Hidden Peanuts

A couple of people have asked me where I disappeared to since I last posted, and this summer in general. Nowhere exciting this month I’m afraid - I’ve just been extremely busy. My job turned one year old a few days ago, and I’m in the midst of experiencing my first start of the fall semester there. I wasn’t quite ready for the rush of professors wanting to bring their classes in. But I’m not complaining, it is definitely good to be useful. Oh, and I’m also officially Faculty now! The title change doesn’t affect what I do from day to day, but the recognition is very nice.

I also did a lot of traveling this summer. I visited:

-New Orleans
-Rochester
-Pittsburgh
-An unintended night in Atlanta
-Chicago
-Passed through Nashville

I feel like I’m leaving something off that list, hmm…

In what free time I’ve had, I’ve gotten a decent amount of reading done. I finally got to finishing the Chronicles of Narnia, I’m well into the Dresden Files series, and fit in a couple of random novels in between.

In gaming, I really didn’t get to it that much this summer. But I did play through Ultimate Spider-Man for the Xbox. It’s a very short game (I finished it in a total of about 6 hours), but also very well executed. The voice acting and plot are of a surprising caliber compared to most games, let alone comic book based ones. I paid $5 for it, which was more than fair. Oh, and of course my DS got a workout while traveling.

My Netflix subscription also atrophied a bit - just didn’t have time to watch much. But I’ve lately been catching up on HBO’s Entourage, and loving every episode. After I’m done with that, I plan on re-watching all the Star Trek movies. Today’s news that the original Kirk series will be re-released with updated special effects inspired me. It’s been years since I saw most of them. But my in-theater movie highlight of the summer? Snakes on a Plane. Great cheesy fun.

On the gadget front, I upgraded my phone to a Razr. The V3m specifically, and I absolutely love it. The 1.3 megapixel camera in it performs surprisingly well outside, although it has problems indoors.

One random highlight of the summer: A behind the scenes tour of the US Space & Rocket Center’s archives, as part of our work with them to digitize their collection. I’m more than a bit of a space geek at heart, so it was an especially amazing collection to me.

So yes, life is good. I’m mostly looking forward to this oppressive southern summer’s end. Maybe I’m a wimp, but I don’t know how anybody lived here before air conditioning arrived.

Next week my fall/winter travel set begins: Disney World (!), Buffalo for a wedding, Nashville for LITA Forum, various holiday travels, and who knows what else.

On a final technical note, I see that my category links aren’t working correctly. They miss all posts made since I switched from categories to tags. Whoops! I’ll try to get that fixed soon.

With today’s announcement of new travel restrictions, there has understandably been a lot of confusion.

This morning on the Today show I heard a brief mention that all electronics are now banned from carryon items. This information persisted throughout the day, and the local NBC station here even did an extensive piece on this fact during the evening news.

According to the TSA’s own FAQ about the new restrictions, this is not true.

I’ve also seen news coverage repeatedly state that travelers will be expected to taste the few liquids still allowed (baby bottles, for example) in front of security screeners. Again, the TSA’s FAQ says this isn’t true.

I’m inclined to cut the morning news some slack, as the information was new and everyone was still processing it. But by the evening, some basic fact checking really should have been accomplished.

I’m finally back from a whirlwind two weeks of travel, during which I visited: New Orleans, Nashville, Atlanta, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and the Thousand Islands area. Atlanta was not an intended destination, but thanks to Delta’s atrocious customer service I got to spend the night. That’s a horror story for another time. Needless to say I’m exhausted, but it was more than worth the craziness to see so many family members and friends.

I’m suffering from information overload now that I have time to sit down and see all that I missed. My list of RSS feeds has never been quite so intimidating.

I had an interesting experience at a gas station in rural Pennsylvania. There I got to use the RFID chip embedded in my new debit card for the first time. While seamless (just wave the card, no button pushing necessary at all), the process makes me a bit nervous. Something about removing the safeguard of a PIN feels wrong, and I’m placing a lot of faith in my bank’s ability to make my chip uncopyable. This wouldn’t bother me in, say, a library card. But in a card so closely tied to my financial identity, it’s another matter entirely.

