Once upon a time in a University library, I happened upon a back issue of Journal of Popular Culture or some such where some academic had done a *very* in-depth study of who wrote which Beatles songs, giving percentage contributions to each. I think I have a copy of that article around here somewhere – I should go read it again – very interesting material. And if you haven't read “Revolution in the Head“, go read it now! And if you prefer to come at the songs from more of a musical perspective than a lyrical/thematic/cultural approach, I highly recommend Allan J. Pollock's “Notes On” series.
You could pitch this as a movie but you might get told it's too unrealistic – a pint-sized hockey player who's short on stature but big on heart overcomes incredible odds to not only make the Calgary Flames but become a prolific scorer and team leader helping the Flames win the team's only Stanley Cup in 1989. He is traded in 1998, leaving the Flames as their all-time leading scorer before eventually playing for Colorado, New York and Chicago. In addition to his Stanley Cup, he also wins an Olympic Gold Medal in 2002 but the following year, leaves the NHL after violating the league's substance abuse policy multiple times.
He bounces around – playing in a British semi-pro league, for a northern Alberta senior team and later, with a Manitoba senior team as well. Eventually, he starts a concrete business with his wife and brother and after six years out of the league, it is assumed his hockey playing days are over.
So when it is announced a week ago that he has invited to attend the training camp of his original team at the age of 41, rumours about the reason for this offer ran wild – the Flames only offered him a try-out to deflect attention from others on the roster, they wanted to ensure sell-outs for their pre-season games to maximize revenue (or demote him to their new farm team in Abbotsford and have the same thing happen there), they want to sell a new retro jersey or most promisingly, they wanted to give a local hero a chance to have some closure after leaving the league in disgrace.
Well, I know it was only a pre-season game but no matter what happens from here on in – whether he makes the team or not – the ending of the first NHL game for Saskatchewan-born Theo Fleury in six years, will go down in the history as one of the most dramatic endings to a hockey game ever with Fleury scoring the game-winning (and only) goal for either team in a shoot-out!
Facebook has stolenadded a new feature, inspired by Twitter, where you can tag another user by using the “@” sign and then typing the person's name in your status updates.
When I was trying it out to tag Shea in a post, I ended with a rhetorical “Is this a Twitter killer?” A few people were quick to respond that this wasn't the case with one very succinctly saying “Um…no.”
So I should clarify what I meant with my half-baked comment. I obviously don't think that one appropriated feature, no matter how core to the experience, means that Twitter's going to disappear (although they appear capable of doing this to themselves regularly anyhow!)
But I do wonder if the rapid Twitter-ification of Facebook does mean that the casual user (here I'm talking about people who aren't early adopters, who don't work in libraries and get excited about every new technology that comes along, and yes, I'll say it, the type of person who answer a LOT of Facebook quizzes) might be less inclined to make the jump to getting on Twitter if they're already on Facebook?
A few months back, I was speaking to someone who'd done a bunch of demographic research on Regina. The topic of wealthy areas of the city came up and I said that I suspected one of our suburban branches, with a high percentage of doctors, lawyers, University professors and other white collar professionals living nearby, likely had the richest patrons.
The person responded that this was probably the case if you were looking purely at household gross income but the question really depended on how you defined “rich”. They went on to say that their research had actually shown that the richest area of the city, at least in terms of net worth (which most would consider a better indicator of wealth than income) was a working class neighbourhood I never would've guessed in a million years.
But it makes sense once you think about it – many of the people in this area are tradespeople who make very good incomes, often as self-employed workers with low overhead. Many work from their homes which they can write-off as a business expense. They have skills that allow them to do their own home repairs rather than hiring expensive…you guessed it…tradespeople. Their homes tend to be modest (at least in comparison to the McMansions in the area where many white collar folks live) and therefore, are paid off earlier rather than carrying a larger mortgage for a longer term (how many people in the suburbs are “house rich but cash poor” after their gi-normous mortgage payment each month?)
Same with vehicles and other status items – instead of purchasing this year's new model to replace last year's new model, many working class folks tend to own older vehicles that they keep for a longer time which means they're owned outright as well and when needed, repaired in their own backyard rather than an expensive garage. And for the skills they don't have, their network of contacts often means that they know people who can do any needed work at a discount and/or under the table. They save money in other ways too. Instead of expensive vacations to Europe and the Caribbean, they might take a family trip to the Rockies or the West Edmonton Mall.
I'm not speaking of my own neighbourhood in this post but the similarities are striking – the area where Shea and I live is also one that would be termed a working class neighbourhood with a high percentage of tradespeople living here.
In fact, the house that Shea and I live in was built by a cooperative of tradespeople in the late 1970's – one carpenter, one plumber, one electrician, one bricklayer and one or two others banded together to buy six lots and built each others' homes. (When we had our house checked over as part of our offer to buy, the contractor couldn't help but comment on the sturdy construction.)
What's my point? I guess that it's foolish to make assumptions about a neighbourhood or an area of the city based on who lives there or what they do for a living (he says having just done an entire post with some pretty broad generalizations about a couple different types of neighbourhoods! )
But obviously I was wrong when I assumed that simply having wealthy, white collar-type workers in an area meant everybody was “rich” just as many others look at “poorer” working class neighbourhoods and don't recognize the real wealth contained within them.
