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Right now, you can view this interesting article here. It has also been posted in the blog sociology LJ community (which is a very interesting place in its own right).
I love this quote from Barbara Quint: "Here he is working all night on something read by five second cousins and a dog, and I'm willing to pay him."
Today I had my first experience of a seriously copy-protected CD, Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, released by EMI. I didn't have much luck ripping it onto my Mac - I ended up having to force quit out of iTunes. Apparently there are a number of different copy-protection methods. One method can be circumvented with a magic marker. I didn't think that this method would work on this particular CD, so I looked for other methods. Then I saw this reference to hold down the shift key on a Windows computer for 5 seconds after inserting the CD. This stopped the CD from automatically launching the program which would interfere with the copy protection. I then copied the CD with iTunes, and soon I'll have it in my iPod.
As I've written before, I believe that creators should be fairly compensated for their work, but that copy-protection technology goes way too far, and I have no moral qualms about circumventing it. I've never been interested in downloading music from file-sharing sites. The only thing which would tempt me would be if I wasn't able to rip a CD which I had lawfully purchased. Then I would feel entitled to download an illicit copy.
When will the record companies realize that people like to listen to music on their computers and mp3 players, and it is manifestly unfair to prevent this from happening? It is simply such a stupid thing to do - piss off your paying customers and drive them into supporting your real target, the file-traders.
I'm about to really start ranting, so instead I'll link this detailed explanation of how the shift method works.
I wrote earlier about my difficulties with getting iBook connected with Telstra's BigPond ADSL service. Well, it turned out that Telstra don't support Macs running on OS 10.3 (Panther). Don't ask me why. I was quite miffed when I noticed this in the fine print. Information like that should be in big bold letters under the Mac requirements. Well I'm happy to say it is possible to connect to BigPond ADSL on a Mac with Panther. It was actually quite easy. So easy that I could have been saved a lot of frustration if only Telstra had bothered to slip in a piece of paper with a few sentences giving some direction to Panther users.
This was something I worked out substantially on my own. I called the Telstra technical support this afternoon. I got the usual line that they don't officially support Panther, but the guy knew that it was possible to connect with it, but he wasn't sure how.
That wasn't at all helpful, but unless the guy was totally lying, it was good to know that it was somehow possible. Of course there wasn't anything on the BigPond website about this. So I looked further afield and found this helpful discussion thread. This gave me the information which I needed to try a different strategy, which actually worked! I went into System Preferences / Network and decided to try the "Assist Me" button for the hell of it, and that did the trick. So now I can return to using my iBook for everything.
Now my dilemma is, shall I stick with Bloglines (which I have developed a liking for), or go back to NetNewsWire (which I also like)?
While I'm talking about Australian broadband internet services, I have got to mention one huge difference between the Australian and American pricing models. In Australia, they really punish bandwidth hogs. All but the most expensive plans have a monthly download/upload allowance. The most basic plans start give you 200 MB to last an entire month. If you go over this allowance, one or both of these things will happen: you'll be charged for each MB over the limit; your connection speed is curtailed so that it's hardly any better than dialup.
From my observations, a 200 MB plan will work for somebody who never surfs the web for more than an hour a day (looking primarily at text), and who never goes to graphics intensive sites, never downloads or streams music or videos and never downloads applications (except maybe the absolute necessary patches and updates, if there aren't too many in that month). And MMORPGs like Lineage, EverQuest and Shadowbane are totally verboten.
I admit, I have been spoilt by my experience in the US, where there are no monthly download allowances. Those would never fly over there! Although I recall reading something about American ISPs are starting to worry about bandwidth hogs.
And it isn't fair when the person who is downloading pirated versions of Buffy season six (6 DVDs worth) and other movies is paying the same monthly charge as the person who just looks at the news, checks her email and does some shopping.
In theory, I can accept the idea of download-based pricing. But it's still a pain. Would it make a difference if they just sold it a different way, such as providing discounts and incentives for lower usage? Who knows. It's probably not so much of an issue in Australia, because most people here have never known anything different.
[See this follow up post about Mac browsers]
Opera 7.50 has recently been released. For the first time, Opera for Mac is no longer a version behind the Windows version. Opera 7.50 is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Of course, Mac users upgrading from Opera 6 will notice more changes than Windows users upgrading from Opera 7.
Opera is still a small download, compared with the other major browsers. I like to use Opera for extended browsing / searching, because it has all sorts of handy short cuts which make browsing more efficient. Things like the z and x short-cuts for the back and forward buttons. Pressing F8 to be tab directly to the address bar, and then being able to go directly into a Google search by typing something like‘g MT “public relations” debacle’. I also like having nick-names for bookmarks, so instead of using my mouse to click on my LiveJournal bookmark, I can just press F8 and type in my bookmark’s nick-name, “lj” and be there. I like a browser which saves me key-strokes and mouse usage.
It can also be really helpful to be able to continue browsing from your previous session, and being able to undo closing a browsing window.
