i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

This one's for all the librarians -- and there are a lot of you, which always pleases me! -- on my flist; the rest of you will probably find this inexplicable and unfunny: today, during a discussion about taxonomy integration, I turned to my boss and said, "Well, you know, I've always wanted to put 'rebuilt the LCSH from scratch' on my resume."


The sad part is that I was only half-kidding. Oh, library humor, how close to home you sometimes strike.

scratchyfishie forwarded me what is possibly the most incredible internship opportunity ever today. it's a CATALOGING internship at the BASEBALL HALL OF FAME:

( Lib. internship: Nat'l. Baseball Hall of Fame )

i've been watching nip/tuck all afternoon, and i just have to ask ... is it ALWAYS this weird and violent and gross? and does christian fuck everything with tits, or just most things? because i'm surprisingly engaged by the show, but i'm unsettled by all of it at the same time. i don't like any of these characters. they're all assholes! i mean, even julia is kind of a bitch. i just. why am i watching this? does it get better? do i eventually come to care at ALL about any of these characters? apparently i have a lot of questions.

lizzies and lala and cee and jay are coming over for dinner tonight. i made brownies! you are all jealous that you do not live close enough to me for me to make you brownies.

( supernatural 1x04: phantom traveler )

a couple of months ago, i was talking about how i wanted to integrate my flickr tags with my livejournal tags with my tags on audioscrobbler¹, etc - and there's no way to do that at the moment, or at least i thought there wasn't. except that technorati has done it. it pulls tags from flickr, buzznet, del.icio.us and furl, plus any blogger's site who's enabled tags in the right fashion, and it's all there. on one page. under one tag.

people, this is so fucking amazing i can't even. it's a MINIMAL INDEX OF THE INTERNET. it's still a random and unfiltered and uncatalogued index of the internet, but it is the skeleton of a classified internet. do you guys understand how fucking COOL this is? the interface is still sluggish and messy, clogged with text ads in annoying places and sort of unintuitive, but it's a BACKBONE. it's a backbone for something really fascinating, something really innovative, something we have never seen work before. it's an internet with a fucking card catalogue.

(i'm not particularly wild about the aesthetic implementation of technorati tags on blog pages - it seems clunky and, frankly, really fucking ugly, but the idea is what matters. the idea is what counts.)

back in the day when i first got online - late '95 or so - the people i spent the most time reading on the web were people like maggy donea, derek powazek, lance arthur. i was later lucky enough to fall in with ben brown and his flabjab crew for a while, back when ben was still a compsci student at the unversity of maryland, and i watched ben, derek, alexis allen, magdalen powers - i watched them explode the internet with the so-called "new media".

and the thing is that new media was sort of. it was not the cutting edge then that maybe we thought it was, except that all these people are still doing all these neat things, and they ARE on the cutting edge now. consumating, ben's wacky-brilliant new dating site. technorati, where derek works. and still and always the beautiful narrative storytelling of fray, which is probably the first site on the internet i really loved.

i'm not in touch with any of the people from back then anymore, except for zannah and dotgirl, but i still watch them from afar with a healthy mixture of awe, respect, and cynicism. the fact of the matter is that i have been lucky all my life to surround myself with crazy creative genius-type people, and then and now are no different - i'm still surrounded by crazy creative genius-type people. but the fact of the matter is that people i knew, however tangentially, once upon a time, are doing crazy cool things with the internet and its resources, just like they were doing almost ten years ago. so. that's pretty fucking cool.

and did i mention the internet card catalogue?

that said, i have some more reading about natural language processing to do. and then i have to go to class.

(for the record and unrelated to this: my favorite piece of writing re: blogs ever published. in case you cared.)

1: also for the record, i found that entry of mine BY USING MY TAGS. hooray.

omg, has it really been almost a week since i've posted? HAVE YOU PEOPLE MISSED ME ENOUGH YET?

anyway. a long list of random things that i have been thinking about while moving and since moving.

1. I AM EMPLOYED OMG. once i start the job - it's in tech services in one of the carolina libraries - i will talk more about it but holy shit omg i can pay rent in october now hooray.
   
   
2. moving related shenanigans: ( my cat is a spaz, the uhaul dies in kentucky, and other crises )
   
   
3. you know what i want? i want a "cap it" button on my tivo. where i can pause the tivo, hit the "cap it" button, and the screen is saved into an image file. and later you can plug your computer into the tivo and pull the image files off the tivo. i cannot believe someone has not thought of this yet.
   
   
4. speaking of the tivo, my mother called me last week to tell me, very sadly, that she did not think i would get bravo on my cable, as my sister does not. my mother, however, was mistaken, and i do get bravo. my obsession with west wing reruns can continue. even better, though, is that I GET WGN ON MY CABLE. OMG CUBS.
   
   
5. dear sweet jesus, the most recent shoebox project SLAYED me. i am dead.
   
