Me 'n my iPhone

I was in Wal Mart when I missed my iPhone. I knew with 95% certainty that it was on the table by my chair at home. But there was that 5% that was working on me. Going to Wal Mart is a strain on my system in and of itself. I can walk in feeling great but always leave needing a nap--the place just seems to sap my energy. And today I was not even feeling great when I entered. I forced myself to finish shopping and make the two other stops I needed before going home. By the time I opened my front door, my anxiety was way over what it should have been. And yes, there was Idella iPhone, resting peacefully by the lounger. I pounced on it and found a nice long text from my daughter. Ahhhhhh...exhaling felt lovely. Now I am in the chair and settling down for a nap, dog on floor, kitty on couch, and iPhone nestled in my pocket. Do I love the thing too much? Yes. I know it can be replaced but it is so much more than a phone. It is my lifeline to all my friends and family, my texting buddy. my picture repository, my alarm clock, my friendly little entertainment center and, OK, my status symbol. I am guilty of something even more insidious than technolust, I fear...dare I say...technolove? I wonder if anybody else has similar attachment to a favorite gizmo.

Wild Dogs/Whackamole Wordle

Whackamole and Wild Dogs

I was talking with an acquaintance today about a mutual project. She said she wanted to tackle it "just as soon as things calm down" for her. I was reminded how often I say the same thing. Problem is, things never calm down, do they? Sometimes I feel like my life is an ongoing whackamole game. Just as soon as I pound down one head with the mallet, another pops up. In a previous life, when going through a divorce, I spent a lot of time at ChuckECheeze with my daughter since it was safe, cheap, and fun for her. That's when I started my love/hate relationship with whackamole. Yes, I did pretend the popup heads were my ex's noggin. It gave me a bit of satisfaction to smack them down, and I got pretty darn good at the game. Just now I went looking around for information on whackamole (or whack-a-mole) and discovered that lots of people make this same comparison of the game to a busy schedule. Here is a business blog with some tips about dealing with this problem that are relevant for anybody: http://www.cmoe.com/blog/whack-a-mole-management.htm

In the spirit of do-as-I-say-not-do-as-I-do, I have actually given presentations on the topic of time management, and here is a link to one of these:
http://forwhomthebelltold.pbwiki.com/21st+Century+Time+Saving

Lately I fear my stress has been ratcheted up, caussing a more dire mental image to haunt my thoughts. Ever since I took my latest job, I have had the feeling that I am being pursued by a pack of wild dogs. These are very big bad snarling dogs with slathering muzzles and sharp pointed fangs, and they are after me as I run down a dirt road. Sometimes they fade back into the woods a bit and I gain some distance on them, but other times they are literally nipping at my heels. These dogs are my unfinished (unstarted?) projects and obligations. I have even given them names. One is named Belltones, after a column that I love to write but whose deadlines I seem to crowd more and more. Another is named 591, the number of a class I teach. Other dogs have names such as: Grant (I am administrator of an IMLS grant), Cohort (I am working on starting up some cohort groups), TCEA (presentation coming up), TLA (another prez), and those that hound me every day such as Email, Budget, Travel Study, TExES (I help students review for this standardized test) and Blog (yes, this blog is one of those wild dogs). Blog dog always runs back in the pack. I cannot even pay attention to him unless I have dealt with some of the others, much as I would like to. Today was a good day. I subdued Belltones by finishing a column, so he will not come to the front of the pack for up to six weeks. I also pacified email and TExES. Thus I was able to give Blog a bit of attention. No, I am NOT caught up everywhere but I did make some progress.

Postscript: Here is the one thing that I find most useful in keeping the worry dogs at bay: Tadalist. This free online service allows me to keep to-do lists that are essential for reminding me what I need to do, when deadlines are set, etc. The URL is: http://www.tadalist.com
This plus Google Calendar are my online saviors. The other reminder and assistant I cannot live without is my department secretary. Thanks Rebecca for all you do!

