this is one fire water won't put out

So on Friday I went to my first Unconference and had a blast. Thanks very much to the fine folks at York U. who put it on, and super extra doubleplus thanks to the people who attended my Evergreen session -- it was wonderful to talk with you! I'd put up my slides, but I didn't have any, and my notes are nigh unreadable.

Random impressions:

* The two-track format was good to fit more speakers in, but dammit, I would have *really* liked to have gone to George Duimovich's copyright session which was, uh, at the same time as mine.

* This may run counter to the very nature of an Unconference, but I really felt badly for the folks who might have put some prep into their sessions only not to be voted the coolest kid^H^H^H^H^H picked to speak. Through pure chance I managed to talk a bit with Dan Sich about his unpicked session on IM reference, and I really wish I could have seen him speak at length about it because I've been working over how to do queued, multi-librarian IM reference to AOL/MSN/Yahoo for, geez, two years now? Not solidly, mind you, but once every few months I'll think "Man, I wish I knew how to do queued, multi-librarian IM reference to AOL/MSN/Yahoo. Wouldn't that be awesome?" and perhaps libraryh3lp is the answer. Or will be the answer, when they get around to going cross-platform.

* I did however get to see Dan Scott lead a wonderful discussion on mobile devices in which I probably complained more than I should have about the less-than-sufficiently-free nature of mobile phone providers. I did get a mention of Splashtop in though, which I've seen pop up in bookmarks here and there.

* Amanda and David Fiander also talked about Drupal implementations, which was awesome. I've done minor Drupal installs myself over the years, but nothing big scale so it was great to hear about issues with running Drupal in a production environment.

* McGill U had some recent graduates show up, which was decidedly badass. Wish I had thought to try to go to conferences when I was in grad school.

So all in all the unconference was a smash. Hit all my buttons -- local, free, and just informal enough to be useful. Thanks, York!

My life, summed up

I'm a frequent and veeeeery vigorous user of del.icio.us -- basically it's my brain dump, so anything that's even remotely notable gets duly tagged and marked. I'm almost up to 9000 bookmarks, yowch.

So when that wordle thing came along and I was near a 32 bit machine (an aside: okay, there's no Java plugin for 64 bit Linux? buh) I popped my del.icio.us through it, and kapowee, here's the result.

Wow. I really really like Metafilter, huh? In my defense, very few of the Metafilter tags are just straight Metafilter. It's almost always mixed in with something else.

Big thanks to Amanda for prompting me to post.

Where I'm Gonna Be

I've never been as good as I should be on the presentation front; I always think something's been played out and people will never be interested in hearing me yammer about it unless I happen to be right at the front to mid-front of the wave. That's happened a couple of times (with Zotero and wikis) but not often enough. So I'm trying to correct that, and here are some places I'll be speaking at in the next few months:

May 7th I'm speaking to the Hamilton Linux User's Group about Evergreen. It's pretty easy to sell the idea of coming to speak on Evergreen to librarians, but I have to figure out a way to make ILS software interesting to people who may not give a wet slap about it. We'll see.

June 27th I'll be at the York University One Big Library unconference. Since it's an unconference, there's no submitting of proposals or anything, so I hope to go there and get some yammering in about Evergreen and copyright issues, or maybe both.

Aaand the big big one, natch: Access 2008 here in sunny beautiful Hamilton, where Dan Scott and I will be talking about, you guessed it, Evergreen. Specifically Ontario/Project Conifer's role in same.

Are you going to be at any of these? Let me know.

My own tech-nots

Following this (and by extension a lot of other folks):


* I don't own a cellphone. Work gives me one, but I never remember what the number is and I'm not sure I could check my voicemail. I find the interface annoying and confusing.

* I don't own any desktop computer that is newer than five years old. I have a five year old laptop that I never use. The last time I bought a new computer was in 1996. At the same time, I *do* buy embedded computers new: my Nokia N800, my Linksys router, (arguably) my wife's EEE laptop.

* My TV is from 1987. It was the baddest, ass-kickingest tube TV in 1987. Now, people make fun of me for it. The speakers on it don't work so well.

