Musicovery

Last semester one of my professors talked a lot about online radio sites, and I'm a little surprised he never mentioned one that I stumbled across today. The ads on Pandora are starting to drive me insane, and I frequently run into trouble finding what I'm looking for on Grooveshark, so I decided it was time to give something new a try.

Musicovery approaches online radio from a different perspective. You choose typical music "genres" the way you do on most sites (Classical, Rock, Folk, Soundtrack, Jazz, etc.), but to launch a radio playlist, you indicate your mood (or the mood of music you are looking for) on a simple graph: a Dark to Positive continuum on the x-axis, and Calm to Energetic on the y-axis.

Many users may be initially deceived by its simplistic appearance, but it's actually quite an elegant design and, at least for me, it seems to work impressively well. At anytime you can readjust your position on the grid and watch the upcoming songs on your playlist adapt to your new mood. A few other cool attributes of the site include: a small timeline will indicates the era of the song that's currently playing, an alternative page allows you to select music from a "Dance graph" (I haven't played around with that one yet), and there's also a playlist for newly added songs to the site's database. They are in the process of compiling a cool looking popularity chart of songs too, where each song is ranked based on users tagging favorites or tracks they dislike. At this point I don't think Musicovery has the variety or volume of something like Pandora, but it's definitely still worth a look!

Time

A required class I wasn't thrilled to sign up for this semester, but which I'm beginning to change my mind about is "Management for Information Professionals." As someone who has had a series of uninspiring entry-level jobs, "management" has always been kind of synonymous with "the enemy." And in cases where things weren't that bad, the individuals in those positions may even have been considered friends, something about the position has always seemed distasteful. But the material in the course has been interesting at least so far, and it's brought up some issues definitely worth thinking through. One of those has been the subject of time management, a key component of a manager's work since time is something they never have enough of, which can really be said of most of us, manager or not.

Mintzberg and Drucker are two writers who wrote about the position and function of management decades apart and have different ideas about how to describe the daily work of managers, but they both agree on the importance of time management. Mintzberg writes “perhaps the most important resource the manager allocates is his own time” (p. 58) and Drucker emphasizes the managerial task of harmonizing “two time dimensions:” the immediate and the long-term (p. 343). This notion of keeping “two dimensions” in mind, while simple in theory, I have found is much more challenging to implement successfully in real life, even just as it applies to one's personal time management, a skill I have never claimed to possess.

Drucker believes that those who are good managers of time “achieve results by planning,” and many
of the elements he identifies that make up the work of managers can be related to careful time management (p. 347). For example, setting objectives is an important way to define goals for one's time and balance desirable end results with “available means” (p. 345). Even when just budgeting personal time management, I find it is often difficult to accurately gauge what a reasonable objective would be for a limited time window. The act of organizing similarly requires one to consider a larger task and “divide it into manageable activities” (p. 344). My tendency to underestimate the time it will take to write a paper or overestimate my ability to read 200 pages in a single sitting shows me that I am not always certain of what constitutes a “manageable activity,” even within my own life. The social skill of communicating might seem inapplicable to personal time management, but on the contrary, communicating with ourselves by writing down reminders or reconsidering our objectives and priorities is crucial for successfully completing projects and meeting deadlines. Finally, effective self-control for measuring one's own performance ensures that tasks stay on schedule and progress is rewarded.

Mintzberg deemphasizes the manager's traditional planning activities but acknowledges that planning does happen on a short term basis “in the context of daily actions,” even if the typically imagined form of long term, abstract planning is not a real managerial priority (p. 51). Personal time management perhaps should also be thought of more along these lines: planning as an ongoing process with adjustments and adaptations made along the way responding to present activities and surrounding environments. When describing the approach of managers to project-related decision making, Mintzberg writes that rather than single decisions, managers work based on “a series of small decisions and actions sequenced over time” (p. 57). Following this idea, perhaps if, instead of designing a set schedule to manage time, I tried to balance homework and other goals as an ongoing process within the dynamic context of daily life, and kept my objectives flexible, I would be able to improve the efficiency of my time management, something this course has made me realize needs to be a real priority in my life.


Drucker, P. (1954.) The manager and his work, in The Practice of Management, pp. 341-350. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Mintzberg, H. (1975). The manager's job: folklore and fact. Harvard Business Review. July-August 1975, 49-61.

Fantastic Flying Books

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, a short film, by Moonbot Studios


The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

A beautifully charming short animation, featuring a scene that takes place in a conservator's surgery, a flying librarian with her flock of library books, and an unforgettable series of events in the life of Mr. Morris Lessmore. At the beginning of the film, a Wizard of Oz-esque storm separates a man from his book. Once the winds calm, the book returns to earth, but all of its words and illustrations have been blown away. The initial sadness felt by Mr. Morris is relieved by his introduction to some highly unusual friends. I especially like the scene where Mr. Morris feeds the books their breakfast of alphabets and picks out their outfits (book jackets) for the day. William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg's film is a wonderful visual representation of the color and liveliness books bring to our daily existence.

Nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Short Film category (2012 84th Academy Awards)!

