Ready for PrimeTime

I am switching over to movabletype. There is definitely more of a learning curve, but It seems to be more customizable, and it has quite a few more advanced features. The folks at weblogs.us have been great, but if you decide to go with them, just remember, they are hosting these blogs out of the goodness of their hearts, so it may take a while for them to get you set-up.

I would appreciate it if those of you who have links to this blog would switch them to The Fiddling Librarian 2.0.

Here is the RSS feed for my new blog

My new movabletype Weblog:The Fiddling Librarian II

I just got my movabletype site set up. You can see it here. Pretty boring so far. I don't have time to work on it right now....but I have great plans!

Palestinians flock to see lamb with Allah's name

I guess the "Jesus in a Pizza or Mary burnt into my Toast phenomenon is universal. What will be next? Krishna in my cornflakes?

From Reuters: "HEBRON: Hundreds of Palestinians have gathered to see a lamb born with what looks like "Allah" spelled out in Arabic on its coat.

Onlookers in the West Bank town of Hebron said the real significance was the fact the animal was born on Monday – the day Israel killed Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin.

"This is clear evidence of God's existence," the lamb's owner Yahya Atrash told reporters. "It was born with the words 'Allah' on one side and 'Mohammed' on the other."

Palestinians said the Arabic letters of the name of God could be made out on the lamb's left flank, but it was harder to see the name of the prophet Mohammed."

The Passion or the Python?

The Life of Brian will be rereleased with trailers starting on good Friday.....

See the story here.

More Life and Music

I have been told to talk more about my life and music, and less about technology. Well this one is for you, my adoring fans. This evening, I have been, for the first time, left home alone with both of my children while Ashley goes to class. Julia has been screaming that she wants her cheese to be in the shape of a circle....no rectangles daddy, even Dora has not been able to placate her. Avery is making those really annoying insistent uh..uh..uh... noises. I love both of them....but I occasionally wish I could have a week or two sans kids.

Still working on getting a Movabletype Blog

I have not been posting as much here lately because I am trying to get a movabletype blog set up. My problem has been finding a host that is:

1. Free


2. Allows CGI Hosting


3. Does not contain Banner Adds

I know that it has been a great deal of fun watching to see what new "adds by google" will show up on my site, but I am ready to have an add free blog. If anybody knows of a webhost that fits my criteria, please let me know. I have applied for an account with weblogs.us, but the site has not been set up yet. They do sound very promising though.

New Photo Blog

I have started a Buzznet photo blog. It has some prety cool features including the ability to syndicate pictures to your website, as I have done at the top of the page here. I found this tool while looking at the great blog Wil Wheaton has. See his photos here.

A Tenth Planet?

Has NASA discovered a tenth planet. Some people don't even think of Pluto as a real planet! Still, I wonder what interesting news NASA has?

Keyloggers

Have you seen one of these on the library's computer plugged into the keyboard port? If so someone is keeping track of every keystroke on that computer. There are also software keystroke loggers which can log information such as, credit card numbers, passwords, e-mails to your mistress etc. There is a good explanation here. If you would like to buy one of these devices to spy on your own loved ones they can be purchased here.

Countries visited

Here I need to go East not West!

States I heve visited

OK Michael...I guess I need to go west.

Polarized readers

Valdis Krebs, a social-network analyst in Cleveland has created a graff of the top 66 political books showing who bought what using Amazon and BN's ...people who bought this also bought....
We can see that there is very little common ground. Here is the NY Times Article.

And I thought my first year of teaching was bad!

This article from Library Journal describes how disgruntled first year librarians are. Their major complaint seems to be regarding the lack of practical classes in many of the top ranked MLS programs including the University of Illinois, Urbana-champain. I find it very interesting that cataloging is not required from every MLS program. I am glad that the IUPUI program still requires it, but I wish that there was more discussion of metadata, Dublin-Core, METS and other trends incorporated in the class.

I don't care about your spat. My kid can't watch Dora!!!!

Echostar and Viacom are in an all out battle and the net result is that I don't have access to...Nogin, Nickelodean, Comedy Central, VH1, MTV,BET and MTV2.

Yes, I believe that dish should fight for my right to low bills, but c'mon, I can't watch I love the 80-'s. My kid has been deprived of Dora nd Blue's Clues. What's next? No more American Idol?

Mining the "Deep" Web

This article from Salon.com describes the efforts of several new search engines to open up the Deep Web. Traditional Search engines such as Google only index about 1% of the information available on the web. Much of the rest of it "resides mostly in databases, shielded by a lattice of registration gateways, session cookies and dynamically generated links."
One of the new big players is Yahoo who now is offering a pay service called Content Acquisition Program. There are also several new search engines popping up including dipsie and Brightplanet, both of which promise to "deliver the deep web" to users. It will be interesting to see how all of this affects Google.

Ahhh Library related items are back

Some time back I posted a link to some funny library related t-shirts. Unfortunately they went out of business....well they are back. Stock up at www.librariangear.com

Hospital Pictures Of Avery

You can see pictures of Avery from the hospital.

Is IM the E-mail of tomorrow?

This article predicts that instant messaging is now in the state that e-mail was 10 years ago. I cant' imagine having enough to say through IM to be as attached to it as e-mail. I see a major possibility that I could say the wrong thing...IM doesn't offer enough time for me to contemplate the consequences of my actions!

Amazon RSS FEEDS

Amazon RSS feeds. This could be a very useful tool to those of us who work on collection development in small public libraries! It makes it easier to keep track of popular materials in multiple categories. Now if only we could get an RSS feed based on what our PATRONS want rather than Amazon's top 10. I guess we just need to encourage our patrons to start their own blogs with RSS feed!

Video You Can Use!

The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. Because researchers attempting to solve similar problems will have access to the same video content, the repository is also intended to be used as a test collection that will enable systems to be compared, similar to the way the TREC conferences are used for text retrieval.

Here is Cat Schwartz's article from Tech TV's Call for Help.

Metadata....good cop, bad cop.

While metadata and XML are obviously very important to those of us concerned with categorizing and retrieving information, it has recently come to light that this technology can also be used by the forces of evil. If you make changes in a Word document.....ie changing the name of the Dear"LIBRARY OFFERING THIS POSITION" part, it can be tracked with a little known feature of MS Word called invisible INK. This article describes the process.

AMERICAN NUDIST RESEARCH LIBRARY

This clothing optional library is celebrating its 25th anniversary. See an article about it here.

Home From the Hospital

Ashley and Avery came home from the hospital today. Julia is still completely enthralled by her little brother. Ashley is getting some much needed rest.