Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

When I imported my (very) old MT posts into my new installation of WP a few months ago, I discovered several draft posts I’d completely forgotten. In this case, I can’t even remember how I found the passage below, or what I was thinking about when I saved it as potential post-fodder. Rereading it now, though, I think it begs for a corresponding flickr stream. Sigh. Must find time to pick up the photography hobby, too, and finally put that dSLR to proper use…

First saved February 3, 2003:

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you —-beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Edward Abbey 1928–1989

Illegitimati non carborundum

I expect this will become a mantra for me over the next four years, and is what I’m trying to remember today.

sigh.

Originally posted in my space at LISNews (hey, why not - makes it look like I’m more active here!):

So, a year and a half ago I was sending in my grad school applications, complete with that “why I wanna get my <insert appropriate acronym - MLS, MSLIS, MSLS, etc. - here>” essay. I wrote about being something of a techie (math/cs in college, and subsequent employment as a Unix system administrator for several years before my current role as “information architect” [which doesn't conform exactly to what's described in the Polar Bear Book, but that may be a topic for later] ) with a strong desire to eventually move out of a corporate library setting “into an academic setting in which I can combine two desires: to continue applying technology to assist others in their information gathering and analysis, and to positively impact the education of younger generations by introducing them to the technologies and methods by which they, too, can learn how and where to find the information they need to know.”

I quickly decided to further postpone the move to a more academic role when I discovered that the School Media Specialist program at my Information School of choice (and probably at other schools as well?) left no room for selecting my own electives - a freedom I wasn’t yet willing to give up. I figured I could start building the foundation now, and at some point in the future back-fill with the education-related coursework.

Since last summer, I’ve discovered two things that are somewhat unsettling to me:

1. With practically every new course I take, my future goals - what I want to do with this degree - seem to change significantly (do I really want to go the school media specialist route? what about medical librarianship? or a different kind of special library? or maybe sticking with my current job description which will be bolstered by the more technical LIS offerings?)
2. With each course - and after each review of the course offerings - I grow increasingly more amazed that I can graduate with a mere 36 credit hours (12 courses) and call myself a degreed librarian … how can 12 classes be enough??

I’ll reach my half-way point in December, and with all but one or two of the core requirements under my belt, some of the more difficult decisions will need to be made: which electives to select to round out the rest of my degree, and which direction I want to take upon graduation. I can sympathize with Jenne’s situation (see posting from June 15) and found the comments there to be helpful. I guess the purpose of my ramblings here is to take her question(s) a little further:

• how frequently do folks with a Library/Information degree switch the types of libraries in which they work? I’m glad to know that many people probably change their minds during the course of school, but I wonder how many make changes after graduation and after working in a particular type?
• I tend to be a dabbler in lots, expert in little; is a broad-but-somewhat-shallow program really ok for most positions? Do many/most folks continue on to get advanced certificates in a more focused subject area?
• Related: outside of conferences, how often do degreed librarians take advantage of continuing education programs? For those that do, which is more of a driving force – the desire to keep learning, or the need to acquire new skills for a particular job?

Thanks for reading my ramblings, and thanks in advance for any insights, anecdotes, or “me too!”s that you all might have!

Ok, here’s a word to the wise: if you ever decide to post images to a web site, think carefully about the names you give to your image files, and to the links that point to those images. If you don’t, you could discover that your images are being found and used in the most unlikely ways.

For example, when Husband and I bought our house (wow, nearly 3 years ago), we had grand plans for all the work that we wanted to do (and that the house sorely needed). We also had grand plans for documenting this process, in the form of a joint weblog (http://www.muddle.org/fatidgies/ ). Several of the links on the site still don’t work (maintenance of the site isn’t high on the priority list currently). and while we have made a few improvements to the house since purchase, the only pictures currently available illustrate the state of things before the papers were actually officially signed and before we moved in.

