HairMixer

There's so much I wonder about the before time. Did robot librarians ever take off? Was there a need to mix and match hairstyles using the Electronic Brain? How did that ChaCha thing turn out? Who are the stone giants imprisoned in South Dakota? What is a McRib?

Okay, I've put off dealing with the paper scorpions long enough.

Gah!

I think the Electronic Brain didn't like me using Zoho because the post looks like ass.

Welcome

I've been away for a bit opening a new branch.  Well, it was already open, but rival librarians were running it.  Anyway it's ours now.

 

While I was away another one of those 23 things showed up.  Now we're supposed to use PluFlu, YubNub, Zoho or something.  I'm thinking the 23 things is really an elaborate scheme to make us appreciate how great our jobs are compared to our foremothers'.

 

For instance, while I only face the daily threat of cannibalistic assault amidst a nuclear annihilated landscape, librarians in the before time faced the constant nuisance of having to create a myriad of accounts to use any teknology. 

 

I now have so many usernames and passwords that I want to change my name to Hank Brisket and hang out in the 600s.

 

Zoho works well, but I already have iWÖRD on the Electronic Brain. 

The neutrality of this article is disputed.

So explain this to me – apparently back in the early 21st century most people wrote encyclopedia entries for fun. Like you’d say, “Hey Mark, want to forage for ammunition (or whatever they did for fun).” And Mark would say, “Sorry, but you know I’m still writing that encyclopedia.” And you’d say, “But Mark, I know you. You’re dumb,” or something like that.

I mean, even back when Noah Webster was sitting around in his primitive dwelling writing a dictionary people made fun of him. Of course, now he’s like, “I givez U spelchek.”

Anyway, I was looking for lolzombie pictures in The Electronic Brain today and ended up learning about wikis and wikipedia. Wikis were portions of the global Electronic Brain which anyone could add information to. Also anyone could change the information you’ve added. But you could also see who changed your information and change it back. Excellence through constant surveillance.

Godo asked me if I thought we could use wikis here. I said that we could use it to keep track of problem patrons: the questions they tend to ask, their methods of attack, any weaknesses they might have. He grinned and said The Friend of the Library might not approve of that.

edit: I found an ancient wiki and played around with it. They are easy to use.

and the White Knight is talking backwards

Sometimes I like reading tattered fragments from the before time about the future of libraries. Like this piece by Dr. Wendy Schultz Infinite Futures:

Library 4.0 … will be the library for the aesthetic economy, the dream society, which will need libraries as mind gyms … Both virtual and augmented 3D reality will enable us to manipulate data via immersive, visual, metaphorical, sculptural, holographic information theatres…

Nothing like the end of the world to derail your plans for a library where reference transactions are carried out through interpretive dancing. Would it have killed these people to stay focused on the real issues of their time? Oh wait, it did.

Speaking of which, I don’t know what a wellington is or why it needs to be managed, but thanks to wellington manager for sharing this:

The Technocrats

Okay so my annual wandering.

Every year Godo thinks we should take time off work and explore the wastes. Godo has a complicated “burnout to fallout” metric which he uses in evaluations. Godo thinks we learn something away from work and that we come back refreshed and renewed. He also wants us to bring something back.

So I went off into the wastes. I had my walking stick, my Rad Block™, food, water, and lots of ammo for my .223 pistol – standard librarian gear.

At first I had to keep low to the hills because we’ve heard rumors of roving mimes. After days of avoiding them, I saw one, but he was distracted by a length of invisible rope. As I neared the city, I found a staircase leading down to one of the old vaults.

The vault I was in was typical. Overgrown rats, health kits stashed in corners, ammo for my incredibly rare .223 pistol just lying in plain sight.

Anyway, I found The History of the Electronic Brain for Complete and Utterly Abject Morons. Most of the pages were unreadable, but there was an interesting section on the Technocrats.

The Technocrats gathered together the world’s blogs and let people tag them. For example, you could search for piranha and find posts about Petey Pirahna, Doug and Dinsdale Piranha, or Pirahna by the band Exodus. This may not have helped if a small fish was eating your leg, but the world was fiercely overpopulated at time.

Eventually there were eleventy billion blogs and every word in the world was used as a tag except for: timely, accurate, and authoritative. As the blogosphere collapsed under its own weight, the Technocrats unveiled their master plan which involved selling more copies in their books for Complete and Utterly Abject Morons line.

I stayed in the vault a few days and had rat steaks, rat bacon, rat stew. Then I was attacked by feral pigeons and had to flee under the cover of night. Godo liked the book, but he wished I had saved him some rats instead.

Missing Death Raider

Still no time to write about my annual wandering.

I came in today and Aritage said there was a new thing to do. I asked what and he said, “Tag everything that’s delicious.”

So I’ve been going around putting tags on all our food. I put “tasty” on the canned cheese, “crunchy” on the canned eggs, and “salty” on the canned salt. I was annoyed because someone put “yummy” on the canned slurm. Isn’t tasty the same as yummy? I wish Death Raider was still around to control our vocabulary. Also, someone put “mrphle” on the emergency sandbags, but that may have been Mrphle the mutant shelver and he gets touchy when he’s corrected.

Returning to work

I have just returned from my annual wandering. Details later, but first look at this sign I made.