Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald

#18 Done, I think

2007-12-04T18:58:00.000-08:00

I've actually found this program quite helpful, as my luddism has kept my investigation into new web tools at check for a while. Well, that and my lack of a decent net connection for the bulk of the last few years. Anywho, the added convenience I alluded to in the last post has helped reshape how easily I get around my daily/weekly web endeavours. And, as this has happened, I've noticed how much more up to speed so many of my friends, family, lovers, colleagues, etc, etc are than I am. My aversion to dissolving into the net - probably something to do with a fear of SHODAN - will probably still keep me back a few steps, but time management's a big issue in my life, so I'm not too worried about this impulse. In terms of the way I approach my profession, it's definitely intriguing and enlightening. I'm presently trying to imagine a juncture where web 2.0 technology and aspects of our zine collection can happily collide without dismissing the beautifully anarchic and tactile nature of zines (not e-zines, though... they have their place in that realm already and need no assistance in staying there).

Time will tell.

Goddamn I'm annoyed about that stupid widget clock.

#17 Gettin' there

2007-12-04T18:38:00.000-08:00

Okay, after looking at a bunch of literature and seeing where and how so many of these new tools work, I think I've narrowed all this down (ah-huh... yeah, I'm not sure what I'm typing here... ah-huh): convenience and communication. Open dialogue is a big one - feeling like you can have input wherever you receive information. And where do you want to receive that information? At home. Or, ya know, wherever (honestly, I just missed gen x... only just). Things are just getting more and more convenient, or perceivably so, so our job is to make sure that the relevance and quality of information is still there, whilst still giving them the opportunity to have a say in how the information is flagged and described. Is that too simplified?

#16 Pod people

2007-12-04T18:27:00.000-08:00

Ended up search Podcast.net and, via a link to a (sadly) dead podcast by local gothy Scot Dave Callan, I found a recommendation to this one. I remember listening to abysmal streams many, many years ago when I was out of range of most Melbourne public radio transmitters - not much Black Metal on JJJ... well, not enough for 17-year-old me - and trying to convince myself that 8kbps Realplayer files were decent. Foolish, foolish me.

Though at the moment, this... this is much more like it. Not sure why I don't patronise podcasts much already. The sound quality is there, and the speed is there, and the variety and competition (hence, content quality and frequency) is increasing. And they cater for a style of knowledge absorption that is often unavailable in libraries, at least in the level at which a wide enough range of topics can be selected from.

And there's Dan Savage, who is awesome.

#15 Ewe chewed

2007-12-04T17:33:00.000-08:00

Three-fold post, this. You Tube is pretty impressive, despite reaching the Napster problem(ish) of getting so popular that all the lovely pirated material is all too easily found by the creators (greedy critters... think they deserve rights... humph) and promptly removed. Oh, and despite killing all our bandwidth. Yeah. Though, if you're an independent, unsigned band like Schadenfreude, it's awesome, even after you debut on Rage late one night. Heck, Rage must be feeling pretty damn neglected at the moment.

Sciencehack is obviously still in the formative stages - a search for Black Noise only yielded one result - but the interface, though primitive, is at least a bit cleaner, lacking all the peripheral glut that YT tends to love so much.

I guess it's understandable that anybody who's no longer in school would find Teacher Tube a little annoying and limiting. It's obviously pretty tightly regulated, though at least there are ninjas. Yeah.

NOTE: And now, for everyone who wondered what it would be like if Michael Jackson grew up in Bollywood...

#14 Widget tool

2007-12-04T17:15:00.000-08:00

The idea of Widgets, I think... yes, I mentioned them earlier in this blog, and, yes, after checking out this winner of the widget category in SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards, I will have to concur that they are indeed added fuel to the "why can't I just surgically attach myself to my computer chair?" line of thought. It's. Just. So. Damn. Convenient. Damn...

I didn't go to the point of developing my own widget - something that keeps an eye out for early/rare Morgion and Joyless releases on Amazon and eBay at the same time - but I altered a couple of their readymades (should've added my signature beneath 'em... hmmm) and added them to the top of my blog. Just weather and time... y'know, just in case I can't be asked moving my field of vision to the clock in the ever so far away lower right hand corner of my screen, and, y'know, open the curtains and crane my stiffening neck a harsh 105 degrees to see what the weather looks like "outside".

