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.

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.

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…

• Admin Metrics 8:00-9:00 Taking a first look at result of metrics. Looking… Ok. As there have never been metrics established prior, there will be some experimentation involved to refine them, as well as this being the first week that we’ve actually kept ‘em and metrics tell more over the long term than they do in the short term. We’ll get there. I’ve got an awesome team now, figuring out where we’re getting randomized and tightening up will just make us even better.
• Admin Meetings 9:00-9:15 Planning for team mtg.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 9:15-10:00 Outsourcing process doc. How we’re going to decide what to send out & technical details of how we’ll pull it.
• Admin Meetings 10:00-10:30 Cat. team mtg. Pretty laid back today.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 10:30-12:00 Outsourcing process doc. Yep, back to this…
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 12:00-13:00 Emails to answer a test question about what we would expect a “contains” search to include (string match of the terms entered? keyword “AND”?). What we would expect (AND/NEAR) was not the case (exact string match to be included in rest of the search). Which is fine. I’m glad I know that’s the case now!
• Outsourcing Vendor Management/Review 13:00-13:30 Outsource pilot lead had questions. I had answers.
• Admin Metrics 13:30-14:00 Looking at updates to the incident metrics. They look good. Better, anyway… we’ll get there, we’ll get there…
• Admin Overhead 14:00-14:30 Spilling water on my computer & keyboard because that’s just how I roll. *sigh* Cleaned up, no damage done. Back to more interesting things.
• Admin Overhead 14:30-15:30 Sales/sales support client call post-mortem initial write up, set mtg for Monday review/feedback from team.
• Admin Overhead 15:30-16:00 Planning Monday. (Why, Brain? What are we going to do Monday night? Monday night, Pinky, we’re going to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!)

Came home. The little girls showed up fifteen minutes after me & we had a lazy daisy evening. Although M2 decided to clean her room. I think she did a better job than I do. When she sets her mind to it, she is really an amazing little cleaner upper. I wish she’d take initiative to do it more often, it’s truly amazing.

• Admin Billing 8:00-9:00 Straightening out billing stuff with a MARC record supplier.
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 9:00-10:00 Mtg. to help a sales guy figure out how to approach a current client.
• Admin Billing 10:00-10:30 Send on the billing stuff for signatures.
• Admin Overhead 10:30-12:00 Restarting computer due to updates, getting stuff ready for bugzilla bash.
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 12:00-13:30 Bugzilla bug bash! w00t! Taking a look at bugs & figuring out how to put together something our awesome director can go into a meeting with to help us get some leverage for stuff that would improve the cataloging workflow.
• MeSH Meetings 13:30-14:00 Sorting out a MeSh mess, sorted & resolved. Yay! My recommendation to resolve the issue is what the dev was thinking too & we’re golden!
• Outsourcing Research/Gathering Info 14:00-16:00 Looking at top dbs that could be outsourced & what sorts of ‘packages’ we could set up for varying markets (mostly med as int’l has yet to be determined). What can we put together (for example, normalizing the top 25 med. databases to 100% — so MARC records and authority records for all holdings within a particular provider package).
• Admin Overhead 16:00-16:30 Prepping for tomorrow.

I feel like there were some wasted cycles in there. Not because I wasn’t trying, but I wasn’t getting as much accomplished as I wanted to. But I feel like we made a dent in some other stuff. Then I came home, fed the cats, & met my parents & girls at the lake. I had the best intentions to go swimming today, but by the time I got there, all I wanted to do was nap. So I sat in the lawn chair & kinda snoozed without really ever sleeping while crazy beach mayhem ensued around me. Then we had a lovely dinner, ending with sweet tasty watermelon. And then we came home. It’s too hot here.

So I forgot to add yesterday that I’m also the executive producer of a couple other sites & one of them got hit hard with spammers, so I spent about 1.5 hours cleaning that up too…

But today… Took the little girls to Auntie’s & made it to work in an hour. Woo!

• Admin Overhead 9:45-10:30 Email, setting up conference rooms for mtgs.
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 10:30-12:30 THE mtg & half hour to follow up on action items. I hear it all went very well. It’s hard to tell over a bad phone connection & not being in the room, but the folks that were there said it went well. Yay!
• Incidents Incident Resolution 12:30-15:30 Normalization issue for a client libraray. Not finished with all the journals that need to be rematched to their target MARC records yet, but… soon.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 15:30-17:00 Trying to pull together the process, priorities, and workflow for what material goes for outsource assistance.
• MeSH Filing or commenting on bugs 17:00 18:30 MeSH taxonomy bug. Easy fix, just need to use the unique MeSH id to identify paths rather than internal tools path id & we’re golden (hopefully those aren’t famous last words! Last time I said that it was requesting recursive queries in a directed acyclic graph database… And that actually is not, by definition, an easy fix. In fact, I believe it’s impossible. These minor details…)
• Admin Overhead 18:30 19:00 Planning tomorrow…

