Sock Puppets in the Stacks

AT&T and Google Voice: a cautionary tale

2010-09-28T12:20:00.000-07:00

Even though I don't have an Android phone (I have a Nokia Symbian phone), I decided to try out google voice this summer. The Google Voicemail service seemed like a fun service to try out, so I gave it a go.

And now I've found out that it cost me, significantly. Or at least in the form of 44 overage minutes and all of my rollover minutes. Why?

What isn't explained in the google voice voicemail activation steps is that you are actually setting up a call forwarding service. Instead of going to AT&Ts voicemail (which doesn't 'count' as call forwarding), the calls are forwarded to an external service (google) which does.

This is important to understanding why my minute usage soared after activating the voicemail feature of google voice on my phone. Every single time I had a missed that went to voicemail, it cost me 1 minute of call time in call forwarding minutes. Not checking the voicemail, but rather every telemarketer who simply called me and hung up cost me a minute of call time.

Add to that a significant other who will call upwards of 6 times a day, and a public listing of the number as a government contractor (a few years expired), and you have about 400 minute increase in usage over two months (200 per month). In other words, all of my rollover minutes are gone, and I got to shell out extra for some 45 minutes at 0.45 cents per minute.

I just wish the disclaimer on Google's end had been more explicit, including a warning that using their voicemail service (while free on their end) would cost call forwarding minutes from your carrier.

Making a Workable Computer on the Cheap

2010-04-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago I was in the position of having to mail in my laptop for repairs, so I took the opportunity to shop around for a small, cheap desktop-like model of computer that I could use at home in the meanwhile. I figured that when I got my laptop back, it could serve as the home media center.

Originally, I was considering the mac mini, but I found a nettop (a netbook architectured desktop) for $170. Since this computer was going to be a glorified stereo, I figured I'd give the nettop a try. This is what I got:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5265729&CatId=4926

Acer Aspire Revo AR1600-U910H Mini Desktop PC - Intel ATOM N230 1.6GHz, 1GB DDR2, 160GB HDD, HDMI, Windows XP Home

The good surprise that came with it was the model I got was refurbished, and I'm pretty sure I got a slightly newer model of processor (namely the dual core model rather than the single core). The bad surprise was the installation of several of the drivers was corrupted so it took me the better part of two weeks to figure out that I needed to wipe and reinstall the drivers in order to get the HDMI working.

If you read about this model, you'll soon see that the video card has extra memory and processing capabilities, such that if programs don't use it, (e.g. flash videos in a website), the playback is terrible. Fortunately the flash and/or nvidia people fixed that pretty quickly.

So far so good. But you might notice that there's no wifi listed in the specs. What it doesn't say, is that if you pop it open, there's a mini pci slot that you can stick a wifi card in. And since I have several expired laptops floating around, I extracted a broadcom card out of one, and popped it in. Problem solved? Well, it still needed an antenna. This is where I could have done something elegant, but instead opted for the franken-computer look. There's something aesthetic about having the guts of a computer spill out onto the table like some kind of technologic squid.

So I snipped the antennae connector from the laptop and wired it onto the antennae from an old iBook, and poked it out the side of the aspire case. Voila. Internet. Which is a good thing, because the old external usb card I have is dying and makes anything I plug it into freeze after about 20 minutes. I really should just recycle the poor thing.

All in all, not bad for under $200.

Sometimes the magic works...[opening a seagate expansion external hdd]

2010-02-17T22:58:00.000-08:00

So I had to ship in my primary laptop for repairs this week. Being studious and all, this has caused me no end of anxiety, as if I were losing an appendage, or a child, or my brain. Probably the latter in my case.

Anyway, I removed my harddrive (a 250gb Seagate 7200rpm SATA drive) and figured loosely that I would be able to access my files via a magic ide/sata to usb connector cable. Note: that cable was one of the better $15 investments in computer accessories that I have ever spent. It doesn't always work well, but it is pure awesomeness to be able to run any drive that comes across my desk on the fly.

The problem? The magic connector doesn't supply power to SATA drives without a secondary dc adapter. And really, who wants to carry that around when there's plenty of power to be had on the USB ports?

The solution: Since I was needing a temporary case for my SATA drive and my partner was needing a back-up drive, we decided to split the difference. We would buy an external drive, I would get the new one, she would get my old one (because I was planning on opening the case on the new one, and she didn't want to deal with that tomfoolery after I was done breaking into it).

How this works: My old external harddrive was an IDE drive, with a different connector than my new one. So we needed a new external harddrive with a SATA connector inside. The hard part is that external harddrives are rarely intended to be disassembled by the consumer, so they don't bother labeling themselves as SATA or IDE. Since I had disassembled a 3.5in Seagate external drive last summer, I figured another one in this vein might work as well. So we invested $60 in a 250gb seagate expansion usb 2.0 2.5in drive and came home to see if I could insert my laptop harddrive into the case.

The bad news: You pretty much have to break off all the plastic nubbins that hold the case together in order to open it.

The good news: The drive is pretty well shielded such that you aren't likely to harm it when removing the case. Furthermore, the drive is simple as pie on the inside, just a laptop size SATA harddrive and a usb controler-thingy. Once you remove the screws that hold on the shielding, the drive can be removed. If you can ever grab hold of it, the drive just slides back off the connector and a new one slides on.

In summary, for $60 we have a case that I can use temporarily to access my laptop files and an external drive that we can use in the long term.

So for all you folks wondering if you can disassemble the external drive and use it in something else, the answer is yes, at least for the model I bought, just don't hold out any hopes for the plastic case looking very good in the end.

If the dataset is mine, then why can't I have it?

2010-02-10T20:12:00.000-08:00

While I'm generally the pacifist type, I've decided that I really hate the software companies that offer fake interoperability for your data. I couldn't meet their gaze if we met on a deserted street. I would feign ignorance if they came up to me with a reference query. They're dead to me.

