers!

Thing 4 - Current Awareness

Thing 4 for the 23 Things for Professional Development program is Current Awareness. It focuses on RSS Feeds, Twitter, and Pushnote.

RSS Feeds
At least I already have RSS feeds (mostly) covered. I use Google Reader to manage feeds from various sites I'm following. My Miss Scarlet Gmail address just follows CPD23 and library blogs and it's pretty handy. It's not so handy with sites that update very frequently (like LISNews), which tend to overwhelm the feed. You lose a little something without being able to see a blog's design, but the counter to this is having something very plain to read which doesn't advertise 'hey, look what I'm looking at right now!'

Here are the sites I'm currently tracking in Google Reader with the Miss Scarlet account:

• A Librarian learns about Web 2.0!
• All Comprehension is Temporary
• Boolean Berry: Adventures in Librarianship
• I Can Read Big Words Now: A Newly Qualified Librarian's CPD23 Blog
• Librarian in a Nutshell
• London library girl
• Notes from the Basement
• Nouveau Librarian
• Odd Librarian Out
• ook librarian
• Rachel's Smaller CPD23 Adventure
• Reflections and ponderings: a librarian's perspective
• Rhythm & Knowledge
• Sarah Said Library
• The Hobbit Hole
• Trails and Trials of a Trainee Librarian
• Wee Librarian
• Younggeekylibrarian's Blog

Some of you have not been posting!

Twitter
Oh, Twitter. I've tried to have Twitter accounts before - a personal one I made just to get into the Library of Congress without intention to actually post anything (I wound up replying to tweets from a friend about a wedding I couldn't attend, for which I appreciated the live updates even if I couldn't quite figure out why said friend was messing with his phone the whole time), and an account for the older version of this blog, Lagomorph Watson (don't worry, all the old posts are imported here, don't bother to go looking). I tried to use the latter to follow a site or two, but again, post quantity was crazy.

I am admittedly at a loss with regards to how to use Twitter in relation to this site. I suppose I could tweet new posts, which would be redundant if anyone was using feeds but useful if they were not. Do I tweet anything else? Is this where I can share things that aren't library-related? Doesn't quite seem so. In any case, I made a new one: lib_scarlet.

Having a personal brand that includes a colour scheme is useful here. While picking a template for my shiny new Twitter feed, I just had to look at ones with red. That narrows down selection!

Pushnote
I decided to link my Pushnote to my Twitter Account. Hopefully, by marrying these two services I'm not sure about, I'll get more use out of them, kind of like Voltron except without any awesome cartoon battles. I'm not linking to Facebook, which I am still keeping separate.

Now let's see how fast my inbox fills up and how long I actually keep Twitter and Pushnote.

The Rosetta Disk

The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.

News from the Rosetta Project of interest to archivists and others! I like how it's not platform-dependent.

For the extreme longevity version of the Rosetta database, we have selected a new high density analog storage device as an alternative to the quick obsolescence and fast material decay rate of typical digital storage systems. This technology, developed by Los Alamos Laboratories and Norsam Technologies, can be thought of as a kind of next generation microfiche. However, as an analog storage system, it is far superior. A 2.8 inch diameter nickel disk can be etched at densities of 200,000 page images per disk, and the result is immune to water damage, able to withstand high temperatures, and unaffected by electromagnetic radiation. This makes it an ideal backup for a long-term text image archive. Also, since the encoding is a physical image (no 1's or 0's), there is no platform or format dependency, guaranteeing readability despite changes in digital operating systems, applications, and compression algorithms.

Also, it looks really cool.

David Lee King's 10 Presentation Tips

As I continue with my library science program, I'm finding that presentations are being stressed as important. I wasn't expecting that when I entered the program! Librarians - all kinds - have to learn how to make good presentations. They have to learn how to make people believe something they didn't believe yesterday; it's a survival technique to make sure libraries and librarians (and information specialists) keep getting funding and keep getting acknowledged as important.

Some people in my program are better at presentations that others. They tend to be the ones who volunteer to present for group projects, and you can see their skills improve with each presentation. Those presentations help them stand out from the crowd, give them practice with selling their ideas, or ideas in general. It's like being a wallflower at a dance - sure, you might be more comfortable, but you're more likely to be overlooked.

I don't like presenting. I'm not afraid of it and I am willing to do it and I make myself volunteer to do it, but I can't say I find it fun very often (Children's Readership Advisory book presentations are an exception). I'm not all that outgoing a person, either; I'm pretty shy. (Yes, a shy librarian. Who'd've thought?) I guess my tip would be to treat presentations of any sort as a performance: you are acting, you are pretending to be a presenter, and your acting can trick people into thinking you're comfortable.

