The best of these I have seen lately come from one Garrett Murray who responds to Adobe Photoshop crashes with vigorous creativity. He blogs these responses here and I include a sample entry:

I hope Mr. Murray will take my imitation as the sincerest form of flattery as it is now my intention to do this with software crashes from this point forward. I’m sure this type of thing entertains the poor sap in technical support who gets these things, and it surely channels frustration better than banging things around².

So, really I just wanted to pass on an entertaining link for your Wednesday morning but figured why not editorialize while I’m here. Head on over and enjoy it with your morning coffee, chai tea, or diet soda. Thanks to the folks over at Galley Cat for the catch!

^{1 one of my many failings
2 again, guilty.}

The thundering, indomitable drone of vuvuzelas has dropped below the horizon, two hemispheres removed once more as the television cameras direct their gaze away from South Africa. Gone are the fever-dreams of Germans dancing the Brazilian samba, Dutchmen fortifying their goal with hammer and nails and a lion-maned Diego Forlan roaming the African Savannah in search of his next kill. What remains is the inevitable hollow feeling that comes when the pageantry and drama of international spectacle ends.

And yet we rejoice at having been witness again to why this game belongs to the world – to why it retains it’s allure as The Beautiful Game. The great joys of sport revolve around identity – the building of allegiances, the thrill of seeing perfected that which you enjoy recreationally, the communal bond created in stadiums, arenas or even an empty lot. So what better sport to draw people together than the one played everywhere by nearly everybody?

The World Cup is about telling these narratives about identity both on and off the field. The joy of the tournament is in the early rounds, when every team has a chance to win and we learn the stories of those who have worked so hard to reach the pinnacle of their profession. The great soccer powers enter with prepackaged identities – the joyful play of Brazil, the clockwork efficiency of Germany and the creative vision of the Dutch. But every four years even these giants must either reinforce or remake their stories along with each of the thirty-two teams that enter the arena.

As with all tournaments, the World Cup begins with possibility and ends with heartbreak for all but the victor. This year was no different. Ultimately, the final was unsatisfying. The Dutch tactics where too brutal by half, and the Spanish for all their technical expertise seemed to forget that this was not just a large-scale game of monkey in the middle. We appreciate the expertise but we yearn for the goal. Finally, the Spanish got their goal and with it their first World Cup trophy. All congratulations to the victors, but the true beauty of the game was on display elsewhere.

The true beauty of the game happened in moments both small and large. As Americans, the moment of the tournament was a last-gasp goal by Landon Donovan to save the team’s hopes. For the host nation it was to be found in seeing their home team – already eliminated from the tournament – seal the disgrace of mighty France. For the continent of Africa it must have been the steel nerve of Asamoah Gyan sealing victory for Ghana over the Americans in the quarterfinal.  For South America the early joy of seeing all their teams advance gave way to the disappointment that resurgent past champion Uruguay could only in the end muster a fourth place finish. And for Uruguay, oh what joy to watch the player of the tournament, Diego Forlan, lift the team on his shoulders to defy expectations again and again.

For those who love the game, the World Cup is a treat not to be missed that comes around every four years. And every four years those who don’t love the game, even those unfamiliar with it, learn a little more about what it means to embrace its beauty. Even in a year where complaints about referees, the ball, and conservative tactics threatened to drown out all but the loudest of the horn blowing fanatics, we know that nothing quite like this will come around for another four years. In the meantime we revel in what we have just witnessed and we wait. For all of us hope remains and we, as have so many fans for so many years, set our eyes on the future and proclaim “we’ll get ‘em next time!”

For those of you noticing Conan’s conspicuous absence of late, in a fit of football fever he got vuvuzelas stuck on his hands and can’t type. I suggested voice recognition software but it can’t make out the muffled ramblings of a madman amplified through the plastic horn either. Alas, we wait and wish him well.

How time files when you’re having fun. Though idle on the intertubes for the past few weeks I assure you dear reader¹ I have been a busy little bee.

So, for the sake of posting something, and at the expense of long-form coherence, here’s what I’ve been up to. Many of these could have been – and still may be – their own posts, but so it goes. In bullet form:

• Presenting to the regional VEMA conference on recommending books to older teenage readers. Powerpoint here and book list here.

• Reading Alex Berenson’s The Faithful Spy and The Silent Man – books 1 & 3 of his John Wells series. Short review – Pass. Slightly less short review – Berenson tries to shoehorn Baldacci’s Oliver Stone character into a John LeCarre novel. Just doesn’t work for me.

• Playing lots and lots of Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies on the iPod.

• Taken up running again. Specifically, waking up about an hour-and-a-half before G-D himself and whipping my lazy butt back into shape.

