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).

In that small sub-section of watching televised events that concerns fantasizing about having casual sex with members of the live audience, I can confidently say, after two nights of watching the Republicans at play, that they’re not doing it for me.

Back in 1984, I did some basic genetics research on drosophila melanogaster, aka fruit fly. Mostly this involved looking at them under a microscope while they were anaesthetized with ether and breeding them in different combinations to see how various characteristics got passed down to children.

I though it was all innocent enough — they were just fruit flies. Obviously I was wrong, as this year the fruit flies have finally gotten around to exacting their revenge by reproducing in great numbers and spreading their armies throughout Charlottetown.

This summer you cannot mention the species in this city without sighs of tired resignation from all around. The fruit flies have taken over, and there doesn’t appear to be anything we can do about it.

Catherine has tried these gizmos from Lee Valley Tools. They work, but they simply can’t keep up with the exploding population.

No matter of cleaning, putting everything remotely attractive to fruit flies in the fridge or in sealed canisters, or any other maneuver we’ve taken has had any effect at all.

Much of the problem extends, no doubt, from the hundreds of these compost containers that now populate the city. Alas the Island Waste Management System has a waste video game, but no advice on their website as to how to control the raging drosophila.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac has this advice:

You may want to try trapping the flies by inserting a paper or metal funnel into the mouth of a quart jar baited with bits of overripe fruit. The flies will get into the jar, but they will not be able to get out. To decrease the number of fruit flies outdoors, promptly get rid of any “dropped” fruits or vegetables and keep all garbage cans tightly closed.

Perhaps that’s what we’ll try next.

Speaking of the Internet Archive, here’s another of their great projects: the International Children’s Digital Library.

Here’s a page from archive.org site that shows The IslandCam — the “live” online digital camera photo we put in place for the PEI Government website — seven years ago, on March 19, 1997.

The design in place for the site at that point was almost the first one. I think it holds up, albeit in a “Netscape 1.0” sort of way. Here’s the home page that was in place at that point. And what was perhaps my favourite project over the years I worked with the Province: A Bag of Rubber Hammers.

Here they are.

Even though Fiddles and Vittles closed several years back, Captain Bart’s didn’t open for the season, and the tourism world is drenched in “golf product,” there are still some classically Island tourist attractions — things that, by all rights, shouldn’t exist in a sensible universe, but that have delightfully squeaked through.

King’s Castle Provincial Park is one example: a free, giant children’s playground created and maintained by the Province of PEI.

The latest addition is the Elmira Miniature Railway, a new addition to the Elmira Railway Museum.

Leaving aside that the project cost $237,000, which seems, well, insane, the resulting little railway through the forest is wonderful: Oliver and I visited on Saturday, paid our fare, got our tickets, and had the train to ourselves as we sped through the wilds of rural Elmira. This is no carnival ride: there’s a mile of tracks through the woods, and the ride takes about 20 minutes to complete. It’s perfectly child-sized, and because this is PEI and not Orlando, there are no superfluous seatbelts or roll cages: you just sit in an open carriage and enjoy the ride.

This is one of those great times when political need — funnel money into Eastern Kings — results in a crazy hare-brained scheme that is probably doomed to fail (great as it is, I don’t see the railway as the key to the revitilization of Eastern PEI) but that also results in something that is actually a lot of fun, and will become, I think, a favourite destination for Island families.

CBC is reporting that Superior Sanitation applies for city wind turbine. Mark this day, for it’s the day that wind power reached a tipping point.