Weibel Lines

Eastward-ho

I left my digs in Seattle at high noon on Monday and got as far as Missoula on the first day before snow-hypnosis drove me off the highway.  I had a suspicion that the first 100 miles of my journey might be the toughest.  Or maybe that was hope.  They were indeed soggy, and then snowy miles, but much more interesting weather lay ahead I'm afraid.  South Dakota... mid November... right.  Still, I stopped at the Little Bighorn Battlefield today to pay homage to earlier exemplars of hopeless military adventurism (which side was guiltier of this is left to the perspective of the reader).   It is within sight of I-90, and well worth the visit, especially in lonely November.

At one point in Eastern Wyoming, I used my GPS to look for a Starbucks, only to find that the closest one was 282 miles distant.  I've decided that I prefer Red Bull to lousy coffee (at least for pharmacologic purposes), so I filled my tank and scored a couple cans.  I blasted past Wall Drug (the midpoint of my journey) with hopes of making 1000 miles on the day. But not long after, the weather turned sour again, so here I am in Murdo, SD and grateful to be off the highway and settled in for the night.  The driving day started with a pre-dawn close encounter with a deer and ended with a semi that passed me in near blizzard conditions, leaving me in a state of blindness resembling a drive-through car wash, except moving at 40 miles per hour in slush-ruts.   Seattle rain is looking very good to me at the moment.  So is sleeping in my own bed.  I am full of poignant regard for friends and family on both ends of my trip.

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Image: 11:55 on Monday, November 13th, loaded and ready to go

Going Home

A week from this moment I’ll be somewhere in the vicinity of Spokane, a few hours into a long drive to my (other) home in Ohio. Sometime around Halloween something yanked my head eastward, and I stopped being here and started seeing most everything as a last this, a final that. Given the rains of recent days, I’m afraid I might have seen the last sunshine of my tenure here already, but true to the viral affection I’ve developed for Seattle, I find that even the rain has charm for me. Like the rivers here this week, I find myself full to the brim and spillable at the least perturbation.

Early in my tenure as iSchool Visiting Scholar, I took the List of Four bait. This week seems a good moment to revisit the idea.

Four favorite places to eat in Seattle: (in no particular order)

• Joe and Lisa’s dinner table. My neighbors - great food, great conversation.
• The Mason’s dining room overlooking Puget Sound.  The zeal of converts to the cuisine of the Pacific Northwest, and a taste for the wonderful wines of the region.
• 35^th Street Bistro in Fremont – allegedly also a favorite haunt of Dale Chihouly, but by the time someone like me learns this, he’s probably gone on to other places. This place can make even eating alone a pleasure. (thanks, Mike!).
• The Flying Fish is still on my list, but I haven’t been there in a while, drawn more to the lesser known treasures of a city where uncommon devotion to food is commonplace.

Four favorite commercial establishments

• The Allegro Café – a great latte, and inexhaustible discourse on love, life, poetry, art, literature, and travel, all decorated with volleys of puns that make Borg and McEnroe seem like pikers.
• Magus Books – they know their stuff.
• Third Place Books – A café, bakery, pub, social space, and purveyor of books, new and used. Location of our Semantic Web Discussion Group during the summer and fall.
• Glazier’s camera store. The place in Seattle to buy art-glass for your camera.

Four happy surprises

• I’m still capable of discovery.
• The rain isn’t so bad after all.
• Ten perfect days showing Marguerite the Pacific Northwest.
• People will leave their homes on a rainy Wednesday night (or a sunny Wednesday summer’s eve) to talk about semantic web ideas. 

Four regrets:

• Not enough time in the mountains.
• Not enough time in the city.
• Not enough time.
• Not making better use of time I had (so what else is new?).

 Four most important ideas

• Say Yes to everything – the basic rule of improvisation (Malcom Gladwell, in Blink).
• The virtues of opaque identifiers are largely hogwash.
• Web 2.0 ideas (and their cousins, Library 2.0 ideas) provide the hooks for a new kind of librarianship that feels quite a lot like the old kind of librarianship, but webulated.
• WorldCat identifiers are potentially the Web’s most useful identifier for curated      intellectual content… now, if we can only capitalize on the potential….