• Thinking about the National Broadband Plan supposedly being released today by the FCC. Hoping they will follow up on their ambitious goals with an actionable plan. CNN has an interesting take on the issue, highlighting a woman who makes her living designing websites but doesn’t have access to broadband in her home. Worth the read.

So that’s the news from down on the farm. Hopefully we’ll be back on a semi-regular basis with your weekly recommendations and ramblings. Until then.

^{1 Surely there’s at least one of you still out there. Yes? Hello?}

OK, so hopefully all of you that stop by here from time to time are functionally literate¹. I hazard a guess that most of my regular readers² are informationally literate, even if you don’t really know or care what that is. Heck, if called to testify before a Congressional hearing I might not even be able to explain it in full. But to hit the high points, most of you know how to evaluate your sources. Most of you probably understand where to start a search for information and follow a trail to satisfactory results. You can read words, yes, but you also know how to find and interpret information.

Blah, blah, blah. What’s the point? My ilk, librarians, have always been in the business of information. And thus, of information literacy. It has long been the purview of librarians to be experts at navigating, finding and conveying information. With the advent of a networked world it has become increasingly more important³ for us to teach people how to do what we do. Teach a man to fish, and all that.

This is the modern paradox. It has never been easier to access information. As a result, finding the right information and putting it to use has become an increasingly complex problem.  Note, that I don’t think using information has become prohibitively difficult – just that ways of collecting, using and interpreting data have changed. With so much information on computers and the ability to manipulate, transmit and aggregate it in so many ways there needs to be a way to wrangle all of this good stuff. And that way is computer code – PHP, Java, Ruby, Python and any number of public APIs⁴.

So far, all of this is great. We have lots of data, we have lots of ways to manipulate it, and there are lots of people who can do this. Anytime you post a story from CNN to Twitter, or share your Facebook feed through your phone or track swine flu on Google Maps you’re using harnessing code to manage or manipulate data. Moreover, you are doing this transparently – you don’t have to understand the code to use it.

But someone does. Code has always been a way libraries have wrangled data. Specifically through the use  MARC records⁵. MARC is transparent – you can use a library catalog without knowing what the 005 field means, or why the author information goes in subfield b. But it is not especially extensible. That is to say, you probably won’t be using Google Maps to find available copies of new best sellers in close proximity to where you happen to be.

The proliferation of data/information has requires a move to more flexible – cross platform – code. And  this, think some, is a make or break issue for libraries. We can make websites, we can promote programs but how do we make information about our physical holdings available outside of proprietary closed systems that read MARC data?

How do we make sure we call attention to all of the quality information we house without being passed over in favor of easy information? That is the crux of information literacy – finding good information efficiently. The more efficient the method the less likely quality of information matters.

This brings me to my final point⁶, the increasing role that code plays in the life of an information professional. There are numerous library projects out there trying to integrate physical holdings with online data. These include things like the Social Opac, the Extensible Catalog and Library Thing for Libraries.  More and more it seems that to do my job I not only need information literacy but technological literacy. In order to harness these technologies I need to understand at least a little of what’s going on under the hood.

Flexible code is the ubiquitous, unseen force behind almost all networked interaction these days. The proliferation of code is both an opportunity and a challenge. We have the tools to set data free in more ways than ever. But librarians are faced with a steep learning curve and the potential need for drastic adaptation of their job descriptions. I didn’t set out to become a computer programmer, but how much of what we do depends on that particular skill set? Can we just outsource this to the specialists – or a new type of sub-specialist within the profession? Finally, how do we adapt our code to the new Internet reality? It’s almost as if we have to create and release our own API for developers, hobbyists and professionals to manipulate our data. The questions are how do we do it, and can we do it in time?

^{1 But what do I know, you could just be here for the pretty pictures.
2 Whom I think I can count on about 1 1/2 hands.
3 Not that it was ever unimportant…
4 Application Programming Interface.
5 MARC: MAchine Readable Code
6 If you’re still even reading, thanks for humoring me.}

The above is unnecessary, really; my point follows. I was inspired to writing by Conan’s recent post about The Swan Thieves. While he described exiting a book in abject misery, really just giving up, I was, how should we say, in-the-text. I was living it up, wallowing in the Word. I didn’t want to rub C’s nose in it then (well, sort of), but he’s of thick hide it would seem. That specific Good Prose was Barth’s The Development which I recommend. Curiously, next I brought home a stack from my public library of E.B. White and John Cheever, white guys dead and buried both. I looked at them. What’s come over me, I thought? I turn 30 and look here. Looking back reveals a pattern. Over Christmas I crossed the ponde to scan some Wodehouse – gasp! Last summer I picked my way through Ten short modern novels, reading several authors notorious for lacking melanin but holding a y chromosome: Faulkner, Mann, Gide. And last winter, gobs of Stephen Crane (M verily forced it on me, but I loved it). Hmm, I wondered.

