James LaRue - myliblog

I wrote my second column about the post-Kindle public library building, here . Then Sharon Morris sent me a couple of links about not just imaginings of what I wrote about, but actual experiments in Aarhus, Denmark. The Children's Interactive Library and The Transformation Lab (I think my daughter Maddy sent this one to me about a year ago -- probably where I stole all my visionary ideas, once I forgot where I got them. Sigh.) It's clear to me that a fact-finding trip to Denmark is in order. Mail contributions to my home address.

I'm about to give up. Fedora 10, as noted below, is a gorgeous and well-documented distro. But I have had persistent problems with my wireless connection. These days, Web access is my main home computer use. 1. Fedora defaults to the Network Manager "service" to manage wireless devices. That is, it uses EITHER Network Manager OR Network. Since I've been having so much trouble with this (other wireless networks show up but mine doesn't, when it does connect I often get a kernel bug message, the connection disappears after a logout), I went to System>Administration>Services and turned off Network Manager, then enabled and restarted Network (an alternative service to manage connections). Then I edited the Network settings to make sure those were right, and reboot. 2. The boot process took a lot longer -- and failed. I saw something that other folks have reported -- it tried to connect using completely different encryption keys (verified in iwconfig). I managed ...

One of the things I enjoy about being a librarian in Colorado is the extraordinary quality of my colleagues. Case in point: Jeff Donlan, director of the Salida Regional Library. Jeff writes a weekly column called "At the Library," which he posts at his library's website, and is available here . This location gives you his most current. If you want previous pieces, pull down "Choose a column" from the top. His March 23, 2009 piece on Amazon's ebook reader, the Kindle, got me thinking, so I wrote my own column on the topic, available here . I think it's a good idea to pose some scenarios based on radical change. As we learned from the newspaper world, it can happen fast.

My good friend and mentor Carl Volkmann has his own blog up now, detailing his now 10 year+ battle with cancer. (Click the title of this entry to get there.) That's how he sees it (a war -- and he's a very gentle man!), and his continuing focus is impressive. We were talking today (as he chauffeured me around Springfield) about this weird truth: there are some people who avoid him now. They don't know what to say about his cancer. Yet the important thing to Carl is that his friends know what's up -- he's convinced that their active support is part of what keeps him healthy and whole. I have other friends battling other diseases. But I found this a powerful reminder: talk to each other. Ask direct questions. Let our friends know they matter to us. We are more than our diseases.

I'm a keynote speaker for tomorrow's "On the Front Lines" conference, put on by my friends at the Illinois State Library. When I arrived at the Springfield airport, I was picked up by my former boss and mentor, Carl Volkmann, and his wife, the wonderful Roberta. Later, we were joined by Judy Rake for a fabulous Italian dinner. Now I'm in the conference hotel. It happens to be just north of Lincoln Library -- where I worked as Circulation Department Head, then Assistant Director. I'm on the 24th floor -- a rare height here in the midwest. And I'm listening to a train moan through the town. My talk focuses on several things: current brain research, how to grow use, how to zero in on some of the key trends of modern librarianship, and finally, how to grow support. Being here again reminds of just how much I learned in this town, from this library. I hope my comments are helpful.

Click the entry for the link -- a Youtube video about a nanotechnology-driven mobile device called Morph. Fascinating. My son sent this to me. I like this approach: illustrate some concepts with simple animation, and show how such technology might really be used. Clearly, the progress toward ever more capable and flexible mobile devices is a trend.

It turns out to be simplicity itself -- once you know the arcane commands. They can be found by clicking the title of this entry. I have to say that since installing Fedora 10 on my home computer, using Linpus Lite (the Xfce version of Fedora 8) seems easier. I suppose it's about getting comfortable with the menus and mindset. But at any rate, this little netbook now communicates quite easily with the other mobile device in my life: the Palm Treo. Wonderful! (I also added some Gnome themes that better matched the Xfce themes, giving me a nice graphite scroll bar to match the Aqua look of the window decorations. Man, I am geeking out.)

My daughter sent me this link (click the title of this entry) to Kate Zernike's New York Times article, "Generation OMG." It does appear that the coming-of-age Millennials are facing tougher times as they enter the world's workforce. But what struck me was the generation still at home, born after 2000. One name proposed for them has been the "Homelanders" -- born in the post-911 world, and so even more obsessively protected than the Millennials. The works of Howe and Strauss continue to hold up for me, their notion of the generational dynamic as a reliable predictor of social moods. All of which seems to suggest the sort of hunkering down we see everywhere: caution, restricting expenditures, and slowly starting to rediscover the value of the public sector.