I am getting somewhat emotional reading about all the parts of S.220, An act relating to Vermont’s public libraries, which was signed by Vermont's governor today.
empowers the Department of Libraries to develop model selection and retention policies for public libraries (PL)
requires the DOL to provide Continuing Ed for public library staff (they do this already)
extends enhanced penalties for criminal threatening in all PL
lowers the age of patron confidentiality in PL from 16 to 12
I do some work that involves one-time emailing people from my domain about a service they applied for. I use a lot of form letters. I am continually battling with my email hosting provider about the content of these emails, they reject them to b/c they look too spammy.
I get that spam is a scourge and I sympathize, but it's wild how much of a dark art spam fighting is. So far I've had to remove my "hello" greeting and add a fake unsub link (they're not subscribed) just to send outgoing emails.
I have DKIM and SPF set up. My domain is not on any blacklists. There is a black box of machine learning between me and being able to do this simple volunteer job which sometimes goes fine and sometimes winds up with dozens of emails returned in my inbox.
The support page for my email host has a huge page of "things to look out for" that I have bookmarked and read often but also states "content guidelines for spam are always changing, much like our world." :ohno:
More to the point--and I swear I am not being a grumpy "I hate change and learning technology" person, I love a challenge--all the time I take trying to learn the shifting spam rules and testing new variants of my email, is time being taken away from my work helping folks.
So either the volunteer work takes more of my time, or I have less overall time available for helping people. As I've said in the past, economies of scale for corporations easily become "economies of hassle" for individuals.
a non-stop talker (asked a question, I started to answer, she interrupted, repeat)
a person who was probably drunk
An improbable ipad problem described but not shown to me (HOW)
a couple who brought in three badly broken pieces of tech, called their daughter to ask about one of the things, all I heard was screaming on the speakerphone ("Everyone ok there?" "Yeah, sure"). Like... look at this.
There was a cookie party downstairs which I missed.
Streaming (only) networks. Many people I work with ditch cable but want to watch network TV/news. It's harder than it should be! They'd pay more for fewer options.
I wrote an opinion piece about Vermont's Data Privacy Act which is sitting on the Governor's desk while the big tech lobby pressures him not to sign it. Threaded here so people can read it and I don't just give you an image with a huge alt text wall.
I support Vermont Data Privacy Act a bill which has passed the House and Senate and is on its way to the Governor's desk. Vermonters deserve to be able to understand and control how their personal information is collected and used online [1/7]
If you participated in the discussion about Libby and maybe-targeted ads and privacy policies, you might like the read the Register's deep dive on what they could determine about what actually happened from @thomasclaburn
Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. I've got work all day and then I am getting back to my "stamp collection," using up some of my stamps before I buy any more of them. Maybe you have a hobby you could get to if you weren't just replying to email? Have a good weekend.
Drop-In Time toots! I made a few little social media posts (thanks Canva!) about the fact that drop-in time exists and it was busy today.
First: a pregame request to track down a fiendishly expensive textbook in a... less expensive form. It's in the 15th edition and I could find the 14th. I respect the rights of authors to make money off of their work but the "No you have to have this edition and we print a new one every year" textbook scene is a racket. Could I find it? Of course I could.
Frequent flier Joanne was in wondering why her camera app no longer made noise (the volume was down, I taught her how volume control worked). She wanted to know if she could "send photos" using her Kindle Fire. I said sure but she'd have to use email instead of texting. She barely uses email and said she'd stick to texting "...but my daughter said I should be able to..." and I said yeah she totally could but her way worked and was likely easier unless someone didn't have a cell phone.
Sandy brought a young person who had clearly been through a rough patch, now staying with her. This person had two broken phones with locked-up SIM cards, part of an SSD drive that needed a new enclosure (and a proprietary one?) and a Google account they couldn't access because the recovery number was on one broken phone and the logged in Google account was on the other. The kid had moved, was nowhere near their old IP addresses, had no other devices. Messy. A great argument against passkeys
I should mention, we moved over from Twitter a while ago but it took us some time to get our "Best Of MLTSHP" bot going but it's running now. Thanks to the kind folks from MeFi Social for offering a nice spot for it.
One of the images in the video, there for a split second, is this one of my great aunt and uncle at their wedding sometime in the 1940s. Random coincidence, my mom had the pic up with a @creativecommons license. Someone saw it and liked it. Was fun to see it again.
I have friends in my town of various ages and we'll sometimes swap food or give people leftovers from events to bring home.
One generalization I can make is that all my younger (30-ish) friends and all my older (70-ish) friends will always return food storage containers and NONE of my approximately-my-age friends will do that. They all know we all have too many and the food is just a pretext for getting rid of some of the containers.
@jessamyn I do have plastic and Pyrex food storage containers, but since nowadays all takeout seems to come in nominally disposable but actually sturdy plastic with good lids, I am very happy to put those to use to give food away and definitely don’t expect them back.
[But I would definitely return any containers that are primarily intended for storing (rather than simply delivering) food.]
"Two works published by The New Yorker received Pulitzer Prizes today—and one of the winning stories is by a library worker.... "Phones and cameras aren’t allowed on Rikers, but I’m an illustrator,” de la Cruz writes in the piece. “Sometimes I saw things that I felt compelled to draw from memory later.”