Everything I know about work life, I learned in Dungeons & Dragons

Interesting post about Dungeons & Dragon play and how it relates to work:
One spell, used well, can be more powerful than an entire book full of spells. I first met Ivan when he showed up for a game in Steve's standard D&D world. Ivan drew up a first-level wizard character who had almost no hit-points and only one wimpy spell: cast an illusion. Whereupon Ivan's character cast an illusion of a 5th-level illusionist...

National Historical Park database with Edison-era sound recordings

Sounds interesting....---------------The National Park Service (NPS) Library Program recently loaded the Thomas Edison National Historical Park (TENHP) MARC-format database of recorded sound holdings into the NPS Voyager catalog.  The NPSVoyager catalog is available for public searches on-line at http://www.library.nps.gov/ .The TENHP database in Voyager includes MARC-format data for the 10,000 cylinder records and 28,000 disc records preserved at Edison’s Laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey.

Reflections on training

Sigh, I will never agree to do anything on Monday again -- it's just too difficult. Anyhow, I will post the ppt to the cataloging tools presentation shortly.Considering how much training I've done over the years (some by choice, some not), I know a few things about teaching and training:
  1. You can't train the untrainable -- We all meet people who are disengaged and stuck (in a class, in a job, in a.... ) Sometimes as a teacher/mentor/friend/colleague, you can help get them unstuck (it takes a giant spatula, though!) Other times, no hope.

For Zynga game users (you know, farmville, mafiawars, vampirewars, etc....)

Interesting article about the fallout over Zynga (Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc., which all have huge communities on facebook) and its scam ads. Hmm, yet another reason to pay attention to what you click on and ALWAYS read the TOS. ;-)"Zynga insists they are serious about cleaning up the industry. And today Pincus has announced that the company will remove all offer advertising from their games.This isn’t a meaningless action.

5 Years of Firefox (and the web)

Very interesting (and short) review of the last 5 years for Firefox and web in general....
“All of our servers melted instantly,” Vukićević says. “We spent an hour trying to get the downloads back up.”
(on the day Firefox launched)....and looking to the future:"“We always ask, ‘What is it that people on the open web can’t do right now?
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