I wanted to leave the following comment on an article about MillerCoors moving its headquarters to Chicago:
"Well, it's not the best but what the hell, reason enough to order another MGD for me."
Unfortunately, the word 'hell' appears to be too hot for the prudes over at the Chicago Sun-Times since I got the following error (in red no less):
"Please edit or remove the following word(s), then resubmit your content: hell."
We've come a long way from the days of 'you must learn our system in order to use it'. From the Usability Guidelines at Yale University Library:
| Factor | Examples |
| Simplicity. Scale back features and dramatically simplify the experience for initial use. This should reduce unnecessary distractions, excess information, from initial screens. An initial search screen should not include advanced features, such as search by publisher or call number. | Avoid wordiness -- only show most necessary text, be concise. |
| Initial page should include only the most important and common tasks for this service with unobtrusive links to other advanced functionality. |
P.S. Remember the Yale site when the front page was one big graphic of nothing but a bunch of leather book spines?
I caught up with old pal and former Wonderful Guise Anthony Millionaire while in LA.
Currently, he's working on a tv show for Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" based on his comic strip, "Maakies".
We got a great crowd of around 20 people for our Drupal 'Birds of a Feather'. The above is a shot of everybody in the BIGWIG Bloggers' room -- just before we got kicked out by some group from YALSA (bums, we'll get even)!
(We then proceeded to the next available empty room and had our get-together there.)
First up on the agenda was setting up the Drupal IG, making sure we have enough signatures and asking for volunteers to serve as Chair and Co-Chair. For the first year, Leo Klein (i.e. me) graciously volunteered to serve as chair and Ian Chen as co-chair.
Not the best quality shot but hopefully it conveys what a great time I had at the LITA Happy Hour on Friday, June 27. I got most of the signatures for the Drupal IG plus met a bunch of great people.
[From O'Hare on my way to ALA in Anaheim:] Roy just posted Current Cites for June 2008. I wrote up an article by Erica Reynolds called "The Secret to Patron-Centered Web Design: Cheap, Easy, and Powerful Usability Techniques" which appeared in this month's Computers In Libraries. You can find the issue here...
I've been involved with so many different things that I completely forgot the one-year anniversary of LibSite.org! Shame on me.
Yes, April 10, 2007 was the historic launch of the user-generated Library Website recommendation service. I was reminded of it recently by the number of sites posted -- increasingly -- from all over the world.
Most recently, and most wonderfully, we've had a collection of interesting examples of Web 2.0 à la française.
I'd like to thank everyone who's listed their site there. The experiment continues.
A couple people from LITA have helpfully suggested that we set up a Drupal Interest Group (IG).
I think this is a great idea since, as I understand it, IG's get a slot at one of the officially sanctioned meeting rooms come convention time.
Aaron Dobbs, Mary Taylor and our friends at BIGWIG have been very supportive in allowing us to have our Drupal4Lib BoF in the Bloggers Room but by having the IG, we can do a couple of things more, including as I said, maybe getting a room of our own next time round.
In any case, all IG's have Chairs and Co-chairs. I'd be happy to offer myself up as the initial Chair. (The thing is open so basically anyone can throw their hat in the ring.) We'd also need someone(s) interested in being Co-Chair. Term is a year.
This is all something we can discuss at the BoF -- on Sunday, June 29 (3:30p-5p). All we need are 10 signatures to get the thing off the ground.
See the Info Page on LITA IGs...
P.S. for the BoF, I'm bringing this nice little projector so people can show off their sites and projects if they want.
Finally someone I know is famous!
In the 80's in crazy Kreuzberg, West Berlin, a bunch of us belonged to this good-time group called the 'Wonderful Guise'. Mark Stewart was one of the lead musicians.
Well, Mark Stewart is now up for a Tony award as "Best Musical" for his show 'Passing Strange'. According to a write-up in the Village Voice, this Bildungsroman in musical form "takes him to Amsterdam and then to Berlin, where he's indoctrinated into hardcore bohemian life."
Hardcore bohemian is was! Above is a shot from a concert we gave at the venerable SO36. Mark's on the left, followed by Enrico, Freie, Art and me. Not pictured were Marek the drummer and Anthony Millionaire (of Maakies fame) who did the costumes and sets.
UPDATE: Results are in. 'In the Heights' won out over 'Passing Strangely' for Best Musical which kind of makes sense considering the subject and location of each show. 'Passing Strangely' did get the 'Best Book' Award which is still pretty good.
Not to be too political here (I really try not to be) but I was reminded by a segment on NPR's Weekend Edition, that the original opening line of Hillary Clinton's campaign was the almost unbearable cliche:
"Let the Conversation Begin"
It's interesting to read in most analyses of her loss to Sen. Obama (here's one), that it was specifically a lack of imagination, flexibility, and attention to detail that proved her undoing.
Perhaps the two are related...
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