Over the past couple of months, we've been working on a project that requires keeping track of a heterogeneous group of stuff that we are going to put through the proverbial sausage grinder to end up with something more delectable. In other words: primary source documents for research.

This sort of thing requires lining up a selection of choppers and slicers, back to back, and having the pig go in one end and the spam come out the other. If the meat won't feed its output from one slicer into the next, then it leaves a mess of raw meat on the floor. It's not pretty.

So, as a result, I've been learning a lot more about databases and database connectors, and how amazing they are for lining up the choppers and the slicers.

These are the applications where I can make prodigious numbers of dataset love children and they will love me back, all the way from the slicer to the chopper. (Did I just mix those metaphors? That's just awful!)

These applications are the ones who love me back:

Zotero: with an API and an ODBC connector (via sqlite) I can spend hours immersed in your elegant data hierarchies, letting them wash over me, through me, and to me.
Filemaker Pro: as a fickle lover who only supports SQLserver, MySQL, and Oracle via ODBC
MySQL: as the plain faced lass who brings the water to the entire village, day in and day out (Man, now I'm really getting into trouble with the metaphors: pigs and babies being chopped up into spam by plain faced village girls? Why not just pull out a horror movie script?)
MS Access: I hate to say it, but over a decade ago, when I was just a wee noodle, I first learned about databases on Access. MS Access, you are the illicit, fickle lover who has a headache most of the time, but ah, when the migraine medicine finally kicks in, you have an ease of use that is all your own. You support ODBC connections that allow me to fetch and kick around data fast and loose, and then push it elsewhere before anyone notices.

These applications are dead to me, or at least dead-end in the flow:

EthnoNotes: You promote yourself as having an architecture that support ease of access to the data, but for how much work it is for me to actually get and use my data for outside analysis tools, you might as well just write it to a harddrive and drop it at the international space station.
Devonthink: Same as before, except that it is more possible, only that in order to get at the data, you have to be able to work extensively in AppleScript. Should I really have to take two classes in AppleScripting just to be able to do what any good ODBC connector can do in 35 seconds flat?
nVivo: You're different. You're dead to me because you have never heard of collaborative work. You have no version control, no way to merge files, no way to share a research project with more than one person in a way that isn't pulling teeth. And I can't get the data out either.

That's it for the rant today. Check back in later for more mixed metaphors of pigs, love-children, and the unrequited polyamory of software hacks.

When all you have is the reaction...

2009-11-15T11:36:00.000-08:00

I'm one of those people who has about 9 different email accounts at any given time, one of which is gmail. Yesterday I discovered about 50 legitimate emails had been diverted into my spambox this week, for no apparent reason. I'm guessing that there was some kind of spam-bomb that went off and pushed their filters way up the scale for a day or two. Up until this point it's been one of the most reliable and efficient spam filter's I've used.

As a result I've been thinking about Google a lot the past few days. There's the new Verizon Motorola Android phone on the market. There's the Google Books settlement that just came out:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10397787-93.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

And an interview with their CEO talking about Google's successes and challenges:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30966_3-10396865-262.html?tag=rtcol;inTheNewsNow

I think the most interesting aspect of this interview is the problem of scale that they are up against. I've been noticing recently that the quality of searches have started to suffer, as they struggle (or fail) to keep up with the new media and blogosphere.

Once again the scale and structure of the internet is changing, and they may have to revisit a number of the assumptions that they build their search engine upon. Which leads me to the question of "how do you plan for fluidity?" How do you plan for a system that is dynamically alive and changing at a pace that only seems to accelerate?

I don't know if anyone has a really good answer for these questions, but I do think the world of computers has some solutions in the works, namely, what I like to call abstraction.

When I was learning to write a simple web application in PHP last spring, the first thing I did was write a bunch of 'classes' that would define objects. Those classes called the database and fetched the data, handling it in the terms defined. All of the PHP I wrote after that called on the classes, calling these 'objects' rather than calling directly to the database.

The beauty and elegance of this is that (in theory) you can change the structure of the database radically, and you only need to change the affected classes. The rest of the code can run, virtually unchanged, on those modified classes. I like to think of it as a type of data abstraction, where the code calls the database via an abstracted, a mediated channel, rather than the database itself.

This is, however, not unique to PHP and web applications. As I understand it, all object oriented programming languages function similarly, defining and calling objects, whether the definition is called a class or a library.

This is, again, not unique to object oriented programming. All of the Linux machines I've used rely on what's called a 'hardware abstraction layer'. Basically the operating system calls this abstraction layer and the abstraction layer acts to communicate with the hardware. One of the big problems with talking to the hardware directly is that if it fails to respond, the system hangs, freezes or crashes. So rather than writing a specific response to every type of possible failure, they rely on the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) which will communicate back to the operating system if the hardware fails to respond or perform normally. Furthermore, if the hardware changes, the operating system doesn't have to change the way it calls the hardware. In my opinion this is one of the main reasons that Linux has made it it out of the geek pit and into the playing field. Prior to this Linux was synonymous with 'hardware configuration nightmares'.

Which leads us back to the question, are there new ways that we can abstract our library functions, our information systems, such that the structures can change without having to create whole new systems? How will we afford flexibility even in our abstractions such that they too can change?

Standing in the Temple of Interoperability and Extensibility

2009-11-07T15:12:00.000-08:00

My research group likes to share links of interesting articles. This week the basket included:

Think Tank Stresses Importance of Information Sharing in Research and Teaching

Tim Berners-Lee: Machine-readable Web still a ways off

All of the links this week really get at the heart of a widespread need for interoperability, extensibility, and some standards for machine readable contextuality.

I find it both really fascinating and totally counterintertuitive that standards (when used properly) promote the creative (and unpredictable) expansion of the net, as they allow interoperability, sharing, and reduce the duplication of effort. I don't think that most people understand the degree to which they provide the substrate for the network to communicate. Because the network is so distributed and largely uncontrolled, it provides the power to aggregate across systems. That is, however, the problem as well.

