blog.ecorrado.us

Tonight I went out to a brew pub that had free wireless because someone was coming to look at my house that is for sale. It was trivia night and one of the questions was what is the biggest non-Great Lake fresh water lake. My first guess was Lake Victoria in Africa. I was correct (and in fact my iBook and I were actually was called on to confirm this). I mention this because I became interested in one of the lakes on the list of largest lakes on Wikipedia: the Aral Sea. What caught my attention was that the size of lake shrunk to 25% of its original surface area in the last 40 years. I read the article on Wikipedia about the Aral Sea and it appears that dams constructed for irrigation was the cause for this and apparently the northern part of the lake is starting to make a come back. It is an interesting read ans shows what can happen if politicians try to solve one problem without looking at what the other consequences can be.

Video (wmv), audio (mp3) files, and photos of the VALE-OLS Next Generation Academic Library System Symposium that took place at TCNJ on March 12, 2008 are now available on the VALE Web site. It was a great symposium talking about the future of VALE libraries and the future of Open Source Integrated Library systems and I recommend you take some time to check it out if you didn’t have the opportunity to attend in person. While the whole thing was great, I especially recommend the presentation by Joe Lucia, University Librarian, Villanova University and President of PALINET Board.

As my last post mentioned, I used Google Docs for a recent presentation. I found out that some things with publishing a presentation don’t work easily if you use Google Apps for your own domain. If you publish a document, it includes your domain and the URL and forces people to log in. I guess this is nice feature if you only want to publish to people in your domain, but causes issues if you want the world to be able to see it. I fixed this by publishing the document using a Google Docs account not on my domain (although just stripping out the domain URL may work as well).

I also just read a post on the Google Docs Announcement page that Export to PPT is here! This is great news as it will make it much easier to re-purpose content into other presentations.

When I co-presented at NERCOMP, we used Google Docs. I never used it for a presentation before, but it worked pretty well. There are some issues with Google Docs (not being able to export into a different, editable slide show format for example*). It is also rather basic, but that is OK for me since I tend to create basic slideshows. You can access the presentation here (If you get a bright green screen, Google might not like the version of your Flash player, in that case, please see the PDF available from this page):

Update

* Note: I have just found out that Google Docs, as of April 8, can now export to a PPT.

I have a travel coffee mug that a good friend bought me that says on it “coffee makes you smarter.”

Occasionally I run across an article that confirms this is true. A BBC story says that “Coffee may cut the risk of dementia” and also reminds the reader that previous studies have show that coffee may lower risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. It apparently does this by limiting (or preventing?) blood-brain barrier leaking. Who wants blood-brain barrier leaking? Apparently people, who unlike me, don’t drink coffee! The article doesn’t go so far to say that coffee makes you smarter, but they wouldn’t want that to come out because they want us to think they are smarter then them. If we all drink coffee, these scientist types won’t be any smarter than the rest of us.