Here’s the issue… we bought a fixer-upper (well, that’s not the exact issue, I’m getting to it in a bit). We’re quite willing to admit this, and when posting the original pictures I gave the files names such as “ugly-kitchen-sink” and the link name “Ugly Kitchen.” At the time, I didn’t give any thought to the fact that somehow these images might make it into Google’s searchable index of online images, and I certainly never dreamed that a search for ‘ugly kitchen’ would yield ours in the first slot (and yes, that picture in the second spot is from our house, too… tho I must stress that it was taken before any of our stuff was moved in!).

One of the benefits of running your own web server is having access to the server logs. One day this spring I decided to go poke around through the logs to see what search engines and other sites were accessing which pages at muddle.org .. to my surprise, I saw hits going to the fatidgies website, which was unusual since we hadn’t shared that URL with many people at all. Even stranger, I noticed that people were managing to find the fatidgie images via Google image searches using the string “ugly kitchen” - and some of these dear folks were actually linking to the pictures on their own web journals.

It’s this latter bit that leaves me feeling conflicted. While I recognize that one really shouldn’t post information on the Internet if it’s not meant to be found, I don’t particularly like the fact that some folks (scroll down to the June 21 entry) go as far as embedding my pictures in their own pages. They haven’t gone quite so far as to download the pictures to their own servers and pass them off entirely as their own (which would be worse, imo), but rather than linking to the pictures in text (and thereby giving credit where credit is due [which one might argue is not particularly desirable when it comes to our house, but that's not the point]) they include the image inline. Not only does this make the picture, at first glance, appear to belong to that site, it also impacts our web server because every time that page is loaded the image has to be downloaded from our machine. In our case, this isn’t a big deal because we currently don’t pay for bandwidth, but in the not-too-distant future this might not be the case. There are measures I could take to prevent this from happening, or to correct it when I find it (like what Medley did when she discovered that someone had done the same thing to her - she surreptitiously replaced the “stolen” image with a different one), but I have neither the time nor the inclination to do so at the moment - it’s one of those things where I want to rant about the problem but don’t like the idea of having to implement a “fix” or work-around for something that’s just plain wrong in the first place.

Snippets from something I turned in for class recently, related to this silly legislation that was introduced to the Senate last week:

Under pressure from a fearful and hidebound content industry and in the guise of protecting our nation’s children from the “worst type of villains” - those who would corrupt and exploit the innocence of children by encouraging them to commit copyright infringement and/or access pornography - Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has introduced new copyright legislation that ultimately threatens to stifle technological and creative innovation. Hatch is no stranger to copyright controversies; he’s a co-author of the widely criticized DMCA, and last year suggested consideration of legislation that would grant copyright holders the right to destroy the computers of those believed to illegally download music (a suggestion that elicited more than one raised eyebrow and never officially made it to the Senate floor). Now, he is trying a different tack in a misguided attempt to curb perceived copyright infringement and thereby appease officials in the music and movie industries.

Originally dubbed the Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation (INDUCE) Act, the IICA (Inducing Infringements of Copyright Act) bill proposes an amendment to existing copyright law that would enable copyright owners to sue anyone who “induces” copyright infringement, where “intentional inducement” is defined as “intentionally aids, abets, induces, or procures” and “intent may be shown by acts from which a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement.”

The primary targets of this legislation are the vendors of P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing software that enables PC owners to download and/or share files over a network connection. P2P vendors such as Napster, Grokster, and Morpheus have come under considerable fire, particularly from the music industry, because many users of the services download music and movie files illegally. Last year the courts determined that P2P software distributors are not legally liable for this copyright; this new bill would essentially overturn that decision, and could also impact the 1984 Betamax lawsuit, which stated VCRs are legal because they are “capable of substantial noninfringing uses.” Additionally, the overly broad language of the Act opens the door for court rulings against manufacturers of other technologies such as photocopiers, DVRs (e.g., Tivo, ReplayTV), and MP3 players such as Apple’s iPod; lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation have already drafted a mock lawsuit against Apple as an example, claiming that the iPod’s 10,000 song capacity is well above the size of the average user’s music collection, and thus induces copyright infringement by inviting users to download music illegally to store on the device.

[snip of other details that can be found by reading any of the search results for "induce act".. and boring bits of me complaining about how Hatch is using the kids and artists as an excuse to push through legislation on behalf of the RIAA and etc.]

