I now pronounce you...

I once had a friend that pronounced the word "gesture" as "guess-ture". It was not part of an accent that he had -- he pronounced German and George in the typical way -- but this one word he pronounced oddly. Whenever we had a conversation that involved gestures, we would both steadfastly pronounce the word our own way, adding stress to the situation, and making it feel somewhat like we weren't even talking about the same thing. My mom explained to me that such things were common in kids who did a lot of reading: if they encountered a particular word for the first time in text, they would make up a pronunciation and stick with it.

The same thing appears to happen with all of these new words for file formats, software and other bits of internet culture: most people learn these words by reading them or by hearing them from someone who has only read them. Even in a formal class, the professor is likely to have only read about the material and spoken to others locally rather than having learned about it from an official source with accompanying audio. Even when a new word appears in a dictionary, its entry may suggest multiple pronunciations or disagree with a dictionary that used different sources. Many developers don't encourage any one particular pronunciation as long as people are talking about their work.

Some examples I've noticed recently:

• FAQ: a Frequently Asked Question about a given topic, or a document in question/answer format addressing such questions. The various dictionaries on Dictionary.com say "fak" or "ef-ay-kyoo" and vary about which is preferred. I use either depending on context (fak if one is already visible, F.A.Q. if I am introducing the idea) but tend to not use "fact". I also avoid the sassy variant fa-queue.


• GIF: Graphics Interchange Format, an early bitmap image format. I pronounce this one with the hard g (like the one in graphic) which is different from the official developer pronunciation (which purposely sounds like the peanut butter brand). Fortunately I don't say the word much, because I don't often use the format. I fell out of the habit of using it due to LZW patent threats which have since expired. The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format, designed as a GIF replacement, always served my purposes just as well and was nifty in its own right. PNG, officially pronounced "ping", cites one of its spiffier features as "unambiguous pronunciation", which I find funny because I have also pronounced it P-N-G and "pung".


• LaTeX: a document markup language popular in the sciences (and a free way to make PDF documents!). In our math department, incoming graduate students commonly learn the language from their office-mates (when required to use it for papers, class notes or worksheets for their students) and at the same time adopt the pronunciation of their particular office-mates or teachers. I pronounce this one LAY-tech, but often hear LAH-tech, lah-TECH and LAY-tekz. In the LaTeX user manual, the creator of the language does not suggest a pronunciation, but rather says that "one of the hardest things about using LaTeX is deciding how to pronounce it."


• SQL: Structured Query Language, a database language with many variants including MySQL and postgreSQL. The ANSI standard indicates that the correct pronunciation is just reading off the initials S-Q-L rather than saying "sequel" (which was the name of an earlier language). I do pronounce this one in the standard way, though I recently went to a conference where everyone said "sequel". I have also heard "squill", "squall" and "squirrel".


• Linux: a family of operating systems (mostly free and open source) which run on the Linux kernel, initially developed by Linus Torvalds. Linus's pronunciation (which sounds similar to his name) is considered the correct one, though I know very few people who use it. I pronounce it LIH-nix and I think LIE-nix (rhyming with the English pronunciation of Linus) is reasonably common as well.

Sometimes I wish that developers would vocally commit to a pronunciation even when they think it is is unambiguous (as did the version control system Subversion) but other times I think it wouldn't help. When presented with the correct (developer-sanctioned) pronunciation, I sometimes reject it because I think it sounds weird. Even my friend, when shown the dictionary entry for "gesture", shrugged and continued pronouncing it his own way.

Maybe this will cease to be a problem as more communication is text-only, or fix itself as web pages are replaced by some format with audio more integrated.

Blue 2.0: Done!

I have now finished all of the activities for Blue 2.0: that was fun! Thanks so much to the organizers for putting this together and helping us out along the way. I know we'll be able to use a lot of these technologies at work now that everyone is more familiar with them.

Blue 2.0: My video!

