Playing with the pieces.

I'm still in the process of deciding what should be included on a new personal Web page, and how it should be displayed. The current "construction zone" (it's not even a work-in-progess) is here. Eventually, everything will be moved to www.lsloma.com

A 110 mile day?

No, a 110 mile weekend. We are so lax this year. We did our annual Dousman-Madison-Dousman minitour late this year, and decided that we prefer the balmy days of May to the 90+ degrees of a Wisconsin August. Next year we'll figure out a way to get off the Glacial-Drumlin Trail for a bit (the crushed limestone path is slow and at times the path has bowling-lane sightlines for good long distances), but we did enjoy this year's ride. Despite the heat. And Madison is always fun. The GE kmz file (one way) is here.

Along the Lakeshore

A ride into town with good company and a morning tailwind: the route mapped on Google Earth (kmz), complete with photos, is here. Note that the photos are not displayed by default. You'll need to check the "Photos" box and then click on the appropriate icons to see them (give the images in the bubbles time to load!). Also, double-clicking on the "Downtown Chicago Detail" entry in the "Places" box zooms in for a, well...

A Local Ride

We both work this coming weekend, so we can't make an organized ride. We did do a 53 mile bicycle ride in the area, though, and the Google Earth map of our ride is here. We rode (mostly) the North Branch Trail and Sheridan Road, and this time I added a few placemarks with brief annotations. Next, photographs? Although for some reason the GE tracks this time are more indicative than accurate-- perhaps because of mid-summer tree foliage foiling the GPS reception? If I were a different sort of person I'd adjust the tracks by hand, but that seems like a lot of work.

Fourth of July Ride

No organized weekend ride this week, but we did do the Joliet Bicycle Club's Fourth of July Ride (it falls on a Tuesday in '06). 62 well-marked and well-supported miles. The GE map for this one is spartan-- no placemarks, no overlay, just the route. The KMZ file is here.

Freeport Wellness Ride

Another weekend, another bicycle ride-- this a very nice one out of Freeport, Illinois. The ride track mapped to Google Earth is here, but be aware: this one includes a topographic map overlay (getting ready for Colorado!), and is a shade over a meg in size.

The BCLC Ramble, 2006

By this time last year we were knocking off centuries every other weekend. This year, a 70 mile bicycle ride on June 11 seems just fine. We just completed the 25th anniversary edition of the Bicycle Club of Lake County's (BCLC) Ramble, medium-long route (white/yellow/red). I had my GPS, tracked the course, and converted the map into a Google Earth KMZ file, which is available here.

Biking on Google Earth

If you have Google Earth installed, you can see the track of our Joilet bicycle ride (May 06) here. Why the GPS track sometimes throws an off-route spike in the track (like that one in Frankfort) is beyond me. The heavy lifting was done by GPS Visualizer, the lighter work by me.

Slowly. Ever so slowly

We're moving over to our new lishost Web space. Right now that space is the test bed for a work project, but once the Library's IT dept. gets PHP installed on their server I can get that project where it belongs (and back in development) and start using lishost for my own purposes.

Christopher Mouse

Let us go then, thee and me,
Where the menu is spread open on the knee,
Like a pancake, buttered on the table.
Let us go--

Back on line

Well, a new job, a few health problems and a few ISP and computer failures stopped progress here for awhile, all right. But we're now back. First project: we'll be riding the Bicycle Tour of Colorado again, but this time I'll ride and we'll have a laptop and a GPS. The plan is to post pictures to our smugmug galleries from the road (whenever we can find an Internet connection) and to post the daily maps generated by the GPS there, too. We'll see how that works out...

A New Job!

I just mailed off my confirmation of acceptance for the position of Electronic Resources Librarian at the Highland Park Public Library, and I am excited. It's a fine, active library with a supportive community and (going by reputation and my experience during the interview process) a great staff. It was worth the wait. I'll be starting the end of September, which gives me a few weeks to set up a transition plan for my current situation, spend a week cycling in Southern Indiana and spend another week preparing the house for winter. A good schedule, but I am anxious to get back to library work...

