Through the Google Glass

It started innocently enough. When Google announced that it was looking for a cohort of early adopters for its shiny new Google Glass device, I answered the call with a nod back to my undergraduate years at MIT, where the Wearable Computing project was just getting underway. I have fond memories of spotting Thad Starner wandering around the Porter Square Star Market looking like he'd been assimilated by the Borg, and although my education ended up taking me about as far away from computer science and electrical engineering as one could possibly go, I never stopped being enamored with technology and its convergence with everyday human life.

Oddly enough, I became a total Google fanboy at the same time that I'd become a librarian (or maybe this isn't so odd in retrospect, given that the digital revolution was fully underway in librarianship at the time I was finishing my LIS degree)- one of my professors had begun her seminar by exhorting us all to create Gmail accounts, as the service had just become available to the public earlier that year; and my final class in the program, the Literature of the Humanities, spend a great amount of time studying the Google Book Scan project and what such an initiative meant for our discipline, the academy, and the future of the written word.
Needless to say, as soon as I heard of Google Glass I knew I'd want to get my hands on one of them, so it was inevitable that I'd take part in Google's #ifihadglass competition.

It never occurred to me that I'd be selected as one of their 8,000 inaugural Glass Explorers, however, as although my desire to play with this new digital toy was surely as greater as the other gazillion people who Tweeted (or whatever the equivalent is called for Google+) their case to be included in the program. My answer was heartfelt, to be sure, but it was a little on the flip side, and more than a little lacking in specificity. So when I did get the nod from Google, I was flabbergasted to say the least...  then I was sad when I realized that, with Child #2 on the way, there was no way I'd be able to justify ponying up the $1500 I'd need in order to get my very own Glass device.  

At first I considered using a Kickstarter to obtain the necessary funds.  I was going to call it The Glass Library, and the idea would be that each backer would be allowed to "borrow" the device for a certain amount of prorated time, to do with it as they will. The mechanics of shipping the item from borrower to borrower seemed somewhat challenging, but certainly I had enough colleagues out there in libraryland who might be willing to contribute in exchange for some quality time with Google Glass. At this point it occurred to me that other librarians may have also been chosen as Glass Explorers, so I reached out on social media to see what they were doing with their invitations.  A few of colleagues responded that they'd approached their Powers That Be about funding their purchase, and that one or two of them had succeeded in getting approval to buy them for their library.

This was encouraging news, as at first it seemed that the Terms of Service for the Glass Explorers program precluded any such institutional purchasing. Emboldened by my colleagues' success, I asked my boss if he thought we might able to do the same for our undergraduate Bass Library, especially since it already had an ever-growing collection of circulating media equipment which could be checked out by Yale faculty, students, and staff. He liked the idea, but suggested that we bring our Instructional Technology Group and Student Technology Collaborative on board with the purchase as well, not just to share the cost, but to widen the pool of potential innovation and development as well.  Fortunately everyone was just as excited as we were about exploring the new technology, so we agreed to move forward as equal partners.

(I'm going to leave out the part where, in the process of putting this coalition together, we unfortunately ran out the clock on my original Google Glass invite. Despite much begging and pleading, we had to resign ourselves to being waitlisted, and although everything turned out okay I still feel somewhat chastened by the near-miss and resolve to keep it fresh in mind so as not to sit on any future similar opportunities. Awesomeness waits for no one, indeed!)

I got to pick up our device this past Friday, at Google's NYC offices in Chelsea Market (where Major League Baseball and the Food Network also hang their hats). To say that I was nervous about my Google Glass experience was an understatement, but despite my initial fumblings with the new technology, my patient  Google technician soon had me up and running with my "fitting" and out the door as a newly-minted Glass Explorer. Despite the fact that I opted to wear the device out, I quickly put it back away as soon as I got in the elevator, as I was deathly afraid of losing or breaking the Bass Media collection's latest acquisition. I was also somewhat self-conscious of being seen wearing Google Glass, which apparently is not an uncommon thing, even among Google employees. The good news is that it comes with a sunglasses attachment, which almost looks like a normal pair of shades and makes you feel much less like you're a walking, talking Borg drone as a result.

 

Glasshole

Glasshole...  or just wearing cool shades?

