Month: July 2007

Categories
news olympia

Plan B from Oly Space

“The state Pharmacy Board adopted rules taking effect Thursday that require timely dispensing of medications and allow a pharmacist to refuse if someone else can fill the order. Exemptions cover potentially fraudulent prescriptions and other concerns.

The rule revisions arose in the wake of concerns about pharmacists’ moral objections to dispensing emergency contraceptives such as Plan B.”

Which brings Ralph’s Thriftway back into the spotlight. After the initial furor over their refusal to stock Plan B, things went mostly back to normal, with a not-insignificant number of activist-minded folks boycotting the store. Now, with Safeway gone, Ralph’s is doing better than ever, but are their morals on the right side of the law?

Read more: The Olympian, Stormans ponders legal action over Plan B rule

Categories
book libraries webcomics

Bookhunter

“The year is 1973. A priceless book has been stolen from the Oakland Public Library. A crack team of Bookhunters (aka. library police) have less than three days to recover the stolen item. It’s a race against the clock as our heroes use every tool in their arsenal of library equipment to find the book and the mastermind who stole it.”

The best part? You can read it for free, right here.

via Librarian.net

Categories
humor libraries

Library Shenanigans

cookie monsterJessy Randall has put together a nice list of the “streaking, singing, and other funny stuff people have done in libraries.” Included are videos of “study breakdancing”, “pac man reenactments”, and even a clip from Sesame Street.

Make sure you don’t miss the peep research or the library musical!

Categories
libraries

British Library Archival Sound Recordings

british library logoThe British Library has made available an archival collection of sound recordings that allow users to “explore 12,000 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments.”

Unfortunately, you can’t listen to them unless you live in the U.K., but that doesn’t make it any less cool (in theory).

Categories
internet libraries

Betty Glover Library Workout Tape

I don’t know if it will help you get into shape, but at the least, you can marvel over the fabulous 80s fashions!

Categories
libraries Uncategorized

Library sets up sex line

This is older news, but too cool to pass up.

A library in Vienna is setting up a sex phone line to raise cash.

Vienna’s City Hall has launched a ‘sex hotline”‘ to raise money for the capital’s main public library, officials announced yesterday.

I’m the deep dark jug: the leaf is a sunny afternoon / of my own dusky soul

It’s unusual, but it’s not particularly raunchy: Callers pay 39 euro cents (25p) a minute to listen to an actress read breathless passages from erotica dating to the Victorian era.

Read the full story at Metro.co.uk …

Categories
book news

“No more Potter” or “No! More Potter!”?

J.K. Rowling talks to Meredith Vieira of MSNBC about the original epilogue for book 7 (it was a lot more detailed), and her future plans to write a Harry Potter encyclopedia. There ARE spoilers, in case you haven’t finished book 7 yet.

Categories
internet love poetic

A Softer Snippet

Joey Comeau, who writes A Softer World and who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia (a place I hear good things about constantly), also has a blog, which is called Overqualified, and which is beautiful and funny and often meaningful. He has also just released a new book of short stories called It’s too late to say I’m sorry.

Here’s a snippet from his most recent OQ entry:

Late at night, drunk, our language changes. Our adjectives shift, becoming stronger, more romantic. Our verbs become more clear, more specific, occasionally more desperate. They change even when we’re talking of simple things, like eating an apple if you will excuse my example. In the day we simply eat an apple, but late at night, while my wife sleeps, I tell another woman how I am piercing the apple with my teeth. Then I am cutting flesh from it and laying those pieces on my tongue. I am imagining that its flavors are hers.

Categories
game humor

Chore Wars

chore wars

Finally, you can claim experience points for housework.

Recruit a party of adventurers from your household or office, and whenever one of you completes a chore, you can log it and claim XP.

For reals.

Categories
book libraries

Library smut

pic from an ad from the library bar in nyc
A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I’d start a collection of library smut. I’m simply fascinated by this whole “librarian as sex symbol” thing, and I think it would just be such a cool little collection to show off to people. I mean really, in our civilized society, how often do you get to show your friends your smut collection when they come to visit.

We aren’t in middle school anymore, after all.

Anyway, my point is, quite simply: please buy me some library smut.

The downside of this collection is that it’s difficult to track down. The upside is that it’s fairly inexpensive. I figure if people can just keep their eyes peeled, books like “Bang the Librarian Hard” are out there, practically falling off the shelves, just waiting to be found, fondled, and ultimately adored.

