James LaRue - myliblog

As noted in my last blog, I've been mucking about with classic DOS outliners, booted up through dosbox-x on Ubuntu. The experience made me dig up some older blogs that have oft been cited on the web, but because I've shifted around the hosting of my website, the links went bad. I still find outliners utterly absorbing. If you do, too, you will find your people at outlinersoftware.com . Outliners Redux February 18, 2002 by James LaRue Copyright, 2002 All Rights Reserved   Introduction As I wrote in " A Blastfrom the Past: Classic Outliners ," outliners (also called outline processors) are a powerful tool for the manipulation both of text, and of its underlying structure. I also recommended two "classic" outliners (where "classic" means "created in the early 1990's"): KAMAS for DOS, and MORE 3.1 for the OSX Macintosh. I used KAMAS (an acronym for "Knowledge And Mind Amplification System") for years, from ...

Lately, I've been playing with classic DOS outliners on my Linux system, mostly using dosbox-x , KAMAS , PC-Outline , and Grandview . Those are live links for downloads, so they are still to be found, and could still be used. Shockingly, they are still far ahead of anything readily available in today's graphic interfaces. I'm still thinking about what I've learned from this stroll down memory lane. But in the process, I dug up some old posts that might be worth preserving. (They disappeared off the internet when I changed web hosting providers, and trimmed my content.) This is the first of two . A Blast from the Past: Classic Outliners by James LaRue September 2001 The "classic" period of outlining preceded Windows. Outliners thrived in DOS and on the Mac. While most of those programs are orphaned now, abandoned by their developers, they can still be found on various shareware sites. There is much to be said for these p...

I had two MacBook Pros, both 13" models from late 2011. One had 4 gigs of RAM, and the other 8. Both of them were intolerably slow. In the first case, I wound up installing CleanMyMac , which did arcane things to various files, and put up alerts to warn me about disappearing memory. But it made the machine useable again, albeit not exactly speedy. I changed some habits: Safari as browser rather than Firefox or Chrome. I tried to keep tabs down to four or five. The second Mac had bigger problems. Its charger was shot, but even with that replaced, the battery tapped out at 75%. More importantly, the whole disk had been wiped, which meant that it wouldn't boot. Recently, I had downloaded a couple of Linux distributions ("distros") on USB drives. Elementary OS 5.1 (Hera) was reputed to be a lightweight, beautiful distro that shared some aesthetics with the Mac OS. So I thought I'd give it a try. Ahead of time, I tried to read up on how difficult it might be to...

It was news when they  named a library after me . It was news when they  took it away . On the whole, I greatly appreciated, for a while, being both a person and a building.

[The First Year: 5 Strategies for Success, 1 of 8] Over the past several years, I've had the pleasure of coaching several new public library directors. For a  variety of reasons, many directors are stepping into the role for the first time. Often, particularly in smaller or more rural libraries, they haven't even had a lot of supervisory experience. I tell new directors that the two big advantages of confidential access to someone who has walked in your shoes is that (a) you can ask the questions you might feel embarrassed to ask your board or staff, and (b) you have the advantage of someone else's mistakes. To be clear, everybody makes mistakes. It may be the most powerful learning tool we have. But I've thought about my mistakes, and I can help you identify the old ones, and with luck, make new ones. There's no good reason to make the same ones! I believe that there are five key constituencies the public library director must satisfy:  your boss  (usual...

[The First Year Director: Strategies for Success, 2 of 8] Make them look good The first dictum in managing your relationship with your boss is this: make them look good. I say "them" because for most public library directors, their boss is a governing board (i.e. hires the director, adopts the budget, sets policy, etc.). How do you know who the boss is? To quote my friend Pat Wagner, "the boss is the one who signs your paycheck." The boss isn't the only important player, but it's not a bad place to start. In some cases, a board may be advisory. That is, while its members may well advise the director on library business, those governing decisions are made by someone else (a mayor, a town council, a board of county commissioners). In other cases, the boss is someone else in the governing body's hierarchy. I once reported to the head of Cultural Affairs. There is an advantage to having a single boss: it's easier to figure out what matters to the...

[The First Year Director: Strategies for Success, 3 of 8] A key relationship for directors is staff. There are at least two dimensions: managing relationships with  direct reports  (an administrative team, if the staff is large enough to have one), and with the larger culture of the organization itself. This post will concern the former. The purpose of an administrative team is to make good decisions. To describe that process, let me outline the  arc of a perfect meeting . It answers five questions, in this order: Why are we here? The first step of a successful meeting is deceptively simple: what is the problem or issue that brings us here today? That statement doesn't have to be fancy, but it should be specific, and based on evidence: "our problem is that our first release popular DVDs are being stolen. In fact, the theft rate has risen to 35%, within the first week of our putting them out." What makes this process deceptive? Not everyone can boil down the real...