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This is a little different post, but I figured I’d let everyone know how I cleaned my bathroom sink drain using products found in most kitchens that didn’t involve toxic chemicals. I found this “recipe” in varying forms on the Internet, but what I used was:

1/2 cup baking soda
1/2 cup salt
1/2 cup vinegar (heated up)

I poured the above down the drain and let it foam up (reminded my of junior high chemistry experiments) as it made a chemical reaction. After about 15 minutes I poured 2 quarts of boiling water down to wash things down. I’m not really sure the salt is needed as many recipes didn’t include it. Also some used different amounts of vinegar and baking soda, but this recipe worked for me. I also read that you can pour a 1/2 cup baking soda and a 1/2 cup salt down the drain before you go to bed and rinse it out with 2 cups boiling water in the morning to keep your drains flowing. A simple Internet search will show you other combinations to try.

I just had an article I co-authored with Kathryn A. Frederick published in Issue 2 of the Code4Lib Journal. The article I co-authored is titled Free and Open Source Options for Creating Database-Driven Subject Guides (I think the title is pretty self-explanatory). There are a number of high quality articles to read along with a report on the 2008 Code4Lib conference, so please check out the new issue.

On Tuesday, March 11 I presented along with Heather Lea Moulaison at NERCOMP 2008 in Providence, Rhode Island. NERCOMP is the North East Regional COmputing Program. The conference is one of the regional EDUCASE conferences. For the library-folk who read this that don’t know about EDUCAUSE, it is a “nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.” They have a rather large annual conference in the Fall and a series of regional conferences.

I never been to an EDUCAUSE conference or one of the regional ones before, so this was a new experience for m. I wasn’t really sure what to expect as far as the attendees. For the most part is was people who manage IT at colleges and not the hard-core programmer geek types. Many of the people were from smaller colleges and it was interesting to here about the issues they face. Everyone was really nice and the conference was well orginzied. While there was not a large number of librarians, I think it was a good conference for systems librarians and others in the library world that deal with technology to attend.

Our presentation was about Libraries as Web 2.0 Portals to Learning and I’m happy to report despite it not being at a library conference that is well attended (Standing room only!) and that we recieved a number of very positive comments. I really enjoyed my time at NERCOMP and plan on attending it or one of the other regional conferences in the future. I may even try to get to the national conference at some point.

I signed up for a Twitter account a while back, and until today made exactly one entry into it (I made two today). I guess I’m not sure how Twitter would be useful for me. There are a couple of reasons why I decided to log into my account today and start trying to use it in order to determine if it will be useful. The first is that during the recent Code4Lib conference a few people where using it to see if they could meet up with other people. I think this would be really useful. The only problem is, you would need to know how is using Twitter at the conference so you can check what they are doing. Actually, there is another problem… for this to be useful at conferences (especially big ones like ALA), you would need unlimited text messages on your phone or it could get expensive. I guess that is why I haven’t used it yet. I have a lame phone plan when it comes to anything but talking. I plan on getting a new phone soon, so maybe I’ll get a better plan for SMS at that time.

The other reason why I decided to really give Twitter a try is based on a short discussion on LISnews about Twitter and a recent video posting on what Twitter is about on Commoncraft. I don’t think either convinced me Twitter is useful or interesting for me, but I guess it did make me think it is worth giving it a try before discounting it.