The ease in which you can syndicate said widgets is pretty awesome, though, as I alluded to earlier, they will become the death of alot of things. Like, I guess, your desktop. Doubt I'll be porting them there anytime soon. I dunno, I just happen to like my completely non-existent wallpaper (at home). It keeps me sane. Too many years of staring at album covers I happened to like, and mash up desktops made by obsesssive music fans - it's just nice not to have too much to absorb when I switch my PC on.

NOTE: I have since removed the time function when I realised that it hasn't recognised Daylight savings yet. Silly.

#12 Publishing

2007-11-15T20:50:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-15T19:49:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-13T19:11:00.000-08:00

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...

2007-11-10T20:55:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-06T18:39:00.000-08:00

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'.

#7 Feeding time

2007-10-30T23:47:00.000-07:00

Since my last post, titled 'Junk', I've since gone back on my own words. Not that I'm really seeing RSS feeds as being bereft of time-wasting attributes, but, well... I kinda predicted what would happen without really applying it to me. Short of jumping in the widget deep-end, I've somehow managed to cram a whole bunch of side-line stuff into my blog. Starting off with the all-important 'bunny', I then slowly head on to the serious by way of The Onion, then end up somewhere more news-y. See, now, yeah... hmmmn. I should probably add that heavy metal librarian blog feed too. Maybe.

#6 Junk

2007-10-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

I think I'll have to concur with what 2-Toed Sloth had to say regarding RSS feeds, especially considering the way that you view them through Google Reader. To me, it seems like a bit of a silly excuse for having a second e-mail account for all your e-mail lists to get re-directed to, and then to have the added annoyance of having to be taken out of that portal to view the articles they're teasing you with. Though I can see how such things would be handy if funneled through a widget in a uniform portal - perhaps that's how this stuff is destined to be useful. I mean, well, if you can get all these handy, time-wasting things in the one place where you're meant to be being productive, I GUESS... hmmmn... actually, maybe it won't. Ah.

Ultimately, the time-wasting will win over, and any facade of productivity will crumble under the weight of all the solitaire successors. Yep, that's my prediction. Madness.

Though, as with 2-Toed Sloth, I do agree about The Onion... and maybe the Dewey Blog.

A worthy site

2007-10-21T21:31:00.000-07:00

Mostly blogs by librarians like myself who talk shop too much outside of work, but the list is long and I've only really scratched the surface.

Ah-huh... oh dear.

#5 What sandboxes have become since Peanuts was forgotten

2007-10-19T00:08:00.000-07:00

See, now, this would take a lot of control for me to get used to. At first, I was fairly enthused about starting up a wiki - I had a dream to have an ongoing list of "Lies to tell library patrons". I suppose I still could, though I'd get possessive - I'd want to moderate every addition, and probably re-jig it to fit the style and feel of the site. Then, of course, I'd grow mad with power.

That's probably where my personality really comes to the foreground. For a wiki to work, you have to allow others to freely access and edit work that you may well have sweated blood over for, I dunno, ample exsanguinating time, and then some stuck-up little...

...hmmmn...

I'll stop myself here.

Sure, wikipedia have loads of restrictions, and as I pointed out a coupla posts back, they reject entries all the time. Good thing too, I guess. Where am I heading?

Oh, yes: wiki-fascist-state. That's it. Now, where's my Skrewdriver...

I was young once.

The first link is fun and useful, the second is a joke that was waiting to happen... and it did

2007-10-09T00:57:00.000-07:00

This one could be great with Ask Now... maybe.

This is the blasphemous one. Seems everyone gets a blog these days.

#4 Man's Ongoing Crisis of Identity in the First Half of the 21st Century (or: Why we're all suffering together around a campfire)

2007-10-04T19:46:00.001-07:00

It occurred to me in the last month that I'd been using a wiki for almost as long as I'd been using the internet. That's right - this. I was introduced to it when tracking down synopsiss(ss) for Cinemedia (see: ACMI) 9 years ago when on work experience there. One day, my job was to watch Night of the Hunter. Um, yes. Anywho, one of IMDB's immense strengths is it's ever increasing pool of contributors. If you're not sure when a film's gonna be released, and you've tried searching the woeful search engine of our local censors (which really doesn't tell you much in terms of an exact release date), there's a fair bet IMDB know. There are membership restrictions, but, well, not allot, really. But, seeing as I gave up on film-making in favour of writing, I wasn't really in a position to get that kind of information before any other chump. But nevertheless, wikis, like most things that get lumped with a web 2.0 label, have existed well before the buzzword bingo really kicked in.

