Reader, I married him.

The Co-Pilot and I were married today on the beach at Mission Beach in Far North Queensland.

We thought it would be romantic to run away to paradise and be married, so we did. We only told the kids about it on Monday. They were ringbearers and bubble blowers throughout the ceremony.

We made the usual vows and exchanged rings and then had a sand ceremony where we poured sand representing us individually into a container representing our marriage. If you are friends or family, we'll email you or send you a postcard with the address of our family blog so you can check out more photos.

It may take a while as I'm going to stop blogging on my wedding night right now.

How do you fit 730 library people in one room?

The Click06 Conference has begun in Perth at the Convention Centrer and continues until Friday. This is the is the Biennial Conference of the Australian Library and Information Association.

If you are in Perth and see a stranger who looks a little bit more interested, clever and organised than the average citizen, and also looks a little dazed and lost - pop up to them and help them out because they are probably a librarian with information overload.

To keep up with what is happening at the conference, while I'm out of the state on holidays, I'm reading these blogs:

• Official ALIA Click06 blog
• blog the conf: - attendees personal impressions of the conf
• University of Sydney's attendees' blog

Steve Irwin, visiting his zoo, and Wikipedia.

I'm using a borrowed computer. Every time I try to upload images for this post, it refuses. I've added some images as separate posts before this one, straight from Flickr. When I'm back on home turf I'll weld it all together.

We visited the Australian Zoo the day after Steve Irwin's death. If we hadn't been holidaying from interstate, I would have left it a couple of weeks. There were a few wreaths and many media outside, but only zoo-goers were admitted, so there were no cameras or roving and raving reporters inside. The general mood at the zoo was a bit subdued, but respectful and celebratory. Numbers were a little lower than usual.

At 11:30, during the main show in the "Crocoseum" arena, many of the staff were watching in the stalls and we all stood for a minute's silence to remember Steve. The commentator said that going on with the show was the hardest thing he'd ever done. There was a huge screen above the auditorium and when Steve Irwin's face came on talking about his love for the animals, Mr3 yelled out in joy "There's Steve Irwin!". I had to explain very quickly that the footage was taken earlier and Steve Irwin had actually died.

The guy operating the bouncy castle said that the day before, staff had initially worked out something was wrong from the behaviour of the senior staff. Staff were informed, and then they watched as zoo-goers received text messages with the news from friends outside.

The most remarkable thing about the zoo was the permeation of Steve's attitudes to animals and people. Staff were friendly and forthcoming. They wandered around carrying baby alligators, snakes, cockatoos and approaching us so we could touch the animals. The philosophy is that once we’ve touched them, we’ll care enough to save them. From the videos, it looks like Steve got a lot closer to the crocs than the other trainers did.

In the enclosures, trainers played (even frollicked!) with the animals - even the tigers where a bloke in khaki had a giant cat toy on a rope, running in front of the tigers, playing tug of war and throwing the toy into the swimming pool so the tiger leaped from the shore to retrieve it. There were two other trainers in the enclosure monitoring the cats. There seemed to be a lot of affection between animals and trainers, including a giant tortoise who was a big sook when it had its shell and head rubbed.

When we left at the end of the day, the front of the zoo had many, many more bunches of flowers. There was much artwork obviously done by schoolkids during the day. A row of khaki shirts was hanging at the front, with people writing condolences on them. Police had set up an electronic sign either side of the entries warning of “changed traffic conditions ahead”.

Steve Irwin did great things to help people understand animals, but he probably didn't expect to help me understand more about how Wikipedia works. I've been watching as the Wikipedia entry has grown, and watching the debates about the content. I found out about the different types of locks that can be on a page and that the style manual says that if an article is about an Australian, then Australian English should be used. Here is the Wikipedia article on Steve Irwin, and here is the the discussion page. Very interesting to see the discussion that took place just as the news was breaking on this archived discussion page.

Like Reg Bolton, Steve Irwin was an example of how extreme enthusiasm, and engagement with other people and what you do well, can ripple out and transform hundreds of lives. Their methodolgy may not have been perfect, but they both died doing what they loved and leaving people determined to carry on their legacies.

flowersforsteve

flowersforsteve
Originally uploaded by sirexkat.

tigerplay

tigerplay
Originally uploaded by sirexkat.

crocfeed

crocfeed
Originally uploaded by sirexkat.

elefeed

elefeed
Originally uploaded by sirexkat.

