This isn’t new, but it’s mad interesting (and I’m slow sometimes):
If you like it, try watching his other videos too, they’re all worthwhile.
Author: ahniwa
Categories
Yes, yes, yes.
Thanks to Coyote for posting.
Another fun little tool. Write secret notes and pass them along in links to your friends.
Probably other more practical uses as well?
A neat little toy for making pretty word clouds. I pasted the full text of Alice in Wonderland into it (see below). Check it out.
I could start, I suppose, with an admission of negligence and a tender, heartfelt apology. I’ve sung that tune before, though, and jumping right back in is better than wasting time philosophasting about the difficulties of balancing blogging with daily existing. One thing is more important than the other.
I’m just about to leave Denver after attending the Reference Renaissance conference, which was rad and which I recommend to anyone to is a librarian and works mainly in reference. I found it so much more useful than the ALA Annual conference in many ways, though both have their own merits and resist weighing on the same scale. I guess the reason I would tend to attach more value to RefRen is because I’m leaving with oh-so-many more neat ideas about what I’d like to do with Virtual Reference services in Washington (among other things). This could be a product of where I am in my job now, but it’s also certainly part of the excellence of the conference and the quality of the topics covered.
I also got married recently. July 12th, 2008, to be exact, to a very lovely woman who I adore. Getting used to married life is a challenge, but we’re smoothing out some of the bumps and I’m looking forward to a long, long future with the love of my life.
So yeah, nothing exciting going on. Nothing at all.
…
Nope.
Miss Conduct of the Boston Globe Magazine explores how libraries might be allowing the idea of what it means to be public to disrupt what their mission is as a library.
But I do think we have the right to pick up a new Alexander McCall Smith or study for an exam without feeling threatened–and a large, unwashed, clearly unstable man is threatening to a woman, or an elderly person, or a person with children who need protection. In their zeal to remain “public,” are libraries in fact driving away significant segments of the public they are meant to serve? Are they emphasizing “public” at the expense of “library”?
Surely there’s a middle ground, but where do we toe the line? Thoughts?
This article is wonderful for anyone who often finds themself in a teaching / training position. Oh, if only more faculty would follow these wonderful guidelines.
Cumulative GPA: 3.96
It was the first term did me in, and in particularly, one horrible partner. Oh well, them’s the breaks. I don’t think school grades are any indication at all of how intelligent someone is or how successful they’ll be, but gosh darn it I just spent two years and lots of moneys to get that degree and I want to brag a little bit!
Also it means I can disregard those horrible dreams I’d been having about completely messing up a final assignment, or missing some sneaky assignment entirely. That will be nice. The best reward, of course, is simply being done with school.
Miles and miles beneath the wheels,
we made it back under a shining sun,
mostly – but buffeted by biting winds –
it didn’t even snow on us ’til Washington.
And now home.
Like an ointment I wait for it to sink in,
to fill the vacancies and mend the lacerations,
to calm and to nourish and to fill –
I’ll overflow with everything that’s been lacking –
I’ll merge my Dionysus with my Apollo
and find peace in my passion and
slumber in my wine.
As I sleep, dreams of assignments overdue,
assignments I’ve already done,
assignments who may only haunt me through ghosts.
I’ve overcome them all.
Home.
I’ll never ride out, now,
without knowing when and how I’ll return.
Categories
On the road again again again
It seems like I’ve hit the road a lot over the past few years. Oh well. I think this will be the last time for awhile, anyway. We’re heading out tomorrow. Oly, here we come! 🙂
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Tagged under “Awesome”
I don’t want to jinx myself, because there are still a couple of what I consider “courtesy steps” to take, but at this point it is pretty safe to say …
I am gainfully employed.
Booyah!
Categories
The yearly report.
Today I turned twenty-eight.
It’s been a good year.
Yesterday I bought a suit and a haircut,
and now I’ve got the world on a string.
At least until the string’s cut,
then it won’t mean a thing.
Interviews, moving, assignments,
fond farewells and
fond hellos
and
the
d
i
s
t
a
n
c
e
that beckons like a drum,
that thrums through the wires;
the distance between home and home.
It was never a choice,
but it was always hard not choosing.
I was playing around learning “Hit Me Baby One More Time”, and I started playing this instead. Funny how music works.
