Been doing most of my running on the track lately, about 2-3 times a week. Used too be really hard to get started, but now it’s feeling easier. Endurance isn’t great yet, but I’m able to run at a faster pace than I was a few weeks ago.
Yesterday was just over 15 minutes on the short track at the Wellness center. On a 267m track, 15 minutes feels like a really long time. According to RunKeeper on my Cliq, the distance was right around 3km.
Run felt pretty good, and I probably could have gone a few more laps. Wanted to save some energy for the weight room though.
I’m going to have to start moving my runs off the track and onto the roads soon. Sub-30 5km, here I come!
Near the end of the Shem Creek Park boardwalk is a concrete boat dock where I snapped the images that went into this nearly 360° panorama of the creek.
Panorama image of Shem Creek Park covering almost a full 360 degrees.
The “reduced” version is 13603×640 pixels while the full size image is 42681×2008 pixels and comes in at about 13MB for the JPEG version. Shem Creek in 85.7Mpx. I like the way it turned out
Note: It seems like Chrome and Firefox are unable to render the full size panorama (too big perhaps?). If you want to see the full size image in all its glory, you’ll probably need to Right click/save link as to download it and view locally.
Went out to the new Shem Creek Park over in Mt. Pleasant yesterday to see what it was all about. It’s a nice place to walk around. The boardwalk takes you along Shem Creek where you can watch shrimp boats going in and out, birds following the shrimp boats, and some nice views of the harbour and marshes.
Over the past few years, the MUSC library has been moving towards largely digital access to its journal collection. Having access to journal articles online is pretty convenient for the most part. Pubmed makes doing literature searches pretty easy these days, and generally links to the journal’s website where, if the site detects you’re coming from an authorized IP address, you can read and/or download a copy of the article.
This is all fine unless you’re looking for journal articles that are older than the 90s. Before that access to the digital version is hit or miss. Some journals have digitized their entire collection. Others only have abstracts for older volumes. Others have nothing. For the latter two cases you need to make a trip to the library to look up the journal volume in the stacks (if it’s in the library collection) or request a copy through inter-library loan (ILL).
Recently the MUSC Library got rid of most of the journal collection to make room for more something (not sure what) in the library. Now for older journal articles that aren’t available online, I have to do an ILL request to get a copy instead of just making the trip down the hall to dig the volume I want out of the stacks. Usually it comes as a PDF of the scanned paper version from another library and can take 2-3 days. It’s a relatively minor inconvenience, but it got me thinking.
What happens when other libraries start doing the same thing and clearing out their journal collections? Where will ILL requests get filled from?
In a very short period of time, people have become almost completely dependent on getting their information from online sources. However, there are still orders of magnitude more information that simply doesn’t exist or only partially exists in digital format.
What happens if libraries aren’t able to support their physical collections anymore? Where will that non-digitally archived information come from?
It also takes away one of the reasons I have left for visiting the library.
Feeling somewhat emboldened after this year’s Dragon*Con I decided to wear my Star Trek robe to BarcampCHS this year. I figured it would be a fun thing to do, and if nothing else would probably make everybody’s Barcamp experience just a little more memorable. I think that mission was accomplished.
My friend and fellow photographer Joe Nienstedt took this photo of me in my robe yesterday. The toque (hat) I’m wearing is an awesome Barcamp hat that Vera knitted for the organizers.
Joe also did a great job of people wrangling and got a cool group photo after lunch yesterday.
BFS made it out for its third Barcamp and survived another event
BFS
There were a pretty good number of sessions pitched, although not as many as last year. Voting was done using stickers although there was plenty of room for sessions.
Session voting
Everywhere I went, there were groups of people chatting, networking, sharing tidbits of information and getting to know other people they might not otherwise have met. It’s what Barcamp is all about.
Hanging out between sessions
I think this year’s Barcamp was a little bit smaller than the last couple, although I haven’t seen any attendance numbers yet. There were definitely fewer sessions this year, and a lot of techie/programming related topics this year. It was still a pretty good time. I offered up a couple of session this year, CT Scanners: How do they work and an Ask a Medical Physicist Q&A type session. They went well, but didn’t get as many people as I expected. The Google Q&A (which has a tendency to suck people away from all the other sessions) was at the same time as my CT talk and my Q&A session was in the last time slot of the day. Still had a few people come by for that and had a nice little discussion about the kinds of things that I do for my real job.
Heading up the stairs to the after party on the outside patio at Mellow Mushroom, I heard a bunch of people yelling and shouting. I was wondering what the heck everybody was yelling about, and as I got closer I realized they were shouting “ROBE GUY!” at me.
Epic. Yep, definitely made Barcamp more memorable for people. Unfortunately I had forgotten to put my robe back on before heading out to the party. Having my robe would have made for more epicness.
Thoughts for next year:
try to get more of the creative community out. Even though they already have a lot of other outlets (like Pecha Kucha and other similar events) I think there can be a lot of potential for collaboration between the two
Bacon camp and last year’s Homebrew 101 were pretty popular sessions in previous Barcamps. It might be cool to to have food related sessions.
Maybe Google Q&A needs to be given its own dedicated time slot. The involvement by the local Google data center staff is great and BarcampCHS is very lucky to have their support. Even though they end up getting a lot of questions that can’t be answered (either because it’s not in their area or they’re just not allowed to say), it always seems to be a popular session and it gives people a chance to find out a little bit about the facility. It does tend to drain people away from other sessions though.
although I was only watching the planning from the sidelines this time, it seemed a lot of effort was spent trying to get around the requirement of having lunch provided by the company that provides CofC’s food services. Maybe it would be better to do away with providing lunch and direct people over to some of the many nearby restaurants instead. It would also remove a large expense from the budget.
Registration seemed to flow much better using the classroom rather than having it out in the lobby of Maybank.
The first session of the day offered up to user groups as a meet-and-greet/meeting type thing was a good idea. I got to find out about Makelab Charleston and find out the kinds of things they have and are planning on.
Overall, BarcampCHS was still a great time and I’m looking forward to doing it again next year. Maybe this year’s robe wearing will start a trend and other people will do something costume-y next year. I certainly had a lot of fun with it.