Oh Crikey!

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm on holidays in Queensland. We're currently on the Sunshine Coast staying in a caravan park that we selected because it is just 20 minutes away from the Australia Zoo .

I have plenty of blog posts half written, but haven't been blogging because the only net access I have is a $2 per quarter hour kiosk. Today I'm breaking my resolve.

Mr8 was complaining in the car on the way home from visiting the Co-Pilot's aunt that he didn't get to swim today like I'd promised. After wandering in a hedge maze, walking through the rainforest and visiting a quaint mountainside village , we just didn't have time to fit it in.

"I know", said I, switching on the radio, "I'm really sorry. I did promise it, but we just didn't have time to fit it in. I do promise that we'll spend all day at the Australia Zoo tomorrow".

Cue radio news. Cue story about how Steve Irwin died this morning while filming underwater in Port Douglas. Cue strange out of body experience as the announcer described how Steve was pierced through the heart by a stingray.

Our camera is full of pictures of the kids with stingrays that we saw yesterday at Underwater World, so the kids well and truly know what they look like. They actually seem to be handling the news better than we are.

My quandry is whether we still go to the zoo tomorrow as planned. As far as I can see at the website, they will still be open. I imagine that it will be full of cameras and reporters, and the atmosphere will be very strained. We are only here until Wednesday when we leave so we can spend Mr3's fourth birthday at Wiggles World on Thursday. The TV here has been showing updates every hour or so as the night goes on.

When we planned the holiday, we sat the kids down and explained to Mr8 (who wanted to go to the Crocodile Hunter's Zoo) that the Croc Hunter probably wouldn't be there. We explained to Mr3 that the Wiggles definitely wouldn't be at Wiggles World. Turns out I was wrong...to celebrate the 1st anniversary of Wiggles World, the Wiggles WILL be there on the 15th. We are planning to go, but haven't told Mr3 yet.

After the events of today, I think we might keep that under our hats a bit longer.

Holidays matter

If there's a nationwide, bienniel librarianship conference coming to your town, what do you do?

Well, if you are me, you book the Big Family Holiday for the same time.

Mr8 changes school next year after 3 years in a very intensive school program. Mr3 starts kindy 3 days a week next year. The Co-Pilot and I have just been working our socks off for the last few years.

We arrived in Queensland yesterday and aren't coming home for 5 weeks. Apart from an obligatory visit to Wiggles World and the Crocodile Hunter's Australia Zoo , we are resting, relaxing and recuperating. We'll leave the Gold Coast for Cairns/Dunk Island on the 17th. Visiting Uluru on the way home.

Apologies if the posting here is a bit erratic for a while. Newer, more invigorated posting will start in October.

Librarian Fit Club - Join Up

Feel like flexing some bloggy muscles? Been resisting all things del.cio.us? How about joining some other librarians as they learn about Library 2.0 tools AND get fit at the same time?



Keith Engwall who is a librarian in Salisbury, North Carolina is inviting other librarians to join him in a project to use new web tools to work toward a common goal of shifting a few pounds.

So far he has set up a basecamp group, which requires an admin to add you, and a flickr group , which is open. He'd like some more people to weigh in with setting up a bog and a wiki.

A potential participant suggested using the 43 things website to track our goals. The joint goal is be a more fit librarian. It's been a while since I looked at the site, so I went back for another look tonight.

I'd seen it before I delved into Library 2.0, but not joined in. Funny, but I am so much less reserved about giving out a few personal details and jumping straight into a social web site. I remember thinking "hmm interesting", and looking at who was from my home town, but not really thinking that I might participate.

Tonight I was joined up in the first minute and after half an hour or so of playing, I have a list of 8 things that I have done, all flagged as "worth doing" by me. I have 6 things I want to do.

What have I done?

• Write a will
• Have 2 children
• grow my own food
• learn to dance
• buy a bicycle
• go to a nude beach
• have more energy
• Have a baby

What do I want to do?

