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31 JulRandom Processing

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Last weekend was great. Did the gyrokinesis teacher training/update (even though I’m neither a teacher, nor apprentice). So much fun. So much lucky for me, it’s terribly decadent to be a student, and to be able to wallow in one’s own body without having to worry about what’s going on with others’ bodies.

Came home to the week from hell. I hate that this week overshadows what was truly a desperately needed few days of vacation. Bitch slapped by the universe. Living in my body means I tend to not frame what I need to say for other people’s parsing requirements as well, so I didn’t frame something in a way that it needed to be framed and kinda blew some stuff up that I didn’t mean to blow up. Oops. We worked through it all and came to an understanding so all’s well that ends well, but… my bad, gotta be careful.

Also, our beloved TimTheCat died. We came home Monday & they’re usually annoyed at having to go back on the regular food, but… it was clear by Tuesday that there was something profoundly, dreadfully wrong. He’s a feral rescue dude, we got him at about 4 months, and while he’d been fostered and socialized before we got him, he never got over his instinctual people=big predator instincts except for M1, who was His Person. If I came within five feet of him and made eye contact, you could see the gears turning in his head calculating what he was going to do. He’d freeze, look up, and you could practically hear him thinking ‘she feeds me, pets me, loves me… but she’s a person and she might be bad news *this* time… Better safe than sorry, I’m bailing.’ And off he’d go. In the last two or so years as long as I didn’t make eye contact, I could walk past him within about two feet, but eye contact? Outta here. Except for M1. She could walk up to him, pick him up, carry him around, make him do silly dances. If we’d had doll clothes that would have fit him (he was 15 lbs of muscle-y feline), he’d have let her dress him up. That Tuesday night I picked him up & carried him around for a bit was a horrid, bad sign. So at 9:30pm, I loaded him into the carrier (a first — we’ve never been able to get him into it before), and went to the vet ER.

Diagnosis there came back not great. Diabetes & DKA with ultrasound and additional blood work to follow next day. Wednesday brought pancreatitis, fatty liver disease, and some degree of kidney involvement. Thursday morning brought fluid in the lungs, increasing kidney issues, & the possibility of cardiac arrest. Any one of the things TimTheCat was fighting would have been an uphill battle. I asked the obvious question, and got back what was rightly the obvious answer. The final consultation the vet had with the critical care vet said that we were making definitely the right decision.

We broke the news to the girls. M1 got it, it took a while and a little further explanation later on for M2. Both of them cried hard for about 45 minutes when they grasped the situation unfolding. M1 was asked if she wanted to be there at the end. She said, ” I can’t stand it! I don’t think I can bear it!” amidst sobs. I stayed home with the girls, P went & took with him something that smelled of M1 & Tim’s favorite catnip toy filled with fresh catnip. He said it was very peaceful and the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. When the reality finally dawned on M2, I was surprised (and yet not) by her questions — she wanted to know how the vet did it, if it hurt, why he couldn’t get better, if we were going to have any more kitties, all asked through sobs.

TimTheCat “comes home” in a little cremation jar sometime in the next week. But it won’t be the same. There’s a place on the mantle for him by Siobhan, he has friends waiting to show him the great people-free catnip patch in the sky.

For now we’re down to the cranky old lady ‘Spew. As soon as the vet is back from vaca, I will make an appointment for her to go in and scream at him about the indignity of a physical… Eventually maybe we’ll have a space in our heart for a couple of new kitties, but the holes are too raw yet, and the ghosts too vivid to go there just yet. RIP, big Tim dude.

Category(s): Critters, The World At Large
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16 JulReflections on Bicycling

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Love love love it! But it took me 1h 20m to get into work this morning. Weirdly, it only took me 1h 5m to get home. Then again, I started out without quite a full battery & it hit the half way power point only 3 miles in on the way in so I rolled in about 75% on my own power. And while I didn’t particularly make much better time mph-wise on the way home (9 on the way in, 10 on the way home), I did take it easy with a full battery, but mostly used for the last hills between the trail and home.

So my final thoughts are these.

