1776 #bookreview

Bibliographic Info

From WorldCat
Title: 1776
Author: David G McCullough; Recorded Books, LLC.
Publisher: Prince Frederick, Md. : Recorded Books ; [Prince Frederick, Md.] : [Distributed by] OneClick Digital, 2011, ℗2005.
Edition/Format: eAudiobook : English : Unabridged
Material Type: Audio book, etc., Sound recording, Internet resource
Document Type: Internet Resource, Computer File, Sound Recording
All Authors / Contributors: David G McCullough; Recorded Books, LLC.
ISBN: 9781449869854 1449869858
OCLC Number: 867115097
Performer(s): Narrated by the author.
Subjects: United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783.

Background

Honestly, who hasn't read 1776 by David McCullough? More than that, who hasn't read something by the great biographer? You know, he also wrote about John Adams and The American Spirit... Well, me; sadly, shockingly even! (Although I did watch the John Adams miniseries with Paul Giamatti on Amazon Prime. It is excellent and I heartily recommend it.) This has been on my reading list for far too long and as I browsed my public library's Hoopla offerings, I saw 1776 and decided to check it out and give it a listen.

As Liaison to the History department, I feel I should at least be familiar with the accessible popular biographies of authors like Chernow & McCullough, even if they are somewhat looked down on by serious academics. At least they provide a baseline of general knowledge that can be improved. But alas, there's only a limited number of hours in the day.

Review

It took a while for me to get into this audio title. I like to read history books on the page (physical or digital) so I can dwell on the details. I found myself wanting to dig into certain phrases when the narrator, David McCullough himself, kept moving on. That is no fault of the writer, it is a personal preference of the reader. Still, it is something of which to beware.

On the subject of the audiobook. While McCullough absolutely did a marvelous job of researching and writing, I did not particularly like his reading of the text. It also threw me when some random lady read random chapters. I assume this is because McCullough read the book initially, and then for the unabridged portions someone else took over. Her voice wasn't bad, it was just a jarring transition at times.

1776 covers the first year of the American Revolution (duh, it's in the title). David McCullough includes details from the highest ranks to the lowest. Eventually, though, he focuses more on General Washingon's tactical decisions which allow the Americans to survive that first year of the war when their cause could have been squashed if the British had made different decisions.

I heartily endorse this book for anyone interested in Early American History. It is eminently accessible and audiobooks are a really convenient medium.

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Librarian Problem No. 562: Read the fine print

I have been a librarian for about two and a half months now, and I have solved several problems. From reference questions, to directional assistance to technical aid, I have done quite a lot under the motto, "All in a day's work." However, this one really had me going.

The Case of the Rogue Access Point

So I was asked if we could extend the library's WIFI for inventory purposes. The stacks are a dead zone and our fancy RFID Wand doesn't work too well back there. The only other solution involved moving Access Points (AP's) around and the whole plugging/unplugging thing scared everyone.

So I, the Electronics Librarian (touch me twice), gave my professional advice. I said, "We should be able to buy a couple cheap routers and set them up as AP's. We will place them strategically on the second floor to extend coverage." Piece of cake! I looked it up and everything! Just turn off DHCP and set the AP up with the same SSID/Password and you should be good. I sent the quote off to my Director and he approved the purchase of a couple lovely Linksys E1200s. Woohoo!

So I get these AP's sooner than expected. Awesome! I was busy at the moment and there was no rush, so I scheduled a day to work on them. The day comes and I unbox the first AP. Sweet! This looks just like the AP we have set up already, I'll just mimic the settings and everything will be hunky-dory.

It worked!
Alright!
Score!
Success!
I am a techno-wizard!

I even took it out to the stacks for verification. I connected with no problem. (In retrospect, I probably should have tested more intensively to ensure that the network stayed up. But, in my mind I was done.) This second one will be cake!

The second one would not work.

Oh, I could get it to work in my office. I could see it. My devices would connect to it. It would load web pages. But when I took it upstairs, I got no connectivity. I must have set this thing up 8 different times which felt like 60 times over. What could be wrong? I set this AP up exactly the same. I change the static IP to one in the range. Why won't you work?