* I don't have a PVR. I tape things, and I fast forward through commercials. Because of the peculiarities of the TV schedules where I live, about 90% of what I watch on TV is Simpsons reruns.

* I don't own a functioning MP3 player. I have an iRiver whose interface is somewhat broken, and I don't use it.

* I can't program very well. This one is actually the hardest one for me to admit; I have a lot of shame over it. I can do some shell scripting and some Ruby but that's it. I have lots of colleagues I look up to whose programming skills range from middling to mind-blowing, and here I am with 13 years of Linux experience and I sometimes have to ask the dumbest questions.

* I don't play many modern games. Part of this is not having Windows or a modern gaming console (I do have a PS2 for which I buy the occasional very used game, and I am inching ever-so-slightly towards a Wii; Spore for Wii might push me over the edge). At the same time, I'm pretty fond of old NES/SNES/MAME/Genesis type games. The concept of paying a monthly fee to play World of Warcraft weirds me out.

* The oven in my apartment confounds me. You have to press one button to wake it up, and then set the temperature with buttons, and then another button to turn it on.. or do you? What's wrong with analog dials, dammit?

* I hate e-books. I really hate Amazon's Kindle; something I see as a very promising device that got wrecked by DRM. At the same time, I'm very fond of e-journals, at least those of which you can get articles in PDF format. E-books are (usually) just too laden with DRM for me to give a wet slap about. I will make an exception here for Creative Commons e-books.

you cannot escape your destiny

Since moving to Canada last year, I've told people that although copyright was a particular research interest of mine back in the States, I've tried to put it on the back burner here 'cos, well, despite everything that's similar this is a different country, with (natch) different copyright laws, and I didn't want to assume something about the Canadian version of copyright and then have it come back to bite me.

But really, I can't push down what's not only a research interest but a philosophical and moral thing for me as well, so I've made tentative steps towards learning about Canadian copyright.

So a couple of weeks ago or thereabouts, I gave a presentation on copyright, fair dealing, and the Creative Commons to the folks here at McMaster, the slides of which I have put up on slideshare.net here.

Can I get a mic check?

Last Friday, Randy Metcalfe of eIFL was kind enough to make the trip from K-W to McMaster to talk to me about Evergreen. In the process, he makes me sound a lot cooler than I actually am. Thanks, Randy!

Cheboygan, land o' penguins.

So I spent most of my Christmas vacation in the depths of Michigan, in a shack that only relatively recently got their own (e.g, non party line) phone service. So yeah, forget about Internet, forget about any sort of informational fun that isn't either locally produced (spent a lot of time watching the Johnny Carson DVDs my pop got for Christmas) or over-the-air TV (Mitt Romney was hitting the airwaves hard, let me tell you). But my pop had a Windows laptop he had to whip into shape, which means a lot of licensing tomfoolery and Windows Updates and all that delight. Which means network access.

So we head to Cheboygan, their public library and their free wifi. It's a new building, a little small, but pretty well laid out. Has fishing poles for checkout behind the circ desk. We get there, and they've got a room with about 15 machines for public internet use and eventually something hits me:

these machines are all running Kubuntu.

It's a library, so I resisted what would be my natural instinct to jump up and run around yelling like a goon. Instead, I get up and pester the library director. Here's what I found out:

1) The machines have been there for around a year.
2) There's been mostly positive response, but some negative.
3) They used to have a guy who spent one entire day a week cleaning off viruses and other assorted muck back when they were running Windows.
4) Support and install was contracted to a local guy -- they don't seem to have their own IT department.
5) Patrons use their card data for login, so they've got their data either exposed from their Voyager ILS or are extracting it from some other source.

Of course, with all the Evergreen stuff going on in Michigan I had to ask the guy if they were considering it -- not at the moment, they wanted to wait and see how Grand Rapids worked out.

This isn't the first time I've personally witnessed public access Linux machines -- in 1996, I had two machines running Linux in the map library back in Ohio, but they didn't stay too long. But boy howdy was I excited to see this in Cheboygan. Hopefully it will spread elsewhere.

A year of near misses.