   
6. and while i'm on the subject of fannish things i'm overcome by lately, the boy and i watched fellowship of the ring on friday night and i was just. i love that movie so much. the bit where the wee elijah is dancing at bilbo's party. the colors. the cinematography. viggo in the pub in bree. anytime dom and billy are onscreen. oh. so much love.
   
   
7. and finally, one more obsession. why i am obsessed with google search history: ( blah blah blah what google does for me )
   
   
   
8. minor league baseball: is the best thing ever. it's like real baseball, except that grown men fall down a lot, and the thing is - the baseball is just shitty enough that minor league teams have to provide something else for people to watch, and so minor league games are full of ridiculous between-inning shenanigans, like grown men pushing baby dolls in strollers, and children catching beanbag hands in frying pans. i love the durham bulls. i am so totally buying season tickets next year if i can swing the money.
   
   
9. the high-speed internet provided by my apartment complex BLOCKS MY DOWNLOAD CLIENT. wtf. i am an adult. i can make my own decisions re: downloading illegal media. please piss off thank you very much. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET THE REST OF DOCTOR WHO NOW? *fist*
   
   
10. so i'm going to rely on you guys to send me lots of new music. since i can't get it myself now. i am SO ANNOYED BY THIS. (that said: if anyone wanted to send me a billy corgan song called "friends as lovers", i would be most appreciative. you can send the file to minkittymusic at gmail dot com or just yousendit to my livejournal address. muchas gracias, minions!) i will begin the sharing by offering a counting crows cover of ryan adams' song "come pick me up". all right. now it's your turn.
    
    
11. i don't have a desk chair. we threw out all our old chairs in the chicago apartment, because they were crappy and we bought them at a yard sale, but i still don't have a new chair in the north carolina apartment. i'm sitting on a big blue tupperware. i lose at life.
    
    
12. in conclusion, ray kowalski.

hi hi hello how are you guys?

Illinois Senator Barack Obama spoke at the American Library Association Convention last Saturday; I did not get down to McCormick Place to see him, nor have I watched these clips yet so I can't vouch for quality, but I thought some of you (who might not otherwise know about this) might want to see Senator Obama address a bunch of librarians. There are 10 80-second clips of his speech and Q&A session available for download here.

The train this morning smelled like wet dog. I suppose it was, more technically, wet commuter, but either way it was gross. Ew, wet commuter.

Now I am going to wonder out loud about Google's latest feature, because I can.

( the text of google searchhistory's login page, for easy reference )

Google's SearchHistory. Has anyone else seen this, or am I alone in plucking it out of a random library blog? I'm not sure what to think ... if you log in, say, with your gmail account, Google will then log your search history. It will, I am given to believe, tailor itself to you, the more searches you record.

And, to be fair, I'm not sure how I feel about this - do I want my search history recorded? Sometimes it would be nice to have a record of what I did to get where I ended up after a search, when I'm trying to find something again but I don't have my bookmarks at my fingertips - but isn't that what del.icio.us does, really? Lets me have my bookmarks at my fingertips, if I want to submit them?

So SearchHistory wouldn't act as a remote bookmarks manager. All right. That's fine - I don't need one; I have something that already does that for me.

Is SearchHistory going to maximize my searching capabilities? Or is it just going to take the information about what I've looked for and clicked through and try and suggest that's what I need now? I can see this as something powerful and interesting, tracking the process of honing down searches - so that in the future, if you can look at your search history and see how you got somewhere, you don't have to go through the process again, you can simply mimic a search strategy and get to the answer. All right, that could be useful - tracking search histories as a way to educate users as to how to use Google to optimum efficiency.

But you're not going to get most users using the service that way, so maybe that's not the point either.

So what is the point? Can I use this to block pages I never want to see, so that if I've blacklisted a useless page in an earlier search, it won't appear in a future search? That would be a feature I'd use. Do they have a del.icio.us feature, where I can bookmark pages straight from my Google search to a public list? I'd do that. Right now, I'm just not seeing why I should be using this, and I'm not even worried about the privacy aspects.

(Some people may be concerned about Google tracking all their internet activity like that; bully for them. If the Federal Government wants to know I'm looking for fanfiction, concert listings and recipes for fried okra, more power to them. I don't search for anything I'd be embarrassed to link to in my journal, and that's already public.)

I'm going to play with it, just to see if it's doing anything that's worth me using it - I'll let you all know. But if you wanted to play with it, too, and tell me what you thought, I wouldn't complain. It's still in beta, so I'm hoping that - like with Gmail - we'll be able to have some kind of say in what direction this takes. That would be okay.

I'm not against new techology, or new applications of current technology - I just want it to have a point. I'm not sure this has a point.

In conclusion, porn. Also, Ray Kowalski.

GOOD MORNING, MINIONS, WHAT'S GOIN' ON?

