An homage in LOLcats form

Hobotopia is a webcomic that plays with the whole LOLcats idea. Recently, Hobotopia payed tribute to the cover art of one of my favorite albums, Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere."

Gotta love it!

You only need two

I spotted a book at the bookstore this weekend - 101 Reasons to Love the Yankees. It also came in a Red Sox flavor. So, in honor of that, here are:

Two Reasons to Love the Mets!

1. They are not the Yankees

2. They are not the Red Sox

It's like a Zen koan. Eh - what else are you gonna do?

Is a book-based meme called a beme?

I have no idea where this meme originated, but here goes:

We moved it to "types of marriage and relationships."

- David Weinberger, "Everything is Miscellaneous."

Rules:
* Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
* Go to page 56.
* Find the 5th sentence.
* Write this sentence - either here or on your blog.
* Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
* Don't look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.

OK, so since I have two books with me today, here's the special bonus edition!

Ditching symbols of Belgian colonialism, Mobutu changed Congo to Zaire, Leopoldville to Kinshasa, and Joseph Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga - good for him.

- Bob Harris, "Who Hates Whom"

A little library science humor (very little)

OK, my friends, which of these Dewey Decimal Classifications actually fits me the best? This little app came to my attention on Jim Del Rosso's Nascent Librarian blog.

Based on the letters of my name:

Roman Koshykar's Dewey Decimal Section:

111 Ontology

Roman Koshykar = 8531415985118 = 853+141+598+511+8 = 2111


Class:
100 Philosophy & Psychology


Contains:
Books on metaphysics, logic, ethics and philosophy.



What it says about you:
You're a careful thinker, but your life can be complicated and hard for others to understand at times. You try to explain things and strive to express yourself.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Based on my birth date:

Roman Koshykar's Dewey Decimal Section:

102 Miscellany

Roman Koshykar's birthday: 11/26/1976 = 1126+1976 = 3102


Class:
100 Philosophy & Psychology


Contains:
Books on metaphysics, logic, ethics and philosophy.



What it says about you:
You're a careful thinker, but your life can be complicated and hard for others to understand at times. You try to explain things and strive to express yourself.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Based on picking the number 5 as my favorite number, apparently:

Roman Koshykar's Dewey Decimal Section:

005 Computer programming, programs & data


Class:
000 Computer Science, Information & General Works


Contains:
Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.



What it says about you:
You are very informative and up to date. You're working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

They're all sort of accurate, in that vague, newspaper-horoscope kind of way.

The next internet celebrity?

Well, hardly.

But, lost in all that's been going on lately was this fact I forgot to inform you all of: a photo of mine was chosen for inclusion in the Schmap guide to Memphis. It's of the ornate lobby in the Peabody Hotel. Check it out here, in it's proper context (the winning photo itself is shown above).

OK, so I didn't really win anything, or even get paid. That's what happens when you deal with a Web 2.0 startup. Well, that, and I'd never in a million years pretend to be a professional photographer. They found my photo on Flickr, because I tagged it with "memphis" and "peabody." Let that stand as a lesson to tag your photos descriptively!

Why is the number 350 so important?

As in 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Recently, top climate scientists including NASA's James Hansen, set that level as a "red line" that human society should set as a target to lowering atmospheric CO2. We're already above this critical level of atmospheric CO2, indicating that the problem of climate change is not one of the future, but of the present.

I'm usually no activist, but I understand science, and I believe in the power of science to persuade people to view the world in a dramatically different way. If collective action is your thing (and maybe this is one time when it should be), check out 350.org for ways to get involved.

An interesting anniversary

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the signing into law of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I remember being concerned at the time, but kind of unsure what it all meant. When I started paying closer attention to such issues in library school a year later, it seemed to me that the law was rushed through without enough attention paid to how content had changed and would continue to change in the digital environment. We still haven't found our way out of the morass. This is one of those issues voters have little to no interest in this election year, and in the mind of the public copyright has been eclipsed by net neutrality and/or media consolidation as the hot button communications/media issue (they are connected, though, if you think about it). Still, I can't help but wonder where the two presidential candidates stand on copyright - and if they've bothered to make any public comments about copyright, net neutrality, or media consolidation.