No introduction of the CDMCA this year. Has the bullet been dodged?

open my mouth, get in trouble

Heh. Maybe I spoke too soon. Hey, citizens, do what I can't do and make a fuss. I don't have the power. Three minutes and counting...

a little rabid over copyright

I've been thinking a lot about copyright issues the past couple of weeks -- this was a research and speaking topic of mine back in the States, but since I left the country I've tried not to think about it too much. No matter how much Canada feels like home and all to me, I don't know enough about the history of copyright and its applications here to really do anything. But two things have popped up to bring the issue back in focus for me.

1. The CDMCA, the introduction of which was delayed by the Tories after events like a burgeoning Facebook group and a showdown with the minister responsible in Calgary. Gotta admit, I was on the edge of my seat for a while with that one.

2. I'm due to give a talk here locally in January about the Creative Commons, public domain, and open access -- all three of which I feel comfortable about but not completely so. Particularly thorny for me -- Fair Dealing versus Fair Use.

Oh, and sorta-kinda related to 2: can anyone Canadian tell me any reason why I shouldn't completely hate the idea of Crown Copyright? I just think "full copyright on information produced by the government with our tax dollars" and I have to confess I see red. The US gets this one mostly right, and I never knew how much I'd miss it until after I left.

Evergreen made eas(ier)

Forgot to mention this -- two great things came out of Access 2007 regarding Evergreen usability at the install: Dan Scott's Evergreen test script, which makes sure you've got all your prerequisites in line for a smooth Evergreen install, and Bill Erickson's Gentoo/Debian Evergreen Makefile.

I've tested out Dan's script but have not messed with the makefile, but if I do any new installs or reinstalls of Evergreen, they'll likely be on Debian and I'll give it a go.

By far my biggest problem with Evergreen has been the install process, and these two go a long way towards sorting that out. If you've been reticent to try Evergreen because of the 40+ steps it takes to do an install, this might help.

this is the last Access 2007 post you will ever read, ever

Not because it's the best one, but because the conference took place well over a week ago and all the best folks have already blogged about it. In my defense, I'm coming to this slowly because on the day after the conference ended I started getting a slight sore throat which then blew up into those monstrous, death dealing colds that I seem to get about once a year. Usually right after I travel. Which may be nature's way of telling me not to go anywhere, ever. So I spent most of last week in a fugue state, mildly hallucinating and dosed to the nines on Buckley's Mixture and cayenne.

But at any rate, Access 2007 was spot on terrific, and I had a completely amazing time. Interestingly enough -- or hey, maybe not so interesting; this is basically the first professional conference I've been to -- about 10-15% of my enjoyment was derived from the actual presentations themselves. This is not to denigrate them; the vast majority of them were really top notch stuff and I'm glad I stuck around to see them -- but what I really enjoyed was meeting and talking to people. Lots and lots and lots of people. What's great about Access is that it's a very healthy mix of tech people (90% of which are way smarter than me, to my shame) and non-tech people (ditto) and you get a hell of a synergy rocking when you get a pleasant mix. Witness Hackfest, where we had two groups related to Evergreen stuff that eventually merged into one group, and had as the tech crew two folks from Equinox, the always dynamic and intrepid Dan Scott, and Brandon Uhlman from BC PINES. Also folks from Victoria were there and had great questions to ask. I was there too natch, but mostly to watch -- Access 2008 Hackfest planning is on my plate, and I wanted to figure out what worked and what could be improved.

Brandon, by the way, suffered a hell of a lot of inconvenience on his project -- installing and configuring Evergreen in a day -- not because of problems with Evergreen, but with Gentoo amd64. He eventually smashed through them and went on to have a good presentation later.

Also present: a healthy contingent of code4libers, and oh yeah, an obscure librarian from Vermont. Like I said, top notch.

A pleasant surprise for me -- a substantial presence of non-evil vendors.

On to Access 2008. You will be there. There's no other option.

now del.icio.us is four

del.icio.us is four today. Happy birthday del.icio.us! What can I say about it, except that I keep the sum total of my recent knowledge in there, basically anything from 2004 onwards. You get a bit of it in the sidebar on the right, but that's only stuff with the library tag, not the whole burrito.

