Cooking and Tech Tips on a Friday

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! I hope you are doing well, dear readers. I had a lovely post planned on a discussion on the effects of “More Product, Less Process” on finding aids, but then it turned gloomy and cold outside and my brain got a little cloudy too (actually it’s my sinuses, but that seems to affect brain function, too). Anyway, I’ll save that post for another day. Today I want to share some fun articles that you can pass along to your friends, family, and patrons on food and more awesome Google labs because it’s Friday, and a Friday should be fun.

Sometimes I just seem to accumulate random posts in my favorites section and then after a couple of weeks they come together in a coherent, thematic whole. Don’t ask me how this happens; it just does. Anyway, this time it was centered around food posts. I love this article on How Cooking Gave Me Purpose. (A summary version can be found on Lifehacker.) It’s a great look at cooking and how much fun it can be, especially when you get to cook with others.

However, if you are cooking for others, you’ll want to check out Foodily. It will help you find recipes that will satisfy picky eaters, who won’t eat certain foods, and help find recipes for people who can’t eat certain foods because of allergies. Also, most recipe websites have fairly well-developed search engines that will help you find recipes to satisfy even the pickiest eater. If you’re on a mobile, one of my favorite apps is from Epicurious. It has a super-fun user interface and some very yummy recipes (it’s a Lifehacker Download f the Day, too).

Finally, in the realm of food, check out This is Lifehacker: Episode 9, which is all about food.

In tech news, check out these two articles on more great Google Labs to try out for: Google Chrome and Google Maps.

That’s all from me for today. I hope you have a lovely rest of your day, a fantastic weekend (hopefully you’ll get some sunshine), time to read some fun stuff, and I’ll be back next week with more archives, libraries, and tech news. Allons-y!

Reflections on Being a Committee Chair

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday and Happy June, dear readers! I hope you are having a lovely start to your month. We actually have sunshine today, so I’m happy. Today I just want to share with you some of my reflections on my time spent as a committee chair and then send you off with a tech article that should be shared with everyone you know.

Yesterday was the last Academic Senate meeting of the academic year which was the end of my duties as the Chair of the Academic Senate’s Committee on Research. As we are wrapping up our Spring Quarter, I wanted to share a few things that I’ve learned that will hopefully help you in your committee work, even if you are never foolish enough to become a committee chair.

First, as many of you probably already know from first-hand experience, committees take a lot of time. It’s not the meeting time, but the preparation time that seems to eat up large portions of days. And if you are Chair, you will spend even more time preparing for meetings. But what can really make or break committee work, in my opinion, are the people on the committee. As Chair, it was my job to facilitate meetings and make sure everything ran smoothly and efficiently because everyone is super-busy and no one likes to have their time wasted. Which brings me to this great post by Lifehacker, use compassion to combat difficult coworkers.

I was extremely lucky to have an amazing bunch of faculty members on the committee this year, but I’ve also been on committees with warring egos and clashing personalities. In either situation, dealing with people with compassion and consciously relaxing so as to not start from a place of defensiveness has really helped me facilitate positive interactions, even with very difficult personalities, in my opinion. I really do believe, and this has been borne out by this year’s amazing amount of work that we accomplished on the committee, that coming into a room with a positive energy will make other people more positive and willing to work together. Being Chair was a ton of work, but it was also incredibly satisfying to have productive meetings and get people motivated to work together.

This article on how the Internet changes everything–except four things that was linked to by Stephen’s Lighthouse also reminded me of working on a committee this year, especially points 1 and 2.

Customer experience and humanizing technology are just as important for committee work as they are for businesses and libraries. Being approachable, available, and actually caring will always make for a good customer experience and a good interaction with a committee chair. Also, even though I love shiny technologies, it’s the people that actually matter. For example, the Academic Senate uses a fully functional, but incredibly clunky content management software program to distribute information and store documents. I, of course, had to send in documents to share with the senate that way, but I also made it easier on my committee members by emailing documents and sharing Google Docs.

So for incoming chairs next year, good luck. It will be a wild ride, full of work, annoyances, victories, and lots of laughs. Remember to keep your sense of humor, don’t pontificate, and for goodness sake end your meetings on time, if not early. Do those things and you’ll be fondly remembered as a great committee chair. Bringing cookies occasionally doesn’t hurt either.