(I hasten to add that I'm not one of these people with a secret net
worth of millions because of my “salt o' the earth” lifestyle and
skills! My leaking bathroom faucet is covered with duct tape as I type this and Shea and I regularly spend way more money than we should on cars, vacations, dining out and all kinds of other un-necessities of life! We fight hard not to get caught up in the “Keeping Up With the Joneses” mentality – sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
But overall, by choosing to live in a “poorer” neighbourhood of the city, we gain some pretty sweet advantages compared to many people who are otherwise similar to us. Shea is able to work only three days a week instead of full-time and we're still able to dedicate a large percentage of our income to savings or other things we want than many of our friends who have similar incomes but chose to live in more expensive areas of the city.
I always think of the horror story of one of Shea's former co-workers being told by her husband that she *had* to work full-time rather than dropping down to lower hours to spend more time with their two young children like she wanted. In the driveway of the bungalow in a “nice” area of the city? A brand new BMW and a two-year old VW Passat. )
[Edit: upgrading iTunes seemed to have brought back the App Store as far as I can tell.]
…did the categories section of the App store disappear for you over the weekend? Trying to troubleshoot when this happened for me, I found one article that seemed to say that Apple took out the categories option with the release of iTunes 9 because the App Store was getting overwhelmed with so many low-grade submissions (ironic since they control the approval process!) and so they could focus on the higher quality (read: paid) apps instead.
If true, this is really unfortunate. It's “Librarian 101” that people find information in one of two ways – they search for it and they browse for it. The App Store search option worked well if you knew what you were looking for and the categories structure did a pretty good job of facilitating browsing and enabling discovery if you were going the more serendipitous route.
Say I'm in the mood for a card game – I would click on Categories -> Games -> Card Games then the “Free” and browse through the results until I found something that caught my eye. For example, just this weekend, I found that old kid's favourite, War, for the iPhone.
If I only had Search available, I might never have stumbled on that game (which also has a paid $0.99 version which, who knows, I may also choose to buy after playing the free version for awhile). In fact, I may never have found it, even if I was searching for that game, since “War” is such a common search term as to be meaningless.
To be fair, I do like that they've added a “Highest Grossing” tab – it helps to highlight, not just the $0.99 “burp & fart noise” apps that sell a million copies but those that don't sell as many copies but are more professionally developed – the $99 app that turns your iPhone into a proper GPS, the $4.99 board game classics like Scrabble and Monopoly.
Heck, it might just help convince a lot of users that there is more to the iPhone than Free and/or Almost Free apps. But if that's the intention, taking away the Categories completely isn't the best solution by a long shot!
“Google Voice’s primary offering to consumers—a single, unchanging
phone number—seems innocent enough at first. The service, which began
with one million numbers and is being slowly rolled out by invitation
only in the U.S. (it’s not yet available in Canada), allows users to
take calls from their Google number on as many as six different
existing phones…. To use the service, people still need cellphones and cell plans, but
with one fell swoop Google Voice has already sounded a death knell for
many of the lucrative money-making features that were once the domain
of traditional phone companies…. Even more worrisome for telecom players is the possibility that one
day a tool like Google Voice will also let users make phone calls via
the Internet, using smart phones connected to WiFi hot spots instead of
the carriers’ own cellphone towers.”
In my ongoing quest to give a theme to every single day of the week on this blog, I've decided to start the “Saturday Snap” recurring feature to highlight a photo I've taken – usually from the past seven days but occasionally something from the archives or maybe even a cool photo I find online.
With the iPhone, I'm taking a lot more photos and it's also a lot easier to directly upload them compared to a regular digital camera. (When will we reach a point that every device comes with some sort of wireless capability? Not just digital cameras but our appliances, our toys, our cars – there are so many possibilities!)
Okay, here's the first Saturday Snap – actually from last Saturday which our first day of Pace's swimming lessons. We had in in swimming lessons in Weyburn when he was around a year old and these ones are fairly similar – mostly getting used to the water, lots of songs, working on very basic skills (blowing bubbles, floating with assistance).
[2009-09-17 – Edit: “b” and “c” aren't that close on the keyboard so I wonder what sort of a Freudian slip it was to type “Facecook” in the subject line of this post originally?]
A minor trend I've noticed lately is people posting screen caps of funny Facebook threads they come across…
Yikes – at least Lisa was only inspired to start a recurring Music Monday post after reading my blog instead of doing something really crazy!
That does bring up some random thoughts… – I get contacted by or comments from or connect to about one new library school student (or someone contemplating going to library school) about once every month or two on average. I consider it a huge honour that people find this blog and then find it useful and/or entertaining after that first visit.
– I'm really bad about updating my list of links on the left side to the blogs of people I know (and weeding out the ones that have become inactive) since I usually add these blogs to my NetVibes account and then laze out on doing more. I'll mess around – maybe NetVibes has a widget I can embed or something that would work better.
– this is probably a longer post but I wonder if blogs are becoming a bit passe? With people getting a lot of their information from Facebook and Twitter, where do blogs fit in anymore? Longer, more thoughtful posts for one thing (I guess I'm out on that count! ) Niche information is still easier to find on blogs than on FB or Twitter probably. I don't know – it'll be interesting to see where blogs are at in another year or so.
– And completely unrelated, Reddit has a sub-reddit called “IAmA” where people from various walks of lives post “I Am A [Blank]” and then answer questions from other users, very similar to the idea of Living Libraries that is making the rounds in libraryland lately. Here's one “I Am A Former Children's Librarian – Ask Me Anything” which is interesting although, being Reddit, there are also a few off-topic, goofy or inappropriate questions (well, depending on your POV – it is called “Ask Me Anything” after all!)
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