I ended that week in frustration. I got one working, but not the other. Ugh! Now let's add some pressure. The Director walks into my office and asks for an ETA on the AP setup. I tell him it should be up by the end of the week. (After all, I am Electronics Librarian and should be able to do these things.) He asks why it would take so long, so we end up with Wednesday as a fair compromise. I have three days before I'm exposed as a fraud.

Monday is all about figuring out what the heck could possibly be the problem. I looked at my network map, I looked at information from Linksys, I looked at my horoscope;mdash&anything that might give me an answer! I was resetting, reconfiguring, testing in my office, running upstairs to test, then repeating the process. Sometimes it would work, once, then stop working. Sometimes it refused to work at all. Always, the AP was frustrating me, mocking me, letting me know how much better it was than me. How I wanted to kick it in the face, but it was busy kicking my butt. Why would it work in my office but not in the stacks? Why, oh why?

Then, two minutes before the end of the day, I found it; I found the last possible solution.

On the aforementioned network map, in the middle of 6 footnotes. MAC locking port security is enabled on the switch that the network ports connect to in the stacks. Only one MAC address is allowed access to the internet from those ports! If I log into the router and change this setting, could it resolve my problem?

Yes! The answer is yes! Oh, thank God, YES! I change the setting and my AP's are allowing all devices to access the internet from all over the library all day and through the rest of the week and into this current week. I finished my project ahead of schedule (technically) and inventory is progressing and everyone is happy.

And all librarians everywhere should know better than to skip over the fine print.

Storytime With James Earl Jones

Who doesn't like Children's Books?

I think everyone likes a good reading, particularly from James Earl Jones. I had no clue that he was a stutterer and dyslexic. That goes to show you that our shortcomings can be overcome with some hard work. Enjoy!

Library: An unquiet history

The Book

Library: An unquiet history
Matthew Battles

I picked this book up in a discount bin a few years ago. I figured I would read it the summer before my first semester of library school and be ready to crush the program with my awesome knowledge of library stuff. So here I am, a week before my final semester of school, finally reading and reviewing this title. The plans of mice and men...

Technical Merit

Matthew Battles writes with that stream of consciousness style that I tend to gravitate towards. He weaves a poetic history of the library from the standpoint of the books themselves. He starts off very strong and inspiring, but wears down towards the end. For that reason, I give this title 3 out of 5 stars for technical merit.

The Review

Matthew Battles uses biblioclasm as his hook for this work. Books have been restricted, burned and censored since powerful men realized that their power could be limited by the knowledge contained in books. He begins with the most famous of all biblioclasms—Alexandria. From there, he continues throughout the centuries and regions, exposing ugly truths from cultures all around the globe.

My favorite quote in this book is from Herman Kruk, who lived in a Nazi-controlled Prague ghetto. He wrote specifically regarding the psychology of the ghetto reader, but it applies to all readers:

[O]nly two things are possible: reading for the purpose of intoxication—that is, in order to stop thinking—or the contrary, reading in order to ponder, to become interested in comparable fates, to make analogies and reach certain conclusions. (Pg. 178)

Those are the two polar extremes of the philosophy of books. Your answer to the question, Why are books here? will reveal what kinds of books you would include in your library. If people should be allowed to read for escape or pleasure, then all titles are permissible. If you hold a high philosophy of learning, that leads to more censorship with selection.

Granted, there are other considerations in play that just the one posed in the previous paragraph. However, this black-and-white, either-or view of books is what Battles seems to blame for the biblioclasms of history. While there is some validity in that statement, things are never so simple.

The one element that dissappointed me is Matthew Battles' treatment of web content. In the first chapter, Battles promised that he will get to the topic and show that web content is handled no differently than print. However, web content gets nothing more than a passing remark in the final chapter. I do not know if this was due to the editing process or if he thought his readers would forget this promise. I felt that the first statement was very ambitious and it piqued my curiosity. Unfortunately, it was ignored.