An interesting note: The Wordpress plugin I use to display what I’m currently reading on my site (Now Reading) can’t handle books that aren’t published yet, so I’ve disabled it for the moment. If anyone is interested, I’m currently in the middle of Stephen King’s upcoming Lisey’s Story, which I grabbed a preprint of at ALA.

What an amazing day! I met Neil Gaiman! (Thanks for spotting his signing, Beth!) And oh yeah, other great stuff happened too

The trip here was relatively uneventful, thankfully! Some construction around Nashville’s airport had me worried, but I persevered. Kudos once again to Southwest.

Shared a taxi ride from the airport with a fellow attendee I met on the plane. Librarians are so very friendly!

So I checked in to the dorm I’m staying at, and caught a shuttle downtown. Picked up my conference materials (the gigantic book of events is the most intimidating thing ever), and hit the exhibit floor. Google had a much larger booth than last year’s table and a banner. And Elvis is there, too. Talked to a few vendors related to work, again everyone was really friendly. How does everybody have a connection to Huntsville? Completely randomly ran into Beth, after we both tried and failed to attend events that were overflowing out the door. We returned to the conference floor, where she noticed Neil Gaiman signing Anansi Boys! Not only that, but giving out free hardback copies to be signed.

Later, went to Membership Meeting I. It was… anticlimactic to say the least. Less than 75 people attended, which is less than the one half of one percent of membership necessary to vote on issues. Later more people showed up, but it didn’t matter anyway since nothing was even up for vote. But in the interest of public disclosure, here’s the notes I took:

-ALA 2006 official attendance: 20,843 attendees registered, and 4494 vendors. Less than 1000 fewer than attended the last event in Orlando, which isn’t bad considering the worries about New Orleans.

-The recent dues increase will be used for a number of projects as part of an overall grand plan for 2010. Some projects are more member input, a diversity web course, and the development of a full strategic/financial plan over the next four months will outline this in more detail.

-Amazingly, ALA has no demographic data on members for things like salary. This will be addressed soon and used to evaluate a potential tiered membership fee structure.

After that, I strolled over to the opening session. Madeline Albright was the keynote speaker, and did a pretty good job. She was interesting, but I question whether going as in depth on foreign policies as she did was relevant to the conference. Mayor Nagin also appeared, as did the lieutenant governor of the state and a videoed message from Winton Marsalis.

Next, I met up with Beth and her roommate Alyssa for dinner. Mmm po’boys! Got to see a bit of the French Quarter in the process.

And last but certainly not least, we attended the Bloggers’ Bash Leslie Berger threw in her Hilton suite. I put a ton of faces with blogs I read, and had some great conversations. Gulf Coast librarians were invited too, and they had some very moving stories to tell. One thing in particular they wanted passed on: Please do not donate any more books to them. They are simply out of storage space, and money is far more needed.

On that topic, it is very surreal to see the places featured in so much news coverage of Katrina last year. Most of the houses the shuttle bus and taxis took me by still have the spraypainted marks from search and rescue teams, and probably one in three houses has some sort of active repair going on (and many more need it). New Orleans has a long way to go. But even so, it is open for business. Everyone has been extremely welcoming, and my only real regret is that the St. Charles streetcar isn’t back in service yet. I would have loved to ride it from Loyola to the convention center.

For those I met tonight, I am horrible with names. Would you mind dropping me an e-mail to say hi and force my brain to make a connection? Haefele@gmail.com

All the pictures I took today are here.

I stayed out later than I intended, but it was worth it! Now: sleep.

Some friends and I have decided to take a trip to Disney World this fall. I haven’t been since I was about six years old, so I’m really excited. After picking a hotel, I was curious to see what it was like beyond the official site description.

One Flickr search later, I had 613 photos to look through.

The way dorm room selection worked at my college, rising sophomores got the worst part of the deal. Freshman had spots assigned in designated freshman dorms. Seniors had first pick of what was left, Juniors next, and Sophomores got whatever was left over. Frequently, this meant the rooms actually ran out before every student could get one. That’s what happened to me and my roommate Jim - we got put on a waiting list, told we’d get whatever opened up over the summer.