Not long ago, I came across a book of poetry that I wrote in second grade. My favorite poem was "hens", so I have performed (and enhanced) it for YouTube. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to leave comments on the YouTube page!



This was a fun project! I did all of the images with IrfanView and GIMP, and recorded the audio with Audacity on my Windows machine. I put the movie together (and published it to YouTube) with iMovie on my mac.

I was reminded of a project I did in middle school, where they paired each of us up with an elementary school kid. The kids wrote Halloween stories, and we had to transcribe them with calligraphy pens and make spooky illustrations. Mine was called "The Legend of the Pumpkin Patch". I don't remember too much about it except that there was "moaning and groaning in the pumpkin patch", which we all got a big kick out of. This project felt similar, only this time the kid writing the book was me! I think Kathy would have been pleased with the result.

Blue 2.0: Photos, Podcasting and Video

Flickr

Flickr is very cool, and very easy to use. I had no trouble uploading a bunch of photos, rotating the sideways ones, and arranging them into a slide show. I made one slide show for painting day (the day we painted our downstairs camera room and one corner of our lab) and another for Becky's Bon Voyage party before her trip to Italy.

A few things to note:

• If you are using a free account and your photos are large, resize your photos before uploading them. Flickr will only show a reduced copy of your photo anyway and you will use up less of your monthly quota this way.
• Flickr only wants your photos, not your drawings, screenshots or newspaper scans. Occasional ones are fine, as long as you tag them as such.

So far in the library we have used Flickr to share photos of department events. We may also use it in the future to share photos of our work area and processes for colleagues to view and use in presentations.


Podcasting

None of us had any podcast ideas that we were particularly fond of doing by ourselves (though Ben made one of himself reading Shakespeare) so we (Shell, Thom, Crystal, Ben and I) decided to record one together. It was very easy! We downloaded Audacity onto a lab computer, gathered around a headset microphone, and chatted about our experiences with Blue 2.0. We exported the file to MP3 (using the LAME library, which must be downloaded separately) and uploaded it to my web site. Our podcast was over half an hour long, so the file was so large that it would have used up a substantial amount of the quota offered by the free hosting site we looked at. We all enjoyed the experience so much that we are planning future podcasts. Any suggestions for content?


Video

There are many good library videos on YouTube, but this was my favorite that I found today:



Cookie Monster tries to get cookies from an increasingly frustrated librarian by sneaking in his request after a request for a book. I like this video for several reasons.

For one thing, it's Sesame Street!! One of my favorite uses of YouTube is looking up things I remember from my childhood and getting all nostalgic about them. Remember that series of public service announcements with the clock guy who talks about nutrition and hygiene? Time for Timer is on YouTube! That freaky Raggedy Ann musical? The songs are on YouTube!

Another reason: it parallels what Nerve and IFC have declared to be one of the 50 greatest comedy sketches of all time, Monty Python's Dead Parrot Sketch: "much of the joke stems from the rational man growing increasingly hysterical, while the irrational one remains perfectly calm".

The final reason is that Cookie Monster's request would not be so out of place in many of today's libraries. With the idea of "library as place" being important, many libraries have coffee shops and restaurants inside to make them more friendly places to be. I suspect that if I were to go to the circulation desk and order a picture book and a box of cookies, I would be directed to the Education Library and to Grub @ The Hub or the Ovid's/Starbucks in the same building.

Oh and one more link: Read or Die Another Day. Yuriko Readman ("The Paper") is my hero!

Currently working on a video of my own to post.

Blue 2.0: Social Networking

MySpace

I created a MySpace profile: http://www.myspace.com/zemkat

In middle school, I brought a clipboard of paper to all of my classes. The back was a collage of pictures from movies that I'd cut out of magazines. Some of my classmates did similar things; I remember one girl had band-aids with various characters and designs on her clipboard. Without talking to people specifically, I could display my interests and start conversations with people with similar interests, and I could change what I had there by taping new pictures over the old. It seems to me that MySpace profiles are a more high tech version of that clipboard -- if I could have put music or video (or games or polls) on there, or had the content update when my favorite actor had a new movie coming out, I probably would have. If companies could have used the back of my clipboard to most favorably advertise their newest movies, they probably would have done that too.

