Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been contemplating my ability to juggle my responsibilities—leader, manager, parent, partner, pup valet—and was reminded, once again, that we need to give ourselves slack. No one and nothing operates at 100%, let alone the cliché commonly brought up of 110% now that we’re in American football season, on a
Latest from David Whelan - Page 2
The Form of the Law
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 7 minutes
There are times when you know you need help and you take the step to ask for it. We were selling a house in Canada and moving to the United States. There are tax consequences and they were complicated because now we had 2 national tax regimes to deal with: capital…
Fine-Tuning A Firewall
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
When you self-host your own website or have it hosted on someone else’s hardware, it takes up a small part of your brain. I chose to put my websites on other people’s equipment because that mental occupation was a bit more than I wanted to handle: was it running, how was…
In With the In Crowd
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
One thing that I attempt with this blog is to share what I know. It may not be much and it may not be exactly what someone is looking for, but I always think that knowledge is accretive. Like a puzzle, a bit gets added here and there until the picture…
Correct Twice A Day
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 4 minutes
I was adamant that the artificial intelligence was wrong. My family had given me a bird feeder that came with a camera. As the birds appeared, the camera would take pictures and make an assessment of the bird’s species. It gathered a location for the camera, so it could geo-locate its…
An Archive of My Ohhh Noooo…
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Mozilla has brought Pocket to an end, an acquisition it made in 2017. Although it was an award-winning read later app, Mozilla felt “the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved”, whatever that means. The outcome appears to be that people who use Firefox can see Mozilla’s…
The Unlearning Machine
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
One recurring thought relating to artificial intelligence is its impact on new staff. The promise of AI is that it will routinize the lower value work, the repetitive tasks, and allow knowledge workers to focus on higher value projects and outputs. This is great, but it begs the question of how…
Push Spam Further Away
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
One of the things I’ve learned both from self-hosting a server inside my home and from using commercial hosting is that I want bad actors as far from my server as possible. When I migrated my hosting company recently, it was primarily for cost reasons. I was delighted, though, to find…
Stop Bothering Me
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Librarians are knowledge workers. We work on things that require attention to detail and investigation, whether we’re cataloging books or answering obscure reference questions. I am always interested in new research on interruptions and thinking around how to improve the work environment so that librarians can be as effective as possible.…
A Hole in the Bucket
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
A colleague was in town and attending ABA Techshow so I swung by McCormick Place to see them. It’s been awhile and the Expo pass is free (something I will keep in mind next year). I walked over to the Metra and hopped on the train to the conference site. As…