Happy anniversary, Beth and Bryan!

Part of the reason this blog has been neglected for the last couple weeks is that last weekend I was off in Nevada helping my sister and brother-in-law get hitched. I knew it would go by fast, but I underestimated the power of the wedding timewarp to make a day pass in five minutes.


Here are just a few of my favorite moments from their weekend:

• Finally meeting my adorable, almost-4 step-niece, whose demand of "read to me, Meg!" within an hour of our meeting totally cemented her place in my affections. Later in the weekend, she was showing off a picture of herself going to the library, and I asked her if she knew I worked in a library. "Yep!" was her reply. I don't think she really did--"yep!" and "sure!" were frequent answers from her--but it cracked me up.
• Nothing to do with the wedding, but getting another chance on Guitar Hero was fun. Suffice to say, it went much better this time. I got to rock out with "Anarchy in the UK" before I left, and I'm just starting to get out of withdrawal.
  
• After the rehearsal dinner, we took Beth for a nightcap/her last single drinks out at The Artisan, a neat off-the-strip, non-casino hotel, which was decorated with bookshelves, candles, and fine art reproductions scattered across walls and ceiling. Really great atmosphere.
• The ceremony went by in a beautiful blur. My only regret is that I didn't have more time to just sit and enjoy the Baroque music ensemble as they played before the ceremony.
  
• Beth and Dad's "surprise" father-daughter dance. Somewhat inspired by this one, but Beth couldn't get Bryan to participate in such an exhibition. Instead, she and Dad started off slow dancing to "It's a Wonderful World" then segued into "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" from the Blues Brothers soundtrack--complete with sunglasses and lipsyncing the announcement. They rocked. As it started, Bryan was pre-occupied with trying to find something. I grabbed his arm and told him to pay attention a bunch of times. He must have thought I was crazy, but his expression when the surprise happened was fun to witness.
• Being able to officially call Bryan bro, which I've been doing unofficially for the last few months. Having a brother is still a novelty, since it was just Beth and me growing up. I'm looking forward to many occasions of ganging up on Beth to tease her about whatever. :)
  
• FINALLY turning over to them their wedding afghan, a project that took me about ten months to complete. It will be a long time before I knit anyone else an afghan, but it's awfully satisfying to have done it.

Happy one-week anniversary, Beth and Bryan! I am so proud of you both, and I know it will be the first of many, many observances.

Beautiful librarians

In case anyone doubts that librarians are a beautiful bunch of people in addition to being smart, helpful, passionate, etc., check out Cindi Trainor's set of portraits and other pictures from Computers in Libraries 2008. The light she captures and the way she focuses are just amazing.

I'm going to make sure to get to a conference with her someday! :)

New social networking article

The Social Networking Titans: Facebook and MySpace, the second installment of the column about social networking sites that I co-author with Debbie Ginsberg, has been published at LLRX:

With this article, librarians Deborah Ginsberg and Meg Kribble raise awareness about the different features provided by these services, and their respective impact on students, lawyers, public users, fellow professionals, and other patrons.

In addition, I was surprised to find our law library’s Facebook page featured on the cover and in the feature article of this month’s AALL Spectrum. The article by Jennifer Behrens is a great overview of the Pages feature on Facebook.

Subway violin study wins Pulitzer!

One of my favorite news stories of the past year, Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten's examination of what would (and did) happen if violin virtuoso Joshua Bell performed in a Washington Metro station, has won a Pulitzer prize! Very cool.

Read the original story with its integrated videos so you can see what happened illustrated.

Listen to yesterday's All Things Considered interview with Weingartner.

SXSWi Day One - Book Reading: High Performance Web Sites

Panel blurb: Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines. The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process.

Panelist: Steve Souders, formerly Chief Performance Yahoo!, now at Google
A slower version of Souders's presentation that incorporates his slides is available at Yahoo! Developer Network Theater. A complete list of the rules and short explanations are also available at the Yahoo! Developer Network.
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Ahhh, yes. My second SXSW panel, and it was mostly over my head. I thought that was great. Yep, I'm at a technology conference. My notes are quite short for this one:

• Souder's book contains 14 best practices for speeding up webpages
• Speed matters
  
• Bug checking tools: Firebug and YSlow (YSlow was originally developed in-house for Yahoo, and is now also available as a Mozilla add-on.
• Keep scripts as far down as possible on pages, and put style sheets above scripts - MySpace pages break these rules [no surprise there!]
  
• Stuff about caching
• Focus on front-end
  
• Two quick fixes: add expires headers and use Gzip components
  

The book reading sessions were fast-paced half-hour segments that took place in the day stage, a room that had both a traditional audience set-up and scattered tables and chairs. There was a small cafeteria line set up in one corner, where I incidentally got the best food I've ever had at a convention center: a (non-Taco Bell) taco. It was a convenient and comfortable place to casually drop in, get a snack, and check email while listening to snippets of interesting content. I popped into a couple others, but this is the only one I took notes on.

SXSWi Day One - Rome, Sweet Rome: Ancient Lessons in Design

Panel blurb: Vitruvius, the first Roman Architect to write about architecture, asserted that any well-designed building must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas or be durable, useful and beautiful. Can these same three tenets be applied today to help us design better interactions in a digital environment? This presentation will first touch on the similarities between designing buildings and designing digital interactions. Then, there will be an introduction to Vitruvius and his book, De Architectura. In his book Vitruvius writes about this notion of a well-designed building being durable, useful and beautiful. Those three qualities will first be looked at in their historical context, but then will be examined to see how they translate into the contemporary context of interaction design.