Of course, these were all things available in previous versions of Opera, so why upgrade to 7.50? Mac users will appreciate the magic wand for remembering passwords and having access to the full range of skins. The user interface looks more efficient and takes up less space on the screen.
One of the big innovations in Opera 7.50 is that it contains a news aggregator. This is a great idea and will probably be taken up by other browsers. Unfortunately, I found the results to be patchy. In the Windows version of Opera 7.50, I experienced difficulties reading my subscriptions. For some reason, the Mac version worked better. If you experiment with Opera’s news reader, I would highly recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts for marking items as read. The Opera news reader is very basic when compared with software like Net NewsWire (even the Lite version), but it’s still a notable first attempt at combining a browser and news reader.
My other gripe about is that Opera 7.50 is that it now only supports search shortcuts for Google. The previous version would support some of the other search engines like AlltheWeb and Teoma. Even though Google is probably at the height of its ascendancy, the other search engines are still relevant if you want to be thorough.
Opera is ad-supported for people who aren’t able or interested in paying for it (there is an upgrade discount for people who’ve registered previous versions of Opera). The good news is that now the ad window is a lot smaller and less intrusive than in previous versions.
Opera continues to be an innovative and competent browser. Sometimes there can be hassles with using a browser with such a miniscule market share, when too many web designers are only concerned with supporting IE for Windows. Opera’s particular niche is that it’s a power-user’s browser. Its extra features won’t be helpful to people who lack the time or interest to explore and play around with them.
There are many blogs about being unemployed. One that I've been reading is the Tasmanian dolebludger blog. I found it interesting that there are no “unemployed librarian” themed blogs. Maybe I’m getting sloppy in my searching, but I couldn’t find any – please let me know if I’ve missed anything. I have found some blogs (librarian.net, Open Stacks, Tour Guide of Coffeehouses) which were written by librarians who were once unemployed, but unemployment did not seem to be the main focus of these blogs and they each found work.
Maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised at the scarcity of unemployed librarian blogs. Having just been through over two months of unemployment myself, I did not seriously consider making unemployment one of the major themes of the exploded library, despite the fact that it would be a great niche for readership. Even if there are very good reasons why somebody happens to be unemployed, he or she feels usually ashamed of this diminished status. Speaking for myself, I was reluctant to advertise the fact of my unemployment to the world unless I really had to. I was also worried that I would come across as self-pitying.
Even now, I only feel able to write about this now because I have just been offered a job. But I want to write about my experience of being unemployed while it is still painfully fresh in my mind.
Oh, and my new job isn’t in a library. So I guess in a way, that I am still an unemployed librarian, because I am not working in the profession. Although I am glad to say that librarians do usually have a variety of skills which are marketable in the event they ever need to work in a different field. I’ll continue to keep my eyes open for library jobs, but I do so relieved at having any job that I may give Vodafone at least a year out of gratitude.
I find it interesting how people drift in and out of librarianship. No doubt there is somebody who always wanted to be a librarian, but all of my former co-workers as well as my fellow students at library school had an indirect path to library work. Librarianship seems to be an accidental profession. People enter the profession accidentally, and sometimes they leave the profession in a similar way.
Libraries in Australia are less funded and have fewer employees than their American counterparts. At least that has been my experience. I worked for a time, on a temporary basis at the University of New South Wales law library, which is one of Australia’s best academic law libraries. It is amazing that the UNSW law library has fewer staff and fewer volumes than my previous employer, the Hamline University law library. As much I really liked working at Hamline, it was a small private law school in the fourth tier of American law schools. Yet its law library was better equipped than one of Australia’s best academic law libraries! And my own law school, the University of Tasmania, has an even more meagre library. Just one professional librarian, yet it is certainly within the top ten of Australian law schools.
Of course, education is a lot more expensive for students in the USA, notwithstanding the changes in the Australian tertiary education system. I’m not saying that the American system is better overall, just that it seems to result in better funded and staffed academic libraries.
Maybe I’m not comparing apples with apples, because in Australian universities, the law library is usually just a branch of the main campus library system. Technical services is often centralized. Whereas in the US, the ABA rules require that the law library be separately administered. I think it is these ABA standards for academic law libraries which cause this disparity between Australian and American law libraries. The standards are fairly detailed and actually have teeth. If a law school’s library is not up to scratch, that law school will not be accredited – it’s as simple as that. That sort of external pressure helps the American university administrators from neglecting their law libraries too seriously.
Then in Tasmania, there are very few law libraries and special libraries (the two areas where I have the most experience). Most of the library jobs are in the public library system, the University of Tasmania or in the school system. I would be happy to work in a public library or non-legal academic library, if they would have me. Never in a school. I think that school librarians have a very important calling, but the way things are, the library is usually the least-valued and supported part of a school system which itself is already underfunded – nothing could entice me to work under such difficult and depressing circumstances.