Okay, so now on to the article that you should share with everyone, top 10 simple privacy tricks. Once again, Lifehacker has come through with an article of simple to implement tips that will have an immediate, positive effect on protecting your privacy.

To end with something fun, check out Joy the Baker’s recipe for whole wheat garlic knots and enjoy some garlicky goodness for dinner this week.

Take care, read a lot, and I’ll be back on Friday with some more thoughts on libraries, archives, and technology. Allons-y!

Communities

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you are having a lovely day and, if you are in the United States, have a lovely Memorial Day weekend planned. I plan on accomplishing a lot of relaxing during the weekend in order to have energy for the last bit of the spring quarter. I just want to talk a bit about communities today and how important archives and libraries are (or could be) in fostering communities.

Public libraries seem to get the lion’s share of press when it comes to libraries fostering spaces, resources, services, and events that increase community involvement and interaction. However, academic libraries and archives can also be extremely important places for fostering community spirit among library and archives users. But it seems that we are not as pro-active on the whole about demonstrating our value to the community as public libraries. I know that my library could do a lot better at reaching out to students and getting them involved with changes in the library. One of my projects this summer will be working on cheap (read: free) ways of doing outreach and getting students involved. Our library is “the heart of the campus” mainly because it is open when nothing else is on campus, but I don’t think that students really feel “ownership” of the library and that’s a problem for engagement.

In the latest issue of C&RL News there was a great article by Gfeller, Dutterfield-Nagy, and Grignon, Imagine: A student-centered library, which described the Fogler Library’s outreach and marketing campaign that heavily involved students. The graphics they produced were awesome, prominently featured students, and would be easy to replicate at other university libraries given a bit of time and a little bit of money for printing posters. Just think of the fun of having students involved with the photography and designing of the posters, as well as creating tie-in events using mobile technologies, QR codes, and other student-led, student-driven activities. There is so much room for engagement and increasing the interaction with users in academic libraries. We can foster community, but we need the time and support to do it.

While archives might seem like a world away from public libraries and academic libraries in terms of fostering community, I would argue that they can also be at the heart of communities. I study community archives and will hopefully be sharing some of my research in the near-ish future with a wider audience because I’ve not finished up all my work yet. But in the meantime, I can say that community archives are hugely important for community history, memory, and public programming. And, most community archives operate on a shoestring budget, so they have many ideas to offer libraries on how to get things done when money actually is a huge object.

Anyway, just some food for thought. How does your library or archives engage with your community members? How do you make sure that people feel connected and involved with your library or archives? I’d love to hear suggestions in the comments as I work with our community members over the coming months.

I wanted to share this photograph of a post-it note I found affixed to one of the water fountains on campus because it made me smile. Unexpected messages of kindness and positivity are always welcome.

Surrounded by True Friends Post-it

Also, for a short work break, check out anatomy of a mashup: Definitive Daft Punk for one of the coolest visualizations I’ve seen in a long while. Plus, the music sounds awesome.

Have a wonderful day, a fabulous weekend, read a lot, and I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on libraries, archives, and technology. Allons-y!

End of the Term Tech Hits

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I hope your day is going well. We are in the penultimate week of classes at my university and, as per usual, the stress levels are rising along with everyone’s workload. So today I just have a few quick technology links to hopefully make your life a little easier.

First, something to share with anyone trying to make pretty diagrams to put in their final exam paper: diagram.ly. It’s a great little, intuitive, free diagramming website. Much easier to use than trying to wrestle with Word or something similar.

Also, in the realm of extremely helpful and useful are these two lists from Lifehacker of Google lab features to enable in: Gmail and Google Calendar. Google may be taking over the world, but we can take comfort in the fact that their lab features are fantastic. (Yes, that was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check out the features and even use some of them.)

Finally, if you are like most people and summer makes you want to get out of the office and out in the world traveling, check out the 5 best cheap travel booking sites. Then, pack your suitcases and have a fantastic break.

And something fun to end: check out this trailer for the first season of Sherlock. I’ve finally been able to watch it and it is fantastic. Definitely check it out if you need a break and like clever, beautifully written and filmed mysteries.

Have a great rest of your day and do something fun. I’m hoping to be back on Friday with some thoughts from my recent research trip on the nature of communities and archives. Allons-y!

