Category Archives: Uncategorized

Remembering John Lennon

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John Lennon would be 72 today if he were still celebrating birthdays. I was 6 when he died. I don’t have any great story or specific memory about where I was when I heard that he died. I’m not sure I knew. My family isn’t big on talking about death.

I do know that I was already familiar with Lennon’s music by the time I was 6. I don’t carry around many childhood memories, but one of my earliest and most specific memories is driving through Cincinnati with Rocky Raccoon playing on the radio. That and Elton John’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”.

I would have heard the Beatles more often because my dad listened to them some, but he wasn’t a heavy fan. My lifelong fascination with the Fab Four didn’t officially begin until I was 14. That’s when my friend, Chris Larson, gave me a cassette dub he had made of the White Album. This was my first chance to really obsess over the Beatles and listen to the songs over and over and over again. I listened to White Album maybe a thousand times that year and it changed me. It made me better.

Everything I came to discover about the Beatles, music and art in general started with that cassette tape. The White Album is a weird mix of songs that don’t quite hang together, a quilt of  30 oddly made pieces that are perfectly complete and individual in their own way yet which somehow belong together in a way that can be felt but not explained. The White Album offers some of the best and worst the Beatles had to give. The best of the best came from John: “Dear Prudence”, “Happiness is a Warm Gun”, “I Will”, “Julia”, “Yer Blues”, “Helter Skelter”, and “Revolution 1”. All of these songs had heavy mix from the other Beatles, but they each felt like direct gifts from John.

I should also note that the White Album gave me two of my most favorite songs of all time: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Long, Long, Long”. Both of these are George Harrison tracks and deserve their own post.

So here’s what I love about the Beatles. John, Paul and George were each geniuses in their own right. Each had a latent gift that the world needed. The thing is, the world would have never gotten the gift of that genius without the presence of the other Beatles. John had a brilliant, keen mind, an acerbic wit and and poet’s heart. Those gifts would not have been expressed if he hadn’t met Paul and George at the right time and started playing around. He would have been in jail or a baker or a sailor like his dad.

A hundred unlikely events occurred to allow the Beatles to happen. John Lennon was open to those events. He was ready for them. Before John Lennon made history, history made John Lennon. He always moved toward the unexpected and never stopped inventing himself up to the day he died. I admire that: brave, relentless, restless, a bit of pain in the ass and always ready to become something new. The Beatles never grew stale. They tore themselves apart, but they never grew stale. That was John’s energy that kept them moving forward, always exploring, never resting, never getting comfortable until the machine wore itself out and it was time to do something else.

John was 40 when he died. I’m 38. Hard to fathom how quick and deep his mark went. I am grateful.

Reading provides mental oxygen

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Science fiction author William Gibson on how reading science fiction enriched his life:

Things might be different, science fiction told me, and different in literally any way you could imagine, however radical. Simply to know that people who thought that way existed was a game changer for me. Being able to directly access their minds, as a reader, was like discovering an abundant, perpetually replenished, and freely available source of mental oxygen.

Two new posts

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Nothing to post here tonight. Instead, I’ve been busy with posts to TBR Mobile Libraries blog and also Roane State’s Ed Tech blog. Take a look:

Pointless Personal Data

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This post isn’t about email. I’ve pretty much exhausted that topic for the moment and have completely ruined my reputation on campus as someone who is responsive and ready to help at the drop of an email. People have started emailing me to apologize for emailing me. Mission accomplished. That whole thread was more of a window into my soul than I expected. there’s one thing I didn’t mention. While writing those posts, I kept a spreadsheet of how many emails I sent and received from my work email account each day.

So, here’s another fun fact about me: I compulsively track pointless data about my daily life and habits.

Music

I keep track of how often I have listened to every song in my iTunes library. I keep a spreadsheet listing the Top 15 songs played since 2006. The sheet is updated on the first day of every month. The top track (150 plays) is “Ruby Blue” by Roisin Murphy. “Ruby Blue” has been my most listened to track since January 2012 when it replaced Radiohead’s “Street Spirit” (112 plays).