It is a very small job market for librarians in Tasmania, and once somebody gets a library job here, they generally stay in it for a long time. Especially for law librarians, openings only happen when somebody dies or retires – and that’s if the employer doesn’t see this event as opportunity to replace the librarian position with a library assistant or technician.
I knew it would be more difficult to find library work in Tasmania, although to be honest, I did not think it would be this hard. I had forgotten that networking is of such crucial importance for finding work amongst this small close-knit group of librarians here. I do not have much of a network here and am not very good at using networking as a job-seeking method.
I know that if I moved to somewhere on the Mainland like Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, I would eventually be able to find a good library job there. I may end up doing that, but not right now. If moving up the ladder as a law librarian was the most important thing for me, I would have stayed in the USA. But I decided that the quality of life in Tasmania was more important, even if moving back would involve downshifting my career. I was prepared to be unemployed after my arrival – which happened. I was also prepared to be underemployed – which is happening now.
How much value does one put on natural beauty, the proximity of family, and a slower pace of life and friendlier strangers? What sort of sacrifice is appropriate to obtain such a thing?
Before I finish, I’ll talk about how my work changes may affect this blog. I still feel as if I am a librarian, and I still think like one, especially in my approach to blogging (lawyers make much of the ability to “think like a lawyer”, but I think that “thinking like a librarian” is just as real a concept). Only at the very beginning did this blog try to be a law library blog. I found that approach too constrictive and changed my focus to a librarian’s perspective on particular issues – some of which were at the heart of the profession, while others had little or nothing to do with librarians. For the time being, I think I’ll be able to continue this. After all, I hope to return to the profession within a year or two, and blogging will be one of the best ways of keeping in touch with the changes in the library world.
I am one of the many people who has experienced this problem after upgrading to iTunes 4.5. I have a 20 GB iPod which I bought at the Apple store in the Mall of America in January. There is a fix to this solution and it has worked for me. Go to Apple's web site, choose the Support tab, then choose the Discussions sub-tab, select the iPod product forum, then select the [regular] iPod, and then the Usage folder. The posting is currently second from the top and is called "iPod doesn't appear in Updater or iTunes in Mac OS X". The instructions were fairly straightforward, at least for Panther users.
The nature of the Australian-American alliance is becoming a domestic political issue in Australia, and one of the main differences between the two major parties. The actual differences are really quite minor, but in today’s political environment the differences have been magnified and become the things which elections can be fought over.
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) under the leadership of Mark Latham, who seems to have revitalized the ALP, is committed to the alliance, but wants it to be more of an alliance of equals, rather than the obsequious sycophantic relationship which John Howard has with George W. Bush. Before he was elected leader of the Opposition, Latham called John Howard an arselicker with respect to Howard’s behaviour towards the US. He called the governing Liberal / National coalition a “conga line of suckholes.” The citation to the offical Hansard record of this debate is: H.R. Deb. (5.2.2004) 10927; it's also on page 37 of the 180 page pdf version of the Hansard transcript.
[I been wanting to quote these choices phrases for a long time. I wonder if this will cause my blog to be blocked out by filtering software? That would be a novelty]
The main debate about the nature of the alliance with the US is focused around two main issues. First the presence of Australian troops in Iraq. Second (and less prominently, although having far-reaching ramifications), the proposed US-Australian free trade agreement (FTA). They are interlinked. The progress in the FTA is widely viewed as Australia’s reward for being such a staunch (I say sycophantic) ally to the US, being in lock-step with George W. Bush over Iraq.
As an Australian who lived in the US for over six years and has fond thoughts about the people and place, I certainly think that it makes sense for Australia and the US to be friends and allies. There is certainly a natural affinity amongst the peoples of both countries.
But if the two countries were true friends rather than being master and servant, our alliance would be strong and mature enough that we could disagree about things like Iraq. When the US chickenhawks became obsessed with Iraq, a true friend would have told them in no uncertain terms that it was a mad crusade which would only increase the risk of terrorism from the Middle East.
It’s also interesting that both Australia and the US are facing national elections this year. If Bush should win in the US (God forbid) and Latham in Australia, the Australia-US alliance will be strained somewhat. Not too much. Mark Latham has already toned down his rhetoric since becoming leader of the Opposition. He is first and foremost a politician and is not so stupid as to allow John Howard to mobilize Australia’s paranoia by being too controversial in the final stretch. But he will take out Australia’s largely symbolic contribution of troops in Iraq by the end of the year. Because of that pledge and because he has repeatedly criticized George W. Bush ("Bush himself is the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory”, H.R. Deb. (5.2.2004) 10926; page 36 of the pdf version) Mark Latham will never be popular with the Bushies.
Of course, I am hoping against hope that both Latham and Kerry will unseat their respective conservative incumbents.
Should John Kerry win, but Howard gets back in Australia, I doubt there will be any problems with the alliance. Kerry is a centrist, not a left-winger – and certainly not by Australian standards. Besides, if there’s regime change in Washington D.C., John Howard will do his utmost to ingratiate himself with the new American President. That is one thing which he does very well.
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