This one's interesting – apparently John McCain, the Republican frontrunner, was born in the Panama Canal Zone, so is not actually eligible to be President (at least he wouldn't be if anyone in the US still cared for their Constitution!)
And speaking of Super, how about that SuperBowl finale? A pretty boring game right until the end and then…wow. I usually cheer for the underdogs but I was picking the Patriots in the hopes of seeing a history-making undefeated season. It wasn't to be though (and I am all right with that.)
The stupid NFL is taking down every clip from the game as soon as they're uploaded to YouTube. Otherwise I'd link to a YouTube video of the game's highlights. Instead, you get a highlight video straight from NFL.com, complete with a front-end 30-second Planters commercial – which I'm currently ignoring as I type this in another window instead. Joy!)
Just finished trying to help someone update their profile on VampireFreaks.com (half successfully, half not – I figured out how to add a background image rather than a solid colour and to add an embedded music player as well. But I couldn't figure out how to place the music player where the person wanted it on the page.)
I sort of regret that I didn't keep a list of all the computer & Internet reference questions I've been asked over the past month as it's been pretty amazing in terms of the range of what people come up with to ask me (as the VampireFreaks.com shows!) – from the most basic beginner questions to quite involved advanced stuff. With a glance at my list of communities visited so far to prompt my memory, here's a list of some I remember…
– how do I do better Google searches? – how do I print a selection of a web page instead of the whole thing? – what are the advantages and disadvantages of high-speed satellite Internet? – why does my high speed cut off sometimes? – how do I erase errors when typing in Word? – how do I change the font in Word? In my e-mail program? – how do I hook my DS to my wireless system at home? – does your library have wireless access for my laptop? (Librarians often mention that patrons ask this as well but unfortunately, we don't at this time.) – what are the “F” keys for? – how do I change a document I've saved on a CD-RW? – is AVG Free Edition good? Should I update it when it pops up saying I should? – how do I erase a contact from my e-mail? – why did someone not receive a message I sent even though it's in my “Sent” folder? – can you help me install my Bridge game from 1999 on my new Vista machine? – what do each of these icons mean? (The patron had pencil-sketched every single icon on her task bar!) – why does my monitor flicker? – why are there pop-ups as soon as I start my computer? – how do I play an MP4 movie on my portable video player? – how do I recover the e-mail address book from the CD-ROM that was created after my hard drive crashed? – how do I get pictures off my digital camera? (I've been asked this one a few times.) – how do I create a Facebook account/should I create a Facebook account/what is Facebook? (This one has come up a few times as well.) – how do I listen to Internet radio? Is there a way to pick a song or artist and have it play automatically? – how do I download music/movies from the Internet? (I've gotten this one a few times, usually asked rather sheepishly as if I'm an undercover cop instead of a librarian dedicated to sharing information with the world! ) – how to log-in to the SaskTel webmail service – why this is an advantage if you're on dial-up and want to preview message sizes before starting downloading huge attached photos, powerpoint files or movies. – how to attach a photo to a Hotmail message – how to save photos that are attached to an e-mail to a hard drive – what a hard drive is – the office metaphor that Windows uses – folders, files, desktops, etc. – how to upload photos to Picasa. What Picasa is. Stepping back, what “upload” means. – how to find census information online – the difference between Hotmail and “regular” (ie. SaskTel) mail – why does my mouse move so fast? How can I slow it down? – how do you log in to TutorWorld.com? – does having a bunch of shortcuts on my desktop slow down my computer? – how can I speed up my computer? – how to view Powerpoint files that someone sends as an attachment – where people find “those funny forwards” that everybody sends. (This is maybe the only time I've actually tried to disuade a patron – “are you really sure you want to do that?” But I did show her some sites where these types of things can be found.)
That doesn't capture everything I've been asked but hopefully provides a good overview of what types of things I'm being asked.
Hmmm…it doesn't seem to require that you be a librarian, only that you are willing to join CLA for the duration of the term on the jury (which is a 5 year commitment with a requirement that you read ~100 books per year. I've done nearly that for a book awards jury once but doing it for five years straight? )
—
Call for Volunteers,
CLA Young Adult Book Award Committee The
committee is seeking someone who is: widely
read in young adult literaturepassionate
about connecting teens with booksa
member of the Canadian Library Association, or willing to join for the
duration of their term on the Committee
Each
member of the committee represents a region of Canada, and
this year’s applicant must be a resident
of Saskatchewan. We
hope to create a Committee that best embodies our national identity.If you are male, a member of the First
Nations or a member of a visible minority, you are especially encouraged to
apply. To
apply, please submit the following:
Submissions
should be sent by Monday, February
25, 2008 to the
Canadian Library Association’s Participation Committee c/o
Brenda
Shields, bshields@cla.ca; or Don Butcher, Executive
Director, dbutcher@cla.ca. Fax to 613-563-9895; mail to
328 Frank
St., Ottawa, ON
K2P
0X8.