Happy Easter, whatever it means to you. 🙂
Ahniwa Ferrari – untitled guitar tune
[audio:https://www.ahniwa.com/blog/uploads/easter-melody.mp3]
silence marks keep filling up the page
angled lines of desperation stretch across
margin to margin like evening shadows
reach across the endless winter
what of that pink railway carriage
what of those blue cushions
we’d have never reached out
had we but known
City lights glowing through the blizzard;
the air infused with falling faerie
dancing gently down to rest in piles
among their silent brethren.
Twenty minutes through the blizzard,
or through the sunny cold,
or the tepid spring;
that walk to class down
charming city streets.
The closeness of the east,
one city piled atop another;
this family of cities
that I never took the time to see.
Energy. Frenetic energy built
around community; the
we-are-all-in-this-together-ness
that made each word bearable.
The thrill of the hunt,
bringing down that big assignment so
we could feast during winter.
And more, perhaps. Perhaps more
than I can say. But
I can say,
Oh, things,
how I long to miss you.
On one of my recent flights home I had the fortune to sit next to an interesting woman who happened to be in marketing. We got to talking about libraries a bit, and she sympathized that if people only knew the breadth and depth of the services their libraries offered, they would want to move in. Given her field, it’s no surprise that her advice was, “You guys need to get in touch with us.” It’s true. In my experience, libraries like to market themselves, and it probably works to some extent. Marketing is not our specialty, though, and our efforts at marketing are probably akin to the results we might get if we gave a marketing expert a book and asked them to catalog it (sure, it sounds easy until I ask you what the 245 MARC field is for, and then you’re baffled). Maybe it’s time libraries went to the experts for their marketing.
Wyoming Libraries are there already, and their campaign is awesome. It’s intelligent, sassy, and multi-modal. They have a library mud flap girl, a library Eiffel Tower billboard, and two radio spots. From the site:
Wyoming’s libraries are as expansive as the state, and as close as down the street.
Libraries offer more than many people realize, and we want to reach out beyond our regular users to let people know this. The new statewide marketing campaign is designed to increase understanding, use and support of Wyoming libraries.
I don’t know about you, but their campaign makes me want to move to Wyoming and use a library. I’d love to know how effective the campaign has been so far in bringing new users into the library, but that’s always a dodgey statistic at best, and I imagine it will take some time before any valid results can be analyzed.
In the meantime, I need to find myself some of those mud flaps …
In the grand tradition.
There once was a library lad
who wanted to graduate, bad.
He wrote every essay,
but oh what a mess, eh?
There always were more to be had.
It’s not entirely accurate because at this point the end is certainly in sight (I’ll be HOME in about a month), but there is still plenty of residual “this-will-never-end” feeling to last me for awhile.
On the upswing, things are going well with my application process, and I have a videoconference interview coming up … on my birthday. After the phone interview, this is another first for me, so it’s exciting but I’m a little nervous about it as well. Maybe one day they’ll even want to meet me.
To wrap up, I’d like to drop in part of what I wrote over at La Casa today, because sometimes even I can appreciate my own writing, and because where I stand on creating comics is also where I stand on creating any content; perhaps most topically, it’s where I stand on self-creation, on developing one’s self as a human being, as an artist (of any kind), as a friend, as a lover, and as a professional. The idea is that we create something of worth and offer it to the world; ideally, something unique that we’ve learned, through introspection and hard work, how to offer.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of comic I want to create. La Casa has been a journey – no, an experiment, really. It’s been a ride. It’s been something, anyway, but a lot of times I don’t know where to go with it, and I don’t know if it’s the story that I want to tell. There are thousands of comics out there, all of them telling stories, all of them with their own worth and audience and humor, and I’m happy that ours has been one of them, but at the same time I somehow want to find a way to make our comic different. I want to find the story that will be our comic, the characters that will drive the story, the merge between art and writing that will, at the very least, be uniquely ours. I’m really not talking about popularity, just the idea that in creating content and putting it out there for people to see, one has a responsibility to make that content … worth something. To somebody.
We start with a dream, and one by one pluck down the stars to light our path.
We start with a dream …
I could say growing pains in reference to, say, the life of this website, but really the most recent change is that I have, essentially, downgraded my web hosting, so “growing” doesn’t really seem appropriate. Moving pains would also work, but then you would lose the irony.