There is an excellent beginning list over at riverofdata.com called, simply, Librarians in Pornography. Alternately, you can do a “librarian” search over at PulpNovelProject.com (which is a fun site to check out all on its own, if still somewhat undeveloped). These are pulp novels, the very tamest of smut, so you needn’t feel any moral indignation over it or anything (unless you must, and then I suppose you must).

Come now, don’t act like an eager young librarian doesn’t get your pages turning.

Related links: Hot Library Smut (with pictures!)
“Libraries” by Candida Höfer
Jessamyn’s gallery of saucy bookplates (potentially NSFW)

Categories
wordpress

Fixer-upper

huzzah for fixing wordpress quirks!There is a nice, fresh feeling that comes of destroying something (after making the necessary backups, of course), and starting anew. Today I deleted all my ahniwa.com WordPress files, as well as their accompanying databases, and started fresh. Aside from the whole “freshness” of it all, this means that comments are working again (I’ve no idea why or how they got broken), and that I can upload images from within WordPress again (also no idea why this stopped working).

As for the theme, I’m as yet undecided. I love the high standards of the Copyblogger theme, but in the end I may be won over by darker colors and a tri-column approach.

Until the WP goblins get me again, functionally yours,

Ahniwa

Categories
internet music

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

radio silenceOn June 26th, internet radio observed a day of silence in a play to make listeners aware of the threat of increased royalty fees. Unfortunately, whether or not people became more aware hasn’t made a difference yet, because as of this Sunday, online radio stations (Pandora, Rhapsody, Live365 et al) will be forced to pay royalties that are not only much higher than what radio stations on the airwaves pay, but will also have to pay back royalties for every song played in 2006.

The result? Many online radio stations are being forced to shut down. Especially the small, independent ones.

What can we do about it? I’m not sure, sadly. For now, I hope people will pay attention to this issue, and see what develops. SoundExchange, who represents the artists and labels, claims that everyone involved in making/producing the music is just trying to get paid what is due to them. A long, personal history of hating the music industry (because I love the music), makes me incredibly skeptical.

Happily (for me), Pandora says that it will stay on(line) the air. For now.

Read more here.

Categories
libraries

Too hip for shushing

bacardi adI can say, from experience, that the librarians of the future (e.g. my current classmates), are totally fucking rad.

Maybe one day we’ll even break the whole “shusher” stereotype. Read the whole NYTimes article here.

Why are people getting into this profession when libraries seem as retro as the granny glasses so many of the members of the Desk Set wear?

“Because it’s cool,” said Ms. Gentile, who works at the Brooklyn Museum.

Ms. Murphy, 29, thinks so, too. An actress who had long considered library school, Ms. Murphy finally decided to sign up after meeting several librarians — in bars.

“People I, going in, would never have expected were from the library field,” she said. “Smart, well-read, interesting, funny people, who seemed to be happy with their jobs.”

In more local “Ain’t the library cool” news, the Olympia Timberland Library had Boston-based punk band Harry and the Potters performing a show, just last night, as part of their summer events for teens program.

If that’s not cool then I’m a muggle.

Categories
internet libraries tech

IM Client Clearinghouse

Looking for the perfect IM client? Sorry, it doesn’t exist. Well, I don’t know. Maybe Adium is perfect, but it’s for OS X, so I’ll probably never know. In the meantime, here’s what my search has revealed (without value declaration or filtering). I’m specifically trying to measure things up to Meebo, and the MeeboMe widget, so I’ll start the list with that.

Meebo (& MeeboMe): I like the support for all the major IM services (including gtalk / jabber, which many others often ignore). However, I do wish that there was a downloadable client (all browser all the time sucks). The MeeboMe widget isn’t as customizable as I would like (particularly in colors / transparency). Some safety concerns, though you can make it more secure by using https:// if you want.

www.meebo.com

Wablet (in Alpha): Sign up to test it. Strange caller id feature, but the tech mags seem to like it so far. I’ve not yet received my invite to test it, so who knows.

www.wablet.com

Plugoo: Supports all the right clients, but you have to pick one of them. Also, you can only chat with one person at a time. Lame.

www.plugoo.com

GAIM / Pidgin: As of April 2007, GAIM is now Pidgin. Pidgin runs on a boatload of OSes, supports a metric boatload of IM services, and overall seems very cool indeed. Sadly, there is no widget support. Apparently, Pidgin is the Adium of Windows (or vice versa). Maybe they’ll develop some fun widgets, eventually.

pidgin.im/pidgin/home

Miranda: Miranda touts itself as the “smaller, faster, easier” IM client. Personally, I hate it. I guess maybe it’s just not for me (e.g. it’s for developers and skinners and the like), but I find it to be the most unintuitive and clumsy program of the bunch. If you want, you can get an Adium X skin for Miranda (http://aqua-soft.org/board/showthread.php?t=30032). Maybe that would help.

www.miranda-im.org

Trillian: I like Trillian, but it doesn’t support GoogleTalk, so it’s a bust. I’m firmly convinced that everyone worth chatting to must have a gmail account by now. Right? Right!? Also, no online widgets. Trillian is working on a very, very, very feature-rich new version though, called Trillian Astra. If memory serves, it’ll do everything for you except make you coffee in the morning (and still may not include an online widget). Whether or not the features are actually worth the cost of developing, I guess only time will tell.

www.ceruleanstudios.com/learn

Gabbly: This incredibly odd little app allows you to discuss any website with anyone else that wants to discuss that website. Simply put gabbly.com/ before any url (e.g. gabbly.com/ahniwa.com/blog) and you’ll see the website with an included gabbly chat box. You can chat with anyone else who did the same thing. Technically, this is more a chatroom than an IM, but it’s kind of neat. Someone noted in my web perusal that you could use Gabbly in an online learning environment by pushing Gabbly links out to a group of people, thereby jumping with an entire class (for instance) from page to page.

gabbly.com

eBuddy: Supports AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. So no GoogleTalk / Jabber, which is annoying. Also seems fairly commercial (i.e. there are a lot of adverts on the website). Sorry, that’s all I got. Doesn’t appeal to me.

www.ebuddy.com

IMHaha: Very similar to Meebo, except drop GoogleTalk / Jabber and add QQ instead. Claims to use https:// so that you can IM securely. I don’t see any mention of a widget, and the lack of GTalk is a dealbreaker for me, again.

www.imhaha.com

ILoveIM: Allows web-based access to any one service: MSN, AIM, Yahoo, GTalk. That’s it.

www.iloveim.com

KoolIM: Meh, same sort of deal. Supports the same four as ILoveIM, plus ICQ. They claim they’ll add SMS support “soon”, which would be neat, but looking at their set-up, I somehow doubt that it’s really gonna happen.

www.koolim.com

Chatango: Chatango is all widgety, which is nice, but only supports it’s own service. Which means, in the end, people can only chat with you through the widget. The library at Oregon State University is using it, and I was impressed with how nice it looked (and subsequently disappointed that it didn’t support any third-party services).

chatango.com

Snimmer & Interaction: Both along the same lines as Chatango, in that they’re web-based. Snimmer uses one of your choice of messenging services, whereas Interaction uses its own service exclusively.

www.interactionchat.com
www.snimmer.com

As far as embedded chat goes, MeeboMe appears the clear winner, despite its imperfections. Chatango and Plugoo are the runners-up. As for non-embedded chat, at least you’ve got choices! Unless you’re on OS X, and then your life is blessedly simple. Still, for windows, I’d recommend Pidgin. Trillian gets the silver.

As far as embedded chat in libraries, LibSuccess has a nice list of who is using what.

At some point I’ll try and clean this up a bit, add better links, and rate things in more detail (just in case people find it useful).

Categories
personal poetic

DYDRMR

Once laid out on that distant shoreline
sand wiggled between toes.

One unending summer,
I’ll dream you a name for every cloud that passes.

Categories
love personal poetic

Disparation

As if the things that bothered us
really mattered anyhow.

We were clenched so tight,
knuckles white,
someone had snuck through in the night and
monkey-wrenched our stomachs.

Why’d the blue skies turn gray, anyway?

It’s easy to play like
there’s no such place as far away,
like distance can drop
like a pin when you call.

Even though the voices penetrate
sometimes the closeness gets lost in the signal.

But it’s not the far away that matters,
but the mutters in our memories,
the murk of missing you that
blends your face into the trees of Mont-Royal.

And there was freezing rain, too.

I came back, expectations akimbo and
high as a kite flown over at least
eight states and two provinces but
not dinged up in the least.

Expectations perform tricks in the slightest breeze.

Fuck freezing rain, anyway.

It nearly took until July before
a heat wave melted those thin ice blankets,
those preconcexpectations that,
like veils,
obfuscate everything.

As if the things that mattered
ever really bothered us anyhow.

At least

I can say that now.

06 July 2007 –Ahniwa Ferrari

Categories
book libraries

LCSHotD

Library of Congress Subject Heading of the Day:

Dandies — Great Britain — Correspondence

Dandies in literature is also pretty great, and offers such great titles as Dandies and desert saints : styles of Victorian masculinity and Performing the dandy : Manuel Machado and the anxiety of masculinity.

Fun stuff.