A Blog of Her Own

I really should be doing about a million other things, but I had to take some time out to write this one down.

Today while riding the not-Vespa home from the U, a motorcyclist waved at me! Coming up Victoria Park Hill. Oh, it made my (very long) day! And then, minutes later, a second motorcyclist waved…and then a third! I don’t know, did all the motorcyclists get together to take a vote and finally resolve the question of whether to wave at scooters or not? Oh, it was so exciting.

One other point. I’ve decided to call the not-Vespa ‘dragonfly.’ So this is the last ‘not-Vespa’ posting.

Ciao.

Well, I’ve arrived in Banff. I can’t say sunny Banff because it’s 11 o’clock at night at raining. Could see a little bit of the mountains on the way in, but not much. The conference is being held at the Banff Centre. I’ll have to try to find some time to explore before I leave tomorrow.

Somewhere around Cochrane I realized that I had forgotten my TALcard. Now I can’t add a new bar code (from the Banff Centre library) and take home a book. That’s my favourite part about travelling around the province.

I’m presenting on the SuperNet at 9:30 tomorrow morning. I’ve decided to call the presentation ‘SuperNet: Information Everywhere.’ It’s my second time trying to use the philosopy of Beyond Bullet Points. I’ll let you know how it goes. After the presentation I’m heading straight back home; I’m transition captain at Coronation Triathlon in Edmonton on Sunday.

I’ll post something about the conference tomorrow.

OK, I bought a scooter. An Aprilia Scarabeo 50 (the not-vespa). Back in early May I test drove a different type. The Usual Suspects came along and documented it here and here.

For years, I was a bicycle commuter. I loved it, even in the rain (well, maybe not in the hail, but rain was OK). But then I got a job downtown with no good bike parking, and I started to like dressing up, and I started to hate changing in bathroom stalls, and I started to have more places to go where I needed to be wearing my work clothes (ride there, change, meet, change, ride back to office, change,…) I guess I’m just getting old. It is a funny time to stop riding my bike so much–now that I have 3 bicycles.

So, in order to be more flexible in my mobility (buses are only so good) while still avoiding the dreaded car-commute, I figured I’d give the scooter a try. Well, after a rocky start actually getting it from the dealer, I have to say I’m in love. It’s like a bike only better.

I can go fast. Faster than I can pedal, anyhow. And I can wear nice clothing and it’s just kinda neat. Yesterday was the first time I rode it to work. That was fine - but it lead me on a 30 minute adventure to find parking. That’s probably a posting on it’s own…tomorrow.

My one fear - this might just be a starter-bike. It might lead me to bigger, real motorcycles. Eek. Well, we’ll find out in July. I’m signed up for the NAIT motorcycle training course. I have to ride a real ‘bike there. Yipee!

This morning’s speaker was Joan Frye Williams who talked about one-stop shopping for library users. And now I’m in a session called “The Commons - What Have we Learned about User-Centred Library Service” and Susan Beatty (UofC) has just shown us their one-stop Commons desk that provides not only library/reference service, but also technical service for students. There are librarians and IT folks who man the desk and can help students with all their needs. So, already the universities are getting this.

This session is actually a look at the experiences in three post-secondary institutions. University of Calgary (Susan Beatty), Red Deer College (Sona Kothari), and University of Alberta (Geoff Harder).

RDCollege - located front and centre and near a coffee kiosk, mix of work spaces/furniture. Library as ‘being’ space. Have people there just hanging out as friends; they are using the library as living room. And experience has shown that they will rearrange the furniture.

Sona touched on another point that Joan Frye Williams made earlier in the day - signage. In RDC’s case, they have a mis-match between their in-library, print signage and the terminology they use on the web; print signs point to periodicals, while the web speaks of journals and articles. Joan spoke more of simplicity and clarity- the Ask and Get windows from her local burger joint.

Some similiarities in all these Commons:

• Built on partnerships (Library, IT group, faculty, student union, etc)
• Laptop access is important (electricity, wireless, ethernet)
• Extended hours (reference, technology support)
• Ongoing assessment to be able to continue to improve
• Location is important

Joan made this point, and Geoff and Sona also touched on it (Sona with the moving furniture) - you can’t make patrons/customers/civilians do things your way. It doesn’t matter if your way is better, their way is good enough for them and it suits them. So learn how to adapt. Learn how to provide superior service in the way that people want it. Maybe that means that if the sofa is always moving to a certain location you should look at setting things up that way on purpose.

Oh, and we had a special guest at the session as well. She didn’t want to focus, though. Sona says she (Nancy)* was drunk.

Tag: alc2006

*Added for Marcus

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” –Scott Adams

Well, I’m here in Jasper again. I love this conference, if only because it’s held at the Jasper Park Lodge. This year we’re in Point Cabin, the haunted one. Haven’t seen a ghost yet, though.

