Why It's Not Enough to Just Suck

With a title like that, a post could be about many things. What it is actually about is vacuums. Vacuums, and hair.

Here's the thing. I am a long-haired person, and, much like any long-haired animal, I tend to shed. (Short-haired ones shed too, but they don't get as much grief for it because it's not as noticeable. Life is cruel.) If there is ever a question about whether I actually lived in this apartment, rather than simply signing my name to the lease for 7 years, a discerning person will brush the carpet and find that yes, I dwelt here, and, judging from the quantity of my hair on the floor, possibly also went bald here. (Not yet--but who knows?)

My vacuum is a suction-only model: it does not have those little spinning brushes to scrub up the carpet. It sucks very well: every time I vacuum, I empty an impressive quantity of general fine-particle dirt from the canister. It's a good little vacuum. But it does not touch the hair.

A long hair, twisted into the carpet, is immune to suction. This is a wad of hair I collected from the carpet after a thorough vacuuming this afternoon.


The Wad o' Hair is shown next to my feet for scale. And I have large feet. Yes, I'm a rapidly-shedding long-haired weirdo with giant feet who posts photographic evidence of my untidy home on the internet. This is the brave new world, baby.

Anyway, as you can see, merely sucking just doesn't do it. The thing is, merely sucking is actually an improvement over the last vacuum we had, which was equipped with those aforementioned little roller brushes. Those touched the hair, all right, but they were no match for it.

Hair would wind up wrapped around those brushes thickly enough to immobilize them, which not only prevented them from effectively stirring up things for the suction to draw into the bag, but which also produced a strong smell of burning rubber. We burnt through a couple of belts on those things, trying to vacuum up my hair.

You pretty much had to stop the motor every few seconds to cut coils of hair off the roller brushes. And it still smelt like burning rubber every time we vacuumed. (Now there's an incentive to tidy up. It'll take an hour per room and stink up the place! I can't wait!)

So suction-only, even though it isn't enough to pick up the hair, is in fact a better approach. It's not really any less effective at dealing with hair, and it doesn't take as long, because you don't have to carry a pair of scissors while you vacuum and pause every few feet.

In closing, the hair has pretty much won on this.

I'm thinking the best option will be to make sure our next place has hardwood floors throughout. It's all about the terrain: hair can't beat a good broom on a smooth surface!

Here, Have Some Photos

I really would have sworn I had more photos of Chicago from MLA, including some of the lake, and of my hotel room and the environs around where I stayed, and of the bus stop (it was near a nice park!), and the river, but my camera seems to have lost them.

There's some sort of data-losing thing sweeping through my life, in fact, what with these lost photos, and my hard drive suffering a fatal crash (resulting in many more lost photos due to tragically incomplete backup), and now the Creature is out of commission for the time being (although there were few photos there). I'm a little worried about what might happen next.

Possibly the apartment is going to catch fire and our wedding photos will burn. I swear, it's as if images are fleeing me. Visual evidence of my history is being erased! Now I can dye my hair black, and no one can prove it wasn't always that way.

In any case, here are pretty much the only photos from Chicago that remained on my camera.

Some handsome buildings near the main hotel:



And here are a couple of rather dramatic, artistically blurry shots from the window of the tower where the AMA reception was held:





Essentially, I have photos of buildings from below in the daytime, and from above at night, and that's it. Honestly, I was carrying that camera all over, and I thought I was doing a better job of capturing at least the cityscape, even if I didn't have many shots of people (and even if it took me a month to actually do anything with them).

But as I said, my photo luck has been bad this month. Good thing I wasn't in charge of documenting anything truly important. (MLA was important, but I wasn't in charge of documenting it, at least not in pictures.)

I do have some nice images of snow-covered trees from last winter, if anyone's interested.

I Can Mashed Potato

Actually, I can't. I have no idea what the Mashed Potato looks like. I bet I could find a YouTube video of it!---but I digress.

So, having finished school, I come back at last to complete the final week's mashup assignment for this interesting little course. On Programmable Web I found this nifty map of the Boston subway system overlaid over a street map of Boston, which, seriously, someone should have made about 100 years ago because I have often wished for such a thing and been unable to find it. The fact that it's searchable (for addresses, sites, stores, etc.) is just icing on the cake! Mmm, cake.

There are also equivalent maps here for DC, Philadelphia and Chicago, and I will totally keep the Chicago one in mind for MLA. People keep telling me there's this and that that I have to visit while there, and to be honest I doubt I'll have the time, but if it gets really slow one day, being able to locate things on a map that shows where the train runs will be handy.

You might ask, "no New York?" No, no New York. I don't know why. Maybe they're working on that next. Maybe someone else already did it. I don't care, I'm happy just to see Boston.

For the second part of the assignment, I was disconcerted to find no results on Rollyo matching the assigned search term, until I realized I'd entered 'librarianbolgs.' Yeah, I'm really into bolgs these days. Very Web 2.0. The moral is, always double-check your spelling.

Anyway, I checked out the search rolled by Gabe, which was nice, I guess, but didn't include this blog, so clearly it's imperfect. Ha. I narrowly avoided making a search for 'privacay' (my spelling is amazing this morning!), and enjoyed several blog posts on privacy instead. I was interested in a couple of posts from the Shifted Librarian about how privacy and modern technology interact today in a way that means we have less privacy than we might imagine.

Credit card transactions, web browsing habits, security cameras in public places, etc., mean that we can be tracked in a lot of ways as we go about our daily lives. Is privacy an illusion? Good question! I'm not tackling it right now, but this is certainly a big issue and it's good to have so many smart librarian bloggers covering it.