Legislators should refrain from pushing legislation that panders to Hollywood’s manufactured need for ultimate control while simultaneously rewarding their stubborn refusal to accommodate contemporary methods of producing, distributing, and enjoying entertainment. Promoting the notion that such pandering in any way protects children is particularly shameless. Instead, Washington would do well to encourage the RIAA and other copyright owners to invest in programs to educate citizens about fair use, the purpose behind copyright laws, and their rights and responsibilities in an increasingly digital age. Even more importantly, in the spirit of forward-thinking American innovation, legislators and copyright holders alike should be looking for ways to embrace these new technologies and associated opportunities in ways that will spur ever more creative, artistic, and literary output.

So there. Hmf.

(and many thanks to my editor for giving this a once-over last week! )

I need to get my digital camera fixed (again. blast.) so I can start carrying it around with me everywhere… I never know when I’m gonna need or want it.
Take the other day, for example. Oh, to have had my camera ready to capture the unfolding circus centered around my lovely car, Trog, this past weekend. (I should note here that the name did not originally stem from the Trogdor character.. although we’ve since adorned our Trog with a Trogdor sticker)

I’m often a procrastinator when it comes to car maintenance. I almost always go past the “recommended” 3,000 miles before getting the oil changed, for example (and with this new car it’s usually a lot more than that, since the “change oil soon” light is not - according to the manual - actually a sign that I’m Already Screwed, but is merely a helpful suggestion). True to form, I had waited until the light went on to get the change, and had gone 5k miles past the time for Trog’s 30,000-mile tune-up. On Saturday I drove over to the local dealer to get the oil change and part of the tune-up that could be done quickly (we were scheduled to head to Maine ’round noon), which amounted to air & fuel filter changes. All went well, and I headed over to the mall to do some last minute shopping. All went downhill quickly after that…

In a hurry to get home to pack & head northward, I tossed my purchases in the car and started ‘er up. Or tried to. The thing wouldn’t turn over, even after multiple attempts. Suspecting problems from the oil change, opened my car door and looked down, seeing a HUGE dark puddle spreading out from under my car. Assuming it was related to the oil change (and not really registering the smell of gasoline wafting from the mess), I called the dealer and they sent a tow truck over immediately. While I was on the phone, a kind passerby stopped to ask if I was ok, and then went on about his business when I informed him a truck was en route. More about passerby in a moment.

Unfortunately for me, the dealer - the same folks who had not an hour earlier spent 90 minutes working on my car - informed the tow folks that Trog was a front-wheel drive, when, in fact, it’s AWD. By this time, TowGuy - with his FWD-only truck - and I are both sitting in the parking lot (now registering the gas fumes, and staring with some concern at the huge puddle under my car) waiting for the flatbed truck to arrive. Previous passerby wanders back to his car, and drives off talking on his cell phone. I think nothing of this, until the police car shows up a few minutes later, informing us that someone called them to report the gas leak (hm. I don’t know whether to be mildly annoyed or grateful). At the same time, two representatives from Mall Security come out to get details for their report, and while we’re going over that, the firetruck arrives. Neat.

Husband arrives. Curious onlookers gather. Firemen spray their petro-safe foam stuff on the spill, on the underside of my car, on the underside of the car next to mine. We all wait for the flatbed. Husband and I boggle at our lack of significant outrage at the incident, even though it’s obvious that something Serious happened while Trog was being serviced, and a simple spark could have ignited and any one of us (me!) could have been crispy critters there in the parking lot.

Anyway, to make a long and boring (in the retelling, at any rate) story short, it was a “faulty fuel filter clip” that went unnoticed during the filter change, which caused my car to leak large amounts of gas when the ignition was turned on (I can hear you skeptics saying “yeah, right, faulty fuel clip indeed; we’re choosing to believe the claim). Quickly fixed at the garage, with apologies and a promise to provide the remainder of the tune-up in a few days, free-of-charge.

It doesn’t look much like spring, what with the skies above Massachusetts in the process of dumping 10-12″ of snow on our lawn. However, I’m slowly starting to get into the spring cleaning mode. At least, the mental list of items that need to get tackled in the coming months is being made; this, for me, is a start.

