No, not “Bring Your Own Doughnuts” (although that’s an idea I could support!) Instead, this article talks about BYOD – “Bring Your Own Device” – and how IT departments are (or aren’t) dealing with staff who are increasingly bringing and using their own personal devices in the workplace.
I don’t use my iPhone at work very often but, since it’s always on me, I do use it on occasion – to look up a call number when I’m in the stacks or to do a quick Google search over 3G if our Internet is down for some reason or even to check if our Wifi is working when a patron says they can’t connect with their own device (as happened to me just yesterday as a matter of fact.)
The idea behind this site is pretty good but I think it’d work better if it was opened up so anyone could contribute so the person running it would have lots of content.
At this point, I should probably add something cute that Pace has recently said or done but honestly, nothing pops immediately to mind. I guess the closest to a “cute” one is that he was talking to his mom the other day and pointing at the cat, he said “Koko has nails and we hammer nails too.” Then he looked at his toy gun and said “This has a spring and spring is a season.” After a quick call to her friendly neighbourhood reference librarian to make sure she had the right terminology, Shea told Pace these were homonyms.
Now he sees homonyms everywhere – although he pronounces them as “hominids” which I find hilarious – he’s found a near-homonym for “homonym”!
[2012-02-23 – Edit: He ran out of his bedroom tonight with a couple more…”Dad, there’s ‘wind’ like in the air and there’s ‘winned’ like a hockey game. And there’s ‘bread’ like bread and ‘bread’ like toast!” So we’ve got a bit of work to do yet! ;-)]
Is religion declining worldwide? That is definitely the trend and a recent discussion with a co-worker left us wondering whether religion as we know it would cease to exist completely at some point in the future (me) or morph into something similar but different (him)?
Full disclosure – I have never read the Bible from cover-to-cover so I couldn’t answer that first question. When I was a kid, I had a “Child’s Book of Bible Stories” that I read regularly and later, probably in my teens, I honestly tried to read the Bible. I even remember buying a copy at a remaindered bookstore in the States (how appropriate!) during a family trip but I just couldn’t get past all the begats and how boring it seemed – compared to my child’s book which at least focused on the stories which are, admittedly, quite powerful.
Have I posted this before? I feel like I have but I spent some time this weekend importing old Tragically Hip bootlegs into iTunes and it reminded me of how fully and completely (get it?) I used to be into the Hip – trading bootlegs, traveling around to attend different concerts, studying Gord’s lyrics like they contained some secret code to the universe.
I always loved how their mid-song jams would lead to future songs. In this case, an extremely risque ramble in the middle of “New Orleans Is Sinking” would later give birth to the very romantic “Ahead by A Century”.
I spent part of today chipping out the last of the ice on our driveway. In mid-February. In Saskatchewan.
Last winter was one of the most brutal I can remember – usually we get 1-2 really cold snaps through the whole winter (which usually lasts from October to oh, let’s say April). But last year, it felt like it was -40 EVERY FRIGGIN’ DAY.
Then, this year, the average temperature has hovered around -4 or something unreal like that and that’s only because we had two very brief cold snaps (one of which we were in Hawaii for – and yes, I’ll be honest and admit I was watching what the weather was doing and hoping like hell it would get bastard cold while we were gone!)
Two brief cold snaps and otherwise, we’ve probably had more days above zero than below it (okay, that’s a slight exaggeration but that’s what it feels like. I do know we’ve rarely gone below -10 for daytime temps all winter.)
Shea, Pace and I went skating at a nearby outdoor rink since it was +4 today and the ice was pretty soft. Did I mention it’s mid-February? In Saskatchewan?
Freedom to Read Week is coming up from February 26 to March 3 and I volunteered to create the relevant display at Central for the next few weeks leading up to FTRW. (One co-worker was impressed and said “Don’t do too good of a job or they’ll make you do all the displays!”)
Anyhow, that made me think of a list:
MY FIVE FAVOURITE MEMORIES FROM MY FIRST THREE YEARS AT RPL (er, of the ones I can publicly write about. Misadventures at CLA 2010 and other fun times will remain undocumented until my memoirs come out!)
1. The daily morning staff meetings we had each day when I was in HR. These informal get-togethers with my HR colleagues where we talked, not only about work but about what was going on in our lives, the movies we’d watched, the trips we’d taken, etc. – did more for team-building than anything I’d experienced previously in any workplace and taught me a lot about how to be a successful manager. I suspect some people saw us chatting about stuff like our favourite comedians or a new recipe and thought we were wasting times but we liked to say we were the only unit in the entire library who had open-door staff meetings – another useful learning!
2. Wearing a white t-shirt as my “Human White Board” costume for Halloween 2008 and asking staff to write their favourite books on it!
3. Planning the 2011 RPL Staff Conference. Even though it had some challenges with a completely new planning committee and some struggles in terms of defining our overall purpose, it felt like the culmination of the previous three years’ experience into a staff day that was pretty seamless and successful for the most part. The day was capped by one of my single most memorable moments as well: At the end of the day, we were going to do a staff photo on the stairs at Queensbury Convention Centre. With all staff waiting, the ladder for our photographer didn’t show up. I raced to find a maintenance guy and a ladder and we quickly carried it out, only to find the regular stairs blocked by ~200 RPL staff. “Does the escalator switch to down?” I asked. “No, we only have an up escalator,” he replied then gestured at the escalator “You wanna try it?” Our Library Director overheard this exchange and I heard him say “I’m not sure that’s safe…” “Don’t worry, Jeff. I’m off the clock!” I replied then me and the maintenance guy sprinted down the up escalator, the ladder held under our arms, in what I was told looked like a slow motion silent movie to the people on the stairs. We made it down without serious injury (and to a round of cheers!) though our momentum nearly propelled us through the glass door at the bottom of the escalator when we hit solid ground! 😉
4. It’s funny but one of the silliest, smallest things I take the most pride in is leading a push to make our staff directory have photos rather than just names. That’s also led to an ability for our Marketing unit to post photos of new or departing staff in our weekly internal e-newsletter and the photos have also been useful for other purposes as well – slideshows for new and long-term staff at our annual staff conference is the one that springs to mind.
5. And as mentioned above, creating a display of some of my favourite books, DVD’s and CD’s for Freedom to Read Week 2012…
Another hash tag encouraged users to #tellviceverything to give the Minister exactly what he seemingly wants – all the information about what we do online and off – with a couple politicians using the hash tag to great effect.
While each of the candidates can point to some Saskatchewan backers, the most visibly involved segment of Saskatchewan’s NDP membership has been a group providing support for Niki Ashton – who thusfar has fallen short of the field in terms of overall support. But if (as seems likely) Ashton drops off the ballot with a reasonable share of the vote, then her supporters might be the members who ultimately break the logjam among Nash, Topp, Dewar and Cullen.
– Regina Leader-Post (Thursday February 16, 2012)
