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When 'They' Became 'Him'

We had this discussion on my blog once already.  But anyhow, since it's one of my personal grammar crusades, here's another article on the history of using “they/their/them” as the first-person singular instead of the contemporary but much more awkward “he/she” convention. 

“…for most of the existence of the English language, ‘they’ was used
as the accepted singular gender-neutral pronoun. The use of ‘it’ was
reserved for objects, as it is today, but for people the pronoun of
choice was they/their/them.

So how did this all change? Courtesy of the English Parliament.”

Damn Interesting » When They Became Him

Posted 22 August 2007 § Main Page § Randomness ‡ Comments (2) °

This Is Why Wikipedia Exists…

List of acquired tastes – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(I'm proud to say that “cilantro” and “clamato” were two additions I made to the list although cilantro is still one I don't have a taste for – I think I have that enzyme thing where it tastes like rotted hell “an unpleasant soapy taste and/or rank smell” to use the terminology I took right from the Wikipedia cilantro entry.)

Posted 20 August 2007 § Internet § List § Main Page ‡ Comments (2) °

How Good Is the CFL This Year?

I turned on the end of the BC-Calgary game on Friday to see a wicked back and forth tussle ending with the new (?) overtime format where the teams play two “mini-games”, each team starting at their opponent's respective 35-yard lines with regular rules in place to as they attempt to score.  The game ended still tied after both teams managed to score majors on each of their possessions for each mini-game. 

Then last night, Pace and I were settled in to watch the Riders-Eskimos game.  It's another exciting back and forth game with first place in the West in the balance if the Riders win.  Then, near the start of the fourth quarter, the CBC feed goes out.  I wait as long as I can stand it but finally turn it off, my mind deadened by the “Just For Laughs – Gags” program they put on while the feed was out. 

Half an hour later, I log on to TSN and see it reported that the score didn't change and the final is 32-27 for Edmonton.  Darn.  So close but so typical for the Riders who embody Saskatchewan's “next year country” mindset – just like our agricultural sector which so often looks like it'll have a great year but always failing to deliver due to early frost, too much heat, too much rain, not enough heat, not enough rain, plagues of locusts grasshoppers – you get the idea. 

But then today, I get a call from my parent who were camping near Yorkton last night. 

“Tell me about the storm last night,” my mom says.
(Hmm, that's a strange question.)
“Well, it was a pretty big storm, lots of thunder and lightning but no big deal really.  We didn't even go out to watch – went to bed early.” 
“You didn't lose your power?” 
“No.  Didn't even flicker.  Why?” 
“The power went out at Mosaic Stadium.  I thought you guys would've lost power too.” 
“No.  I was watching when the CBC feed went out but thought that was just them.  You mean the whole stadium lost power?”
“Yeah.”
“After the game was over?”
“No, they restarted the game.  The Riders won.”
“What?”
“The Riders won.”
“I saw on TSN's web site last night that they lost.”
“No.  The power went out in the whole stadium for an hour then they restarted the game.  There were still people in the stands and the Riders ended up winning.”

By this point, I've made my way to my laptop and check and yep, somehow TSN reported the score when the power went out as the final.  But in reality, 8000+ fans stayed for nearly an hour in the darkened stadium with a full bore prairie lightning storm happening until the game was restarted, just before officials were ready to cancel it. 

How insane is that – on so many levels?  That the fans stayed?  That the Riders rallied to score a final TD to take the game?  That they're got their best record at this point in the season since 1976?  Pace (who resembles a linebacker more and more each week) was inspired to put on his gear today to celebrate…

Posted 20 August 2007 § Baby § Main Page § Photo § PopCulture § Saskatchewan ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Best Tales: Some of My Favourite Posts

(Last Updated: November 24, 2007)


As I write this, I've been blogging for nearly a year a a half on a pretty much daily basis, I've written 662 posts and have received an average of one comment per post (two if you count the fact that I reply to almost every single comment I receive.)  I get quite a few site visitors (although I'm still not prepared to share the number for some reason, especially considering some of the other stuff I've shared over that same time period.    I will tell you that it's more than 10 per day and less than 1000 per day.)