Not only does that breath of fresh air need to be added to the content here, I’m bored with the interface and want to tackle a redesign this spring. Unfortunately I tend to be much more interested in fiddling with technology and getting things to work than I am in actually maintaining the output once it’s running like clockwork; this poses somewhat of a problem when it comes to updates, as the frequency of entries over the last several months indicates. With luck, I’ll find a new look-and-feel to be more inspiring.

This spring will hopefully mark the start of our landscaping plans at the house. The back yard is in desperate need of regrading, which fortunately requires the removal of our back porch (a very good thing, since we’ve discovered a few rotting steps). I can’t wait to have a real back yard, free of the strangling vines and vine-like plants (bittersweet, possibly?) that have overrun a rather large section of it, and I’m hoping to find the time to get some more day lilies planted along the perimeter (gotta love the low-maintenance plants). The plan was to start some of the preparation this coming weekend, but it looks like tonight’s snowfall is going to delay those plans for at least a week or so.

As usual, the house itself is in need of spring cleaning (we suffer from serious CHAOS - “can’t have anyone over syndrome”). A while back, L pointed me to FlyLady.com, a neat site with some great tips on how to avoid the chaos and keep the house in shape. Unfortunately I always seem to be in need of the crisis cleaning hints (boy, I wish I had remembered these tips this weekend, as my folks are planning to be in town for part of this upcoming weekend). Mom’s always said that just a few minutes each evening will help keep the messes at bay, but I never seem to be able to follow that wisdom.

One of the target areas for the spring is what I like to call the “craft room.” The ultimate goal is to get the boxes out of the way so I can comfortably set up my sewing machine and actually spend some time working on some quilting projects (I seem to have the same hoarding tendencies with fabric that I do with books; my fabric stash is getting quite large these days). Husband and I both have a fondness for modern tech toys, but my sewing machine is one thing that isn’t state-of-the art, and I love it. It’s a Singer Featherweight that belonged to my great-grandmother, and it does everything that my newbie projects require:

I’m definitely envious of the motivation the folks at ATQ have for their projects; reading that site always makes me want to seek out a local quilting (or knitting or crocheting, for that matter) group to join, but alas, that’ll probably have to wait until I finish my degree program.

And summer’ll be here before we know it…

Just a quickie post for now, hopefully something a little longer later this week.

School is chugging right along; this semester is more hectic than usual, due to an increased workload and two courses, but both the database class and the information organization class are turning out to be fun, interesting, and highly applicable to work. Yay.

Something that was posted to our class discussion board by a fellow student earlier this week:

Alternative Source Citations : Newest Rulings on Alternative Source Citing.

When writing papers and needing to provide courses in the references section, this page can come in handy, particularly if one has some rather… unusual.. sources. My current favorite (considering I have one of these on my desk):

Laughter has always been a big part of my life, particularly during family gatherings. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, particularly when I was in college and when I was living in VA & NC; it always means lots of my mom’s fantastic food, and even more good humor. There is always good-natured ribbing between my brothers and myself (there was a span of several years when my mother refused to sit me next to or directly across from Brother M during mealtime, as inevitably he’d make some snarky comment under his breath or give me one of his one-eyebrow-raised looks, which always resulted in a gasping fit of giggles), Dad’s horrific puns (which seem to get even worse as the years go by!), teasing of the parents, and Simpsons quotes (and other pop culture references) galore. Family gatherings have made me really appreciate environments in which there’s abundant amusement, but not until recently did I realize that I no longer laugh that much at work, and how much I actually miss it.

I first started working at my current place of employment in the mid-90s, back when I was learning Unix system administration and worked with a bunch of other techies. Nearly every day saw us lunching together in the cafeteria, where the conversations were almost always humor-filled, and always enjoyable. I usually met for daily coffee with another group of like-minded folks at work, and tech talk was almost always interspersed with a few jokes. After two years, I moved to VA into a very different environment, but one thing remained the same - the humor. Actually, the jocularity there took on a very different flavor - much more geeky, and not for the thin-of-skin or easily offended (if you’ve ever seen South Park, you’ll have a sense of the milder side of most of the jokes in that work environment). Despite the fact that I refer to my time in VA at that job as one of life’s “learning experiences” (a euphemism of grandest proportions), I have to admit that I did enjoy the more social aspect of the environment and my coworkers when not dealing directly with work stuffs.