There is also that "I have more friends than other people, see this big list of them?" aspect that many social networking sites have. In middle school, we did this with friendship bracelets (made with embroidery floss) or friendship pins (safety pins with colored beads that you wore on your shoelaces) -- the more you had, the more friends you had! Of course, many of us made additional pins and bracelets for ourselves. It's probably harder to justify making MySpace profiles for your imaginary friends, though I wouldn't doubt people do that too!

Overall, I'm not that fond of MySpace. Maybe I just haven't personalized it enough, but the ads pretty aggressively outshout the content. It's pretty rude to have an ad on such a page which is a link that says "1 New Message".


Facebook

I made a Facebook profile: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=625167466

Maybe it's just that Facebook is aimed at an older audience, but I pretty instantly found lots of friends from college on Facebook. It also seems that there is more of a focus on games to play with your friends and ways to find old and new friends. I have several games of Scrabulous going on at any particular time, and I keep hearing about this superhero game where you fight each other with your assigned super powers. MySpace seems to have more to watch than to do.

I don't typically do the "microblogging" that these sites allow; that is, letting people know at any given time what I'm doing. "Zemkat's in a meeting", "Zemkat's going to lunch!", "Zemkat's back from lunch". I set my Google Talk status to "watching a movie" several months ago, and never changed it. When I see people in real life now, they ask how the movie is, and if I'll be finished with it any time soon (because if it's that good, they'd like to borrow it).

Facebook seems to be a fine site -- the interface is clean and not covered with ads. I'm not sure that I like that every new application I install seems to get access to everything I do on Facebook, but I'm also not sure if such privacy is all that important to me. I do after all use a Kroger card and a Pet Perks card to save money at the store, and sometimes I get coupons in the mail for things that I actually buy. Maybe letting application developers know what sorts of things I like will lead to more things that I like. I know this is an invasion of my privacy, but I am not chilled by it. Kroger doesn't sell anything so embarrassing that I wouldn't buy it just because the Kroger people would know. Nor will I do anything that private on Facebook.


LinkedIn

I made a LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/7/a52/299

As a third social networking site, I made an account on LinkedIn. I chose this site because I received two invitations from colleagues. The first tempted me to join with a statement like, "if you join now, you will have access to Kopana's network of 2 people." How can I say no to that?

It seems to be a more professional networking site -- you don't just link to who you know and who you like, but who you have worked with and whose work you would recommend to others. There is built-in functionality for requesting letters of recommendation, for example. Seems interesting, though I currently only know a few people who use it. We'll see how my network grows.

Podcasting

This afternoon we gathered around my desk and recorded a podcast about Blue 2.0! You can download the podcast from my web site. I made an account with podbean, which may have offered extra features, but it wasn't clear enough that they wouldn't try to bill me if our podcast became too popular.

It's about 30MB, so I suggest saving it to your computer or mp3 player and listening to it from there.

Blue 2.0: Advanced Wikis

Wikipedia is loads of fun. I have read a number of blog posts where people have been interested in it, but have not found anything to change. If you are looking for something to change, try the following:

• Spelling! There are tons of spelling errors on Wikipedia and new ones being created every minute. Some are vandalism, but others are from editors with good content but poor spelling or spellchecking.
  
  Check out the Lists of common misspellings. For example, search for "secratary" or "seperate" to find pages with those misspellings — if the misspellings are still there by the time you get there, fix them and any others you see! Make sure you aren't changing something that's an acceptable variant.


• Sorting! Another minor edit you can make is to make sure that things sort correctly when you look at them in a category. For example, look in the category American writers and scroll down through the list. Note that most of them appear in the correct order, sorted by last name, but some of them do not!
  
