Library Cogs

I work for the University of Waikato Library in New Zealand. One of our goals for 2007 was to start a blog, naturally starting a blog is the easy part. Keeping it going will be a little harder...

Anyway if you are interested in libraries, computer support, or other geeky type things check out LibraryCogs - http://librarycogs.blogspot.com.

Helpdesk, I'm having trouble with my book....

I'm not usually big on posting youtube videos, but this one really had me laughing. I guess working as a computer support person in a library might make it a bit funnier...




Enjoy.

Julian Beever

According to my web statistics a fair number of people are finding my site by searching for "Julian Beever's Life". I guess they must be discovering an old post of mine on Julian Beever's optical illusion pavement drawings.

Unfortunately I don't know very much about his life, but I'm always willing to please so I'll tell you want I do know. According to his website has been making pavement drawings for over ten years and has worked in the U.K., Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Germany, the USA and Australia. Apparently he started pavement drawings to finance his travels around the globe.

The BBC has a great article from last year on him, The Pavement Picasso. Which gives more information on the drawings, but not a lot about his life other than that he got started with pavement drawings while working in a Punch & Judy show in York. And that the ten years claimed on Julian's site is actually more like 15 now...

Julian Beever doing a pavement Drawing for Aveeno in Union Square, New York

For those who still want to know more, Eric Shackle has an interesting article, relating to Julian's recent pavement drawing in New York's Union Square.

See Also:
* Video of Julian Beever doing the union square pavement drawing
* Julian Beever's Flickr Photos
* Julian Beevers Website
* More pavement drawing photos
* Info about the art work and how it works
* ART OF ANAMORPHOSIS

Jesus preaches more about heaven than hell!

It isn't exactly surprising that Jesus mentions heaven more often than he mentions hell (at least when considering his words as recorded in the bible.) However it seems to be persistent myth that Jesus really talks about hell more than heaven! I don't know where that idea came from, but it annoys me when preachers don't bother to do the research to find out if what they say is true or not. Every time I hear some one say, the bible says more about X than it does about Y, or Jesus talks about Z 3 times more often than he mentions Q. I'm alway skeptical...

Thanks to Frank Ritche for doing the math.
Did Jesus Preach About Heaven or Hell More?

Luceo non Uro

While in Colchester England, I saw a key ring bearing the name "Mackenzie" on it. Seeing as McKenzie is my middle name, I couldn't resist buying it. Yes that is right my middle name is McKenzie, it comes from my Dad's mothers maiden name I think. It seems like a bit of tradition if you look at my family history of maintaining the mothers maiden name as a middle name for the eldest son.

Anyway, On the keyring is the Mackenzie clan motto "Luceo non Uro" which literally means "I shine, not burn". Apparently the saying came from blacksmithing or smithing in general, where one had to make sure that the metal you were working with didn't get burned, but shone in the heat. [1]

I think that is quite a cool motto when applied to life, We need to balance the hardships/heat in our lives so that we continue to grow and to shine but we also need to make sure we don't let life burn and scar us. The motto reads like it is a choice, which I think it often is. We do choose how we react to circumstances.

Are you going to allow yourself to burn or to shine?

5 things Google should give us all for Christmas

Like all good ideas, more than one person has them :)
Panda Search Engine News beat me to the "google christmas presents" idea...

Here are mine anyway:

1. Put http:// back in the urls

Like many avid google users I use the google personalized search feature, this has benefits in that you are able to look back at what you searched for and found, but it has the disadvantage that the link you click on in the search results isn't the real link. It redirects through google's tracking servers.
The problem is now that you can't look up a site then right click copy url and paste it into an email. You can select the url under the result and copy and paste that, but you have to add your own http:// to get the mail client to recognise it as a link. Since Yahoo also seems to do that same thing there may well be a very good reason for not displaying the http:// but it would be good to atleast hear it so that I can think of all the people I am helping each time I type http://

2. Speed up google analytics

I'm sick of waiting seeing "waiting for ssl.analytics.google.com" in my firefox status bar. It is also the reason I don't use it on my blog. I trialled it for a while but it just seemed to slow everything down. If it was me I'd go for a minimalist approach. Just get people to but a really small image on their site and record the hit at the server end. We don't need the fancy javascript stuff...

3. Make Picasa Web Albums manageable with picasa

When I heard about picasa web albums I was excited. This was going to mean I could create and manage albums in picasa and publish them on the web. Hoorary! The reality
left something to be desired. Picasa basically is just a tool you can use to upload files to picasa web, what we really need is something that will keep the same albums synchonised, eg. you say put this album on the web and as you add or remove files they magically appear in the right place on line.

4. Add a "grab contacts" button to Gmail

I often get emailed other peoples email addresses, or see people I need to email cc'd into an email I get. I would be great if there was an easy way to add these people into the address book.

5. GCal Outlook Sync.

People have been asking for this for a while, and some people have even developed some work arounds, but none of the ones I've tried work reliably for me. I think this is something google need to develop before Google Calendar really takes off in the business world.
Update: Syncmycal provides an excellent and free solution for this! Thanks Vaibhav.

5.5 Rest

Have a good break, and come up with a whole lot of better ideas to do next year...

Update: Matt Cutts likes my list!
And see Pandia again for a round up of blog posts on this topic.