Maps of Reported Crimes in Chicago

"The Chicago Police Department created the Citizen ICAM to permit Chicago residents to search their database of reported crime. ICAM is short for Information Collection for Automated Mapping. The CPD wants you to understand that a reported crime isn't the same as a confirmed crime. Legal disclaimer not withstanding, it's a good resource." (Gaper's Block)

The interface is fairly picky and temperamental, though. Entering the intersection of "Lunt" and "Wolcott" results in a failed search of the south side, while "N Lunt" and "N Wolcott" lands you in the right location (even though Lunt is an east-west street)...

Chicago Skyscrapers

A database of high-rise buildings in Chicago, including those never built... (from Gaper's Block)

Is this really good for me to know?

I learned from Masters of Cinema that a Carlotta reissue on DVD of Anthony Mann's Man of the West (with the English soundtrack) won the Bologna DVD award for technical quality. Well, Lyn's a confirmed Mann fan (I like his work as well) so I thought I'd pick it up. The squib mentioned that the DVD was not available in the US and UK so (after confirming that fact) I logged on to Amazon.fr, did a quick search, and there it was for a little over 26 euros!

Here's the dangerous part: I put it in my basket, tried my US Amazon logon and password (adresse e-mail & mot de passe- I delete all cookies from my system regularly) and volia! My (US) Amazon account options were in play! Apparently any Amazon site for any country has access to the same customer database. The DVD is on its way, but I'm out $27 for the DVD plus $13.50 shipping (ouch). Even so... non-region-1, UK, French, Italian, Japanese (maybe Korean?) DVD's through good old Amazon? One click away from the new BFI DVD of "Piccadilly", the Japanese DVD of "Hero"? I knew the Firefox translation panel extension would have a practical use...

UPDATE: Gary Tooze disagrees with Bologna's estimation of the DVD, and Gary's usually right. Sigh. His review, including screenshots, is here. Apparently "there were no technical specialists on [the] impromptu [awards] committee" and "this was the first year of the awards, and one of the members only arrived in town the day before we gave the prizes!" Second hand information, but I trust the hands.

Digital and High Def Television

The FCC posts a list of licensed DTV stations as well as a searchable database of all TV stations (including pending licenses); The NAB also offers a list of DTV stations; AntennaWeb offers a nice utility that calculates the broadcast TV signals (including HDTV) you can receive at a given address (including maps and info about optimal antenna orientation); Home Theater Magazine posted an article about antennas for digital broadcast reception; PBS offers DTV/HDTV information and schedules for affiliate stations; and TitanTV (free registration required) offers program schedules by location and signal type (broadcast, satellite, high-def satellite, cable, digital cable, digital cable high-def, etc.). Finally, HDTVoice.com archives offer information and links to a wide variety of related resources.

Deciding on a service can be confusing. ConnectMyCable lists cable and satellite services for any address and generates an options and price comparison matrix for partnered service providers. "Order now" links are included in the matrix. I know nothing about the trustworthiness (good or bad) of the site's e-commerce functions. The matrix URL (bestpriceconnect.com) is registered to Qcorps Residential Inc, which shares (according to the Network Solutions Whois Directory) the same Houston address and a contact name as the registrant of connectmycable.com. Qcorps doesn't show up in a search of EBSCO Business Source Elite or ABI Inform (which doesn't mean much in itself) and I can't get info from Hoover's (not a customer).

Searching for Images

TASI, the Technical Advisory Service for Images (UK), offers Searching the Internet for Images which provides advice, strategies, and sources for finding images on the Web. (from SLS' What's Gnu.)

Evanston Farmer's Market

I'm building a photo gallery of the market, a local institution and a fine way to spend a Saturday morning. I've been taking a few pictures every week and posting them to the gallery, so by the end of the summer there should be a fair number of shots. The City of Evanston publishes an official market web page, and the market runs until November 6th.

Internet Librarian

Our Internet Librarian presentation is on the docket. Look for session A203 on Tuesday, November 16th, from 1:30-2:30 (the post-lunch crowd). It's misleadingly titled "University Weblogs" (we're a community college library) but we're there. We'll cover the technical and cultural/political issues we encountered during implementation. This includes how we're using (and plan to use) feeds as a basic CMS for some Library pages, and how we worked with administration to decentralize (to some extent) control of Web content. A fine opportunity to share and learn.

