Video Streaming and Sharing

The YouTube site is familiar to almost anyone with access to high speed internet, but this is the first time that I subscribed to the site. One bugaboo I have is the amount of PERSONAL information that these "service providers" want to collect and use. This reminds me of the problems we've run into in the past where retailers and even governments were all trying to track people using their SIN numbers. Once the information is collected, the user seems to lose any control over it, or, the legal disclaimers and agreement policies are so filled with legaleze that the average person can't be bothered trying to understand what they are agreeing to do....

Anyway, the site is fun to browse, and has some educational as well as entertainment value. The last time I checked however, the day continues to have roughly 24 hours and my number of hours of life continues to decrease. I think you get the idea.

Too much stuff, not enough time....

I watched a video about a crow that takes on a mothering/friend role with a feral kitten--what unlikely playmates.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JiJzqXxgxo

The quality of the videos varies tremendously. For example, authors reading in an outdoor tent at Toronto's Word on the Street fair, shot with a cellphone or similar small camera do not make for great quality.... Like so much of the internet, YouTube has few gems and lots of dross.

Better get back to the library literature that I'm supposed to be reading.
v

PodCasts as a RULA20 exercise

Interesting coincidence: I wanted to listen to an audio file (an interview of Seetha Gunraj by Michael Schellenberg) today that I found on BookLounge.ca (actually I was notified about this file and about the book from a newsletter that I subscribe to), but first had to update some software.... this meant actually downloading the Itunes plug in.

The BookLounge.ca site also has podcasts, so I decided to use their RSS feed for this exercise.

I really do not like having to download all these plugins etc. in order to get everything to work... too much trouble that I'd just as soon do without. Besides, I'm not really a "music" person, don't have an ipod, and although I acquired an MP3 player with a cd-player once, I haven't actually bothered to use it. Only this past year did I rip music off a cd-rom onto my computer.... I'm not really a dinosaur but....

Here is a link to the BookLounge.ca page on podcasts and how-to do it. This is where I found the RSS link for their author podcasts. http://www.booklounge.ca/podcasts/guide.html

Anyway, I'm actually looking forward to testing this out further by way of seeing how the automatic downloads work.

Time to log off! Ciao.

Browser Tools: RULA week 10

Although we're already in week 11, I did complete the week ten assignment but forgot to blog about it. I decided to download and install the Firefox Screengrabber application. First, I had to download a more current version of Firefox. I got some technical advice from Simon and everything worked out fine. The application seems simple enough to use.

Not much else to report here.

More on GoogleMaps and Public Transit

I just realized that Google Maps also has a public transit tie-in. Unfortunately, the TTC and the City of Toronto are not participants at this time, however you'll see from this url that many of the major cities in Canada are already participating in this innovative feature:
http://maps.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/text.html#2-canada

I've just contacted my city councillor and copied the Chair of the TTC (Councillor Giambrone) and Mayor David Miller encouraging them to participate too. Maybe you'll want to contact your city councillor as well. Here is a link to the elected officials:
http://app.toronto.ca/im/council/councillors.jsp

Social Networking Pt. 2: The Facebook Account

I've created the account, but really, I still think that e-mail is more than sufficient for my needs and wants as far as staying in touch with my real friends and acquaintances. I suppose there is some value in the networking possibilities of the site but there are only so many hours in a day and life is too short to spend it all on some electronic interface....

I haven't even been watching tv that much in the last year. Now that spring is almost here, I think I'll be out walking more, and listening to the birds chirping and singing, rather than to a talking book or sound recording.

logging off and shutting down,
Val

Social Networking Pt. 1

Just checked out some of the library sites noted on the RULA2.0 blog that have social networking features. I'm far from impressed!
Seems like so much of a wasted effort to me.

If you were a real friend of mine, I might be interested in the diagnosis that your cat has OCD. In reality, you're some stranger in NYC and I couldn't care less!

The Denver site was way too busy. You need to have an attention deficit disorder to find it exciting.

Meow,
val

P.S. Why doesn't the RULA posting mention any of the controversies such as Facebook's recent media flare up about "ownership" and "use" of postings.....

Ignoring important issues like this does not serve the user community well. Let's use tools but be smart about them.

Rula2.0 Catchup
Better late than never....
Just finished messing about with some of the Google docs stuff. It was quite straightforward to create a new post for sharing but I didn't try uploading an existing file. I received a couple of notices that people were sharing things with me, including Michelle's name game activity that I finally completed a little while ago.

The google mapping helped me to calculate some distances that I've been walking in the RUNAMOK team exercise project. Practical uses for learning things is more in keeping with my learning goals.