There was also some time spent after that sending loltaxonomy images due to a polyhierarchy issue that reared its ugly head during the MeSH thing, but that was just muckin’ around having fun. :) Then I logged off & came home. And now here I am, dreading to go inside my 95F house. It’s so much more pleasant out here on the deck, although the only light is from the laptop screen & it’s starting to burn into my retinas. Good times, people, good times…

Round 1 July 2008
Round 2 January 2009
July 27th 2009 begins the Second Annual

Eh, so I’m starting a day late. I’m the cataloging team manager for Serials Solutions. I’ve been in this position about 5.5 weeks & I’m still learning the ropes and wrapping my head around things. I think I’m getting there, but I also have a ways to go before I’ve mastered the finer details. I got my MLIS in 2005 & I’ve been working in various library environments for the last 12 or so years.

MONDAY

It’s an early morning for me. It’s warm in the house already. I get in the car & make it to work in about 35 minutes — it’s a *good* morning. Except I overslept because it was so hot, and so I walk in the door right when I wanted to get there. Woo!

• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 8:00-9:45 Trying to get my ducks in a row so I’m prepared for an upcoming client meeting.
• Admin Billing 9:45-10:45 Reviewing and sorting out billing issues and changes to MARC records provider contracts.
• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 10:45-11:30 Back to trying to organize those ducks for the client meeting.

• Normalization Normalizing 11:30-12:00 NORM! 29 records reviewed, two normalized. Sadly, I think I messed up both records. On the upside, one of my excellent team members caught it & promises to continue to help me out until I have it all down.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 12:00-13:30 Outsourcing strategy overview. Completed with minor exceptions (Normalization plan, largely…). The volume of materials we have has increased exponentially & to continue providing the services at a reasonable cost in a reasonably efficient manner, we need some extra hands!
• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 13:30-14:00 I know, I’m preparing a lot — there are a lot of details and I want to get them right. This is tying up loose ends before meeting with one of my awesome team members who will promptly provide me with a hydra of questions… :) Also a moment of recursive brain explode-y as we contemplate how things might go with this library. They’re kind of a unique case. Everyone’s library is unique, but this one is even uniquer than most…
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 14:00-16:00 And here’s the hydra. For every question I get answered, five more questions pop up in the first question’s place.
• Acquisitions Research/Gathering Info 16:00-16:15 Reviewing MARC records received from one of our international libraries that I had to do a lot of clean up on last week. Yay for learning regex! Regex is *neat*.

Leave work — the blast of hot air from the elevator warns me that it’s ridonculously hot outside. Drive in hot weather for an hour to fetch The Girls from Auntie’s. Drive another half hour to get home, pick up everyone’s swim suits, a book, and some other stuff. Drive another half hour to meet my parents & husband at the local beach for dinner. Eventually come home to a freaking hot house (91F when we got home at 9ish).

TUESDAY

Late morning for me — that means I take the girls to Aunties. Made it to work in a little over an hour round trip from my house to Auntie’s to work — not too bad, considering I usually chat with Auntie a little.

• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 10:00-11:00 New client agenda for the meeting I prepared for yesterday. Filling in what I can as pre-prep mtg prep.
• Outsourcing Research/Gathering Info 11:00-12:45 Composing email response for a library who might help us with foreign language cataloging to help fill in some of our gap records. During this time, my lovely bosslady brought in the book The Time Trap for my team and me. Looking forward to seeing what kinds of things I pick up from this book…
• Admin Billing 12:45-13:00 Responding to library MARC record resource that updated their contract based on info from our lawyer. This doesn’t appear to be a super-easy renewal. We’ll see where things go from here…
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 13:00-14:00 Prep mtg for tomorrow’s client mtg with my team. Because they are totally awesome, they feel confident that we’re prepared for this meeting. I still feel very new & am nervous about it, but I’m glad they’ll be there because they know their stuff. They’re really amazing & I’m lucky to have another good team. Hoorah! I’d like to bring them with me to InfoCamp & do something, but I don’t have any idea what that something might be.
• Acquisitions Research/Gathering Info 14:00-16:30 *cries when mrk -> mrc borks the int’l records* Send stuff off to library that might help us with it. Really, this is a cross between the outsourcing stuff I’ve been working on and the records acquisition stuff. Ball’s in their court!
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 16:30-17:00 Setting up bugzilla bash & NOMS. We need to organize the outstanding bugs that are getting in the way of our productivity for the director. She wants to get some of that fixed for us which would be really great. A lot of the fixes are “well, I guess we do have a work around…” but none of them are efficient & some of them are only barely functional. But other stuff has a higher priority and yada yada… so to have someone with a little more leverage say, “yep — time to add some extra resources and Get That Fixed” will be a good thing.
• Admin Overhead 17:00-18:00 Organizing & planning for tomorrow. I know it sounds weird, but by taking about a half hour to wrap up & another half hour to plan the next day at the end of a day, it makes it much easier for me to come in and get right to work the next day. I don’t have to try to remember where I left off, what needs to be done, what my priorities are, because it’s all set up for me by my very own best administrative assistant — me, the night before. :) As I get more settled, this routine may go by the wayside a little, but at this point I’m tracking so much stuff, I think this might be How It Is for me from here on out. And in the name of productivity, I’m totally cool with that.

