Last week I bought a refurbished Blackberry 8700c from Cingular. I
wanted it for a number of reasons yet wondered if it would live up to
my expectations. I was worried, for example, if I would be able to
work with a thumb keyboard–the centerpiece of the device. While I am
still getting used to it and still don’t [...]

While Michele and I are at Mayo Clinic I thought it would be a good
use of Twitter to write snippets of updates for family and friends. I
decided to replace the Meebo Me widget on the righthand sidebar with a
Twitter widget.

I just came across an insightful article by Michael Calore of Wired News that describes his attempt to transition away from desktop-based office applications in favor of Google’s web-based applications. Mainly this involved switching from tools like Microsoft Word in favor of Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets web application. See the link at the [...]

Life is hard.  Do you ever feel so overwhelmed, so downhearted that you find it hard to literally and figuratively put one foot in front of the other?  When doing even the most routine and little things seems impossible or too much to handle?  When you can burst into tears at the drop of a [...]

Recently my mentee at UIUC GSLIS asked me to look into my crystal ball and articulate some thoughts about what lies in store for technical services librarianship. What follows is my response. I publish this here because although my points aren’t polished and well-defined, what I wrote to my mentee expresses some of [...]

These are my links for April 6th through April 16th:

LIBRA: LIBrary Reports and Announcements - An occasional PDF publication of The University of Chicago Library. I like to read this whenever a new issue is published because it helps me keep informed about what’s happening at Chicago, a place where I worked for several [...]

The latest issue (Spring 2007) of LIBRA: LIBrary Reports and Announcements, is now available. LIBRA is a publication of The University of Chicago Library. I like to read each issue because that helps me keep informed about what’s going on at the place where I spent my formative years as a librarian. [...]

A belated note that UKSG has a conference blog open for their annual conference and they are already reporting some good summaries of conference presentations from today’s session (today is the start of the conference). Check it out at http://liveserials.blogspot.com/index.html. I was particularly interested to read the summary of the opening session featuring [...]

I thought the following article in the Chicago Tribune today provided a nice, easy-to-understand overview of RSS, with a focus on how it can lead you to good deals. I have proven this to be true probably dozens of times. One of the best deals I ever received was via an RSS feed [...]

I was excited to read the news last night that Chicago was picked over Los Angeles as the site nominated by the U.S. for the 2016 Olympics. How cool would it be to live near the Olympics, if Chicago happens to win the international bid? I think Chicago is a great choice (prejudice [...]