In the end, I certainly would recommend this book. It is a straightforward read if you can handle the stream of consciousness style that Matthew uses. It is an entertaining history of books, libraries and biblioclasm that I am glad to have read.

Have you read "Library" by Matthew Battles? What did you think of it?

A free weekend

I know my list will seem segmented, but for this semester I need all the encouragement I can get. Seeing little things get crossed off my list gives me that extra OOMPH that I need.

Plus, I have a busy weekend ahead of me that starts tonight. I needed to finish this stuff ASAP!

What do librarians do? THIS!

I can't wait 'till I get to do this stuff for a living! Remember, you can't do this with an eBook...

http://jmnz.us/14czhCJ

Social Media Culture

The three most common speech balloons
(top to bottom: speech, thought, scream).
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Are we getting stupid?

I had a couple discussions over the past few days about our western culture, global culture and the ultimate fate of civilization in light of our social media habits. One of my friends lamented that we, as a species, have little to no hope of survival if the current trends hold true.

Granted, these fears are extreme and, I argue, slightly exaggerated. However, there are several indicators that are worrisome with regard to the human race and the way our culture is processing the issues set before them.

Nobody builds an argument

Gone are the days of methodically crafting an argument. It started in Florida with the FCAT and comprehensive testing. Grade students are taught that an essay is a five-paragraph paper with an introduction, three paragraphs of support and a conclusion. That is presented, not as a starting point, but as a finished product.

I feel there are merits to building slowly. The ABC's come to mind as a great place to start. However, your kindergarten teacher should never present the ABC's as a grand finally, those are just the beginning! The five-paragraph paper (though there are some solid reasons for teaching this model) is not a destination, though it justly serves as a vehicle to deliver the student to that place.

The real travesty here is that students are not building arguments, they are busy making statements instead. A statement is useless unless there is a solid argument backing it up. I have heard, to my dismay, many older high-school/younger undergraduate students present what they think is an argument which is, in fact, a string of unsupported statements with no logical backing. While this is troubling, even worse are those students who think they are presenting an informative paper which is actually lacking information or an argumentative paper that never actually takes a position.

Do you see the problem?

The Social Media Culture

Let me begin by asserting that I am a product of the social media culture. I have all the accounts and am active in most of them. I love social media and see immense value in it's potential. But when placed in the hands of the inexperienced and logically challenged, conversations easily turn into shouting matches and things like cyber-bullying are born.

But what do we blame for the dimming of internet wit? Here are the four main culprits:

Culprit # 1: Web Publishing

This goes back to Web 1.0. Do you realize that people (like me) who take classes (Master's Level) on web publishing are told to condense arguments, write short paragraphs (3 sentences max) and use bullet points as often as possible to facilitate scanning? Do you realize how hard it is to build a serious argument using only bullet points?

Does this advice make sense? Absolutely! Reading from a screen is completely different than reading ink on paper. It is also more difficult to curl up on the couch with a good computer screen than it is with a good book or term paper (what?). These principles, though completely reasonable given the medium, have decreased our culture's ability to read and comprehend a solidly structured argument.

Culprit # 2: Blogging

What? I admit it, I am a part of the problem. An extension of writing for the internet, the blogging phenomenon has allowed anyone to publish their thoughts for he world to see. My argument here has nothing to do with the education of the masses. There are some very uneducated people who are incredibly intelligent and make fantastic arguments and certainly should host a blog. By contrast, there are individuals who have earned multiple degrees and can barely put together a coherent sentence. No, I do not care who publishes a blog, the problem is with weblog culture.

Like web publishing, blog creation is formulaic; it can't be too long or dense because you will lose the audience. This is not the second coming of the newspaper article, it is a distant cousin who is in dire need of Ritalin. Why do I have four clearly marked culprits? So you, dear reader, can scan my post and decide which parts interest you enough to read. As a result, nothing I say here in this section is supposed to be dependent on a previous section in case you didn't read the other section.