Twitter and Typography

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you’ve had a lovely week and have a great weekend planned. As you read this, I will hopefully be on the road driving back to my beloved Bay Area from my research trip in SoCal. Today I thought I’d share a handful of articles about Twitter and some fun pages about typography that should be useful for you and your patrons. Then let’s all agree to relax and get ready for the weekend!

I’ve been collecting links to articles and posts about Twitter over the last couple of months and I’ve rounded them up here so you have a convenient list of links to give out to people who may need some convincing that Twitter can actually be a useful tool. There are also some good ideas for those of you who already use Twitter, but want to use it more effectively.

First, for those who believe the that Twitter is just for narcissists, check out the top 10 uses for Twitter that aren’t self-indulgent. And while you don’t want to be narcissistic, you probably do want to increase the number of followers you have on Twitter, so check out ways to increase your Twitter following too.

If you use Twitter on your Android, you might be interested in Twicca, which is a Twitter client. Only downfall is that it can only be configured for one account. So if you have multiple Twitter accounts, I suggest Seesmic. (And yes, I’m that person with multiple Twitter accounts. I use Twitter for my classes, so I’m not a narcissist, really.) The regular Twitter app is quite good too. Yay for choices of apps (and the mobile web) for getting your Twitter fix while on the go.

Now on to typography, which really has little to do with Twitter other than the fact that I’m rather interested in both. First check out this great post: You Don’t Really Strike Me as an Ariel on font selection and then for some fun, check out the infographic, So you need a typeface. If you really love typography, I can’t recommend I Love Typography enough. It has so much to inspire you, including this post all kinds of type. Maybe if we all work together we can rid the world of poorly used fonts and bad typography. Even if we can’t, we can at least look at some lovely examples of typography.

To end, check out Improv Everywhere’s “Gotta Share! The Musical”

Have a wonderful rest of your day, a lovely weekend, and I’ll be back next week with more library, archives, and tech fun. Allons-y!

Librarians, students, and the Future

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday, dear readers! I hope you are having a lovely day. I can hardly believe we are to the middle of another week and I’m off on another research trip to the archives. So today, I just want to talk a bit about some of the stuff buzzing around the bibliosphere right now and leave you with some tasty recipes for your tea breaks.

So if you have been hanging around the blogosphere at all this week, you’ve probably already read Seth Godin’s, Future of the Library article. And hopefully you’ve also read the very well-written and balanced response by Agnostic, Maybe. I just have a few comments to make about Godin’s article that will hopefully not duplicate everything that’s already been written and why I think it is just as important for academic librarians to pay attention to what Godin wrote as it is for public librarians.

Yes, of course, Godin got some stuff about librarians and libraries wrong (in my opinion). Libraries are still needed, freely accessible resources are definitely needed, and the digital divide is still a real problem. But on the whole, Godin got it correct and some of his misconceptions about libraries can be chalked up to the failure of librarians and the library profession in general in marketing our services and resources.

Now some librarians do an excellent job in outreach and marketing efforts, but on the whole, we obviously don’t do enough. If we did, Godin (along with the majority of people) would realize that libraries subscribe to many online resources and databases that have the ability to blow Wikipedia out of the water and are able to make researching more efficient and effective. It’s not that we don’t have the resources, it’s that we don’t make people aware of them. I see this in my own library and in classes I teach where the instructor will tell me after that s/he had no idea we offered so much or could help in so many ways.

This ties into my last post about caring. We have to demonstrate that we care about our users and market our services, resources, and general awesomeness as librarians in ways that our users, be they a public library user or an undergrad in an academic library, find relevant. We are the awesome teachers, info curators, guides, and sages that Godin says we are and can be, but we need others to “get it.”

So instead of saying how Godin got it wrong, let’s use his post as a call to (more) action. He got some parts wrong, but so do most writers and people. His main message, that we need to use our talents to connect people with information to create value is right on the mark. I think that having people honestly write what they think about the future of the library and librarians is fantastic, especially by people outside of the profession. This makes us take a hard look at what we’re doing right and what we can improve on if we read such articles with an open mind and with an open heart looking towards improving ourselves and services instead of being defensive when obviously our message as librarians is not as clear, or as powerful, as some of us believe it to be. We need to become, in Godin’s words, a purple cow–something remarkable. I’m working everyday to make my work and interactions with people remarkable, are you?

