A Passion For ‘Puters

I talked to a local IT manager recently about his library’s planned migration to Google Apps. He’d emailed me late last week, saying he’d read my article on the subject and wanted to discuss it with me. We talked for quite a while and, during the conversation, they brought up the fact that Gmail may be E-rate eligible. I had not even considered this – even after learning that Amazon’s cloud services may be eligible.
This is one of the great things about being willing to share what you know – I, at least, always learn something from the people I’m ostensibly teaching or providing knowledge to. I’d like to say that my willingness to share what I know is purely selfless – a true act of generosity, but in reality, it benefits me as much as it does (hopefully) the people I share with!

Updates
I’ve finally gotten around to posting links to the last couple of presentations I’ve done on my Presentations page, as well as the latest information about the Publications I’ve put out (a link to purchase the Library Mashups book and a tentative publishing date for the Twitter/Friendfeed book). Also, I’ve updated the Raves and Reviews page with a new section called Awards. I found out on Friday that I’d won an Honorable Mention in the 78th Annual Writer’s Digest Awards in the Magazine Feature Article category. I’m not sure how prestigious that really is – I’m not among the top 100 listed winners in the category on the Writer’s Digest site, but the letter that accompanied the award certificate said that, “your success in the face of such formidable competition speaks highly of your writing talent”, so I suppose it is worth something…
Cache Clearing
– Google Wave – I’ve got an account and have been using it to conduct extended group IM-like chats with people and to follow the Real-Time Web Summit that happened in Mountain View, CA (Google’s backyard…) last week. The use of the conference wave was one of my favorite uses of Wave so far. Lots of great information at my fingertips!!!
–Drupal – I’m still in the process of working out the kinks in the new MRRL site, but it should be available for “sneak peeks” by the middle of November – it’s going live on the 17th of November. I’ll be posting more about my adventures with Drupal, but lets just say that I still have most of my hair… not quite all, but most. And, if anyone has a lead on a kick-ass editor that won’t eat my PHP code or re-write my content folk’s stuff at random, but will still give some help to those who are HTML-challenged, I’d appreciate it. That’s where most of my hair is going right now – crazy editors that either do too much or to little.

Regan Harper is presenting on converting face-to-face training into a web-based environment. The idea is to take face2face training that we give for LITA and adapt it for online environments.

• 2 tips fof online – 1)give less of it & 2) organize into small units
• planning – is the topic good for online? synchronous or asynchronous? what do I need to change to make it work?
• breaking into chunks is important – end each session with a complete thought
• make sure attendees know your tech people – put tech support # for the tool up for them, for example
• keep it simple!!!!
• delivery – set ground rules, use appropriate pacing (slow!), appeal to all learning styles
• “be as engaging as you can, without being annoying”
• keep visuals moving – not just animations, but use highlight/pen/pencil tools to add movement to the screen
• ask lots of questions of the audience – keep ‘em involved
• gesticulate – wildly – it will be reflected in your voice – be dramatic

First, I’ll start off with a pointer to my “Raves & Reviews” page, where I’m keeping track of the reviews of my Library Technology Report that was recently published. The book to which I contributed a chapter (about using the LibraryThing API), Library Mashups is available for pre-order. I don’t yet have my author’s copy, but I’m eagerly awaiting it!!! Finally, I will be at ALA in Chicago for the majority of the conference (9th-14th) and will be hanging out there, wishing I was with somebody cool from the library world (since I’m the only one from my library going) – so get in touch with me (I’m robin.hastings on the gmail service – which includes GTalk, of course) if you will also be in ALA and want to meet up!

I’ve had my new Palm Pre for about 5 days now and I finally feel comfortable in giving it a thorough going-over. First, I have to say that this was a HUGELY anticipated product for me. I’d been looking forward to getting my hands on this for quite a while!! I’ve read the reviews that others have posted and I’m ready – now that I’ve got it – here are some of my thoughts:

Cons We'll start with the cons, since there are fewer of those... First off is the battery life. Right now, because I'm still in the blissful throes of technolust, I'm grabbing it and turning it on and playing with it 5 minutes out of every 10. This may have a teensy-tiny bit to do with the fact that I start to get battery life warnings at about 3pm in the afternoon - but not that much, I'm afraid. The battery really is pretty weak for such a strong phone and is a definite "con" - but not a deal-breaker.
Another issue is the memory - it sometimes acts like it's RAM is completely full and it slows down until it crashes. Once it comes back up, it's just fine again. For a day or two, then it slows down again. This may indicate a need to optimize the hardware so that it can keep up with the software, or it may just be a weakness in the hardware itself, and no updates or optimizing tips will help. Too soon to tell. That right there is closer to making a deal-breaker, but it's actually rare enough that it's not going to stop me from using the phone regularly, so I'll live with it until it's fixed.
Pros

It’s freakin’ beautiful. It fits perfectly in even my tiny little hands and is comfy. I’ve heard that some have issues with the keyboard being a bit difficult to slide out, but I’ve had no problems – the mechanism works beautifully and the keyboard itself is plenty big, easy to use and backlit (another drain on battery life, to be sure, but very handy in the dark!).
The OS is REALLY well thought out, being both beautiful & usable. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of navigation (though I wish someone had told me that swiping things to the right deletes them – that one took a day or two for me to “get” – so I was opening each email to delete it…).
The applications are a *current* weakness, just because there isn’t much there, but the ones that are work nicely (mostly – my shortcovers ebook reader has been crashy today) and are universally useful.
I have: