Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

Well-performed, with great effects, and one of those independent movie shorts not to show to your children, Cat With Hands is definitely worth a watch. Not for the squeamish or faint-hearted.

If you want to learn about the track record of the Bush Administration and blow things up at the same time, try this out. I’m amazed at how fleshed out the game is, how funny some of the dialog is, and how well they did their research on federal spending, political records, etc. Plus, it has Voltron & a Star Wars Scout Walker in it. That makes it cool by default. Truly, this is some good stuff.

Kendall Grant Clark’s newest addition to his Hacking the Library series is out. Putting ISBNs to Work discusses the ins and outs of that old standby, the International Standard Book Number.

PC World has announced its Best of 2004. Their Product of the Year is the very unsexy (except to us geek types) AMD Athlon 64 FX processor series. Yum. Their Loser of the Year is that stupid Smart Watch (Dick Tracy model included). I was somewhat interested to see that Spybot Search & Destroy won in the Anti-Spyware category (though my own experiences with that product have revealed that it misses a lot). I guess it’s better than nuthin’.

Toshiba (who manufactures the teensy hard drives that Apple uses in its iPods) will be launching a 60GB version in the next few months.
Dagnabit! I just (meaning last week) bought a 40GB iPod. Now the 40GB prices are going to go down, and I’m going to feel scrappy. *sigh* Such is the way with technology, I guess. You buy the best & newest thing, and then a week later something better comes along, making yours seem overpriced & not as cool. Still, I am excited about my 40GB baby, and look forward to hours of entrancement (read: using it at work so I can’t hear all the foot traffic & conversation noise around me).

Wow! The Old Car Manual Project is nice! This actually might have helped me with a reference question yesterday about radio wiring diagrams for a ’68 Ford. The site also has brochures, photos, & ads for said cars. Got a heap o’ junk car? Or get asked questions about old cars by patrons? This site’s for you!

Read a review of the site at Research Buzz.

The Center for Digital Storytelling is a non-profit that helps folks use digital media to tell their stories. The site has examples of digital storytelling (just regular folks telling stories of their lives) as well as a whole lot of “how-to” information about storytelling and how to incorporate digital media into the storytelling process. Our library has an extensive Oral History Project (hundreds of recorded histories & transcripts), 40 or so of which are online already. I think that some of the tips on this site could come in handy for us… Also, I’ve been thinking for some time now that I need to get an oral history from my maternal grandmother. Perhaps this site will give me the tools I need to do it right!

Thanks to Marylaine Block for highlighting this site in her Neat New Stuff this week.

ProQuest has teamed up with the New York Times to offer a digital archive of the Times going back to 1851. The archive is accessible through the Times site and the articles cost $–around $3 each. Advertisements are searchable too, which is a nice feature. So, I read this on Research Buzz, and think, hey that’s cool, but our library has the microfilm. We could use the search engine to find where exactly a particular article is, but people shouldn’t have to pay the bucks for the article, we’ll just pull it up on the microfilm reader. Well, then I looked at our holdings list for the New York Times on microfilm.

Sept. 1851 – Dec. 1852 (in storage); 1861; 1865; 1890-1898; 1912; 1917-1920; 1936-1937; 1960+

Huh. That’s not very comprehensive, is it? So then I’m thinking, are our library’s holdings just unusually scattered? So I searched a half-dozen other libraries’ catalogs (big, well-known, honking libraries too) and found that almost everyone is missing multiple dates of the Times. A week here, a month there, a year over here, a decade there. Even NYPL! So, yes, I conceed. Paying $3 for an article seems a little more acceptable now.

We’ve all seen them, been annoyed by them, or had our own e-mails refused by a listserv because of them. That’s right–e-mail disclaimers. The spawn of satan, the scourge of online communication, and one of the many stupid technological “enhancements” we get to deal with every day.

Slate has an article that analyzes Time, Inc.’s disclaimer, and finds it to be somewhat lacking in oomph. The author raises some good points about the lack of clarity in the language of the disclaimer (which is typical of other disclaimers as well, including my employer’s).

Try the Flash Zen Garden. What an amazingly done application–it is even sensitive to the speed of your raking.
Find peace, my son. Find peace.

found via Little Fluffy Industries