Au revoir, Samson

I had the good fortune a couple of Fridays  ago (Dec. 12) to shop at Samson Hardware on what was certainly its last day in its current location, and what may be its last day ever.  I witnessed the end of 104 years of Fairbanks history. My visit there was entirely accidental: I needed something [...]

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Follow the discussion through e-mail

A few of my readers do not use a feed aggregator, but prefer to be notified by e-mail of new posts. I’ve also had a few requests for some kind of e-mail notification for new comments. So, voila! If you’ll look at the top box at right (“Subscribe by E-mail”), you’ll notice two links now: [...]

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A little more about the author

Some loved ones have recently described my “About the author” page as “terse,” “cold,” and “snooty.” My intention was just to keep a bit of distance between my personal life and the themes of The Fairbanks Pedestrian. I would generally like not to bring personal details out for show, except where they illustrate my points [...]

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Ten things you didn’t want to know

I’ve been “tagged” by my colleague “P” who has given me the charge of listing “The Ten Things Most People Don’t Know About Me”. I’m not so sure I’m interested in sharing — good God, to what avail? — but it gets me writing, which is a good practice. While I refuse to pass this [...]

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My mark of shame

Prompted by my colleague “P”, whose blog’s reading level has been rated as “Genius”, I tested the reading level of my own blog. The results: Oh, how embarrassing. Clearly, my blog is “pedestrian” in more than one sense. Perhaps if I revised some posts to include more edumacated words…

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No. 30 (Summing up)

Following my colleagues’ blogs, I am astonished to find how little value some of them find in nearly ALL the Web 2.0 tools. Some people are eager to see tools as time-wasting toys, and will not have the imagination to see how a library might use them. C’est incredible! For my money, what were the [...]

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No. 29 (Rasmuson Web Resources)

I’m familiar with most of these already. But new to me was the Rasmuson DVD browser. How nice to have a tool that more closely matches the way people like to search for movies! Not good for the finer-grained subject searching that documentary, instructional, and other non-fiction videos should allow — but there are few [...]

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No. 28 (New Browser): Mostly Playing with Konqueror

One of the drawbacks of using a non-mainstream browser is that it is often not supported. For example, I’ve just been rejected by the MyUA portal for using Konqueror, a web-browser/file-manager for the K Desktop Environment (KDE) on Linux systems. Another disadvantage — though perhaps this is more a disadvantage of using Linux? — is [...]

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No. 27 (Grokker)

First thoughts: Why can’t this thing get me more than 250 results? When you get only 250 hits on britney spears (vma OR “video music awards”), there’s clearly a problem. Who could be happy with only 250? I can’t figure out how to increase them. I am distrustful of dynamic clustering, especially of web pages, [...]

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No. 26 (MySpace)

On this one, I’m not going to spend a lot of time — because I’ve already spent more than I care to. If I’m going to be doing anything online with friends, they’re going to be friends — that is, flesh-and-blood people who, I know, already have something in common with me. There’s just not [...]

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