Library Humor

I love Rhymes with Orange!

The not-really-a-break Spring Break

I've been on Spring Break this week! Woo hoo! Or is it boo hoo? It's true, I don't have classes on Saturday of this week. However, I still have plenty to do. This is how I've spent my spring break:

• Instead of getting right back to work on Monday morning I took the day off from schoolwork and got busy with writing the registration form for camp. It needed to be done by March 1st. OOPS.
• I went to the gym on Monday morning because I could. The sauna was so toasty warm I almost fell asleep in there.
•  On Tuesday I started researching for an upcoming paper due on 3/20. 
• Volunteered at Hatfield Public Library Tuesday afternoon.
• Wednesday morning found me back at the research. Finally settled on a topic and emailed my prof. She's so excited (?!) about my topic (RFID in libraries) that she wants me to present to the class. I'm pretty excited about my topic too but now I'm wishing I'd picked something dull and ordinary.
• Paid bills, filled out paper work for health insurance from the Commonwealth, mailed my passport for renewal. ($75!) Cleaned off my desk in the process. Have you ever noticed how your virtual desktop is far easier to keep tidy than your physical desktop?
• We went to the annual spring flower show at Smith College on Wednesday afternoon (see tulips). It was such a lovely afternoon we took a walk along the Mill River in Northampton after sniffing flowers. And because I wasn't in a huge hurry to get home we went to the Forbes Library while we were in the neighborhood. I picked up a cute-looking graphic novel I was hoping to read this weekend but Mom's visiting so I don't think that'll happen.
• Trevor had a meeting on Wednesday night so I plopped myself on the couch and watched Jon Hamm (of Mad Men) host SNL on Hulu.com on my new MacBook. It was really funny! 
• Thursday morning I was back at the research. Saved all the articles I want to print to my flash drive and drove to South Hadley to take advantage of the free printing at the GSLIS office. Ate my lunch while printing articles for the paper due 3/20. Chatted with a fellow student who was also experiencing a not-really-a-break break. 
• I got my hair cut! Found a stylist at Ochoa in South Hadley who is trained in the curly girl method of cutting hair. 
• Went to the gym Thursday on my way back from the haircut. Went to the co-op after the gym on my way home. 

That's it so far. This is my plan for next week:

• Read about a dozen articles ranging in length from 1-21 pages for the paper due 3/20. 
• Write the 5 page single-spaced paper due 3/20.
• I'm still researching my topic for a short assignment due 3/20. 
• Study for exam on 4/3.
• Read the usual chapters and articles for classes on 3/20.

Looking forward to my "real" break when the semester is over on May 8th!

Miss Me? Part 2

Well, it's been a whirlwind of technology impediments for the past 2 weeks. That wire? That's the phone line that brings DSL into our house.

First, my trusty circa 2004 Mac iBook started acting flaky on me totally out of the blue. It was experiencing "kernel panic" which made me feel all panic-y about my laptop that's been my trusted friend and gateway to the "Interwebs" since November of 2007.

So, I brought my circa 2004 Mac iBook to a local Apple authorized dealer and repair shop and they kept it for 5 days! (2 of which were a weekend) I was in the midst of writing a paper for one of my classes. I got up in the morning, ate breakfast, showered, packed a lunch and drove 25 minutes to S. Hadley to use the computer lab at the Simmons GSLIS West office every day for 3 days. I even started getting a bit territorial about "my iMac". I even went so far as to add a few things to the Firefox Bookmarks toolbar that would make creating citations from a website so much easier. I am a tiny bit embarrassed to admit that I even kicked someone off "my iMac". I was becoming such a regular there that the Assistant Dean laughed at me on the second day in a row when I was there to continue working on the paper. 

On Monday I went back to the local Apple dealer to check in and they said they would call me that afternoon. They also had a refurbished laptop for sale. It was installed with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). My circa 2004 Mac iBook was a refurb which I bought in 2007 from a reputable outfit in Florida. My iPhone is "refurbished" (cost me $49). I'm in favor of "recycling" so I normally don't have a problem with refurbished equipment. However, this time, I was severely disappointed. I started writing a paper for a new assignment and got about 4 pages done. The next morning it started acting really flaky and the screen would just go black. I could barely keep it stable long enough to save my paper to my flash drive. I packed it up, brought it back and said, "I made a mistake. What I really want is a new MacBook with an Intel processor."