2007 Technology Pioneers

The World Economic Forum has just announced the technology pioneers they have invited to their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Apparently getting to davos is every entrepreneur's dream.

So congratulations to those companies who made it:
http://www.weforum.org/en/about/Technology%20Pioneers/SelectedTechPioneers/2007TechPioneers/IT/index.htm

WEF, might need to hire one of these to technology pioneers to updated the titles on these pages so it doesn't display as "(untitled)" in the web browser...

Vision

I read a good definition of vision today.

Vision is a picture of the future that produces passion.

- Bill Hybels (in Courageous Leadership)

SF book meme

There is a 'meme' going around at the moment about Science Fiction Books
I found it from Simon Chamberlain who saw it on "Walt At Random" who found out about it from "Thinking out Loud" who was triggered off by "The Essential Kit".

These kinds of things go on and on around the internet all the time. Normally I am not interested but I have been getting into science fiction a little bit recently so it is interesting to see what books other think are good.

Here are the rules:
Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished, put a star next to the ones you love, and put a [?] beside ones that you think you may have read but can't really remember. Just to add to the fun I have added another option [!] a book I own but haven't yet had a chance to read, or in my case because my brother borrowed it and hasn't gotten around to giving it back...

Now it is interesting to see what an individual blogger has read and thinks is good etc, but I think this is an example of where aggregation would be really helpful. It would be cool if we could see that 86% of people who did this survey liked JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I think this potential for aggregation is why sites like LibraryThing, Delicious, Flickr and other "social" sites are so popular. People want to see how there content, likes and dislikes, etc compare with other people.

Anyway enough rambling here is my list.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien *
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov *
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute [!]
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson *
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

NZ -> UK -> US ->NZ

I have finally succeeded in uploading all my photo from the my trip. Since it has taken me so long i though I should probably go through and link to all the blog posts about my trip. It started off being a sort of travelog type thing but due to time constrains deteriorates into just photos from the various places I visited.

Roughly in order of events:
Flying Brunskills
Colchester
Lavenham
Bury St Edmonds
Westminster Abby, Big Ben and The London Eye
Changing of the Guards (Buckingham Palace)
Greenwich (The Royal Observatory, Maritime Museum, Thames Barrier)
Windsor Castle (The Queens Weekend Residence)
The British Museum
Sherlock Holmes Museum
The Tower of London
HMS Belfast
San Francisco
BEA World Conference

In the Chair

A interesting company has just opened its doors, it offers you the ability to play your instrument along with professional bands and orchestras. Their software gives you feed back on how well you are playing and fitting in the with the music. See: http://www.inthechair.com/

I play drums and sometimes saxophone (both very badly due to the fact that I never practice) in a band (The Jandal Society) one of the best things about it is that I get to hear how my instrument sounds with other musicians rather than how it sounds in my bedroom. In other words In the Chair has just given us all one less reason to meet with people in real life! Someone please tell me there isn't a Secondlife Orchestra?

Cynicism aside, I think this is a really good idea it will help people to achieve a higher level of playing, before they join a band and have to learn how to play for real...

First and Follow Sets Page - Updated

This probably isn't that relevant to many people, but I just wanted to let the world know that I have finally gotten around to updating my First and Follow Sets page. It now displays correctly on any unicode complient browser.

If you are wondering what First and Follow sets are, they are used by computers when 'compiling' software.

Time - Best Inventions of 2006

Time has released it's annual "best inventions of the year feature". Check it out online here:
http://www.time.com/time/2006/techguide/bestinventions/

Here are some of my favorites:



- This saw senses when it comes into contact with something soft (like a finger) and automatically stops the blade. It must have been a bit of fun testing it, "Hey mate, just stick your finger into this spinning saw blade, Oh argh I was sure I had it right that time, oh well you still have 9 fingers".




- How cool would it be to sleep on a bed suspended from the floor by magnets!





- This machine sucks fresh water out of the air. That has to be the coolest thing since sliced bread.





- This one turns straw into a useful building material. No more big bad wolf stories with this tool in the picture.

A Tiger at Hamilton Zoo

I'm testing out another photo site called Zooomr it has some cool features, but flickr does seem to be catching up adding geo locations etc. It will be interesting to see what zooomr brings out next.

Groom and Groomsmen

Groom and Groomsmen, originally uploaded by Azzaroni.

Yes, I was a groomsman once...

Photo Credits: Stephen Barker www.barkerphotography.co.nz

James Brunny tees off at Pitch n Putt

James Brunny tees off at Pitch n Putt, originally uploaded by Azzaroni.

I didn't know I was now called "James Brunny" but I guess that will have to do.
Note: I don't really know how to play golf.

A Sea Gull in a fountain

A Sea Gull in a fountain, originally uploaded by jambe.

Just one of many novelties in beautiful Sausalito

Mother Duck and Ducklings

IMG_0136, originally uploaded by jambe.

Bethany aka The Dog

Bethany aka The Dog, originally uploaded by jambe.

The Dog

The Dog, originally uploaded by jambe.

Well I posted a photo of the cat and a pigeon, now it is time for the dog. (Only about 365 million more animals to go, I'm glad I only have to feed them when everyone else is away!)