I promised a point; I’ll attempt delivery. Lately I’ve been in John Cheever’s Journals and E.B. White’s Letters & Writings from the New Yorker. I’ve never read any Cheever that I recollect. His covers are awesome, so here we are. The Journals interest me for several reasons. It’s the prose behind the prose, the ‘inner writing’ of a professional writer, that still reads on the page as professional and inspired writing. I guess that’s talent? It is interesting to glimpse what concerns a novelist in the day to day: money, family, writers’ block (writing well about writers’ block…), alcohol, sex. Other entries are splendid  mini-stories, really sublime. Surely the journal is a writer’s device to aid creativity.

Now White. Again, save the children’s classics and his little grammar aid, I can’t recall reading any E.B. His prose is concise but not proud. There would seem little chance for self-deprication in such style, but it surfaces beautifully, and we see in White’s brevity humanity at once arresting, personal, and universal. Read ‘Hunger’ where the narrator bumps into an old friend starving himself to death because he’s increasingly paranoid about what lurks in our food. It’s absurd, but it reveals systemic societal paranoia, some founded some not. Kudos. Read ‘Tomorrow Snow’ where a diner waiter delivers heavy news:

“I’ve been listening to the radio,” he said. “Tomorrow snow, turning to rain.” He was a man carrying foreknowledge in his breast, and the pain was almost unbearable. We don’t remember a winter when people followed the elements so closely and when foreknowledge so completely destroyed any chance of momentary bliss.⁵

I nearly cried reading this late one night, after yet another day of scraping the frozen muck the plow spreads back across my driveway each morning. This has been a winter of great Sisyphean shoveling here. You’ll note I employed the same tactic as White, I envied it so: I nearly cried, like the waiter’s pain was almost unbearable. White belies a stoicism that attracts me. We suffer through, this is our predicament, all that jazz. Updike, another DWG, introduces the Letters and hints at a nervous condition that kept White on edge, or something like that. White’s New Yorker writings intimate this, from the food paranoia to a piece on dizziness. My Personal Private Affliction puts my world topsy-turvy too, leaves me reeling from the sun, and I delight in well-wrought prose capturing similar experience. Nothing is mentioned in White of migraine save for the odd ‘headache’ reference in letters. New Yorker editor Harold Ross allegedly said of Thurber and White, “Look at them, my two best writers, one can’t see to cross the street and the other is afraid to.”⁶ So I pretend a comrade and commiserate. Content aside, White’s prose, for those of us here at Literary Gibberish who revel in such matters, is downright breezy. Browse a passage and marvel at the space between words where you surely would have put words. ‘Omit needless words’ is a Strunk and White rule. Right ho!

Reading this stuff of late I am transcended, I am on a plane I can only describe– like earlier– as refreshingly in-the-text, a sort of formalist mind ill aware of the politics of DWGs nor any other critical meta whatnots. Reader, surely I lie– I earlier described White the humanist and hinted at a fictional narrator submerged in Cheever’s Journals; my training won’t be stymied. But this is pleasurable, heavenly, delightful reading so elegantly wrought that looking upon it is much like appreciating distinctly American furniture– far from lacking refinement in its understated forms and simple designs.

^{1 Mostly post-WWII, so comparably current in the span of English Letters.
2 RMN
3 Black, White, Afrikaaner esp.
4 Not real
5 Writings, 6.
6 Letters, photo insert.}

In case you missed it, Google just announced a plan to install 100Gb fiberoptic networks in several communities nationwide. Say what now? 100 what? Fiberoptic who? In brief, this is plan to bestow¹ upon a number of unsuspecting citizens internet access at a speed that runs circles around Verizon’s Fios service, currently the fastest commercial internet available to any significant number of customers.

“OK, so where do I fit in” you may ask? Well, I’m glad you did. There’s a current belief² that much of what troubles the American Economy may find its remedy in widespread availability/affordability of broadband access. There is even a bit of a groundswell in the philanthropic realm to begin providing such access to rural communities³. And as someone in the so-called trenches of one such rural community I sit firmly in the camp that believes expanded access is not just an economic but a social imperative.

Every day, in numbers that continue to rise we see people coming in to use our computers. Many of them are surfing facebook but many others are applying for jobs, updating their resumes, looking for services and filing for unemployment. Why do they come here? Internet in our county is expensive and slow. The fastest “broadband” speed available to residential customers is relatively pokey DSL.