  • It’s absolutely decadent.
  • It was a lovely ride in and a lovely ride home.
  • If I do it somewhat regularly, I will likely get faster.
  • Realistically, this is something that will have to be a treat — it leaves too much of the dropping off & picking up of kids to P. At least until I get faster.

There might be more to say, but I’m watching The Pink Panther with the girls & am distracted by Inspector Clouseau.

Category(s): Fun, Movement
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15 JulBicycles and Stuff

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Tomorrow, barring extenuating circumstances, I’m going to be a tourist to the world of bicycle commuting to work. It’s about a 13 mile ride one direction, which is, by most standards not undoable, but a little further than the folks who do it usually consider it an option. It’s an experiment. It’s also something I’ve wanted to do since I got this job. And this bike. I love my bike. It’s an electric-assist, so I have the option of having some help, but it won’t make me go super fast, just help me get to where I’m going without arriving there totally exhausted & fried. Well, except that last time I took it out for an 11 mile ride I came home and took a two hour nap. Not so much a luxury I’ll have if I bicycle into work! But maybe when I get home…

I’m simultaneously looking forward to it and somewhat apprehensive about the whole thing. The distance is one thing. Eight miles? I could do eight miles and not really be phased. In my mind’s eye, I can picture eight miles from here & it’s a ways, but it’s not too bad. I think after about eight miles, I get into more urban and more bicyclists, and the roads I’ll be crossing are more major crossings, and more people, etc, etc. After eight miles, I don’t really have a sense of the trail I’ll be bicycling on either. Not that I haven’t done it before, I just haven’t done it for something like 16 years and I’m kinda foggy about how it all goes. I think I can just keep following the yellow brick road (and all the regular bike commuters), but still. I like to be able to visualize this stuff.

I’m also not a super confident rider. I’m ok. I’m not particularly fast, even with an electric-assist, I average out at about 10mph unless I’m going downhill. You know, gravity helps everyone out there. Being slow like that means the silly lycra/spandex people zoom past me. As does pretty much everyone else, but… whatever. I like bicycling. I just don’t like going up hills & I have help with that now. Also, my bike is real purdy.

I think my best bet tomorrow is just to let myself be a tourist. That’s more fun anyway. That means instead of being all boring and serious and focused, I get to look around and stop and smell the wild roses and take pictures of the lakes and generally dawdle & annoy the boring, serious, focused spandex people. And if I’m late to work, eh, I’m late to work. It’s an experiment, after all…

In other news, got the article draft out to the people who need to contribute to it. A little (a lot) later than I wanted it going out, but… it’s out & hopefully they get it back to me in time to revise & send on to the editor so we can go through the whole process again. Also did a walk through of a webinar presentation. I’m the host… which of course brings to mind, “I am your host und sagen wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome im Cabaret, au Cabaret, to Cabaret!” I fear the presentation will be nowhere near so interesting as Cabaret, certainly not choreographed as well (I mean, really — who can compete with Bob Fosse?), but it’ll be interesting.

And if I’m going to be coherent enough to be peddling a bicycle, electric-assist or no, I need to be going to bed in the very near future. So that’s that for now.

Category(s): Movement, Other>Miscellaneous>Other, Professional Development, Stuff
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06 JunBread & Roses

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As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

–James Oppenheim

Category(s): Stuff, The World At Large
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13 MarTime: Cost: Quality

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Mass production of everything inspires fear and worry (sometimes rightfully, sometimes not) of quality. Until the middle ages spinning was done on a spindle. People said the quality of wool spun on the wheels was lower, though it increased production. Later the more industrialized machines increased volume further. Again people said quality decreased as quantity increased.

