1. OK. They never actually say the word librarian, but it is definitely implied.

1. Image of Ubuntu Desktop taken from the Ubuntu Desktop Home Edition Page

The other night in my LIS 768 class we played video games. This was probably one of the funnest classes that I’ve ever had. A number of people brought in various video game systems (PS2, XBox, Nintendo DS, PSP) and we hooked them up to the projectors and played. We had DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) on one projector and Guitar Hero II on the other. I have seen DDR but never played it. I understood that it was a physical game, but I didn’t really understand how physical. By the time we were done playing I was dripping sweat (this was compounded by the fact that I was wearing a long sleeve and a t-shirt). I’ve decided that I’m going to start a workout regimen that consists of nothing but DDR.

I also had a blast with guitar hero. I was really impressed with some of the music that they had available. I was playing DDR when I heard Danzig’s “Mother” and I was instantly pulled toward the game. It was the chance to fulfill my lifelong dream of being a rockstar.

If there was ever a way to get people into libraries, this is it.

1. Cover image from Wikipedia
2. Cover image from Wikipedia

The story follows the lives of two homeless boys who live in a city called Treasure Town. One boy is named black and the other is white. Black is the older and more jaded of the two while White is basically an innocent kid. The story is one part urban drama, one part crime drama, one part fantasy and just a dash of sci-fi sprinkled into the mix. The story moves all over the place from humor to heartbreak, then from revenge to madness. If you get a chance to pick this up I highly recommend it.

1. Image from Comics 212 by Christopher Butcher. Copyright 2006 Studio 4°C.

She really had the kids attention right from the beginning and they all seemed to be enjoying it. Katie would read a picture book and intersperse it with finger plays, action activities and sing alongs. It was a good mix of activities because it kept the kids from zoning out and then would draw them back in when it was time for more focused attention. It was really nicely done.

The one critique that I would make is that it was too long. The entire program was 40 minutes and at about the 35 minute mark the kids really started to get restless. It wasn’t too crazy but you could tell that the program was running too long.

All in all it was a great activity and I would recommend it to anybody with young children. It would make a great morning activity, you could take the train down, go to the program, eat lunch and then take the train home (that is if it doesn’t interfere with nap time). The programs are at 11:00am and are supposed to run about 40 minutes. At some point I’m going to bring my own children down but I’ll wait until I can get the Mommy to come with me so I don’t have to wrestle the kids on my own.

For more information you can look at the Thomas Hughes Children’s Library Calendar of Events.

1. Photo by Paytonc

1. There is the Star Trek kind of space travel where the captain says, “Make it so.” or “Engage.” (in a deep commanding voice) and the ship takes off at warp 9 or hyper-space or something like that and it arrives a couple hours or days later. No problem. A quick jaunt to another system. We’ll drink cocktails and eat hors d’oeuvres and lounge on the deck.
2. Then there is the “step through a door” kind of space travel. This usually involves wormholes or far-gates or something like that. Basically there is some kind of portal that you step through and viola! you are magically transported to another planet. How convenient.

There are many other kinds of space travel that are included in sci-fi (I like the one used in Altered Carbon) I’m not saying these things are bad. Some of these ideas make for great stories (Pandora’s Star), it just seems too convenient. If we ever make it to space (really make it, not just toss tin cans into the sky) I have the feeling that space travel is going to be hard.

In walks Alastair Reynolds. Alastair Reynolds is the the Author of the Revelation Space series of books (Revelations Space¹ , Chasm City, Absolution Gap, Redemption Ark, Diamond Dogs; Turquoise Days, Galactic North) as well as several other great novels (Pushing Ice² , Century Rain and Zima Blue and Other Stories). Reynolds universe is a vast, cold, desolate place. It’s not necessarily antagonistic toward humans so much as it doesn’t really care. Humanity is just another blip of intelligence waiting to be wiped out.

Space travel in Revelation Space universe is not easy. Here Reynolds follows closely the laws of physics. You are at point A and you want to go to point B. First you accelerate. Acceleration can’t be done too fast or the passengers will be pasted all over the floors of the ship. Acceleration has to be slow and steady. It’ll take a while to reach a decent speed so sit back and do nothing for awhile. The top speed is just a couple of points (tenths of a percent) below the speed of light. (There is no breaking the light barrier in Reynolds novels (mostly).) Once you reach your top speed then you just coast. Remember, it’s light years (10′s to 100′s) between star systems so you’re going to be coasting for awhile not to mention time dilation. Near the speed of light, time on the ship slows down, so what may seem like a 10 year flight is actually 100 years (I’m guessing the time difference) for everybody else in the universe. By the time you get back home (if you ever make a return journey) your friends and family are probably dead (unless they are using some kind of medical treatments to prolong their life). So your coasting along for 50 years and you start getting close to your destination, now you’ve got to stop. In order to stop you need to decelerate. You have to flip the ship around and then start slowly and steadily decelerating (remember, not too fast or you’ll squash everyone on board). Finally you arrive at your destination. Quite some time has passed. What did you do on board all that time, play chess? In Reynolds books people usually elect to freeze themselves.