However, in the history of solutions in this arena, from html to packet switching to email, you see a pattern of innovation that is both simple, efficient and elegant. The need for semantic structure in the web is building, across institutions and across disciplines, and I'm willing to bet that we'll see a solution start to take hold in the next few years. The pressure is building, and the dam will break. As such, I would argue that we are in one of those important historical moments where change is about to form itself before our eyes.

Since I've had too much coffee and not enough procrastination, I'd like to indulge in theorizing about what innovation matrix may come out to solve this problem. I say matrix because it's such a complex systems and sociological problem. I don't think any one technology or innovation is going to get us from here to wholesale adoption of something like the RDF.

There are, however, some assumptions to predicting evolution. We have to assume that the nature of the system won't radically change, and that the assumptions that have given rise to the current system are not fundamentally flawed.

That being said, there are regularities to technological change. The innovation has to be simple enough to be distributed and elegant enough to be adopted. It has to be something that's obvious from the technology in hindsight. I see the following principles implicated:

It has to be a simple step from the current technology to the innovation. For example, twitter is an obvious innovation if you look at blogging culture, sms culture and and the adoption of mobile web applications into everyday life. It's an extensible platform that can be run on the most basic of web enabled phones, allowing blogging impulses to happen away from the desk and without the strange and tiered costs of sms.
It has to be based on obvious and available reconfiguration of current technologies, but remixed in a way that isn't inherently obvious, or it would have been done already. In other words, it needs to take advantage of the current strengths of the system. It's not going to be something built in a free standing vacuum to address this problem.
There needs to be either a low barrier or a high incentive for adoption. In other words, it has to be either easy or rewarding, which is a complex sociological calculation in itself. Regardless of the complexity of estimating this variable, there is a strong underlying argument for ease and simplicity within this factor. Basically, it needs to be cheap to adopt.
There is also a strong argument for a multifaceted rewards system. In other words, it needs to maximize the number of groups and possible ways that it can benefit the system. If it only benefits a small group, it probably won't be adopted, regardless of the size of the benefit. In order to get a large enough net benefit, we might need to aim for a solution that yields a smaller benefit to a larger number of users.
It needs to be injected into a place where it can take root in a sizeable portion of the population of online documents. It doesn't matter how simple, elegant or functional it is if no one is using it. One word for this problem: Betamax. Size matters when it comes to adoption and market share. The most successful path for the retroactive injection of structure system is probably at the lowest attainable level.
Centralization is tenuous in an online environment, the only examples that work are ones that are highly open and interoperable such that the content can move fluidly between systems, or where demand is high.
There is a strong generalized need for semantic structure for the web, but virtually no focused demand, because of a positivistic myopia. The deficiency of the system isn't immediately visible even the most proficient users. They don't know what the searches aren't returning to them. We are trained to optimize our thinking within the current structure. It's a nebulous problem without clear solutions or villains. That's what makes it an interesting problem to watch, because it means that the crystalization of the solution will be somewhat unpredictable, but when it does crystalize it will precipitate a whole new iteration.
The solution must be extensible. The system is a moving target, and must either grow with or shed existing structures. Any successful solution must provide for both the present and the future. We must be able to add in things to it in the future that we cannot conceive of now, because of the nature of system.

Because of these factores, I don't think a centralized repository of metadata (semantic) information is feasible. The distributed, layperson-oriented and uncontrolled nature of the internet precludes a number of avenues of innovation.

However, I think the solutions will look mundane and yet powerful. Below are som that might pass through most of these limiting factors.

1. Embedding more semantic/metadata information within the hyperlinking html definition.

Why this would work:

Low level structural injection of metadata information into the design of webpages in a very simple way.
Can be highly distributed. No one central agent is responsible, but any given agent can have a significant impact.
Can be automated across many types of systems and document types.
The current internet indexing (search engine) paradigm is largely built upon the linking network of pages. If we improve the semantic information embedded within those links, the search engines can easily use their existing infrastructure to provide significant improvements.
Since linking has proven to be so important to the nature of the web, there is no reason not to push for this structural improvement, regardless of what the final solution is.
There is already the seed of this idea, insofar as the LINK tag can be used to provide more information as to the nature of the html documents. It's just not structured. See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.3.3

It wouldn't be final solution. It doesn't provide the extensive benefits that the RDF would, but could bridge the problem significantly with distributed labor, low cost, low overhead, integration into the structure of the internet and distributed benefits.

It would only begin to address the problems of non-html documents on the web. In the end, the metadata really needs to be emdedded in the document such that if you have the document you have the metadata.

2. Creating a standardized file wrapper that embeds the metadata. Just like the embedded metadata of mp3s, and the wrapping of digital video files to encompass multiple encoding types within a single file type. These two solutions could be extended to the entire world of online files.

This would require a bunch of details to be successful:

The standards would need a library of definitions hosted centrally, just like for document type definitions within html/xhtml. This is so that they can be extensible, grow over time, and embed only the minimal amount of information in the file itself.
The metadata should also include document versioning information. There is such a need for embedded versioning information that this alone could drive adoption rates. Imagine if every document you emailed for review could have an edit time date/stamps with every user included, regardless of which platform you or they used. The technology is simple and at our fingertips, think of it as email headers for web files. Semantic file management problems are not restricted to the internet. We need the next generation of embedded file information in a global way.
The wrapper would need to be based on a simple open architecture, such as xml.
The wrapper would require broad spectrum buy in from the software and gadget community. It would need to be designed by and supported by software manufacturers such that it could be automatically generated when saving the file. If Microsoft and Adobe supported this endeavour, I believe that virtually all filemakers would follow suit. It's not inconceivable to think that they would do this, and do this openly, given the history of the development of the pdf and the ms office document types. Google, microsoft, and yahoo all have a great deal to gain having a voice at the table with regards to increased semantic structure of documents.
Support would need to be such that users could save, and modify the wrapper information on a variety of platforms and applications, preferably on the fly without actually opening the document. Browers could be adapted such that the wrapper information is optionally editable upon download of a file, (just like the filename and download location). Browsers could then also take contextual information from the website to pre-populate fields. Just as citation management software can recognize citations, browser and application plugins could be written to read and populate metadata fields on the fly while saving documents.
There could be scripts written to automate the wrapping of current document repositories on a large scale. Arguments could be made for publishers to do this so that their files can be tracked for copyright purposes.