Okay, that’s my two cents.

I just wanted to share one link from Lifehacker today on how clean up your digital life and manage information overload. Great article as always. Share it with your library users. They’ll thank you.

And finally, for some tasty fun, check out Joy the Baker’s post on love and sugar recipes. These are fabulous and, if all else fails in your marketing campaign for the awesomeness of librarians, bake ’em cookies. Everyone is a fan of cookies.

Have a great rest of your day, help someone out, read something lovely, and I’ll be back on Friday with some tech stuff to share with your friends (family, library users, students, etc.). Allons-y!

Caring and Archival Conservation

/ dwakimoto / 1 Comment

Happy Friday! I hope that your day is going well, even though it’s the thirteenth (and no, I’m not really superstitious). It’s a Friday and that’s a good thing. Today I just want to talk briefly about caring and archival conservation, then send you off with some fun videos for your tea breaks. So let’s get going.

On Tuesday was the second of two Protecting Cultural Collections workshops held at the lovely California Historical Society in San Francisco. Sponsored by the IMLS, these workshop series are supposed to help more cultural institutions (libraries, museums, and archives) create and implement disaster preparedness plans and also learn basics about salvage/conservation techniques. I will admit to almost falling asleep in the first half of the workshop, mainly because the room was freezing and the lights were dim, but the second half of the workshop made up for it because it was hands-on. I like doing things so working with water-logged materials and determining how to go about drying the materials was a lot of fun. I highly suggest the workshops if you need a brush up on the basics of salvaging materials or need to create a disaster plan. You can see a schedule of the upcoming workshops and register here. If you want more in-depth training for conservation, you’ll have to go elsewhere as that is not the point of the workshops.

In addition to getting me thinking about how much conservation work needs to be done to the materials in my archives, the workshops also got me thinking about caring in general. Not just caring for the collections, which sorely need it and which the one grant for preservation work we got is going to help in that aspect, but caring for and about cultural institutions and people on a more general level. These thoughts have also been bouncing around in my head due to a lovely post over on Ink and Vellum,We’ve built the brand. Now let’s build celebrities and due to reading a lot of Seth Godin’s work lately, including The Big Moo. After thinking quite a lot about this, among other things, I really believe that a lot of the problems in branding, funding, increasing statistics, etc. comes down to not showing people how much we care. Now before you raise your pitchforks, hear me out.

I’m not saying you don’t care, or your organization doesn’t care. I’m saying that people don’t perceive us as caring about their unique problems. I’m saying that we are all so stressed and overworked that it’s beginning to show and this leads to a vicious cycle of apathy and bad statistics that then leads management to want to try new fancy “actionable” steps and “measurable” outcomes. However, I think we need to simply think about the truth in one chapter of The Big Moo:

You could spend all your money and all your time trying to improve your customer service through one fancy technique or another. Or you could just care. And hire people who care.

When people know you care about them, they start caring about you. And when they care about you, they’ll seek you out for help with their research paper, or their job application, or their archival research. When they care about you, they are willing to listen to your story and your ideas for creating a better library or archives or museum with programming and services that matter to them. And if they really can see that you care and have proof that you care, they will tell their friends and family members and start spreading the word and helping you out. Having a support base is the only way that we are going to be able to survive and improve, and it’s really the only way that we’ll ever get “celebrity” librarians or archivists.

So that’s all I really have to say today. Workshops on archival conservation and disaster preparedness made me think about caring in all aspects of life, but especially in my work. So let me know what you think because I really do care and love to hear from you, dear readers.

Finally, here’s some fun stuff for your Friday study/work breaks. Check out this video: Super Tiny Apartment is an Amazing Transformer. It’s really nifty, although I don’t think I want to do that moving of furniture in my apartment. Also, for those of you that like design and especially typography, check out: What Font are You? It’s fun and let’s you read through all of the font personality types at the end.

And, of course, we need a great video to finish with so here’s the Doctor because, well, it’s the Doctor.

Have a wonderful rest of your day, a fantastic weekend, and I’ll be back next week with more library/archives/tech thoughts and news. Allons-y!