Hosting with DreamHostfor the past some-odd years has been fine. They have decent starting prices for the first year, competitive prices after, and they offer ridiculous amounts of both storage and bandwidth. More, in fact, than anyone should ever need on a shared host. They’re inconsistent though, when it comes to uptime, though I hear rumors that this is pretty much on a server- by server-basis, so maybe I just got unlucky.
I’ve been investigating DreamHost alternatives for a long time now, with some good leads now and again. I used Precision Effect when I created the lissat.org website (one that, sadly, I’ve never developed), and was happy with their speed and support, though at $6 a month for their smallest package, they still weren’t inexpensive.
After more recent browsing, I finally moved this site over to NearlyFreeSpeech.Net, which is a hosting service with a neat idea. It’s essentially a pay-for-what-you-use service: you charge your account with moneys, and then pay as you go, starting at $1 for the first GB of bandwidth and then getting cheaper per GB as/if your site becomes more popular. They don’t have any one-click installs, no user-friendly services. They have a knowledgeable user base and a well-used forum for when you run into trouble (as I did quite a few times getting WordPress installed). Pricewise, I expect $10 will get me through a few months, at least. Speedwise, so far, I find it much improved over DreamHost. And no, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net does not have an affiliate program, so I’m not trying to sell you anything. Fact is, the all-manual approach to site management is probably more than most people want to deal with, so NFS isn’t for everyone.
I’m in the process of moving La Casa Comics over to A Small Orange. That was also a swinging deal, $20 for 14 months of hosting in their “Tiny” package, which will most likely be enough for us, obscure as we are. I’m still waiting for the DNS to propagate (after a freak accident where it propagated immediately, and much sooner than I thought it would, and I have to switch it BACK over to DreamHost to ftp some files out before the switch). Once I get things set up, I’ll report back. But so far so good.
I moved all of the domains over to name.com, which has been nice and easy so far, and cheaper than anywhere else (currently under cost, actually, for new domains). I always heard that domain registrars should be separate from hosting services, but I’d always been too lazy to change it until now. It’s nice to know, though, that is for some reason the hosting company really decides to suck, there’s no chance of losing my domains on top of everything else.
Alternative hosting sites that I looked at (of note) include: Laughing Squid and Bluehost. Laughing Squid is neat because it’s based out of San Francisco and claims to serve the artist community particularly. Still, even if you use their “starving artist” discount, it’s $8 per month, so I thought I’d hold off and try some cheaper plans first. Also, you can see their sticker in the photo above. Bluehost seems like a big, but good, solid web hosting company, with lots of space and bandwidth and a free domain for $7 per month, but still a little too pricey for me, who is trying to save ALL his pennies for the time being. What can I say, I’m cheap yo!
If you’re interested in hosting and you have no idea what you’re doing, find someone like DreamHost who has nice one-click installs on a variety of applications (they really are easy for first-time host users). Bluehost evidently has a WordPress one-click install, though I’m not sure what else. If, however, you want cheap and complicated, so far I’m pretty happy with both NFS and ASO. I’ll be sure to let you know if anything changes. In the meantime, things should be much more stable around here (and eventually over at la casa); that is, if you even noticed anything going on in the first place.
So that’s my story. What about you? Do you have a great host? Who with and why are they awesome? I’m always on the lookout for the best deal. On the other side of the coin, who is completely worth avoiding?
Bound to be your new, favorite library game. Learn everything you can about the library guru and then challenge your friends to out-six-degrees you. More fun than “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” because a.) It’s library-related, so obviously excellent; b.) It’s obscure, which as we all know means “hip”, and 3.) SDofKB gets easier and easier every day, and you like a challenge. Also, when it comes to Library Science, Ranganathan was like the coolest guy around. Theo did it in reverse, but he’s off to a good start with a hybrid Six Degrees of RangaBacon sort of thing:
1. Ranganathan died in 1972 which was the same year that the Pierre Hotel Robbery happened.
2. The Pierre Hotel was robbed by Samuel Nalo and Robert Comfort of the Luchese crime family.
3. Don Licio Lucchesi was a character named in the Godfather part III.
4. The Godfather Part III co-starred Sofia Coppola who was also in The Outsiders.
5. The Outsiders starred Matt Dillon who (6) was in Wild Things with Kevin Bacon.
Tasty.