That’s something else I’ve been thinking about lately. The volume of information both accessible “online” & unaccessible except through gatekept systems (in libraries or in books/print materials only) has skyrocketed. Part of my job is to help libraries scale up to the volume of information available to them electronically. We don’t deal with nearly as many titles as OCLC, but we track around 4000 databases (and have more that we don’t track), and have around 1.3M journals & …3M? ebooks? Everyone knows that LoC doesn’t have all titles cataloged. And OCLC considers us a competitor so though we’ve tried to work something out with them, we’ve thus far not come to a workable agreement (and OCLC doesn’t have everything cataloged either, not by a long shot!). I have two catalogers and there’s no way we have time to catalog all of it, much less the $$$ to pay outsourced catalogers to catalog all of the remaining & ever increasing content we have libraries that are subscribed to. We have a autocreate program that uses publisher info to make brief MARC records based on publisher info to cover the things for which we don’t have full records. At least there’s *some* record that way otherwise no record means no way to search for it for our client libraries. We also buy Bowker records (created from publisher info sent to Bowker as part of establishing the ISBN), which also informs LoC’s CIP program, and we’re increasingly reaching out directly to publishers for MARC records for their content with decidedly mixed results.

The long and the short of it is — no record means no access. A “poor” record may not provide all the various access points that one might wish to exploit, but it catches the major ones of title, author, publisher, and a few other data points (barring diacritics issues in various programs along the way which is something we definitely struggle with).

Libraries are backlogged in cataloging some several years behind. There’s just a lot of material out there requiring metadata and no one in the library world, libraries, vendors, or anyone else, can keep up with it. No one in the internet world can keep up with it either, but the expectation is much lower there. Library, catalog thyself! If we use “lower quality records” to provide some degree of access while we painfully slowly bring up quality (millions of records with two catalogers is not something one does over night), at least we are trying to provide some access for everything instead of waiting for everything to be fully & perfectly cataloged… Quality vs. Quantity, you can have two of anything: Time – Cost – Quality… We’re trying so hard to provide as much quality as we can, but… damn, the quantity & pace at which that quantity is growing is Freaking Insane.

Category(s): Library Stuff
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13 MarGatekeepers

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I’ve been thinking about this for a while and it’s been gnawing at me. The concept of libraries/librarians of gatekeepers of information. Libraries and the internet battling it out for who is going to be the great bastion of knowledge… Initially I thought these were two kind of separate issues but they keep getting intertwined in my brain.

Ok, first the gatekeepers issue, or… we’ll start there because that’s what struck me first. I can’t remember what I was reading or overhearing or … what. I think the context was how it was great that libraries/librarians are the gatekeepers of information and knowledge and how librarians vet and serve out The Best™ Information, that pep talk we give ourselves about the service we provide to our various communities.

I think I might be in a minority in that I mostly use my library card for searching for articles that come up in Google behind paywalls. Now and again I’ll get a book, but like an increasing amount of people, one of my earlier stops in the information gathering process is to check out what’s online in the great unwashed, dirty masses of Google. Maybe I’ll ask Google to take me to the Wikipedia article – it’s still somewhat unwashed, but it usually gives some pointers to some relevant and somewhat better sources. Or maybe I’ll just see if something fits in the top ten to twenty results (unless I’m really obsessed – I’ve been known to go hundreds of pages deep poking at what’s out there, less so more recently though).

The majority of the time, for my personal purposes, I find what I’m looking for without busting out the library card. For professional purposes, I… well, I follow largely the same pattern. Don’t need a library card because I’m in the library/publishing industry & I have access to certainly not all of what I need, but a fair amount of it & if the price is right, I can buy what I need, if I don’t have access through work or a library or Google. But most of the time I can find what I need online.

I get it when people say “I can find what I need online – why do we need libraries?” I can find what I need online to my authority qualified standards. I may disagree with someone else’s assessment of what’s an authority but that’s going to be true still if I’m standing behind a ref desk helping them try to find something too. Librarians may be gatekeepers of information, but with the internet seems to be a low barrier to information & an easy fence to jump. Might not get into the ivory tower, but there’s plenty of goodies in the king’s woods.