It's a little weird that just about everything I learn and know recently can be distilled into an rss feed, but it's helped me with my memory if nothing else.

What I've learned

I've been at my new job/new country for -- hmm, a little over a month now -- and here's what I've learned. This is specifically unrelated to the library, so apologies for the departure. I'll get back on the library stuff shortly.

Things in Canada that are more expensive than things in the US:

1) Regular brick-n-mortar banks. They charge a monthly fee. To hold onto my money. Which earns no interest anyway. My mind is officially boggled.

2) Car insurance. From 2-3 times more expensive.

3) Phone service. Vonage is about 1.5x what it is in the US. This isn't counting cellphones, though, which are their own special dimension of horror.

4) Transit, at least compared to SF Muni. US$1.50 for a Muni ticket, CAD$2.25 for the almighty HSR. Although monthly passes in Canada are tax deductible.

5) Gas. ~CAD$4 per US gallon.

6) Beer. I can't tell you the amount of ribbing I've had from my otherwise excellent colleagues here about my love for Lakeport, a sort of Ontario Schlitz/Milwaukee's Best/Pabst-alogue. But the minimum price you can charge for beer in this province is a dollar a bottle, which is a far cry from paying a quarter for whatever unholy dreck was on sale at Jungle Jim's. The way I figure Lakeport -- it's brewed locally, so it's gotta be fresh, right? And it's a perfectly serviceable beer, dammit all. Plus a 28 pack comes with a free T-shirt. Free T-shirts are always the sign of a classy brew.

To be fair though re: the whole money thing, I'm still working with the old expectation of the US$.60-$.70 exchange rate. Now that the US dollar and the Canadian dollar are reaching parity -- they're probably about at Diefenbuck range currently -- things get comparatively more expensive.

One of my big psychological hurdles is trying to get myself into the Canadian mindset. This means not endlessly comparing things to how they are in the US. This includes not referring to the Celsius temperature scale as "fake temperature". Eventually, eventually.

What's cheaper in Canada?

1) Pizza. I don't know how it's done, but pizza is about half the price here as it was back in Ohio, and probably 1/3 the price of pizza in San Francisco.

2) Medical care. Natch.

Things that are about equal:

1) Food, OTC medicine, general miscellaneous sundries -- some are pricier, some are cheaper, it works out to about the same really.

2) Broadband internet.

---

What can I say though about the town of Hamilton itself? Completely and utterly in love with it -- yes really. It plays the Ontario version of Oakland to Toronto's San Francisco -- and probably has about the same rep in Toronto as Oakland has in SF -- smelly, dirty, unsafe, mostly uninteresting, home to rubes and also-rans. This is utterly untrue. Hamilton is exactly where I want to be, in just about every way I can think of.

small pieces, loosely joined

Cranking like crazy to get things in order for the move so that's why I've been maintaining blog silence, although a couple things have happened in the last few days to which I want to bring some attention:

Evergreen was at ALA, with flat-out terrific attendance. Incredibly encouraging, and the slides are a must-view -- I was particularly struck by the patron reactions to having a union catalog -- something we're very familiar with here in Ohio, natch, but it's never a bad thing when (especially) rural patrons can borrow materials from nearly any location in the state hassle-free.

Amanda at Mac has posted her postmortem of their Learning 2.0 jaunt with some great observations about the planning and administration of such an audacious project.

Here's hoping it won't be so long 'til the next update.

heading north

I haven't written about this -- bad blogger, bad! -- but I'm pleased as punch to announce here that I've accepted a new job at McMaster University Libraries in Hamilton Ontario. It'll be the first time ever that I'll be expressly charged with working with open source software in libraries, which has been my consuming passion professionally since 1995. Add that to the opportunity of working with an absolutely flat-out stellar group of people who are truly interested in exploring next generation issues in libraries in an inclusive environment, and you have one extremely pleased librarian. I'll be up there in August and I am completely, but completely excited about it.

twitter and the beauty of enforced limitations

This post is going to be about Twitter eventually, but let me start out by dividing the worlds of blogging and/or social networks into two very rough portions. There's personal blogging, which is about what you ate for breakfast, where you are right now, what's going on with your favorite TV shows, your professional activities etc... basically media about you as a person, whether that be personal activities or professional. Secondly, there's content-based media which is still "personal" in that it's generated by a person, but is less about the person than about content. Del.icio.us feeds are a prime example. You'd be hard pressed to tell much in the way of too many personal details about someone from their del.icio.us feed.