Still, it's fascinating to read the summary linked above. Clinton surely did have other things on his mind at the time.

Stuck in Vermont

No, not me personally - it's the brilliant title of a video blog from the newspaper Seven Days. Just recently they posted a video interview with American Elf artist and rockingest rocker ever James Kochalka! Freaking awesome.

He even wrote it into his comic, of course.

So it's come to this

The Rays are in the World Series. To quote Dave Lenahan, "it takes a bandwagon to defeat a Nation."

I like it when perennial losers win, but I still have some kind of weird, unexplainable need to cheer for the teams that stay losers. But anyways, here's to the ultimate All-Loser Series. They of 10 losing seasons in 11 seasons of existence vs. They of 10,000+ all time losses.

Pennant race

I love a good pennant race. Or wild card race. Divisional title race. Whatever the heck we are to call them in this era of baseball. It's great that my team is in the thick of it, but their relievers currently look like minor leaguers. Bah. I never thought the Mets were going to be more than a second place team this season. Perhaps the Phillies have been the disappointing ones, since they don't have a commanding lead. What do you think about that, sports pundits world? Also, the prospect of a Cubs/Phillies NLCS fills me with dread for the actual end of civilization. That is a vortex of suck that no one will be able to pull out of.

The baseball world will be saying goodbye to two more parks soon, one beloved and historic, one utilitarian and hard to love. I've been to Shea Stadium twice and Yankee Stadium once. Newer ballparks have a lot over them both, honestly. My only visit to Yankee Stadium was, I believe, in 1990, which is also the last season when the Yankees finished in last place. Perhaps this is not a coincidence.

Politics = Many ticks, or, Get 'em off me!

As I've passively watched it unfold while CNN is on in the background, buzzing along like an annoying gnat, I've been trying to think of a single word to describe the Republican convention and campaign for president this year, but I haven't been able to narrow it down to just one all-encompassing term. Suggestions are welcome. I'll get you started:

desperate
deplorable
shameful
outmoded
craven

The Corn Blog has no problem whatsoever endorsing Barack Obama, though we wish that he had considered raising Orville Redenbacher from the dead as his running mate.

Yellin' about technology, or, maybe I picked the right profession after all

I've been thinking a lot lately about technology, information, and learning. Because that's what I do. When I decided a number of years ago to pursue a career in academic librarianship, I signed myself up to muse about how people find information and learn from the published record.

There has been a backlash recently against digital culture and the Web, in such books as "The Dumbest Generation," which I read recently and made reference to here . Only I'm not sure if it really is a backlash against the Web itself. Check out this clear-eyed assessment from Wired magazine to see what I mean.

To make a corny metaphor, libraries have always been a beacon of enlightenment in a sea of ignorance. The Web is a larger, more ubiquitous version of the same kind of beacon - but there's an undeniable down side. The Web is itself largely a sea of trash. Still, it's only a tool created by humans. We can use tools to serve many purposes, but a fascination with tools (which leads to a belief in salvation by technology) can only get you so far. It's always been about what you do with the tools at your disposal.

It is a little worrisome that many people automatically assume the Information Age will be an across-the-board improvement from whatever age preceded it (the Industrial Age? the Age of Killing Each Other In Big Wars?). There is never a shortage of problems to solve, and no one technology can solve all problems. I think that the techno-critics are largely responding to this attitude, whether it's a prevalent one or not. And, it seems, the defenders of technology (like David Wolman, author of the Wired article) are still able to find good justifications for digital culture. What worries me, and most people in my profession, is that instead of being a cumulative thing, as human advances have been all along, the rise of the Web will be used by some as an excuse to discard all old information technologies, regardless of whether or not they can still serve some purpose. If you believe, as I do, that it's the sum total of human knowledge that matters, there will always be a place for non-digital information alongside the burgeoning world of digital information built upon it. There will always be a need to learn about what didn't work, as well as what does work and what might work to solve those ever-present human problems.