• be a more fit librarian
• eliminate clutter
• go walking every day that I can
• make a smaller ecological footprint
• get my asthma completely under control
• Create communities

Should I choose it, I'll be reminded every week that these are my goals. I can see who else shares my goals and what their other goals are. I can "cheer" someone else to encourage them.

I actually received a cheer within seconds of posting a goal (something to do with my comment on the "go to a nude beach" goal that it was really worthwhile..except for one Easter holidays when I accidentally met my own brother there...hooo boy).

(I also want to go to 12 places:

• Dunk Island
• Australia Zoo
• Eumundi Markets
• Noosa
• Dreamworld
• Gold Coast
• Palm Beach
• Surfer's Paradise
• Cairns
• Sea world
• Currumbin wildlife sanctuary
• Byron Bay)

Make a magic dragon !

Wow, wow and double wow!

I've been behaving bizarrely for the last day. Every so often I'll stop what I'm doing, walk to my desk, close one eye and rock from side to side. No, I'm not stimming. I'm just marvelling my little dragon friend below, and how his head follows me as I move. Spooky but fascinating!

This paper dragon was made from a template available here. It is cut from a single piece of paper, and has only one part. It involves about 2 minutes of cutting and sticking.


The movement is all optical illusion, based on our brains expecting certain objects to look a certain way - like noses to point outward, not inward. It was created for the Gathering for Gardner event in 1998. Martin Gardner, born in 1914 wrote the "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981.

If you don't think you want to make your own, then watch the video here. After you watch the video, you probably will change your mind.

Folksomic and Synchronic

Last night, I listened to a podcast from from Talis of members of the Library 2.0 Gang discussing tagging, folksomies and libraries. You can Download the MP3 here. I'd already written this post before a couple of coincidental things happened. More on that later.

I've been waiting to hear librarians talking about social tagging ever since I poked my duck like beak into Library 2.0. I particularly wanted to hear where our traditional cataloguing tools might fit. I wasn't disappointed. Paul Miller did make the point that it was 40 minutes into the total 45 before authorities were discussed.

Street performers - Australia (LCSH)

It was great to match people's voices with their blogs. All much as I imagined - except Paul Miller. I expected him to be brash and way too forward..something to do with the job title "Technology Evangelist", I guess. He was very English and politely witty in a way that made me think of old BBC radio series like My Word.

Synchroniciity number one - A couple of hours ago, Paul Miller actually commented on my "They DO mash" post. BTW, they received 18 entries in the Mashing Up the Library competition)

Some of the points raised that I found interesting (many of them by Karen Schneider, I think):

• Tags and subject categories need not be mutually exclusive. There is merit in assigning both to a work (I'd presumed it was either /or).
• Faceting and sub faceting is not really possible with tagging, but is an advantage of traditional classification.
  
• Authority control is less important when you have large volumes of tags assigned to one work. So what if the same thing is tagged by 30 people as "felines", another 20 as "cats", and 5 more as "cat" - all provide access and there is built in "see also" referencing.
• This may be a Long Tail issue. Very popular items will have lots of tags, but subject catgories may be the only way to find items in the Long Tail.
• Some items are more findable with categories (French history for example), whereas some are better with tags, particulalry contemporary topics (like surferpunk).
• Tagging probably works better when the tags others have assigned are offered, or somehow the system detects probable tags for the subject area. (a great project for someone, there).
  
• People need to feel ownership of the enterprise before they will tag (explains why they do it like mad on Library Thing, but on Amazon, not so much)
  
• Casey Bisson is working on a WordPress plugin to allow users to assign their own tags to items in a WordPress blog.

Synchronicity number two - This afternoon, the admin group for the lint blog (aka. the thali) has been discussing categories versus tagging for our blog. A tag cloud would look great and categories can get hard to maintain. You can't have RSS feeds for tags, like you can for categories.

Mummy's Honour Certificate

About twice a year I receive a note from Mr8's teacher telling me to turn up at the next school assembly because Mr8 is going to receive an Honour Certificate. The whole family drops him off at school and we casually say "Oh, we're here now. Is there assembley this morning? Maybe we'll just stay for that".

