This is my last day at UQ Library as I’m moving on to find fortune and glory at a new workplace and of course I won’t be posting anything new on this blog after today.
It’s been a fun ride here at UQ. I’ve found the environment to be quite relaxed yet focussed on doing a good job and there is a good level of camaraderie amongst the troops. I suppose that most people here don’t find it difficult to find a sense of belief in what the library does and most people working here are here because they want to be.
Contrast this with some of my past jobs where there is a much higher contingent of people who are motivated by money and status.
I will miss working on campus here, there is a certain buzz or energy that comes from the students, a variety of food options, some fun architecture and the peace and tranquility of the lakes (only interrupted by attacking geese, the ferrari lawn mower and students who couldn’t get a room).
I will also miss the diversity of staff here. IT and engineering is a male dominated industry and tends to attract harder, more rational personalities. There is probably less mixing between different levels of managment in private industry too.
I’m not sure how much work I’ll be doing in the library field in the future but I have a half plan to be working on some projects in my own time. If you’re interested, you can follow some of my progress at my IT and engineering blog: Smithology . Otherwise, some might be interested in my more frequently updated blog of finding lifes meaning amongst the confusion of postmodern predystopian “raised on television” society at Bogosity
In the same vein as “March of the Librarians”, here is “March of the Engineers” filmed at UQ. The the Dorothy Hill Engineering Library Entrance is featured in this video too.
For fans of “Ask a Ninja”, there are also “Ask a Mining Engineer” vids on YouTube filmed at UQ.
IRENE makes a high-resolution digital image of a disc record. The key is found in creating a digital audio file from the analog information in the disc’s grooves. IRENE can efficiently extract sound from an image of a fragile or damaged disc, “heal” scratches or digitally “reassemble” a broken phonograph record. The extracted sound is converted to standard digital files and stored for purposes of digital access and preservation.
This is a nice idea. It would be good to do this kind of thing with some of our collections, setting some of our images to music in an interesting way.
This is a technologically inspiring use of data and quite relevent for me this month (click link to see the video that Mr Bibliotech is talking about):
Here’s a TERRIFIC use of available technologies to illustrate a concept. Someone has take the housing prices from 1890 to the present, adjusted them for inflation, plotted the chart, and then used Rollercoaster Tycoon to make a rollercoaster ride version of the chart.
Joel on Software is one of my favorite programmers blogs – he always has good advice and is entertaining to read. His latest post is a fairly damning book review with a few good insights about common problems in software projects.
This is a particularly dangerous trap when it comes to software development. You get some big picture idea in your head for what you want to do, and it all seems so crystal clear that it doesn’t even seem like you need to design anything. You can just dive in and start implementing your vision.
The latest safran has an interview with Andrew bartlett about freedom of speech which briefly touches on banning of euthanasia books in Australia. Worth a listen.
Andrew Bartlett also mentions this interview on his Blog
I think John Safran is interested in just how strong the commitment of our society (and our politicians) is freedom of speech, which is a good topic to explore. One of the tests in promoting the importance of rights is to stand up for a principle when it is unpopular or involves something you disagree with. I try to hold myself to that, although not always successfully.
This is a really cool idea and could work – think of an A4 sized calculator. I imagine it would be more in the order of $100-200 dollars to start with.
A workable design for the $50 PC might be the size of an A4 portrait page: 297 mm high by 210 mm wide. From the side it would be a wedge: 10mm high at the front, rising to 64 mm at the back. The wedge shape would provide about the same angle as a PC keyboard for comfortable typing and allow enough room under the back for the batteries.
Huge investment by a large corporation is not the best driver of innovation, especially in the modern connected world. The explosion of the Internet has shown that open platforms are the real spur for innovation. The open standards of the Internet mean that anyone can create a website and offer any imaginable online service, and it will be instantly accessible by all Internet users world-wide. The result has been an unparalleled wealth of innovation, which goes far beyond what proprietary online services had previously achieved.