Colorado Vacation

Although we both signed up for the Bicycle Tour of Colorado only Lyn rode. I thought about my embarrassing 600-miles-to-date training season, my knees and the 28,000 feet (plus) of climbing, and chose to putter around instead. A lesson learned-- so frustrating to sit out such a beautiful ride! Pictures in a smugmug gallery.

Letterboxing & DVDs

American WideScreen Museum offers this helpful page on DVDs, wide screen, and letterboxing. How to read a DVD label's format info!

Palm (OS) Movie Guides

Sometimes the best way to evaluate software is to research, buy, and then do an idle search to find the better package. I recently registered a copy of Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide for Palm OS (v1.1 build 0031). Not much later I discovered that it includes few of Guy Maddin's and Robert Bresson's films, and few of the films that come up in conversation at the local coffeehouse. Not good. I then stumbled across the VideoHound Movie Guide for Palm OS (v1.1.1), and it appears to include more (interesting) movies than the Maltin product, and has better search abilities (for my interests and uses).

Both guides allow searches by title, director and actor/actress, but VideoHound also allows searches by writer, cinematographer, and composer (Maltin does not). Maltin does allow searches by language, year/decade, and MPAA rating (VH does not), but these searches are not as important to me as VH's. I don't care that much about the reviews (I use the guides for information about movies rather than guidance), so searching by star-rating/recommendation (Maltin yes, VH no) doesn't interest me. Neither does the ability to build a to-rent list-- I keep that list in Memopad, since it includes many films that don't appear in either product.

Both guides do allow you to build lists, but once a movie is added to a Maltin list, you can not link back to the guide entry for that movie from the list (you can in VideoHound). I like the Maltin interface a bit more-- it's more direct, less glitzy and relies less on icons and more on words (although it doesn't take long to learn VH's icons). It does put me off that the VideoHound site's ad copy claims: "We took every ounce of material from the bestselling, phonebook-sized VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever, added an interface to pant over and packed it into one lean, mean movie machine." "Every ounce of material" does not include reviews/comments or personnel details for most of the indexed movies-- that material costs extra, available only in the REX add-on package.

DVD Rental Services

The next step-- which of the online DVD-rental-by-mail services to go with? I'm getting frustrated with the selection of our local bricks-and-mortar rental house, so it's time to check out the terms of service and catalogs of a few sources. NetFlix? Facets? NicheFlix? GreenCine? Or any of the other services listed in the Open Directory's listing?

The Summer Road Shimmers...

150 years after Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act into law, creating the U.S. Interstate Highway System. The road system (A.K.A the "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways", renamed by President George Bush in 1990 to the "Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways") shaped the country. Public Roads Online's Summer 1996 issue is dedicated to the Interstates and offers histories and evaluations of the system, and articles on the poetry, art and movies inspired by the open road. Primary source materials can be found in the Eisenhower Archives. The Smithsonian offers a collection of images in the site's America on the Move section, including one of a poster protesting a highway's construction. Also, the USDOT Federal Highway Administration offers a list of links on highway history.

The Moraine Valley Blog

SLS offers its member libraries free server space and an installed copy of the blog-building software Movable Type. We (the Moraine Valley Community College librarians) jumped at the offer. We're now learning MT, building our blogs, and using one of the blogs to chronicle our blog-building experiences. The Library's Blog Portal offers details and links to the blogs.

Software Toys

After running across the software toy Balldroppings I remembered the online toy Soda. Both can be time sinks. If you find Soda Constructor confusing, just play with one of the toys in the zoo.

More RSS

Want to include an RSS feed in a web page? Check out the list of RSS Parsing Programs on the RSS in Government site. Feedroll is a free service as is RSS Feeds via JavaScript.

RSS

In June of 2002 LLRX published an article titled RSS for Non-Techie Librarians. Although it's well over a year old, it's still a good basic introduction to the subject. 2RSS offers articles, software, and a directory of RSS feeds. A fine place to start, as is the Weblogs Compendium. LII has a list of links to RSS info sources.