Oliver went off to pre-school this morning for the first time. At the Holland College Child Development Center. By lucky happenstance, the daughter of our friend Lowell (Oliver’s middlenamesake) is taking Early Childhood Education at Holland College, and so will be in and around Oliver and his peers a lot this year.

Catherine reports that Oliver ran all the way to school this morning, and didn’t bat an eye when she left. I take this simply as a determined effort on his part to rebel against my own anti-schooling feelings. No doubt he will start wearing a tie soon, and will insist on eating porterhouse steaks for dinner.

Beyond the usual “our little boy is growing up” sorrows (and their equal and opposite “our little boy is growing up!” excitements) this event has inspired, it’s personally daunting for me for an additional reason: my own first memories are of going to nursery school. I don’t remember nursery school clearly, but I certainly have strong impressions of the room and the routine and the people. It’s when my memory of life begins.

During the early years of Oliver’s life it was possible to console myself about my defects as a parent with the knowledge that his memory, at least his conscious memory, wasn’t compiling yet. If his experience mirrors my own, though, the “record” button has now been pressed. There are no do-overs left. And my performance as a parent will now officially become part of the record that will later be recalled over thanksgiving dinners when Oliver is 22 and wondering why he ended up the way he did.

Even as I type this, I can picture the grins of glee on my own parents faces as they read this. Turnabout is fair play.

Thanks to Adam Curry for plugging Live From the Formosa Tea House in Thursday’s Daily Source Code [MP3].

Happiness is being able to fully embrace your dorkitude, and just run with it. Witness this, pictured here:

With real buzzers, no less.

Recalling that the Internet is sometimes called the world wide web makes the concept of spidering make somewhat more sense.

Search engines like Google, Feedster and Altavista — basically any web application that needs to grab a snapshot of the entire Internet so that it can be searched, indexed or otherwise sliced and diced — generally develop this snapshot using automated web browsing computer programs that start at one web page, collect all the links on that page and visit each of them in turn, collect all the links on those pages, and so on and so on and so on.

This process, because it is conceptually like “walking throught the web” is called spidering or crawling.

Earlier today, Steven posted on his blog:

Notice that there are four hyperlinks back to this site (I’ve highlighted each link in a red box). When Technorati spidered Steven’s site, the result, in my Technorati Cosmos is four links:

In their FAQ, Technorati defines an inbound link:

In a blog or on a webpage, the term inbound links refers to the hyperlinks pointing to that page or blog entry.

On one level, then, because there are four hyperlinks in Steven’s post, it makes sense that it would appear four times in my Cosmos. It would be handy, however, to have this boiled down to one link, which is what it really is.

Presumably this would be possible simply by counting a link only once per blog post.

Is it?

A regular user, with no familiarity with RSS, clicks on an an RSS or XML icon on a website: depending on their browser, they’ll see something that more or less looks like XML, which they will find confusing. Since we added RSS feeds to Almanac.com, we’ve received some feedback that confirms this confusion.

Using a style sheet to style the RSS feed helps to mitigate this. I’ve set this up for the RSS feeds here, like this one.

Thanks to Adal Chiriliuc for the pointers to the right places. Proof again that the Romanians are ahead of the pack.

Nathan reveals that the CBC has switched to Windows Media to deliver audio (CBC FAQ here).

I echo Nathan’s concerns.

Part of the problem with dipping your toe lightly in as many waters as I do (which is another way of saying “part of the problem with being so scatterbrained” or, as Steven would say it, “part of the problem with not really being for anything”) is that it’s hard to participate with any authority in the post-game analysis.

I’m not a librarian. I am the spawn of a librarian, some of my best friends are librarians, I admire librarians, sometimes librarians even invite me to come and speak to them; but as an aversion to calculus kept me out of the space program, an aversion to ontology kept me out of library school.

As such, I really shouldn’t wade into the how come our OPAC vendors are such dorks debate. But I will. Partly because it was this that apparently started it all. Partly because I’m a software vendor myself. And partly because I’ve watched the duelling between librarians and OPAC vendors, from the distant sidelines, ever since my mother became a technical services librarian back in the 1980s.

To summarize my thoughts: hey, librarians, it’s your own damn fault.

