BTW, Pamela says it's Bollywood month on TCM on Thursdays, and Entertainment Weekly confirms that Thursday night will be "Intro to Bollywood" with back-to-back-to-back showings of Rangeela, Dil Chahta Hai, and Sholay.

I'll be setting my ReplayTV for this. Speaking of which, I'm having great fun with the new 5000 version we recently purchased. I'm using DVArchive to pull shows off it and Ulead DVD MovieFactory 2 to burn them to DVD (purely for personal viewing). My brother also purchased a 5000 series, and we've been experimenting with sending shows back and forth across the internet.

For example, I missed a really good Daily Show with Jon Stewart that he happened to record, so he sent it to me. On his end, he couldn't record all of the Friends season finale because he was already recording something else at 8:00 p.m., so he asked me to manually record the last 15 minutes. I did, and then I sent it to him. The first show he sent me was the Three's Company movie, but it took for-freaking-ever to come in. I accepted the show before going to bed, and it was still coming in when I left for work the next morning, commercials and all. Sending shows is not what one would call speedy, and we're both on broadband connections. Give me an inch of bandwidth, and I'll take a mile (yeah, I downloaded a few hundred songs from PureTunes). ;-)

However, all of this seems to me to be no different than videotaping shows for family members. I know the television industry is working hard to prevent us from ever doing this again. What a shame, because between my brother and the time-shifting Replay, I'm watching more television.

Researchers Can Track Our Every Media Move

"Technology is hurtling along, offering a wide assortment of Orwellian options to gauge viewing and listening preferences. As with medicine, however, those advances are coming faster than we can sort out their implications and decide how much information we all want our corporate big brothers to possess.

So enter, in a closely monitored test under way in Philadelphia, the 'portable people meter,' or PPM. It's a device the size of a pager that people carry around with them, picking up encoded signals in the media they consume. The individuals need do nothing, with the PPM automatically identifying what the users are watching or what radio station they're listening to.

Creepy, you say? Not so, says Arbitron, which is conducting the trial with the cooperation of Nielsen. After all, the current TV ratings sometimes require letting people install boxes in their bedrooms, and the radio version, almost Jurassic by today's standards, asks you to keep a diary of your listening habits.

'What we're asking people to do is less invasive than allowing meters in their homes,' said Roberta McConochie, Arbitron's director of client relations for the venture, who recently briefed research executives in L.A....

Nevertheless, I felt a chill drift up my spin when McConochie cited the device's ability to track which "retail environments" people patronize -- using the same silent code to cross-reference what stores they shop in with their viewing patterns -- or perform a similar trick linking TV viewing and movie attendance. Without being paranoid, it all sounds a little like 'The Matrix,' minus the slow-motion....

Yet whether you dread or embrace it, the day is coming when media consumption will be indexed with buying patterns to form one vast database -- all in the name of conveying more precise targeting data to those who see the public as a commodity to be bought and sold. That's terrific news for advertisers but a bit scary to anyone inclined to question if Rupert Murdoch and other guardians of pipelines into the home can be trusted not to abuse the privilege." [Chicago Tribune]

I still have a lot going on at work, but we took time out last week to honor Diane because she is leaving SLS after 17 years. Her leadership has built up SWAN to be one of - if not the - best LLSAP in Illinois. We had a lot of fun roasting her Friday night while also showing our appreciation for all of the hard work, long hours, dedication, and camaraderie she's given over the years.

Kate and I did a Powerpoint presentation (a joke in-and-of-itself) to roast her. We photoshopped her into different pictures for a "this is your life" retrospective. We had a lot of fun putting it together and then making Diane turn red in front of everyone (another joke in-and-of-itself).

Here's my point, though. We used Google Images to find a lot of the pictures and Kazaa to download some music. I own most, if not all, of the songs we used, in some form or another, but it was easier to download them than to find, rip, and transfer them. I'm not currently subscribed to an online music service because I can't use WMA-encoded files on my MP3 players, so I didn't have a legal alternative (that I know of - someone please correct me if I'm wrong and I don't have a Mac). I'm not even listening to those files anymore and they'll get wiped off my hard drive when my PC is re-formatted during our standardization project.

We'd love to put the presentation online for everyone to see (although our scintillating narration would be missing), but I'm too scared about copyright holders coming after me for what are essentially harmless uses of their works. I won't make any money off the music or images, no one will be embarassed by association (except Diane), and it wouldn't be that widely viewed.

But if the MPAA, RIAA, and Congress have their way, I won't be able to create another presentation like that in the future. I'm really worried about that, because I don't believe I did anything wrong. But if I can't import music from my home PC, use excerpts of images or text and modify them, and just generally mash formats together to create something new, what's the point of having everything digital in the first place?

Oh, You Think You Know How to Search the Internet, Do You?

"From Denise Howell's unofficial transcript of the recent conference with luminaries such as the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), we get this statement from Larry Page:

Page: 'I've been waiting for them to start teaching searching, alongside spelling, in school.'

I agree that we should teach searching in schools, and it wouldn't have to be limited to Google.  It hasn't taken my kids much prodding to grasp the concept that they can find things quickly with the computer.  Then again, maybe the problem with teaching Internet searching is that there aren't enough teachers who would know how to 'teach' this; perhaps the process doesn't lend itself to 'formal education' because the target is moving too quickly.

But I can tell you that if my kids didn't know how to search the Internet, I'd be worried.  It's a basic skill along with reading, writing and calculating." [Ernie the Attorney]

I think we're all worried about this, but here's the thing. Librarians do this really well. If you're old enough, you learned how to search information from the librarians at your school and your local public library, and this knowledge was enhanced when you reached university. So, Mr. Page, librarians have been teaching this for-like-ever. Why aren't you and others working more closely with librarians to teach searching? You don't want a lawyer teaching you about medicine, so why are we "waiting" for non-librarians to teach searching to our kids (or adults, for that matter)?

Why are we so quick to de-value and lay off school librarians? And why are we then surprised when students go through school using only Google to find information? In California, they pretty much don't have school librarians anymore, and we're so blind that it's the dominant trend nationwide. And yet, we librarians have this whole thing we do called "bibliographic instruction." We take classes in it, write books about it, do studies to improve it, and practice it for anyone who walks through the door.

I guess that's the rub - you have to take advantage of it, even if it's a "virtual" walk through the door. How many of you are using the more in-depth, better indexed, full-text databases your library provides for you free of charge?

You were forced to walk through the door in school, but what happens when we've gutted our libraries to the point that there is no one there to teach you about information and the optimal retrieval thereof? You do the math.

Your Screen on Your Sleeve: New Prototype Wearable Computing Jacket

" 'Bev points us to this AP story and photo about Pioneer, a Tokyo-based firm that has created a wearable computer prototype jacket with built-in sleeve display: "Using an organic film electro-luminescent (EL) display, the wearable computer is being developed with a new information technology by a collaboration of academic institutes and electronic companies. The development is expected to help medical, firefighting, and farming workers.' Link" [Boing Boing Blog]

For those who have seen my Information Shifting presentation, it really is coming.