James LaRue - myliblog

Today, in the Denver Post (and many other newspapers around the country) the news was carried that Judith Krug, Director of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom, died over the weekend after a year-long battle with stomach cancer. I didn't always agree with her. More than once, I found her public positions harsh and divisive. I thought there might be a better way to make the library point without polarizing the debate. But I never doubted her deep and genuine passion for one of my profession's core values -- the freedom from censorship. Her contributions to the cause have been many, stretching over 40+ years. She made a difference in an area where it mattered. She served the profession. Well done, Judith Krug. Very well done indeed.

I've been interested in animation since the late 1970s, mostly because of the BBC series "International Festival of Animation" (hosted by Jean Marsh of "Upstairs Downstairs" fame), and the very beginnings of computer animation. A couple of years ago, my son got interested in stop action animation, which I find fascinating, too. My daughter just sent me a wonderful piece, "featuring photography by Eyal Landesman and music by Oren Lavie." It has a wonderfully surreal quality to it, with more than a dash of whimsy. Click the title entry to watch it.

Click on the title entry here to see a live feed on the zeitgeist.

Here's a video (click the entry title) to see a protoype wearable web interface, running off natural gestures, and capable of projecting onto any surface (a nearby wall, a T-shirt, the inside of a book, your own body). It shows that the integration of the Web into daily life, with a simple physical interface, is right around the corner.

We asked a group of long time library users living in Douglas County, often vocal about library support, to respond to this prompt: "In four words or less, what does literacy mean to you?" Here's a word cloud of the phrases they used to respond.

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 ...