These are not wholly discrete, never-the-twain-shall-meet designations -- there are many excellent blogs that combine personal and content; really, I'd argue that the best blogs are almost always a blend of the personal and extra-personal content.

I've made several stabs over the years at personal blogging; Livejournal, different Blogspot blogs, stuff like that. But I've never really been able to maintain a decent rate of post on anything that was intended mostly to be about myself. It's not that I don't consider myself an interesting person, it's just that I've always been a little uncomfortable advertising myself, at least the part of myself that concerns what I ate for breakfast. But compare my sporadic posting on this blog to my bookmarks on del.icio.us -- I'm coming up on 4000 bookmarks now and have more or less been plugging away solidly at it since September of 2004 with no break in activity except in times of net deprivation.

Okay, so Twitter now, right? I'm actually pretty enchanted with Twitter, and Twitter is *nothing* but personal, *nothing* but what-I-ate-for-breakfast stuff. Yet I've got well over a hundred updates on it going back to February. And I find myself posting to it a lot and reading other folks' Twitters, most all of which with scant exception are breakfast-type posts.

Now it's a bit early to tell whether or not I'll stay with Twitter at the rate I've been doing it, but I think probably yes. But why? Not because it's RoR based, although I'll admit that Twitter is probably the best example of Rails scalability. Not because of RSS feeds, AJAX, and all the other Web 2.0 stuff. All that's good, of course, but what I really love about Twitter is its enforced character limit.

In case you're not up on the whole Twitter thing, it's like blogging, except that you can't have a post of more than 140 characters. So instead of having to slog through (or God help us, to write) xxx pages of breakfast-type posts, I have to think of my breakfast with this 140 character limit. And it's completely liberating, weirdly enough. I have (yet) no problem with posting about myself or my activities with this teeny-tiny limit; I feel that I'm allowed to be ego-tastic with posts as long as I keep them succinct. Ego plus prolix = yawnsville.

ODCE

Welp, I went and survived ODCE, but wouldn't you know it I forgot to come back here and talk about it. So here's what went down:

• I had 100% attendance! Yes, this means my one attendee showed up.
• There was another guy who was supposed to be there, and he didn't show up, and he left his 4 attendees and the organizers scratching their heads.
• None of those 4 attendees came to my session.
• I'm not surprised by this.
• I like bullet points.

My one attendee was very pleasant and in good spirits re: being the entire audience, and it was extremely worthwhile for me to meet her as she comes from an academic library quite radically different from my own -- private university, very small, low budget (e.g., they haven't bought into RefWorks because of the staggering cost). So I think that she went away with some valuable information, and I went away similarly enlightened. All good, all good. Plus, I've been making (small) inroads locally on the Zotero front with one of my faculty for whom RefWorks isn't really a good choice.

All-in-all, I'm pleased with how it turned out.

My OpenID "Aha!" moment.

Finally starting to get a handle on this OpenID stuff, although I have to admit it's taken some rattling around in my head to actually get it to come together. The "Aha!" moment just came something like ten minutes ago, with this tutorial. Took me about five minutes and kapow, I could log into wikitravel, using libgrunt.blogspot.com as my ID and the fine folks at myopenid as a server.

It helped me to think of it as sorta like LDAP, which I've been using with great success on my class's Drupal-based podcast server.

In my opinion, every university with a centralized ID scheme -- like we have here locally -- should implement a OpenID server. We already have LDAP; OpenID seems like a natural progression. Then imagine not having to create accounts on each and every Super Spiffy New social network -- I've already got a text file full of what must be fifty to a hundred different logins to as many different services. Good thing I encrypt it, because.. well, I'd rather not think about it.

Anyway, if you've been hearing about OpenID and want to see it in action, try that tutorial.

Stand by for action!

As lucid an explanation of the importance of Net Neutrality as I've ever seen. Go see it if you haven't.