Booleanings

OK, so now that my bird flu obsession is in full force, I'll take a break and profess my love for a couple blogs I love: Go Fug Yourself and Dooce.com.

GFY basically skewers the dumb fashion choices stars make. And they do it in a way that's hilarious to someone like me who doesn't give a rat's ass about fashion. Some things worth knowing:

• All the Hiltons are trashhhhyyyy (duh).
  
• The writers have an obsession with George Clooney, that even a straight guy like me can't find fault with.
• I'm also a big fan of the bloat watch and the neck-cord watch (Celebrity Terror Watch), too. It's nice to have a yardstick by which to gauge superstar weight loss and weight gain.
• Finally, don't get started on the Breast Police or Bai Ling.

Why do I, a trained journalist and almost-trained librarian like this trash? First, it's not trash. I don't want to hear that kind of language from you again. Understand? Mostly I think they are good, fun, snarky writers. One can't read (or write) about the bird flu all the time.

That's precisely why I like Dooce.com. While she mostly blogs about life as a former Mormon now living in SLC, she also has goats on her site banner and the text: "this website sux sweat goat balls." What's not to like about that?

Here's a bit more:

My parents raised me Mormon, and I grew up believing that the Mormon Church was true. In fact, I never had a cup of coffee until I was 23-years-old. I had pre-marital sex for the first time at age 22, but BY GOD I waited an extra year for the coffee. There had better be a special place in heaven for me. (from the About this site section)

I especially recommend the following archive sections to get started:

• How to Annoy Me
• Poop
• Boobs

Happy Reading.

Have I mentioned I'm totally freaked out about birdflu? At this point I'm wondering if the L v. I thing will even matter. Sigh... I know it's irrational, but I totally have masks and gloves on my Costco shopping list. I have this feeling that the google news algorithm is biased toward showing bird flu stories. It's on the front page almost every day. However it's hardly ever on the the NYT front page. I really should look into that at some point. Yeah, right. (says the two-post-a-month-blogger).

Note: blogger's spell check replaces "birdflu" with "birthplace." Hmmmm....what's that mean?

More to the point, an anagram for "asian bird flu" is "Fail: is bad. Run! " Sounds like HAL made a boo-boo and is trying to warn us.

Am I going to be a two-post-a-month blogger? What's the point, eh?

Some interesting stuff these days in i-school world. One of our favorite professors, Jens-Erik Mai, is leaving the UW i-School to be associate dean of a new I-School up in Toronto or some other cool Canadian city. Can't blame him. He's Danish and oozes a bit too much cool for Seattle.

Congrats to him, but a bummer for us. I'm taking his indexing and abstracting class right now, and let me tell you, Mr. Mai can even help me enjoy Wilson (even though I want to edit the crap out of him).

Also, (and probably more important for future students) he's one of the "I" people who helps keep the forces of "L" in check. Don't get me wrong. I love L's. But balance is important and I think we're going to be a little L-heavy.

Lemme just say I have total Mac lappy lust. I look at the machines some of my cohort are using and just want one. But, I can't go there. I just can't stand you people and your zealotry.

It's icky.

Here's an example: I was at the IA Summit in Vancouver at the end of March. Samantha Starmer from Microsoft (and a UW iSchool grad) did a session on getting execs to buy off on IA. It was a great, energetic presentation. (As an ex-microsoftie, I gotta say she nailed it. That girl's going places in the company). The one snag: her slides stopped working about halfway through.

I couldn't believe it. People in the crowd were positively snarky. "Get a mac," "Microsoft sucks,"and "Weak," were comments I heard.

To her credit she soldiered on and got the issue resolved by the end -- which, just from observation seemed not to be Windows related at all. Instead, I think the VGA cable wasn't making a connection or something.

The very next day, Dan Brown did a session on "New Strategies for Content Management." Now, it was an solid session (the Content & Templates tied directly to my last quarter's cataloging class which, in turn, made me like this tuition wasn't a total waste!) that focused on trying to apply new metaphors to our content processes. Good stuff.

The interesting thing was, his slides didn't work either. It kind of became a joke -- he'd be ready to advance a slide and would wonder out loud if it was going to work. Mass uproar, right?

Nope. No one said a thing.

