I read heaps of blogs, but seem to always lust after more.

To feed the monster, every so often I:
1) Check in bloglines who has publically subscribed to this blog
2) Check in bloglines who has publically subscribed to other blogs I like
3) Look at the blogs that those people have subscribed to.
4) If I don’t already have a blog in my collection, I run it through my blog-o-meter and subscribe to it if it passes.

1) Updated within the last 2 – 3 weeks
2) Frequent regular posts
3) Not covering the same ground as something I already subscribe to
4) Description is a bit more unique than “Jane Jones gives her idiosyncratic view of librarianship”
5) Short posts about tools and sites that are useful
6) Posts usually less than 4 paragraphs long

My blog usually does not pass 6). Probably wouldn’t have passed 4) either.

It’s a good thing that other blogs slip though. How?
1) Recommendations or pointers from other blogs.
2) Looking at the blogs of people who comment here and on other blogs
3) A “something about you” experience where I just know I’ll be friends with the type of blog I don’t usually mix with.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: This moment.

Over at lint, I just posted a piece which used the rather grand term “software agnosia”. I cut out a bit of the definition of agnosia, because it didn’t really move things forward. I kind of liked it, so here it is:

If you’re interested in “agnosia as bittersweet comedy”, check out Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Dr P had visual agnosia due to brain damage. He could see objects but not recognise them. When he wanted to wear his hat, he reached for the thing he thought was most “hat-like”. In this case, it was his wife’s head.

Or, you could try the the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form:

He sees things — just what, he can’t place.
That’s an object agnosia case.
But with prosopagnosia,
This person who knows ya
Won’t recognize you by your face.
contributed by Virge

If you have subscribed to the feedburner feed for this blog, then you will have noticed that items I’ve tagged on del.icio.us have been in the feed.

I’m just fiddling with it for a work thing, so soon they will disappear as stealthily as they arrived.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Be supportive.

This post is brought to you by the Department of Way-Too-Much-Information

The other day, Iris asked me where I got the name “sirexkat” from, and I told her:

Sirexkat came about when I had already registered on a site as Sirex, then forgot my password, so had to create a new ID – so used the first 3 letters of my name.

I used to post to a ParentsPlace forum for mums who were pregnant at the same time, way back in 1997. I took my handle from my cat (who is in my profile photo and turned 11 last week). She’s an almost hairless Cornish Rex . When they breed them with Siamese markings, they are called a Sirex. (sigh-rex).

I called my first blog Sirexcite (as in Sigh-rex site and Sigh-rex cite), but saw that when it was written it looked like “Sir- excite” This gives quite a different impression!

At the moment I’m contemplating ditching it all and just writing everything as “Kathryn Greenhill”. I write as Sirexkat on my blog and lint , but then as “Librarian Kathryn” when I moderate on lint. I’m commenting throughout the
blogosphere with sirexkat and Kathryn Greenhill. Getting a bit too confusing for me. (And then there’s Emerald Dumont in Second Life……)

Oh..way too much about names…maybe I’ll recycle it as a blog post 🙂

Consider it done.

The tipping point for me was when Jennifer quoted from a post I’d written on lint about “early adopters” as “Librarian Kathryn”, and I thought it looked unduly cryptic.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Be open.

Today my good friend S and I had our annual “go to the posh revolving restaurant in the city for High Tea” afternoon. S is a librarian too. Browsing though the shops afterward, we ended up at the new-ish Borders bookshop in the Hay Street Mall, as I’d not been there kid-free.

En route, we popped into the Birkenstock shop (B store) and tried on some Masai Barefoot Technology Sandals. These cost about $400 a pair, but we both have friends who had epiphanies over these shoes – they’ve cured their back pain; they’re going to wear them to balls, the beach and work; never will they wear anything else on their feet. The sole is shaped like a rocking horse’s rocker, forcing you to adopt correct posture and use your core stabilising muscles. Of course, you need to be instructed in how to walk in them- so S and I imitated the “strutting dude” kind of walk, following the salesperson in a circle around the shop, looking like a kindergarten music and movement session.

Walking back to the train station in our infinitely inferior shoes, we realised what we’d been doing….

