Subject/Object » 2006 » September

New Google Reader… oh why?

Steven Chabot — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 03:13:25 +0000

River of News. It is a style of reading RSS feeds where all the posts are jumbled together in one big mash, unlike Bloglines et. al. which sort posts by feed source, and even user generated folders. When you read with RoN, you surf along, never bored too much by one source because the next one could be totally different.

The concept has been around for a while, but there was only one online news reader which did it, well, until now, and that was Google Reader. Sure, it was slow in the beginning, but I loved the fact that it was so simple: titles on the left, content on the right. Now what do I find when I load Reader at like 8 pm tonight? Clutter, extra clicking, dreaded folders, and no more River of News. Sure, the developers like to assure us:

Well, things might look different, but we made sure the new interface enabled the reading style of current Reader users. For example, clicking “All items” and choosing “List view” should make the experience feel quite familiar.

But, really, that setting just doesn’t cut it. In the first place, it doesn’t use all of the screen space. The titles are displayed on the right, and clicking on them opens them up, pushing all the other titles down. But that leaves 1/2 of my screen wasted with Folders which I made over a year ago and don’t use, and a link to the “Home” section of the reader which is utterly useless. Ok, not all of us have a huge LCD, an I have a 12″ laptop which only does 1024×768, and I need all the space I can get.

Luckily the haven’t taken away the old interface, and I hope they never do because I have tried other readers and I just can’t do it. Although, the more I look at the content of my feeds, the more I think that maybe this is a good thing.

Subject/Object Wiki

Steven Chabot — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 20:07:11 +0000

Partially in an effort at procrastination, I have set up a wiki at wiki.subjectobject.net. Hopefully I can work on research there and have it open to the public.

Right now my classes are so introductionary, it is hard to find anything interesting to say about them. For instance, my theory course, Information and its Social Contexts, has some every scholarly readings, but I find the classes to be at a very elementary level. However, I realize that they are core and required courses–hopefully I can do some interesting work in the assignments.

I will say that my Introduction to Bibliographic Control is much more interesting then I thought it could be, but I am falling behind on the non-graded assignments (which I will work on right after this post).

But, as expected, my Book History and Print Culture class is amazing. Partially because it gathers together students from a variety of departments: English, French, Fine Art, History (that is, others not in a professional-ish Master’s). The theoretical level of discussion is really high, and there are only 15 people in the course which makes for a great 3 hours.

I don’t know which way I am going to go yet as per interests and professional life, but I am really interested in the possibility of Analytic and Historical Bibliography in some respects, maybe working with Rare Books as well in some kind of scholarship. Although I am still interested as well in the future of the book, and I cannot seem to disconnect the two in my mind.

The founder of the Book History Program here was also the General Editor of the 3 vol. History of the Book in Canada. She came in and gave a lecture on National Histories of the Book on Monday. I hope I can go to some lectures held by the Toronto Centre for the Book over the next few weeks to get a feel for things.

FIS 1311 Students, Welcome

Steven Chabot — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 13:26:45 +0000

As you all may have noticed I have had this site for a while. In fact, I have had some kind of web presence for almost ten years now. Most of you have stumbled here from the Class List, but if you feel like reading past entries, please do so. And if anyone is interested in starting Free Culture Toronto with me, give me a shout.

It has been a busy couple of weeks, but I am glad that the work for this course over the next 2 or 3 is really nothing. I hope to write about my classes later (particularly Book History and Print Culture) when I get the time, maybe when I am at work at Autoshare here in Toronto.

PS: If you don’t allow all people to comment on your Blogger blog, not just Blogger users, I can’t talk about what you are saying, which I have just tried to do to like a dozen people the last half hour.

Google’s Hypocritical Banned Books Week Post

Steven Chabot — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 03:10:28 +0000

Does anyone else find it ironic that Google is promoting Banned Books Week?

Now Google has joined the party [party?]. At google.com/bannedbooks, you can use Google Book Search to explore some of the best novels of the 20th century which have been challenged or banned.

Oh really? Google, your left hand promotes “Celebrate your freedom to read”, while your other denies the same rights to the Chinese as you censor your search results.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger? Can you get Orwell down from the shelf for me, Big Brother?

Feed Reading

Steven Chabot — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 15:10:16 +0000

I’ll tell you one thing about not having a computer:

I kinda don’t miss reading my feeds. Sure, I am interested in what everyone has to say–the small blogs for their individual life stories, and the large blogs for the cool things I am shown which I might have not discovered otherwise. But today, as I got up before work and drank coffee, I skipped my usual routine of the Gmail -> Globe and Mail - > Google Reader - > Slashdot -> Arts and Letters Daily.

What I did instead is get up at 6:45 and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the morning sun. Sure, the book is not all that ground breaking, and it is most surely a book for hippies, but I will finished it in a day and I am enjoying it all the same. So I read for a few minutes, shuffled off to get coffee down the street, shuffled back and sat in my chair while the cat moved throughout the room to sleep, following the spots the sun made on the floor as it rose.

And while I was reading I was thinking, something I don’t think I do as well when reading on the Internet. I was thinking quite a few things, but when I finished to go to work I thought this: my morning was more enjoyable then it had been in a long time. I didn’t really miss anything by not getting the news from its various sources both traditional and from the blogsphere. I put off reading my feeds until I got to work, and I was fine with that.

But not only was I fine with it, but when I did get to work I was less interested in what they had to say. Just looking over the titles, the posts seemed meritless, often recycled, and despite objections from the community, more dead to me then the oldest books I have on my shelf; Pirsig in his book mentions the Tao-Te-Ching, and I almost put down his book to pick up my own copy just from the force of its life there on the shelf.

So why is it, despite all the potential for debate and interaction and giving works “life” that dead, cold, fixed traditional books lack, do I find blogs so lifeless? Why do they inspire less re-reading, debate, or commentary then a great origial piece of formal writing? Why do they seem so recycled and derivative? How come I have no desire to go back to a great post, even the best of blog posts, but yet Eastern monks and Western hippies still re-read the Tao-Te-Ching two or three thousand years later? And how come if the devil held the entirety of the blogsphere in the past and the future in his left hand, and all of the copies of Plato’s Complete Works in his right, I would gladly toss blogs out the window?

Perhaps I am aristocratic, a label I will accept if it can be proven to be true. But I don’t feel like I am, at least in the sense where I think I am better, or others cannot see what I see. Maybe I am too anachronistic, too wedded to the old media. At the same time I grew up with computers, feel comfortable with them and have had a web presence of some sort or another for over 10 years. I see how the media is changing things, and I see its potential, but things get fuzzy when I read the actual sentences word-for-word. Or, another way, I see the justification for all the buzz about the way things are progressing, but in the end, I think that we are making too much of “the medium is the message” — I cannot be all the message, because when I get down to it, I find the focus on the medium is somehow masking the lack of message.

Perhaps I see these posts in the wrong way: they are not extended treatments of a topic, or even essays, but sentences in a debate that is happening in a way that is closer to real time then printed works could ever aspire to. Then why do I find the debate pedantic, superficial (in terms of topic as well as in terms of depth on serious topics), and uninspired?

And, because you cannot question a media in the media without irony, why I am writing this here? Does it betray the fact that I actually do endorse blogs, or is it because I have no other voice right now? Any answers?

“Linguo….. dead!?”

Steven Chabot — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 23:01:32 +0000

Sometimes you don’t realize what love is until it is gone. It takes a parting and a little bit of heartbreak to make you realize that your life is empty, and almost meaningless, alone. You can’t get work done, you feel disconnected and purposeless.

Yesterday I came home to find my ibook…. dead. Well, almost, it ran fine, but the battery refused to charge. It was on the brink of life, slowly the numbers counted down its last moments: 4 hrs remaining, 3 hrs, 2…. 1 hr.

Ok, true, this is all my fault really. They say people are apt to blame trauma on themselves. But, I did spill coffee on the keyboard. But it was fine when I went to school, really… it seemed all ok. Later that day I stammered around, looking for a way to make it all better. I figured out that it was simply overloading the AC adapter; it must have been a short somewhere. If only I could clean the coffee from the circuits, everything would be fine.

Finally, with the last remaining battery power, I backed up my Home directory to the fileserver under my desk. As I began to remove screws, I realized that Apple does not want you playing inside there and it was a hopeless prospect. I was defeated.

I woke up early this morning to get down to the repair centre at 8 am. The verdict: a new part, of course not covered under warranty, and labour. I will have the computer on Wednesday. Until then, I am single, disconnected, OFFLINE. Here I was, wanting to write a thank-you letter, work on some Free Culture stuff. And now, it is as if I am thrust generations into the past, no lights no phones no motorcars.

I wanted to write about meeting everyone at my new program. Maybe I can sneak a chance on a computer sometime this weekend. Until then, I am forced to read and write the old fashioned way.

Maybe I will come back, some day.