Because of all that and because of the main weaknesses of blogs is that they're in reverse chronological order (usually) which means the more I write, the less likely someone is to go back and browse through the blog to find informative, engaging or humourous posts (I wish I had a “random entry” button like Wikipedia does – anybody want to whip up the javascript to do it for me?), I thought I'd go back to day one (February 28, 2006) and work my way through all 662 posts, trying to pick out some of my favourites that aren't library and library school related (I already have another spot for those but I did update my “Unofficial Guide to Library School” with various posts I didn't add there when I first wrote them.  I'll try to add to this page when it is warranted.)

Baby
First Photo of Oscar

Five “Controversial” Things We Do In Raising Our Baby



Guess Who's Pregnant?

– we announce that we're pregnant with perhaps the most disturbing photo ever to appear on this blog.

Oscar Comes Home

Oscar's (Pace's) Heartbeat
– A YouTube Video of Shea Having A Doppler Test of Pace's Heartbeat

Pace Is Here
– announcing the birth of our first child

Smaller: The Story of the Disposable Diaper
– really just a link to a Malcolm Gladwell article but so interesting, I'm putting it here.


Humour
A Plea for Saskatchewan Separation

– a trip to Montreal inspired me to post this tongue-in-cheek essay I wrote as an undergrad.


Shea's Career vs. Jason's Career

–  a humourous comparison of nursing and librarianship

You Should Have Come Home Earlier
– I'm out drinking after my final class and get caught in a blizzard.  Shea pinch-hits to keep my “daily post” streak alive and gets a lot of great comments on top of it!


Your Next Candidate in Souris-Moose Mountain Is…

– I briefly considered running in the federal election…until I remember what day it is.


Miscellaneous
10 Books on Books
– I have a lot of lists on this blog so will only include a couple favourites on this page.  There's a  list category as well if you want to see all of my “list posts”

2006 End of the Year Meme
– using a couple different memes to summarize my year, this is something I hope to remember to do each year. 

How To Boost Your 'Books Read' Count Really Quickly
– some thoughts on how many books a person might read in their lifetime.


I Swear
– one of my favourite Friday Fun Link posts.

Is There A Universal Book?
– another post that generated way more discussion than I ever expected (and led to me posting the question at Ask MetaFilter as well.)

Myths of the Developing World
– this is how you do a presentation!

Public Humiliation (aka The Public Library Game)
– as a new grad who was extremely interested in public libraries, I decided to try to name the ten top level Dewey categories.  I end up getting 5.5/10.

Some Thoughts on the Four Day Work Week
– some thoughts on one of my pet causes

Sometimes I Post Just To Say I've Posted That Day
–
this post gets, by far and on a continual basis, the most hits of any page on my site.  I have
no idea why.  It might be the reference to Darth Vader and Eminem, it
might be that somebody has somehow managed to embed an invisible porn gallery. 

Suggestion For A New Statutory Holiday
– I won't say I called it but I did foresee the implementation of Family Day in Saskatchewan by a few months.  (Now, if someone would only take up my idea for “You-Day”.)

The Concept of Alphabetization
– one of my favourite Friday Fun Links ever

Warriors and Wusses

– some thoughts on the (contradictory?) idea that you can be against the war but support the troops

Personal
About Me – A Timeline of My Life
– this is linked from the blog's header but I thought I'd stick
it here as it really is a favourite post plus maybe the single post
I've put the most effort in to of anything I've ever written –
thinking back over personal milestones during my lifetime, talking to my parents and confirming dates, digging up and scanning appropriate old photos. 

And Now, I Am A Librarian

– I accept my first position post-FIMS

Dad's Filing Cabinet

– a slightly sentimental post about family, passing on traditions, and
attempting to impose order on the world to understand the world.

Eulogy for Grandma Peet

Eulogy for Grandma Hammond

Eulogy for Grandpa Peet  (and the post I did on the following Remembrance Day about him)

My “Co-op” Is Over (Ten Best Things About My New Job)
– looking back at my first four months as a professional librarian



My IQ Is…

– 130 (according to a CBC test anyhow)  Plus a critique of IQ testing and my own theory of multiple intelligences. 



My Myers-Briggs Personality Type
– or save yourself a clicky and know that it's ENFP as it has been since I first took the test in 1997

My Political Compass
– you probably don't have to read this blog very long to figure out where I stand politically.  But this shows you in handy-dandy chart form. 


Technology
A Failed Experiment
–
my first attempt at creating a new entry in Wikipedia for the Spirit of Librarianship award gets deleted in
very short order. From this entry, you can click on “A Failed
Experiment 2.0” which was the following day's post and contains more
thoughts on this process. (By the way, the page I created for reality TV blip, Lukas Rossi, as a quasi-protest is still going strong !)

