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On the odd chance you’re a Canadian and don’t have this site bookmarked… #AirQuality #ForestFires #Canadahttps://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/
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Ed Bilodeau
@edbilodeau@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06🌱 🇨🇦 Respectful of others, mindful of this existence ▪︎ libraries ▪︎ academia ▪︎ work ▪︎ technology ▪︎ music ▪︎ ottawa
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Joined December 28, 2023
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News broke at work today so: I've been appointed to serve as Interim University Librarian here at Carleton for a year, starting in July.
"Under the US$125m deal, ICE will pay the [Canadian technology and content conglomerate Thomson Reuters] to access its Clear database – which includes property records, social media and geolocation information – in order to identify 'voter fraud' and 'immigration fraud'"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/24/canada-government-mark-carney-block-data-sharing-deal-thomson-reuters-us-ice-avi-lewis
I'd like to encourage everyone to learn more about past waves of technological change & the impact they had on people, communities, and the environment. Not to show them that change is inevitable, but to help them appreciate that the way of life they cherish & are trying to preserve was built on the disrupted, damaged, & destroyed lives & lands of people that came before them, and from this understanding to then face the challenges of our time with far less righteousness and a bit more humility.
Today's the 26th anniversary of the first blogger meetup in Montreal!
history: https://www.blork.org/blorkblog/yulblog/
photos (Mike was taking the photos and so wasn't in them): https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikel/albums/72057594085757254/
87 FTE positions over three years, which according to the article is "a 32% reduction in staff working on access- and privacy-related files over three years, in addition to a cut of 23 FTEs that occurred over the past fiscal year".
Warmer weather means that plowed sidewalks become long canals of water bordered by uneven, wet, icy mounds. The water is usually only a few inches deep, so not a problem if you have waterproof footwear. Still, it does make walking around interesting! #ottawa
-12 but I don’t care I’m wearing my running shoes today.
Aside from Heartbreakers and Pizza Nerds, are there any other joints on the list that people here care to vouch for? Any good places missing entirely? #ottawa #food https://ottawatourism.ca/en/ottawa-insider/best-pizza-places-in-ottawa
Library signage. McGill Library. March 2018.
Making sense of performance reviews. McGill University. March 24, 2014.
I have no idea... it was a dark time.
"Workers absorb the cost of understaffing in their bodies and their psyches. It's not just physical exhaustion, it's also the abuse that is directly correlated with lower staffing levels. Frustrated customers vent their anger at [front-line workers]."
Important to remember when we're feeling frustrated by the lack of staff + being pushed to use machines to serve yourself ➜ Be kind to people, and take your business elsewhere as much as you can.
iA Writer hack: I use authorship to colour/differentiate text. I've created authors called 'highlight' and 'highlight 2', and when I mark text with that author, iA Writer will change the colour of that text. I can't customize the colour, but it is something.
Having the skill and discipline required to maintain an email thread is something I appreciate.
I know the current pitch is "message anywhere, put your files anywhere, use AI to find it all, don't worry, be happy", but I'm not falling for it. This is my craft.
As much as we truly love some of the pizza joints in Ottawa, truth is that our homemade pizza will always, *always* be the best pizza.
An interesting, comprehensive look at the strategic aspects of the US' war with Iran.
Toby likes his pasta! Old Montreal. March 26, 2016.
A summary of the cuts expected at Library and Archives Canada over the next 3 years:
"➜ Number of positions to be reduced through comprehensive expenditure review: 161
➜ Notices to employees [that their jobs are at risk]: 90 employees, 4 executives (according to Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat)
➜ Number of employees as of March 2025: 1,201 (FTEs)"
Good news! While universities may be good places for resources like ArXiv to emerge, they eventually need to move on to a more independent and sustainable environment that universities cannot provide.
🔖 ArXiv, the pioneering preprint server, declares independence from Cornell
https://www.science.org/content/article/arxiv-pioneering-preprint-server-declares-independence-cornell
RE: @Sebprovencher@cosocial.ca
"The facility occupies the first three floors of a new condo building [...] on the former site of the Montreal Children’s Hospital."