Study Break Time

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! So if you work in the land of academia and you’re on the semester system, you’ve probably just endured (or are about to endure) the end of the semester craziness. If you’re on the quarter system (like my institution), you’re still in the middle of the term and students are instead going a bit crazy over studying for midterms and the like. Either way, I thought we could all use a quick study break today. So share these links with those students (colleagues, friends, and family members) who you think could benefit from them.

First, check out Lifehacker’s wonderful article on the top 10 fixes for annoying web problems. We can always count on Lifehacker to share some useful advice.

Also from Lifehacker is this very useful article with tips on ending sleep problems. I don’t know about you, but I definitely know a few students (and librarians and archivists) who could use some more sleep. In addition to the tips in the article, I’ll share my friend’s advice that you should also try yoga (it works, really).

Finally, you should really check out this article on a guy who has an augmented reality tattoo. Then check out the video of the tattoo below. It’s both crazy and cool.

Have a wonderful rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday with some reflections on the preservation workshop I was at earlier this week along with some thoughts on other issues facing libraries and archives. Allons-y!

Lee Rainie: Libraries as Social Networks

/ dwakimoto / 2 Comments

Happy Friday! I hope your having a lovely day, dear readers. I’m at BayNet’s Annual Meeting today and the keynote speaker is Lee Rainie, the Director of the Pew Internet Project. I’m super-excited. So on with the summary blogging!

Pew Internet Project is funded to do primary research and then write up reports. No agenda, no policies on Net Neutrality, etc.. Hope is that by producing useful data that Pew Internet Reports will be interesting to people. Considers librarians as one of the primary groups for the reports and data. [Rainie said to not Tweckle him. Really don’t tweckle anyone, it’s not nice.]

Talking about the rise of networked individuals (co-author Barry Wellman, University of Toronto). New social operating systems: networked individualism. Can see libraries as networked nodes. The world is a networked world and the networks are large. Social networks are more influential now than ever because of the stresses of information overload, etc.. Turn to networks for news, assessments/evaluations, and as a audience. Social networks are bigger, more segmented, and more diverse than in the past. It is easier to find and maintain relationships via many-to-many online communication tools. Social networks are more vivid and tied to creation of information/media. More conscious about how networks fit together and how we can create content for network building.

New kinds of communities now. There is an explosion of group activity and group niches. There are groups for everything and group niches are becoming narrower. Rise of social posses: grab a cause and pursue it with their networks. Advent of just-in-time, just-like-me, peer-to-peer (support) groups, especially in the medical field (like the talk at Personal Digital Archiving Conference). Able to find people who understand your circumstances online. Fifth Estate of content contributors: different sensibilities, more passionate, more personal, and tell stories differently than mass media= new media culture.

Librarians are attuned to networking and finding solutions, so this should mean we are at the forefront on using and optimizing social networks. Librarians are teachers and content creators. Social networking is a new way of looking at networking and leveraging librarian skills in new ways.

Q&A Break

  • Are you going to talk about youth and social networks?
    A. Sure, but the most interesting and fastest growing demographic now isn’t youth. Fastest growing segment on social networks is those over 50 years old now.
  • Aren’t librarians really just content aggregators?
    A. Librarians are both content aggregators and content creators. [Nice to see lots of hands when asked about who was tweeting the talk.]
  • A. What happens if people can’t find information online?
    A. If people can’t find something online, they create it. And mostly, people are super-helpful if you ask your network a question. [I can totally second that–whenever I ask a question on Twitter I always get kind and helpful answers]
  • Differences between Fourth and Fifth Estates?
    A. Still norms and narratives followed by Fourth Estate, while in Fifth Estate it is still quirky, personal, partisan sensibility.

Revolution 1: Internet and Broadband
46% of adults were using Internet in 2000 on first Pew Internet Survey. Now 79% use Internet (2011). 93% of teenagers are now online. Internet user population grew up until 2006 in adult world.

Asked about broadband adoption. 66% of Americans now have broadband at home. Become very Internet users when more people got broadband, instead of dial-up. People could now create content, find things more easily, and encouraged people to participate. Internet solutions then became primary in people’s workflows.

Higher socioeconomic status people are more likely to be online: household income of %75,000, college degree, parent with minor child at home, married or living with partner, employed full time. Negative correlations: having high school degree or less, over 65+, prefers speaking Spanish, disabled, African-American.

