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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Imported from the earlier version of my blog that used Blogger. Commenter’s email and URLS will not show up.

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.

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.