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Month: February 2007

Frost Art

On Tiny URLs

Published by Iris on Thursday, February 8th, 2007

I hate getting emails where my email program correctly identified only half of a URL as a URL, making it entirely useless unless you copy and paste into your browser. It’s one of those little things that’s just annoying. Of course, then I laugh at myself that I think it’s such a pain in the neck to have to highlight the URL, control c to copy, alt tab to my browser, click into the address bar, and control v to paste. It all takes less than 3 seconds. I mean really, is that such a hardship?

The answer seemed to be TinyURL, which makes any big honkin’ URL into a nice, tidy little URL that no email program will choke on. There’s even a nifty Firefox extension.

But here’s the catch. I’m suspicious whenever anyone sends me a link that’s a tiny URL unless I know the person who sent it to me. There was a comment added to this blog recently from someone I don’t know, and it took me a long time to get up the gumption to click the stupid thing. How was I to know that it would just lead to someone’s blog? There’s no domain name to give me a clue. It just says http://tinyurl.com/[some numbers and letters to make a unique string].

I hadn’t realized just how dependent I am on reading URLs to see what I might be getting in to. Not that they’re perfect or that they can’t lie. But at least there’s some clue.

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Feeding the Free Web

Published by Iris on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

As more and more rich, wonderful, authoritative sources go up on the free web, the trick becomes finding it, organizing it, and making it available. And I’m sorry, but I’m not going to bug our catalogers every time I run across a great site online, no matter how accommodating they are whenever I’ve decided to go that route. But handing them anywhere from 5 to 50 links per week would be a prohibitive pain in the neck, even if formal classification in the catalog would provide the best access, or even if we could be sure that the URLs would be stable. I just wouldn’t do it. I’d spend more time than I have to spare agonizing over whether or not it was “worth it” for each site, and in the end they’d just pile up and become one of the looming projects that I always know I should be getting to but never seem to actually do.

So I’ve been trying to keep track of these things in my del.icio.us library, and now that I’ve got a mini curricular and professional library building up, I’ve started feeding the annotated links to web pages attached to my research guides.

So far I only have two up and running. One is on my subject guide for Art and Art History here, which encourages students to see recent items here, or just play around on my del.icio.us library for themselves.

It’s not a perfect solution, and I’m still having trouble standardizing my tagging practices… And I’m not sure if students will ever actually USE the links. But in my imaginary world they’ve all (even the pre-majors) flocked to the newly updated pages and are gazing in wonder at the amazing-ness that is an RSS-fed page of annotated links.

Hey, a girl can dream.

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Brrrrrr…….

Published by Iris on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007

Yesterday evening the temperature dipped below zero (F).* Today our high (of -3) occurred near midnight and it’s simply gotten colder all day. Tomorrow we’ll bounce off the bottom (at -17) and make it all the way back up to -3 by evening. I don’t see any temps above zero until next Tuesday evening! We won’t get above 10 degrees until Friday, which is so far away that I don’t think I trust that prediction.

With the breeze, this means we’re flirting with windchill temps in the -30s and -40s all weekend.

I take back what I said. This is definitely colder than the freezing point. If you walk outside with earrings on, the post sends bolts of cold through your ear lobes. Nose hairs catch condensation as you breath out and freeze into a tiny brittle net. (I’m glad I don’t have a nose ring, or a lip piercing.) Apparently you can damage your skin (due to ice crystals exploding your skin cells) if you stay outside longer than half an hour.

On the up-side, the ice crystals on my windows are beautiful, and the warnings about dangerously cold temperatures is a great excuse to stay in, curl up under fluffy blankets, and drink steaming mugs of various hot beverages.

*Celsius translations for temperatures are -17.8, -19.4, -27.2, -19.4, -17.8, and -12.2 respectively. Translations of windchill temps are also in the -30s and -40s… interesting.

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