My opinion on Wikipedia tends to change depending on what company I keep. When annoying acquaintances start loudly plugging it as the best thing since google, I really start to tense up. Crystal glasses start to chip in the next room - it's bad. But alot of the time, well... how the hell else am I going to find out the real names of all the members of Skepticism? Those guys don't talk to people much. Anonymity helps to maintain the dischord. That, and a whole wealth of people who don't like their music. I can't really decide - I'll just flip a coin and hope that it doesn't explode and kill the whole lot of us.

Seriously though, Zinewiki. Might create a wiki sooon. More news on that later.

But first, a shameless plug: hmmmn, yes... zine-y goodness. Wikipedia rejected an attempt another Sticky person and I made to generate an article on the store. Called it a 'shameless ad'. Or something. Damn moderators. Not as free 'n easy as you'd like, it seems. We probably should've omitted the word 'store. Sigh...

And now...

Anthropodermic bibliopegy

2007-10-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

No, really.

But first, a bit of fun:

...that... was more complicated than it need have been. I wanted:

text
image
text

...but, I guess, I'll just need to hone up on my html. Also, I'm not sure if the GIF will play. Hmmmn. Just in case it doesn't, lookie here. Or here. GIFs have forfeited enough quality already, it'd be shameful for them to lose their powers of animation as well. It'd be like telling a satyr not to prance.

And of course...

Cheese.

The end of humanity as we know it

2007-10-02T19:06:00.000-07:00

Yet again, I'm confused by a lack of a blinking cursor. Maybe we're just meant to assume that there'll be a cursor there - pretty soon, you'll start typing in the kitchen bench, staring at your partner's forehead, and a whole garble of text will spill out of their receding hairline... thanks to an unseen cursor.

But really, my home computer is working again. For ages, I've had White Ninja as my homepage, realising all too soon that Men In Hats had long since ceased, though now, I think, another change is in store: Shelf Check. An incidentally queer web-comic about a cynical librarian in a public library. I rethought my approach to it when telling another queer librarian about it on this weekend previous, it occurring to me as I beamed at it's awesome out-ness that her sexuality isn't made a big point of per say - it's mainly just the 025 geekery. Truth be told, another good contender for homepage fun is this one... though I'm slightly ashamed to name it.

I feel I need a rug to cover up my bedroom PC now that I can actually use it again, though. It's been nice to have one less thing that I can do in my bedroom. Sort of liberating, I suppose.

You at the back - stop sniggering.

And, in conclusion, I've been able to master a somewhat resonant librarian glare... FINALLY! Someone on their phone, me staring at their back, their friends picking up my daggers and poking the person heaps... oh, it was fabulous.

This one will probably not be very interesting

2007-09-30T20:09:00.000-07:00

...except for the fact that I found it oddly hard to click into this space. Or, maybe the cursor was being sneaky.

I haven't checked my other personal blog in the better part of a year. Sometimes, friends have found this offensive, to which I just shrug and try to pass off an excuse that will at least make the conversation a bit less awkward. Presently, my home PC is incapacitated, and apart from finding it hard to pick a time when my housemates are away so I can pleasantly watch all my DVDs with loads of screaming in them - the main reason I've enjoyed having a computer and set of headphones in my bedroom - it' s had a rather pleasant effect on my homely down-time. The room isn't skewed towards that box in the corner, and I've rediscovered the calmingness that is listening to strange Finnish metal whilst reading strange short stories in my bed, surrounded by candles, sipping on red wine. All my memories of VCE are flooding back...

But that's by the by. This is a new blog, and I'm not sure what will come of it. No doubt I'll rant about Ghinzu a lot, for no good reason (nobody else seems to be doing it this side of the hemisphere), and whine about all the films I keep forgetting to watch (like, how did the new Werner Herzog movie slip through my grasp so quickly, huh?! Grumble grizzle grr...). Oh, the hilarity.