Playing Around With Great Results

This afternoon I treated myself to some playing around online time. This is a luxury I seldom seem to be able to enjoy lately. I love looking around, letting one site lead to another, and thus finding exciting things that I can use or share with colleagues and students. The agent of my serendipity was Twitter, and this was my method: First I went to Search and looked for "school librarians." Then I visited pages that looked like they might belong to school librarians that I would enjoy following. I clicked on their icons and went to their pages, and often from there to their blogs. Sometimes the blogs then led me to other great sites. Here are some new-to-me discoveries:

• The Lunar and Planetary Institute is right down the road in Houston, part of NASA. They have a library, a library blog, and a Twitter page. Here are the links:
• Their website: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/LPI_Library
• This is a little embarrassing to admit, especially since I just got back from the SLJ Summit, but I did not realize SLJ was Twittering: http://twitter.com/sljournal
• The Unquiet Librarian has a nice blog: http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com/
• And Twitter Page: http://twitter.com/buffyjhamilton
• This blog has a cool staff development idea...Speed Dating! The blog is The Wee Librarian: http://theweelibrarian.wordpress.com/
• And Twitter Page: http://twitter.com/weelibrarian
• LIS Blog describes itself this way: LISNews is a collaborative weblog [aka blog] devoted to current events and news in the world of Library and Information Science: http://lisnews.org/about_lisnews/
• Twitter Page: http://twitter.com/LISNews
• Here is something I picked up at one of the many sites I visited: FREE WEB 2.0 BOOKS--who knew these were waiting for us to use? http://www.terry-freedman.org.uk/db/web2/doc_page4.html
• This new tweet of mine has a great school web page: http://www.ilovelibraries.com/
• Here is her Twitter page: http://twitter.com/sraslim
• This is a great tool for Boolean searching! http://www.boolify.org/
  

Here is hoping that some of these sites are as interesting to you as they were to me.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

I have a very bad habit of postponing blogging about really good books because I doubt I can do justice. But I promised I would write about this one tonight. Yesterday, driving to my dad's house for Thanksgiving, I finished listening to Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. I picked it up because of the name Doctorow on the cover. "Wow!" I thought, "First Mel Brooks' son writes a book (World War Z by Max Brooks) and now E.L. Doctorow's son!" However, Wikipedia says there is probably not a connection between the two. BUT I am more than glad I listened to the book. It is a heck of a story and makes you think also. Marcus Yarrow, narrator, gets scooped up by Homeland Security guards along with three friends in the panic filled moments after terrorists blow up the Oakland Bridge in San Francisco. They are taken to a secret offshore prison site and subjected to harsh grilling even though they are obviously just innocent high schoolers. Marcus, in particular, is singled out for excessive cruelty because he keeps demanding a lawyer and insisting that his rights are being violated. When they are finally freed, three of the four friends are traumatized and haunted by the fact that their fourth companion, who had been injured in the melee, is nowhere to be found. In the days and weeks that follow, Marcus vows to take down the out-of-control DHS (Department of Homeland Security). His weapon is technology. The excesses in violations of privacy and fear tactics that are put into place after the 2nd major terror attack on America are not hard to believe in view of what has happened in the wake of 911. In this story, the president is never named, but references are made to him being elected a third time and running for the fourth, clearly predicting what life might be like if the Bush regime were to remain in power past the second term. I do not thinkI would have enjoyed this book nearly as much if I had read it prior to this November's election. Now, with a change in administration, I have some hope that our society can pull back from excessive fearmongering and assaults on our constitutional rights. Still, the things described are far too close to our present reality to seem overly far-fetched.