Books of Spring

Where I grew up, you could usually count on winter to reliably last until mid-March. March blizzards, and even April flurries weren't even that rare. So it's a little disorienting to be living in a place (less than four hours away!) that has a very different climate. 60 degrees in January can be a treat, but it also feels downright odd.

I saw the art of Su Blackwell featured on ecofabulous a while back. I'm always on the lookout for interesting artwork, and I found her book sculptures absolutely stunning. With paper cutouts, Blackwell crafts delicate miniature worlds.

On her website, Blackwell reveals an interesting detail about her technique: "I always read the book first, at least once or twice, and then I begin to create the work, cutting out, adding details. The detail is what brings it all together, the magic element."

With a passion for fairy tales and nature, Blackwell brings a living quality to her sculptures, bestowing a second life on the old books she chooses as materials. She has some incredible winter scenes in her portfolio too, but I was struck most by the pieces that transport me back to days of playing outside in the woods and the fields around my childhood home, creating my own imaginary worlds. While it's not a blooming garden outside quite yet, the warmth in the air makes me think it will be on its way before much longer.

Winter Reading and Novel Appeal Pt. 2

In this followup I'll use two more of Saricks' categories, Framing and Storyline, to catch up on some of my winter reading book reviews.

Framing: Julian Fellowes, Snobs
Though a first person novel, the atmosphere of the fading British aristocracy is the most memorable aspect of this book. Julian Fellowes is excellent at crafting interesting characters, but they are characters who are tremendously shaped by their environment. Rather than dynamic, action-oriented people, they are features of their social world, reacting to the atmosphere of fading luxury and elitism around them. Fellowes is well-known for creating the vivid world of Downton Abbey on television. Though a different medium, Snobs possesses the same power of transporting you into a past world, this time one of aristocratic elites, actors, and social climbers. The story is told through the eyes of a young actor with enough noble blood in his veins to put him in an interesting position: the ability to move in two social circles--that of his wealthy, traditional roots and the less polished, spirited world of the middle class. Through this perspective the reader watches the social rise of Edith Lavery: her determined air, the marriage to Lord Charles Broughton, and the reality she must deal with as a result of her choices. Fellowes' writing is bittersweet, dark, and sometimes nostalgic, and the novel becomes an entertaining comedy of manners with a sharp dose of social critique.

Storyline: Bill Willingham, Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall
Before reading this book, I wasn't familiar with the world of Fables, but Bill Willingham's conception is a modern twist of fairy tale characters intersected with the grit of reality. In this graphic novel, Willingham constructs a multi-layered plot of stories within a story. The setting is Arabia and the main character (or storyteller) is initially familiar: Snow White. But Snow is not a frightened girl in a forest, she is a confident woman serving as an ambassador with a serious warning for the Arab Sultan. When her advice is not taken, she uses her wits and her storytelling skills to extract herself from a dangerous situation. A complex and episodic read, Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall adds additional layers by using the work of eleven different illustrators to depict the characters and storyline. The variety of design and style visually makes this graphic novel unique from any others I've ever read. While there is some immediate resolution at the end of the book, the plot is left open to further episodes of Snow and her companions. A quick search on Amazon will show that the series is pretty extensive: there are at least a couple dozen books that fall into the main Fables serial or its spin off adventures.

There is one fairly major aspect of this system of appeal description that I haven't mentioned so far (or quite adhered to in these posts). Saricks hopes that we can use these categories to discuss reading options with patrons even if the we did not like a book. (pg. 72). It's hard to remember sometimes that a librarian's job is to be objective about the books in his or her collection; to provide the users with information and then leave it to them to decide what to do with it. Pushing one's own reading views or opinions onto a user definitely does not fall into this job description. Using terms of appeal allows you (at least to some extent) to describe a book based on its intrinsic stylistic properties rather than on your personal opinion of it.


Saricks, J. G. (2005). Articulating a book‘s appeal. In Readers’ Advisory Services in the Public Library (3rd ed., pp. 40-73). Chicago: American Library Association.

Weird Words

An interesting collection of weird words, showing both the massive volume (over 600,000 words have been recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary) and the peculiarities of the English language.

Ever wondered what Antejentacular meant? (Before breakfast--adj.) How about Phlogiston? (An "invisible fluid first proposed in 1667 to be possessed by all flammable substances and released when they burn. Antoine Lavoisier debunked the theory in 1777"--noun) Or Ucalegon? (A neighbor whose house is on fire--noun) Have you ever heard of these words before? Or do you have any notion of how to even pronounce them?

While some might see unused and forgotten words as empty or meaningless, I think they are a testament to the intricacies and insanities of the English language. Our past has a rich linguistics history that remains a part of our culture and literature even when individual words fall out of use. I have no doubt our future will continue this practice of vocabulary invention. Today to keep up with new and changing aspects of language the OED is updated every three months; the last update, in December 2011, included more than 1200 newly revised and updated entries.

Get your weekly weird word fix at curiousnotions.com. This week's word is Naufragous, an adjective meaning shipwreck-causing. It would be fun to see if you could find an opportunity to use these weird words each week somewhere in your daily life.

Google Art

Despite my frequent Google-related alarmist blog posts... I really do love Google. =)

So here's some neat artwork from the LA Google offices as photographed by Trey Ratcliff: a hallway full of Google Doodles!