I am on a mission to rate every song in my iTunes. This is an important project because it allows me to make the most of smart playlists. (Note: I’ll need to write an entirely separate post on smart playlists).

My monthly spreadsheet also includes my progress with this project. Of the 12,127 songs currently in my iTunes, 2328 are currently unrated. That’s 19.2%. I’ve been tracking this since June 2011. I figure I’ll be finished by this time next year.

To make my rating easier, I keep several smart playlists of unrated songs (alpha by album, alpha by song, jazz alpha by album, jazz alpha by song, classical alpha by album). Shocker: my monthly spreadsheet lists my progress by album and also by song. (By album: Lennon (Disc 2) by John Lennon; by song: Marble Halls by Enya). (Note: Enya is a yawn and this particular song will probably be a two star. My rating system is another entirely separate post for later.)

This isn’t as much work as it sounds. I don’t spend lots of time doing this, and it makes me happy. I don’t know why. I use to automate the process of tracking play frequencies by scrobbling my iTunes to Last.fm. They give lots of good data about frequency of plays segmented by week, month and year with a sub-sort by artist. Lots of fun until I noticed that the Last.fm database couldn’t disambiguate songs with the same title. I was listening to lots of Yo-Yo Ma and getting crazy high counts for Allemande and Courante which isn’t really a unique song title. Last.fm was collapsing every play for a song by that name into one entry. Major problem since each title occurs at least 7 times in my iTunes and each is a different song.

Books

I have kept an Access database of every book I have read since May 2005. I haven’t updated in a little while since I post everything to GoodReads now. I need to go back and update the database. It gives me a nice report of every book read sorted by author.

Workouts

I use the Run Keeper app to track my runs. This is great because it automates the collection of time, distance, pace and calories burned.

Calories and Weight

I use the Live Strong app to keep track of daily calorie intake and also track my weekly weight gains/losses. Super easy to use because it is backed by a database populated with common, name-brand foods with authenticated calorie values pre-entered. That’s all I’m going to say about that for right now.

Anyway, you get the point. I like to count things. I like to put things in a spreadsheet and keep track of them. I can’t say this makes me a better, more effective person. I also can’t tell you exactly why I’m doing this and what the specific appeal is for me.

Please tell me somebody else out there is a complete nut job about keeping track of the pointless, quantifiable minutia of everyday life. This blog is called Ubiquitous. Quotidian for a reason. File this one under Quotidian.

TBRmLibraries blog post: “If you welcome people into your library, you’ve got to welcome their stuff”

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My most recent blog post to TBRmLibraries is about Joan Frye Williams’ observations on adapting to change in our libraries by keeping two priorities clear: hospitality and convenience.

Where I Get New Music

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This is going to be one of those posts where I gush a bit about how much I love my iPad and how it makes me better, faster and smarter. Actually, I just want to post a quick word about two of my most favorite iOS apps: Aweditorium and Vodio.  Both have become my go-to apps to discover new music.

Aweditorium is a simple, straightforward indie music discovery app. The display is set up as an image grid. Each box is a interesting photo of a band I’ve never heard of. You tap somewhere on the screen and start listening. It’s a bit like Pop-Up Video on VH1. While the song is playing, factoid bubbles pop up with random info about the band, their sound and new projects. You can favorite the tracks you like and share to Facebook and Twitter. I tweet mine so I can have an iTunes shopping list outside the app. Hope this doesn’t get on people’s nerves.