Although it does seem rather fragile, Google Glass is actually surprisingly rugged. It's basically a big plastic headband built around a titanium frame. Because it's designed to be form-fitting, the device does not fold compact like a conventional pare of glasses, which makes it a bit awkward to carry around, but it does come with a nifty bag that protects the eyepiece display when you stow it away. Now about that eyepiece.  I think one of the common misconceptions about Glass is that it's like looking through a computer screen, when in fact the display is only projected in the corner or your right eye.  Even I was surprised at how easy it was to tune the image out when I didn't want to look at it, and the screen times out quickly as well so as not to waste the onboard battery.

Glass syncs either with your smartphone via Bluetooth, or any existing wi-fi network. Wi-fi syncing is a breeze- you look at a QR Code on your computer screen and voila, you're in.

(WAIT!  Did I just say that Google Glass actually uses QR Codes?  And that it actually makes sense?  And it actually works?  The Apocalypse may in fact be nigh...)

The interface takes a little getting used to at first, as it involves a combination of voice commands and swiping up and down and side-to-side along the rim of your device.  I'm still getting lost when trying to visualize the right path in Glass' operating system, and find myself wishing that it recognized more natural-language commands. Still, it's pretty freaking cool to tell Google Glass to take a picture, and snap, there it is appearing in the upper right-hand corner of your eye as a thumbnail.  Glass has a 5 megapixel camera, so you'll be taking snapshots similar to your current cameraphone.  It is rather weird that you have to "point and shoot" by aiming your head at things, and I've yet to find a zoom function on the camera, but it is extremely liberating not to have to remove yourself from the moment by fumbling for your phone, activating the camera app, aiming and shooting.

I guess this is really the epiphany of wearable computing.  After wearing the device for a while, you really do forget it's there.  Think of Google Glass like a bluetooth earpiece for your eyes and you wouldn't be far off.  In fact, I couldn't help but notice that knowing I was wearing Glass made me less conscious of my smartphone. I didn't want to fiddle and stare down at my screen compulsively because I knew I could get whatever information I needed out of Google Glass by cocking my head and asking it a question.  ("What's the score of the Denver Broncos game?" I asked it as I was changing the baby this evening.  "The Broncos are currently leading over the Chargers 17-0 in the third quarter," the device dutifully replied).

They see me rollin'...

Right now the list of available applications for Google Glass- called Glasswear (get it?) -is somewhat bare-bones, but the promise of the technology can be seen in an app like Strava Cycling, which in addition to tracking your trip like the smartphone app already does using GPS and the onboard accelerometer, also feeds you a real-time heads up display of your speed, time, and distance traveled as you bike. There is also a Glasswear version of Google's Field Trip app, which I've yet to try out, but I'm very curious to see how wearable technology takes advantage and makes sense of location-based data. This is one of the respects in which I think devices like Glass will work really well with libraries, as translating the oceans of metadata on our shelves in the library stacks could open up brand new ways of visualizing our physical collections. We've always romanticized the "serendipity of the stacks," but imagine how much more powerful happenstance discovery could be if a reader could see subject headings, citation rankings, and cross-references just by glancing at the spine of a book!

Our partnership with the ITG and STC means that we will have many different groups of interested parties playing with the potential of Google Glass, so I hope this increases the chances of our seeing these kinds of applications being developed in the long run. On a more utilitarian note, over this Spring I'd like to work on a proof of concept for using Glass as a vehicle for fulfilling electronic document delivery requests via Scan and Deliver. Although the device's price tag is quite hefty for a wearable computer or smartphone, for a mobile scanning unit it's actually quite cheap- add to that the time savings of not having to lug books around the library to be scanned (during which time they are unavailable to other patrons), and I feel like there might just be something there beyond the simple gee-whiz factor.

So that's my two cents after a weekend with Glass. Despite knowing that I'd be kindly disposed towards anything so new and shiny, I was nevertheless still pleasantly surprised by how natural and unobtrusive it felt while wearing and using it.  But don't just take it from me- here's an assessment of Google Glass from my 10 year-old daughter Andriana, who naturally took to it like a fish to water.

Mountain View, We Have a Problem

"There's a problem here, and it's not just because everyone suddenly decided to become a drooling moron on the internet here."

- Google user Freyar on the Gmail support forums

Another day of people complaining of hacked Gmail accounts and still no official word as to the cause. Although PCWorld does say that Google is now investigating the uptick in account hijackings, they're quick to note that the good folks at Mountain View are not acknowledging any bugs or security flaws on their end at this time.