Four books that had the most impact on my thinking:

• The Soul of Money (Lynn Twist) You have enough, you’re smart enough, you’re good enough.
• Blink – Malcom Gladwell’s exposition of thin-slice thinking.
• On Photography – Susan Sontag’s classic photography criticism.
• A Fine Balance – Mistry’s tale of India in the years following partition. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy affords a perspective of the same era from a different class. Great reading, both.

Four CDs I’ve listened to the most

• Time, Sex, and Love – Mary Chapin Carpenter.
• Modern Times – Bob Dylan.
• The Future – Leonard Cohen.
• Beethoven Symphonies Nos 5&7 (Carlos Kleiber).

The things I’m most thankful for in the year just past (no way to stop at four):

• Lorcan, who thought my sabbatical was a good idea even when my own doubts made me      want to cling to the safety of home… and Jay, who believed him.
• Tony Hey of Microsoft, whose support of this activity was the tipping point I needed.
• Michael Crandall, Bob and Marilyn Mason, Harry Bruce, Mike Eisenberg and the many other people at the iSchool who helped make a place for me in the vibrant intellectual life of the University of Washington.
• The MSIM crew for helping me to renovate my thinking, and being great companions. In particular, Mike and Geoff and Jason whose generosity of time and ideas lit the fuse of my sabbatical.
• Discovering the Allegro Café and the menagerie of astonishing people for whom this amazing place is an intellectual and social home.
• A landlady of indefatigable curiosity and dedication to learning, and her brother, my housemate, who each enriched my visit in entirely unanticipated ways. A Craig’s List success story.
• Marguerite, who unflinchingly supported my absence, doing the heavy lifting at home. Yes, I’ll walk Buddy for a year.
• Chandra and Kody, Efthi and Terry. Randy. Brian and Elizabeth, Mark and Carol and Lauan and others whose names I don’t know. Joe & Lisa. Kevin, Corprew, Sharon, Evelyne, Chris and others in the SemGrail group.
• My Mom, who got the three day tour and whose passion for life always inspires me. It’s going to be a great thanksgiving!

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Image: I rediscovered this image of the Olympic mountains in my frantic effort to organize the 8 or 10,000 images I've generated this year. 

So, shall soft wear? Well?

Yesterday, out of the blue, Jay Jordan sent me the following message:

FYI
http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/02/meetup-in-seattle/

Well, what the heck... why not?  So I arrived early and watched for the baseball cap with a B, waiting for a blind date who didn't know I was coming.  Soon after 8, Marshall and Curt arrived and I introduced myself, and we set about deconstructing Web 2.0 (mostly they deconstructed, and I listened). Highlights of my Monday night site map follow:

Lulu Self publishing saleable content, one book, CD, DVD or podcast at a time.

Grazr - Web-based outline processor for better organized feeds (look under TopTen Sources for the Library Blogs); uses OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language).

Freedom Toaster Free open-source access kiosk - no internet needed (and where is Knysna, anyway???)

Netsquared.com "remixing the web for social change"

AJAX - its not just for GoogleMaps anymore.  Read about it at this link, or try some of the latest aps here

Podleaders.com Tom Raftery's podcast thoughtleader interview site.  Got a question for an interviewee? 

Ohmynews.com Citizen Journalism in South Korea... "Asian participatory anything is just way ahead, whether it's Japan or Korea"

Library Stuff  Steven Cohen's Library 2.0 Weblog

ResourceShelf Gary Price's news digest for IT professionals

Raw Danny Ayers, semantic-webhead RDF, RSS, metadata wonk tranplanted from northern England to Lucca, Italy. 

Buzzmachine Jef Jarvis' blog on digital culture and media

Librarysuccess.org A best-practices Wiki for innovation in the library world.  Managed by Meredith Farkas, of Norwich University

Dar Williams the folksinger

Mashup the idiom of Web remix culture

Pledgebank Social contracts in social software

Frappr  Link your group/photos/ideas/favorite places to the GoogleMaps API

Nicholas Carr Does IT matter?

And then, as if all that wasn't enough, I got home around midnight to dessert, from Lorcan:

The Hughtrain Manifesto
"We are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary."

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Smithsonian towers and the Washington Monument, the Mall, March 2006

Seattle Musings

Seekers of substance: move along, move along… nothing to see here… (but come back soon!)

I’m a month into my Seattle Sabbatical, and in service to my goal of having no unblogged thoughts, I’d like to share some observations and experiences of my stay here thus far.