Shhhh…. don’t tell anyone or we will have set the image of the profession back by 20 years.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Grace

NIGHT SHIFT
I work on our reference desk from 5pm to 9pm on Tuesdays. Students don’t respond well to zombies on the desk, so I try to be in bed at a reasonable hour the night before.

Can I heeeeelp you?

Last night, however, I was up late making a podcast using Captivate. The abstracts for the Five weeks to a social library course are up and the others all looked so good that I thought I should get cracking on my podcast/screencast. Participant applications close on 1 December.

I wondered whether I could just rant into the microphone, using my abstract for guidance, to get that unforced, conversational feel. Well- twenty minutes later- I discovered that I could, but I would repeat myself several times over, and miss some essential points.

Although I got some good sound bites, I’d need to be more formal and scripted. It was great fun to use the editing facility to cut out my coughs and irritating habit of repeating “Okay” at every small change of topic. Also, I want to work with a team from the library to see whether we can use this presentation to build our skills together.

Happy with my night’s work, I went to bed, read Steve Holzner’s “Secrets of RSS” for a few minutes and slept until 7am.

Except I didn’t. Sleep.

MORNING SHIFT
4:30 am. Mr4 is “hearing beeps”. Too tired to put him back to bed, Mr4, Snugglefish and Firebear join us in bed.

5:30am Our sirex cat, Nougat, scrabbles and caterwauls in the roof above our bed until the Co-Pilot gets up and lets her out the loft door.

6:30am Mr8 discovers his little brother’s door open and bed empty and, very concerned, comes into our room to make sure we know.

ZOMBIEVILLE here I come.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Overindulgence (I did not make this up!)

When I read Jessamyn West’s latest post about the Digital Divide, I thought – “that’s it, that’s my family”. The bit that struck a chord was:

… the Digital Divide isn’’t just about not having access to the Internet, it’’s about not living in an Internet-aware culture. So in the same way that poverty is really about paucity of options -— so not only do you not have money or resources but no one you know has money or resources – the Digital Divide is really about not having access, having erratic access, or not knowing what to do with that access once you have it. Every time I see a web page with ads designed to look like page elements, or pop-ups designed to look like Windows error messages, I cringe because I know that the people I work with are likely to have trouble with them. While I go on the road and talk about library 2.0, I’m still explaining to many of my students that no, they haven’t won a free laptop no matter what the blinky ad on the page says. I feel sometimes like teaching computer skills is all about explaining to people why they should dip their toes into a culture that seems hellbent on deceiving them, misleading them and ripping them off.

Mr8’s reading book this week is Hunting with my camera , which is a diarised account of some guy snapping photos of wildlife in Kruger National Park. The date is written at the top of each entry and he kept skipping it until I said in frustration “You know how a blog is organised by dates – it’s just like a blog”. Then, and only then he “got it” and began reading the dates out.

So…I have a kid who understands blogs better than diaries. We are deliberately sending him to a school with high laptop usage, as he’d need to use one to cope with his handwriting difficulties, and that way he’ll stick out less. While I help Mr8 with his homework, Mr4 “does websites” on a nearby computer.

Both kids can choose to have one hour of computing or of video/DVD per day – and usually choose video/DVD. We don’t have a gaming system like a playstation, but they do game on the PC.They probably use computers recreationally far less than their peers. BUT they constantly see me answer email, sync our PDAs with the online family calendar, read my RSS feeds and write blog posts. Their dad is often working from home, programming upstairs. We have a family blog and write about stuff like great lego models or particularly delicious muffins. At our dinner table we happily discuss topics like Telstra sacking a corporate blogger because of the contents of his blog.

I had wondered whether restricting our kids’ computer usage was disadvantaging them. I can now see that they are actually immersed in techno-skeptic culture, so they can assess web culture and use it as a tool rather than a master.

Now…wearing my librarian’s hat, I need to ask “Given that providing more gizmoes isn’t necessarily the answer, what can I do to help my library users develop skills to evaluate and think critically about the web?”.

I’m reassured, however that I’m not breeding super-freakish-techno-geeks. They still have their bewilderments about technology. Like Mr4, who yesterday stepped onto our digital scales to “see how many metres I cost”.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Wait