Five things involved in every sleepover I ever went to as a kid
- Sleeping bags (natch)
- Friday the Thirteenth, Part __
- Jolt Cola
- Camouflage pants
- Wandering the neigborhood at 3:15 a.m.
21 November 2008 | No Comments »
On Optimism
I don’t normally talk about who I support in elections. I usually prefer to play my cards close to my chest, since I don’t mind if someone votes for the other guy.
But tonight is different. Tonight, Barack Obama won.
Tonight, my country is eighteen years old again. Tonight, the future is an open book and the possibilities are limitless. Tonight, we can unite.
Tomorrow, we’ll go back to our bickering, our anger, our finger-pointing, our petty squabbles, our cynicism.
But tonight—just tonight—things are looking up. For the first time in what seems like forever, things look…hopeful.
Mahalo.
5 November 2008 | No Comments »
On Autumn in Chicago
Twitter can only be the work of the Father of Lies himself, because all my great ideas for posts get condensed down to 140 characters. (Hey, that would fit!)
Little of note has been going on lately; I have mostly been working and doing little else, although I did go this weekend to see The Princess Bride at the Music Box Theatre’s midnight show. I went with David and his fianceé Mel and a good time was definitely had by all.
Summer has definitely cashed its check here in Chicago and so we’re about to begin the long slide that ends with single-digit temperatures in January, February and March. On the upside, it’s October, which means it’s time to prepare for Hallowe’en. That is certainly a Good Thing.
Officially, I’ve been transferred to the Woodson Regional Library of the Chicago Public Library system, but right now, it’s a paper transfer, since I’ve been detailed (i.e., loaned) back to my original branch. However, I should be moved over in person sometime between now and January 1. We’ll see what happens.
I have been following the election, but only with moderate (enjoy that political humor, fellers) interest. I’ve actually reached a point where I don’t dislike the McCain/Palin campaign any more and I just feel embarrassed to see the depths to which they’ve sunk in order to try to scare up votes. Part of me can’t believe this is the same guy I really liked and wanted to win in 2000. I’m also amazed at how well Barack Obama’s campaign has been run. I think we’re looking at the Jack Kennedy of our generation (only with less Marilyn Monroe sex).
6 October 2008 | No Comments »
On Amazing Shows and Great Weeks
It’s been a good few weeks.
I saw The Dark Knight in IMAX and wow, was it ever amazing. I also went to Lollapalooza and saw some incredible bands, including Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, Flogging Molly, Explosions in the Sky and Nine Inch Nails, all of whom put on incredible shows. I took a bunch of very bad photos and videos that I’m sharing so you can laugh at my terrible skills.
I also had a big win when I got back to work, because I hosted a very successful event at my library, called “Stand Up Against Violence”, which drew almost fifty people. The event was a double-header, involving local author Marcus Jones who is a reformed gang member and an anti-violence organization.
All in all, the last few weeks have been good. I’m trying not to wait for the other shoe to drop.
15 August 2008 | No Comments »
On Taking Advice from Orange Men
A conversation we had last night:
Brenda: Ugh.
Rob: What?
Brenda: I’m watching this television show about parents who worship the ground their kids walk on. This kid is totally spoiled.
Rob: Wow; didn’t they learn anything from the Oompa-Loompas’ song?
Brenda: I don’t think I’d want to take advice from a bunch of slaves who work in a chocolate factory.
Rob (after a serious bout of laughing): Okay, good point.
17 July 2008 | No Comments »
On Geniuses
Alan Mathison Turing was born June 23, 1912. He developed theories in the 1920s about a “digital computer” which would be a machine that could answer just about any mathematical problem. He helped crack the Enigma code. He is the father of computer science. He was persecuted (and prosecuted) for his homosexuality. He committed suicide just before his fifty-second birthday by eating a poisoned apple. He is the biggest single reason—more than Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates—that you are reading this very sentence.
He would have been 96 today.
Happy birthday, Dr. Turing, and thank you.
23 June 2008 | No Comments »
On the Reading of Feeds
I’ve been using Google Reader for a while now and I’ve been very happy with it. However, I’ve recently started falling into the trap of feed overload. I find myself skimming stuff just to get through the massive number of feeds and I feel like I might be missing what I really like. As a result, I’ve just reorganized my feeds in Google Reader.