Mr8's Honour Certificate

We sing the jazzy version of the national anthem complete with digeridoo and a drum machine beat. We distract Mr3 in an effort to keep him quiet (a pre packed lunchbox works wonders). We join in when the music teacher leads us through today's song, complete with hand actions and bum wiggles. We listen to a description of "This week's virtue".

Mr8 usually receives his for "determination" and "great attitude" and "improvement". We know that every kid will get a couple each year. But it is still special and makes us feel really proud. If you know Mr8, then you'll know that hearing he is still trying his hardest and that the teachers acknowledge this is a big achievement. The last honour certificate commended him on his "friendliness" - for him, that's BIG!.

So, as I was leaving work on Friday, I saw a white envelope in the tray next to my in-tray. In it was a Staff Recognition Award. It's for innovation in using and exploring new technologies throught the MULTA project and the development of screen capture online tutorials. They do have a staff morning tea where they present these each quarter, but it's not on the day I work. I don't think it involves the whole family or digeridoos or bum wiggling.

I took it home and showed the family over dinner. "What's that?" asked Mr8. "Oh, that's mummy's Honour Certificate" said the Co-Pilot. I think they were proud.

They DO mash, they DO.

I found the entries in the Mashing Up the Library Competition. There are 11 so far. They are located on a forum at the Talis site. Interesting that many of the people who can do amazing stuff like make a mashup don't have blogs, so haven't tagged an entry on technorati.

The one that caught my eye was Lillian, a chatbot who is meant to tell you holdings in a library near you. After exhausting the cities I knew in the UK, I entered London, but she still didn't know what I meant. Looks nice, though.

There's a cute little cover display that shows all the Mystery items added to the library in the last 6 months.

There's an entry from the Alliance Second Life Library 2.0 It's just so uber.

Some were created just for the competition by non-library folk. Some were already in use. I think that both are great - people are thinking about using these things in libraries and those who already are can get acknowledgement.

All I can say is - cha cha cha!

Category: mutl06

MeeboMe out, WorldCat in.

MeeboMe just didn't feel like my kind of widget, so I've taken it off my sidebar. It felt a bit like I was looking over my readers' shoulders.

And I tried to show it to someone today and I couldn't log in to meebo. Probably a liveware failure. So I'm sulking.

Now, a Worldcat search box is much more my style. And they published super instructions about how to add it in their It's All Good blog.

So now, even if you can't have a good goss. here, you can find a good read.

Are we mashed yet?

I thought I'd have a peek at the entries in Talis's Mashing up the Library competition that I blogged about on July 2nd. It closes tomorrow. One thousand pounds is up for grabs.

Now, maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I can't find the entries. They are supposed to be tagged on technorati with MUTL06 but I can only see 21 postings under this and only two are entries.



One finds a string that looks like an ISBN from any web page and shows what can be done with it (eg. search Amazon, show your library's holdings, cite the item in whichever citation style you specify). The other bundles RSS feeds that a library might want to provide to patrons (eg. New books, contents of current issues of specified journals) and presents them using an OPML browser. They are both created by Tony Hirst. I like them very much, particularly the first one.

Some possible explanations other than "that's all the entries there will be this year".

1. Everyone is waiting until the last moment to enter, so no-one else can create a smarter cousin to their idea
2. I'm just not looking in the right place. A search of Flickr shows nothing under that tag, and del.icio.us has just four entries.

I know that there are people with the skills to make wonderful library mashups (Note to Talis: next year don't ask them all to be judges). I also know that lots of people are just stretching their wings in these areas. I think that next year, or the year after there will be floods of entries. Even better, there will be people entering things that they just had hanging around because they made them for work.

I also feel much, much better about where I am with mashups, APIs, OPML, Ajax etc. I know their names and what they do, but we haven't really met yet and certainly haven't tangoed. Seems like I'm not the only wallflower in libraries. Let's get dancing!

Shiny happy mums

The post after this is about library mashups, so if you're not interested in crackpot ideas, stop here and move on to some serious library reading.