Then I tried a search for mustard (mmm, mustard). A few people mentioned that, too, although I didn't find any discussion of whether our mustard-using habits are being tracked and how that intersects with larger privacy issues. But watch the blogs, it's bound to be out there!

Then: My, but it's quick and easy to sign up for Rollyo! You don't even have to confirm your password! It's also super-easy to create a search. I set one up using a few sites I used to visit often for roleplaying game info, news and chit-chat. I called it, creatively, Roleplaying Sites. Not a lot there about privacy, though. I could definitely see this being a useful tool for reference: federated search on a selected set of websites you trust (or distrust but want to keep an eye on, I guess). I think 25 sites might not really be enough for big subjects, but I guess you could set up several sub-sets of a large topic and work with it that way.

In closing, certainly some fun stuff here!

I'm Still Here, Honest

I swear I will get to the final assignment---I've just been distracted with the end of the semester. But any day now. Like possibly Sunday. It'll happen.

Video, Video, Video!

I have friends who are more heavily into YouTube than I am, but I've certainly enjoyed my share of videos there. As with television, internet videos can be funny, educational, entertaining, thought-provoking, or total garbage.

I've been referred to goofy and mildly amusing videos there, and have also watched documentaries and educational programs, including some videos recommended for classes. I think there's certainly plenty of good stuff there, but I generally wait to hear about it from others since I find trying to sift through the mountains of random junk a little overwhelming.

I understand that there's a social networking aspect to YouTube, since you can befriend other members, subscribe to their videos, check out what other people are watching, share videos with friends, etc., but, again, lack of time to explore has limited my use of this feature.

I mostly rely on out-of-site social networking, otherwise known as people I know who specifically send me links, or finding videos linked on (or embedded in) blogs.

Here's my attempt at embedding a video (Sesame Street!):

Casting Pods Before Swine

In theory, I am very interested in podcasts, and could definitely see them having a place in the library, either as resources in the collection to which patrons can be directed for information, or as information resources produced by the library itself.

It will probably not be every library that has much use for producing podcasts, but if there are frequent information updates, events, etc., there's no reason those couldn't be publicized and offered to users for subscriptions. The library used to promote events on the Community News update on our local public radio affiliate when I was a kid, and podcasting is essentially an extension of radio, so why couldn't someone read the library's news and post it?

In much the same way that blogs might, podcasts could provide a means of getting the news out. And, again in the way that blogs do, a librarian's personal podcast might provide a means for thoughts and observations that could serve to highlight aspects of the library's functions.

And, of course, subscribing to health/library/science/technology (or whatever one's subject interest) podcasts could be a good way for librarians to keep up with what's going on in these fields. Since they're audio files, they can be listened to during a commute or while doing other things, rather than requiring the focused visual attention of reading, and I know many people appreciate being able to catch up on a topic by listening.

In practice, I have limited experience with podcasts, mostly because I have limited time. Podcasts aren't on my assigned coursework, so they aren't high on my priority list right now! I am, however, interested in learning more about them and using them more in the future. It's really on my list of things to know more about, once I'm done with school. (Because once I'm done with school, I'll only have a job, and that won't keep me busy at all, right? No, don't disillusion me.)

One of these days, I'm really going to get an iPod, the way I've been thinking about for months (I know, you don't need an iPod, any mp3 player will do, but I've still got credit on an Apple gift card, so I'm leaning Podwards).

I'm interested in Odeo, and look forward to listening to some of the things I found to subscribe to. It seems like a convenient organizing site to keep your podcasts in one place---I saw that there's also an option to subscribe via iTunes and have new podcasts downloaded to your computer, but the cool thing about Odeo is that you can collect the things you're interested in online, and then get to them from any computer (as Google Docs and other online office applications offer for documents). I like it!

Hmm...this was only one week's assignment, but this is already getting a little long, so I'm going to put the youTube reflections in another post.

Takin' Pictures

Ah, photos. I just got a digital camera for Christmas, and have been enjoying taking pictures of stuff. 

For example, please enjoy this image of some buildings I walk past on my way to work in the morning. 

I've also posted some photos on Facebook, and shared some on Picasa, though I keep those albums private and only send the link to people I want to see them. 

I tend to think that people don't care that much about most of my family event photos, and also that I don't care that much about having people see them indiscriminately...but it is incredibly nice to be able to share photos with the people I do want to see them, without having to print up copies, or attach them one by one to emails, or (back in the dark ages), get multiple prints developed and mail them to people (what are we, barbarians?).

I think photo-sharing has a lot of uses, because photos can often make clear things that are complex and difficult to explain in words. 

Also, people like to take pictures, and to share them with others, so there's an obvious social component that will be popular. 

Libraries could use photo-sharing features to post pictures of events, nice shots of the library looking libralicious, snapshots of employees, and so forth. It's often nice, while browsing a website, to get a picture of what the people involved look like (although it may also often be the case that I really don't care---it's of minor interest to me to see pictures of the manager of my bank or something).

Of course, some people don't really want their picture on the website of their place of employment, either. I'm indifferent, but I work with people who aren't comfortable with it: they're simply "more private people" and aren't interested in having just anyone with an internet connection be able to look at their picture.

So photo-sharing comes with some privacy concerns, and with the added twist of having people be able to post pictures of other people, not necessarily with the other person's consent or even knowledge. 

This tends to be legal, if the photo is taken in a public setting, but whether it's appropriate can still be a complicated issue. Should the library get permission from everyone in the audience at a poetry reading, before they post a group photo online? 

Should they get permission from parents to post photos that include children? 

Should they just stick to photos of buildings, the way I've done here?

Some buildings are extremely handsome, but what if you live in an ugly town? 

Clearly, this is an area with food for thought.