First of all, dislocation from one’s home and routine is lonesome at times. My hosts in Seattle are gracious and welcoming, but the truth of the matter is being away from home is isolating to an extent. It takes work to break out of that, and the lack of sunshine makes it hard to overcome inertia at times. I miss my wife, my dog, my friends, thursday night beer breaks, my workshop, and the easy to-and-fro of a collegial work environment that I’ve known for two decades.

But this is America, and when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. Buying toys is a welcome diversion (pleasure isn’t happiness, but it is… well… pleasure!) My favorite so far is a video iPod and JBL Onstage II docking speakers. So, I’m ready to listen to all the neo-grunge alternative rock that I will, no doubt, be collecting in the vibrant music scene of Seattle (the assertion has been made to me that Seattle has more live music than any city in the US except New York).

The big surprise to me about my video iPod, however, is the video part. I got it for music and also for backup and sharing of my photographs, but I couldn't really imagine watching much on it.  I have not watched a television screen since I’ve been here, and I don’t miss it a bit. I don’t buy music on iTunes, and I’m even less likely to buy old episodes of Friends there (the Simpsons, on the other hand, might tempt me).  But I can imagine ripping a DVD and being able to watch it on a plane, and I’ve made my own iMovies from vacation trips.

My first discovery was that the iPod wouldn’t play the output of iMovie. Duh. Thanks Apple-of-the-plug-and-play idiom. But I stumbled onto iSquint, a freeware application that converts it, so I have my very own iMovie on my iPod. It is surprising how much of the feel comes through on the 320x240 pixel screen (and the sound is iPod-terrific of course). It made me an instant believer in the video iPod business model. And now, I can impose my home videos on perfect strangers!

The other purchase I will make, as soon as my friend Wes-the-bicycle-expert signs off on my choice, is a bicycle (waiting with bated breath at my keyboard, Wes!). In Seattle, bicycles assume the sort of totemic cultural valence reserved for crucifixes or sports franchises in other places.  You think I'm exaggerating?  The Cascade Bicycle Club's byline is "creating a better community through bicycling" and bicycle advocacy is a prominent part of local government here. This reverence is partly the result of the often-paralyzing traffic and the strong ethic of outdoorsiness that is pervasive in the area. One of the iSchool faculty, Terry Brooks, cycles to work every day it doesn’t snow… which rounds to every day: 6000 miles a year. Terry’s advice about bicycling in the rain: “Beginners try to stay dry – the veterans know better.”  My digs are literally a stone's throw from the Burke-Gilman bicycle trail, one of the prominent bike thoroughfares in the Seattle area.  So, commuting the 6 miles or so should be quite natural, and very pleasant, as the trail skirts the margins of Lake Washington.  But biking isn't the only good alternative to leaving one's car lonely in the drive.  More on that next time.

First day of iSchool

OK… maybe the first week, depending on how you look at it. I left Columbus on Monday, January 2^nd, and rolled into Seattle on Wednesday evening at rush hour, my worst weather fears of a northern traverse of the continent largely unrealized. The only difficulties of the road trip were in the first and final hours. I inauspiciously left both of my computers by my chair at home in the early hours of dawn on Monday. When Marguerite called me to tell me, I was two hours out of Columbus, with no choice but to turn the ship around and go back. From there on out, the drive was without incident, though my advice to Seattle newcomers would be to avoid arriving at rush hour (not an easy objective, as evening rush hour in Seattle lasts from about 3 to 8).

I stopped enroute for little but food, fuel, and a cheap night’s sleep, but two roadside attractions in South Dakota were irresistible: the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota (pictured above), and then Wall Drug (which, by coincidence, was within a mile of the midpoint of my trip). You’ve seen the billboards “If billboards don’t work, why are you reading this one?” Well, after dozens of Wall Drug billboards for hundreds of miles, I was unable to resist the offer of free ice water, even in January. And that free bumper sticker… well… don’t leave South Dakota without one!

I had as my companion on the trip an audio book of Anna Karenina. Thirty CDs totaling 38.5 hours. There’s a condensed version… 9 hours shorter… that achieves its brevity simply by collapsing all the character names to single syllables… Ann… Al… Dee… but hey. I had the time, and I wanted the full treatment. This is as painless a way to do Russian literature as I’ve personally experienced. And at about a dollar an hour, hard to beat in terms of cost efficiency. Talk to me about my gently-used copy for your next transcontinental trip.

