#12 Publishing

I decided to approach google docs, as the idea of another password to remember gave me a nervous twitch. I've used the site a handful of times, and have since used that as a way of sating disappointed patrons who want to edit word docs. It's still not all that straightforward, in that it can't work with remote files - they have to be uploaded first. I guess that would probably open them up to attacks. Arrr... this is looking to be a short post. My time on the desk is nigh over.

Haven't gone back to use the site that much - not really useful if you already have full office software on all the PCs you use. Still, one day I'll be stranded... and yet, not.

#13 Tech-Nostalgia

The stream of computers that came into the home I grew up in started around the time my mother went back to work in the early 90s. She needed something to word process on, so she got some sort of cut-down early-days laptop with a basic LCD display that made gameboys look flashy. All it did was typing, and saving of documents... I THINK we could save on to 3 1/2" disks, though I think there were limitations. It was, in essence, an 80s word processing machine without the built-in printing capacity. I think that was when old mini-gun-whirring dot-matrix came into the picture.

The next couple of computers were hand-me-downs from my richy tech-head uncle (visits to his computer 'nook' always prompted lots of silent gawking at the bell's n whistles). The first one of them enabled my brothers and I to cut our teeth a bit with basic DOS commands. Figuring out what executables were, learning how to copy files between drives, and using the blessed 'dir' command to see what wonders were held within. As it turned out, it was Q-bert. Other stuff was there, but I think I got a gameboy not long afterwards, whereafter I was trapped in Wario Land for quite some time.

The second computer eventually became my baby, mainly after the family's first Pentium was purchased around '98. As time went by, I scrounged up some second hand bits to add to my jerry-rigged Doom and X-Com beast (ahem). Parts of it are actually still chugging away in the room of a housemate of mine. Admittedly, only the case and power-supply, but living in denial never hurt anyone (irony). It continued to be my pet, going through at least a couple of 3D cards, until a couple of years ago (2004 actually) when I jumped on the 'good enough to play pretty things' band wagon, receiving a brand spanking new computer for my birthday. Although I still insisted on building the damn thing myself.

Not alot has changed in the system since then. The RAM's doubled, the cooling system is now able to keep the damn thing below 90 degrees (c), and the DVD drive has changed. Most of what I've learnt about computers has been trial and error - if, when my adolescence lead me to techy dissection, it didn't explode... I ran with it. Not too much has changed. I read the manuals a bit more these days, but I often get a bit impatient, jump right in, then kick something later. I'm astonished at what I was able to accomplish way back when, considering all that. For a time, I managed to network 4 computers in my parents place (this is around 1999-2000, I think), all tapping into the same 33.6kbps dial-up modem. Hmmmn... snail. Then, a few years later, I networked 7 computers in a uni share-house, nearly all of them having different versions of windows. Um, yeah... though, truth be told, I just wanted an excuse to force people to play Doom when they came over for 'dinner'.

God, I'm sad.

#11 Mash

This area of flickr mash-ups is a good example of the wide range of web 2.0 new emergences, from 'fun but pointless' to 'handy and productive', and a bunch of squidgy middle bits. The geographic tools, such as mapr, are awesome, and a great way to contextualise images. The random image cycling tool and flickr's favourite colour, are more in the former than the latter. And the colour searcher... well, it could have had an advanced search (ie: searching for more than one colour in an image), and the retrieval set could have been larger (admittedly, they would've decided to avoid the cluttery side of things). The image editing tools are a nice way to avoid photoshop, though, and could serve well when you're running out of avatars.

#10 Flick'n

A few days ago, I had an idle moment and wondered whether anyone had done a lolcat site for Cthulhu.

Um...

Someone had.


'lolcthulhu' doesn't really yield results, nor does 'lolthulhu' (the name of the site devoted to such cutesy insanity).

Although, scroll through enough pages tagged with cthulhu, and you'll find plenty of stuff like this:

It doesn't work quite as well as with cats, but considering chibi cthulhu merch has been around a while, it makes a bit more sense. This next image has been done better, but this was the only one I could find quickly:

Terrible, terrible pun.

Anywho, I'm sure lolthulhu will slip into the vernacular before too many terrabytes have passed.



Hmmmn... passing a terrabyte. Nasty.

PS: Did the optional thing too - this was a picture Ken Fraser forwarded on to me in my first month here.

#9 Tech...

My opinion on tagging is definitely changing, although the flaws within the principles of tagging, folsonomies, etc still simmer away. Technorati was definitely impressive, although I can't help but feel that peer pressure definitely holds more sway over what may be a more correctly named subject category. You can see this in more professional areas, such as the numerous different entries in Libraries Australia for the same items, many of which are only slightly different. But it seems that tagging culture, as I've mentioned earlier, tends to overcome this by something of a lemming tendency... whether or not it's jagged rocks or warm fluffy marshmallowy candy at the bottom of that arbitrary cliff.

The lack of uniformity in Library Thing annoyed me as well, although I saw that multiple representations of names did get grouped together, and the tag clouds were handy when trying to decide what the general consensus was on the scope of the book. I guess I'm still a bit clingy regarding the strong community aspect of it. Wow... that sounded terrible. I'll remember that one day when I need to lose some self-esteem.

It is interesting to look at the reshaping and opening up of the term 'peer-reviewed', considering that so many on-line communitites, despite interpersonal hierarchies and elitist mentalities, operate on more-or-less an even plane. It takes the guts out of a lot of academia when it comes to tracking down relevent information. And the raising profile of blogs into the professional and academic arenas themselves has had an impact - people genuinely want this medium to become more reputable, and it shows. The negative stigma is declining, and the diversity of information, ever-growing and re-creating itself, is a great thorn in the side of mainstream media sources.

#8 Folky

For some reason, it took me a while to get my head around folksonomies last year in library school. Taxa's, controlled vocabs, etc etc, made heaps of sense, as they were enmeshed in rules and structure. Maybe the inner control freak I have trouble silencing (mentioned a few posts back) was screaming so much it generated enough white noise to cancel out any chances of understanding folksonomies. Now that I understand it's just tagging, I'm, well, yeah... that makes sense. That's the problem with jargonism - that is, applying new words to a more understandable colloquial tongue - it will inevitably have a significant buffer period before people realise what it's synonymous with.

I'm a bit skeptical of tagging in many respects, though that often falls back on how arbitrarily I tend to tag things (see: this blog). But cataloging's an intrinsically subjective art, and as much as we have LCSH, MARC, AACR2, etc to keep us in line, there will still be plenty of times when subject headings have to be created to accomodate for a certain location, new field, etc, and dewey is constantly being rejigged, so a few different points of entry to any one subject area is pretty much a given. And, as a couple of the articles pointed out, once you find someone's personal taxa and vocab that alligns with yours - bonus. Less time spent trying to guess how the cataloguer (or LC) would approach it. You're constantly breaking rules with any controlled vocab anyway. As a colourfully disgusting example, an australian tourism guide controlled vocab from an annoyingly recent (still over 10 or so years, but still...) period of time listed 'homosexuality.. see: sexual perversion'.