Daily Thoughts 4/8/2009

Portrait of Cornelis Claesz Anslo, etching by Rembrandt

Daily Thoughts 4/8/2009

I have decided to read Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick W. Taylor. It is the first text on ideas about modern efficiency. I have heard quite a few horror stories about this work and what it means to laborers and unions. I would like to see what it says. I am going to read this book online as an etext because there is only one copy of this book in our library system and it is currently checked out. This is one of the reasons places like Project Gutenberg and other sites for free online books are so useful. The book is on longer under copyright. http://www.eldritchpress.org/fwt/taylor.html

This morning, I was reading some more of On The Road, The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac on the subway and came across one of those sentences that comes out as a strong theme in this novel, " At the end of the American road is a man and a woman making love in a hotel room." I also learned that Potchky a dog owned by Lucien Carr chewed up the last few pages of the ending. They present a possible ending, but it not quite the same as the rest of the book. This is one of the deep ironies of this book.

We had a reference meeting today where we discussed different books. One of my colleagues discussed Benet's Readers Encyclopedia which is excellent and well written. I talked about Wikimedia Commons which is Wikipedia's media collection. The Deutsche Fothothek uploaded 250,000 images under creative commons to Wikimedia on March 31, 2009. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deutsche_Fotothek I find Wikimedia Commons to be a tremendous resource for images.

We hung up a huge marigold colored poster for Earth Celebration Week in the lobby of the library. It is four feet by eight feet and really stands out. I also put out a bunch of flyers near the circulation desk for the city on Earth Celebration Week. We will a place for neighborhood groups to sign up. The committee meeting was today as well.

They finished processing We The Media Grassroots Journalism By The People For The People by Dan Gilmor and Step by Step Microsoft Office Publisher 2007 by Joyce Cox and Joan Preppernau. I am going to have a long weekend starting tomorrow. I will have a few things to read.

Daily Thoughts

Illustration to American popular song "Beautiful dreamer"by Currier and Ives (between 1856 and 1907).

Daily Thoughts

On the way home, I read How to Manage an Effective Nonprofit Organization by Michael A. Sand. I am kind of neutral about this book. It serves a specific purpose which makes it hard to review. It is a series of checklists of what you need to do to effectively run a nonprofit. The lists seem accurate and to the point, but they are not that interesting. Still, the book is very practical in a sort of this is what needs to be done kind of way. It would be a good book to check to see if you are missing any specific activity in managing an effective nonprofot organization.

This morning, I started reading Halo, The Cole Protocol by Tobias Buckell. It is on the Locus bestseller list for paperbacks. The book starts out with lots of action. On the way home, I finished about half of the novel. It is a solidly entertaining serial science fiction novel. Not spectacular.

This is clearly written for those people who play the video game. Most of the references are to things which happen in the video game. The author clearly tries to follow the video games storyline. Tobias Buckell has clearly played the game. It is a good first series novel set in a serial setting like Star Trek. I think he still has to work out what makes people excited about the formula in the video game.

I am sure that he will write more books in the Halo universe. This book is clearly selling well. I think a second one will be better. I expect him to write another one. I will read it. This is light quick escapism. It is fluff which takes your mind off everyday worries.

I also went on Wikimedia to look for images of Abraham Lincoln which I could print out for my display. Wikimedia is one of my favorite sources for public domain images. I found a picture of Abraham Lincoln reading with his son Tad and a painting of Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation so far. The lady who is donating the book, The Cosgrove Report a mystery about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is coming at 3:00 p.m. this afternoon. I also have selected several books on Abrahm Lincoln to display. It is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birthday on February 12. It is also the bicentennial of Darwin's birthday as well.

I spoke to the lady about the display and summarized J.G.A. O'Toole's biography on a single sheet of paper and put it in the display. She wants to do another display about animals in the library. I have to think about how this might be done.

I also spent a bit of time weeding the reference books. I have to weed and shift the 100s, 200s, and 300 dewey number sections in reference right now. It was a surprise project.

Six Hours Past Thursday by Jack Payne came in for me to read through interlibrary loan. I am looking forward to reading the book.

Thoughts for the Day, Various Web Tools

I have started reading Oil by Upton Sinclair. The writing is very dense with a lot to say about industry, labor, and human motives. It will take me a considerable amount of time to read this book. At least four or five days. The writing has real substance to it. It is about as dense as Dostoevsky in its writing style. I am surprised that they were able to make this book into a movie. It does not seem to be very cinematic at all. There is a lot of internal dialogue by the characters in the book.

This almost seems to have nothing to do with anything at all. I keep track of many of the websites and webtools that I use on a personal web index. I have been using http://www.backflip.com/ for many years to store links to sites of interest.

I am going to suggest a few web tools and search engines which I like to use a lot. The first is a downloadable search utility called Webferret, it has been around for many years. If I am going to do any really serious web searching, it is a utility which I add to my desktop.
http://www.webferret.com/more/ Some people like Copernic better which has both a free and a pay utility.

If I want to search for free databases on the web on specific subjects, I will turn to Completeplanet. This is useful for searching for information directories and searchable lists.
It has indexed over 70,000 sites with specialty database search tools inside them.
http://www.completeplanet.com/

If you want to search for a person by either phone number or email address, one of the best search engines for locating people on the web is Yahoo People Search:
http://people.yahoo.com/

Similarly if you are looking for executive information and want an easy biographical search engine to use there is:
http://www.zoominfo.com/


If you are looking for an excellent focused metasearch engine which gives a very short list of results, Mamma is quite good because of the limited results it gives.
http://www.mamma.com/

My favorite place to look for public domain or creative commons images is Wikimedia.org
http://www.wikimedia.org/


I just felt like suggesting a few web tools that researchers often use who have some specialty skills on the internet. These tools have all been useful to me at some point in my career. This is far from comprehensive.

Anyways, the last few days have been very busy. I am on jury duty which is tedious and difficult at times. I went to a really bad restaurant at noon with Americanized Italian food. I'll remember to bring my lunch tomorrow. Sitting in court has been very revealing, but I can't really talk about it too much.

I am not going to work which is kind of interesting. It really breaks up my day very differently.

Elizabeth Moon and Some More Random Thoughts.

I am about halfway through Moon Flights by Elizabeth Moon, a short story collection. I enjoyed reading her earlier science fiction and fantasy. Both the Deeds of Paksenarion series, and the Vatta's War series are very good. There is a short story called Say Cheese which is set in the Vatta's war setting. This collection is a mix of swords and sorcery and military science fiction. So far, I've liked "Fools Gold" about a miser turned into a dragon, and "Politics" which is about the politics of a group of marines in the future. There are fifteen stories and an introduction by Anne McCaffrey who she has collaborated with.

I've finished adding images to each of my posts. These are all public domain images with their copyrights removed or just in the public domain because of age. I got most of them from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page .

It is fun to look through this site, there are a lot of very interesting images. Most of the images aren't particularly modern, but they are free and in my mind free is good. They are good for things like bookmarks, newsletter headers, and other minor items.

I haven't found any new places to post my site. I might go through and look at my keywords again to see how they might be improved. I am working a little bit each day on making this site better.

I just went and added a listing for Book Calendar to the social network site http://www.technorati.com/