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Amusing reference question of the day:

Teenage boy: Do you have Canary Road?
Me: Did you mean Cannery Row?
TB: Yeah, that's it.

Well, I'm the popular librarian today! I not only let the kids play Monopoly, but when it turned out the dice were missing, I made them paper dice from a template online. They were astonished that you could make dice.

And we also got a little grammar lesson after I heard "dices" (it just hurts my ears). They somehow thought that having only one "die" was funny.

My birthday is starting early this year - my first present has already arrived, from my father. He got it from an online auction, which explains why it is so early.

He got me a home theater system. I'm stunned. I can only imagine that he got an amazing deal on it (my father brings new meaning to the stereotype of the tight-fisted Scot - and if he read that statement, he would agree with great pride). It certainly looks like a fairly nice system, and what we've set up so far sound great (no rear speakers yet).

Rich is very excited about it, and spent the majority of his day off getting it set up and playing with it. Although he says if he turns into an audio geek and starts spending money on more equipment, he's totally blaming Dad.

The first movie we stuck in was the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It happens to have thunder in some of the opening scenes. The sound was realistic enough that the cats started looking around, and went to hide under the bed, as they do during actual thunderstorms. Much amusement for the humans.

I've been working on my web page(s) for the past few days, trying to clean up the markup ganked from someone else (with permission). Nothing like trying to understand and tweak existing code to improve your understanding of how HTML and style sheets work. I know SO much more about style sheets now.

So I've managed to eliminate all of the tables but one in the layout, make it look almost the same in Firefox and IE (though not quite), and add a few more live elements (via javascript) so there's always something different. I also managed to get virtually all the layout stuff in the style sheet, with only structural stuff in the HTML. There were just a few items that were exceptions to their classes. But now it's so much easier when I just want to change margins or whatever.

And all my various profiles on all the social sites are now interlinked. Now if I could just convince Google that this is the page that should show up before my profiles on userscripts.org, Amazon, and Google Co-op ....

I think it all looks pretty good.

I just placed a hold for a teenager named Tequila. OK, technically, Tequilla (with two Ls).

Why would anyone name their child that? It's even worse than Brandy (and there were three of those in my high school class).

Current Mood: mystified

I love that even at the height of summer, I'm dressed in three layers - and yet, I think I still look relatively summery. I have to do the tank-shirt-jacket thing in case the branch I'm sent to has gone overboard on the AC. But white pants and khaki jacket make anything look summery.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: the arctic

Saturday I attended a birthday for my grandmother, who turned 90. We call her Magie. The whole family wants to be just like her when we're her age. Complete with the selective hearing. The only thing she doesn't do is drive (thank god! - that was scary). She gardens, she plays bridge, she volunteers at the museum ... she has a more active social life than I do.

I got dragooned into picking up my Aunt Jean in New Jersey so that she could attend, which more than doubled my driving time, but that's OK. Aunt Jean was complaining that she couldn't believe she had to be picked up, "as if I was an old lady. And I'm not!" (she's 88, Magie's sister. Good genes on that side!)

The party was great, lots of family stories about all the stuff my Dad and his siblings got up to when they were younger. Funny stuff. Especially when almost every story seemed to end with 'fessing up to a parent, and either Magie saying "don't tell your father" or Gramps saying "don't tell your mother." I guess when you have 6 kids, you don't really want to hear about every single incident.

And one more cousin announced she was pregnant, which makes me the oldest one who doesn't have kids. That will be oh so fun at the next family function. I'm going to deflect any pushiness to my brother, who is the oldest one who isn't married. And who is, incidentally, the only Fleming boy. Desperate times.

I really need to update this more often.

So, attended the ALA conference two weeks ago. It had its moments, but I don't think I'm going to something that big again for quite a while. Definitely not alone - walking through the exhibits with someone else would have been much more entertaining. I missed a lot of the talks I was interested in because they were too early in the morning - I was coming in from a suburb, long commute time. Shame about some of them.

I did manage to meet up with a few people from online -

libwitch and a whole group of MetaFilterites. Very fun.

Then I went down to Newport News and visited family and friends. Finally got to meet my nephew (who is already a year old).

And then had an exhausting drive back up to NY, but which did not involve any accidents or tickets, so: good trip.

Separate update on this weekend coming next.

Ah, more justification:

Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things
Robert A. Heinlein

I always say that laziness=efficiency. Or, at least, lazy people want to find the most efficient way of doing things so as to do the least amount of work. It's actually a virtue! Well, sometimes.

I just had to ask one patron to leave the library because he wasn't wearing a shirt, and also ask his buddy to put his shoes on.

I know it's summer, but I don't think I should have to verbalize these things.