When you outsource the administration of your data to someone else (whether it’s an OPAC vendor or a university computing department or some guy down the street), you’re also outsourcing any chance you have at retaining ultimate control over that data.

When you buy a “one size fits all” technology solution — an OPAC that’s designed for, say, “any public library” — you’re buying a commodity, not a solution.

And you should expect to be treated as an insignificant cog by your vendor: that’s what you are. By absolving yourself of personal responsibility over your data management in the first place, you’ve already said “we don’t care enough about this to do it ourselves, so you take care of it for us.” Is it any wonder they treat you like they do?

Add to all of this that the prevailing wisdom in the old-line software world is that moves towards openness are to be best avoided lest users gain too much control, and is it any wonder that your vendors don’t let you export data as RSS: if they did that, then you might start doing interesting things with the data, and start to realize that you don’t need them as much as you thought you did.

You might say “but librarians shouldn’t have to become programmers!” And you might be wrong. In the olden days, being a computer programmer meant a much different thing than it does now, and you truly couldn’t be both a programmer and a [good] librarian because computers back then were more like coal-fired boilers that needed specialized practitioners to maintain.

These days we have the Internet, open source, scripting languages, UNIX everywhere: combined together these tools allow an informed person with an organized mind to create wonderful, powerful applications, customized to their own needs. Get those informed people with organized minds working together, and you’ve got a technology force to be reckoned with.

As librarians, you already have all the basic intellectual building blocks to take over the technology blast furnaces yourselves: you understand how information is organized, you understand the value of interoperability, you understand (intimately) the value of thrift and economy, and, what’s more, you’re already organized into associations that could become the sort home base that collaborative technology efforts can profit from.

Jenny says that “It’s crazy to see users writing code to compensate for a lack of services from library OPACs.” and “It’s true libraries have limited resources, but they already have a vendor for their catalog, and that vendor should be the one leading the way.” I would suggest a different tack: take the little scripts that I created not as a call to berate your vendors, but as a demonstration that it’s really really easy to take control yourself using free, open, public resources that already exist. Don’t berate your vendors, replace them.

If a scatterbrained non-librarian like me can string together 117 lines of Perl code to make an RSS feed of the books I have checked out of the library, just think of what a organized technology strikeforce of frustrated librarians could do! Vendors wouldn’t stand a chance.

Listening to Adam Curry’s Source Code this morning, and hearing him describe the role of the “drive time” slot in the radio world: it’s valuable because it’s the time of the day when people who are commuting have nothing better to do than sit in their cars listen to the radio.

Hearing this, I realized why I’m not consuming as much audio as I’d like: I have no drivetime.

Most days I either walk to work (where wearing an iPod seems both antisocial, and counter-productive because the audio of the street is interesting too) or I ride my bike (where wearing an iPod would simply be dangerous). My long car trips are limited to the three or four times a summer that I drive out to Park Corner for Land Trust meetings, and the once or twice a year we drive to Halifax or Moncton.

I could listen at home, instead of watching television (do I really need to watch more episodes of Seinfeld?), but I find it odd to just sit there and listen. Perhaps I need a hobby. Or perhaps I should wash the dishes or clean up the kitchen. Or exercise. As it is, my attention is fully occupied almost all of the time. Maybe that’s not such a good thing.

I saw Before Sunset last night and really, really liked it. The dialogue was a little forced at times, especially Julie Delpy’s, but that might just be an inevtiable feature of a movie that consists entirely of one conversation shot with a series of long tracking shots (and also because Ethan Hawke — and I can’t believe I’m writing this — is arguably the better actor of the pair). Hawke and Delpy are a little younger than me, but we’re clearly all of the same generation; a lot of the film’s appeal to me extended from the same sort of “hey, that’s us!” feeling that people one or two generations up the line felt when they watched The Big Chill. I don’t have a confining loveless marriage, but there are certainly times I’d like to run away to Paris.

Before I went to bed I tuned in to Hardball on MSNBC. I don’t know why, but I used to find the program almost unwatchable, and now I’m completely compelled by it. I used to find Chris Matthews brash and bombastic; I now find him delightful and bombastic. In any case, last night’s interview with bombastic turncoat Senator Zell Miller was amazing television; here’s Matthews blogging about the interview (there’s a link to a video of the internew on that page, but it’s only viewable in Internet Explorer).