Alternative Medicine

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | June 18, 2013 - 3:11 pm |
2 Comments
just water

Have you ever seen a post go across your Facebook, and you thought “Wow, I want to reshare that and comment on it, but I’ve got too much to say”? That’s what this post is. Dennis Moser shared this really good article about the business of alternative/integrative/complementary medicine. Go read it. I’ll wait. And, having recently been a patient of an “integrative medicine” practitioner—two, actually—I had some thoughts. One practitioner is a doctor of naturopathic medicine (ND), and one is a myofascial therapist. And although I am no longer seeing either of them (possibly temporarily, in the case of the … Continue reading →

Web Fundamentals

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | May 29, 2013 - 6:03 pm | , , , ,
Leave a comment

I don’t know if I mentioned, here, that I was signed up to teach “Web Fundamentals” at Anchorage Programming Workshop (“APW,” or “that monthly workshop where women learn to code”), earlier this month. I remember wanting to write a whole post about it, because I was fretting pretty hard about what to include, what to exclude, etc. But then I didn’t, because I got overwhelmed by that and other projects. I always have the most things to write about when I have the least time to actually do the writing. Anyway, it was supposed to be an hour-long (give or … Continue reading →

Keep on MOOCing?

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | May 25, 2013 - 12:17 am | , , , ,
2 Comments
My writing is normally neater, but my thumb's out of commission.

I’ve enjoyed the Coursera Python MOOC so far, though I didn’t end up with a local—or even a distance—cohort of people taking it with me. Things have been kind of hectic, both at work and with outside projects and medical stuff, and I ended up doing the homework on Saturday, last week. (Homework is due on Saturday evenings.) I mean, I implemented Pong in three hours or so, and I feel good about that. But last-minute is not how I like to roll. Now we’re fast approaching another Saturday, and I haven’t watched the week’s lectures (again) or thought about … Continue reading →

Usability testing on our OPAC

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | May 21, 2013 - 3:50 pm | ,
2 Comments

I have a confession to make: until last week, I hadn’t ever done any formal usability testing.* In many ways, we’re still working our way through the findings of a usability test done several years before I got here.** So when the Joint Library Catalog (JLC) Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) Working Group kept going around and around, between ourselves, about interface decisions, I suggested maybe we should test the interface with some of our users. Happily, they agreed! So last Friday I headed over to one of the public library’s branches. The branch manager is a pretty great guy … Continue reading →

Book Review: Lean In

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | May 5, 2013 - 8:03 pm | ,
Leave a comment

Confession: I’m a little stressed about writing this book review, because I think I lack some of the grounding in feminist theory to react “correctly” to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and because reaction to the book has been so very emotional. As has reaction to the reviews of the book, for that matter. (Even my own. I cringed at some of what I saw in various places, including GoodReads.) But I have thoughts, and I’ll do what I can to share them coherently. Like most readers, I bring my own experience and biases, … Continue reading →

A Much Happier Post

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | May 4, 2013 - 10:45 pm | , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment
happysun

My last post was a serious downer, and I apologize for that. I debated skipping the medical stuff, but I really felt like I needed to justify my decision to back out of ALA—if not to everyone else, then at least to myself. (And enough people have asked “What did you do to yourself, Coral?” that it seemed worth getting it all written down somewhere I could share it, anyway.) Deciding not to do ALA was a hard call. People have been super supportive, though! I am really grateful for the amazing folks in the library world, and I’m glad … Continue reading →

Not going to ALA Annual (and bummed about it)

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | May 3, 2013 - 10:36 am | , ,
1 Comment

It’s funny. Earlier this week I compared conferences to summer camp. You have your conference/camp friends that you only get to see once or twice a year—though today’s world beats the world in which I went to summer camps, where our options for staying in touch were “hand write and mail letters” or “nothing”—and you really look forward to seeing those friends and hearing about what they’ve been up to. I’m going to miss campALA this year, and that makes me really sad. It’s taken me a week to 1) realize, 2) accept, and now 3) act on this reality, … Continue reading →

Anchorage Programming Workshop – First Class!

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | April 25, 2013 - 8:54 pm | , , , ,
4 Comments

Level up! Anchorage Programming Workshop held its first class last night, on GitHub, and I think it went really well. Besides the two teachers, four people showed up—fewer than we want, long term, but a great start, given that we really hoped to ease into this whole thing, anyway. Their backgrounds and learning styles varied a bit, but I think they all got something out of the class. Becky did a great job of teaching, and I was able to contribute what I hope was some helpful input. Everyone left with a working repository—and hopefully the confidence and know-how to … Continue reading →

Intro to Python – Week 1 – Musings

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | April 24, 2013 - 10:44 am | , , ,
2 Comments

About class (and teaching/learning programming): In Week 1 we covered functions, the modulo operator, comparisons, and if/elif/else. They offer a tool called “Pystep,” where you can see functions being evaluated. I am not sure whether it is actually more helpful or more confusing to someone who is unfamiliar with programming, but it’s a cool idea and another way to try to visualize what’s going on. Similarly, they talked about functions in terms of “black boxes.” As an engineer, that’s super intuitive to me, but I find myself really curious about whether that made sense to anyone who’s new to programming. … Continue reading →

My First Hackathon – #hAKathon

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | April 21, 2013 - 8:06 pm | , , ,
Leave a comment
Compare to Adopt-A-Hydrant for an idea of what I changed.

I did a hackathon this weekend. (It’s funny. I did a whole lot of work to get skills-based volunteering practiced among librarians, and I ended up doing my first successful SVB as part of the software community, instead. Ah well.) I wasn’t initially planning to participate in this one—something about having said “yes” to too many things and needing some down time—but my husband and a couple of friends convinced me, claiming there were no designers signed up but a dire need for logos and other images. (I wasn’t really the only designer, just the only designer on my project. … Continue reading →