Category Archives: conference reports

California Trip — episode 2.

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Well, I got to Monterey the other day, rented a car, and drove up to Mill Valley (in Marin County) to visit my old skating buddy Dale. When I got there, Dale had grilled up some insanely good chicken, which was great as I was quite hungry. We ate, and then watched a documentary about 1980s vert skating ripper, Jason Jesse.

Saturday we both got up kind of late, had some breakfast at a local eatery, shopped for skate shoes for Dale, and then in the afternoon went for an excellent hike on one of the many trails around Dale’s neighborhood. Later in the evening we went to see the new film, “W”. The film was enjoyable, but strange. Too over the top to be serious, but not funny enough to be a comedy. But there were some really funny parts.

I know Dale would like to have gotten some skating in. I’m happy though that as old skate friends, our friendship isn’t just confined to skating. 

Got up this morning, had breakfast, and drove down to Mountain View for a freestyle session with Gary Holl and the guys from sk8kings.com. Lots of fun. I always enjoy skating with Gary, who is an amazing skater. He always gets some nice pics of me skating. Here is one below. 

Big thanks to Dale and Gary for their hospitality.

After the session I drove back down to Monterey and checked into my hotel, which is where I am right now. Looking forward to the Internet Librarian conference tomorrow.

Me, doing a 180 casper. Photo by Gary Holl.

Me, doing a 180 casper. Photo by Gary Holl.

Chillin’ at LAX

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Well, I’m on my way to Monterey, California, sitting here in the Los Angeles airport waiting for my flight up north. The tmobile internet connection here is WAAAAY faster than my shitty cable modem wifi at home.

Anyway, I have a nice 2.5 hour wait for my flight. Not much to do except surf the web. Looking forward to a fun weekend. Will take some pics as soon as there is an interesting subject. The Internet Librarian conference starts on Monday. Should be great, as always. 

Right now, I’m ready to chill with my friend Dale, have some relaxing and fun skate sessions, chill, and skate some more.

Holy cow – they’re playing the Electric Light Orchestra here in the terminal. Nice.

New project

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Quick Note: using some of the RSS stuff I learned at CIL 2008 to create some new services at work. Will report on them in more detail later, but I am using Google Reader’s sharing capability/page along with some other tools to push out information relevant to my organization.

RSS Readers: Google Reader vs. Bloglines

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I’ve had a bloglines.com account for some time now. Honestly, I haven’t used it that much, but I do think it is useful from time to time. For those who don’t know, among other things, bloglines.com allows you to aggregate posts from any site with an RSS feed, and read/link to the posted items from bloglines.com, rather than having to check lots of sites every day.  In other words, if you read lots of news sites, blogs, etc., you check one spot instead of dozens.

At the Computers In Libraries conference last week, Steven Cohen sung the praises of the Google Reader — Google’s RSS reader. Since I’ve seen him speak at several conferences and he’s never given me bad advice, I checked out Google Reader.

As usual, Steven is right. Google Reader is cool. But first, let me tell you what is STILL good about bloglines.com :

  • When you set up an account with bloglines, you are not only automatically set up to subscribe to RSS feeds, but you are also immediately able to start your own blog. Is it pretty? No. It is a simple blog, with from what I can tell no options for different themes, layouts, etc. But it is a blog, and is right there.
  • I still think bloglines has a nice page layout. It isn’t fancy, but it is functional. The majority of the page is the window in which posts are displayed — nice and wide. Looks good. Displays images from the posts.
  • When you are reading a post on bloglines, you can click a link to see who else subscribes to that feed. Nice feature for finding other interested in the same stuff. Not sure if Google Reader does this — I’ll check.

 So, what is so great about Google Reader?

  • Well, if you have gmail account you an just go right into Google Reader with no sign up.
  • You can import your subscription list from another reader. Don’t have to re-enter all your info.
  • Since it is part of the Google system, you have easy access to all the other Google tools.
  • Most important: Google Reader allows you to click a link and share items to a public page that it creates for you. For example, here’s my public page. As you will notice, there is an RSS stream for your public page, which allows other people to subscribe to it. Yes, you can create an RSS stream of what you are reading. Sort of cool.
  • There’s also a “friends” function in Google Reader. Haven’t played with it much.

As you can see, Google has included a lot of social networking tools within Reader. I think this is what bloglines was missing.  They both allow you to aggregate information for your own use, but Google Reader has added the ability to share that info with the group.

Anyway, pretty cool.

Do I want the extra functionality? Probably. Do I want to sign over more of my online activities to Google? Maybe not. Will I continue to ask questions like this and then answer them? Most definately.

Discuss…

UPDATE: I added a link to my shared matrial from Google Reader over in the sidebar, under bibliosk8 stuff.