Sweet Delta sound

Feeling blue? Check out these great rare clips of Mississippi John Hurt plying his trade.

Insert obligatory "time warp" pun

Oh blog, how I've neglected you lately.

From the "that's just sad" file, it seems that a remake of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is in the works. I've never been a huge fan of Rocky, but seriously, doesn't this just make you feel like even happy accidents are calculated moves these days?

Straddling reality and imagination

This is brilliant - Tom Waits interviews himself.

Perhaps I was a bit too hasty

It appears that libraries will endure - even when Earth is evacuated due to some vaguely malicious but not really dangerous alien threat:



Give this video a minute - the quality is really bad at the start.

So, aside from the valuable lessons learned about the nature of library organization and the Dewey Decimal System, what have we learned? We've learned that libraries preserve the information generated by humanity, and that will never change, even if no one bothers to read it.

But, you know, we shouldn't worry, the Internet will last forever.

Right?

Did I pick the wrong profession?

Currently, I'm reading a book titled "The Dumbest Generation." OK, I know what you're thinking - this is some grouchy old shriv's take on those darn kids. Well, not quite. The author draws his arguments from a wide range of surveys and studies, one of which indicates that one in four college freshmen and one in five college seniors read exactly zero books "for personal enjoyment or academic enrichment" each year.

I hear plumbers make decent money...

Oh great, another meme

From the people who brought you LOLCATS, there's a new site out there where Americans can simultaneously satisfy their desire to make fun of celebrities and look at funny pictures on the Web.

I bring this up for no reason other than I really kind of like the Bob Dylan/Snidely Whiplash juxtaposition.

Woody Guthrie, copyright cowboy?

One of my personal heroes, Woody Guthrie, was apparently the Lawrence Lessig of his day. Guess that's what folk music is all about. That, or he wanted to defend himself from any accusations of plagiarism.

Foxy

I am up and running with Firefox version 3. Lots of new features - but it keeps more information on your browsing. The default is to save your browsing history for 90 days! It knows what you're doing.

Firefox has always been extensible, but the new version should work with more third party applications. However, some existing Firefox 2 add-ons are incompatible. The del.icio.us add-on I had installed on my office computer was one such legacy application. But, not to worry, Firefox 3 automatically disabled it upon installation! It's smarter than we are.

I installed the new del.icio.us add-on, and it automatically sucked up all of my bookmarks. Which is ok, I guess - except that I had been using del.icio.us only to share research-related bookmarks with students. Like this list I put together for patent searching tools. But now it's got all of my bookmarks in there. It's become self-aware...

Another one?

I have yet another new toy.

No, this isn't the vaunted (and soon to be updated and upgraded - and cheaper) iPhone. It's the iPod Touch - basically, the iPhone without the phone. I didn't actually buy it for myself - it is a work tool and was purchased for me by the library.

The cool thing is that I now have true mobile Internet access. I had a PDA for a few years at work, but I was always disappointed with it. The iPod Touch is so easy to use - I figured it out on the first day I had it - and it actually handles online content well.

Though I'm hardly on the cutting edge by getting mobile Internet at this point in time, I feel like it's a big step towards the hoary future. What's next, a car that runs partly on batteries? ;)

Must be that new car smell...

Well, I've traded in my car of 7 years and 98,500 miles for... a new car of the same make and model.