Panelist: Jennifer Fraser, Lead User Experience Designer, Corel Corporation (Fraser has degrees in building architecture)
Presentation slides are available at SlideShare.
[edited to add] Presentation audio

Notes:

• Interaction design is a profession in its infancy
• Vitruvius was a theorist, not practitioner - we only know of one building he designed plus his treatise De Architectura consisting of ten books
• Trivia: Leonardo's famous Vitruvian Man drawing is called that because it is based on Vitruvius's principles of ideal human proportions [I'd always assumed the proportions were original to Leonardo]
• Three design qualities: durability, convenience, beauty
• An example of what we might start with when approaching a project: the Winchester House
• Various foundations for different designers: OS, browsers, Facebook apps, mobile devices, etc. If not carefully built, project/product turns into house of cards
• Importance of failing gracefully. Examples: Twitter's 404 page and error pages, Firefox's "restore session" feature when restarting after crashes
• Not so great: MS asking you to send crash data
  
• No south-facing libraries in ancient Rome because of damp south winds
  
• Rooms = webpages
• Matching is important - don't mix Doric and Ionic features
• Adhere to established vocabularies and conventions, or at least be aware of them
• Good: MS Office 2007 minibar that shows up just when you need it and fades away after a moment
  
• Modern interpretations of Vitruvius's three design qualities: usable, useful, desirable
  
• Fraser used an equilateral triangle with points B, C, and D (for beauty, convenience, and durability) to illustrate. The aspiration is to be in the middle (in most cases--some products/projects will vary). Try to figure out where your project is in the triangle. There will be tension and pull between internal and external stakeholders.
• It is terrifying what people will do with products!

Thoughts:
Fraser's session was mainly theoretical and abstract, but managed to be practical at the same time. She said that she had been curious how traditional building architecture principles could be applied to interaction architecture design, and chose Vitruvius after considering several others.

Fraser's content was fantastic, but I wish she hadn't tied herself so closely to the prepared text. She made nice use of humor, but I'm not sure how much of the audience caught it in her delivery. That said, presenting solo to a SXSW crowd is an act of bravery I'm not sure I'd be up for.

Photo © Luc Viatour GFDL/CC

For my fellow introverts

If you dread networking as much as I (mostly) used to, check out this Allison Wolf's great article Networking for Introverts at SLAW.

Ironically, now that I'm more comfortable with it, one of the hardest items for me is number 2 on Wolf's top ten list of tips at the end: making sure to have business cards! I always forget to pack extra when I travel, so I just put enough in my purse that I'll be forced to remember to take them out and hide them in my travel bags.

Announcement: Bloggers Get Together at AALL

Passing along this message from DALL blogger Barbara Fullerton:

It's time to mark your calendars for the AALL's Third Annual Bloggers Get Together!

Time: 5-6 p.m.
Date: Sunday, July 13th
Place: TBA
Guest Speaker: TBA (we are inviting bloggers from the Portland area)

Come share your ideas and meet the other law librarian bloggers! Open to all bloggers and potential bloggers.

RSVP: Last year we had over 35 participants so we are anticipating a good crowd this year. For a headcount, please RSVP Barbara Fullerton by Tuesday, July 1st to bfullerton@10kwizard.com.

Special Thanks to Laura Orr, Law Librarian at Washington County Law Library, for helping in organizing this event!

Barbara Fullerton
DALL Blogger

And three fun sci-fi links

Three things I've been intending to link/post relating to my three favorite sci-fi series:

1. Wired reports that Caren Golden Fine Art in New York City is hosting an exhibit of crafty Star Trek art:
   

   Mirror Universe, [Devorah] Sperber's show that opens March 20 at Caren Golden Fine Art in New York, consists of crafty Trek imagery pieced together out of beads and spools of thread. The show's title is an allusion to the 1967 Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror," in which the Enterprise crew is swapped with evil doppelgängers, but it also refers to the way viewers are supposed to look at the exhibit's art -- via reflective materials.
   

2. Three lucky bloggers at Concurring Opinions interviewed Ron Moore and David Eick about legal, moral, political, and religious aspects (and more!) of their brilliant re-imagination of Battlestar Galactica. Though I haven't yet had a chance to listening to the whole recording, the beginning sounds excellent.
   
   If you don't watch BSG, but enjoyed the Klingon story arc in Star Trek: the Next Generation, the ST: TNG finale, and/or much of Deep Space 9, Moore was responsible for all of those, and you should be watching BSG too.
   


3. Finally, what if Star Wars had been made in the 60s and had an opening credits sequence designed by Saul Bass?
   
   See also the "special edition" version.

Catching up is hard to do

Now that I'm back from Austin, done with arranging and hosting the amazing Sabrina Pacifici's visit to SFALL, and done with the joint faculty-library presentation panel that I wasn't sure I'd be able to prep for with the other two things going on, I can catch up. Or at least that's my ambition.

Over the long weekend, I'm planning to post my raw notes from the SXSWi panels I attended--if I can read the chicken scratch my writing turned into on the small notepad. Yes, my notes, save for the one panel by which I'd lost my writing utensils, are analog. I confess though I popped it open from time to time, I found using the laptop too distracting. No laptop in the classroom for me, though I found that knitting through most sessions--the most extensively I have done this--definitely kept the fidgety portion of my brain occupied and helped focus my attention.

Last week I was welcomed as a contributor to Out of the Jungle, a blog that I respect and admire, and am excited and honored to join. I will likely post more coherent and discussion-inducing (I hope) thoughts from some of the panels there. My ulterior motive, of course, is to lure more law librarians to attend next year's SXSW.