autohotkey. It takes a bit of setting up, but seriously, having the computer type things for you is great. I use this every day and with dog as my witness I will never type out another boring rote email again.
hey library lovers, I’m just home from an outing to Lillian Smith, and wanted to remind you that Toronto Public Library has updated their catalog, which means it’s time to update our library lookup bookmarklets.
To make a new one, visit Jon Udell’s Library Lookup Bookmarklet Generator, and indicate the base URL for the new catalog, http://catalogue.torontopubliclibrary.ca and choose the vendor, Sirsi (WebCat) from the list.
Voila! You have a handy tool to help you find books from online bookstores at your local public library!
encountered an adorable EULA today from Storynest. It’s like a little poem.
no need to agree…/no need to disagree…/because it cannot be agreed or disagreed/it already happened.
inspired by a friend’s dreadful suffering at the hands of sinusitis, I’ve proposed an idea to the halfbakery, where the community decides which ideas are baked and which are not.
Once there was a local literacy program. This place was a fun place to spend time – very welcoming and lots of nice people, kids and grandmothers, books, lots of collages and writing projects up on the walls, a geriatric photocopier and mismatched furniture.
Along with everything else, the literacy program had a bank of PCs along the back wall. A toad was sitting at a table back there, happily engrossed in some Aesop’s Fables when she heard a scream. One of the grandmothers was covering parts of the screen with her hands, looking away and grimacing. One of the kids, attracted by the excitement, exclaimed “I see a bum!” You know what that means – there had been a porno eruption on her computer!
The toad dashed over to help her fix it. They started fresh with firefox1 and the toad headed back to reading the Tiger and the Brahmin. But lo and behold, what should appear but more bums, and other images of homo activities that were not very interesting or appealing to this particular grandmother. The toad rushed over, stunned that we still had a porno problem.
Then the toad noticed the URL. The grandmother was trying to login to hotmale, to check her email. They sorted out the spelling and the problem was solved.
Lesson: Never underestimate the power of homonyms.
1 if you don’t already use firefox, you’ll really like it.
Some good news about the South Asian Legal Aid Clinic… apparently they are getting funding. Yay. 1
The bad news? When the Attorney General’s correspondence office gets an email, they obviously 1. write a letter back using a word processing program, 2. send it somewhere to get revised / approved 3. print out the letter 4. get the AG to put his extremely jazzy signature on it 5. scan it, then 6. email the resulting file.
Um, guys? You could just skip all the middle steps and email me back?2 And for this I don’t even charge consulting fees!
1 does this mean the legal aid system works? No, it does not. But it is good news for some people who need legal advice!
2 I know I’m expecting too much, but seriously… all this over an email? The whole reason we like emails is because they are easy, tree free and don’t take two months to respond to, like this one did.
(warning: shameless self plaigarism, I’m borrowing this book report from elsewhere… )
The Anarchist in the Library How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System
Siva Vaidhyanathan
A great survey of just what the subtitle says, “how the clash between freedom and control is hacking the real world and crashing the system.”
Earnest-as-fuck academic look at freedom on the innernets. Wish it had been written when I was in school, it would be a great reader in current topics from a left-liberal “information wants to be free” perspective. He reviews a number of different recent tech fights from the perspective of anarchy vs. oligarchy.
Criticisms would be:
- too close a focus on specific and current events means this book won’t age well – things are moving too fast for a book on issues like filesharing and DRM (hint: read his blog instead)
- I’d appreciate a bit more theory and a bit fewer specifics about this or that court battle.
- no charts? why no charts? Needs charts.
- for a book about anarchists and libraries, I was expecting a bit more sex.
Favourite part:
when my librarian gave the cover a double take and asked about it.
Lots of press these days on multitasking and shortened attention spans, but apparently the problem goes pretty far back. According to William Wordsworth people were disconnected from real life, because of
“the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid commmunication of intelligence hourly gratifies.”
Wow, imagine if they had email two hundred years ago how much worse it could have been!
(from the June 2007 Harper’s Magazine, p. 89)
Do you have one of those little knobby thingies in the middle of your laptop keyboard? What do you call those things, anyway?