Month: April 2004

not much to say

I’m busy – come back in a week.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been concienciously avoiding many of the online distractions I usually frequent, such as an IRC channel, the LISNews community, and various other websites. I’m behind on a number of projects at work (where it was easy to justify an hour of LISNews reading) and I’m moving to a new location outside of town on Friday. I need to catch up on my work because there are a number of projects I’d like to get started on that I can’t until I finish the ones I am working on already. Also, I only have my bedroom and bathroom packed – there’s still the living room with all my books, CDs, and random trinkets, as well as the kitchen to do. Plus I have a stack of CDs to review for the radio that I have been putting off for a couple of weeks. Not to mention various engagements that I’d rather not break. When did my life get so busy that I have to make time at 11pm to read a book and relax?

All of this is to explain why I’ve been even less visible out there online than usual. Not that I post much here, but I felt like I needed to at least let folks know that I’m still alive. Also, I needed to publicly whine a bit.

php

I’m taking a class next fall on PHP.

The computer science department is offering a new course next fall called Web Programming with PHP. I’m signing up for it (if I can get the necessary over-rides) because I’ve wanted to learn PHP, but I don’t have enough discipline or programming experience to do it on my own from books. I have these ideas of things I want to do to enhance the user interface with our electronic resources, and I think that PHP will be a good first step towards gaining the knowledge I need to do implement those ideas.

feedster politics

Feedster and displaying your political preferences.

I was surfing around the Feedster site, mainly because I’m procrastinating, but also because I haven’t checked it out lately. I ran across this page where you can make your blogging voice heard and connect it with the candidate of your choice. Yeah, I’m sure they’ve had this up there for a while, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to put my little plug in. Not that it matters now.

I Blog For:

stupid American voters

“The pharmaceutical-drug and insurance industries are tickled pink. Guess who’s paying for it? You. Congratulations, moron. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message.”

This issue of The Onion has a satirical look at campaign ads that I think is hilarious.

A controversial 30-second TV spot for Kerry that aired throughout the Midwest Monday blamed the country’s ills not on Bush’s policies, but on the “sheer stupidity” of America’s voters.

“In the past four years, America’s national debt has reached an all-time high,” the ad’s narrator said. “And who’s responsible? You are. You’re sitting there eating a big bowl of Fritos, watching TV, and getting fatter as the country goes to hell. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

The sad thing is that it’s true.

linux for non-geeks

A new book published by No Starch Press.

Linux for Non-Geeks: A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow, and Have-Some-Fun Guidebook by Rickford Grant I received an email today from O’Reilly & Assoc. about this book. I’m on their mailing list for book announcements because I want to keep up with what’s new for computer geeks, since I’m the library liaison to the Computer Science department. This title caught my eye. I’m a bit of a computer geek, but I’m not very good at tinkering with programs or the OS, so my laptop has most of the out of the box configuration for the Corel distribution. Unfortunately, that distribution is no longer supported, and as a result, my kernel is very old (in terms of the age of Linux), and I can’t install most new programs developed for Linux. I’ve been toying with downloading some other distribution, but I haven’t found one yet that is non-geek friendly. If this book was written by the author for his mother, then I think it might be useful for me to at least get my feet wet. Maybe someday when my computer geekiness becomes so great that I dream in UNIX code I’ll look back at this entry and chuckle….

shameless plug

I’m a librarian DJ, too!

I’m still catching up on reading my RSS feeds from this past weekend (I was out of town), so I hadn’t seen Jessamyn’s post about the librarian DJs in Massachusetts until just now. I thought I’d take the opportunity to remind folks that I, too, am a radio personality once a week. You can check out my playlists or listen to the live stream. I’m on every Monday from 3-5:45pm.

NASIG 2004

I’m going to NASIG!

Today I finally registered for the NASIG 2004 conference in Milwaukee. I get reimbursed by my library after the conference, but coming up with the chunk of change needed to register before the deadline is always a bit tricky. I have my flight booked and my room reserved. Now I just need to figure out how to get from Milwaukee to Midway in Chicago on that Sunday, and I need to find a roommate, although I have a few options there.

I’m really looking forward to this conference. As a serialist, it’s probably the best conference I could attend. There are quite a few sessions on issues relating to electronic resource management, which I am very interested in. Beyond the conference program and the networking, the people that I see at the conference make NASIG special to me. I met some wonderful folks my first year attending the conference, and we’ve had lots of fun together ever since. Although in recent years, there has been a bit of a convergence in Oregon, most of us do not live in the same state. The conference is the only time we see each other, and we do a pretty good job of making up for the time and distance in between.

css.php