This proposition is certainly more ambitious, but then again the idea of the semantic web is highly ambitious. I would also argue that it is far more attainable/negotiable than the direct implementation of the RDF (because so few people can do anything in xml). Furthermore, it seems like this would support the implementation of the RDF, I believe, as it could be one of the metadata types supported, complementing everything that has been developed so far.

And I'm sure this hypothesizing shows my gaps of knowledge as much as anything. But you have to admit that it's an intriguing issue to think about, regardless of how things fall out. And while this may not be the solution that takes hold, it is likely that it will be something in this vein.

WorldCat Identities

2009-10-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a paper for one of my classes and in the process I stumbled upon this beta 'identities' site from WorldCat. While I've come down on both sides of WorldCat from time to time, I think this feature for aggregating information about a single author is pretty innovative and useful. Here's an example:

http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n83-71663

Zotero v EndNote

2009-10-14T22:58:00.000-07:00

I'm a Zotero user, I won't dice any words about that. After working with RefWorks, EndNote, and Zotero, I was won over pretty easily. It was that thing which I had been holding out for, as I had more or less managed without any citation management tools for years at a time. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to read this:

National Science Foundation Hires Zotero

We are delighted to announce that the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Centers Program in the Division of Engineering Education and Centers has hired the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) to provide a customized interface for NSF’s internal use. NSF had already been using Zotero for some time, and based on positive experience with the software, NSF contracted with CHNM to extend Zotero to meet the organization’s needs more fully.

Ironically, as part of working on a NSF grant, I may have to move the relevant portions of my library over to EndNote, the program users love to hate. This may well be how things move full circle in the world of large bureaucracies...

Computery Goodness

2009-08-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

I've been tinkering with multiple operating systems on my laptop. This is nothing new, but rather something I've been doing for going on four years now, with various OS's and laptops. Today, however, I achieved a new level of geekiness.

Today I restored my installation of Windows XP. Rather than reinstalling and reconfiguring the twenty-some-odd programs I use on a daily basis, I did the following:

1. Made a copy of the entire windows xp partition to an external harddrive (while in Linux, because Windows will get sticky about certain system files)
2. Reformatted the original harddrive, creating an empty partition for Windows to reside in, and installing the operating systems that required the reformatting of the hard disk.
3. Copied the entire windows partition back onto the blank partition.
4. Used my original windows installation disk to go into 'repair' mode to execute the following command: 'fixboot'
5. Voila, my windows xp works exactly as it did yesterday before I made the backup, in a fraction of the time it would take to reinstall everything.

But I bet right now you're wondering what sort of practical use this has for your life. Well, should you be one of the masses using Windows XP in your personal life, you can easily download a thumb drive version of linux (such as Puppy), install it on an old flash drive you have lying around, and then use it to make a backup of your entire hard drive. Then, should you ever get a virus, have a hard drive failure, or whatnot, you can have a new disk up and running with all of your old programs installed in a fraction of the time.

And believe me, hard drive failures happen to everyone. You don't want to spend your days looking for spare hard drive parts on ebay so that you can squeek one last read out of a dead harddrive.

Living in the City of Beautiful People

2009-08-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

This fall I'll be starting a doctoral program at UCLA. Aside from the obvious issues of graduate study, moving to LA has been full of other things as well. For instance, our apartment falls pretty squarely between West Hollywood and Hollywood proper. If we walk four blocks south, we find ourselves in a transitional neighborhood of aging Russian Jews and young, fashionable gays. If we walk four blocks east we are surrounded by tourists and highly manicured fashionistas trying to make it in the entertainment industry. Every day I feel like I'm in some sort of strange movie set, and then I realize that I am.

Then there are the little things that make life so colorful. Like not having power for 5 days. I guess the previous tenant was enough of a deadbeat that I had to show up in person at the LA Dept. of Water and Power with a copy of my lease and photo ID. It wouldn't be such a hassle if they were open on the weekends...

But being a technophile without power leads to the question of what do I do with myself when the technology fails me. I like to listen to music, watch movies, cook, listen to the radio, read, all of which become more complicated with no power. No fans, no refrigerator, no stereo, no lights, no wasteful hours of internet surfing, but then again, I can't remember the last time I ordered take-out for a candle-lit dinner, so perhaps I shouldn't complain.

Link of the Day - Dial a Poet

2009-07-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

In continuing the theme of politics and poetics, here's a tidbit from a neat archive on art and music:

(Dial-a-Poem was a sort of answering machine system where people like John Giorno, Alan Ginsberg, and Patti Smith recorded poetry for people to call into. Perhaps it could be considered an odd precursor to the podcast)

DIAL-A-POEM HYPE

One day a New York mother saw her 12-year-old son with two friends listening to the telephone and giggleing. She grabbed the phone from them and what she heard freaked her out. This was when Dial-A-Poem was at The Architectural League of New York with worldwide media coverage, and Junior Scholastic Magazine had just done an article and listening to Dial-A-Poem was homework in New York City Public Schools. It was also at a time when I was putting out a lot of erotic poetry, like Jim Carroll's pornographic "Basketball Diaries," so it became hip for the teenies to call. The mother and other reactionary members of the community started hassling us, and The Board of Education put presssure on the Telephone Company and there were hassles and more hassles and they cut us off. Ken Dewey and the New York State Council on The Arts were our champions, and the heavy lawyers threatened The Telephone Company with a lawsuit and we were instantly on again. Soon after our funds were cut, and we couldn't pay the telephone bill so it ended.