So I was giving my standard “these days, buying online or doing your online banking is as safe, if not safer, than doing it via a real world transaction” line during a public Internet session the other day when some old guy puts up his hand and goes “What about that Silent Banker virus they were talking about on the news the other night?”
I've been on the road for most evenings lately and hadn't seen that particular report so I admited I hadn't heard about it, bluffed some answer about making sure you have your anti-virus program up-to-date and quickly changed the subject.
Anybody have any more details? How does it get on your computer? Are most anti-virus programs able to catch it with their latest updates? Is there a program out there yet to specifically check for it? The people of rural Saskatchewan (including me!) need answers!
Oh, and speaking of the librarian's best friend, in my training sessions, I always point out that Google isn't the be-all-and-end-all and that there are other search engines that often have vastly different results – Ask.com, MSN Live and Yahoo! being the other main ones right now.
I also get my branch librarians to do a “vanity search” for their own name, first without quotes then within quotes then with a relevant keyword related to themselves (“Saskatchewan” or their community name or “librarian”) to illustrate how to use different techniques to improve and refine a Google search.
Even though this is part of the training, I hadn't done a vanity search on my own name for a long time and guess what I realised when I did – “Jason Hammond”, even without quotes, brings up my blog as the first result in all of the search engines I listed above EXCEPT Google.
I can't figure it out – before starting my blog, my regular web page used to be the first result for Jason Hamond as well. Now, even though I've submitted my new site to Google via their own URL submitter, it's just not showing up at all – even in the first few pages of results. Using quotes doesn't help and even a search for “head tale” only brings up my site via a third-party listing service called MyBlogLog.com. Very weird.
I see this all the time in the small towns I visit where the locals are expected to volunteer for various organizations to keep those organizations running – the rec board, the library board, the arts society, the parks committee, etc – so their “volunteer” service to these boards and groups isn't really voluntary in the purest definition of the word. Some people who are recruited to groups such as Student Council and CLA Student Chapter at FIMS would fit this definition as well.
But other than a brief discussion with the branch librarian about the events of the last couple years since a young man from Montreal was able to execute a series of online trades from his starting point of a single red paper clip to his goal of a house, I made no mention of the event during my public sessions.
I did, however, have to change my usual methodology of doing a search for the local community's name when demonstrating Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. as I knew the Red Paper Clip story would come up in all of my searches and I'm sure, whether they thought this was a good or bad thing, many locals are tired of being known for this one thing.
Luckily, a family of immigrants from China who are working at a local business (and were the impetus for a successful ESL group starting at the library) attended my session so I was able to use Shanghai as an example for many of the searches I did instead.
So in honour of that family, here's a video clip of their city…
So the main reason I'm posting this story isn't because of that revelation but because of this hilarious quote from the MetaFilter discussion:
[McGuinness:] Notwithstanding the promotional noise, even Radiohead’s honesty box principle showed that if not constrained, the customer will steal music.
[MF Poster:] Damn, think of all the music the world could have listened to, if it
weren't for those damned thieves. Now it's stolen, so we'll never be
able to enjoy it. And I would never have been the wiser if it wasn't
for the child molester* Paul McGuinness. Paul McGuinness, rapist of
children that he is, knows a thing or two about music theft. The infant
poker Paul McGuinness also knows a thing or two about abusing the
English language to change the meanings of words to suit your own
purposes.
* Child Rapist: (n.) One who expects children to pay $15 for a CD.
This is only semi-related (and I know I have readers who lionize Bono) but the more I think about it, the more I think that he (and anybody who is a multimillionaire in a world where more than half of the people on it live on less than $2 a day) is a gi-normous prick. If you're a “greed is good – the more for me, the better” millionaire capitalist, I can almost understand your viewpoint. I don't agree with you and you're still a prick but I can understand why you might see the world that way.
But when you base a big part of your life like Bono does advocating on behalf of those 3 billion extremely poor people but still don't seem to realise that either the entire developed world has to reign in their excesses because we simply can't exist at that level of consumption, you are also a massive hypocrite. (And I admit that until I give up 99% of my worldly goods, stop using as much fuel as I do, stop buying useless shit from China that I barely use, etc. etc. I too am a hypocrite. But I am not a MASSIVE hypocrite on the scale at which Bono exists – where, as a single individual, he has a net worth which is exponentially greater than the amount of money I will earn in my working life pus the fact that he leads a band that has earned over a billion dollars during its existence by some estimates. Sure, I might have to give up fuel and dollar store trinkets to clear my conscience but Bono needs to give up his private jet and four thousand-dollar vintage wines.
(Now where'd I put that “rant” tag? I know I left it around here somewhere.)
)
) but the more I think about it, the more I think that he (and anybody who is a multimillionaire in a world where 