Now, for real conference talk…The keynote speaker on Friday was Avi Lewis, very inspirational. He spoke of the need to reclaim public spaces–and the library is one of those public spaces. Avi has produced a documentary, The Take, which looks at autoworkers in Argentina who have taken over their closed factory and started producing again. I didn’t attend the screening, but I’m placing a hold for it at the library. In my IB class last year, we looked at the whole issue of the IMF and WorldBank demands of countries when they provide financing - Argentina was once the poster child of IMF policy adoption - and how it has failed countries such as Argentina, and the documentary does an amazing job of showing the issues and how people are reacting and getting on with their lives now.

You know, it seems that this is my year to get involved with some social activism. First I have the Community Wireless Network and the current of taking back freedom of speech, freedom of communication. Now I have a library conference and its talk of reclaiming public spaces.

From Avi, I went to a session called Opening the Library Closet:Diversity, Equity and Social Responsibility in Alberta Libraries (by Alvin Schrader from the UofA SLIS). I was curious about social responsibility in a library - I mean, with all the talk of corporate social responsibility, I wanted to know what that meant in a library context. I’m afraid the subject was not what I expected. Now, I know the “Closet” in the title should have been a clue, but I was not expecting it to be a session specifically about sexual orientation and servicing the needs of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth patrons. Nothing wrong with that, just not what I expected. I’m not a librarian, so collection development and programs in any area are, well, beyond me. That said, it was an excellent session (of course I stayed!), and really eye-opening in what materials are not out there. This probably isn’t the only minority community that is being poorly served in public libraries, so the information presented could be tailored to meet many different needs.
More later…

Tag: alc2006

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of old ones.” –John Cage

Dana Porter all lit up for Exams at Student Life Centre

Some fun from my Alma Mater, UWaterloo. You have to think it was the engineers…

Unbeknownst to us, each session had a scribe – someone to capture the major elements of each session since no one could be at all of them. Wow. So today we’re starting with them presenting their summaries before we breakaway into track-themed groups to discuss strategies, action items and next steps –to discuss what this means and where we are to go from here.

Angel investor and VC session was cancelled because there are none.

Policy group

• National coalition exists and is dealing with media reform issues. They will provide bullets on relevant points that we need to be talking about. They have a more detailed website in the works
• Contact your local legislators as individuals and as community groups. Use the information gathered from the above bullet
• Encouraged to use socialtext.com website to share information
• Creating a bloggers network.
• Set up an online forum that shares detailed, current information that can lay the basis of what is posted to the blogs
• Attend freedom to connect conference and enlist their help (blogging, messaging, etc)
• Create a council of regional organizers to get the word out (national coalition – regional organizers – individuals)

Tech group

• Bridge the communications barrier between the technical groups
• Open up communication with commercial groups
• More communication between disparate areas (commercial, techies, people, community groups, government, leaders)
• Be involved in creating standards
• Register at freenetworks.org to create content channels for different people to communicate.
• Do less parallel development and more collaborative development

Implementation and sustainability models

• Strategic goals

• Manuals to take back to elected officials to discuss
• Manuals for how to build by coalitions
• Case studies not created by vendors (success and failures)
• Coordinated efforts

• CWN and MWN work together
• Overcome the antagonism between people who do community outreach and people who do business model (lead to change in language)
• Be aware that the technology is changing (not a static …
• Be realistic about technology
• Maintain your options
• Set modest goals (figureout what your’e going to do and accept that you might not be the best person to do something)

Thoughts

We need to get more Canadian policy makers and business people to attend (we had techies and researchers, but no one to look at sustainability and policy development in CA).

Comment from one attendee: differences between CWN and MWN and keeping the community as close to the network as possible.

I don’t know—I guess I’d come down on the side of muni-wireless and by that, I mean the idea that the municipality should build this as part of infrastructure. The content can be community based, and I can definitely see problems in how we can do that (if the community doesn’t have access to the hardware). I guess CWN has been a grass-roots movement, but MWN is a business decision and generally happens when the muni decides wireless will help them run their city better and then open it up to the public. Can these two perspectives be reconciled?

Models in small towns (rather than top-down alien ship of Philadelphia), it’s the different community groups coming together to build. Other models that intertwine the institutions building the network with sustainable community groups as it’s built (like libraries, senior groups, etc). So maybe there is a common ground. And these are the models that will work in Alberta.

Comment: this is political. There is a connection between building networks technically, building networks socially, and building networks politically (Alison).

Message: neutrality of people putting together the network is important. Commercial is OK, as long as network neutrality is retained.

I’m falling hopelessly behind. That means I’m posting something closer to my rough notes. Filling in the blanks is left as an exercise for the reader.

Panelists: John Atkinson (Wireless Ghana), David Young (CUWiN), Michael Peralta (Tribal Digital Village), Arun Mehta (Radiophony), Bogdan Tancic (BGWireless)

Bogdan

• Need to improve technology or wireless networks at the physical layer to increase throughputs.
• BGwireless community network infrastructure
• Node consists of one AP, omni-directional antenna, point-to-point link to another node, can handle about 20 users/node and coverage is approx 1km.
• Use HG24 (HyperGain) to link hops together.
• Get 40-50Mbps
• Can actually run high-bandwidth applications over this.
• This is a serious wireless network. Very different from the urban groups that are looking at providing connectivity everywhere to support a connected lifestyle.
• BGWireless has a workshop where they make their own antennas. They have information about their antennas on the website.

