Reading Time: 8 minutes
Gosh, Twitter fell off a cliff. What a blessing. It’s been a few months now since my usage largely came to a halt. It’s made me rethink a lot of what I’m doing online. The demise of Xitter is only part of it.
Hardly a month ago, I’d posted about how RSS was becoming more central
Continue Reading Begin Again with Social Media
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Our family recently experienced one of those things that is stressful in the moment but funny after the fact. No threat to life or reputation, just something you wished you could avoid. As we were discussing it afterwards, one of the kids parroted back to me some pearls of wisdom that I’m sure I’d said. It
Continue Reading I Can’t Get No
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I had a lot of fun at the AALL annual meeting in Boston. It’s making me rethink professional conference attendance. Not necessarily not going, but having to be more deliberate to get what I want out of it. Last year, I found the numbers of people a bit much, and figured it was post-pandemic. But
Continue Reading You Are Too Kind
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I have been reading The Big Con, a book that looks at large consulting organizations and their impact on their clients, especially public ones like government. I’ve long been skeptical about how consulting fits into business operations, libraries or otherwise. This book spoke to me, reinforcing my concerns about expertise and knowledge loss, and especially hollowing
Continue Reading The Place for Expertise
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I like to think I’m a mid-career law librarian but, if I’m frank, it may be that I’m already at the end of my career based on my position. We have shallow organizational hierarchies and becoming a director is just a couple of hops up the chain from an entry level role. That’s not to say
Continue Reading Lateral Leadership
Reading Time: 6 minutes
It is a time that reminds us that information consumption changes. The tools we use, the expectations we have. I think, like perhaps many other people, I had gotten accustomed to the stability of platforms and expectations for what I would (and would not) find on them. Now that is changing, and I’m finding myself leaning
Continue Reading The Centrality of RSS
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I’ve been on a bit of a tech jag recently, working through a list of things that needed attention. I was watching usage on my photo site and saw a surprising spike in usage. On the one hand, the whole purpose of the site is to share. Every photo is CC-0. But my hosting service
Continue Reading Too Much of a Good Thing
Reading Time: 6 minutes
There was a Windows 11 update the other day and, after it restarted, Google Chrome wouldn’t resolve any websites. Burned before, I cleared all of my cookies in the web browser. No luck. It may be the leading browser but I also have Microsoft Edge and Firefox Mozilla running on my PC. Neither one had a
Continue Reading The (Lack of) Need for Chrome
Reading Time: 12 minutes
Our law library has a supporting foundation—like a friends of the library group—that has a website. Like so many websites, it’s mostly brochureware. They had a change in their board composition last year and lost the person doing the web work and so I volunteered. It led to me migrating the website. Here’s some of
Continue Reading Shift a Foundation
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I’m a dog person. I can abide cats but one of only two times I was in an emergency room was cat dander related. So I keep at literal arms distance. At the moment, I’m not with our family dog. I go across the street to the local dog park, where I can see all varieties
Continue Reading Paved Over Paradise
Reading Time: 7 minutes
It is hard to know whether your family is like other families. We all make different choices. Due to my technology curiosity, our family settled on centrally shared network services. As our kids grew and we collected more digital data—music, photos, documents about them and pets—it became something I thought about more and more. By 2016,
Continue Reading A Closer Look At Securing A New NAS
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I am working on my communication: when to speak up and when to shut up. I can get a message across and communicate information. But I know that there are times that I could be more…politic, shall we say…when I am communicating. One of the things I find challenging is feeling as though the wrong lesson
Continue Reading Learn the Wrong Lesson
Reading Time: 6 minutes
The time has finally come. When my twin brother was taken hostage by the Russian government over 4 years ago, we tried to preserve his online life in amber for his return. This involved taking control of his accounts as best we could. Now Twitter and Google have announced inactive accounts will be deleted. I
Continue Reading When Push Comes to Shove
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I had some small hopes that generative AI—like Google Glasses and Facebook Smart Glasses—would be a flash in the pan. It still might be. But Microsoft and Google have now embedded it into their search and so it has become inescapable from an information searching perspective. It was interesting to me, then, to see a use
Continue Reading Tech When Tech Is Needed
Reading Time: 10 minutes
I work in a service profession. There’s nothing worse than when something gets in the way of the customer being served. Sometimes it’s within our control to remedy and sometimes it’s not. Law libraries intermediate most of our electronic materials, so if a legal information provider fails to function, we don’t really have much to fall
Continue Reading It’s a You Problem