  For example, I see:
  
  
  
  • T. Bill Andrews
  • Angela Johnson (writer)
  • Taylor Antrim
  
  So Angela is sorted by her first name instead of her last! If you edit
  her page and add the line:
  
  {{DEFAULTSORT:Johnson, Angela}}
  
  she will be sorted into the J's as she should be.
  


• Reference Desk! There are a number of reference desks where you can ask questions, or answer the ones there if you know them! My favorite is the Entertainment Reference Desk where people often ask about music and movies.
  
  Make sure you read the rules for the reference desk — don't give legal or medical advice, and try to avoid doing people's homework for them!

The reference desk is a great way to share your expertise, and making minor changes will help you get comfortable with Wikipedia. Happy editing — I hope to hear about your adventures!

Cooking experiment: cheesy cheddar pasta in the rice cooker!

This weekend I learned a number of things about my rice cooker:

• It makes good jasmine rice, and keeps it warm while you run out to fetch gumbo.


• The rice is good the next day with reheated gumbo.


• It can make pre-packaged rice and pasta mixes. (I learned that on the internet!)


• When you do so, the pasta cooks fine but has no cheese on it because it all pours out of the steam vent onto the counter.


• It's hard to clean the vent without watery cheese pouring down onto the heating element.

I know that the internet is not the best source for information, but I got this (about the rice mixes) from the rice cooker company's website and searched for corroborating evidence (about pasta mixes) on cooking forums. Many posts were of the form "you could do this, but why would you?" None of them mentioned the giant mess aspect; they were more concerned with "why would you use a rice cooker? are you too good to use a pot like the rest of us?" or "OMG basmati rice is so much better than jasmine." I think I'll stick with plain rice from now on.

Blue 2.0: play week!

Okay, so I did more than two. I may still comment on the others, but I wanted to be caught up through play week so I'd be in the drawing for the iPod!

1. Image Generators

Image generators are fun. One that is always amusing is the Church Sign Generator. I made this one, inspired by Becky's powerpoint presentation from a few weeks ago:



2. Personal Portals

I have set up a number of these portals, but continue to use only iGoogle because I don't intentionally log into it. I use Google as a search engine, and if I'm logged in I happen to see my mail, the weather, what movies are in the theater, and the last few books to be posted to Project Gutenberg.

3. Make your own search engine!

Interesting idea, but I can't really think of a use that I have for it. I made a Rollyo search engine using the blogs of my colleagues and tried a few test searches for uncommon words that I knew appeared in posts. For the most part these posts weren't indexed by Yahoo! so the searches only retrieved ads. These ads make me grumpy, but that is the subject for a later post. I wouldn't say you can "give Google a run for it's money" with Rollyo because you are not creating a new search engine, only using another one with restrictions. If I find a use for this concept, I will probably just add a new search engine to my Firefox that makes use of Google's site: and OR keywords.

4. Encore

Encore seems fine though I'm hard pressed to point out its "web 2.0" features. Web 2.0 seems to be all about collaboration and doing things your way: searching and monitoring things of interest and adding your own access points and information. Encore has a "tag cloud" (a common feature of Web 2.0 applications) but who sets these tags? Can you actually see the tags assigned to a given book (without just deducing from a refinement) and if you see them could you browse to find books that have those same tags? Why is the sequel Small Steps tagged with "african americans" when Holes is not?

EDIT: Ah, I see now. Those tags are just the LCSH subject terms gathered together and shown in the Encore interface. If you want to see them for a given item, just click "Show location, call number, and availability" to get back to the old infokat interface, go to either the Full View or MARC tab, and look at the subject terms. You can also click on the subject terms there to find other books with those subjects. So the tag cloud in Encore doesn't seem like a big feature. It has also thrown an exception both times I've used it now. The little book covers (which now also appear in the infokat search results) do make it easier to pick the children's books out of an author search for "Sachar".

7. Investigate open source software with SourceForge

I'm a big fan of open source software for the same reason I like cooking -- I know what's in there and I can change it if I don't like it. If Ragú spaghetti sauce has too much salt, you can either eat it like it is or not buy it. You can't take the salt out and you can't just make it yourself with less salt because you don't have the recipe -- that is, it's closed source. If your grandmother makes her sauce from scratch and it has too much salt, you can ask her for the recipe and make it yourself with as little salt as you like. Her sauce is open source. You know what's in it, and you can change it if you like. It may take some work: you need some cooking skill, but you can gain that if you care about such things. If you have a modification you like well enough, you can even post the recipe on SauceForge to share with the world. (Dangit! I thought I came up with that joke!)

8. Mozilla Firefox

Firefox is cool. I started using it because I could run it on linux and because I love tabbed browsing. Internet Explorer has tabbed browsing now too, but Firefox is still open source!

Some add-ons I like are:
* DOM inspector
* Web developer
* Firebug
* HTML Validator
* FoxClocks

If the Eskimos have 100 words for snow...

...Kentuckians surely must have just as many for snow on your car. My favorite type is the snowdrift that buries the car when it is so cold that brushing all the snow away leaves the windows clear. One of my less favorite types is the one I had this morning: the frozen dew as a foil-thin layer of ice on all the windows. If you are not already late for work, you can sit in the car and just let the defrost take care of it. If you are in a hurry however and choose to scrape, it generates a fine spray of snow at your face and down your shirt, regardless of the direction of the scrape or your position relative to the car. I noticed that some of my fellow drivers chose a third option: believing that the ice was transparent enough to use as a window and leaving it there for the drive to work. (!)

The first line of this post is an example of one of my favorite linguistic devices: a snowclone. It is a familiar phrase in which some words may be replaced to form a new similar phrase. The most general form can be written with variables in place of what you can reasonably replace. A few examples:

• If the Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have M words for Y. (the snowclone after which they are named)
  
• Sometimes a X is just a X. (Did Freud actually ever say that about the cigar?)
• What happens in X stays in X. (Vegas? The Mile?)
  
• My degree in X is pending. (Mary uses this one and it always makes me laugh!)
  

I like keeping an eye out for these, and learn about new ones from the Snowclones Database blog, which I watch with an RSS feed. Do let me know if you notice others!

collaborative cataloging and editing

del.icio.us

I made an account on del.icio.us with no problem -- I have often seen other people's bookmarks there but have never bothered to put my own up. The site addresses one reason that I don't keep bookmarks, which is that they don't follow you from machine to machine; that is, you must bookmark them at work, from home, on the laptop you travel with, etc. and hope they don't get mangled as they are migrated when you upgrade your browser(s). My tendency is just to make a web page to avoid all that.

I like the ability to tag links rather than organize them into directories or pages, though I don't have high hopes for my internal taxonomy melding well with the existing "folksonomy" of del.icio.us. The site suggests commonly assigned tags, but should i assign "funny" or "humor"? How about "humour"? All of the above? I expect it doesn't matter, since 5627 people have already bookmarked icanhascheezburger.com. I'll try bookmarking things this way for a while and see how it works out.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing appears much easier to use now than last time I looked at it. Last time, my husband and I chose to write our own catalog instead! I added a few of my books to my account, and put a widget on my blog. Let me know if you want to borrow any books!

Google Docs

I didn't know you could compose documents with Google Docs and post them to blogger -- very cool! My favorite part of Google Docs is its automatic version control. Rather than just saving the most recent draft, it saves periodically so you are likely to have a revision saved for major revisions. That way, if I am writing a blog entry and get up to check on laundry and the cat lies on the keyboard (which she frequently does) I don't just have her version as a draft.

Google Docs is very good for community editing of a document: on the Institutional Repository Task Force, we copied a paper we were discussing into a Google Document, and each made notes and highlighted interesting passages in our respective colors. I have also used Google Docs with a friend to hash out the spec for a program we were writing. While chatting on Skype, we both typed into the document and could see the changes as the other typed them. Very handy! Prior to that we application-shared a word processor, which was slow and only allowed one of us to type at a time. So I am a big fan of this program.