So how are we bloggers supposed to create an argument if only a couple lucky paragraphs are going to be read?

Culprit # 3: Social Media

Chances are, everyone who is reading this post is likely plugged into some form of social media. CNN recently reported that Americans 1) grab their smartphone within 15 minutes of waking up and 2) check Facebook 14 times a day. That's a lot of social media consumption.

Social Media only compounds the problem. We begin condensing our arguments with static web pages, then blogs produce articles that are even more compact, now we have even more limitations on our social media statuses. With Facebook and Twitter we officially arrive at statements rather than arguments. We no longer have the time or room to add nuance or context to our assertion, we just say what we feel with no respect to others.

Again, there is nothing wrong with social media per se, but note that it has affected our ability to appreciate a well-crafted argument.

Know Your Meme
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Culprit # 4: Memes

If you thought status updates was the lowest rung of the argument ladder, think again. Meme culture has wrought even more devastation in the form of ridicule. Where there was little room for nuance, memes have removed it completely in favor of blunt statements or sarcasm.

Again, I love a good meme. I can even appreciate several memes of lesser quality. Cartoons have a long-standing tradition of using humor to point out truth. However, if the meme is used as a substitute for actual discussion, we have a problem.

Android Photo app speech bubble
simple tastes Oscar Wilde
(Photo credit: Fueneco)

What's the point?

My point is simple: awareness. Know the limitations of social media and never let the 140 characters define your topic. It is a great practice to condense your main point to a concise statement, but you should always be prepared to expand you point and add both nuance and context to the discussion.

Is there anything intrinsically wrong with these four culprits? No. The we rules are set up as they are for good, practical reasons. Arguments must spring up from within mankind. Search yourself and make sure you've done your homework.

Then go away and read some books!

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What do you think? Is our culture getting dumber? Why?

RSS is Dead

English: Don't Panic towel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Welcome to the 21st Century

Given all this hoopla about Google amputating Reader from their line of products, it is probably time to ask the question: Is Real Simple Syndication (RSS) dead? An article from Business Insider seems to suggest that it is.

My library coursework has promoted RSS as a futuristic technology that delivers information right to the end-user. I have built CMS pages and blogs and burned the feeds so that people can receive my articles as soon as I publish them. But are we wrong? 

Business Insider seems to suggest that Social Media services (Twitter) is killing off RSS as a viable end-user product. RSS may still find a home in the back end, but it is no longer a product that users, ahem, use. Note that most of the products purporting to be alternatives to Google Reader integrate your social media timelines into the application!

I have always felt that the RSS technology was antiquated in light of Social Media and other on-demand services. I think librarians should be aware of potential change on the horizon and flexible enough to jump on the wave of innovation.

Opinion wanted: do you think RSS is dead? Maybe it's just a little dead? Maybe it's just dead to the end-user? Well, go on and tell me in a comment. I wanna know!

Moving Along, Nothing to See Here

English: This icon, known as the "feed icon" or the "RSS icon", (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google Reader is going away

Where did I leave that panic button? I know it's around here somewhere...

I love to read. I love to read about current events and niche topics that hardly anyone really cares about. I use RSS feeds to deliver my content right to me. It is a librarian's dream to have information delivered to both my computer and my mobile device which makes information consumption and retrieval a smooth a ride as ever.

But alas, it was not meant to be. Google has announced that Reader (proper noun) is just not hacking it, so they've placed all the readers (common noun) on notice to find a new news (see what I did there?) delivery service by July 1.

Cue the Common Top 5 Post

This announcement has been a boon for techno-bloggers who suddenly have visions of writing THE post that helps people find their new RSS reader (while boosting their own subscription statistics). Guess what, look no further, because I have written that post a day late and a dollar short.

I searched high and low and decided that these RSS reader services are the best ones for you, fair reader, to investigate. Be sure to take these out for a test drive to see how they fit in to your personal preferences.