Then we moved to The Museum of Modern Art, where one half the content of Dial-A-Poem was politically radical poetry At the time, with the war and repression and everything, we thought this was a good way for the Movement to reach people. TIME magazine picked up on how you could call David and Nelson Rockefeller's museum and learn how to build a bomb. This was when the Weathermen were bombing New York office buildings. TIME ran the piece on The Nation page, next to the photo of a dead cop shot talking on the telephone in Philadelphia. However, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and The Black Panthers were well represented. This coupled with rag publicity really freaked the Trustees of the museum and members resigned and thousands complained and the FBI arrived one morning to investigate. The Musuem of Modern Art is a warehouse of the plunder and rip off for the Rockefeller family and they got upset at being in the situation of supporting a system that would self-destruct or self purify, so they ordered the system shut down. John Hightower, MOMA Director, was our champion with some heavy changes of conscience, and he wouldn't let them silence us, for a short while. Then later John Hightower was fired from MOMA and Ken Dewey recently flying alone in a small plane crashed and died.

In the middle of the Dial-A-Poem experience wqas the giant self-consuming media machine choosing you as some of its food, which also lets you get your hands on the controls because you've made a new system of communicating poetry. The newspaper, magazine, TV and radio coverage had the effect of making everyone want to call the Dial-A-Poem. We got up to the maximum limit of the equipment and stayed there. 60,000 calls a week and it was totally great. The busiest time was 9 AM to 5 PM, so one figured that all those people sitting at desks in New York office buildings spend a lot of time on the telephone, then the second busiest time was 8:30 PM to 11:30 PM was the after-dinner crowd, then the California calls and those tripping on acid or couldn't sleep 2 AM to 6 PM. So using an existing communications system we established a new poet-audience relationship.

Dial-A-Poem began at the Architectural League of New York in January 1969 with 10 telephone lines and ran for 5 months, during which time 1,112,337 calls were received. It continuted at MOMA in July 1970 with 12 telephone lines and ran for 2 and a half months and 200,087 calls were received. It was at The Musuem of Contemporary Art, Chicago for 6 weeks in November 1969 and since then has cropped up everywhere. This was with equipment working at maximum capacity and sometimes jamming the entire exchange. At MOMA, the 12 lines were each connected to an automatic answering set, which holds a pre-recorded message. Someone calling got randomly one of 12 different poems, which were changed daily. There were around 700 selections of 55 poets.

On this LP of Dial-A-Poem Poets are 27 poets. The records are a selection of highlights of poetry that spontaneously grew over 20 years from 1953 to 1972, mostly in America, representing many aspects and different approaches to dealing with words and sound. The poets are from the New York School, Bolinas and West Coast Schools, Concrete Poetry, Beat Poetry, Black Poetry and Movement Poetry.

John Giorno, August 1972

MP3s recordings can be found here:

http://www.ubu.com/sound/gps.html

2009-07-08T11:59:00.000-07:00

Link of the Day:

http://twitter.com/QueensSpeech

International LGBT news snippets, based out of London.

Although I'm kinda bummed, because their regular website (http://www.queensspeech.com) is down with a db error and it's the second site in a row I've found today with database errors. Did MySQL go on strike today?

Just because the technology is there...

2009-02-16T23:47:00.000-08:00

Last week I attended a panel of library directors giving tips to library students on entering the job market. They discussed resumes and interviews and gave the perspective of the people on the other side of the table. By and large, it all the things I've heard dozens of times already. But there were a few points where I was both shocked and appalled by the discussion.

The first thing that stuck in my throat was the comment from a male academic library director who stated:

"When you're going on the job market, manage your online brand of yourself, because I'm going to google you, and if I don't like what I see, then you're out."

I've heard this statement before in various contexts, so it was not unexpected or unheard of, but I still couldn't quite swallow it whole. I had a strong gut reaction to the question. Initially I felt that looking on sites such as facebook or myspace to make hiring decisions would constitute an invasion of privacy. These social sites are almost entirely unrelated to professional activities and are the very sites that are blocked in many public libraries and federal agencies. It didn't sink in as to why it was bothering me so much until some other students brought up the issue of how to handle discriminatory interview questions in terms of being females in their child bearing years. Here was a untraceable way for a manager to engage in that kind of discrimination without having to disclose about it.

I believe in a sharp distinction between my professional and personal lives. What I do at work I would like to leave as work, and what I do at home I would like to leave as my home life. However, because I have worked in LGBT archives and history projects, I've gotten some bleed over between the two, especially in terms of my 'internet branding of myself'. When I worked at the LGBT Resource Center at the University of California, Davis, the director of the center was perfectly candid in warning me about potential hiring descrimination if I was listing the job experience on my resume. It was general practice to suggest to all the employees that as an alternative to listing the LGBT Center as my employer, I could always list our department of the Cross Cultural Center instead. However, as a result of this employment, I'm still cited in various LGBT higher education websites as being a resource or a contributor. There's no hiding that I was playing on the gay team. But why should I be ashamed to have worked in a well paying, legitimate, and complex work environment within student affairs at a Tier I Research Institution?

There is also the problem that with every passing year, there is more bleed over from the physical to the digital. Every year it gets easier to carry over ephemera from the physical world into the digital one. Every year there are more pictures of pride parades, more pictures of political rallies, more pictures of nightlife posted on the internet. I see more and more of people's personal lives becoming accessible on places like facebook and flickr as their lives become integrated with digital technologies. It has become simple to use these social networking tools to facilitate cocktail parties, network with high school friends, chat with classmates, etc., but it is being done in a forum that is now being recorded, word for word, picture for picture, and may also be accessible to outsiders. I don't think we should underestimate the implications that this has for fundamental changes to our conception of privacy.

However, regardless of what bleeds over from the physical world into the digital, it doesn't change the fact that just because it is possible, does not mean that should be considered ethical. The ability to google a potential hire also opens the door for a manager to engage in discriminatory hiring practices. It allows the manager to ask questions of the candidate's background that would be unquestionably unethical to ask in a job interview itself. It is also highly problematic to require candidates to mask every personal element of their digital lives that could form the grounds of discriminatory hiring practices.