Questions about blogging with Google Docs:

• Can you add a subject line to your blog post? I thought I clicked the option in my blog settings to do this if it was supported. (I manually added the title to the blog post using blogger)
  
• Can you tag documents in Google Docs and have those tags? The blog site settings screen indicates that you can do this, though I do not see a way to tag Google Documents. A brief search indicates that maybe this feature has been broken or missing for a while.
  

del.icio.us

My del.icio.us bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/zemkat/. More in my next post (from Google Docs).

PB and other wikis

I just created a wiki with PBwiki, a wiki service aimed at businesses and educators. It seems pretty restrictive and suggests that I upgrade to the pay version to get > 10MB of space, but that is probably sufficient for many people. One particularly cute feature of PBwiki is the ability to save any given page as a PDF.

Not only am I a big fan of (and frequent contributor to) Wikipedia, I also have found its underlying software, MediaWiki, to be very usable. It is free and open-source, so you can just download it, install it, and have a featureful wiki which you have total control over. (Having control over my software and computing environment is a big deal for me.) MediaWiki appears to be pretty commonly used. Some other MediaWiki sites that I have used include The Muppet Wiki, The DLXS Documentation Wiki, The Guild Wars Wiki, and of course our internal department wiki.

We set up the wiki about two years ago and have used it for various things, including gathering meeting agenda items, composing documents collaboratively and sharing current events on a News section on the front page. Mostly we use it to document our current processes, workflow and status of our equipment. It's very useful to have everyone create pages on topics of their expertise and experience, and to be able to search it! Today I added documentation on setting up samba accounts so that our students can access volumes on our storage drives from their Windows accounts.

I have tried a few other pieces of wiki software, including EditThisPage and TikiWiki, and found Tiddlywiki to be particularly interesting. It is a very cute and powerful one-file wiki you can install on your desktop and add features to with specialized plugins called "tiddlers". As I tend not to stick to just one computer (or domain even) for my work, I will likely stick with MediaWiki for my wiki needs.

Blogs and Bloglines

I just set up a Bloglines account and added a few feeds to it without much problem. My favorites are blogs written by my friends, and a few web-comics: xkcd in particular seems to read my mind many days. I have also added a few blogs of professional interest such as the File Formats blog.

Bloglines appears somewhat useful, though I probably won't continue using it unless amazing features surface. Its main strength seems to be "blog discovery": helping you find the top 1000 blogs, blogs on certain subjects, etc. Unfortunately I'm mostly interested in known blogs at the moment, so am happy with my existing solution to keeping track of all these new blogs: adding them to the News & Blogs section in Thunderbird (the mail client I use, brought to us by the creators of Firefox). Apparently Outlook 2007 also allows you to keep track of RSS feeds.

The first service I blogged on was LiveJournal. LiveJournal is very friend- and community-oriented, so encourages you to gather a list of personal blogs and communities. Once you have done this it offers you a "friends" view which merges several blogs and shows you the posts in date-order. Blogger does not seem to have a concept of friend-blogs, and Bloglines does not seem to have a feature to mix feeds, so for now I'm seeing how well I like the "list of feeds with periodic polling and bolding of feeds with new entries" view which I get with both Thunderbird and Bloglines. So far Thunderbird is winning, since I already have it open for my mail and it takes fewer clicks for me view any given feed. I tend to skim new entries quickly and go back to read them in more detail later, and that second step seems to require a button click to show me all entries that aren't "new". I suspect the real solution will be when my husband writes me an XSLT feed mixer. I like when he makes me presents. :D

Another thing I miss about LiveJournal is threaded comments: the ability to respond to a particular comment on a blog post. In Blogger, you can only add another comment to the big laundry list of comments already there, and it may appear nowhere near what you are responding to. Somebody responded to one of my comments on somebody else's blog and I only saw it because I happened to go back to the blog to look. (Note: comments do not show up in the main RSS feed for a blog!) I could have chosen to get email whenever anybody else left a comment to the blog post, but they may not have been relevant. Right now I'm fine with reading everything, but that is likely not going to scale with time.

