The Invisible Library

Apparently, we uncouth bloggers are giving some folks the vapors:

Readers should be warned when they are reading blogs that may contain “crude language”, a draft blogging code of conduct has suggested.

The code was drawn up by web pioneer Tim O’Reilly following published threats and perceived harassment to US developer Kathy Sierra on blogs.

The code begins: “We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation.”

And then goes on to tell us all to shut the fuck up, because we’re just prolls who should accept our place and thank the media outlets, all six of them, for allowing us the pantomime of free press they sell us.

But here’s the thing: if you’re reading this right now, you’ve already decided for yourself if you’re going to be offended by my loose language and run to the swooning couch and have Mammy fetch the smelling salts, or read through to the end to see if I make a valid point or not. And that’s all the bloging ethics we’ll ever need. Read my words or don’t. Agree, or don’t. You can agree and leave a comment to that effect or disagree and call me names. And maybe I’ll respond and maybe I’ll delete your trollish rants. But it’s up to me to decide because it’s my fucking website. I pay for the bandwidth, I own the domain. You don’t like my perspective? Go start your own blog and call me names on it. Maybe I’ll read it, maybe I won’t. But if you don’t like what I write, you’re under no obligation to read it. That goes as much for me as it does for Atrios or any of the big dogs in blogland. And the thing is, we all figured this out pretty quickly, on our own, years ago when we started this blog stuff in the first place and we didn’t need a manual or some policy board to tell us how to run our sites. We just made up the rules as we went along. seems to be working good so far, so what’s the problem?

The problem is that the Internet is a free medium and that scares the shit out of some people. It means unpopular opinions that might have some validity have an opportunity to get heard and to spread and become popular opinions, all without gatekeepers or some authority figure giving the thumbs up. It allows for culture to be spread and evolve organically, in the hands of anyone with a desire to contribute, not just the monied elite who, for most of human history, were the arbiters of taste and expression. Now that it is no longer so, there is fear that we, the unwashed, foul mouthed masses will have a say. And that, my friends, means the end of the way things used to be.

Daylight Savings Time is three weeks earlier this year and Microsoft doesn’t much care:

For three weeks this March and April, Microsoft Corp. warns that users of its calendar programs “should view any appointments as suspect until they communicate with all meeting invitees.”Wow, that’s sort of jarring — is something treacherous afoot?

Actually, it’s a potential problem in any software that was programmed before a 2005 law decreed that daylight-saving time would start three weeks earlier and end one week later, beginning this year. Congress decided that more early evening daylight would translate into energy savings.

Software created earlier is set to automatically advance its timekeeping by one hour on the first Sunday in April, not the second Sunday in March (that’s March 11 this year).

How simple would it be to coble up a patch for this and offer it for download? Apple fixed it six months ago. I didn’t even know I had already downloaded the fix because they put it in a free security upgrade. And that right there is why Microsoft isn’t doing jack: They can’t find a way to make people pay for a minor computer glitch everyone else fixed for free. So, anyone on a Windows platform will just have to suck it up or run an hour late for most of March.

Everyone out there who got on my case for being a Firefox evangelist, take note. This is why IE7 is a piece of shit. Microsoft is counting on it’s users being too dumb to realize that IEs supposed innovations, like tabs and RSS and a functioning Web 2.0 interface, aren’t actually bonuses you have to pay for. They are free as is every other browser out there, and were available years before Microsoft bothered to throw out some half-assed piece of shit with a wildly inflated price tag on it.

Microsoft wants your money. Once they have it, you’re on your own.

NY Times:

ONE of the hottest books in New York appears on no best-seller list.
“Russian Thinkers,” a 1978 collection of essays on 19th-century Russian intellectuals by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, has virtually disappeared from bookstores across the city, including Barnes & Noble, Labyrinth Books and Shakespeare & Company. The Internet is not much help either: the book is sold out on bn.com, and though it can be ordered from Amazon, the order won’t be shipped for two or three weeks.

The culprit behind this Berlin craze turns out to be none other than Tom Stoppard and his epic three-part play, “The Coast of Utopia,” which opened at Lincoln Center on Nov. 27. Tucked deep inside the show’s playbill is a list titled “For Audience Members Interested in Further Reading,” with “Russian Thinkers” at the top.

“If you were intrigued and wanted to know more, this would be a good place to start,” said Anne Cattaneo, the play’s dramaturge, who compiled the seven-book list. “I tried to keep it to a little George Sand, a little Turgenev.”

As a result, Mr. Berlin’s book is not only all but impossible to find in New York, it is also completely out of stock with its publisher, Penguin, which earlier this month quickly ordered two reprintings totaling 3,500 copies, the first time in 12 years the book has been printed, to satisfy more than 2,000 suddenly unfilled orders.

As my wife pointed out, these days, everyone wants a little more information. That extra aside or note or pointer to something related. A tangent for the inquisitive. This list of further reading– what we librarians used to call a bibliography (it’s a term from the late nineteenth century, basically the Victorian equivalent of a hyperlink)– is a clear example of this growing acceptance of the interconnectivity of all knowledge and information. Sure, this sort of thing existed before but it was nerdy stuff, practiced by academics. The internet, that wild and woolly system of tubes, has just democratized the concept and made it mainstream. Hell, it’s even gone Broadway.