To make a long story short, we ended up living in the Zerbe Health Center on campus. Two giant patient rooms had been converted into two dorm rooms, four guys in each, to help alleviate the room shortage. There were two singles down the hall as well, so 10 guys total (and an eleventh friend who might as well have lived there). We had to keep things down during the day, but at night we had the run of the building. Wheelchair races up and down the hall were not uncommon. The kitchen was ours to do with as we wanted, too. There we learned valuable lessons like “Don’t put hand soap in the dishwasher.” On the day of meningitis vaccines, when tons of students were tromping through the building, we threw a dorky party. I had better single moments in college, but not a better whole year. We made our own fun, but not without help.

Part of what made “The Ranch” (as we started calling the building) so special were the nurses who worked there. In particular, the head nurse Karen Danielson. Go look at this picture again, I’ve made a note marking her in the background. She treated the ten of us like we were her kids. She was a chef on the side, published a successful cookbook and was more than willing to share her culinary skills with us. Karen even went along with our whims when someone decided deep frying a twinkie would be a good idea. She talked to us when we were down, thrilled as the seniors got jobs and/or engaged, helped pick out outfits for dates (in one case even altering some pants for a guy), watched afternoon tv with us, and of course took care of us when we got sick.

Karen died of a sudden illness on Wednesday. I just found out. Unfortunately I never got back to see her after I graduated. I won’t be able to make it to the funeral, and just wanted to get a few words down. Campus won’t be the same without her.

Found on BoingBoing this morning:

Someone in Portland has a homemade fake car registration sticker. I guess they needed a barcode to make it look even somewhat legit. So, they stole it from a library item! Here’s the original post with picture:

http://totebagsandfannypacks.blogspot.com/2006/03/parking-in-portland-maine.html

The bar code is: 3 1220 00777 6211

The public library I used to work at started patron numbers with a 2 and item numbers with a 3. Anybody from Portland know how their system works?

This song/slide show makes me smile like an idiot:

http://www.laughinglibrarian.com/bd_blogga.htm

Plus, a mention of me is good for the ‘ol ego

Today I finally broke down and preordered Black, an upcoming shooter for the Xbox (and other systems). While there at Electronics Botique, I got talking with an employee about the game - in particular the demo, which I hadn’t had a chance to try.

EB just happened to have an extra copy of the Official Xbox Magazine, with the aforementioned disc included, on hand. The very nice employee threw it into the deal, free of charge.

Only one problem: my Xbox refused to recognize the disc as a game! Not having a receipt for the magazine, I couldn’t take it back and swap for another. Naturally, I turned to Google.

Poking around various gaming forums showed that I was not alone in my problem. Nobody seems to know why, but the OXM demo discs run into this pretty frequently. Luckily, there is a solution: Boil the disc.

Yes, I said boil it. Again nobody seems to know where this advice comes from, but countless forum posters swear by it for fixing demo discs. The running theory is that it removes some sort of finishing layer off of the DVD, allowing the Xbox drive to more clearly read it.

Figuring I had nothing to lose, I set a pot on the stove. I brought some water to a boil, tossed in the disc, and then immediately took the pot off the burner. I let the water cool enough to remove the disc by hand. Patted it dry, and voila! It works!

You may wish to add salt to taste.

Oh, and the demo is a whole lot of fun. Stunning graphics, especially considering that this is not an Xbox 360 game. Glad I made the purchase, and can’t wait for the full version.

You might notice that I’ve added tags to each post, courtesy of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.

If you’re not familiar with the concept: Just click on a tag (after ‘Filed Under:’ above), and a page will load with every post I’ve written that has the same tag assigned.

At the very bottom of the page you can find a nifty tag cloud, where the size of a tag represents how often I’ve used it. I may move this elsewhere on the site soon.

One tagging question: Is there an easier way with this plugin to go back and assign tags to my older posts than doing each one individually? I’d love to be able to do it all on one page, because doing each post separately will take literally forever.