But hold on, this new car is special. It's still a Toyota Camry, but mine has a hybrid engine. I'm getting used to driving the hybrid, and so far it's great. There is an additional meter on the instrument panel that shows you your trend in gas mileage, which is pretty cool. Also, there is a separate display where you can track your average miles per gallon from your last fill-up. This is also where you get a little "eco drive level" trend diagram after you turn off the engine - if you get really good mileage on a particular trip it rewards you with a little "EXCELLENT!" at the bottom.

Yeah, I know, if I still drive an average of 14,000 miles per year, my hybrid won't do much of anything to save the Earth. I have no delusions of that. But it will save me some money on gas, and it really appeals to my (shall we say) obsessively practical side.

The photo above isn't of my car, but mine pretty much looks like that - same color, same style.

That most precious commodity

It seems like I've been very pressed for time lately. Not that I've been feeling overwhelmed or anything - just that a lot of my past few weeks has been pretty solidly booked up. I got to present at the Western New York/Ontario ACRL spring meeting, attend the Imagine RIT festival (though much of the day was spent working at the library reference desk), and have a mini-reunion of sorts at Cornell. I also have to work this Saturday, which means that I haven't gotten to various and sundry household chores yet (cf. washing windows). But there were so many things I just wasn't able to get to do. Here are some things I missed:

• Live satellite simulcast of the This American Life stage show
• Kids In The Hall live in Niagara Falls
• Any screenings at the Rochester High Falls International Film Festival
• Screening of the Best of the Ottawa International Film Festival (separate even from High Falls Fest)
• Dreamland Faces at the Eastman House (will be missing this tonight - but I get to go to a baseball game instead)

So what does this all mean? Well, other than revealing that I am a ridiculous nerd, it also shows that I'm a big bad grown-up who successfully prioritizes when necessary. And, on the bright side, I have much vacation time coming up. And it's not like no fun is ever had. I already mentioned tonight's baseball game, but this Sunday I'm going to see Lewis Black, and last Sunday I got to wander through the lilacs at Highland Park without any of the Lilac Festival crowd getting in my way.

Did I mention I'm on vacation for the last week in May? Yeah, I still could use that.

Welcome to my (professional) world

Have you ever wondered "hey, just what the heck does Roman do at his job?" No? Or was the answer to that a snarky comment about posting here while I'm supposed to be working?

Well, for anyone out there that does wonder what's up with libraries and librarians these days, have a look at this series of articles posted by the British Guardian newspaper. It's a handy guide to some of the issues I and my fellow librarians are facing. Plus by posting it here, I saved you the trouble of Googling it. Score one for librarians!

SPECIAL BONUS BLOGTERIAL:

Did I forget to mark the 3rd anniversary of this whole deal yesterday? I did? Must be because I'm so busy trying to be a better "information broker."

Best possible souvenir of Washington

Take a look at what I found on my recent trip to Washington! Creepy, isn't it? Cathy says "it's like his eyes follow you."

(technically I bought this in Alexandria, but that's apparently where the good souvenirs are to be found)

You're getting warmer

Way back when I was considering a career as a scientist, I briefly considered learning more about paleoclimatology (studying the climate of the geologic past). I think I may have come across this when I was researching grad programs at the University of Arizona, but as this was a decade ago, I can't really remember.

That's why I found this article from Wired fascinating. The human impact on the climate very likely predates industrial times - certainly on a local level, but possibly even on a global level. One of the scientists quoted even stated that the advent of agriculture may have prevented another period of glaciation! I don't think we'll ever know that for sure, but there is tremendous value in slowly uncovering the puzzle of humanity's impact on the earth over the last several thousand years.

In short,

So long, Kids

I just read the sad news that Schoolkids Records in Chapel Hill is closing. I know being saddened by this will automatically out me as a sad old man who once was cool but now looks with scorn at the younger hipsters who just don't "get it." But it is kind of sad. Schoolkids was the quintessential college town music shop, where you could browse a weird and wonderful selection of music while simultaneously pining for the cute rocker chick that worked there. Visiting Schoolkids made me feel better during the somewhat difficult year I spent in Chapel Hill. I have no problem with college students (those poor slobs) sharing music with each other, but it feels like something will be lost when there are no more record shops. Especially in college towns, which seem to be transforming into more trendy, less family oriented versions of suburbia with each year that goes by. Ah well.