All Walls Crumble in Time (Thoughts On Setting Up A Facebook Account)
– my wife joins Facebook giving me a chance to reconsider the process with a fresh set of eyes

Crackbook Musings
– random thoughts and links to Facebook-related information

E-Music vs. iTunes
– I hate DRM.  That is all. 

Facebook's Dark Side (and Some Thoughts On Why I Blog)
– mostly about sharing information versus retaining your personal privacy

Facing Off With Facebook
– an article I wrote about Facebook for CLA's “Feliciter” magazine

Firefox Extensions I Use
– interesting but out of date now as I keep adding (and occasionally deleting) extensions all the time.

Five Easy Ways To Improve Facebook

Five More Easy Ways To Improve Facebook

Yet Five More Ways To Improve Facebook

Five Things Google Could Learn From Wikipedia (and Five Things Wikipedia Could Learn From Google
– my first ever submission to Digg (which got me 11 Diggs – yee-haa!)

Google Ad-Words Experiment
– I briefly delve into the world of online advertising to promote my blog.

When Did Facebook Replace E-mail?
– although I definitely wasn't the only one to observe this, I was just ahead of the curve on this idea and this entry got a lot of links from elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Posted 19 August 2007 § Blog § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

Friday Fun Link – See Who's Editing Wikipedia (August 17, 2007)

Wikipedia allows anonymous edits but it does track the IP of anyone
who makes the edit. So a Cal-Tech computer grad student, inspired by
news last year that Congress members’ offices had been editing their
own entries, and curious whether other organizations were doing
anything similar, developed a program to make it much easier to see the affiliation of anyone who made edits to any Wikipedia page.

This has led to numerous revelations
about corporations like Fox News, organizations like the CIA and
individuals such as staffers for a current US Presidential candidate
abusing the intent of Wikipedia

(via MetaFilter which has lots of other links I didn’t include in this post)

Posted 18 August 2007 § FridayFunLink § Internet § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

"I Am *Not* Impressed!"

Posted 16 August 2007 § Baby § Main Page § Photo ‡ Comments (0) °

Truth In Number: The Wikipedia Story (Trailer)

This looks pretty wicked…

Posted 15 August 2007 § Internet § Main Page § Video ‡ Comments (1) °

Google Gets Healthy, Rate My MD

Google is apparently setting up a health site. Google Health Screenshots are now available online. 

On a related note, I've talked about RateMyProfessors.com on this blog before but have you seen RateMDs.com which is similar except when somebody gets a 0 rating, that usually means they've killed somebody or otherwise, majorly screwed up.   Kinda puts FIMS in perspective, no?

Posted 14 August 2007 § Internet § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

Crackbook Musings

Shea was rapidly catching up to me so I've spent the last couple hours ping-ponging from person to person's friend lists on Facebook madly adding people I know (and knew and wish I knew). 

Here are some random thoughts from the process…

– In “The Tipping Point“, Malcolm Gladwell uses the term “Connector” to define one of three types of people who create situations where ideas/products/whatever “tip”.  Finding someone who has this characteristic (Kitty Lewis from Brick Books with her nearly 400 friends after only a few months on Facebook is a good example) is a great way to lead to lots of others you will know.  (In all modesty, I'd probably put myself in this category too.  I'm sitting at over 400 friends but probably 1/4 are people I've never met but that I connected with via my Saskatchewan Mafia group on the site.  Actually anybody who has over say, 200 friends on Facebook – that they do know in real life – is probably a good bet to be a connector.)

– that also makes me think what the optimal number of friends to have on Facebook?  I'd suspect it's close to the figure cited as the ideal number of people to have in a community which was presented in a similar book to Gladwell's called “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki.  That number was somewhere around 150 and after that, the claim was that you were stretched too thin trying to maintain and track all of the various relationships that your group/community will fall apart. 

– If I were to analyze it, I'd say I have three main “circles” of friends – “librarians/library students”, writers/publishers” and “high school/college/hometown” mixed with assorted others who I know in other ways.

– the number of friends I have is partly a reflection of my personality (I “collected” friends long before Facebook existed simply because I'm interested in pretty much everyone I meet.) and partly because I've lived for significant lengths of time in three different provinces, often in positions where I was in a spot that was a sort of “hub” in some ways (especially at the Writers Guild of Alberta where my office was one of – but definitely not the only – main hubs for activity relating to all kinds of literary events in the Southern half of the province.)

– I'm debating doing a longer post on “The Most Famous Person on Facebook” but let me just say that once you start seeing who (and I say this with all due respect) mid-level Canadian authors link to that you start finding well-known authors (notice how I didn't identify which writers I class in each category in case they read this? ).  Which can lead to authors who are also singers.  Which can lead to rock stars.  Which can lead to NHL hockey players.  Which can lead to sitting Canadian MP's who used to be hockey players.  Are all of these profiles legitimate?  If I just did a search for “Wayne Gretzky” and a legit looking profile turned up, I'd be doubtful.  But because of the chain of connections that brought me to some of these celebrities (and the fact that privacy settings were often ramped up quite high), I have very little reason to doubt that they're not legitimate. 

– this leads me to other thoughts about the nature of celebrity in our culture.  What does it say about celebrity (which is based in large part on someone being removed and remote from the plebians like you and me ) when, for example, the singer with a Canadian rock band that had a few hits in the early 1990's is directly connected to a woman I went to high school which means there is only one “step” between us?  I have some problems with Facebook but how it may lead to a “flattening” of our societal hierarchies is one potential good thing. 

– I wonder what it will be like for somebody like Pace (assuming Facebook is still around) where you grow up with a site like this always being a part of your life and by default, everybody you know being on it instead of the mixture that I get – a lot of surprises but definitely not everyone I've ever known or even everyone I would expect to be on the site. 

Anyhow, just some random thoughts, way past my bedtime on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. 

Posted 12 August 2007 § Internet § Main Page ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged:

If It's Saturday, It Must Be A Link Dump (Plus A Bonus Sex Story)

I just had it brought to my attention that Bloglines isn't reading my feed (and hasn't since July 18 – wow, my birthday post helped knock out part of the Internet!).  If you subscribe to this blog via Bloglines, hopefully you've realised this and are checking in directly or reading this via another RSS reader (Google Reader is popular and I personally use NetVibes).  I've started doing some investigating and hopefully I can get it figured out soon. 

Also, I've updated the Spirit of Librarianship page as promised in a recent entry.  I also created a Facebook group for former nominees and winners so if you search for Spirit of Librarianship, you should find it. 

I've written before about my interest in Digital Footprints, the information about ourselves that is online, both intentionally and unintentionally.  This is an interesting series on the same topic (though he calls it Digital Breadcrumbs.) 

This letter is the very entertaining response from a smaller Australian book distributor when an Australian bookstore chain tries to charge them to make up for the “unacceptable profitability level” that stocking their books creates.  (Wouldn't that be great in any business?  If you're not making enough profit, charge your suppliers to make up the difference!)

A discussion of library fines at Librarian.net.  I've mentioned in passing that the system I work for doesn't have overdue fines and I think that's about one of the most progressive ideas libraries can pursue.  There are some who say that it's charges for losses and damages that are the real barriers for a lot of disadvantaged people but I think those two issues are intimately related.  Put another issue on the list of “topics I wish I'd written about in library school but never did.”

Spock is a new people-centered search engine.  It's a good idea in concept but quite lacking otherwise, at least so far.  For example, I'm definitely not going to give anyone my LinkedIn password just so I can “claim my profile” on your site.  So for the time being, I think I'll continue to use Facebook to find people from my past. 

(Speaking of, this is probably crossing that line between things I should keep for my personal journal and things that are appropriate for the blog but I feel compelled to mention that I stumbled across the Facebook profile of the charitable young woman to whom I lost my virginity to many moons ago.  I wasn't stalking her (honest!) but she'd joined a Facebook group for a resort area near my hometown that we'd both grown up with and the only reason I recognized her while scrolling through the list of group members was because she listed her maiden name (or may be going by a hyphened name now – hard to tell.)  To be honest, I haven't searched for any of the women who've been similarly charitable to me in my past – not sure why that is and I don't feel like doing the self-analysis needed to figure it out, thank-you very much.  Still, it's yet another way that Facebook can re-unite you with your past in ways you least expect.)

Putting Things In Perspective – an interesting article espousing the idea that, no matter what you're doing and how mundane it may seem, you should envision yourself as an elderly person looking back on yourself doing it and no matter what the activity is, you'll appreciate it more. 

Posted 12 August 2007 § Internet § Library § Main Page § PopCulture ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,