In keeping abreast of this issue as it's been developing I've seen a lot of blaming the victims going on, both in the Google forums and elsewhere. While it's true that many online accounts are compromised by means of phishing or via insecure desktop computers, when this many otherwise tech-savvy users are suddenly complaining about a new issue all at once you might want to consider being just a little less condescending (and you might want to change your own passwords as well while you're at it, no matter how "strong" you think they are).

It would also be nice to get more of an official acknowledgement from Google that something is amiss. I've been a Gmail enthusiast since 2004 and while I understand that hacking is something that can happen even to the best of systems it would be nice for Google to post something to its blog addressing the problem rather than having to get third-party confirmation that they're working on it via the press.

I've predicated my faith in using Gmail as my primary means of communication on two things: one, that the system is as secure as the alternative (if not more so); and two, that even if there were some kind of security breach Google would be right on top of it, both in terms of resolving the issue and communicating it with its users as transparently as they were able in as timely a manner as they could. The longer GOOG maintains its silence on the recent outbreak of hacked accounts, the less confidence I'm going to have in them in the future.

It's up to you, Mountain View.

Gmail Hijackings Continue

Yesterday I posted about two of my Gmail accounts being hacked. Since then I've been keeping an eye on both the Google forums and Twitter to see if other people have been similarly affected- still no official acknowledgement from the GOOG, although reports continue to stream in on the Gmail users forums, and every time my Tweetdeck refreshes I see several new people complaining that their accounts have been compromised.

The MSM has been slow to pick up on this story thus far, though word of the low-grade hacking epidemic is beginning to percolate through the Intarwebz: there's a mention of the Gmail spammings on Wonkette and a thread on 4chan as well (Protip: Whoever you are, Viagra spammers, hacking a channer's account was probably the dumbest thing you could do!).

In any event, if you haven't already changed your Google password now would be a good time to do so. Also be sure to change passwords to other web services if you were using the same login information as your Gmail account.

If you're still worried about getting hacked, you may also want to consider implementing an Early Warning System in your Gmail: in your Contacts, add the email address for your cell phone text number. Since numerical entries appear at the top of your Gmail Contacts list, if your account is compromised by a spammer you'll receive a spam TXT on your phone almost as soon as the hacking activity gets underway. This is how I discovered that my account was being hacked, and fortunately I was able to log out the spammer and change my password before he/she got through the A's in my Contact list.

Good luck to all, and I hope we get some official word soon from Google as to what's going on...

I Don't Like Tuesdays

10am- Off to a late start, I begin my Tuesday with a statistical inquiry, trying to determine our ratio of ARIEL to Odyssey deliveries. Since switching to an "Odyssey-first" policy for ILL article requests (i.e., always delivering via Odyssey if the requesting library has an Odyssey address) in the Fall 2008 I know that our ARIEL delivery volume has sunk dramatically, but simply ballparking the figure isn't going to work here. So I'm going to have to get at this data somehow, even though it's not a stat that we actively collect- although I have a couple of ideas as to how to coax these numbers out of the database it'll have to wait, because...

10:45am- ...we have ourselves the first troubleshooting call of the day, concerning Odyssey delivery no less! In trying to help my colleagues with their resending woes I discover that our own scanner is having its own trouble with the resend function, so I grab a screencap and contact our scanner vendor for help. Fortunately they're extremely responsive, so after I email them I return to what I was doing before. What was I doing again? Right, those statistics--

11:15am- Oops, I completely forgot that a couple of the vendors I'd tried to pay yesterday were closed when I called, so I now take care of that before the day gets away from me. I always enjoy calling the British Library, and today is no exception- I joke with a friendly rep from Manchester while making sure that our library is in good standing with their resident bean counters. Now where was I again?

Noon- All right, I admit it. Sometimes I'm not very good about leaving the non-essential email alone. In the interest of being a good neighbor I like to keep an eye on the various ILL and resource sharing listservs and offer whatever help and/or advice that I can when the opportunity arises. Today's an international copyright question about an unpublished work in Germany from the 1940's, and since I've more or less had copyright on the brain for the past several months I feel the old College Bowl urge to be the first kid to ring the buzzer. At any rate, the answer is exactly what the librarian was looking for, so it seems like time well spent.