Settling into my digs (sharing a house on Lake Washington with a professor of Surgery at UW), I rediscovered the joys of grocery-shopping-for-one and appointing my rooms in grad-student-modern (thank you IKEA!). I’ve even fixed a few meals, though that old graduate student standby, beer and popcorn, is both filling and more nutritious than most nutritional experts let on.

Monday morning felt like the first day of third grade. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a first-morning experience, but it was a pleasant one to be sure. The iSchool faculty must certainly have grown faster than any other comparable faculty in the discipline, and the faculty meeting I attended marked the assumption to leadership of Harry Bruce, who is taking over the Deanship from Mike Eisenberg. Mike led the school during its growth from about a dozen faculty to its present size of 40, and they are a diverse and engaging company indeed.

Now, about this rain… on two occasions in 7 days I’ve glimpsed a patch of what I believe was sky, and as I write this the sun is actually peeking through the clouds. Mostly it has simply rained steadily.  The headline in today’s UW Daily reported MUDSLIDE EVACUATES HOUSE. The article indicates it was actually 4 students who evacuated -- A fraternity house rendered unlivable… imagine! The radio tells me it is the rainiest winter since the early 60s. I bet Seattle is a great place to be a roofer.

Nothing profound in any of these observations -- just reflections on the start of my Western Sojourn. Any day now I’ll have profound insights to share. Really. I promise.  In the meantime, where else in the Blogosphere can you find the Corn Palace and Anna Karenina all rolled into one?

PS.  I would be remiss in failing to credit Wes Boomgaarden, preservation officer for The Ohio State University Libraries for clueing me in to the cultural importance of The Corn Palace.  There's a certain wry smile that crosses his face when he's telling you something you can't afford to ignore, and this was one of those admonitions.  Sure glad I listened.

Molting

v. molt·ing
v. intr.

To shed periodically part or all of a coat or an outer covering, such as feathers, cuticle, or skin, which is then replaced by a new growth.

Starting in January, I will be molting… traveling to the iSchool at the University of Washington to take up a sabbatical year away from OCLC Research, my professional home of the past two decades. OCLC has no tradition or policy for sabbaticals, so, being afforded such an opportunity is both wonderful and perhaps a little daunting. 

My sponsors at the iSchool – Michael Crandall and Stuart Sutton – are colleagues with whom I have worked closely for some years in the Dublin Core activity. Stuart has been active as chair of the DC-Education working group and the DCMI Usage Board, and Michael is a charter member of the DCMI Board of Trustees, and has been the spark plug for that group since it began.  While I am not going to UW to do metadata work per se, I’ll be among friends who understand my background and can help me extract maximum value from my visit.

The term sabbatical is rooted in sabbath – a day of rest. In today’s environs, sabbaticals are about focused work rather than rest. What both senses of the term share is the idea of renewal, and that is certainly at the top of my list of expectations.  My objectives for the year include writing (on the topic of persistent identifiers) and ventilating my thinking through interaction with a strong and diverse faculty.

I hope to make a contribution to both the iSchool and to OCLC Research while strengthening the outward-facing ties that have become increasingly important to us, and to the future of librarianship.  It is hard to imagine a more hospitable place to do this than the iSchool at the University of Washington.

I am indebted to many for this opportunity:

Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President for Research, has encouraged me and promoted the idea within OCLC. He also took it upon himself to seek support for the activity outside OCLC.

Jay Jordan, CEO, has been a supporter of standards in general, and of my own work in standardization for the duration of his tenure at OCLC. Without his enthusiasm, the idea would have gone nowhere.

Michael Crandall and Stuart Sutton made very clear that my welcome at the iSchool would be a warm one, and have seen to the administrative advance work in support of my visit.

Tony Hey, Microsoft’s Vice President for Technical Computing, has generously agreed to support the local costs and travel associated with my stay at the iSchool.

Finally, my wife, Marguerite, will be keeping the home fires burning in Columbus. Marguerite has for many years absorbed the intangible but substantial costs of my life on the standards road. True to form, she has supported this idea wholeheartedly as it has evolved.  Marguerite has completed three books of her own (its clear who the real scholar in the family is)... Buy them now at Amazon, or find in a library, here.