Beyond the issues of offering up information that ethically shouldn't be using to make hiring decisions, there are other questions that I have about using to google to evaluate potential hires. If a manager makes hiring decisions based on a medium that librarians, by and large, universally disparage as an unreliable source of information, then it calls into question the manager's core competencies as an employer. Does the manager have the skills to conduct a successful job search without resorting to sources of information that are not verifiable (such as facebook or myspace)? I used to work with a billing system where we had full access to all the personal information imaginable that the university retained, and we still regularly confused patrons and had difficulties establishing matching identities between the billing system and our patrons. I don't think that we were particularly incompetent, it's just that there were hundreds of thousands of people in their database. And if you expand that search process to the internet at large, the pool of potential hits expands into the millions.

Finally, it is also important to note that librarians are going to look hypocritical and ineffectual if they make a stand to protect the privacy of their patrons and ignore the privacy of their employees, even if they are only potential employees.

Strange Days

2009-01-27T19:49:00.000-08:00

I found a journal article for sale on amazon.com today for the low, low price of $5.95:

http://www.amazon.com/ceiling-mounted-airborne-concentrations-building-TECHNICAL/dp/B0009738BW/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233113596&sr=8-16

It's the first time I've seen an academic article for sale on amazon. I wonder if it's a viable paradigm. It seems quite odd to me.

I knew there was something different here...

2009-01-22T15:13:00.000-08:00

Somehow, after having spent most of my life in California, I never fail to be amazed at the stark gulf between the have's and the have-not's of that place. Today I was reading about how they built this statistical model of literacy rates:

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates/

The interesting thing about the model is that you can compare rates of the minimal levels of literacy between counties and states across the country, and it will show you the rates as well as various confidence intervals.

So naturally, I compared the place that I was born with the place where I am now (using the data collected in 2003). The model estimated approximately 24% of the population in the county where I was born to be lacking in basic literacy skills. And now I live in a county where the model estimates only about 5% of the population to be lacking in basic functional literacy skills.

Why can't I shake the feeling that these statistics are deeply related to other problems of race and class?

The Illusion of Printed Objectivity

2008-12-01T16:07:00.000-08:00

Last night, while being softly rocked between airports and timezones I watched a documentary of the Romanian revolution during the fall of communism in 1989. [Videograms of a Revolution http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108489/] It is a beautiful, haunting film composed of a composite of footage from those fateful days in December 1989. As the popular uprising against Ceauşescu gained momentum and dissidents took over the streets and the airwaves, it was interesting to see who they chose for their spokespersons. Some were organizers, some were army generals, but one of the ones they were most proud of, who they took the most time in introducing, was a poet.

This summer, while working on a paper discussing censorship in East Germany, it became clear how important the writers were to organizing and vocalizing criticism of the government. Ironically, they became the beloved voices of the people criticizing a regime that was supposedly ruled by the people. Moreover, these citizens were so hungry for voices from outside the ideological cultural and political monolith of communism, that every novel was read in hopes of a whispered meaning that had escaped the censor's attention, regardless if the author had intended any such hidden meanings.

At every turn, it becomes clear that literature is an ever powerful tool to create a representation of the world as the author wishes the reader to experience it. And with every powerful tool, it has been contentious, a struggle over the power to define reality. It has always been plagued by these politics of this representation. Plato and Aristotle argued back and forth on the morality of poetry. The church of the middle ages burned heretics for disagreeing with or disproving scripture. Luther translated the bible into the language of the people, and thereby made the texts accessible to them. The Nazis burned books and libraries. The Allies disposed of some 3 million volumes from German research libraries after the end of the Second World War.

Since the induction of the ALA Library Bill of Rights in 1948 which elevated the concept of intellectual freedom to a fundamental right, libraries have bolstered the bulwarks of their ships in the rough seas of politics using the argument of objectivity. They are not meant to endorse any particular politics, but rather to support the political process.

After reading these histories and others of book challenges across the US, I can't help but wonder if that posture of objectivity is impossible, as the very nature of communication is through subjective bodies. However, I don't know if I would move away from the discussion of objectivity. I think it stands in for a discussion of assimilation in the face of plurality. And I very much want to make an argument for a pluralistic society, where the many facets that already exist within any given community are allowed to exert their presence.

So perhaps objectivity in librarianship is being able to say "this isn't for me, this isn't for you, but it's for someone." The difficulty with this argument then arises surrounding the question of how an outsider knows that the item is needed. It gets into the question of whether libraries have a reactionary versus a leadership role in defining who items are for. If libraries have a leadership role, then they can be held responsible for addressing the social problems of the community. If libraries have a reactionary role, then they are at the mercy of the social problems of the community.

Hmm... this doesn't seem like a recipe for success. No wonder libraries walk such a fine line with collection development and seem only too happy to put a certain amount of the responsibility in the hands of vendors.

Atomic Super Babies

2008-10-28T20:23:00.000-07:00

I was working on my homework and one of my housemates came over and commented on the topic headings for the week:

Lecture 1: What is Normalization?
Lecture 2: Dependencies and Determination
Lecture 3: Design Tips

At which point I realized that it sounded like we were creating a fascist breed of atomic superbabies rather than studying some of the more mundane points of database design.

Yes. This is all I have that qualifies as intellectual discourse at the moment. It is THAT point in the semester.

Biblioburros

2008-10-21T14:46:00.001-07:00

We were sitting in one of my classes the other day, wondering what it would be like to be librarians during the early days of Wisconsin librarianship. We had been reading about that century's library commission and the circuit librarians, traveling from township to township, delivering books via horse and carriage. However, even in this age of precision bombs and satellite television, not every library runs on oracle and xml, and not every librarian has a computer:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/world/americas/20burro.html

I still secretly wish that there were more burros in my job description. And as my pedagogy teacher so aptly reminded us in class last night, it all comes down to engaging with and caring about your students and giving them the tools they need to learn.

