Blog
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Kurt Vonnegut, RIP at 84
"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies–‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’" —from "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater." There’s
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The Rogue Scholar Wants You!
But be assured that I only want you for your mind. More importantly, I want you for your knowledge of and expertise with digital cameras, face-up copiers, flatbed scanners and digital data formats. The project we’re talking about is funded by a grant from the New York Metropolitan Library Council and deals with original printed
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What They Didn’t Teach Us in Library School
If you’re not in the habit of reading Tomdispatch.com on a regular basis, this is definitely the time to start. The reason being that Chip Ward has penned an excellent article for the site titled "What They Didn’t teach us In Library School: The Public Library as an Asylum for the Homeless." Now as a
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Girls School
Two great book titles today, one of which is an actual non-fiction tome and the other is . . . not. Here’s a fast quiz, choose one: "Teen-Aged Dope Slaves and Reform School Girls""College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now" If you chose the first one as being the comic book, (ahem,
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Post 9/11 Archived Material Removed En Masse
I think this fits in the "Not Good For Anybody" Department of government policies and procedures: AP: 1M Archived Pages Removed Post-9/11By Frank Bass and Randy Herschaft, Associated Press More than 1 million pages of historical government documents — a stack taller than the U.S. Capitol — have been removed from public view since
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The Awesome Story of Medieval Helpdesk
Behind this link is an amazing story of tech support in Medieval times. As you watch, consider whether all our fancy newfangled text storage systems are actually better than the books, or merely more complicated. (Y’all already know what I think–that there is no more reliable or easier to use system than a bound sheaf
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A Medically Disliterate Culture
This bit from today’s Independence Journal caught my attention: I’m starting to refocus on developments in what seems like a battle over money between the pharmaceutical business and food supplements crowd. What got me started was the recent headline on Reuters "Suspected steroid ring to stars busted". The story centers on allegedly illegal sales of
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MS Access and the 2006 Darwin Awards
Busy, busy, busy . . . I’m slowly and painfully working my way through Microsoft Access and SQL, and have the basic skill of modifying queries and building reports, but there’s a long way to go. The most immediate trick was to nudge one of the existing queries (the Bib-level "s" item data) to produce
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It Serves Us Right?
I’m out for most of this week, but something that did catch my eye was an article the Matt Taibbi wrote for Rolling Stone (located by way of Alternet.org) on the subject of the White House’s 2008 budget proposal. His main point is maybe it serves us right if we’re footing to bill for egregious
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Middle East = Real Estate
Way back when I was returning to college after a year’s hiatus, I took an ancient history course. The teacher’s name and most of the historical details I learned have been forgotten or misplaced in that murky swamp I call a memory. But our professor said one thing that stuck with me through the years.