What I worry about with the gatekeeper metaphor is that “normal people” will start seeing the ‘gatekeeper’ mentality is less one of Information For The People! than truly a gatekeeper mentality of Information For Our People. There’s a tension between The library is free! Information wants to be free! and the reality of the cost of that information and who, in reality, pays for and gets to use that information. Libraries have their audiences. Public libraries are funded and supported (or not as the case sadly seems to be increasing) by their local tax base and it’s hard, if possible at all, to get a library card for the next town over. Libraries do provide interlibrary loan, for which I’m thankful. I’ve gotten good books that way (and interlibrary doc delivery supports my brother, for which I’m also thankful, he does some awesome stuff).

I think libraries are really important. I have to believe that libraries have a place in our future. Maybe not because “that’s where we keep our books, our trusty knowledge repositories” but we do keep our knowledge repositories there with professionals who can help us find and retrieve them when we can’t find them. If we know they can do that. Yeah, and here is where my thinking breaks down because nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

I do wonder about the assumption that “everything is online” and think it would be really awesome if libraries could get localized matches in search engines. Somehow. I know. And then there’s WorldCat. Still never seen that show up in an internet search result despite that being kind of the point of it. Weirdly, I do see LibraryThing fairly frequently. What is LibraryThing doing right that WorldCat isn’t?

I don’t know – it’s rambling; there are holes in my logic big enough to drive a parade of MACK trucks through. But I think there’s something there at the core, that might be true, and that little piece of truth nags at me. And there was a small bit of illumination that just came to me & left again. It’s been a long week of thinking about things.

Category(s): Library Stuff
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29 NovThanksgiving

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Today we celebrated our harvest — both of us having jobs in a time when we’ve seen many released from their jobs, both of us getting new (and good!) jobs on top of that (good fortune). I harvested the first lemon from my lemon plant & used the zest in the spiced dried fruit pie tonight (good agriculture). We have good friends, good kids. Increasingly we get to do things we enjoy rather than living moment to moment and paycheck to paycheck. I get to do gyrokinesis which I adore.

M2 has discovered the glitter — our house is covered in it, just in time for the magical holiday season. My kids are so sweet. They’re kids, so they get annoying like all kids, but they’re sweet good kids when it matters.

No work this week so I ah… I got sick, lost my voice, my car got backed into while it was getting its oil changed (with an OOF-y estimate, but that’s why we have insurance), and I’m kinda recovering now from being sick, sorta, except my voice seems reluctant to return, and I get tired fast. This is the kind of vacation I hate because it went sideways on me. But even though it went sideways, I’m still so thankful for all the really good things in my life that… so it went sideways. We’ll try this vacation thing again in a few weeks around Xmas. Of course, I’ll be carless probably during that time because that’s probably when I’ll take my car in for fixies, but… Maybe I should get my car fixed before then and figure out how the whole rental car thing works. Decisions for another day. There’s so much that I have to be thankful for and that I’m lucky to have that it seems ungracious to complain about the little stuff.

Also, there’s been pie this week. That’s right. PIE.

Category(s): Stuff

23 NovTrip to Lopez

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Damn, I had a big long thing started through partway of the first day & I accidentally shut the window & this dumb thing didn’t autosave any but the first few words. So, this will be briefer than I meant. Ah well.

It went off without a hitch. This story requires a tiny bit of set up. Jaina and I met a zillion years ago on Lopez. Many years she goes back up to Lopez at various times of year, and occasionally helps out with their Community Shakespeare productions. This year the little kids (1-8th grade) were doing The Tempest, and the older kids were doing The Merry Wives of Windsor. I thought the girls would like The Tempest and love an adventuresome visit to Jaina so I got everything in order and P made trip reservations. Somehow I managed to keep this secret until…

6am (otherwise known as dark o’clock on a Saturday morning). We woke them up with “Time to rise and shine, young ladies, if we’re going to make it to Jaina’s in time for lunch!” Marian’s response was, “reallyreallyreallyreallyreallyreally!?!?!?!?” Yes, reallyreallyreallyreallyreallyreally. We told them to bring puppy & kitty, and Phil (M2′s beloved, bedraggled stuffed groundhog). M2 wanted to know what time the ferry was going to pick us up. I told her we had to drive to the ferry, and then drive the car ON to the ferry. Her eyes got wide, then wider as she took in the implications of driving a car on to a ferry. I told her the ferry carried lots of cars and was a really really big boat. She said, “I guess so!”Then we dropped the bomb that we were also spending the night at an inn. Jaina had plenty going on, and the girls never get to spend the night in hotels, so it would be an extra treat. I packed their suitcase the previous weekend so as not to trigger suspicions.