Three and a half years ago, I started working in my current group, which is small and geographically dispersed. Most of our communications take place via emails and conference calls, and I thought I’d adjusted quite nicely to being a cube-hermit (the folks I sit near are not in my group and we very rarely have any interaction aside from a cursory “hi” in the morning and “have a good evening” on the way out the door). Last week, however, I was reminded how much I’m missing.

One of our current projects necessitates my working with some software vendors in order to test drive their products before selecting one to purchase. Last week marked the first of our official tests, and I found myself working for four days with the sales engineer, trying to understand the software. There were several problems with the software, actually, but on Friday as I was writing up my report I was surprised to discover that it hadn’t really been a frustrating week; I laughed more at the office last week than I have in ages, due largely to the fact that the vendor was so laid back and had a sense of humor that I could appreciate. (I’m suddenly reminded of a Jack Handey/Deep Thought, which was something like: “Dad always said laughter is the best medicine, which is why, I guess, so many of us died of tuberculosis” ; aside from the tuberculosis bit, there *is* something to be said for laughter as “medicine”) He reminded me a great deal of many of the folks I’d worked with in VA and a few in NC; and while my current coworkers all have fine senses of humor, there’s something to be said for people in the workplace with whom you can share a chuckle at things like Strong Bad’s English paper. (don’t ask me why that’s funny. it just is)

At any rate… thank you, VendorDude, for the reminder that I still need to have some of that face-to-face contact with some of the other tech people in the workplace, no matter how comfortable I think I am in my cube/cave, and for reminding me to add this to my list of criteria when I’m on my next job hunt.
I suppose I should also add my thanks for illustrating that not all vendors are evil.

February’s been a hard month; work’s been rather hectic for both Husband and myself, and February presented us with cat problems as well. At the end of January, we discovered that Idgie (my HugelyFatAndNeurotic darling) had two sizeable (well, what I’d consider sizeable) lumps on her belly. After a quick trip to the vet, it was determined that she had kitty breast cancer (a concept which, while perfectly logical, I guess, still strikes me as being bizarre), and a kitty masectomy (no less bizarre to me) was scheduled.

The poor thing wasn’t pleased about the two long scars down either side of her stomach, but seemed to be recovering well a day or so after the surgery. The vet gave us one of those cone-shaped collars to take with us in case she started licking her wounds, but we were pleased to see that she didn’t seem to be at all concerned with her stitches. Note to other cat owners: always use the collar. Idge turned out to be a stealth-licker; after three days her recovery seemed to slow, and she was much more lethargic and in pain than she had been. Licking her wounds when we weren’t looking(!) had created a nasty infection, so on went the collar and in went the antibiotics. Later that week, in went the drains to help empty the wounds (yuck).

Two weeks after the surgery, Husband took Idge back to the vet to have the drains removed, and called me at work with the bad news. The test results from the biopsy were not good - she had an aggressive form of cancer (i.e. anywhere from just a few weeks to just a few months to live), and the infection had killed the skin around her wounds (i.e. they’d need to re-do the stitching to reconnect healthy skin).

Given the fact that the cancer was so aggressive, and that going through the re-suturing would be difficult for her to deal with, we opted for the only real choice we had and put her down that afternoon. It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do, since she was the first pet I’d adopted on my own (my family had a cat when I was growing up, but I don’t really remember having any idea what it meant when Mom said she had to put Ralph to sleep - according to her, she was more upset by the ordeal than my brothers and I were), and was a real sweetheart (neurotic, but sweet). She’s left a big empty space in the house, and it seems strange not to see (and hear) this pear-shaped fuzzy cat stomping around the kitchen, squacking, or curled up on her bed in the corner of the kitchen (one of her favorite spots, aside from under our bed).