So, I've already heard from a couple people, but: who else on my friends list is going to ALA? My schedule is filling up, but I could probably meet up with a few more people.

So, so true:

Although today there were some moderately interesting questions.

When a sign says there's a height limit, there really is a reason:

(he was 6 inches over the height limit)

(from the New York Times today)

[Error: unknown template video]
OMG, I think I will die from the cuteness:

You know, Joss Whedon is awesome not just for his creativity, but also for his worldview and the way he expresses it:

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority -– in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

(edited to add a quote)

Well, I didn't go all out for my Mom on Mother's Day, but I did send her an assortment of forced spring bulbs, which she evidently really appreciated, as they don't really get spring flowers in Florida (hard to do spring if you don't do winter first).

So, she has daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips, and is very, very happy with them. I heard the phrase "so thoughtful" at least twice.

It's so nice when you know you got a gift right.

That's it. Evidently everyone in America thinks that everyone else in America is an idiot who cannot think or make judgments for themselves. They want to issue a R rating to movies that have people smoking. OK, movies that "appear to glamorize smoking".

I think most people in ~~America~~ the world know at this point that smoking is bad for you. Seeing someone smoking in a movie is not going to make them decide to take it up. And face it, movies set in certain eras need to have people smoking for verisimilitude, even the good guys!

And don't even get me started about how sex gets an R rating easier than violence. Um, wouldn't you rather your child see something sexual than something violent?

Of all people, a sex blogger has best summarized why I hate video on the internet:

People keep sending me videos (mostly YouTube) and links to podcasts, videoblogs, all that stuff. And I almost never post them. Why not?
Because they are so inexorably linear. I love the internet because the data flows at my speed. I can skimread, jump around, consume the bits I like and move on (next!) when I've got boring bits in my face. For that, I need text. Audio and video, compelling as they are, require me to slow down, focus on one thing on one of my three computer screens, and wait for the information to flow at whatever glacial pace the creator chose. That's fine for porn clips, but for pretty much anything else, I've already got 180 channels of narrowcast video programming on a big screen eight feet away that I never watch.

Some people say that my distaste for audio and video blogging makes me a crusty old fart who just doesn’t "get" the cool new thing. Me, I say I'm a hypermodern info consumer, moving too fast for linear data modes of the old twentieth century. I've been known to argue that audio and video blogging are reactionary trends, vain attempts to rescue the doomed and tired viewer/listener audience model. Whatever, maybe I am just an old fart. Doesn't matter. Vlogs and podcasts are dead to me, I just don't have the patience to sit through 'em.

Here's the most relevent part:

I love the internet because the data flows at my speed. I can skimread, jump around, consume the bits I like and move on (next!) when I've got boring bits in my face. For that, I need text.

Now, anyone who knows me, knows I speed-read. That is why video drives me insane - it's just such an inefficient way of transmitting information. I'd much rather read. I just don't understand the current mania for podcasts and videoblogs.

And I'm really amused that a sex blog explained it best.

Yes, two entries in one day! Because doing anything involving large amounts of text entry at home sucks, unless I want to dig out the keyboard for the tablet.

Anyway. Friday I went to the Metafilter meetup in NYC, and a good time was had by all. It turned into a pub crawl (at least three locations before I had to leave). Second location rocked, as they had hard cider on tap, and I could look like I was drinking beer like everyone else.

Unfortuntely, I went on a mostly empty stomach, drank just a little too much, and may have overshared a touch. Oh well. Hopefully no one thought I was a complete loss as a person.

I did find someone to share my fanfic obsession, and we had a great time comparing favorite themes.

So, definitely attending any future meetups I can, because that was fun. And, somehow, I ended up being treated to all my drinks, so next time I need to stand a round myself.

Well, yesterday we finally got off our butts and did our spring cleaning. I have to admit, it did give me a nice sense of accomplishment for the day. Rich was really in the mood - he was even rearranging the kitchen cabinets and stuff.

I, on the other hand, was concentrating on getting the winter stuff out of my closet and the summer stuff in. I also managed to clean up the second bedroom enough so that someone could actually sleep in there with no notice (the bed was covered with miscellaneous stuff). At some point we need to get some kind of storage in there - the closet is slowly being taken over.

Current Mood: accomplished

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Cascading downwards

ah, the mind-reading comes in handy

a good day

pwesents!

web-design self-tuition

why would you do this to a child?

clothes

my grandmother's birthday

various stuff

just came across a great quote

library decorum

ALA

the life of a public librarian

why signs are important

awwww

I love Joss

mother's day

oh, you have got to be kidding me

why I don't like internet video

meetup

spring cleaning

Profile

Links

October 2009

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