And thanks to The Lost Albatross for sharing the link.

RIP Celeste West

2008-10-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

I encountered Celeste again and again in the print world of my universe, from Synergy magazine to the book 'Revolting Librarians'. And perhaps the most powerful thing I could say for her is that she made me feel more welcome and more involved in the world and in libraries, without ever having the opportunity to meet her. I probably would never have considered library school if I had never stumbled upon 'Revolting Librarians' in the stacks one day. So it was no surprise to read this call:

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO A CELESTE WEST “FESTSCHRIFT” BOOK PROJECT

Co-editors Toni Samek and KR Roberto are seeking articles, stories, poems, photographs, letters, thought pieces and other individual and collective memories of Celeste West, lesbian, feminist librarian, publisher, and activist, for a festschrift to be published by Library Juice Press in 2009. Celeste passed away in San Francisco on January 3, 2008 at the age of 65. She was a pioneering progressive librarian and one of the founders of the Bay Area Reference Center (BARC), Booklegger Press, Synergy [Magazine], and Booklegger Magazine. She was also co-editor of the now classic title Revolting Librarians. From 1989 until 2006, Celeste worked as the library director at the San Francisco Zen Center. She was a radical library worker whose practice challenged established library traditions by encouraging librarians to speak up about the need for systematic change. West initiated questions and challenged assumptions (such as library neutrality) that continue to be central issues examined in critical librarianship today. However, while Celeste released a lot of work to the world as author and editor, not much was ever shared about her as subject.

Thus, we are seeking your contributions to a Celeste West festschrift book project.

For an historical snapshot of some of Celeste´s key contributions via Booklegger Press, please see: Toni Samek. 2006. “Unbossed and Unbought: Booklegger Press the First Women-Owned American Library Publisher” in Women In Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand. Foreword by Elizabeth Long. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press in collaboration with the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Pages 126-155. Available in print and as an online book.

For a more contemporary introduction to Celeste´s way of thinking, see: Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out by K.R. Roberto and Jessamyn West.

Please direct your ideas and queries to the FESTSCHRIFT Editorial Assistant and Project Manager Moyra Lang (moyra @ ualberta.ca). The final deadline for all contributions is December 10, 2008.

If you have not encountered the name Celeste West until now, please see here: http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=361 and here: http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/in-memoriam-celeste-west.html

THANK YOU! Toni Samek, KR Roberto, and Moyra Lang.

Link of the Week: Stories for Change

2008-10-14T09:27:00.000-07:00

People have been telling stories for as long as we have had memories to remember them. History itself is just stories upon stories stiched into a patchwork of a larger picture.

Well, one of the latest iterations of storytelling is via digital technologies. Thus it is no surprise to find an organization dedicated to teaching folks to share their stories with a wider audience. Stories for Change offers stories you might not otherwise hear in a sleek interface that pairs usability and design with a solid metadata schema.

http://storiesforchange.net/

Dream Jobs

2008-10-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

Whenever I get bored or dissatisfied in my classes I start looking for jobs. Over the years I've enjoyed looking for jobs on:

http://www.lisjobs.com

And after working in a number of different library departments, I decided that this is pretty close to my dream job:

http://sirsidynix.iapplicants.com/ViewJob-13659.html

It includes teaching, interacting with folks, getting to travel, getting to be geeky about technology, helping people be more efficient with their use of technology, and so on.

Link of the Week: MaintainIT

2008-09-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

Finally, a place for public libraries to share information, tips and tricks for dealing with their technology:

http://www.maintainitproject.org/

Things I like about it:

The language is accessible for the techies, but non-intimidating for the non-techies.
It's full of lots of different kinds of information, from print-like publications to webinars to audio interviews with various folks, which is sparkles my interest.
the design seems highly functional. The color scheme makes me a little crazy, but it didn't stop me from being drawn into the website and finding interesting stuff.

Museum of Jurassic Technology

2008-09-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

While in Denver last month, I visited the Denver Zine Library and saw a short documentary on the 'Museum of Jurassic Technology' located in Culver City, California. It is an entirely different pretext of creating a public event, part science, part art, part question, and part answer. On one of their sites, they comment:

"The rarest and most precious knowledge is not that which is imposed, but rather, that which is absorbed, inhaled almost, from the ephemeral substance of the world in which we are contained."

Unfortunately, I have the feeling none of these sites successfully capture the nature, the aboutness of this enterprise. It plays upon that which we already know and take for granted, and push those assumptions to their edge, twisting them just slightly into the realm of myths, but rooted in a level of childlike wonder for the complexity of the world.

If this Museum of Jurassic Technology merges the lines where science and myths intersect under the name of 'museum', what would a library along the same pretext look like?

Surprisingly, White House found to be lacking formal records management system

2008-08-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

I hate to admit, I'm not a real big reader of the news these days. I love the act of drinking tea and reading the paper in the morning, let's face it though, it just doesn't fit into the sleep deprived schedule of your average graduate student. But I do get sucked into various virtual newsrooms periodically in an attempt to keep myself somewhat informed of the world outside my head.

And despite my reclusive tendencies, I know we've landed in strange times when gay.com is reporting on the email archival practices of the white house:

White House missing up to 225 days of e-mail
published Wednesday, August 20, 2008

http://www.gay.com/news/article.html?2008/08/20/4

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in February, the White House told Congress it was trying to determine how many e-mails were missing. An earlier analysis from 2005 estimated the number of days of missing e-mails at 473 over a period of 20 months.

"We will continue to work with members of Congress and the National Archives and will communicate the results of our accounting effort at an appropriate time," White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has said the White House's failure to properly archive e-mails violated the Presidential Records Act. The top lawyer for the National Archives has expressed disappointment the White House did not have a formal records management system in place. (Pete Yost, AP)

An Apology to Hytemlia

2008-08-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

Over many years of living in cramped cities, I have inadvertently found myself becoming a disciple of Asphaltia, goddess of parking. I am not an ardent believer, but rather I find myself offering up incense and incentives while circling blocks and blocks of cars seperated only by slim margins of driveways and fire hydrants. Being that I gave up my car earlier this summer, I find myself wondering if I will miss her benevolent presence in my life, or if she will instead confer her benevolence on my thin skull whilst I pedal my way betwixt impatient drivers.