12:30pm- Back to the stats. It seems that this question is proving a little thornier than I had even imagined, as in the process of building our campus document delivery service we coopted a database field that our preexisting reporting tools don't know how to separate out from regular ILL requests. The net result is that all of our canned reports now mix everything up. But is there a quick fix? I email the vendor in hopes of getting those reports tweaked, and while I wait for their response I try and tackle another project.

2pm- During the previous week my Borrowing coordinator and I were talking about the problem of communication within our rather large Department of Access Services. Instant Messenger has been nothing less than a godsend in addressing this difficulty, but unless you already knew someone's IM address and had them listed on your buddy list a lot of the convenience of the medium was lost. This is when I got an idea: what if we created a "live" version of our org chart, only with Meebo chat windows for each of the IM-enabled staffers? Since I was waiting on a couple of vendor responses to proceed with my other business I decided this would be a good time to work on this a bit, so using Blogspot I hacked together a proof of concept mockup consisting of an HTML table and several embedded Meebo widgets:

http://harryneedsbooks.blogspot.com/2009/07/sample-live-org-chart.html

Though I was pretty pleased with the results, there are a couple of barriers to getting this adopted- first, it would have to be posted on the College Library's intranet and not our departmental iSite, which is the preferred platform for such online content. The second problem was that everyone on the "live" org chart would need to monitor a separate Meebo account in addition to their normal IM presence. Still, the benefits of having the potential of instant and ready access to the entire department all on one page might outweigh any downsides. I send the mockup link to my boss and share my work with my librarian Tweeps, who are very encouraging.

3pm- Still no response on either outstanding issue, so I bust out another one of my "20% projects" (the term coming from Google's allowing their employees to dedicate 20% of their workweek to their own personal projects, a fascinating and controversial policy that nevertheless has yielded many of Google's current suite of apps). I have always want to mash up our ILL data with Google or Yahoo Maps so that we can create maps of everywhere that we've loaned to -- or borrowed from -- in the previous fiscal year.

After finally locating a batch geolocating application (http://www.batchgeocode.com/), I start playing with our Lending data to see if I can get it into a geocoding-friendly format. The problem was that we had too much data. In FY09 we loaned over 11,000 books, and to render that much information without our own servers is proving to be more trouble than it's worth. That's when it occurs to me- why not use a pivot table to consolidate deliveries to the same location? I do just that and now we only have 900+ data points to plot, and voila! The batch loader is done within half an hour. Though some of the data fields need a little tweaking to prevent totally whacky map plottings (we had one in the Canadian tundra hundreds of miles from any human settlement!), it worked and it worked well, and I can't wait to spend more time with this.

4pm- Well, it's 4pm and I need an answer to my original stats question whether or not I hear back on tweaking the reports, so I roll up my sleeves and dig out the numbers the old fashioned way. For some reason the task doesn't seem as daunting as it had earlier- maybe getting away from the problem for a bit was just what I needed, or perhaps I'm just on a roll at this point. Whatever it is, I'm happy, the person who asked the stats question is happy, and it's almost time to close up the office...

5:15pm- Almost. I just need to answer some email while hashing out a student training plan with my Borrowing coordinator, who will be inherited 70+ hours of student processing help at a couple of our service desks in the Fall. Given that our Borrowing request volume literally doubled from FY08 to FY09, he'll need all the help we can get! After coming up with some good ideas we agree to continue the conversation tomorrow, when hopefully we aren't as exhausted as we both are at the moment.

All right, so this Tuesday turned out much better than I'd originally thought. I think one of the most challenging aspects of being a professional librarian is balancing Getting Things Done on a daily basis with both the extremely time-sensitive queries (such as the ARIEL vs. Odyssey question) and the more open ended special projects which, although not urgent, often prove to be just as important, if not more so. We're all so busy these days that it's so easy to default to crisis mode, when there's so much more we could be doing to take our field to the next level if we just make an effort to carve out the time for such innovation and creativity. I don't always succeed in this regard, but today the stars just aligned. I leave work much later than I had planned, but much more satisfied than I'd hoped as well.

See you on Wednesday!

Happy birthday, Second Life!

I celebrated the fourth anniversary of Second Life's creation by hanging out in my skybox while I manned the Reading Room desk here in Real Life. Of course the client kept on crashing because I was running the program off my flash drive on a CPU barely able to keep up with my normal multitasking ways, let alone run Second Life in the background, but I persevered... Blue Screen of Death be damned!





