Jaf – Page 122 – Dumpling in a Hanky

I have one, and his name be Wolverine!

Apparently, every librarian needs a nemesis. I have mine, although I must admit, I share him with my boss. However, his ability to frustrate attempts to help him, evaporate knowledge from his brain, palm off his work to others and daydream through essential training sessions does mean there’s more than enough nemesis-ness to go around….

Basic Blogger

Reading the article by Nick Holmes in Legal Information Management about law blogs, made me think about just how little I really know about certain technical stuff.I’ve been blogging personally since March 2006, so I can post, I can hyperlink, I can insert pictures, yet I still don’t know how to make a banner. HTML is a mystery to me (new look Blogger = so nice!!), I can’t trackback visitors (to either blog), and I failed when trying to put a statcounter in the code of this one.

I’m a techie failure.

But, I ask myself, do I NEED to know all these things? A banner makes things look prettier, and I may not be able to do it myself, but I know people that I could ask to do it for me. I can live without prettyness, and save favours for essential times. Do I really need to be able to rummage in HTML? Why would I need to track back visitors, other than for my own personal interest? Do I have the time to learn how to do any of these things anyway, and if I do, would I be able to spend enough time on them to make me actually good at them?

I’ve come to the conclusion that I should be happy about the fact that I’m able to do a lot, and accept that I don’t have to be able to do everything.

I think that works for life / work too.

Sorry Jennie Law!

I admit, my choice of blog name was not particularly clever or well planned. I didn’t expect to get linked to, or even read, so I just thought, when Blogger prompted me for a name, “erm, my name, yup. That’s taken. Ok, so it’ll be mainly about law / my work…so law will do. That combination’s not taken yet. Yay. Job done.” It’s not particularly anonymous, but I don’t think I need to be anyway. Although a lady does like to retain a little bit of mystery…

I didn’t think there’d be a lady out there actually called Jennie Law. Or that she too would be a librarian! Perhaps I should get in touch and apologise for accidentally stealing her identity as my blog name?

Why must government websites do this?

Thanks to Binary Law, I now know that the DTI has become something unpronounceable, the DBERR. Is it ‘deeber’? ‘debeer’? ‘deberr’ (which allows me to say: to deberr is human, to forgive, debine?) Fingers crossed that they decide to be sensible about the whole process, and don’t just decide to shift the whole site, with no redirects, thereby rendering entirely useless the work of anybody who’s spend any time creating weblinks to any of their information…yup, that’d be me then!

Wonder if they’ll also fix the fact that their inbuilt websearch is the biggest excuse for a user enhancement I’ve ever seen, and has yet to ever actually work for me. Google and site specific searching is the only way I’ve been able to drag anything out of its depths!

And did I miss any prior notification of this? As of yesterday, their site was DTI, today it’s morphing (logo gone, I assume the new one’s coming), but no hint of todays change. Today, it’s their entire front page. Have I been selectively blind?

And now, I see the Department for Communities and Local Government is ‘redesigning’ too, apparently in response to ‘stakeholders’. Is the word ‘users’ actually banned in government circles? I don’t ‘stakehold’ their website, I ‘use’ it. And I wonder who the stakeholders were that they consulted…hopefully they’re not the usual, colour blind chimps with hugely advanced search skills they seem to base the rest of their redesigns on!