Topping & Co in Bath - photograph by Susan Humphreys
I guess its hardly surprising that I haven't had much time for writing lately - well not unless you count filling in application forms for jobs - I've written plenty of those! I've even written a report on social networking as part of my volunteer work and of course i'm writing all the time on Facebook and Twitter - even on here whe i can think of something to share! but as for actual fiction - nothing!
There's no excuse really though and as a former reporter I should know you just have to do it! I must try harder! Especially as this month's National Geographic magazine has Angkor on the cover.
I have however managed to find time for my quick trip to Bath where I got to hear my hero Glen David Gold read from his new book Sunnyside. He was very funny and admitted he is also very bad at writing when he should - "oh look there's a cat in the yard," was his comment. I got to have a quick chat with him after the reading and he very kindly signed my books and told me he is however working on something new (hurrah). I'm hoping it won't take him eight years as it did after finishing Carter Beats the Devil - my favourite book. I also mentioned I read his blog - which he seemed very pleasantly surprised about! Well I know how that feels - when I'm writing on here I always feel like no-one's reading it.
Topping & Company was a fanatastic bookshop - you could spend days in there and the staff were lovely. They are also open 7 days a week till 7.30pm! I couldn't resist buying the new Jonanthan Stroud book too - Heroes of the Valley especially as it was a signed copy. If you're in Bath and you love books do pop in - well linger!
I also got to pay my second visit to Bristol Zoo, it was a glorious day and I got to check out al lot of Madagascan animals again including the aye-ayes, mouse lemurs and mongoose lemurs. One of the highlights though was getting to shake hands - well legs- with Gabriella the tarantuala - which involved letting her carefully put her limbs on the palm of my hand. She was much lighter than I expected and very soft - not at all scary. I also got to hold a Madagascan Hissing Cockroach again - they were very noisy!
That’s a bit scary. I don’t know about possible repercussions for being on the Social Responsibility roundtable, but I imagine there’s a Lesbian-Gay, etc. roundtable, and, unfortunately, I can easily see the possibility of repercussions from being identified as a member of that one.
I am an ALA member, and there are radio button selectors in my profile to let me choose:
* Show my profile to ALA members only.
* Show my profile to ALA members and the public.
It seems to be an all-or-nothing choice, but you may be seeing only those who have selected the public option… just a guess.
Thanks for the post, Jessamyn. Some additional information:
1. The profile info displaying to authenticated non-members was a mistake that has been rectified. They now only see a member’s name and picture. The picture is a voluntary addition and can be anything. Some members are using pictures of their cat, library, etc. I’d like to note that at no time was contact information ever available to non-members or even members by default. Only friends you’ve manually marked as part of your network can see contact information.
2. The username issue is an unfortunate side effect of difficulties we encountered with Drupal’s native search engine. We had to go this route to make it easier for other things, such as searching for members and alphabetizing lists without resorting to hacking Drupal core worse than we already have. The username issue only affects non-members, as members can use whatever username they’ve chosen on the ALA website for their membership account. We regret this inconvenience.
3. Non-members and the public can see the first name and last name of most members, but “every” is incorrect. ALA has long offered members the option to opt out of appearing in the member directory, and Connect respects that preference. A few thousand people have that option checked in their member profile, and they don’t appear anywhere in Connect. If a member is uncomfortable with her name appearing on the site, she can log in to the website and check that box in her profile to exclude herself.
4. Rick is correct that members can choose to display their full profiles publicly, although this still does not include contact information. Members also have the ability to hide any non-committee affiliation from their profile. Theoretically, a member could hide all of his community, division, round table, and section affiliations from displaying to other members.
5. We worked with the GLBTRT folks to notify their members well in advance of the launch about these options, and we offered to go in and hide that affiliation for anyone who requested it.
I hope this helps clarify things, but please let me know if you have further questions or concerns. We’re pretty proud of the level of privacy options Connect gives members. They have far more control than they’ve ever had before.
Well, I tried 6 times to create an account (I am not currently an ALA member) and every single time I got a message saying that my username had to start with my first and last names - which it did. I tried adding punctuation, spacing, numbers, whatever it said was allowed, and no luck. I have signed up for hundreds of online accounts in the past 15 years, and, um, yeah, it’s not rocket science - or is it? Sort of a FAIL, IMHO.
Sorry it failed for you, Jessica. If you’d like help with this, please let me know. We’re excited by the number of non-members creating accounts and joining the communities there.
jess amyn? count yourself lucky. ala members are rewarded with their member ids as usernames. here’s a new reason to quit ala: you can use your name to log in to ala connect.
i don’t mean to grumble, not too much. ala connect is a great idea and i hope it will thrive, if not for all six kajillion ala members, then at least for a few groups of people willing to work for ala online.