I bought a brand new 13" MacBook with the newest operating system, Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6, installed. I also bought iWork (word processing, spreadsheets and slide presentations) for $79 (there's a $30 rebate). In the end, I paid twice what I paid for the refurbished laptop. With the Intel processor I'll be able to upgrade to new operating systems.

So I brought it home and did a two-hour software update. I went to volunteer at Hatfield Public Library that afternoon and had a great time shifting and weeding the non-fiction collection. It snowed on Tuesday evening. It was that wet, heavy snow that we get this time of year. I woke up on Wednesday morning to no power and no DSL. A branch knocked down the phone line that brings DSL into our house. Here I was with a brand new laptop and now power and no DSL! That afternoon I went to my gym and used their power and DSL to work for about an hour. We went to our public library the following day to get caught up on email and, for me, on-line research for another paper.

It took no less than 5 communications with my Internet Service Provider (starts with a "V",  sounds like "horizon") to get them to understand that someone needed come to my house to fix the downed phone line. A technician showed up on Saturday morning at 8am (one hour before my on-line class), and said, "Is that your phone line down out there? Do you think that's why your DSL isn't working?". "Yes," I replied. "They didn't tell me a phone line was down...." And then he grumbled, "Verizon is idiots." (oops! Told you who my ISP is!)

It was fixed within an hour and I was able to participate in my on-line class on Saturday morning without borrowing my neighbor's wifi. As soon as I was done with my class we packed up and drove to Cambridge for the rest of the weekend. But, that's for another post. You'll have to wait.

Miss Me?

Classes started up again on Saturday January 30th. At the end of this semester I'll be half-way done! I'm taking 2 classes this semester: LIS 451 and LIS 488. Pardon me for speaking in Librarian. I will attempt to translate.
LIS 451 is also called Academic Libraries. What does that mean, you ask? The following is from the (daunting) 17 page syllabus, "This course surveys the development, current state, and future directions of community college, college, and university libraries. The focus will be on broad issues within a context that connects academic libraries within their parent institution and the broad context of higher education. Such issues include managing change, scholarly communication, publishing, information technology, advocacy, staffing, budgeting, public relations, policies, services, evaluation and assessment, planning, and higher education environment. The course approaches these issues from a systems perspective and the framework developed for ASERL. Prerequisite: LIS 407."

Our first class was the equivalent of a technological train-wreck. Our instructor is based in South Dakota. Yes, I said South Dakota. Our first class meeting was conducted via an on-line meeting using DimDim. It was horrendous. Future classes on-line classes will be conducted using Elluminate. We've been told this is better. I have high hopes. Fortunately we were able to divvy up the reading assignments for the first week amongst a group of 4 so instead of each reading approximately 200 pages we read about 50. Right now I'm researching a topic for the first paper (10 pages) which is due Saturday 2/20. In addition to reading 4 chapters and 2 articles for this week I'm reading at least 8 articles for the paper. Some of which are almost 30 pages long. YIKES!

LIS 488 is Technology for Information Professionals. The following is from the 11 page syllabus: "This course covers the conceptual and contextual foundations of computing, networking, the internet, social networking, and digital publishing technologies as used in information-intensive professions.  There is an emphasis on the terminology used in the professional LIS literature.  The course serves as a gateway to other technology courses offered at GSLIS."
 
The instructor for this course is Linnea Johnson and she's based in Boston at Simmons College's main campus. She's really cool, super nice, wicked smart and really knows her stuff in a geeky/techy way. Our first on-line lecture was an MP3 which I was able to download and put on my iPhone so that I could listen while working up a sweat at the gym. It was a chronology of the history of communication and computers. Really neat. She also included a slide lecture that had links to 13 youtube videos. One of which was a clip from a David Letterman show featuring Grace Hopper. Watch it. She's a hot ticket, as we say. I love her visual demonstration of a nanosecond.

We're also using Twitter in LIS 488. We're using a hashtag which aggregates all our tweets about class-related messages. I'm relatively new to Twitter so it's fun to get an opportunity to use it. If you want to follow me you're welcome to. I mostly tweet about library-related stuff that I find interesting. Micro-blogging on Twitter is challenging since it's only 140 characters. That's right,  140 characters. Not words. No mucho blah blah blah as I like to say.

