Canadian Dollars Does it Again

The Canadian Dollars, affectionately known as the Loonie (those fearsome birds), has hit a new high against the US Dollar. So much for earning a once sweet American dollar!!

Follow this bird's ascent on Yahoo! Finance.

Gaming in the Working World?

The news story on BBC News online--"When work becomes a game"--sounds interesting. I remember way back, when I was a young kid playing video games, I was often scolded for playing too long with my video games and not spending enough time doing my homework.

Well now look here. The tables have turned. It looks like the skills needed and acquired in playing video games, particularly team-based games, may become required skills for the workplace of the future.

Time to dust off my Nintendo!!

Brush with Washington Famous, Parts 2 and 3

A few weeks ago, I walked past the former Director of Central Intelligence and former head of the Central Intelligence Agency F. James Woolsey. I chronicled this event in a recent blog post.

Yesterday, Saturday, I had two--yes, count 'em, two--encounters with the Washington Famous. I was doing my usual Saturday grocery shopping when I bumped into Ben Stein's shopping cart (or, to be more accurate, his cart almost bumped into me - but he quickly apologized).

Ben Stein is an economist, writer, comedian, TV personality, game show host, reality show host, and on and on the list goes.

Bumping into him near the cold cuts and cheese section was a surprise and then seeing him line up in the express check out lane was equally surprising. I guess these Washington elites and Hollywood types are not all that different from us (aside from a few million dollars in their bank accounts).

My second encounter with the Washington Famous occurred later on in the evening when I was leaving the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts building following its daily free show program.

I was crossing the street from the Kennedy Center to the Watergate complex when I saw a sleek black Cadillac slowly pull to the curb, followed by two large, black SUVs. The slow, deliberate movement of the three vehicles alerted me that this was a coordinated motorcade.

Two secret service agents jumped out from the SUVs (looking suspiciously like Agent Smith from Matrix fame), and I continued crossing the street, actually walking between the two now parked SUVs. The driver of one SUV looked at me with piercing eyes; I could see his communication ear piece and its coiled wire running down into his shirt collar. Another agent with bulging eyes saw me coming and probably sized me and concluded I was no threat.

In an almost surreal moment, I looked to my left and saw another agent open the door to the first SUV and out stepped US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, her long black legs reaching toward the sidewalk. She walked toward the Watergate with purpose even when someone from a local cafe shouted, "Hi Condi!"

While I have serious mixed feelings about living and working in this city, these encounters with the Washington Famous add some needed distraction to the daily routine.

The big question is: Who will I bump into next. Stay tuned!

So Far Away From Blogsville

Where were you?

For those wondering where I have been, why the silence on the blog front, the reason is simple: I was and continue to be very, very busy at work. It is hard to believe, but I am almost 8 months into my projects, and I am simply attempting to wrap up one of them. This is the nature of archival work; things take a long, long time to complete. I am not particularly fond of this because I find my attention wanes roughly six months into any given project.

What were those two Jott blog posts all about?

I had a meeting last week (or was it two weeks ago?) with a colleague who works with advanced technologies; he determines their business value, analyzes their potential, and dispenses recommendations and cautions as to how the institution should proceed with them. Lately, his focus has been on Web-based technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, mashups, collaboration, social networking, etc.

During the course of the meeting he mentioned Jott, a free service that allows subscribers to call a toll-free number and send messages to yourself, to groups, teams, or even to Twitter or your blog. The magic is that Jott transforms your spoken word into text. My description is probably not doing justice, so go check out this page.

What do you want to do with your life?

I wanna rock. I WANT TO ROCK. No, wait, wrong answer. It's no secret that I am still looking for that elusive dream job. But while reading David Lee King's latest blog post, I think I am homing in on what I'd like to do. As a Librarian and Digital Branch Manager, David's list of work activities reads like a dream job:

• attended a meeting about progress with Second Life projects
• attended a meeting about the upcoming election year and content possibilities with the Digital Branch (ie., blogs, community sharing, partnerships, etc)
• created a draft document of digital branch content and staffing guidelines and emailed it out to our guidelines group for review
• drooled over the library’s new iPod Touch - the last of our Techie ToyBox goodies to arrive!

If I shared with you my daily work activities, I would probably lose my readership (yes, all two of you), so I will not.

If your daily work activities are similar to mine, or if you're lucky enough that they resemble David Lee King's, let me know either way.

This is my second blog...

This is my second blog post to blogger using jott. For those who do not jott is a new service that allows users to telephone a jott specific number and speak their idea and jott transcribes whatever they say into words and publishes it to either blogger or twitter or even to yourself.
Click here to listen

Powered by Jott

This is my first blog...(er, not really)

This is my first blog post to Blogger using Jott. Let's see if it works.

Powered by Jott

A Lesson Learned

In the past few weeks I had several blog post ideas circulating in my head. Rather than writing them down or simply making a few notes, I filed them away in my increasingly cluttered brain.

Well, the filing system in there failed, sadly, and much of what I had to write about were drowned by the onslaught of monotonous work. The word busy does not even begin to fully describe the level of work in these past few weeks, hence the lack of updates to this blog.

So a lesson learned: If a blog post idea strikes you--anytime, anywhere--be sure to have some sort of notepad (the real or Microsoft kind) readily available. Do not put faith in the memory prowess of a tired and busy brain.