Of course, Dan was using a Mac and as a contractor he works with much more popular organizations than Microsoft -- like the postal service and homeland security.

What is up with attitude mac folks? You are scaring me off your sexy white computers.

I'm elitist enough all by myself. I don't need need to saddle my computing choice with that baggage, too.

Every time I venture into the blogosphere I realize I know less about technology than poeple give me credit for. All those years at MS be dammed, I'm probably much closer to the librarians than the junior IT guys in the infomatics program. First thing I want to do is add some categories -- maybe freshtags? Or maybe just toss blogger altogether and go with wordpress? Something else?

I figure if I'm going to put some effort into this effort, I might as well make some effort to get it right. Or something like that.

All I can say is don't going looking for my March archive. It isn't there. I won't make excuses (final projects, end of the quarter, spring break, IA Summit), ahem... but, I do have a lot of interesting topics I've been meaning to cover so I'm just going to throw out a lot of random, undeveloped thoughts over the next couple days. Hey, it's a blog, right?

Ok, I gotta throw this out. Those hilarious fellas at Woot, though hucksters, have launched a pretty good one at iPod Church Rev. Jobs. I'm sure you've seen the new ipod stereo/boombox/HiFi/Life accessory announced just today (or maybe yesterday. Who can keep track?). It's pretty. It's white. I'm sure they'll sell tons. That's what they do down there in Cupertino.

Anyway, Woot nailed it (him?) with their pitch of an "iPod-compatible" Denon home theatre. The timing itself is no mean feat when you consider Woot's business model and the usual lack of lead time from Apple on product announcements. It's not like they (woot) have a lot of products on the shelf they can whip out at leisure (seemingly unlike apple. what's next?). BTW, if you didn't know, Woot has this wacky e-commerce model where they sell one product each day and when it's gone, the store is closed for the day. Next day, new product. Disclosure: I'm not a customer but could be some day.

I just read it again and still love it ... here's a snippet for your reading pleasure, but check the whole thing:

"In response, I ask only one question: is your precious Denon system white? (pause for stunned epiphanies throughout audience, followed by thunderous ovation) Because if you’re still listening to silver audio components, you’re listening to the past. Besides, who watches DVDs anymore? Nowadays we’re all staring at album art on our 2.5” iPod screens, right? I know I am, and I’m what you might call a stereophile."

Proof that someone at Microsoft is working (it's not the lazy-B yet): The Windows live local virtual earth street level demo is pretty cool.

My first thought is "neato." My second thought is, "big deal, what would you do with it?" which is quickly folloed by wow, this could really be useful for something." The more integration of gps, mapping, and video we have, the more we're going to see these hybrid apps. Some of them are going to stick -- they've gotta. Thanks for MS to throwing this one up against the wall.

OK, so I'm all of a sudden thinking about how an application like this could be used in the, stick with me, library world. OK, thinking out loud here. One of the problems with catalogs (and online searching) is that you lose the browsability (serendipity they like to call it) of the stacks. The idea that you may think you want one title, but when you go to get it from the stacks, you find another document that you didn't think you need, but is the best match for your need. Well, in online catalogs you have access a bunch of titles that correspond to your search, but their context to each other is (other than fitting your search terms) non-existent. You read that document electronically (and context free) and go on your merry way. Poof! So much for serendipity.

But, what if you could do your searching in the catalog, and then, when you went to electronically retrieve your document, you could "browse" -- via a technology like virtual earth street level -- the other items shelved with your document... Then to take it a step further, would if you could flip through the scanned pages of all those books and make your serendipitous choice (via the -- insert your favorite search engine name - Books project).

I'm sure if I thought about this for more than 15 minutes I could shoot some holes in it, but just for a second, it sounds pretty compelling. Cool.

"Over one billion songs have now been legally purchased and downloaded around the globe, representing a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the Internet." -- Steve Jobs

Hmmm…. 42 Million iPods, another 60 million other digital media players (probably a low estimate), with say, an average of 1000 songs/each on them. I’m not a math major, but my uniformed figures lead me to believe around 100 BILLION songs (and that's not even thinking about the terabytes of music on computer hard drives) are floating around on mp3 players. Hey, Steve, where’d those other 99 billion songs come from? Vinyl?

I don’t know. I’d have a hard time calling that a major force against music piracy.