Now, let's see about last week's activities....
val - virile

Dinner With Shani Mootoo

The dinner that I won with author Shani Mootoo was held on Feb. 21, 2009 and it was a magical event. In addition to me and my four guests, the diners included a number of people from The House of Anansi Press including the president of the company who was our gracious host, Shani's partner, and a young journalist from The National Post. The Press has some publicity information posted on their website.
http://www.anansi.ca/anansi_reader.cfm

Shani and her kitchen assistants did a remarkable job, preparing an appetizer of polenta with coriander served with roasted tomatoes and baked kale. There were two main courses with half of the guests dining on seafood, and half on poultry. The poultry dish was baked chicken breast, stuffed with spinach I believe, and coated in baked ground cumin and cinnamon. This came with an apple sauce and a form of glazed carrots seasoned with thyme and bay leaves. The seafood dish was a bouillabaisse or fish stew that contained fresh scallops flown in from Nova Scotia, shrimp, clams, salmon and monk fish. There was a fresh greens salad and the dessert was a true work of art: poached pears with whipped cream and a fresh mint leaf. A Bacci chocolate was served as the finale.

The red and white wines were all very tasty, and the conversations most enjoyable. I probably drank too much, and talked too much but can attest that everyone seemed to have a wonderful time and my guests did not disappoint as they added so nicely to the mix that evening. Shani answered countless questions about her writing, her visual art, her love for a Trinidad that is no more, and of course we enjoyed talking about the characters in her recently published novel Valmiki's Daughter.

I've been asked to submit a book review to the Caribbean literary studies journal
MaComère, and hope my review will meet their standards.

Thank you Shani and House of Anansi Press for making this wonderful dinner happen.

LibraryThing

Library Thing
Here I am again playing catch up... two weeks behind but at last I've got my Library thing account up and running. The site is quite easy to use, but I hate all of these separate logins and passwords.
Here is a link to my catalog:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/vlem
My profile isn't fleshed out very fully yet:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/vlem

I did remember to tag my records with RULA20. Did you?
Well, I have to move on to another post.

Wiki Report

I forgot to blog about the wiki exercise that we did a few sessions back. I made a post about a Trinidadian Dinner Party that I'll be attending. For those of you who have access to the RULA2.0 wiki,
you'll find the posting here:
http://rula20.pbwiki.com/Trinidadian-Dinner-Party

Thanks to Lei and Helene for commenting. I've added a comment of my own.
mmm, can taste the seafood already.

Social Bookmarking with Delicious

One of the hassles with this RULA2.0 web2.0 learning program is that it requires so many new online registrations and passwords. For someone who can barely remember his phone number on a good day, this is all TOO much.

However, I did find that setting up the account and downloading the bookmarklet tool was quite easy. The features are fairly intuitive. Finally an e-tool designer that actually gets it! It wasn't too challenging to figure out how to get into and edit my bookmarks' tags. As for tagging, I think this is greatly over-rated. If it works well for you, power to you, but it cannot replace other metadata tools, and dare I say, controlled vocabularies that I like to use. Sometimes a single word just doesn't capture the essence that I'm looking for, and it isn't practical to hyphenate or otherwise conjoin words because of the design of the tagging tool.

I could write a booklet, but don't have time to fool around any more tonight.
Here's a link to my bookmark page:

http://delicious.com/vlem

ciao

Flickr account now live

I didn't get around to creating my Flickr account on Friday afternoon--the time when I seem to get around to doing the weekely RULA2.0 tasks. Last week was the Wiki exercise and I haven't been back to check out all of the recipes.

I uploaded a couple of photos of some elderly friends that I took last fall, and a couple of photos that my friend Pascal in Marseilles, France sent to me the first week of January 2009 following a big snowstorm. I'll try to upload a couple of photos of his garden in the spring of 2008 for comparison purposes.

To visit my Flickr site, try this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35267005@N08/

RSS Feeds, Not Quite as Simple as I Thought

It's already Friday afternoon and I'm still farting around with my RSS tutorial for week 2 of the RULA2.0 learning program. The process of setting things up isn't as intuitive and simple as I would have liked. At any rate, I've muddled through.

Here is my public blog
http://www.bloglines.com/public/vlem

Fridays are Good and your Catalogue can be good too

It has taken me all week to get to this stage in setting up this blog.

Something that I've been thinking about viz library's and their public catalogues.

Traditionally, the opac (online public access catalogue) has been the main gateway to the library's print/audiovisual/map/and e-book collections. The metadata that populates the database comes from many sources, adheres to various levels of standardization, yet remains key to "discovery" of materials owned or licensed by the library.

On one hand, many big heads say the opac is obsolete as a discovery tool, that cataloguing standards and tools such as library of congress subject headings are passe. I suspect, that these same heads are the same people that are saying, lets outsource all of our cataloguing, or to save costs, lets just use bibliographic data supplied from the publisher or a vendor. It is good enough.

Good enough for whom? How can a crappy record that may not even contain the correct title or subtitle, serve a good discovery role?

I maintain that you get what you pay for. If you want to enhance discovery, one way is to ensure that your have well trained staff creating enhanced bibliographic records that include things like contents notes and access points in the conventional catalogue. With advanced keyword searching capabilities that are the norm now, the added value has the potential to pay off in spades with greater discovery of relevant material and therefore cirulation and use of the material acquired, catalogued, shelved, preserved or made remotely accessible by the library.

Have a great weekend.