Just downloaded and tried out a new "social networking" browser called Flock.  Pretty neat.  It allows me to save my ids to and access easily all my social networking related accounts and tools and sites like facebook, del.icio.us, Blogger, Flickr, etc.  It's got all the bells and whistles that Firefox has (and I do like Firefox) since it's built on the Mozilla engine so it's got all the basic functions taken care of.  The extra bits are well-integrated into the tools such as a left sidebar to view my "people" accounts such as facebook, myspace and Flickr, so I can easily see recent updates my friends have made to their statuses (stati?), media, my notifications, my messages, etc.  It does the same thing (integrating access into the tool) with media sites (like YouTube, and Flickr), web-based mail (Gmail, Yahoo, AOl, etc.), blogging software (BLogger, Wordpress...  I'm writing this from within Flock right now!), rss feeds (I imported all my bloglines subscriptions into it to check it out, plus it recognized my Flickr comments feed that I didn't realize actually had comments that I should have been responding to!), and probably more that I haven't discovered yet.

 

Despite any of our best efforts to live our lives rationally or even with some sort of reasonable guidance, all it really comes down to is random chance, brute force and instinct. What?!? What am I talking about?

Here's an example: a recent post on "Tomorrow's Professor's Blog" called "How to write anything". It makes the usual but absolutely true claim that to write (whatever it is you're writing), instead of waiting for large chunks of time to work on it, simply schedule regular small bits of time here and there. Absolutely true. But why? Because we don't listen to ourselves. We don't really do want we think we want to do. Our future selves don't listen to what our past selves wanted and planned for. You have to bargain with and cajole and trick your future self into doing those things. If we really wanted to write that book, wouldn't we do it naturally? Maybe, maybe not. What we really want to to write the book. But just not now. (Or whatever it is we want from our life and our time.)

Another example. I want a clean house. I want to be able to find things I need when I need them. I want to be proud of the little environment I call home. But I have to work at it. I make lists. I make plans. I plan to make more lists. I make lists of plans I have to make. I involve my family. I take it all on myself. I try to be be happy with a sty of a house. Nothing works. Why? Because I think about it. I'm too busy planning how to get all the chores done while I should be doing the chores. I think that I have to figure out how to do it well when what I should be doing is just doing it. Turn my brain off and mindless do it. Create a list maybe but just blindly do what's on that list.

And that's what depresses me. That's too often what we all have to do to "get things done". One of my big social problems is that I like to figure things out, and come up with ideas on how we can best accomplish tasks, regardless of how things have been done in the past. Sounds great, huh? No. The majority of people for the majority of tasks the majority of the time want "same old same old". That's what I have to learn. I wish we could all think about how best to work on the things we do instead of just jumping in. But few people want to do that, even briefly. "There's a time to think and a time to act, and this is NO time to think!" So just consider that when you complain that there's a better way to do something: how would YOU like it if someone told you there was a better way to do YOUR job? How would YOU react? No really...

Shut up and do something, Matthew. Just do it.

 

Ok, can you tell I'm a librarian? I'm celebrating Dictionary Day. Well, not actually celebrating (although I guess I could go pick up a cake after work... hmmm...) but rather just pointing it out on my blog. Nobody else here at the library has made mention of it, and really there's not that much to be found easily online on the topic. Here's a couple mentions:

• OUPblog: "Dictionary Day is Coming…", an informative blog entry from last year about the day and related details, from the Oxford University Press blog.


• Holiday Insights: "Dictionary Day", a brief description of the details, and lack thereof, regarding this holiday.


• Education World: "Happy Birthday, Noah Webster!", some more information about the man and the dictionary behind the day.


• And of course, the thing that reminded me of this special day, meeblog: "dictionary day", the blog entry for the day from one of the staff at meebo, the free online IM tool.

So, hat's off to Mr. Webster, and happy birthday, sir! It reminds me of historical novels and biographies I've read about people sitting down to write dictionaries or encyclopedias or broad histories of whatever... I would think, "How could they even consider taking on such a task without computer technology... being able to store large numbers of information bits in such a way as to easily update details, and manipulate the whole." Think about the amount of paper used, the incredible need for complete organization to keep track of it all, and the intense focus the author must have to keep from going completely bonkers! LOL

Well, congrats Noah. 27 years of work to create something that so many of us use but take totally for granted, except for the large staff it probably takes to create regular up to date editions.

So, what special crazy holidays do you celebrate, or really mean if you can remember and if you have the time?

 

Read: Springer to acquire BioMed Central Group from Springer's News postings (written 7 October 2008).

So, Springer, a big commercial name in STM (Science, technology, medicine) publishing has bought the biggest open access (OA) STM publisher so far. Woah. That just sounds wrong. Or very, very good, depending on how you look at it. Worst case scenario: Springer's commercial, for-profit perspective run's BioMed Central into the ground, destroying one of OA's big success stories. Best case: Both flourish and OA is shown to be viable for commercial publishers to embrace, and everyone everywhere is convinced, and we all live happily ever after.

Don't know where in the middle it will fall... Any ideas?