Along with the suspense and an inevitable but very sweetly depicted teen romance, there are lots of things to think about. The technology Doctorow describes, with ubiquitous cameras, gait recognition devices, RFIDs in everything from credit cards to BART passes, online snooping, phone taps, and other devices that track and control all citizens effectively turns San Francisco into a police state within days after the attack. Marcus and friends quickly realize that their computers are useless, and turn to reconfigured Xboxes to build an underground that goes to war with the DHS. One thing this book did for me was change my views about hackers and hacking. Now I realize that people who tinker with devices and try to see what they can do with them are pioneers as often as destructive bad actors. Without hackers, we would never know whether security technology really works or not. Sad to say, all too often it does not work, and people have a false sense of security about the effectiveness thereof. Really, did you ever think removing your shoes at the airport made us safer? Another thing this book makes you think about is intellectual property. Doctorow joins the chorus who call for more freedom to use, adapt, mashup, and otherwise participate in shared creativity, certainly a trend today. And he practices what he preaches: This book is FREE at Creative Commons, Gutenberg, and the author's own website. If you want to learn a heck of a lot while getting caught up in a riveting story, all for free, here is one link, the one to his site where you can download the entire book: http://bit.ly/xraz
And while you are there, look around! Unless you are a geek to the level of Doctorow/Marcus, you will find lots to learn, both from this website and from the book itself. In fact I may just have to blog about that in another entry. And before I sign off, here is a sad shame: No kid can get to this book at school, at least at the site I just shared. No librarian can show it. Look at the URL. Are we making ourselves safer by blocking this and other sites that kids should be able to use? Oh wait! I just used a new-to-me URL shortener, bit.ly, not because the address was long but to get rid of THE WORD in the actual URL. So at least this blog might get past some filters. But then if you try to bring up the site...probably won't work for you. Aruggh. That. is. not. what. filters. are. for.

Unable to resist: Dewey Decimal Quiz

Mary Ann Bell's Dewey Decimal Section:

041 [Unassigned]

Mary Ann Bell's birthday: 9/5/1946 = 95+1946 = 2041


Class:
000 Computer Science, Information & General Works


Contains:
Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.



What it says about you:
You are very informative and up to date. You're working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Dissing a Popular Book

Normally I blog about books I like and recommend, but here I go with a discussion of one I do NOT care for. I am doing this even though I know the book I am criticizing is one that is enormously popular right now. When I read, I like to share my comments and reactions, and just now finished a column by Stephen Abram called “Promoting Reading Using This 2.0 Stuff” in which he reminds us that reading is a social activity. So true! When I finish a particularly good book, I usually want to talk about it with somebody. Even if I do NOT like a book I tend to want to see if others agree with my judgment. Since almost all my close friends and family are avid readers, there are lots of opportunities to share. My favorite book buddy right now is my 96 year old dad. Often I pick up something because I think he will like it and then we both read and discuss. My daughter is also a reader and we often find ourselves reading out loud to one another, even over the phone.

As Stephen Abrams points out, blogging is a natural way to share discussion about books and reading, and while most of my comments in this blog are about technology, I do still like to cast nay or yea votes about books I read. Actually I almost never write about a book I did NOT like, since I seldom finish something that does not bring me back again and again. But I recently made an exception. Channeling my dog Ringo and also Cracker, the Best Dog in Viet Nam, I have to pronounce The Shack pretty “arf arful.” The reason I persisted and (thankfully) just finished the book is because a relative has been very taken with it and wants to discuss it with me. I might add that my dad reports liking it also, as does his caregiver. Not me. A lot of people criticize this book for its “theology,” and it is certainly Christianity lite. People are wanting to elevate this little tale to a level that deserves study and deep discussion about the nature of the Trinity. Some have called it “today’s Pilgrim’s Progress.” Oh please. Bunyan may be hard to read today, but in his time he certainly had mastery of the English language that caused his book to endure. He did not use the same adjectives over…and over… and over. He did not write dialogue that would make one think of an eighth grader with minimal skill.

I would like to add that I am not particularly put off by the quirky rendition of the trinity offered in this book, but it does not resonate with me either. I am not offended by the book on religious terms from any standpoint. It is fine with me if people want to take flights of fancy with any religion. I don’t think humans have a lock on Truth or even a tenuous grip. Here is what turned me off: THE ABYSMAL WRITING. Word choice, description, and especially dialogue, are all horrendous. I just never was able to get past that deficiency. I even took to making notes on my Kindle to tag especially irritating locutions. Here are some comments I recorded: “’thingy’…he actually used the word ‘thingy’…aruggh,” and “smirked—he just smirked at God? I don’t think so!” and so on. I am also irked by the promotion of what he called “The Missy Project.” As one critic pointed out, the project is not to help people grieving the loss of a loved one, or maybe to help find missing children. No! It is to help sell more books so everyone can have the experience of reading this tale. I know someone who reads this may be a Shack fan—my understanding is that the are legion. Feel free to take me to task! I am going to stick to my view. Nothing written this badly could be that good.