David Lee King is a much more accomplished presenter than I am, and he has a whole list of tips for presenting.

10 Tips to Do Presentations Like Me:

1. Don't Use Templates
2. Use Presenter Notes
3. Use Presenter View
4. Learn Your PC
5. Use Screenshots
6. Do What You Said You'd Do
7. Tidy up Those Transitions
8. Rehearse
9. Interact with the Audience
10. It's a Performance

Oh hey, look at that last one.

Sir Patrick Stewart Geeks Out About the Internet

Scott Cawelti On the Meaning of 'Elite'

Scott Cawelti on the meaning of the word elite and how it comes with a stigma.

Whenever you want something done well, you seek a member of the elite, meaning a specialist, a board-certified doctor, a recognized, experienced expert, someone who's practiced a craft or art beyond an apprenticeship.

If you don't believe in an elite, you're welcome to take your chances with the quacks, frauds, con artists and all-around amateurs who've learned the talk, but didn't finish, or even start, the walk. Good luck with that.

Sometimes it makes me think of 7331 hax0rs. Oh, internet. What have you done to vocabulary?

Penguin Books' Spinebreakers

First off, kudos for coming up with a badass name about reading. I almost want to join just to say I am a member of SPINEBREAKERS. Instant street cred! Sadly, I am too old. The site is for teenagers 13-18.

Inspired (?) by Facebook, Penguin Books has introduced a social site dedicated to reading. Site founder Anna Raffery, managing director of Penguin Digital, said:

"There are too many distractions out there for teenagers which pushes reading down the list of hobbies. Even other social networks are a major distraction for teens, which is why I hope giving reading its own social network, which is written and edited by teenagers, will help keep reading relevant in the digital age."

Though not intended to be commercial, the site does feature brand-related promotions, but does not have any commercial advertising (and more kudos are given for that).

I know I would've been all over this site as a teenager aged 13-18. I love talking about books but never had the opportunity to do so in high school. One reason why I enjoy my library technician program is that finally I have a large group of associates who like to read.

Ancient Tweets Were Made in Stone and Clay

Time to play some catchup after Thanksgiving!

Let's make science interesting by comparing it to Twitter!

It was interesting anyway!

When ancient scribes invented the world's first systems of writing by cutting symbols into stone and clay, they unleashed an anxiety the Facebook generation can relate to: worry about how the new technology might upend their culture.

As the technology caught on in Egypt and Mesopotamia, ancient writers recorded the anxiety of some in Pharaonic Egypt that the written word would impair memory and turn humans into ignorant fools.

Maybe Amun had something, though:

...Amun predicted trouble for readers and writers.

He said it would cause forgetfulness in writers because they would not use their memory. Moreover, he predicted, readers would give only the appearance of knowing things while remaining "ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise but only appear wise."

Social Media and Death

From Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl: Social Media and Death. Excellent discussion in the comments.

I think the internet in general (including Facebook) has affected the way I react to news, yes. I know more about the personal triumphs (and tragedies) of people I know or once knew. I've been active online for over half my life now and I've 'met' a lot of people over the years, some of whom have passed or knew someone who passed. 'News' has become more real now, as I found last week when my brother's friend's grandfather disappeared, his body found days later in the woods. The family used Facebook to spread the word and keep people updated on the situation. Facebook allowed me to give my condolences as well.

It's hard, sometimes, when someone far away has died and there's no way to attend a funeral. My brother experienced that earlier this year when his Guildmaster in Warcraft was killed by a drunk driver. He organized a memorial meeting online and that helped people with their grieving process. At least I think it helped with his grieving process. Maybe it seems silly - a Warcraft funeral, really? - but these connections we make with people happen in all kinds of ways nowadays. As unlimited as we are now forming new connections, we are still limited in some ways.

I for one am glad to have met as many wonderful people as I have, even if I haven't met all of them face-to-face.

[Related to the blog post: I also read Where is Raed? back in 2003. Read more about it on Wikipedia. One entry I recall vividly is the one where a guest blogger and Salam were talking about the best ways to duct tape windows and lavendar scented candles. They didn't duct tape the candles, it was just mentioned that... oh, go read it.]

"One day, like in Afghanistan, those journalists will get bored and go write about Syria or Iran; Iraq will be off your media radar. Out of sight, out of mind. Lucky you, you have that option. I have to live it."

