5 candles. Not 4 candles..or fork handles.

5 candles on my blog birthday cake, on its fifth anniversary*!

I’ve done quite a bit since I started this blog up: Chartered, (hopefully) Revalidated, been a Committee member, been a Convenor, organised training events, gone to training events, formally and informally mentored other information professionals (and been mentored by them in return), set up the UK Library Bloggers wiki, pottered about the edges of interesting projects like the Library Routes and Build India A Library initiatives, been involved in the setting up of various wikis for various purposes, taken part in a course of online study, attended formal conferences and informal unconferences (that is such a horrible word!), and along the way, found a ton of entertaining book-related gifts on Etsy.

In other words – good lord, I got professional! And it didn’t even hurt! Keeping the blog going (despite long periods where I’ve thought “I really have nothing to talk about”, or “I have loads to talk about, but I’d probably be fired if I did”) has been less traumatic than I would have though, and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to type all my highbrow and lowbrow thoughts (admittedly, it’s generally more of the lowbrow), and see if anyone else shares them.

So, happy birthday dear blog, may we have many more years together 🙂 And if you’ve tolerated reading this for any of that time – thanks too, especially for not laughing too loudly when I’m being utterly dim 😀

All birthday gifts gratefully received….

*Well, it was on the 17th of June – I’m not so hot on dates sometimes.

Back to the Renewables Future

So, while trying to find out what the difference between a megawatt and a gigawatt is, I had a thought…how much power, in gigawatts, did it take to power the Delorean in “Back to the Future”?
According to the esteemed Doc Brown, it was 1.21 gigawatts, the power being provided by the nuclear reaction of plutonium, unwisely stolen from terrorists.
According to the Scottish Government (p3), as at July 2011, Scotland had 4.2 gigawatts of installed capacity from renewable sources such as wind and wave power.

We could send Marty Back to the Future three times over. And completely avoid the need for stealing plutonium from bad guys.

Nice!

Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010 Regulations and Order introduced

Scheduled to come into force on 2nd July, the new regulations for the Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010 will move Scottish law firms one step closer to the ABS model currently in place in England and Wales. From 2 July 2012, the Scottish Government will be able to begin accepting applications from those bodies wishing to become approved regulators, presumably the Law Society and other legal professional bodies.

Legislation referred to in the Scottish Government press release is linked to below:

Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010 (Ancillary Provision) Regulations 2012 (draft)


Licensed Legal Services (Specification of Regulated Professions) (Scotland) Regulations 2012 (draft)


Licensed Legal Services (Complaints and Compensation Arrangements) (Scotland) Regulations 2012 (SSI 2012/153) 


Licensed Legal Services (Interests in Licensed Providers) (Scotland) Regulations 2012 (SSI 2012/154) 


Licensed Legal Services (Maximum Penalty and Interest in respect of Approved Regulators) (Scotland) Regulations 2012 (SSI 2012/155) 

Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010 (Commencement No. 2 and Transitional Provisions) Order 2012 (SSI 2012/152 (C.14)) 

The need for speed

I had a few minutes of fun today checking my reading speed on this site. Probably a not very accurate test, but it does check your understanding of the text you’ve just read, by questioning you on aspects of it at the end of your reading time. I got 100% accuracy each time I tried it, and a very fast reading speed each time. I wanted to average out my speed, but there were only 3 sample texts, and repeating them wouldn’t be very accurate, so I had to settle for the average of the 3 texts: 754 words per minute.That seems to put me above “college professors”, and below “high-scoring college students” (ok – that seems slightly back-to-front, but hey-ho!) on their scale. 

Now, although I’m actually generally a very fast reader anyway, I think that years of doing legal research has actually trained me to be a more accurate skim reader. I may not necessarily understand the details of what I get asked to research (I’m not a lawyer, so the esoteric points that they may want to find out more about are quite often entirely new areas for me), but I can usually pick out the relevant material from the content quite quickly.  I don’t have time to read everything I’m looking through in-depth, but in the process of skimming, I end up assimilating some basic information about the topic too. It means I can retain or discard materials quickly, and collate only the relevant stuff to pass on to the enquirer. Of course, it also means I can get a response together more quickly than if I had to read every item in full…and everyone is happy when they get a reply to their query fast!
And the best bit? I only have to do the skimming – the really hard bit, when you have to read the whole thing, and interpret how that relates to a specific situation, is down to the enquirer to do. And *that* is why I would never want to be a lawyer – too much thinking involved!  😉