August 2009

Story from Game Pro : According to a Flickr photo, the man set up an Xbox 360<, monitor, and wireless router and began to play a shooter, possibly Halo 3. He was apparently shouting commands into his headset while he played, so it didn't take long for him to get kicked out. This guy brought a monitor, Xbox, wi-fi router, external HD, earphones with mouthpiece and a controller (disguised under a NY Post, no less). He proceeded to play Quake/Halo/Call of Duty...some nerd fighter game while yelling out instructions to his "teammates". Took him 20 minutes to set it all up. Took him 2 minutes to get kicked out.

A City Council decision to take back the Springfield, MA’s Mason Square Library through eminent domain was preceded by strong feelings pro and con among city residents and strong concerns among councilors about displacing the Urban League from the site.

The vote on Monday was 9-0 to approve taking the property at 765 State St., by eminent domain, but several councilors said it was a very difficult decision.

Councilor Jose F. Tosado said both uses of the site were beneficial for the city, but he sided with the library use as “the greater good” for that site.

Read the full story.

Children who attended a reading program yesterday at the Needham Free Public Library watched in delight as their teacher bowed down, rolled on the floor, and used her nose to flip through a book about the Red Sox.

Those things don’t happen in your average classroom. But Lucy, a black lab who is trained specially to help children learn to read, is clearly not your average teacher.

Lucy and her owner, recently retired first-grade teacher Pat Howes, help kids develop their reading skills and instill a love of books through the programs they hold at schools, libraries and bookstores. Howes said the programs are effective because children feel at ease when they are reading to a calm, friendly dog who won’t judge them when they make mistakes.

Read the full story.

Launching today is Homer’s Odyssey, a book about a remarkable blind cat, written by her human companion, Gwen Cooper.

Through her agent, Gwen Cooper had been shopping a book about her cat Homer to publishers, but there were no takers.

So, she put a sample chapter on Open Salon. The author says in her post today, “it went viral with a speed and scope that even those of us who believed in Homer’s Odyssey were unprepared for.”

Full piece at EarlyWord.com

Investigators in Colorado say they have broken up a massive methamphetamine ring in the Denver area that distributed pounds of the dangerous drug every week and laundered the profits using collectible comic books.

Story at CNN

Your Kindle can’t do this, local library ebooks now available on the Sony Reader. Blog post at The Mobile Gadgeteer.

Yes, a librarian can now be anyone — from your cute neighbor or cool classmate, to that sophisticated babe or handsome hunk. Or better yet, he can be a multi-talented computer expert who is into flip spin, poi, fire breathing and photography such as Johann Frederick Cabbab, a professor of Library and Information Science (LISIS), at the University of the Philippines in Diliman.

The Salinas Public Library has plans to start lending toys by the end of the year.

“We took this project on because it represents a remarkable opportunity for the Salinas Public Library to enrich its services within the community,” Gardner said Friday. “I don’t think we need to do a lot of research to know that this [service] can be valuable to the development of children in Salinas.”

Before there was a state, Kansas had a library, now celebrating 154 years of service
State librarians are marking 154 years of providing resources to Kansans with events at the Statehouse.

The Kansas Territorial Library was established in 1855 before statehood, becoming the Kansas State Library in 1863 when legislators appropriated $2,000 for its creation.

Is Google ready–or willing–to become a library?

Librarians, academics, and privacy advocates will gather Friday on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley to discuss the implications of Google’s proposed settlement with publishers that, if implemented, will allow it to bring millions of books online.