Vodio is a more recent discovery. It is basically a curated collection of videos that I am likely to enjoy based on my Google, Facebook and Twitter feed profiles. Pretty much like Zite for video. Vodio offers more than just music — news, comedy, politics, tech updates. I pretty much just go in for the music. It is a good way to see the stuff I’m not watching on YouTube because I hate browsing video on YouTube. Like Zite, Vodio seems to get smarter about my tastes as I rate videos (thumbs up, thumbs down) along the way. Found this video by First Aid Kit on Vodio. Love it. Also discovered Die Antwoord on Vodio. Not sure I’m an actual fan but they get in my head and require listening.

There’s lots of other ways to find new music: podcasts; social radio stations; Pandora, Last.fm. I’ve got my ears wide open. Where do you find your new music?

Less perfect. More effective.

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I struggle, sometimes mightily, with the urge to make the work I do a certain way. I have come to recognize when this is happening by the list of “great ideas” that never seem to get born.

Yesterday, I published two video introductions of myself to the online political science classes I am helping as a course embedded librarian. The perfectionist in me wanted to learn Camtasia, hire out a studio director, and rent a sound stage for the production. But time is even scarcer than money. I had a 10 minute window to get this done and then had to move on.

I recorded my first 3 1/2 minute video in one take. Watching it I realized that I make a dozen unfortunate faces and say “uhhh” or “ummm” over 50 times.

What to do? I published.

I needed those students to see my face and hear my voice so they could relate to the email I sent with all the information about how the library was going to help them succeed.

And rather than apologize in advance for what the video was not, I am offering a small prize to the first student who successfully counts the number of “uhhh” and “ummms”.

A watched video is far better than an unwatched video, even if imperfect.

The future started 15 years ago. It’s time to stop being afraid.

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Just had to share this little gem from Tara Barseghian’s MindShift blog post “How Do We Prepare Our Children for What’s Next?”:

We’re 15 years into something so paradigm-changing that we have not yet adjusted our institutions of learning, work, social life, and economic life to account for the massive change. Fifteen years in is when people tend to start thinking about technological change in less fearful and more practical ways. They give up their nostalgia for the “before” and then start to focus on now, on how we can make the tools and resources available to them as productive as possible.

In other words, we are right on time to give up techno-phobia and to tackle the problems and opportunities of the digital world with good sense, pragmatics, realism, and purpose. Once we absorb the realization that we’ve already changed, and that we’re actually doing pretty well despite major realignments in our lives, then we can think about how we want to take this amazing new tool and use it in a way that better serves our lives. Being afraid is never useful. It’s time to survey our lives and figure out what works, what doesn’t, and how we can make real and practical improvements in our schools, our workplace, our every day lives.

This passage recalls me to my original intent in writing Ubiquitous. Quotidian. We are already living in the future for which we have spent so much time waiting. It snuck up on us. I’ll see if I can keep myself away from the Big Thoughts and simply document the simple, unobtrusive ways in which my daily life is shaped, both for the good and bad, by continual, reliable and portable access to the Internet.

Sir Ken Robinson on creativity in higher ed

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Years from now, I expect to look back on my career as a teacher librarian and remember the morning I heard Sir Ken Robinson at the SACS annual meeting talk about creativity in higher Ed. I expect to remember the morning as one of the moments when I understood very clearly that we can teach more effectively and efficiently by focusing our energies toward helping students create their own connections with their own learning. This will also be the morning I finally lost my patience for administrators and politicians who work against a culture of creative teaching and learning. There is too much at stake. We are running out of time.

I’m on the move for now. More on this later.

For now, two offerings:

My rough notes from Sir Ken’s presentation are here.

A quote from H.G. Wells:

Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe

Paging Dr. Jung. Is Dr. Jung in the house?

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This morning I woke up from a dream in which I was crawling between two enormous rocks. The crevice between them was just barely big enough for me to squeeze through.

At the end of the crevice stood a tall tree. Once through the rocks, there was no where for me to go but up. So I climb the impossibly tall tree until I found myself stranded on the highest, most precarious branch with no good way down.

If you listen, your dreams can tell you a lot. Mine are not usually quite so straightforwardly metaphorical.