I'm still struggling with programming, not because I don't understand it (well, that's not the only reason), but because I find that it just isn't taught very well. I'm hoping these courses from Stanford will improve upon what I've managed to cobble together.

I'm learning quite a bit about social media (and reinforcing what I already know) by reading through this site. I only wish I was one of those people who was good at information visualizations.

A really nice presentation from a library down under on social media in libraries.

"Caught at night with infrared cameras, deep underwater with huge floodlights, and under microscopes which distinguish different sorts of microbe, the BBC’s Wildlife Finder is the product of years of planning – and dreaming. Technology and funding have finally made possible the corporation’s ambition to give its spectacular natural history photography and film a permanent global audience."

"Bess Sadler, chief architect of the online library environment at the University of Virginia, sees the open-source Blacklight project as a "shift of power," as she wrote recently in the journal Library Hi Tech. The idea is that libraries, which know their local needs, should control the technology that patrons use to gain access to their collections. That's a change from the one-size-is-good-enough-for-everybody, commercially managed model that has prevailed in the industry."

File under "Why librarians are awesome": a law librarian in Vancouver convinced the lawyers in the firm where she works to bring in old fiction titles that she would then sell. Proceeds made from the sale would be donated to the Raise A Reader literacy campaign. So far, the firm has donated around $1,000.

I can't ever seem to get it together to create my own library of interface elements for wireframes. so I rely heavily on attractive, well-designed libraries that are available for download. The Konigi UI set is my most heavily used set by far.

“A location-based social network is not going to truly take off on the iPhone until it can run in the background. You know it, I know it, and even Loopt, which makes such an app, knows it. That’s why they’ve done something about it. Beginning today, Loopt is rolling out a trial for background location on the iPhone.”

I'm trying to put together a resource list for fat cyclists. This was a good place to start.

I have to admit, the bit about fat cyclists seems to be a prevalent attitude among many cyclists. I have a granny bike and a fat butt, and I often feel I should be apologizing for not racing racing racing to get through the streets when I'm out on my bike.

I once used Mozy. The less said about that, the better. OK, I'll say a bit more – IT NEVER WORKED. Backblaze, on the other hand, works like a Mac application: unobtrusive, quietly working, and getting the job done while getting out of my way.

I could stand to remember these things when I'm off on one of my (weeks-long) sulks.

A while back, I said something very much to this effect on Twitter. If libraries really are committed to 'access for all', then shouldn't that also mean that we should try to embrace other computing platforms as well?