the pod bay door

:: Two days ago it was 55F/17C in Edmonton. Tonight there are a couple inches of snow on the ground, and the temperature is -3C. Such is life in Edmonton. A personal mantra of mine is, “every day after Hallowe’en in which we do not get permanent snow is a blessing from God.” Maybe not this year. I suspect, however, that what we are receiving right now in amounts of white stuff will melt or sublimate in the next few days. Nonetheless, I forgot to remove my outside garden hose, so arrived home tonight and stuggled to get it off its rollup on the side of my house.

:: So Tim Horton’s doughnuts aren’t so fresh after all. Krispy Kreme, please come to Edmonton! (KK will be in Calgary next February.) Here’s an interesting take on the story from Thunder Bay.

:: This afternoon, Heavy G and I ran through our forthcoming presentation on biblioblogs for GELA. I thought it went rather well, and I bow in Geoff’s general direction for designing a great-looking visual style for the slides.

:: My right shoulder and arm were examined today by a doctor with a specialty in sports medicine. Turns out my shoulder is somewhat out of whack – can’t give you much more of an explanation than that. My muscles, rotator cuff, and so on, are ok, but the shoulder blade is out of alignment, bulging a bit at my back. I will need physiotherapy. Unfortunately my first appointment is on November 12th, so in the meantime, I’m getting a massage and stocking up on pain killers.

:: Amazon.com announced last Thursday that it is making the full-text of ~120,000 books (>33,000,000 pages), searchable to its customers. The searching is done at the same level as a title or author search. So I took the book Moonwatcher’s Memoir by Dan Richter, flipped it open to a random page (116), read the phrase “some Velcro slipping” in a sentence, typed that phrase into the Amazon search window, and boom, the first item retrieved was Richter’s book, with a link to p116, where it found the phrase. What was interesting was how fast the results appeared, in less than five seconds. Given the size of the db, 33 million pages, never mind how many words, I was very impressed that it found the one book with the phrase so quickly. The search algorithm retrieved other books and pages with the words “some“, “Velcro“, and “slipping“, but not the phrase itself.

However, I tried three times to retrieve the text of the page, and finally received a response; I suspect Amazon’s servers are burning a lot of coal right now, trying to keep up with the new service. So to see the page that contained the phrase, I had to wait over 10 minutes. Once the page with the phrase you searched appears, you can browse two pages on either side of that page in the book.

This is an impressive feat on Amazon’s part. Within my profession, a growing number of full-text databases exists, mostly of primary and secondary journal literature, along side a smaller number of databases which offer the full-texts of monographs, such as books24x7. None of the book dbs remotely approach the content of Amazon’s 120,000 books. It’s a unique feature that will no doubt increase sales. Amazon’s customers now have another powerful search tool to retrieve books (and CDs, DVDs, etc) of interest to them while browsing and searching. The question is: how quickly will their competitors move to offer a similar feature to their web sites?

:: It’s 17°C in the Big City, and I just returned from having coffee and reading the NYTimes Magazine. Wearing denim short pants and a t-shirt, I drove home with the window rolled down in my car. This is the last evening I’ll be able to dress so casually and lightly for months to come – the temperature will begin dropping tomorrow until it reaches -21C on Sunday night. Cruel is a word that comes to mind. The forecast high for Hallowe’en is -11C, with light snow expected. Not fair, not fair at all, especially to the ghosts and goblins who will be out and about that night.

:: And people wonder why I’d like to live in NYC. 😉

:: This is one of the funniest eBay entries I’ve ever read. This poor fellow’s ex-wife left him with a few Beanie Babies, and he wanted to get rid of them to buy a few tools. Be sure to read down through the entry – it’s a laugher! (From: Karlin.)

:: The Florida Marlins won the World Series, beating the NYYankees four games to two, preventing them from winning their 27th WS, and giving Ivan Rodriguez his first championship in thirteen seasons in MLB. Will Steinbrenner open the vaults and sign more power hitters and rock solid starters? Has baseball become way too predictable? While a Red Sox/Cubs WS would have capitivated the sporting world, this series was rather dull. I missed most of it, despite baseball being my favorite sport to watch on the tube. I cannot shed one tear for the Yankees.

:: I might have to buy this one. Triumph, The Insult Comic Dog, is releasing an album, Come Poop With Me. If you haven’t seen any of Triumph’s videos, check a few out at the Conan O’Brien site. Be sure to check the excerpts from Triumph at the Star Wars premiere, and his interview with Bon Jovi. (Unfortunately, the full videos are not available on the site).

Frank DiGiacomo writes about the forthcoming release, and of Triumph’s creator, the protean Robert Smigel, in the New York Observer. Among many projects, Smigel is the creator of TV Funhouse, the cartoons featured every few weeks on SNL. Come Poop With Me is produced by Jimmy Vivino, the guitarist in O’Brien’s band, The Max Weinberg Seven, and a member of The Fab Faux, who I saw perform in NYC last June. (Via: Derryl.)

:: My right shoulder is in considerable pain again. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ll see a sports physician on Monday about my left tennis elbow condition, and ask him about my right shoulder as well.

:: I was at the Netspeed 2003 conference today in Edmonton, and attended a number of interesting sessions, including ones covering virtual reference services, and PDAs in the library. One of the keynote speakers, Ian Whitten, currently the iCore Visiting Professor at U Lethbridge, and Director of the NZ Digital Library at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, discussed Greenstone Digital Library Software, a suite of open-source software used to build and digitize library collections. During his engaging and at time hilarious talk, he showed us examples of digitized collections created with Greenstone, including this page on castration from Basic Husbandry Practices and Veterinary Care. (The foreword of the book states: “The manuals are based upon experiences documented through a series of intensive field work activities over a one-year period with a group of livestock small-holders living and working in Cavite province of the Philippines.”)

Note the picture of the farmer tossing the animal testicles onto a roof of made of galvanized iron. This is an indigenous practice done on hot days, as the belief is that the testicles will dry up faster, and thus so will the wound to the animal.

The attentive crowd watching Ian, myself included, had just finished eating lunch at this point in time.

:: I’ve been playing around with Blogger sites again, ones I’ve created to keep myself familiar with how to set up an instant blog on that site. Among these sites is my original blog from July 2002. I need to maintain familiarity so that I might sound somewhat intelligent and coherent when G and I present blogging sessions in the not-too-distant future. As some of you might notice, I’m also experimenting with the font size and styles here as well.

:: Today is Take Back Your Time Day. This is something we could use in Canada too, if only to get people talking:

THE TIME IS NOW – TAKE BACK YOUR TIME DAY, OCTOBER 24, 2003

Seattle, WA— Americans are working too much, according to 85% of the 7800 Americans who participated in a recent CNN money.com poll. 4 in 5 Americans wish they had more time to spend with family, according to a poll commissioned by the Center for a New American Dream and half of all Americans even say they’d trade some of their pay for more time off. Their concerns are buttressed by the fact that barely half of all Americans took a week’s vacation this past summer, and that while millions of Americans have lost their jobs to the recession, many more are working longer hours and more mandatory overtime than ever.
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