( livejournal and me )

( information science and YOU; or, answering questions and owning intellectual content )

have i sounded off on the new pope yet? i can't remember and i'm too lazy to look. regardless: i think that ratzinger isn't the best choice by far, but i don't think he was the worst, either, and according to a coworker, i don't get to have an opinion on the pope, anyway, since i'm not catholic, so there you go.

anyway.

a while back, i saw someone on lj - not someone on my flist, just someone i saw while i was idly surfing - do this thing, wherein their flist told them a song they liked, and the original poster replied with another song that aforementioned original poster thought the commenter would like.

so. in that spirit, post here telling me a song you really like, and i'll reply with another song (yousendit link included!) that i think you'll like. for the sake of my sanity, let's say first 20 responders - and then i'll take more later if this works, if you guys are interested.

eta: i cannot respond to the song thing until i get home tonight! but i will then, promise. so you should all tell me things you like, okay?

i spent a lot of time these days thinking about the distribution of information. it is, technically and to a point, what i do in my job, for one thing - i take information in one form, convert it to another form, and send it to people. (my job is actually much more complicated and frustrating than this, but for the purposes of this post. you know.)

but not just that. i am thinking about the information that exists in the world. and, say, the internet. what did we do before google? there were other search engines, sure, but none of them a.) encompassed the breadth of information that google does, and b.) they weren't nearly as easy for the common man to use as google is. google is a smart search engine.

take, for example, one of my latest obsessions: rochelle mazar's blog posts about the search strings that bring people to her website. not only are they sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always interesting, but she breaks them down the way only a library or an information professional could and would - by how good of a search they are. there are efficient ways to search, and inefficient ways to search, and most of us probably use both of these methods at various times. (rochelle's blog is syndicated on lj as mazar, if you're interested; i think it's one of the best professional librarian blogs out there, fwiw.)

but see, my thing about going to library school is - i'd love to be one of those people who makes the internet an easy, logical place to find information. up to date, relevant information. and teaching people to use search engines in a produtive efficient way.

so. you know. information.

the other thing is - i am constantly, mind-blowingly amazed at what the internet thinks up. livejournal, while not always a candidate for a site that gives back to humanity and the information world in a good way, is an incredible invention solely for the communities that it can build. i have flown and driven thousands of miles to meet in real life people i first encountered on livejournal. i count among my closest, dearest, real life friends a large number of people i first met on the internet. livejournal did that. how fucking cool is that?

and take the way the internet disseminates information - this winter, i watched a friend, who had just seen the charlie and the chocolate factory trailer for the first time, marvelling that johnny depp was in this tim burton film of this incredible book, and why wasn't everyone talking about this? and this is not to belittle my friend at all, because he is a smart brilliant guy who i love, but i thought to myself, everyone i know is talking about that, where the fuck have you been? because of how i use the internet, i feel as though i have information ten times faster than a whole huge chunk of the population.

and take audioscrobbler, which is such a clever unique idea that i am pissed off that i did not think of it first. (other things that i am pissed off i did not think of first: baseball, the title "the only living boy in new york", and buffy the vampire slayer.) who thought this up? ten years ago, would something like this have even been a blip on anybody's maybe-someday radar? no. but the internet made it happen, because the technology and the thirst for information allowed it to.

and there's the whole idea of instant communication, which is pretty damn cool, and the whole idea of reinventing the narrative media in storytelling (see also shoebox_project and peter_and_fran), and the whole idea of - however much the record companies hate it - shared music, this whole huge way to spread the news about a band where before you were reliant on badly dubbed tapes and mixed cds.

and that is so absolutely amazing, and also it is something that is relevant to my chosen field.

i've never really had a burning academic passion before. some mild obsessions, but never one that consumes me when i'm waiting for the train, boiling water, smoking a cigarette. these days, my default brain setting is not "pretty boys kissing" but instead "isn't the search for information a really wild and crazy fascinating thing". i suppose it's good that i've made this my chosen field, eh? (also, for the record, i still spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about rayk blowing fraser, so it's not like i've been replaced by a pod person or anything. it's just not number one anymore.)

(one of the routinely top hits to my website is "toes", which is vaguely strange until i remember that i have a couple of photos of the tattoo on my foot posted, whose image files are just called "toes.jpg". i wonder if the people who find them are disappointed. (or if the people searching for "twat" are disappointed when they get fully-clothed pictures of flowery_twat instead of porn.))

I finished the most gorgeous, heartbreaking, breathtaking book on the bus this morning, and consequently spent the entire morning reading about the Maori people and language online, as said book was set in New Zealand and featured a great deal of Maori culture and language. (Maori actually should have one of those little bars over the "a", but I can't figure out how to do it in HTML. So. Just for future reference.)

Thus, links. For my own education, but feel free to poke around. Pretty interesting stuff.

100 Maori Words Every New Zealander Should Know (with .wav pronunciation guides!)

Official Maori Language Commission

Maori Language Resources (requires paid registration)

Maori Language Information

Searchable English to Maori/Maori to English Dictionary

Between this and Sumerian, I'll be a veritable font of information about languages no one in America speaks!

Cultural resources:
http://www.maori.org.nz/

At some point, I'll actually talk about the book, The Bone People, by Keri Hulme, but it's still settling into my brain and my soul at the moment, so it won't be today. But y'all should go find it and read it, because it was the best book I've read this year.