How I Love My Spam Filter (Not)

Ah, the joys of the Spam Filter, that interesting piece of software that's supposed to make your life easier. Ours at work is slow, p-a-i-n-f-u-l-l-y slow, and I often get the "server timed out" message. So I sometimes miss a useful message.

I registered with More Things on a Stick earlier this week, and while looking at the site, was wondering if there was much activity yet. Little did I realize that with one exception, my "More Things" messages were getting caught in the spam filter. I made the mistake of looking yesterday afternoon, and have been wrestling with the filter since then to get a dozen or so messages out of there (perhaps even deleting the real spam, hmmm.) So if anyone of the More Things participants come across this blog, I have started Thing 24, but I'm not getting the messages - yet. This too shall pass, right?

This 'n' That

• Update on my Computer Woes: after taking a turn for the worse, today my computer seems better. Yesterday was a mixed bag: my second Outlook personal folder came back, Outlook slowed to the occasional crawl, and my calendar reminders refused to work - which was where I started 2 weeks ago. However, a wonderful tech has worked on my machine, and when I logged in today the Terrible .DLL Message did not come back (although Outlook was slow to load again.) I'm crossing my fingers.
• Ever since my earlier post on computer error messages, I've been saving examples for another fun-filled post. But now that I've been in DLL Hell, it's not so fun anymore. That blog posting will have to wait.
• More Things on a Stick has opened for enrollment; that's still on my to-do list. Maybe today. They recommend using Firefox to do the Things, so I have to remember this. I've gone back and forth in the browser wars over the years, but I retreated some years ago when my institution said that they only supported Things Microsoft. (Which didn't stop me from installing Firefox on my newly-leased computer this summer.)
• Web 2.0 hit our household last weekend: my husband discovered Facebook. (He did help me load a picture of myself to Facebook, which is nice. The picture I did months ago on this blog was the only digitized one I could find at the time, and it's of me and our dog.) He's still in the infatuation stage ("I have 24 friends!"), but he assures me that he'll settle down soon. I wonder...he's thinking about encouraging his mom to get on Facebook, that it might be a killer app for her. My killer app is my handheld, an antique Palm III Palm Pilot which has 3Com on its lid, bless its heart. I use it every day, and haven't migrated to the newer Palm that I was given by computer spouse some years ago because I can sync the old one at home, but not the new one.

Onward to the new week. I assume that once I get going on More Things, I'll be posting more often.

Computer Woes

I'm having a bad week. My computer has a Something. I'm not sure if it's a virus, or spyware goop, or what. Being a mere user, I am not privy to the illness that has befallen my machine. I'm told it's not even my fault, that it came through the network, and is not a result of anything I did. But it's ill. It started with my calendar, which spread to other pieces of Outlook. My preferences and personal files are gone, at least for now. I've had a wonderful tech person here several times for the past few days, and she's referred my problem to another tech. So I wait, and suffer.

It's not unlike the Bad Old Days that we tried to explain to our daughter the other day, when a child in the family was dying, and the mother wasn't told what was wrong (it might upset her, which would upset the child and delay recovery.) The child wasn't told (the child would be upset and delay recovery.) So I know there's a Something on my computer, and that I get a System32 message when I log on that ends in a .dll. We tried looking up the particular error message on the web and couldn't find it. But now I feel better knowing that Wikipedia has an entire entry on DLL Hell (DLL means "dynamic link libraries," and is a Windows thing. Learn somethin' every day, don'tcha?) Now I know where I am. DLL Hell.

Meanwhile, I've learned that More Things on a Stick is coming, starting on January 20th! I hope I get out of DLL Hell before then.

What is Presearch?

One blog I like to scan on a regular basis is Karen Schneider's Free Range Librarian. Recently she had an interesting post on her Top Ten Words and Phrases for 2008, and the one that caught my attention was "presearch":

"Presearch: the informal Google/Wikipedia look-ups students do before digging into better resources (and yes, they do that!)"

That definition hasn't hit Wikipedia yet (maybe a good thing?), but I like it. Years ago I worked with some folks at our campus Writing Center, and I remember they emphasized "prewriting," the writing that goes on as you're just getting started. It doesn't have to be perfect, and it's not unlike brainstorming on paper. I think this is an intriguing idea, and it will be interesting to see if the term/definition catch on.

Musings on Web/Library 2.0 Reluctance

Recently I received an email from a student librarian asking for my thoughts on why folks are reluctant to use Web 2.0/Library 2.0 technologies. I hadn't thought conciously on this much, but my subsconscious must have, because I was able to distill several ideas into some coherent points. Here's what I came up with, from an academic library perspective:

• A feeling that it pulls us away from what’s been important in our profession: the personal contact with patrons, diminishing the human touch.
• The thinking that our patrons aren’t there yet. I’ve heard from some colleagues that students (particularly graduate students, but not limited to them) aren’t aware of these technologies, and students want things to be as simple as possible. And many faculty aren’t there either.
• The belief that making things too simple is not good pedagogy. Research is a process, and it’s work, which isn’t necessarily easy (at least at the college level.)
• An impression that faculty make assumptions about student use of technologies, that students know more than they do; this idea is in tension with library staff perceiving that students know less than they used to, and/or have more to deal with than they used to.
• It’s a fad, another “trend” that will be replaced with something else.
• Lack of time to learn new technologies.
• Lack of support, in training and in ability to acquire and use new tools, both hardware and software.

She also asked about how we might overcome these obstacles. I didn't have many ideas there: frankly, we haven't made a lot of progress at my institution. But here are my thoughts:

• 23 Things programs of various types are helping library staff get on board with new technologies. Here in Minnesota, we’ve had two rounds of 23 Things on a Stick, with new Things promised for 2009. (The joke is that at our Minnesota State Fair, which is one of the biggest in the country, you can buy almost anything on a stick, including turkey, ostrich, and alligator.
• Incentives, even small ones, can be helpful. The original 23 Things program, as you may have seen, offered a prize for completion, as well as a chance to win a laptop computer and other prizes.
• I think any kind of partnering, or teamwork, or mentoring can help. Working with someone else, or a group, can give you encouragement and someone to ask if you run into problems.

I hope we can make some progess in 2009!