Trip to Boston

I spent the weekend in Boston with two friends from Simmons College GSLIS,  to attend my first ever ALA conference. I picked up several ARCs while I was there. ARCs are not giant boats that you may need in the event of flooding but they are Advanced Reader Copies that publishers give away! Most of the time ARCs are unproofed but they're free so I'll take one, and then another, and another and before I knew it I had at least 25 books. Some of which were not ARCs at all but regular books. NEW! Hardcover! Autographed by the author. Perfect for giving as gifts.

In addition to gathering up as many free books as possible from publishers, I also attended an author forum which featured 4 authors whose books have been made into movies; Eric Van Lustbader, Chuck Hogan, Tracy Chevalier, and Julie Powell.  I had never heard of the first 2 authors. Tracy Chevalier is the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring. Julie Powell is the author of Julie and Julia, which was recently made into a movie starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child.

Immediately following the author forum, I scurried down to the Exhibit Hall to fork over $10 for Tracy Chevalier's latest novel, Remarkable Creatures. She was there autographing books so I even have an autographed copy. It's the story of a young woman, Mary Anning, in the 19th century who is an amateur fossil collector whose discoveries were, well, remarkable.

On Saturday after collecting more ARCs from publishers, I attended a lecture by a former US VP who is fond of speaking about the environment. It felt like he was preaching to the choir so I left and went back down to the Exhibit Hall to, yes, you guessed it, collect more ARCs.

By mid-afternoon, my fellow student, Laura and I had bags of ARCs and decided we needed to get rid of them before we could continue with the rest of our day. After a semi-quick trip on the MBTA back to Cambridge to drop off books, and headed to Copley Square to visit the Boston Public Library. I used to work in that neighborhood back in the 80s and occasionally ate lunch in the courtyard but it had been decades since I'd been inside the old McKim building. It's so gorgeous!

We headed up Boylston to Lir where we attended a social hosted by the DLS, Distance Learning Section is their official name but when we arrived they told us that the acronym also stands for Drinking Librarian Section. Providence was at work yet again when I was sent that email!

After hanging with the DLS for a while, Lexi showed up and we decided to depart and form our own DLS. After wandering the upper end of Newbury Street we settled on Daisy Buchanan's. Not exactly the experience I was looking for, but it was inexpensive and not crowded at all.

Another semi-quick trip on the MBTA back to Cambridge, we stayed up way too late chatting and finally called it a night at 11:30.

It was a really FUN, yet exhausting time, and I've managed to find room in my book shelves for all of the ARCs.

Missed it by That Much

We spent 5 days in Vermont for Christmas. One of the best parts about visiting the Northeast Kingdom for Christmas is we get to play in the snow! My sister, Wendy, has this great sledding hill behind her house! At the top of the hill is an amazing vista. I love to go sledding. It's about my speed. Here's Jon and Trevor about halfway down the sledding hill. And Higgins, the dog, getting in the way, or trying to get in on the fun. The only problem is that there's a compost bin at the bottom of the hill and a brother-in-law who likes to push the envelope. He's a great guy and I love him but that's his only fault. (Wendy may say differently.)

So, here's the compost bin in question. It's a nice looking compost bin. Jon asked me at the top of the hill if I wanted a push. I said, "No." But he pushed anyway. I'm not saying he pushed me in the direction of the compost bin. Not saying that. But I was sledding down the hill at a good speed and heading straight for the compost bin. And the closer I got to the compost bin, the more I was saying, "No. No. No." I was doing my best to steer the sled to the left to miss the compost bin but it wasn't moving. Had I been on my Flexible Flyer I'm sure I would have had better luck.

So, I'm heading straight for the compost bin and desperately trying to steer away from it and all the while thinking to myself if I crash that's going to hurt so at the last possible second I leaned my whole body to the left and stopped the sled from crashing into the compost bin by about 1". It was very dramatic and James Bond-like. Then I got up, shook off the snow and went in the house and grabbed my camera. That was the end of sledding for me that day. I went in the house, told everyone I was making hot cocoa but I really was having a shot of Jon's whiskey.

Monkeys to the Left

This sign is at the top of the exit ramp at exit 21 off I-91 in Hatfield. It's been there for quite some time, like since the fall. But recently, I noticed that it had been modified a bit. There's a deer checking station (whatever that is) in Hatfield to the right and there's monkeys (?!) doing something in Hatfield or Northampton to the left.