In the meantime, I’ve walked across the street to get a pint of blueberries & the heat outside is ugly. At the end of day I head out into the heat. Just straight home this time. Sit on the back deck & eat some fruit & chicken. It’s actually pleasant out there. I surfed for a bit as the computer was out there, then we came in to watch Deadliest Catch & Chopped because clearly we’re crazy. It’s come down several degrees in here since we came in. It’s only 90F. It was 94F when I got home. Uck. We shall see what tomorrow brings!

/as you were…

Next week I am free! FREE!! FREEEE!!!! I have to get the front bearings in my car fixed, go to the spa, try to find a home for various things in my house, get new fish for the bedroom tank (and a new right light for the living room one)… and more stuff than anyone should probably pretend to try to cram into a week. Which means I won’t get a bunch of stuff done. Ah well. Maybe at least watch some bewitched… Heh.

So I’m just off the BG Trail at home & 13 miles down BG is where I start work come the 22nd. I want an electric bike. Really badly. It just seems like a good thing to do rather than trying to find parking or bus an hour and a freaking half each way. I know. 13 miles — 1.5 hours. LAME.

Oof. M1 wants to know what the tooth fairy does with all the teeth. We also had the discussion last night about whether or not tooth fairies were like dentists — ie, not a single tooth fairy for the entire world, but a number of tooth fairies serving a local region. This whole fairy thing is starting to get complicated! We’re on our third envelope now, although lately they’ve been leaving notes on the white board we brought home from storage. Crap. I don’t know what the tooth fairy does with all the teeth!

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

Why does she get her own day & what’s this all about?

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

Until just a few weeks ago, I knew who Ada Lovelace was, or thought I did… and then I found out she’s also Lord Byron’s daughter. Poetry & computers. Code has its own rhyme & reason, poetry like a puzzle to put together, it makes sense, in a funny sort of way.

Wikipedia’s article says of her, “She is today appreciated as the “first programmer” since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built.” Funny, as a taxonomist, I sometimes feel like I’m manipulating symbols according to rules for machines not yet built too… Or for machines built, but not configured, or for machines that are built, but there’s no code interface to use the work I do. Or for machines built & programs owned… but not by us… But then again, despite the potential missed, my work is used & valued, just not always very efficiently or elegantly. You win some, you lose some, you draw some.

There’s Grace Hopper too. Her wikipedia entry says, “A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.” Woo, compiling! It’s the moment that always makes me fret while I wait to see if I did the install right… Computers are like knitting though. I can always tear it out & start over if I have to. Well, maybe I can’t always, but I certainly have often enough to know these things are possible.

Then there are the six women who programmed ENIAC in 1943-1945: Frances Elizabeth “Betty” Snyder Holberton, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen “Kay” McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, & Frances “Fran” Bilas Spence. From the article:

“Because the ENIAC project was classified, the programmers were denied access to the machine they were supposed to tame into usefulness until they received their security clearances. As the first programmers, they had no programming manuals or courses, only the logical diagrams to help them figure out how to make the ENIAC work.

They had none of the programming tools of today. Instead, the programmers had to physically program the ballistics program by using the 3000 switches and dozens of cables and digit trays to physically route the data and program pulses through the machine.”

In 1995, my best friend from college sat me down and showed me the minimal basics of html. Up until then, it was Word, solitaire, & tetris. Then came M1, Bee Lavender & HipMama.com & Mamaphonic. I hand-coded all but the board at Mamaphonic until 2004 when we switched to the Drupal CMS. I did some things here & there on HipMama.com before the CMS, but that was largely coded by Bee and various other people. Not long after I started doing stuff with the mamas, I landed myself pregnant with my second & in library school. Now I know whole bundles of women doing amazing things with technology. Phoebe and her really neato stuff with wikipedia, Darci and her completely amazing stuff with Plone & Plinkit, Lynn to whom we are ever thankful for helping us with Drupal at the HipMama.com sites, and hordes & hordes of other women doing awesome, amazing, excellent work as well.

Ada & Grace & all the rest of you, so many that I missed, thanks for blazing a trail for us!