And then at 6:30, we were off to the Anacortes ferry dock. Which was cold. P mocked me for retreating to the car, but it was really really cold. He marched the girls up and down the ferry line and took them to see if they could see the ferry coming in. M1 eventually spotted it & then they came back and steamed up my car. As promised, we drove the car on to the ferry. Once we pulled away from the dock, P took the girls to the front to look out the window. It doesn’t seem like 17 knots/h (about 20 mph) is all that fast… until you’re standing at the front of the boat. Once he was done, I took them up to the second passenger level & pointed out that there was another level for the steering cabins too, just for the benefit of seeing M2′s eyes widen again at the size of the boat. And then it was time to land.

From Lopez

We drove off the ferry and proceeded to Holly B’s Bakery for cinnamon rolls (the best cinnamon rolls in the world). It’s an island tradition. And that was the place that baked P’s and my wedding cake too. Jaina showed up, we ducked into the little cafe next door for chai, then went and checked into the inn. Jaina waited while we unloaded our stuff, then we followed her to her house for the promised lunch. On the way we stopped at the tiny church that we got married in (top picture there, the cemetery across the street owns the church). The little church only holds about 50 people total, so between family and friends, we had it pretty well filled. Later we came back and found the microcache at the site too.

From Lopez

Lunch was wonderful. Yoram made a “roadside” salmon (Jaina said it was the weirdest roadside stand she’d ever seen with salmon, shellfish, and some other non-fruit or produce goods), an excellent potato salad, and broccoli. I baked bread to bring with us, so we had that as well. It was cozy & lovely & we soon found it time for Jaina to head into town, and we followed, M2 fell asleep in the car. We dropped Yoram off in town, then took M2 back to the inn to sleep (dark o’clock and lots of excitement is very early for a little girl!). Paul and M1 ventured into the village for a bit, then it was time for The Tempest!

The kids all did really well, despite three of the cast being knocked out by chicken pox (can’t get either more community than that, or more classic story about community plays!). The subs did a fine job and it was a lot of fun to see. Jaina was the stage manager. The performance was done ‘in-the-round’, and every time M2 heard Jaina’s voice behind the curtains, she’d say, “MOM! I hear JAINA!” And every time the lights dimmed, and the set was changed, she’d point Jaina’s dark figure out as well. It was all very exciting.

After the performance, we went and fetched dinner from the Galley, then back to the inn. I think we were all pretty much asleep by 9:45.

M2 with Phil in his “bed”.

From Lopez

Both girls curled up and giggling way too hard to go to sleep.

From Lopez

Alas, they did not sleep in. They woke up at 6:30 in the morning. Dark o’clock, as far as I’m concerned. On the upside, there was a Muppet movie on the tv to distract them while we tried to snooze a little more, and then we were off to Jaina’s for breakfast. Tasty local farm eggs, scrambled, and fresh from the oven ginger scones for breakfast. NOM. Then we walked down to the beach. Or rather, we walked to where the beach would be, had it not been a winter high tide. There was approximately two feet of beach. Quilty, one of Jaina’s cats, walked all the way down there with us, and back. Apparently she’s followed Jaina all the way down to another further away beach as well. Quilty is a funny and most adorable cat.

Eventually all good things must come to an end. We left and picked up a few more cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and then hit the ferry landing. Found one of the ferry godmother caches while waiting, then boarded our ferry for home. Eventually the sun broke through briefly, allowing M1 to take this shot as a beautiful end to a beautiful weekend.

From Lopez
Category(s): Friends, The Girls(TM)
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11 OctPost-Infocamp Processing

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It was a good weekend. I saw a lot of people I know and miss working with. Got to meet in meatspace A, and say hello to some other people I usually only “see” online as well. I met some people that I got some good ideas from and had fun talking with. I went to some interesting sessions. I spent a lot of it looking for lateral ideas that I could use with what I’m doing now, which is a lot more management & business oriented thinking. Fortunately I like interdisciplinary idea cross-pollination.