I’m about 30 pages into the new Thomas Pynchon book, Against the Day and enjoying it immensely. There’s so much story, character and information on each page, that it’s easy to get overwhelmed and bit overstimulated. It’s also a little difficult to keep everything straight in our linear-trained minds. I think this is what trips some people up when it comes to enjoying Pynchon’s writing. His books are not novels in the conventional sense. He isn’t telling the life story of one person or setting out to illustrate a single idea. It’s a survey of humanity and out civilization from a different perspective. In this case, from a great height, which can be dizzying. Luckily, we have the Pynchon wiki to help us sort it all out.

What’s really amazing is that ten years ago, when Mason & Dixon was published, the Internet wasn’t advanced enough to have such a resource in place. We were all left on our own to sort out the details for ourselves, without so much as a compass or a sextant. Finally though, the world has caught up to the scope of Thomas Pynchon, which is the real reason for inventing web 2.0 and social networking, Myspace be damned.

As I’m sure you all know by now, I’m Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. This was a huge surprise as I didn’t even knew I was in the running. Hell, I didn’t even know anyone at Time read the blog. Just goes to show that the mainstream media isn’t quite as daft as we think it is, or as it has often proven itself to be, repeatedly. Over and Over.

But, after singlehandedly swaying the election through my powerful net-roots activism, it was pretty hard to miss me. And I’m sure my LibraryThing page had a lot to do with swaying the decision in my favor, too.

Not to worry though, I won’t forget my faithful readers reader as my meteoric rise to fame and fortune make me a big time shaker in whatever the hell it is I do with this blog. As we all know, cat pictures have a startling array of effects on the world stage, from economics to geopolitics, cat pictures, snarky reviews of movies and anti-religious rants will surely win the hearts and minds of all those who wish to do us ill.

With my help, I’m sure we will use the power of this mighty series of tubes to change the world for the better.

At te very least, we’ll have something to look at until the world ends.

Lori Bowen Ayre over at Mentat asks the good questions:

What if the Library Worked Like Netflix?

NetFlix is easy, personal, fast, and convenient. It assists users in finding titles they will not only enjoy but titles that they are probably very excited to find because they are surprised that they could be found or they’ve never heard of them before. Their choices are not limited to the blockbusters of the day. NetFlix makes it very easy for customers to borrow and return titles. NetFlix is to movies as libraries should be to books.

She lays out a solid argument that I agree with a hundred percent. Too bad it’ll never work.

Some of the institutionalized policies that we librarians deal with are holdovers from the analog days of card catalogs and physical browsers (people looking at shelves) rather than OPACs and web browsers. But there are still enough old school librarians around who remember how things used to work and never wanted them to change to begin with and don’t want them to change too much, at least while they are still around.

A colleague from grad school was telling me about this recently. She had a great idea to streamline her library’s ILL procedures, and all it would have cost was a piece of software that was less than the cost of one month’s ILL shipping expenses. But the ILL Librarian there didn’t want to hear it. She had her paperwork and her forms and her filing system and her two to six week turn around time and that was that. Didn’t matter if the new system would save time and money and help people better. The Netflix model of patron service probably has merit. And public librarians could save thousands of dollars switching to Open Source, and maybe one day we’ll ditch Dewey and LoC and catalog with tag clouds. But not today. Or tomorrow.

We new school librarians can’t change the world It’s going to take time. Time to either convince admin to take a chance on new technology (regardless of how well it’s proved itself in other fields) or time to wait for the dinosaurs to die off.

The stars are not just our destiny, they are fucking ours. Not content to invade Middle Eastern countries that are no threat to the US, the Bush Administration has decided to expand it’s imperial goals to include All of Frickin’ Outer Space:

The document - signed by President Bush - also says “freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power”.

The document rejects any proposals to ban space weapons.

But the White House has said the policy does not call for the development or deployment of weapons in space.

Except, that for the last six years, when not dissembling about his role in the destruction of the cradle of civilization, Rumsfeld has been pitching a tent about a laser guided missile defense shield/ space station with lasers. You know that somewhere in the Pentagon, Rumsfeld has a team of engineers working on plans for his very own Death Star so, claiming that we have no designs on weaponizing space is silly.

Having a space based automated “defense” weapon is all part of the Neocon techno fetish. They’ve been flogging this wet dream of waging total global warfare with the minimal number of troops possible for decades and aren’t going to let a little thing like reality or the limitations of technology or utter, abject failure stop them. It’s the same old strategy that went horribly wrong in Iraq, the notion that we don’t need soldiers or Intelligence, we’ll just bomb the shit out of anyone who gets on our nerves. And if we can do that from space (with lasers!) well, that’s just cool as shit.

Wonder if this includes China and their plans of recreating the Lunar Landing by 2012? These idiots will start WW IV because China violates our claims to own the frickin’ universe.

Have you ever wondered if there were a way to completely restrict what your computer does (I mean besides using anything by Microsoft)? Ever wanted to have some Jesus on your desktop? The Pope in your RAM? Well, now you can have your very own Christian Operating System:

Ubuntu Christian Edition is a free, open source operating system geared towards Christians. It is based on the popular Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support.

[…] Ubuntu Christian Edition includes more than 16,000 pieces of software, but the core desktop installation fits on a single CD. Ubuntu Christian Edition covers every standard desktop application from word processing and spreadsheet applications to web server software and programming tools.

Along with the standard Ubuntu applications, Ubuntu Christian Edition includes the best available Christian software. The latest release contains GnomeSword, a top of the line Bible study program for Linux based on the Sword Project. There are several modules installed with GnomeSword including Bibles, Commentaries, and Dictionaries.

But the real question is, does it quote scripture at you when you try to downlaod porn?