But I fear I must also offer up an apology to Bitonia, goddess of code and Hytemlia, goddess of the internet. For I have created indescretions against them. Forgive me, Bitonia. Forgive me, Hytemlia. I am complicit in using software that creates mauled and ugly code through the use of a buggy WYSIWYG HTML editor. I promise that I understand the weakness of my ways. Please understand, I shall to atone by creating a beautifully simple and yet effective hand coded informational page, marked up in validated XHTML, and laid out like a haiku declaring my dedication to your wisdom.

The Simplicity of Basics

2008-07-31T13:27:00.000-07:00

I make a habit of trying to explore different libraries in different corners of the country. Many libraries seem in a struggle for identity, caught between being archives of history, warehouses of books, educational institutions, public spaces, study areas, social anchor points, and purveyors of print culture and reading.

These things all sound so similar, but the tension between them is clearly in our discussions of 'library as place' and whether the 'library without walls' is ever going to replace the brick and mortar edifice of my youth. It's also in the tension between food policies and the coffeeshops, as well as the struggle to serve youth in the same space as the elderly, poor, and homeless.

Yesterday I was sitting in the periodicals section of the Penrose Library at the University of Denver (Colorado). Sitting there, completing an online training for managing federal records, my eyes kept wandering to the brightly colored magazines surrounding me. My fingers were itching to touch the glossy cover of the news magazine from Africa, but then, looking around, I realized that every third magazine interested me enough to want to pick it up: Ms., Bitch, Natural History, Der Spiegel, Popular Mechanics, and so on. I think I heard a soft slurping sound as I stood up and was thoroughly sucked in by the collection.

I don't remember the last time I was in a browsing collection that was so simple and yet effective. Comfy chairs + visually engaging materials + display shelves = drawing in readers. In my four hours there, I did manage to complete my online training, but I also learned about the issues of air quality in Peking surrounding the Olympic games, as well as how Obama's trip last month to Berlin was organized.

And yet, despite the struggles that many colleges and universities are having with basic literacy, the libraries that I have been to lack the encouragement to read for pleasure and background understanding of larger issues. Sure, we're all too busy these days to take time out to read the paper. And sure, our budgets are being maimed by the lack of fiscal support for the public sector. But somehow, when the chair and the shelves are both at my fingertips, it seems a lot less daunting to squeeze it in, like a furtive cigarette between my classes and work.

In an educational institution, sometimes service doesn't mean just giving the patrons what they need for their classes, but rather giving them the room to grow beyond their current understanding of the materials.

Reference: Digital Dictionaries

2008-07-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

For a language that was initially considered to be too base to use in royal courts, German grammer is full of complex points, cases, directionality, and a number of segregations and labels that would impress even the most seasoned cataloger.

Over the years, I've just gotten used to looking up every fourth word in the dictionary, not because I didn't understand the meaning, but rather because I can't seem to memorize what most Germans consider to be simple operating details of the language. Like if the preposition 'through' should be used with the accusative or the dative case. Or if a spoon should be referred to with masculine, feminine or neuter articles.

Who thinks about spoons as having gender anyway? And if the spoon is masculine, why on earth is the fork feminine? And then why is the knife, the most phallic and suited to violence of all the silverware, neuter? I don't know anyone who would think of knives as being neutered. Then there are the plurals that don't have any kind of regularity in their endings. None of that English laziness where you just slap an s on the end. Nope, sometimes there's an ending change, sometimes a vowel change, sometimes both, sometimes neither.

But regardless, I've developed quite a thumb for thick dictionaries that include genders, plurals, cases, and idiomatic expressions, and so I was more than pleased to discover this dictionary project from The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences:

http://www.dwds.de
http://www.dwds.de/?kompakt=1&qu=Maschine&sh=1 (sample record)

I was pleased because I can type far faster than I can look up something in the dictionary, even if I am pretty fast with those wiley reference tomes. Up until that point, I had been using this other project run by educators and academics in Munich:

http://dict.leo.org

Although the DWDS is a work in progress and many of the entries are incomplete, it is a beautiful accomplishment, even in the midst of its inadequacies. It includes all the information you might get from a standard dictionary as well as other features such as word relationship diagrams, a pool of example texts where the word occurs, and a list of synonyms.

It's a dictionary that's been redefined without the limitations imposed by the medium of bound paper, and it makes me hopeful. Because if digital dictionaries can become so effortlessly free of the limitations of the historical print format, maybe online catalogs can get there eventually as well.

Travel Destinations for Library Geeks: Philological Library, Free University of Berlin

2008-07-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

What library nerd isn't going to swoon over a library designed to be shaped like a brain? Honestly, I was skeptical when I first visited the Philological Library in the southwestern corner of Berlin, Germany. I've seen too many architectural feats of design that were beautiful but entirely impractical for the reality of shelving books and accommodating patrons. But in this case I was pleasantly surprised by the success of form and function.

With the stacks resembling the lobes and the folds and the stem consisting of the central staircase, this language and philosophy library in the student union of the Free University, Berlin is a great example of modern architecture working as a modern library. The whole building is a solid investment in design, from the environmentally friendly heating/cooling to the passive lighting, from the staffing to the study areas. Despite the artistic bent of designing the building to look like a brain, the function of the library was clearly weighted equally in the design process. The whole library can be run in the evenings by one or two staff members. The bright (and warmer) upper levels offer a variety of study space, while the interiors of the lower levels house the books.

The attention to detail in the design and execution is carried out on the digital side of the equation as well. Searching the catalog yields your standard lists of books and resources, but also offers the user a floor plan of the library with the location of the book clearly marked. This sounds like an obvious innovation for an online library catalog, but has been terribly slow in being implemented in most libraries.