My feed groups (or tags, as Google Reader calls them) used to be organized by category, thusly:
- Big Blogs
- Comics
- Friends
- Librarianship
- Nerditude
- Photocasts
- Politics
- Web Design
Unfortunately, I was subscribed to more than a hundred feeds and it’s just not possible to keep up with that much information. Few people can, in fact, because although topical organization has benefits, the big problem is that there’s no way to differentiate between feeds in a particular topic that you follow religiously and ones you just skim through.
So I’m trying out Merlin Mann’s priority-based feed groups idea for a while. I’ve rearranged my feeds into three groups, nicknamed after the cards dealt in Texas Hold-‘em poker:
- The Flop: The stuff I follow very closely and read in detail. There are 24 feeds in The Flop.
- The Turn: The stuff I like, but that I can read a little more loosely. There are 38 feeds in The Turn.
- The River: The stuff that I’m interested in, but that I can freely skim or skip altogether. This group is for the feeds for which I can click “Mark all as read” without guilt. There are 13 feeds in The River.
There was also a substantial culling of old feeds that hadn’t updated since mid-2007. I think I unsubscribed from thirty or forty old feeds that were just hanging around.
I’m going to be testing this new system out over the next few weeks, reading feeds and moving them up and down in priority as I realize how much I read things. It will be interesting to see how this changes my reading habits. I’m also contemplating—as per Merlin, once again—a fourth group, called “on probation” or something similar, which will be for feeds that get on my nerves (e.g., infrequently read, update once every six months, post lots of pictures of cats with funny sayings in large impact fonts, low content, etc.) and are in danger of being unsubscribed.
(P.S.: Of particular note was my subscription to Digg’s “all news” feed, which has long since become a cesspool of stupid links and people putting “BREAKING” in their headlines. I unsubscribed from that god-awful trash-feed and re-subscribed to just the Digg Technology feed in an attempt to get away from the stupidity. Time will tell how well I have succeeded in that. Digg may, in fact, end up as the first probationary feed.)
17 June 2008 | 2 Comments »
The Speed Bump Weekend
Don’t you just love long weekends?
I spent my Memorial Day weekend in Texas with Brenda. I flew down on Friday and got back late last night. I had a great time, but there were a lot of annoying bumps.
To start off, I’ve been trying to get direct deposit set up, but my employer seems to be having some problem accomplishing this. Despite being told that direct deposit would be set up by the time payday rolled around on Thursday—the day before I flew—I still got a paycheck instead of a direct deposit receipt. Between meetings and such, I didn’t get a chance to deposit my paycheck until after banking hours, which meant that the money would have to post to my account on Friday. Unfortunately, when I landed in Houston in the morning, it hadn’t posted, so renting a car was made considerably more difficult.
The rental was a pain in the ass, too. Since they were only a couple of dollars more than a compact, I rented an “intermediate” car from Enterprise. We took a Dodge Caliber that I am reasonably certain was possessed by the devil himself. We got a “change oil” message about ten minutes after leaving the rental and discovered that there was no windshield washer fluid.
The car itself was a typical example of why our auto industry is being consistently beaten by the Japanese and Germans; the engine was clearly underpowered for a car of that size. What my little Nissan Sentra would have no problem with, this car strained to do. Accelerating from sixty to seventy miles per hour should not in any way involve the engine racing. Oh, and did I mention that the car burned fuel so fast that I was certain there was a gnome siphoning gasoline from our tank? Holy cow, did this car ever guzzle gas!
The car was clearly possessed by some dark force, as evidenced by the fact that the passenger-side dashboard slopes downward, guaranteeing that anything you put there—like, say, an iPhone—will slide promptly off when any acceleration is detected. My poor iPhone fell off the dash and struck the lever that you use to pull the seat forward and back and suffered a nasty ding right over the speaker and spider-web cracks in the screen. It will sadly have to be replaced, perhaps in a few weeks.
We went to the Menil Collection museum, where we saw some very nice art, including three of Joseph Cornell’s beautiful boxes. I’ve loved Cornell’s boxes for ages, but I’d never seen one in real life before that. Something about his works are so marvelously meticulous that I can’t tell whether a crack in the paint is the result of time or if Cornell intended it to look like that. We also went to the nearby Rothko Chapel and reflected on his paintings. (We also found out that the paintings, which are enormous, were brought in through the ceiling, since there was no way they could fit through the doors.)