Twitter Police

I've been snickering at this one for a while: some Twitter users take it upon themselves to correct the spelling, capitalization, and grammar of other posters.

“It would be kind of nice if people cleaned up their grammar a little bit and typed in lowercase, and made the Internet a little bit smarter,” said one of them, Nate Fanaro, a 28-year-old computer programmer in Buffalo, whose Twitter handle is CapsCop.

Last October, Mr. Fanaro wrote a simple program that detects tweets written in capital letters and automatically sends one of several snappy responses, like “This isn’t MySpace so maybe you should turn your caps lock off.” So far, he has issued more than 130,000 of these helpful reminders, including at least 205 to one particular user, a woman in Singapore. (Oddly, with little effect.)

“Some people don’t really understand that it’s just not good Internet etiquette” to type in all capital letters, Mr. Fanaro said.

Yes, he and the other Twitter cops do get quite a backlash, much to their delight. Mr. Fanaro posts a phone number on his Twitter profile page, and his voice mail is full of death threats and foulmouthed rants. For laughs, he sometimes takes his phone to a bar and plays the messages for his friends.

Good luck, guys. That stuff's been in decline ever since the internet expanded itself from just the nerds and geeks. (And as a nerdy geek, sometimes I miss those days, but most days I'm glad everything else has expanded, too - meaning it's easier to do research.)

The National Braille Challenge

June 26th was the day of The National Braille Challenge, a competition where the best blind students in the US and Canada compete for prizes and savings bonds. They are tested in areas like reading comprehension, braille spelling, chart and graph reading, proofreading and braille speed and accuracy.

"This competition is unique in that it tests a very specific skill. The great thing about The Braille Challenge, is that it gives us the opportunity to celebrate braille literacy and bring this issue to the attention of the public,” said Nancy Niebrugge, director of The Braille Challenge. “Most of the participants who make it to the national competition are the only blind students in their school. They go through their entire lives being the exception. This competition gives them the opportunity to build camaraderie among kids who have shared similar life experiences."

Very cool! And hopefully another reason to fight the decline of learning Braille.

Earthquake Twittering

Okay, I admit it: Twitter can be useful.

On June 23rd I was sitting at a computer when I thought I heard a truck go by. A really big truck, for a really long time, and everything started to shake. Within a few seconds I figured out it wasn't a super monstrosity truck passing by, but an earthquake.

It's been a long time since I've been in an earthquake - years and years and years. It was unsettling. Once I was convinced it was over, I registered it at The US Geographical Survey Earthquake Hazards Program site and then started Googling to see what news there was. Nothing that fast - except Twitter.

Lo and behold, checking on Twitter's front page gave me oodles of information. I learned how far the quake had gone and got reasonable guesses as to how far from the epicentre I was. Instantly. It was... useful. It wasn't just about people reporting on what they'd had for lunch. It was actual stuff I was interested in.

Disturbing.

Letters With Character

Letters With Character is a fun project encouraging people to write letters to fictional characters. Very cute; also funny and touching at times.

It also reminds me of a book I enjoyed when I was younger called Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary, even though that was a book about a kid writing to his favourite author. I suppose it's because it seems like the kid, Leigh, is writing to a figure that will never write back, just like a fictional character. It was a funny book and I can't remember if Mr. Henshaw ever wrote back. I think he did.

Execution Twitter

Is using Twitter to announce an execution appropriate? Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff thought it was alright.

"I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims."

While Twitter's Tweets are 'legitimate' enough to be included in the Library of Congress, how appropriate are they in this situation? I'd say not at all. Mark Shurtleff Tweeted about an execution he was involved in. He Tweeted. Say it a few times, think about how silly that sounds. Tweeting. Tweeting about someone's death.

I have no sympathy for the man executed; it's more that I imagine that would be a terrible thing for a family member or other relative to hear about. It's irreverent, and even if they guy was horrible, it's still not quite appropriate respect for the taking of another life. Even if it's by death squad shooting.

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.org

Snaked from Wired, who in turn link to the New Yorker website - No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org.

I don't know about you, but I kind of feel like a secret agent just reading about it.

TED Talk: 4Chan

The virtues (and downfalls) of anonymity on the internet. Mostly I like the Dusty story.

Spelling Bee Protests

Four people dressed in bee costumes protested the Scripps Spelling Bee in Washington, DC.

According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for 'fruit' to be spelled as 'froot'...

While I agree literacy is important, I don't think dumbing language down will help anyone. In fact, I think it might be UNGOOD. Perhaps DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD.