homoLudens

El Rincon - Haarlemmerstraat, Amsterdam
Originally uploaded by Patrick Delaney

So Flickr allows direct posting to blog, eh? Even to an ancient, ill-used Manila blog it seems. About time there was some motivation to freshen this page up. To the right, the lovely corner (”el rincon”) that I’ve been given for morning times.

We’re in Amsterdam, in the first week of the first two months of travel during this undeserved but most welcome sabbatical year. Our close host is Nico B., with his partner Azito a distant host in Brooklyn, where Nico will join him in a few weeks while we house sit the cat and ducks and chickens and various other fowl that add flesh to the bones of santeria practice around this place.

Science Fiction author Chiaki Kawamata says: “A high school student wrote to me to tell me that he read 1,000 books in a single summer. There’s absolutely no way he could have done that with regular books and without having the novels on his phone instead.”

It won’t be long before there’s a PLA (Personal Library Assistant) that makes the Japanese novel-serializing cellphones described in that BBC piece look as out of date as word processing typewriters seem to us today.

So things are heating up in cold, wet San Francisco:

Fed up with the slow pace of negotiations, on Wednesday March 15th, the Assembly of the United Educators of San Francisco voted unanimously to set a strike vote by the end of March.

And we can use the warmth. We haven’t gotten a cost of living adjustment in four years, in a city that’s the most expensive place to raise a family in the state (if not the country).

“No money,” the district says. No money to pay us. So there’s no staffing or budget for tech integration efforts that might include the sorts of cutting edge stuff that gets bandied about as ‘Web 2.0′ Hell, we’re at something like Web 0.2 in most of our schools. At Galileo, I’ve pushed the adoption of a few apps that might serve teachers well, but those efforts have been under the district radar. They can’t be sustained much longer. Several of the few teachers who’ve adopted tech through the library make quiet plans to bail the district for better-paying suburban gigs next year. They’ll be replaced by enthusiastic newbies who’ll learn a bit and leave in their turn. And even if we could train and retain most, the more teachers start to use galileoWeb, the more we need to bring hosting home and that just ain’t gonna’ happen. There is so simply no money to do this tech stuff.

Rain’s lovely tonight, with empty streetlight-reflecting streets. Reminds me of Shanghai and Taipei. China’s smart - they’ll find the money.

Here’s a reason to subscribe to blogs written in other than English: “Now, this is great. But why didn’t we know about that beforehand? ‘Re: Enhancement request PNG . I wrote PNG support for my..’.” [thomas n. burg ¦ randgänge]
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Quoted in full from Jenny [The Shifted Librarian] Feingold Introduces Legislation to Protect Personal Information

“U.S. Senator Russ Feingold today introduced the Library, Bookseller, and Personal Records Privacy Act. This legislation is aimed at protecting the privacy of law-abiding Americans by limiting the ability of the FBI to obtain library, bookstore, medical, and financial records and other sensitive personal information under the USA PATRIOT Act. Feingold’s legislation would place reasonable limits on the FBI’s access to this information by requiring the FBI to show how the information it is seeking relates to a suspected terrorist or spy before the information can be obtained.

‘The Library, Bookseller, and Personal Records Privacy Act would restore the privacy of Americans, while also allowing the FBI to follow up on legitimate leads,’ Feingold said. ‘This legislation recognizes that under certain circumstances the FBI should have access to library, bookseller or other personal information and simply puts safeguards in place to protect the rights of law-abiding citizens.’

The concerns about possible abuse of the PATRIOT Act are so strong that some librarians across the country have taken the step of destroying records of book and computer use, as well as posting signs on computer stations warning patrons that whatever they read or access on the Internet could be monitored by the federal government???.

Feingold was the only Senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act at the time of its passage in October 2001. Among the amendments Feingold offered during the floor debate was an amendment to make it clear that existing federal and state privacy protections of certain information would not be diminished or superceded by the USA PATRIOT Act.” [via Gary Price]

Please contact your legislators and demand that they support this bill. It’s YOUR privacy that is at stake. Librarians have been fighting this battle since day one, but we can’t do it alone.

In addition, note that the ACLU has filed the first legal challenge to the USA PATRIOT Act in order to combat the Bush Administration’s invasion of your privacy, too.

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