The last Librarians' Internet Index has an entry about Secrets of the Sexes, a BBC TV series looking at whether men's and women's brains are wired differently. Having a spare half hour, and being a curious puppy, I took the online test, Sex ID. Find out how your mind works. The average woman scores -50% , the average male scores +50%. My score - 0% - my brain is balanced exactly between male and female.

What's inside my head?

Now, maybe it's because the test was co-designed by Simon Baron-Cohen who is a foremost autism researcher, but suddenly - "ping" - one of the mysteries of my universe fell into place.

I know a whole bunch of mums with kids on the autism spectrum. What has impressed me is that D, J, K, C, S, S, D, C, R, A and J aren't just normal people. They are unusually articulate, bright, shining women.The dads who I know are primarily scientist/engineer types. There's something going on there. Mum (bright and articulate) + dad (engineer) = some kids with ASD.

Now I think I have a bit of the answer....
Asperger's Syndrome is often described as extreme maleness (see, for example, Baron-Cohen's The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism).

Let's call whatever causes autism the M factor and do a "what if".

What if......

1. You're already male and you get a dose of M factor? You present as extremely male, with characteristics of autism.Your already male brain gets a double dose of male thinking style.
   
2. What if you are female and you get a dose of the M factor? Your female brain counters the maleness of the M factor and you get a very well balanced woman, able to use both styles of thinking.
   

Further ideas around this:

1. Women with the M factor end up with engineer/scientist types because the man finally finds a rare woman who relates to his very male thinking style. (logically, he does all he can to keep this relationship going :) )
2. Maybe when women present with autism symptoms, it isn't due to the M factor at all. Maybe it's because they are lacking whatever causes a female thinking style. Or maybe they get the M factor without a female thinking style to counter it. Would that explain why they only represent 25% of the population with autism?
   

It seemed all so much clearer when my newly outed androgynous brain thought it up yesterday.

Meebo no no !

I made a post about adding the meebome widget to my sidebar, republished and now the first post is something I posted three days ago. No further posts appear, but I can find them by clicking on the archives for August.

Novel.

I'd be interested to know what others are seeing.

Sevice will resume after the kids are in bed tonight.

Meebome widget is on my sidebar.

Wanna chat?

I've just installed the meebome widget on my sidebar. Still testing right now. If it says I'm online, then you can type in something and we can chat. Bit like having a brand new car in the drive without a license I'm afraid. I'm still learning to drive it, so please don't think I'm rude if I ignore you.

Meebo allows people using different Instant Messaging systems to talk to each other using their own logins. Someone using MSN Messenger could talk to someone using AIM without needing to be in the same system.

Rock on! For better and for worse.

I was as excited as Peta when I read over at Inn0vate that Blogger Beta has been released.

Google has begun stamping its own mark on the site. It now allows google ID login. I wonder how long before it's google login only - like Flickr is now yahoo login only (unless you are - and I quote -"Old skool - rock on" ).

They are switching accounts to beta bit by bit, so if you want to play with the new features, you need to get another login and create a new blog. I did this last night and had a play.

For Better
I like the fact that you can now:

• tag a post, using a "labels" option.
• restrict who you want to see your blog by specifying email addresses, via a new "permissions" tab.
• do more fiddling with the templates - although I couldn't see the new templates they advertised.
• change my template by dragging and dropping boxes around the screen.
• preset the default font and colour by selecting buttons. (Too lazy to change my template, I manually change the colour and font of each post)

For worse

But, in the "publishing" settings for my new blog there is one little line missing.This one:
You're publishing on blogspot.com
Switch to: FTP (publishing on your ISP server) Or SFTP (secure publishing on your ISP server)

You are locked into your blog address being at blogger and cannot use your own domain name.

Why would this disturb me? Well, a couple of days ago I went out and bought a domain name and some hostiing to use for this blog. I had just read this article at How to Blog advising anyone starting out to ensure their blog had its own domain name...and if you already have a blog to switch to your own domain name. This is so your readers can find you regardless of where your blog is based. If the blog host starts charging for what was a free service (like Typepad did), or makes changes you don't like, you can switch.

I'm still planning to use my own domain name so I'll stay on the old version of blogger while I decide whether to switch to WordPress on my own domain. Rock On!