We spent the night at the house of Brenda’s friend Lulu, who is very nice and lives in a house that is extraordinarily big for one person. Next morning, we went with Lulu, Jose and a few others out to New Braunfels (which is just outside San Antonio), where we were going to tube the Guadalupe River. Brenda and I ran into one small snag, here, as we accidentally followed the wrong red Chevy Silverado for about ten minutes. It was an easy mistake to make, since everyone in Texas drives a pickup truck. Everyone.
We eventually got to the river and had a nice time floating along. Since it was in a park which was okay with open containers, virtually everyone was floating down the river with coolers and drinking themselves silly. Still, the river was clean and cool on a hot day and we eventually met up with Lulu and Jose again. I banged the hell out of my heel on a rock jumping into the river. I thought I might have broken my heel, but since it felt a little better the next morning, I decided it was just a nasty jam and that was it.
Jose, Lulu and the others went camping that night, but since Brenda and I had no camping gear, we opted for a nearby hotel.
The next day, the others went off to Austin, while Brenda and I stayed in New Braunfels. Brenda and I tubed the river again and the following day, we went to Schlitterbahn, a water-park nearby, which was really impressive. (They had uphill water slides!) It certainly beats the pants off of Splish Splash, a mediocre water-park on the east end of Long Island. Schlitterbahn was a lot of fun, although the saturation of German-shounding names for rides and attractions unnerved me a bit. One ride even had music playing which sounded like Wagner. I half expected a ride to ask us to annex the Sudetenland.
We drove back to Houston. On the way, Brenda called Lulu, who said she’d gotten a tattoo of a fish on her leg to commemorate the weekend. I think if I were to do the same, I would have to get a tattoo of a speed-bump. We returned the devil-car and I flew home.
All in all, it was a fun, if not the smoothest, weekend.
27 May 2008 | No Comments »
On Updates (and the Lack Thereof)
I have neglected blogging again. Damn.
Last week, I spent most of the week in downtown Chicago, at the New Reference Staff Orientation that Chicago Public Library holds every year or so for new-ish staff. It was a lot of fun; we had two days of conference stuff, one day of touring libraries around the central and south districts and one more day of conference stuff. The touring was a lot of fun; I got to see a number of other branch libraries that I normally wouldn’t, including the beautiful Hall library (where Langston freaking Hughes used to come) and a host of others. More than anything, those four days restored my faith in my job, because in all honesty, I’d been feeling rather out on my own lately. I suppose that’s a symptom of just going “work, home, work, home,” etc. I met many new (and new-ish) librarians and library associates; I met the Commissioner of Chicago Public Library; I met wonderful senior staff and branch heads. All in all, it was a marvelous experience and reminded me why I’d gotten into this line of work. It’s renewed my faith in my choice of careers and I’ve promised myself I won’t let myself run dry as I think I had in the last month or so.
I have also started exercising again.
It’s been years (how sad is that?) since I had an exercise regimen and as a result, I have become what John Cleese used to refer to as a “pepperpot”. However, I don’t want to be one. While I wish I had the metabolism I had when I was eighteen, we all know which hand fills up first when you wish in one and defecate in the other.
Part of the reason is that two of the branch heads I met last week have run in at least four Chicago Marathons and it reminded me that when I was eighteen, I wanted to run a marathon. I’ve a long way (a very long way) before I can hope to complete such a trial, but it is my hope that I can stick with regular exercise and eventually, perhaps I can run a marathon.
There are a lot of things I’ve neglected with my schedule and blogging regularly is one of them; however, I want to get back in the habit of doing more than going to work, coming home and flopping down on the couch with a DVD. That way lies peril and ill health.
In other news, I have now had my new car (a silver 2008 Nissan Sentra with a stick shift) for almost three months and I still don’t have a name. Suggestions would be appreciated. Don’t bother with “Silver Bullet” (that was the name of my old Volvo) or “Silverado” (that was my sister’s old car). My car needs a name, so help me!
30 March 2008 | 2 Comments »
Have You Got a 27B/6?
A (paraphrased) conversation with the city:
Me: Why did my request for direct-deposit get returned?
City: You need to send the direct-deposit form to X.
Me: But…the form says to send it to Y. It doesn’t ever mention sending the form to X.
City: No, it wouldn’t.
Me: The direct-deposit form wouldn’t tell me the correct place to send the direct-deposit form?
City: No.
Me: (boggles)
18 March 2008 | No Comments »
