j's scratchpad

The May 23 Bourne Courier had the following article called The family goat ate the library book–honest!: “BOURNE – The Bourne Public Library received a package in the mail last week from the May family of Dennis. The contents included a letter of lament from the Mays whose goat ate a book received at Dennis [...]

Rich here I read j’s posting about Jon’s problem finding a book at the Brookline Public Library: http://civilities.net/Who_moved_my_book Some of the library processes are automated such as “Checkout”, “Checkin”, “In Transit” while others such as “Bindery”, “AV Repair”, “Missing”, “Tech Services”, “Unshelved” are done manually by a staff member. While “Unshelved” is unhelpful to a [...]

Drat! Yesterday, May 25, was Towel Day which is in tribute to the late author Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy “A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around [...]

Smashing Magazine has scores of nifty resources on free icons, WordPress themes, wallpapers, web newspaper designs, fonts, pictures, Ajax and Java scripts, tools and screensavers. Though you might check each site for any copyright info: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ Link via What I Learned Today:  

One of the (dis)advantages to working on a cool Web site like Babbledog is that I’m always finding cool things to read and note. Here’s another one. The Washington Post obituary writers have a blog called Post Mortem where they share stories about the folks who died. “Obituaries have become an increasingly popular feature in [...]

After not finding the book he wanted on the shelf, Jon suggests more Web 2.0 goodness in library catalogs and other ways people can note when books are missing, but not checked out. He also wonders if there’s any desire in having a feed of missing items. He also mentions tagging and library catalogs. I [...]

Pardon the bragging, but my employer, Renesys, got a mention on the incredibly popular site Slashdot on Monday because of a blog post my colleague Earl wrote about a problem with root name servers he initially describes as identity theft. Don’t let a fear of technical talk prevent you from reading Earl’s words. He does [...]

One of my best moments at BarCamp Boston 3 was when a woman walked up to me to ask for whom I worked. I guess my Babbledog jersey wasn’t obvious enough for her, kinda like how I didn’t guess the fellow wearing the Google shirt actually worked for Google. When we started talking a bit [...]

Many Eyes, a really nifty data visualization tool from IBM, is worth a look by those of you trying to figure out how to convert textual data into visual queues. The tool can be used for many different purposes, from building tag clouds to interactive charts and graphs. I first learned about it at a [...]

Brady Carlson, who deals with new media for New Hampshire Public Radio, gave a really fascinating talk at WebNOB on Tuesday about how they’re integrating the Web into their operations. He also talked a bit about what news organizations can do to remain relevant in this age when people, especially Internet users, have access to [...]