They made it to the Madness!

This past Saturday, Cornell's men's basketball team did the unimaginable and capped off an undefeated regular season in the Ivy League. Since the Ivies don't have a conference tournament, the Big Red win the conference outright and have an automatic berth in the NCAA tournament. How great is that? Remember to pick them in your office pools. I can smell the upset already.

No devils here

God bless you, Daniel Johnston.

Chill out, moms and dads

I missed Frontline's documentary on the internet and teenagers when it aired, but David Pogue just posted a great assessment of the situation that includes a link to watch the whole thing for free online. I find it very sad (and unfortunately, not surprising) that the editor in Pogue's story asked specifically for a more sensationalized slant. The fear surrounding kids on the internet is pretty much the same as the fear surrounding abductions and "talking to strangers" when I was a child two decades ago. In both cases, it's a matter of teaching kids common sense and helping them develop good judgment skills, not overreacting to a handful of horrifying and possibly overblown stories.

February has been... eventful

Wow, this shortest month of the year (plus one day this time around) is only half over, and already it's been quite the ride. I had jury duty for a day, but I was not selected to serve on a trial. I've had to scrape ice off of my driveway twice (this is recommended only if you want to experience what it's like to be drenched in sweat in the middle of winter). And my house was broken into. Now, don't worry, nothing happened to me. The damage was very minimal - just a broken window in my side door - and nothing was stolen except for some change I had sitting around. Actually, I'm kind of tired of talking about it. I've taken steps to secure my house. Maybe I'll get a dog. Or a gun. Or a dog that knows how to shoot a gun. Or Dog the Bounty Hunter - because I assume he's available.

But such things are probably not necessary, and I'm not going to dwell on it, since plenty of good things have happened so far in February. I'll just distract myself with Star Wars themed hot air balloons. Look, up in the sky - it's the disembodied head of Darth Vader!

That's Un-American

Far be it from me to get overly worked up over minor league sports, but it needs to be said: the Rochester Americans are having a terrible season. They have won one game since the end of November. Their long-time parent franchise, the Buffalo Sabres, will end their affiliation with the Amerks next season. The dispute between the NHL and AHL clubs was primarily over the fact that the Amerks management signed a secondary affiliation with the Florida Panthers so they could line their pockets. But it also has to do with the fact that the Sabres management doesn't want anything more to do with the Amerks management. There has even been talk of buying/forcing/litigating the team's executive (an ignorant greedhead) out. It's sad - read more about it here.

I don't think I've attended an Amerks game in about two years. Is it any wonder why?

Would you buy a computer from this man?

Well, would you? It is the wonder computer of the 1980s, after all.

I love how their big selling point is that it's a serious computer that will teach you all these valuable skills, but you can still play cool arcade games on it right at home! Kind of anticipating those Mac vs. PC commercials.

Shiny new "lifestyle accessory" (?)

Is it really a lifestyle accessory, or is it just a darn music player? At any rate, I recently realized my old iPod was approaching the age of five - that's probably unheard of for a digital music player. I also noticed that the battery life was never very good and that storage was dwarfed by the contemporary generation. So I bought a new iPod this weekend. And the cosmos restored balance by breaking my garage door. How about that?

Synergistic convergence

Ahh, YouTube - preserving our pop culture heritage. The video above is a music video (remember those?) of The Ramones covering a Tom Waits song, with animation and cartoons by Daniel Clowes.

I'd call it my perfect storm, if "perfect storm" weren't on the list of banished words for the new year.

Incidentally, I think this song would have been perfect for the jug band, but with, you know, less volume. And no drums. And a kazoo solo in the middle.