Sounds like an excellent example of mixed-used development that all cities could use more of! #montreal #libraries
"All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again" #librarians #ai
I have a bad habit of sending interesting looking articles I come across to instapaper for later reading based only on scanning headines, snippits, and maybe someone's comment, only to find that the article itself is paywalled. I need to pay a bit more attention up front to avoid cluttering up my reading list.
Blech… #ottawa
Tried to add a text file to a Copilot notebook and got the following error (see below). Workaround was to create a new page in the notebook and add the text content to that page. #copilot
Exporting spaces to PDF is much, much slower with Atlassian-hosted Confluence than it was when it was running on our own servers :/
Good news for libraries in Canada! The federal government has reinstated the protection for the Library Book Rate that supports interlibrary loan. #canada #libraries
The melt….
Less sleep! Yay! Overall I find I've been getting too much sleep, so I'm glad that as of tomorrow I'll have less of it. Yay! Yay!
Working from home today has me thinking that if I truly want to make "simplicity" the goal of my office workstation, I should just get an iMac and be done with it, smaller screen and all.
Visual aids stimulate discussion. Source: National Industrial Conference Board Inc. annual report, 1960
I needed to quick scan of a document into PDF, but couldn't find the scan feature in Apple notes. I'm sure it used to be 'right there' whenever I opened the app. Hrmph... :/
In any case, OneDrive to the rescue!
If I forgot my Apple Watch at home this morning, did today even happen?
I won't expect it to be Storm Corrosion 2... but I really want it to be Storm Corrosion 2.
Monday starts with three hours of listening…
@robchapman@ohai.social Then why bring up the books?
"The 8.5 million HathiTrust items now in Anna’s Archive represent both public-domain and copyrighted material. The majority of the items are believed to be in the public domain in the United States and originated from Google’s digitization efforts."
More content for the LLM training that Anna's Archive supports.
https://www.hathitrust.org/press-post/unauthorized-distribution-of-hathitrust-data/
The upside of the time shift is of course the gorgeous light at the end of the working day.
Walked in to work this morning. 4.75km across OOE, Glebe, and Ottawa South. Wet, cold, windy, but zero ice accumulation that I could see. #ottawa
The noteworthy bits (for me): ambient music widget, average bedtime metric (health app), keyboard bug fix. #iOS
Still considering the MacBook Neo as my eventual on-the-go computing option. Every time I find myself wondering whether it will be powerful enough, I remind myself that my main work computer is a 5-6 year-old iMac running a 3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i7. So I should be good.
How it's going: coffee + riffs + screaming #music #meshuggah https://open.spotify.com/album/04NtJiGUlXvRdQSFPOSbX2?si=-Wkrk4RwSgyXAfr81Fb4NQ
Music as the day is winding down... #PorcupineTree
https://open.spotify.com/album/1DlEP44E1fNMgFh8TwI7cm?si=Sj6dzJOnSbS-oe2Rz_E-og
Short walk through a slightly soggy morning, 5 km there and back, carrying an extra 40 lbs of groceries for half of it.
Thought I would try to use Automate > Flows > Create PDF Copy of the OneDr... to convert a Word doc, and was shown the following dialog. I'm already logged in, and if I re-authenticate to any one of these am I good to go, or do I have to log in to all three somehow?
Maybe some other time, OneDrive. I don't have time for your shenanigans today.
Corporate reports card catalogue. McGil University. March 26, 2018.
Taken during my last week at McGill, it was the first reference question I got that had me going to one of our few card catalogues.
Bear sleeping... #catsOfMastodon
Music for doing the dishes… https://open.spotify.com/track/20Te7PjqlmnIWYBrPVh0kb?si=RwALN-3nRi6zOhTC26w65A
Going to risk wearing running shoes for the walk in this morning. It’s already above freezing and I’m fairly certain the sidewalks between here and work are dry.