Arun

Teaches programming to blind people – to the blind, the computer is as important a development as written language was for non-blind. But screen readers are not available in every language. So a computer is advanced technology for many people

What we consider to be advanced today we may consider primitive in two years.

We are at a critical juncture (like microcomputers were in 70’s). There’s a difference between what we had then and what we have now – then the big companies thought micros were a joke, they figured they’d disappear, no one considered them a threat. Today, the big telecoms are worried (and fighting). They do see the potential. And telecom is regulated, and regulations are different in different parts of the world.

How do we advance wireless networks? One of the most interesting developments is the hack of the Altheros chip set; we’re now able to take commercially available hardware and hack it to do completely different things. This is particularly important in developing countries; it’s not easy for the police to see that you’ve gone in and changed code to do something that would be illegal. Even more we could use steer-able antennas to allow for better use of spectrum (highly directional antennas while working in omni field)

GNU Radio – FBGA integrated circuit that can be programmed/changed. You can do anything at all. You can make advanced telecom devices – it’s like the IBM PC compatible. Open source, fully programmable mobile phone on steroids. And you don’t have to have advanced telecommunications training to program them thanks to middleware. Great device for teaching students how to do telecom programming, how to make stuff. If you’re interested in rural communications in developing countries, and there are many different standards (CDMA, GPRS…) – if GNU Radio can detect what type of phone that’s come into range and provide service.

Enables working in frequencies that are much lower frequency and allow for connections without line of sight requirements.

Free Space optics (wireless optic communications) No regulations issues, efficient, easier to focus. You can shorter masts. If you use infrared, no one can see what you’re doing. Optics is not black magic, we’ve been dealing with it for centuries, one of the most expensive things in broadcasting is the pre-amp—in the case of light, your pre-amp is simple, it’s a passive device, it’s called a lens. We’re used to optics. (low power, spectrum is unregulated) Can you imagine the Internet today with its 500% annual growth without optic technology? We’re going to be wanting this capability in wireless. We can’t run fibre to every house in a third world country, but we could do optical wireless.

What’s holding up the optical wireless uptake? Us, we’re just not doing any research; people have not been interested. We need to start some real research into this in order to overcome the problems that will come with. This is not a new technology; the point is building critical mass of interest. RF is good, but there are limits to what RF can provide for bandwidth. We need to look to the future.

Print disabled – also interested in this problem; software that works for visually impaired also works for illiterate (if the computer’s reading to you, you don’t need to worry about not being able to read). So, things that can do audio are interesting…Asterisk server (OpenSource PBX). Asterisk was also mentioned by Gabe as the tool being use to serve out the stories in his [murmur] project.

David

Problems with mesh networks and some technologies that might help resolve them

1/ hops/distance from Internet

As you get farther away from the Internet gateway, your bandwidth is going to be dropping off because of interference. Can use more than one channel to retransmit to avoid collision. We advance the networks by using >1 channel on each node.

2/ Marginal links; a link where errors occur often enough that you usually have to retransmit in order to get past that link.

Have nodes collaborate to rebuild damaged packets : multi-radio diversity. I’m not sure if this is the reference Doug was thinking of, but there’s a paper by researchers at MIT here.

3/ Adaptive antenna systems at 900MHz band (new ubiquity.com cheap radio)

900 MHz helps to get around the problem of rain on trees…There is less interference with signal than 2.4GHz; 900MHz can get through more things. But it’s hard to build on small scale – it has really high gain; you might need have an antenna 3* as large in order to get the signal. It doesn’t allow you to really focus the signal.

4/ Important not to get too hung up on wireless; it’s an awesome technology, but it’s easy to forget about wire and we should look at how we can use it.

Use wire if you can. AC wire, CableTV go to almost everyone’s home. So why not power line networking? There are issues there, too.

John

He has problems and he’s interested in help – so he’s sharing the problems

In Ghana, there’s a link that needs to go 30K, in the TCP/IP handshake there can be problems with time out of the SYN before the ACK gets back so it resends. Of course, there’s a requirement that this be doable with inexpensive, non-enterprise equipment.

BGWireless has a 60K link and they changed their acktimeout. (discussion ensued). Right now, John’s system works, it’s just retransmitting packets a lot.

Could be the software. Others who have long links like this working are using MikroTik software.

Michael

Wanted to get native reservations in the county connected again (southern California tribal) 3 tribes divided into 18 reservations. Idea to bring broadband access to these rural communities.

Used 5.8 for long links (greater than 5K). Some links use 2.4 because can’t meet the power demands. The power is solar for all the backbone towers which are placed on the tops of mountains. Some sites have propane generators as a backup; lesson learned from an extremely rainy season in 2004 where they had 2 months of rain.

Had shadow project where took teens to learn everything they did and at end of project they were given the job of building 2 towers.

Sustainability: costs $8K/month for DH3 link—need to find ways to fund, have created some businesses to generate revenue.

Michael showed some photos of extreme weather conditions in which things are operating; rain, ice, snow, rockslides.

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