Week 13 Muddiest Point

"Helloooo Ladies..." it's the muddy llama! Watch out now, don't let the Thanksgiving triptophan goggles fool you: he's a dirty boy underneath that handsome exterior.

Reading the No Place to Hide site, I got to thinking: how much more difficult is it to hide when you engage in electronic forms of communication? Should those wishing to send secret messages revert to rotary phones, carrier pigeons, and paper airplanes if they want to keep their information private?

Week 12 Muddiest Point

This week's Muddiest Point is brought to you by Muddy Squirrel. Apparently he lives on a Hill or something. I'm not sure, I don't speak squeakum (3:18 mark), and he was a Pixburger squeaker at that.

Why are we learning about the value of blogs months after we began blogging for class. I mean, c'mon, we're all MLISes aren't we? My black, technology-unsavvy heart cries out "Poor form!", even tough my teacher-sense tells me that we can't learn everything in the first week, and my Yoda-soul tells me to chill.

Week 9 Muddiest Point

Complimenting last week's muddy dog, pointing you towards SCALA's Technology Petting Zoo, and continuing the animalistic ferocity of this blog in general, may I present the muddy horse (with hooman accessoree)!

Now that I’ve been thinking on it a little bit (as I carefully *stifled laughter* edit this post), maybe HTML is that much more comfortable than XML because it seems a more natural extension of what I already do to edit my documents. I press CRL+i to italicize, then press it again to stop italicizing. If I were to write out what I was doing, say to instruct someone through IM a Librarian (a Help/Reference Desk service popular at many academic libraries and called Digsby at Pitt) about how to italicize something in their paper, I might just write it out like HTML. XML, not so much. Is anyone else getting the sense, like I am, that HTML is more semantic than XML, despite techie claims? Or am I just being an ostrich with my head stuck in the sand, incapable of moving forward at the necessary pace?

Week 8 Muddiest Point

Mud? I haven't seen any mud. Don't touch the stuff myself.

Know it's a little early...for me at least, but this week's muddiest point for me relates to Koha. Does it have a foreign language complex? I really wanted to add a book about Dominek Hasek (one of my favorite goalies) to my virtual shelf, but the book just wouldn't load past to the second screen (where you have imported the MARC record already, but need to assign it a barcode).

Could this be because the book (and parts of the record) is in Czech? I do have a couple of French books, too, but they're all translations. None of them had any trouble.

Is foreign language a common stumbling block for tools like what we're using this semester?

BTW, the book and all its AWESOMENESS can be found here: http://lccn.loc.gov/2004549421

Week 7 Muddiest Point

"Muddy...tonsils?" You ask yourself. "Yes, indeed," I whimper, "and adenoids too."

I am sick. I hate being sick. I'm bad at it. Like 3 year old wrapped around mama's leg bad at it.

This week's muddiest point is two fold because I haven't got the energy to think of anything at a deep level. First of all, will we ever run out of IP addresses like they thought we did with ISBNs? Second, can you actually exchange books through Library Thing? I didn't think it was a place for physical exchange like Craigslist or anything.

Week 6 Muddiest Point

I didn’t find the time to look into it myself after finishing the Wikipedia article on Networks, but are we going to go over Bluetooth networks in class? I should very much like to know more about them.

PS- I searched and searched and searched for a particular picture for this week’s muddiest point. As a young’un I loved the movie Drop Dead Fred about a girl and her imaginary friend (really her id) who keeps getting her in trouble. There’s a lovely mud pie scene in that film, but I couldn’t find a screen capture high or low. Anybody know where I can find a screen capture of it?

PPS- Are we really in week 6 already? Sheesh!

Week 5 Muddiest Point

She’s so plastered.

Maybe I just missed it in the reading, but does the collaborative Pittsburgh digital image collection only include “old” photographs—i.e. stuff from before 1960? In twenty years will it be our task as librarians to digitize photographs from 1960-2000? How many of these images will already be digitized? How many photographs may be lost to us by a Flickr account going inactive or an inadvertent Delete? In short, how will already digitized images be put in digital libraries in similar, future collaborative efforts?

Week 4 Muddiest Point

This week’s Muddiest Point is brought to you by a very special and not-so-muddy guest: Rainbow Brite!

A shout out to my homie Chris for allowing me to ride your mustang. And yes, I mean that in the most double entendre-y way possible, just to make you blush brighter than Rainbow Brite’s 80s-tastic scrunchie here. It is by Chris’s request that Rainbow Brite is with us today. Fantabulous sparkles and rainbows y’all!

Annnnnnyway…the muddiest point this week relates to the different types of databases as outlined in Wikipedia.
I pondered and pondered and pondered my little heart out, but I couldn’t think of good examples for a hierarchical model, a network model, and a relational model in tangible terms like grandma’s kitchen (could one be like her recipes, another her spice rack, a third her cooking methodology on Thanksgiving?). Can any reader out there think of a good, tangible, preferably related set analogous to the different database models?

Week 3 Muddiest Point

This week's Muddiest Point is brought to you by Muddy Waters. Chill, cats, chill.

I am struck this week by the eternal dilemma of good writing and technical expertise. It is such a great rairty to discover a writer who can both write compellingly and clearly while also writing with authority and great depth of subject. I felt this especially strongly in the Linux readings. I want to increase my technical knowledge through this class this semester, but I don't see that happening when I have to struggle to read the articles like I'm a preschooler trying to take on the Iliad!

So, just to reiterate, I need someone to explain well the what exactly a kernel is. Cuz these are the only two kernels I knowes:

Week 2 Muddiest Point

Wait--are the weekly chats required? I had thought you just used them if you needed help, but looking at the slides for this week it looks as though they're required. I am all confusion! What about the discussion boards? We didn't much mention them last week, but now they look like a requirement for this week. Arg!

Week 1 Muddiest Point

The muddiest point this week was explaining what muddiest points were only after assigning them a weight in the grading system. At a close second, though, was trying to figure out the due dates for everything. Would it have been too hard to simply say "X is due on Friday the 29th, while Y is not due until Tuesday the 2nd" instead of causing mass confusion and mild panic with endless "this Friday"'s and "next Tuesday"'s?

For the uninitiated, this picture was captured at Texas's Redneck Games in the bellyflop event.