The Magazine Style

Most of those other (read: lesser) "Top Reader Replacement" posts promote these guys as THE GO-TO options when transitioning out of Google Reader. They all have mobile platforms that make the reading experience as mobile as it is beautiful. Without further ado, The Magazine Style Readers:

Image via CrunchBase

1) Feedly: This bad boy is number one on my list and number one overall. This is the only RSS reader alternative whose placement in this link is also a ranking. I have been somewhat transitioning to Feedly anyway. I like the social features that are baked right into it. Your standard Twitter, Facebook, G+ and email are all there, but it also includes Buffer, Evernote, Delicious and others. This spares me the need to use IFTTT to jury-rig a "seamless" share to other services based on a trigger. (What other blog dares to use jury-rig and seamless in the same sentence?)

In addition, there are browser plugins and a handy transition guide that promises to make the July 1 transition a painless process.

Pulse (Photo credit: Johan Larsson)

2) Pulse: I began using Pulse Reader when I owned a Motorola Cliq (author shudders with sudden sensations of sinister semesters with that cursed phone and inability to update to Android 2.0). So maybe my opinions are tainted from the lack of a quality device. If that's the case, then go out and use Pulse now!

I actually do not mind Pulse all that much as an RSS reader replacement. It certainly has a beautiful interface which can be customized to a certain extent. I mainly miss a list format (Pulse seems to only allow the magazine look) and the social options provided by others. Clearly, you can't really go wrong this this application.

Flipboard (Photo credit: netzkobold)

3) Flipboard: Another favorite in the visually stimulating category is Flipboard. This is a gorgeous reader for the mobile platform that presents news in an aesthetically pleasing manner. It can pull information from feeds and social networks (so can Pulse) and organize them in a sensible way.

The only downside is the lack of a web application for desktop use. Perhaps things will change with a ported view given the trajectory of the modern OS, but that is a major downside of this option if you consider yourself a power user. (I fancy myself a power in everything, even if it turns out to be only a fantasy.)

The Ugly Style

Please tell me you haven't forgotten The Ugly One...

Some people don't care about those fancy-schmaltzy user interfaces that come with these new-fangled interweb RSS readers, let me just have a basic view where I can jump from item to item with no problem. After all, Google Reader worked just fine under that principle. The few people who used it seem to like it. So there!

4) The Old Reader: This application claims to be just that, an old version of Google Reader! What better place to transition to than a downgraded version of what you love? All kidding aside, this little RSS Reader is a nice application for those who just want to read articles--images or video not so much. It is clean and straightforward.

As mentioned earlier, images were rendered strangely (everything was shoved to the right side, no wrapping  whatsoever) and videos didn't even appear (which may be a clue for bloggers to remember to always include a link to videos in addition to embedding them). The Old Reader also seems to be gaining in popularity, because they were unable to process my Google Reader feeds due to overload. I tested the application on my personal blogs: GARB & WTHT. Overall, if you want a nice reader that doesn't bother with images and stuff, this is probably the one you'll be happiest with.

5) NewsBlur: Newsblur is laid out very much like Outlook, complete with a folder structure and reading panes. This RSS reader also owns a mobile app, so you can take it on the road. Personally, I feel like I am staring at my work inbox when I look at this UI, so I'm not too hot for it. But I understand how some people would love the simplicity and versatility of this layout (so much for my power user status).

The worst critique of NewsBlur--from what I've read-- is that they limit the number of subscriptions available to users. If this is true, then shame on them. Can't you see we're used to getting whatever we want in whatever portions we want?

6) Twitter Lists: I am not going to link to Twitter. You should know this one by now. And yes, people are actually suggesting that Twitter can be used to aggregate content because anyone who publishes stuff on the web should have a twitter feed by now and should be posting links to their articles straight to their feeds.

This option is decidedly more cumbersome, but still a great idea with some great benefits. For one thing, you can receive a text notification that your favorite writer has published a new post. Once you have opened the link in your browser, you can also share it with whatever application you'd like. It is mobile, a web application and can be customized using client software.

No, Twitter was not developed specifically as a feed reader. But it can serve admirably as a patch for the RSS service.

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