"I think that maybe you read too many books, Reuben."

When I first started library school, I saw on a LIS600 syllabus the assignment of watching a movie with a librarian as a prominent character. (If you have any favorites, comment and let me know!) Though I was not actually in that class, I thought the assignment sounded fun and sought out (and re-watched) many movies from the list (and not on the list), including:

• Desk Set (starring Katharine Hepburn as an incredibly cool reference librarian)
• Party Girl (awful!)
• The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag (pretty cute)
• Soylent Green (though he is called a "book")
• The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (fun!)
• The Mummy ("I may not be an explorer...")
• The Station Agent (sent to us by Netflix by mistake -- but it was really good!)
  
• The Music Man (a classic!)
  
• The Day After Tomorrow (much of which takes place in a library)

You can find an exhaustive list at Librarians in the Movies: An Annotated Filmography.

So I am interested in (or perhaps more amused by) the portrayal of librarians in media. Yesterday I came across a game who has as a prominent character a particularly hostile librarian: Zoo Race

The premise of the game: what if Noah decided to have races with all of the animals on the ark? God could be the race commentator!

Anyway, I highly recommend watching the intro. Your jaw will drop at all the horrible things the librarian says. For those studying for comps, which articles of the ALA Code of Ethics does she violate?

Uh oh -- Wikipedia is full!

I guess that last article about the Fokker C.IV (a 1920s Dutch two-seat reconnaissance aircraft) was the last one.

Wikipedia is my newest hobby. I started out by just reverting obvious vandalism that I saw, and then moved on to copy-editing the articles about horses, as a way of learning about the subject of my project at work, the Daily Racing Form. Now I watch new edits scroll by using applications which highlight probable typos (like Febuary) and vandalism (like hi i'm editing wikipedia!!!!!).

It's really fun -- I love the variety of topics I see just by correcting the spelling on them. It reminds me of when I used to proofread ebooks for Project Gutenberg. I chose books more or less at random, so ended up working on things I would not typically read in general, including westerns, romance novels, and religious books. I similarly edit whatever articles come along. Many valid edits are reverted as vandalism because of typos, and I hope that I help them get judged based on the content they add to the article rather than how tidy they leave it.

Never mind that error -- it looks like the database is back! Now I can fix those typos on the article about Alan Spaulding, a fictional character from the CBS soap opera Guiding Light.

chatting

The most difficult part of this exercise was remembering my AIM password -- I hadn't been on it for years, but did eventually remember it. These days, I mostly use jabber (sometimes through gtalk) and irc for a few specific channels. I was surprised to find a few people from my old buddy list logged in, and chatted with a few library people as well.

I am a big fan of online chatting and have used it for work for, well, as long as I have worked. I find it to be a great way to unintrusively ask questions and have asynchronous and multi-threaded conversations. If you keep logs of your chats (which some clients will do automatically) you can also search them later.

Online chatting was very useful while our department was split between two areas, and now helps us avoid the temptation to shout across the room to each other when we have questions. I have installed a jabber client on our student computers, and plan to create (and lurk in) a chatroom where our student workers can report problems and ask questions.

meta-blog: blogging about blogging

Good morning!

Setting up a blog with blogger was very easy -- I was just able to login with my Google account. I have used other blogging software/services in the past, including LiveJournal, Geeklog, and other home-grown and site-specific services. I have never used blogger before now, but have heard good things about it.

No trouble coming up with a name or content -- I can always change it later if I decide I don't like it.

I do keep a blog for work (in subversion), but many days it is more of a queue-like to-do list rather than a prosy thing that anyone would want to read. I am not sure what will appear here over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!