It's been six months since I jumped on the SL bandwagon - six very weird months during which Second Life went from being a curious distraction on my computer to something that has staked a claim on both my personal and professional lives. Who knew that when I logged in as Oodja Fadoodle back in January that I would be taking a class in virtual librarianship taught entirely in SL by one of the country's most well-respected library schools (The Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and that I would have become fast friends not only with people I've never met in Real Life but also colleagues whom I barely exchanged more than a few pleasantries with in the course of working with them before meeting them in the "metaverse"?

Speaking of metaverses, the most recent issue of Technology Review has a fantastic article about virtual worlds such as Second Life, virtual simulations of the real world such as Google Earth, and the inevitability of these two entities meeting in a mashup that promises to transform how we interact with both the Web and the world. I had blogged about this a few months back, so I'm gratified to see that all of this isn't just idle futurist speculation but something that people are actively working towards both inside and outside Google and Linden Labs (creators of Second Life).

But here I am, reading Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash - which incidentally didn't just coin the term "metaverse" but has also served as one of the chief sources of inspiration for the people behind such virtual world creations as Second Life in a bit of self-reinforcing prophecy that can make your head hurt if you can think too hard about it - and realizing that just fifteen years after this book's publication we are rapidly converging on something that is eerily close to what he envisioned. Of course it would be nice if we could have Mr. Stephenson's virtual Street without all of the other dystopian trappings to go with it, but I suppose that remains to be seen in the end.

In the meantime, though, let's say happy birthday to this metaverse that the Lindens built and wish it many happy returns!

Now we know where all of that 'dark fiber' went

Google unveils TiSP, its flushable free in-home wireless broadband service:



My favorite part of the FAQ:

Why is TiSP in beta?
When things go wrong with TiSP, they go very, very wrong. Let's leave it at that.

The new obsession

Twitter is a social-networking service that allows you to post short updates of 153 characters or less to a bloglike webpage hosted on their site. The gimmick here is that once you've registered, you can set up your account to update your Twitter page via IM and cellphone text messages, as well as receive others' updates by the same methods. Maybe it's the forced brevity of the medium, but I find myself updating my Twitter account several times a day (and sometimes several times an hour), as contrary to my expectations the idea of people -- many of them complete strangers -- following my every waking thought and action is strangely much more fascinating than it is creepy.

Now if Twitter were GPS-enabled, that might veer a little into the Creep-O-Zone™. But as all of these Web 2.0 services converge how long will it be before our First Lives are identical to our Second? Google is thinking about moving into targeted advertising on electronic billboards, and by virtue of their wifi-enabled appliances and Bluetooth accessories most of the digerati are already walking mounds of metadata rich for the browsing. Who knows? Maybe in five years just by walking past me on the street you'll be able to pick up my RSS feed as I blog and Twitter my way through the Google-ified First/Second Life mashup that will be the future. I must admit the prospect is as scary to me as it is thrilling, but make no mistake: it's coming much sooner than we all think.

Jersey goes Google

Princeton University's library will become the 12th library to join Google Book Search, according to an article this morning that I found on Lifehacker's Daily News Roundup (credited to Yahoo News, ironically enough!). Score one for the Garden State!

The rest of my entry is over at The Library Ass.

It's not space, it's Google Space™

Google and NASA have joined forces to index the universe and make it searchable:

NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a Space Act Agreement that formally establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces.

As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will focus on making the most useful of NASA's information available on the Internet. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future.

"This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin at Headquarters in Washington. "This innovative combination of information technology and space science will make NASA's space exploration work accessible to everyone," added Griffin.

As Neo might say: "Whoa."

How long until the Martians start pranking Google Mars, I wonder?

Renovation in progress

I just recently upgraded to Blogger Beta, so please bear with me as I play around with the site's layout here and there and explore some of the new functionality the good folks at Google have recently added to Blogger...

One of the things I really like about Blogger Beta's WYSIWYG interface is that when I drag and drop various page elements such as image files, html, and javascript, I don't have to spend the rest of my afternoon fiddling with the code in order to make the blog look pretty on my browser. This is very good news for incompetent perfectionists such as myself.

That being said, the only thing that the new Blogger is missing is the ability to edit the raw HTML of your template, which actually causes a problem when attempting to insert javascript elements into your blog. I fiddled around in vain trying to get my Adsense code to work after upgrading until stumbled upon a workaround on someone else's blog (thanks a million, btw!).