It’s not a nice place and nothing comes easy. If we ever make it to space I have the feeling that this is what it’s really going to be like. Cold, dull, long and meticulous. Not very exciting and something we probably won’t want to do a lot of.

1. Cover of Revelation space by Alastair Reynolds.
2. Highly Recommended!

First off I should let you know what kind of system I was running SL on. I have an iBook G4 1.2 GHz with 1.25 GB RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 graphics card with 32MB VRAM. I do meet the MINIMUM system requirements but not necessarily the recommended system requirements.

So I went to the (SL) site and clicked the “get an account” button. I had to fill out the usual info (name, email, age, “I agree to terms of service,” etc…) the one thing that I was a little annoyed about is that you could type in a first name for your avatar, but then had to choose from a list of last names. I don’t really understand why you can’t just type in a last name rather then choosing from some preselected names… If anybody knows why please let me know. When I was done I downloaded a 50MB file. When it was done, I dragged the application into my apps folder and fired up SL.

SL came up just fine and I logged in with no problems. The first place that I popped up was a place called “orientation island.” It was pretty straight forward, there is a path to follow with signs and little floating green hand icons along the way. The hand icons say “click me.” When you click one, they give you a little pop up text window that tells you how to do different stuff in SL. All in all the orientation worked out really well. I got my bearings and my SL legs (so to speak) and I was on my way.

I should note here that there were a bunch of other people around me also getting acquainted with second life. When you first create your account you can choose from several different basic avatars. Once you log in you can go the edit->appearance and actually edit the way that your avatar looks. Most of the people around me were doing this. I have to admit that I was impressed with the apearance editor. There was a LOT of stuff you could do with it although it seemed to take a long time to load each charactistic. I edited my avator to look somewhat like me and then I proceeded through the orientation.

Getting around in Second Life and doing stuff is fairly easy. The arrow keys move your avatar, holding option while clicking allowed you to look at stuff, holding control while clicking an object allowed you to manipulate objects with a matrix like telekenetic power (remember, there is no spoon). It’s kinda of funny, when you control click an object your avatar actually points his hand at the object and a magical stream of translucent… magic… shoots out of the avatar’s hand and raises the object off of the ground. (size matters not). Did I mention that you can fly? There is a fly button, you click it and your avatar spreads its arms and raises off the ground, you still control movement with the arrow keys, moving is just much faster.

Once I got to the end of orientation island I entered a “transporter” and ended up on help island. At this point I was ready to go do some exploring, so I opened the map (there is a map that gives you an overview of the SL world and allows you to search for places) and searched for library. I actually got a list of several library locations but the one I was looking for was info island, so I selected it and hit “teleport” (you can do that too). I instantly appeared at the library. The place seemed deserted. There seemed to be two to three other people someplace on the island (according to the map) but I couldn’t see them. I wandered around a bit and another visitor approached me and said hi. “She” (let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and say it really was a woman. She was wearing a female avatar… although the name was sexually ambigous, “Sam”.) turned out to be a college student who’s professor had talked about SL and how there were colleges that were offering classes in SL. (I’d like to mention that anytime somebody is typing a message, the avatar “air types”, like air guitar only with a keyboard.) We “talked” a bit and then I had to get off line to do some homework.

All in all it was a good experience.
The Bad: The graphics seemed to take a long time to load. When I first appeared in a place, the “world” would apper as sort of abrstract shapes. As time passed, the shapes would fill and eventually you would have a 3D world, but it took awhile. The graphics in general seemed choppy with low frame rates. I messed around with the video preferences but they didn’t seem to really make any difference on my machine. If anybody knows how to set preferences for my machine to get a smoother experience, please let me know. Would I get back on SL again? Yes, I would if I had something to do there, I might go back to explore a bit more but I don’t see myself spending much more time in there.

How could libraries use SL?

This is a tough one. If a library wanted to use SL they would have to make some pretty big assumptions. they would have to assume that there users have a computer and that the computer is powerful enough to run SL smoothly. Some people might get fed up with the graphic hinderances and just give up. The library also has to assume that the user has an internet connection that is fast enough for SL and that the user is computer savvy enough to figure out how to use SL. It’s one thing to get people to use blogs, flickr, wikis, IM, etc… SL is a different kind of story, there is spacial reasoning involved and a certain amount of 3D video game literacy that is needed to navigate the SL world and interact with it. This might be a real stretch for some users.

After you get past all that stuff, a library could set up a virtual space in SL for people to visit and interact. Perhaps a librarian could be staffed there working SL reference while working real world reference at the same time, they would have to switch between the two. It would make great PR. I suppose you could have virtual terminals in SL that would give you access to the libraries catalog (I don’t know if that is possible in SL) or other reference sources. Then again a user could just go onto the libraries website and use the catalog there. The library could ask authors to do virtual visits to their SL space where patrons could go and have chats with the author.

I’m not sure exactly how this technology could be used by libraries. Anybody have any ideas?