Category Archives: Technology

Feb 24

Mindfulness and Social Media: Shifting Perspectives

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One of the results from the past few weeks of mindfulness practice, first a few days at Deer Park and now a few days at the Wisdom 2.0 conference, has been a looking deeply at my social media presence. I love the technology and am relatively active on several networks. I heavily use Twitter and app.net. A moderate user of Google+ and Facebook. And a very light user of LinkedIn.

In all cases, I have practiced being mindful about the content I share and have the hope of cultivating positive relationships. It has served me well over the past 6-7 years of regular sharing. I have taught full semester courses and workshops on social media and it has therefore contribute directly to my livelihood. I have found new friends and I also believe has served as a platform to share the practice of mindfulness and meditation. This is all good and I love playing with the technology.

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Feb 22

All This Relates to Everything

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This is what Ev of Twitter fame said during his interview with Soren Gordhamer from the stage of Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco – all this relates to everything. Brilliance in five words. Wisdom 2.0 is a tech conference, but it’s not. It’s business conference, but it’s not. It’s a wisdom gathering, a dharma talk, a practice, and a community.

Ev was talking about mindfully building a company from the ground up without really talking much about his new company called Obvious. He talked about meditation practice, about building culture, and about using Holacracy within the new company. This is something to explore and learn more about.

The day began with Ev and got increasingly better. I’m sitting at the end of the day with a cup of coffee and an espresso feeling inspired and motivated; trying to digest all that I heard.

Receiving the dharma rain throughout the day from the likes of Padmasree Warrior (CTO for Cisco), Gopi Kallayil (Google), Jack Kornfield, Tony Schwartz (Energy Project), Pam Weiss (Appropriate Response), Jane Fulton Suri (IDEO), Bradley Horowitz (Google), Peter Deng (Facebook), Melissa Daimler (Twitter), Jon Kabat-Zinn, and a fantastic interview with Jeff Weiner (CEO of LinkedIn).

A few highlights that I’m left with to ponder include integrating mindful planning into my work day, discovering my True Job, and managing compassion. My thoughts go to how this can manifest at Santa Barbara City College in my capacity as the director for the Luria Library and soon-to-be Academic Senate President.

All this relates to everything indeed. My work as a dharma teacher, a parent, a partner, a mentor, a librarian, a colleague. Cultivating wisdom and compassion is my practice. I’m feeling the energy to focus on how I can share about being a mindful leader here on misc.joy even more. Please encourage and support me on this endeavor.

Dec 09

Experimenting With a More Sustainable Business

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I think many of you know I’m a technologist and that I enjoy playing with the latest gadgets, apps, and social media options. According to a recent article (Big Data is not the new Oil) in the Harvard Business Review, “Our browsing habits, our conversations with friends, our movements and location — all of these things are being monetized.” This fall I’ve been giving app.net a try because it pushes me into a non-librarian community (mostly developers), allows me to see what developers are interested in creating, and demonstrates a more sustainable business model that aligns well with library values. This new company, less than six months old, is experimenting and I appreciate their efforts. It may look a lot like Twitter, but scratch under the surface and there is a great deal more. Find me on ADN.

What do you think?

Sep 16

Fall Beginnings and Time to Breathe

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Students, thousands of them, fill all spaces in the library. Lines form to use computers and textbooks. All library staff are on their feet every moment the library is open to direct and support any need. Students come and go with alacrity, which is a joy to experience, and I smile to our role as a central place on campus. It’s the fall semester and, as I write this letter, we have just completed our third week. Finally there is a calming energy after so much activity. It’s the space between beginning and middle. To add to the huge number of students, we also went live with the WorldShare Management Services platform this semester (eight other California community college campuses are actively migrating, with a few more still in the works). It’s been a very full three weeks for us and I am certain that each of our campus libraries can share a similar story for the fall semester beginnings.

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Sep 03

The First Week with OCLC’s WorldShare Management

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The power was completely out for half the campus on the first day of the fall semester at Santa Barbara City College. The library, already a crowded place, was even more crowded than usual. We experienced our continued record capacity with over 5,000 students each of the first three days. The Luria Library also went live with our new library system from OCLC – WorldShare Management Services (WMS). How did the first week go with the new system? What did we learn? Continue reading →

Aug 26

Tomorrow we go live with WorldShare

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With the arrival of students and the start of the fall semester, tomorrow is our go-live date for OCLC’s WorldShare Platform (WMS) at the Luria Library. I fully embrace this migration from our legacy platform (SirsiDynix Horizon), but I am clearly nervous and a little uncertain if we are ready for the switch on Monday morning. This has been an accelerated implementation with all the work having been performed since early May. The library staff, particularly our technical service librarian and circulation staff, have been working extra long hours focused on this migration. It’s an exciting opportunity that will serve our students and our staff into the immediate future.

The steps for the migration aren’t that difficult – export patron records, circulation data, and bibliographic data, configure our settings in WMS, and test, test, test. Unfortunately, the tests have uncovered a few hiccups to our migration and we’ve been working closely with our OCLC implementation team to get them resolved. A few aspects of migration are going to require significant manual effort. Specifically, creating the Reserves Collection, cleaning up the Serials Collection (holdings information is not accurate), item costs didn’t migrate well due to discrepancies in Horizon, and it seems we didn’t migrate local holding information for our 25k+ ebooks so linking doesn’t exist right now (unknown resolution).

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Feb 11

Adventures with iTunes Match

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This post is about bit rate and mono files while using iTunes Match. For those of you who don’t know, for a small fee ($25/year) my entire music catalog is moved to the Apple servers and I can play it on up to five devices. The service will sync my playlists and keep track of the play count. The best part is any file that “matches” in their database that is less than 256k in my collection, is easily upgraded with just a few clicks. That’s worth the first year fee alone. The service is limited to 25,000 tracks (I have about 15k) and the audio quality music be a minimum of 96kbps.

I have hundreds of dharma talks by Thich Nhat Hanh in my collection. These will not “match” with iTunes but I am able to upload them to the cloud if they meet the 96kbps criteria. Unfortunately, many of these files are below this threshold. Fortunately, it is possible to trick iTunes into uploading the files by “converting”

them to MP3 files with a higher quality. Obviously, the files won’t actually have a higher quality but they will meet the criteria. To keep the files small, I “upgraded” them to 96kbps and then deleted the original files. In the case of mono files, the custom setting had to be adjusted to 192kbps to get the mono files to threshold because of how iTunes handles importing files. It took a few days to get everything converted and uploaded to the Apple servers, but all tracks are now in the cloud.

My next project is to get everything synchronized between the two home computers and the one work computer. I noticed some discrepancies between the track numbers on each of the computers. Shouldn’t be too difficult. Seeing a winner with iTunes Match. Are you using this service? What has been your experience?

Dec 22

Thoughts on Path

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I signed up for Path last year when they launched. It was an odd product at the time because you were limited to 10 friends on the social network. Intriguing, but it didn't really go anywhere. I posted a while but then drifted away.

Last month they relaunched with an updated app and a different approach to the sharing process. I have to say the new app is really great. It's clean, intuitive, and unique (at least until Facebook released their timeline). I would/could use this exclusively. I highly recommend giving the app a try; you won't be disappointed.

Up to this point, I've been using as a private journal and not adding friends (with very rare exceptions). I can write things that I wouldn't necessarily write on a public social network. Of course, at any time I can option to share out to Twitter, Facebook, or FourSquare. The photo tool has filters and actually create a Facebook album when pushed there (unlike my other favorite photo app Instagram).

So now I'm in a quandary. More people are discovering Path, which is great, but I've been hesitant to add people to my Path and I don't really need another social network to monitor. I've enjoyed the privacy with the option to share.

I am curious what the philosophy of the new Path is for the company. Obviously, they are not highlighting the small network of friends aspect, though it still feels that way to me.

I'm staying limited for now, but will remain open to expanding later. Are you using Path? How are you creating (or not) a network?

#miscjoy #iphone #path #networking

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Dec 04

Apple Photo Stream Should Be Simple, Right?

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It's taken a month or two of tinkering, and I think I finally have an understanding of how the Photo Stream works. Like other Apple products I've experienced in the past, this was perhaps too simple for my mind to grasp.

The first challenge arose when I tried to delete a picture from the Photo Stream. You can't. What you can do is reset the entire steam from iCloud. However, you must also remember to turn it off on all connected devices as well. For the record, Photo Stream keeps a rolling 30-days of photos (or 1000 pics).

The second issue had to do with getting photos onto my Mac. I could continue syncing when connecting to computer, but this seemed kind of silly to do in conjunction with the Photostream. What's the point of the Photo Stream if it doesn't backup to computer as well. Well, it does backup but one needs the latest version of iPhoto to accomplish. Launch the App Store and turn over $14.99 and an updated version appears. Lovely.

It took a while, some money, and a few inappropriate photos, but now I understand. It does keep the rolling 30-days of pics/videos, and it does sync between all devices, and most importantly, one can configure Photo Stream to auto backup to iPhoto and create monthly events.

Still can't delete, so if I take more inappropriate photos then I have two choices. Reset the entire steam (on all devices) after the fact or turn off Photo Stream temporarily on the iPhone taking the picture. The Photo Stream doesn't sync photos taken when it's off.

Though this has probably been covered elsewhere, I hope this helps a few of you.

#miscjoy #apple #iphoto #software #stream

Nov 14

iTunes Match versus Google Music

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Am considering iTunes Match ($25/yr), especially since the Google Music (currently free) web app is having trouble on iDevices. For example, it's showing a blank screen when browsing via Album or Artist. But, I'm gonna try using gMusic app first (only $1.99) before making decision. I've essentially shut down my SubSonic server and will rely on a service rather than self hosting. Most likely I'll try Match at some point too, but annual fees are starting to add up across the Internet services I'm willing to pay for.

Where are you landing? Google Music, Amazon Cloud, iTunes Match, or other?

#miscjoy #music #Google #Apple