Still confused about how this affects you, dear reader? Setting aside discussion about whether we view it as essential that one be able to facebook, youtube, email and other such activity⁴, we now live in a world where you need online access and computer skills to apply for a shelf stocking job at Food Lion. Setting aside, again, the fact that those with the most need and the least access pay the highest price in this game we see that internet access is quickly becoming a necessity of everyday life.

And trust me, it ain’t getting any less necessary anytime soon. Which brings us back to Google, and eventually libraries. What Google seems to be doing is firing a shot across the bow of telcom companies who often find themselves in a monopoly situation⁵. By showing an alternative way of building infrastructure – partnering with communities – and offering competitive prices for superior speed Google is challenging the current economic model. And here’s hoping it works.

Finally, back to libraries. I’ts always going to come back to libraries around here. Happily, my library has just finalized paperwork that will bring 10Mb/sec fiberoptic internet to county residents at our six locations. Although we currently provide faster internet than many people have access to the county, this will give our people faster access with fewer interruptions in service⁶ in an economic climate where whenever we can provide more we should.

Libraries are always going to be a stop-gap for the underprivileged and those in the greatest need. This is often a source of satisfaction and frustration in my day-to-day. But by providing this service we, like Google, will hopefully start to exert some economic pressure in some meaningful way. Perhaps the more projects we see like the one from Google and the more institutions (read: libraries) that offer these types of speeds the more people will come to expect broadband saturation. And that’s good for everyone.

So what do you think? Is expanding broadband speed and access for everyone a priority? How dependent have you become on having ready access to the internets? Are you now planning to petition Google to bring fiber to your neighborhood? Discuss in the comments.

^{1 I use the word bestow in a limited sense – the big Goog does plan to charge for this access, but promises “a competitive price” to between 50,000 and 500,000 customers.
2 evangelical and wild-eyed though it may be…
3 full disclosure: my place of employ is included as a beneficiary in the linked grant.
4 Yes, I argue – and this may end up as its own post.
5 Sure, I can choose between Verizon and Comcast, but the choice is between slow (Verizon) and expensive (Comcast).
6 Heavy YouTube use still drags our network to a crawl.}

At work this morning, originally uploaded by rwhitesi37. ]]> http://gibberish.sidewhites.com/2010/02/wordless-wednesday-232010/feed/ 0 http://gibberish.sidewhites.com/2010/01/wordless-wednesday-1272009/ http://gibberish.sidewhites.com/2010/01/wordless-wednesday-1272009/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:13:38 +0000 Conan http://gibberish.sidewhites.com/2010/01/wordless-wednesday-1272009/

Papparazzi, originally uploaded by rwhitesi37.

I won’t go through the numbers, percentages, etc.¹ but two baselines for TV viewing within these metrics appear to be two hours per day and four hours per day. Sweet Jeebus! We might watch four hours of television per week. That is to say that we have about six shows that we try and see every week and have our TiVo dutifully record. We then plow through them, commercial-free, in the brief time between getting Zeke to bed, and succumbing ourselves to the day’s weariness.

So, with three masters degrees between us, K and I seem to give credence to this notion that More Education = Less TV. Or does it? Thompson rightly points out that while this is interesting data, there’s a lot more going on here. He, for instance, came of age² in environs lacking easy television access. His habits thus cemented, he watches very little TV in his adulthood.

I submit to you that the reason K and I watch very little TV these days has little to do with education or formed habits and everything to do with having a two-year old in the house. Morning television is out of the question as we race to shower, dress, eat and get out the door on time. Zeke gets to watch a spot of tele in the evening as K prepares dinner. Then as soon as I get home we eat, play for a while and then head straight upstairs for bath time, jammies and books for Zeke. By the time he’s safely ensconced in dreamland, neither K or I has stopped to breathe for more than about 20 minutes during the day and it’s time to sit, debrief, play online and/or watch television. I assure you that there is not a spare four hours each day for us to watch the tube even if we wanted to.

Which brings me to the story I wanted to tell in the first place. Last week we decided it was time to join the 21st Century and buy a large flat screen television. After spending much of a day off running between stores and comparing prices we brought home a 42″ plasma at a pretty good price. We then set it up realized it was way too big and were underwhelmed by a standard definition picture on a high definition TV.

We dutifully researched the exorbitant prices that Comcast would charge us to upgrade from basic³ to any sort of HD package and realized that this $600 TV was going to cost us far more than that initial cost in the long run. This information in hand, we calculated the value of cable service over the 4-5 hours per week of television and promptly took advantage of Costco’s generous return policy.

Do you, my educated readers, view less television than the unwashed masses that surround you? Is it because you’re wicked-smaaht, or do other factors come into play? Or do you watch far more? Weigh in with your comments, and go visit Hunch for more crowd-sourced conversation starters.

^{1 that’s what the link is there for, silly.
2 went to college
3 veeeeerrry basic.}