The keynote by Axel Roesler was excellent. Of his many good points, one of his sidenotes was that he had been a designer, then an engineer, and was now back to a designer. It was at this point that I started thinking about how management is at least partially about designing an experience for the employees that allows them to be as productive as possible, in both directions — I want the folks above and below on the org chart to be happy and productive. How can I facilitate a work experience for them that will set them up for success? With that in mind, I thought about why I’d been hired again and what sorts of things I would be able to find at this conference that would aid & abet me in meeting some of those larger scheme goals.

To that end, the first presentation I went to was Designing Experiences Beyond the Screen (Ariel van Spronsen) — services design. It was during this that I jokingly told one of my former co-workers that for the weekend I should change my title to Employee Productivity Designer. She laughed at me and said, “It sounds like you’re a manager that doesn’t want to say you’re a manager!” Totally. She then said, ‘and you’d have to work with a lot of people to design that experience, facilities to set up desks, IT to set up computers, HR arranging onboarding…” Um, yeah, I’m a manager, what do you think managers do? Heh.

Then it was lunch. Yay lunch. Met up with P who went to WikiLeaks: Information Between Legal Borders (Brian Rowe), which was the other one that looked interesting to me, but not as likely to provide the lateral ‘I Can Use This’ sort of thing. After lunch we both went to Intro to Sharepoint (Quentin, Greg) — it was *way* intro for us, but as we both have staff we’d like to pull over to SharePoint, it seemed like an optimal time to step back and see what other folks were telling noobs about SharePoint. I also got some good ideas of things I can tweak SharePoint to do, helloooo key performance indicators. I’d love to figure out a way to ping off the incident management stuff to SharePoint to track my team specific metrics there, but have yet to figure out a way that won’t just add a zillion additional steps to the workflow. Still, in time…

The third session of the day, we went to Google Book Settlement (Brian Rowe) — it was good. Kind of a coaster session with fairly minimal cross-over immediate ‘can use’ stuff, but interesting from a copyright and intellectual property standpoint. The final session of the day was Discussion/Idea Generation: Next Gen Internet-making taxonomies & social media work (Pam Green). We didn’t actually get around to the social media aspect of the session, but there were a lot of my peeps there, and Pam is awesome. Looking at how to organize a massive intranet effectively is an interesting exercise. There were a lot of assumptions that had been passed on to Pam by people who tend to make the decisions, and there were a lot of assumptions by people in the room who lacked background and context (not the least, how long Pam had been doing work along these lines). But there was some good signal in the noise.

We went down to the info parties — I had a tasty Manhattan, although the bartender asked me a question a couple times and I just couldn’t hear her, or rather I could hear her, but not distinguish quite what she was saying, to her annoyance. It got made sweet, which is fine. It was tasty. We stood around and talked about random things, then headed to a place down the street with the claim that they had better beers (plus you didn’t have to order food at the bar). That was fun. Would like to do that more often with those folks. I really miss working with them, though I think ultimately I’m in a much, much better place, that’s a much better fit for me.

This morning the presentation was a presentation on search engines, search & the like by Vanessa Fox. It was also a great presentation. She in relation to tracking real time search trends based on tv advertising, she asked how many of us watched the Super Bowl last February. In an audience of around 300, only four people raised their hands. This reminds me of the PM that started out using sports metaphors in a meeting I was in where there were a couple of librarians, a nice content lady, and an Israeli database guy. We all gave him blank stares. He shifted to military metaphors and the database guy got what he was saying and started laughing… I can’t remember if he ever came around to a metaphor that the rest of us would actually get. But Earnest Tom was so earnest that we didn’t really mind. We kinda got it, the metaphors were just really not well thought out for the audience… ANYWAY (it’s my blog, I can go on a tangent if I want to). Apparently 50% of people are on both the computer and tv at the same time (I don’t know where the statistic comes from or the full context, I’m just sayin’ that’s what I heard). I leaned over to P & whispered, “That’s because we only have one computer in the same room as the tv right now…” But search trends and information seeking behaviors are an interesting thing to take a look at, I find my interest drops fairly quickly when the only interest in them becomes focused down to “how do we use this to push traffic to sites”, but that’s not what this presentation was about.

