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Author: Iris

Library Hold Shelf Pros and Cons

Library Hold Shelf Pros and Cons

Published by Iris on Friday, February 10th, 2012

I recently got a notice that I had a book waiting for me at the circulation desk. Thrilled, I raced over there having completely forgotten a) that I had put a book on hold months ago, and b) anything about said book. What fun! What an adventure!

After having had my library card scanned and the book desensitized, I realized that there’s a downside to placing a hold on a book that’s so popular that a million other people had placed a hold before you and 85 million people had placed a hold on after me.

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Non-harassing protest of SOPA at ALA Midwinter

Published by Iris on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Quite a few of the vendors that will be exhibiting at ALA Midwinter support SOPA, which “could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression” according to the Stanford Law Review.

The Library Society of the World is here to help you help us conduct a non-harassing protest against these vendors. We recognize that the vendor representatives that will be staffing the boothes in the MidWinter exhibit hall are not the bad guys. They didn’t make these decisions and they don’t deserve to have bad days because of this protest. Their executives, however, need to know that SOPA is not ok with us. The Library Bill of Rights is clear:

III. Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.

IV. Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.

So here’s the plan:

  1. Print off as many copies of the LSW SOPA Protest Coupons (PDF) as you can manage, making sure to print it double sided. (The file is in color, but it prints in black and white just fine.) Ideally, print off as many sheets as you think you can use and as many as you think you can carry to hand out to people at Midwinter.
  2. Cut or tear sheets into 6 protest coupons, each of which should have the letter on one side and the “+1 Protest Point” pattern on the other.
  3. Use Andy’s Exhibit Hall map to help you know which vendors support this legislation, and take them a coupon or three.
  4. Please try to be nice to the vendor reps, but make it clear that their higher-ups need to know that we’re not ok with this.

Ideally, by the end of Midwinter, each vendor booth should have a hefty collection of protest coupons quantifying our displeasure.

P.S. This post and the protest coupons have a CC0 license — that means that I claim no copyright on this work and that you can use it and share it at will.

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I will manage these passwords if it’s the last thing I do

Published by Iris on Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

With passwords proliferating like tribbles, I’ve had to upgrade from my two previous methods of managing my accounts.

The first method was the easiest: I had two passwords, an easy one and a complicated one. If the site was important I used the complicated one. If the site wasn’t important I used the easy one. Well… that started to seem like less and less of a good idea pretty much as soon as I started online banking and getting work passwords that mattered and stuff. So.

The second method worked for a long time: I had several passwords written down in a fairly secure online place that was itself password protected, and then I had an easy password that I used for all my “I wonder what del.icio.us is” experimentation online. That started seeming less and less good after several of the sites with the easy password got hacked multiple times and the hackers stole their databases of user passwords. Multiple times. And then I’d have to go through these millions of little sites changing a bunch of passwords all day. That got to be a less and less appealing way of spending a few hours. So.

Now I’m using an encrypted password manager. Here’s the setup. KeePassX (the Mac version of KeePass) on each of my computers and KyPass installed on my iPod Touch, each of these is directed to look at the KeePass database that’s stored in Dropbox (and the file made available offline on my iPod Touch).

Hopefully this solution lasts me for a while.

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