Consequences for the information ecosystem: huge volume of information, high velocity, more vibrant environments online, and easier to set up filters to get relevant information. Lots of work and teaching now based around gaming. Lots more content creation. About 2/3 of American adults are content creators, includes social networking site users, sharing photos, blogging, etc.. 14% of adults blog and 12% use Twitter. Don’t know how to ask about using geo-location services on the survey yet, get responses from 4-17%. Location is now become more important because of smartphones.

Big challenge for libraries: collections are disrupted BUT there are also opportunities. People still like books and now want more technology, too. Libraries do a unique and special job in solving some problems. For example, bridging the digital divide by providing access to Internet connections and computers. Librarians are teaching people how to leverage social medial.

There is more that librarians can do (of course). Non-users of online technologies say that relevance and digital literacy are primary factors for not going online. We can help with the digital literacy issues and show people that there are relevant sources for them online (like news sites, health information, government information, etc.). Go information literacy instruction!

Revolution 2: Wireless Connectivity
Because of lack of time: take home: the wireless revolution was really important. [I’m not kidding, we’re running out of time, so we’re skipping over a lot]
57% of adults now use mobile internet. 35% have apps on their phones and 24% actually use apps.

Revolution 3: Social Networking
Social networking population is more diverse than you might think. Fastest growing cohort is those over 50 years old. For many youth, Facebook is their dashboards. FoMo: Fear of Missing Out (Rainie heard this new term at SXSW) So this is one reason people feel the need of always being connected and are not comfortable with being alone.

Librarians now have to share the stage with amateur experts because of social networks and the ease of content creation and sharing. Now we need to have influence in order to maintain our authority in this networked world. [I still think we need experts, but we need new skills in order to have our expertise matter.]

Practical Questions to Ponder

  • What’s the franchise vs. commodity? What’s the aggregation play?
    Do what you do best and link to the rest.
  • What’s the social networking play? What alliances can we strike to do distributed versions of our mission? What’s the word-of-mouth, viral play?
  • What’s the mobile play? How do we understand and exploit real-time informatin with our patrons?
  • What’s the gift economy play? What’s the API play? What can we pry loose that others can exploit? What feedback do we want from our stakeholders?
  • What’s the definition of success that is based on outcomes not outputs? How do we measure it?

Take Home Message
Go librarians! We do a lot, but can of course do more to help people use social networking tools online. Need spaces to be connected and collaborate with others, but also need reflective, quiet spaces. We need to ask ourselves hard questions and find innovative ways to do our work. Let’s, in Seth Godin’s words, create Purple Cows!

Note: Rainie’s talk was taped and should be available via BayNet sometime soon.

Have a fantastic rest of your day and a lovely weekend. I’ll be back next week with more tech, library, and archives news and notes. Thank you, dear readers, for reading. Allons-y!

Work, Work, Work

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I hope everyone is having a lovely day. I can’t believe it is already May and it seems like we’ve gone straight from winter to summer here in the Bay Area. Today I just want to share a few links to help you at work or rather to help you do and feel better at work.

I decided today would be a good day to share these links because:

  1. I presented with three other awesome archivists on Saturday at the Society of California Archivists’ Conference on networking and employment, so it’s kind of on my mind. And, I’m sorry to report that the panel wasn’t taped for webcasting. I’ve got to get back into the habit of taping my talks for podcasting, but that’s neither here nor there.
  2. There have been a lot of useful and inspiring posts over the last week or so about work.

First, if you don’t already read Seth Godin’s blog or books, you should at least give his work a try. I find all of his work to be quick reads and very useful for giving me a swift kick in the pants to start doing valuable work. His post yesterday on Hard Work vs. Long Work is a great example. I love that his posts are usually short, pithy, and are like a little daily pep talk on getting out there and getting things done.

Lifehacker, of course, does not fail to deliver some good advice articles. I love this reminder to stay positive to boost your career. (Plus, it gives my officemate and me an excuse for our unrepentant optimism!) Lifehacker has a great summary on how to get respect at work (and you can read the full article over on the Art of Manliness and yes, it works for people who don’t want to be manly, too).

If you have any tips or advice for enjoying your work and being productive, please let me know in comments. I’m always interesting in hearing what works for other people.

And to end, check out this cool video of Festo’s AquaJelly robots:

Have a lovely rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday (hopefully) with a report from the BayNet talk by Lee Rainie from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Allons-y!