The first, and only session I attended today, was Using Humor to Convey Information (Jess Hagy & friends). It was put on by Jess of Indexed, a site I’ve been following for about three years now. One of the things I need to do is present information about what my team is doing. While at the moment, I need to present my information seriously and get taken seriously, I think that using humor and the unexpected in other areas helps engage people and bring stuff home that would be otherwise much less accessible. For instance, this example of what’s changing in a MARC record is completely amusing to me & made much more of an impression than it would have had the example been, for example Lawrence Whelk.

Then to lunch, where we met a nice library student from PDX, and a SharePoint widget designer & a SharePoint dev, all of whom we had good discussions with. Then when we were done eating, we wandered over to KW and talked to him and I got from him what I was hoping to hear someone at the conference talk about — namely, storytelling and creating compelling narratives. Got some book recommendations, or rather, re-recommendations because he’s talked about them before (and that’s why I asked him, I knew he’d have some good resources). His opinion was also ‘maybe not so much employee productivity designer, but productivity engineer.’ Which lead to an entertaining, brief discussion on design v. engineering. “Don’t call me an engineer! I’m an artist!”

And with that, we went home a little early. It was good, but we needed an infonap & at least a *little* bit of a “weekend”. Also a chance to recover from being around that many people. Introvert much?

Kind of general stuff, we saw more whale tails & ass cracks than we really needed to. Pull those pants up or wear longer shirts, yo. All in all, it was good. From an lateral usability perspective, I got what I needed. Networking and keeping in touch too.

Category(s): Professional Development, Work, geekery
Tag(s): , ,

14 SepQuiet

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I haven’t been writing a lot. I know. It’s quieter around these parts than it used to be, and I’ve retreated somewhat in terms of what I’m choosing to share with The World At Large for the moment as I take some time to reflect on where I am and where I might go from here. I am striving and yet largely content. It sounds weird, but… it’s good. A good stretch. As such, not entirely comfortable & yet… it feels good.

In other news:

  • I love my new job. It has it’s challenges, but they’re good challenges and I work with good people.
  • M2 is finishing off the last of her medicine for a strep throat diagnosis that turned out to be staph instead. Not the whatsit resistant one, “they usually tell us when it’s that”, just run of the mill. Makes me wonder if that’s what it was the times last year when it was diagnosed as “Not Strep.” I might have to ask from here on out assuming treatment is required for it. It looks and hurts suspiciously similarly…
  • Our back deck is now finished and stained. Hoorah! It looks so nice. Now that we’re past the dog days of summer and starting into my favorite season of fall. Not that I didn’t get a massive sunburn on my shoulders. UGH.
  • Mmmmmm, fall…
  • We went and saw Julie & Julia. It was lovely. We followed it with dinner at Persimmon where we were the only people in the restaurant until about five minutes before we left. The lovely owner brought us two candles to sit at our table with us, since we were re-attempting our anniversary dinner. The dinner was perfect & tasty. It really could not have been lovelier.
  • The prior weekend I had a gyrokinesis class with the ever charming Mia. There wasn’t really any doubt in my mind that I would love it. Now I’m just plotting how to get a regular fix. The length of class I want is at the same time I *should* be sitting/exercising at the Y while the little girls take swimming lessons. I could take a class half as long, but… it’s half as long! Anyway. LOVE. No surprise. I am what I am, for sure.
  • I gave the tortle a new home this weekend. She has responded by burying herself gleefully in the dirt. She comes out to eat, wade, bask, & wander around, and then buries herself under her little log again.
  • Aaand, I think that’s about it. Probably stuff most of y’ins reading this already knew…
Category(s): Food, Home, Movement, Stuff, The World At Large, Work
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