What I did at TXLA – the food version

bananananana

I went back to Austin for TXLA and was pleased to get to eat at a ton of places that were terrific without the usual lines that sort of plague everything during SXSW. My write-up of the actual conference is over on librarian.net. Since most of what I did in Austin this time was eating, sleeping, or attending TXLA, I’ll cover all bases.

The sleeping part is simple. I stayed here, a very nice AirBnB place that was everything I could have wanted, except possibly not being a treehouse. Nice price, great location, well furnished, terrific. Having my own little apartment made it easier to manage my own schedule without having to put a Do Not Disturb sign on my door or get dressed to go have coffee. And the food, wow. We lost our only “Mexican” place here in town; it’s been replaced by a decent coffee shop so I can’t say I’m too disappointed, but I do hanker for guacamole and beans and rice, pretty much constantly.

I think the preponderance of food photos and food talk and food twittering online is often a way of letting people know both 1) I like food, I am a person of decent appetites and also 2) I am taking care of myself. See? Food! I feel self-conscious talking about food much since it’s always the cliche “I don’t care what you had for breakfast” response to people who like twitter/facebook/social media. But whatever. You might care what I had for breakfast. And if not, we are still internet-friends, or real ones.

  • Sunday I drove/bused down to MA. I think I had cereal for dinner, maybe an apple.
  • Monday was travel day. I had a bagel with cream cheese at Dunkin Donuts (my experience mirrors Jason’s, I don’t know what I was thinking except “cheap airport food”), airport crackers, and some cup o’ soup at my destination, maybe a powerbar.
  • Tuesday was talk day. I hit the Korean BBQ taco truck for lunch and ran into Aaron who was having kimchee fries. Gave the talk and decided to head back to the nieghborhood I was staying in–mainly to see if I’d left my powercord at home, yes I had–and then went out walking down Cesar Chavez until I got to Las Cazuelas and got some take-out tostadas. I’m sure there are better Mexican places, but it was walking distance and tasty.
  • Wednesday I met a local friend for BBQ at Green Mesquite which was an old timey place off South Congress. I got a pulled pork sandwich and some green beans but somehow neglecrted to photograph it. In the evening I took my friend Paul out for dinner to thank him for the airport pickup and we went to the Blue Dahlia Bistro a place I’d initially discounted because of a fruity website. The food was good though it was maybe a bit too upscale for my tastes (to be fair, I have very lowbrow tastes). I had some sort of black bean and corn salad with, yes, more avocado. We skipped out on that place for dessert and wound up at BANANARCHY which was hands-down the best thing I ate in Austin. Frozen banana, dipped in peanut butter topping, rolled in coconut. Joy. Pure joy.
  • Thursday I miscalculated and wound up walking around hungry trying to figure out what I wanted to eat. I wound up in some place on 6th Street where I had tempura which was perfectly fine. Thursday evening, however was the Small Community Libraries Dessert Social which was at 7 so I stopped in, ate several desserts (example dessert) and then went to dinner at Guero’s which is some sort of massive tex-Mexican food place. I had tamales which I can never get out here, and was super duper happy.
  • Friday I was up with coffee and met MetaFilter’s new mod Jeremy for some lunch before heading to the airport. She suggested Whip-In which is this crazy Indian restaurant in the side of a beer store. Oh and sometimes they play music. I had some Zambian seasoned rice and corn and peppers thing and Jeremy got a bowl of goat meat. It was a terrific send off to what had been a great week of eating. I had another power bar and some cereal before I went to bed in MA that night.
  • Saturday my friends Andrea and Corey and I ate at the Great Taste Diner [formerly Danny’s Diner] which is a Peruvian-type place but that didn’t mean the BLT there wasn’t terrific. I got home and had a cheeseburger.

This week I’m back on Jessamyn Chow which is mostly Kashi-type cereal, english muffins and a lot of brown rice and coffee. So far okay. If you’re wondering how I managed to maintain a list of all these places, I’ll point you to Foursquare where you are more than welcome to be my friend. It’s got limited utility, especially in a place like Vermont, but as a “Hey where did I eat last week?” listing machine, it can’t be beat.

while I’m making other plans

I leave today for a few days in Texas with a stop in Boston on the way out and back. I’m giving a longish [80 minute] talk that is more or less all new. I’m excited about it but at the same time having a hard time putting all the final pieces together. The good news is that I am the sort of crazy person who procrastinates doing one thing, by doing others. So I’ve…

  • Started rowing with the indoor rowing machine my friend gave me when he moved to Portland Oregon.
  • Pruned my mossariums
  • Paid all my outstanding bills
  • Started my taxes. Read up on how I’d ask for an extension on my taxes. Probably deciding against it.
  • Gotten down to inbox five.
  • Made sure the “libraries I’ve visited” listing is up to date.
  • Backed up my hard drive
  • Unpacked the stuff from my car from when I went down to my Dad’s
  • Started planning an Autumn trip to Michigan
  • Updated all my apps
  • Almost finished the math-y book I’m reading
  • Won a few Scrabble games
  • Assessed the state of my mutual funds [upshot: eh]
  • Installed my landlady’s printer
  • Read the paper
  • Did some HR stuff at MeFi Inc
  • Nearly finished companion website for the book [sneak peek here, it’s not done]
  • Recorded an old Cordelia’s Dad cassette from when they played in the Pioneer Valley in 1988 or ’89.
  • Got lost in the unicode tables looking for a good wingding.
  • Figured out how to use OSX’s Automator program to export my notes for my talk
  • Wrote this.

If I told you it was still snowing would you be surprised?

withoutanet

This book has been so long in the making that I think every single person who has been any sort of part of it now swears when they mention it. Barring disaster [which I have said several times previously and then endured several near-disasters] it’s at the damned printer. I’m not sure I ever linked to the final version of the essay I wrote about writing the book, but you can read it here and expand the timeline out into April a little bit but I’m really hoping the next email I get about it is asking “Where do we send your copy?” The crazy thing is that I know that even though I swear I will never write another book again–something you frequently hear from authors at this point in the game–I’m also still thinking what my next book might be about. Irrational.

Anyhow, if you know me you’ll know that I’d never tell you to go buy my book. Buy what you want. That said if you want to buy it ABC-CLIO sent me this flyer (with the old name of the book on it lord help me) offering 20% off to TXLA attendees and, really, anyone who types in the promotion code. You can grab the flyer here. I think if I do the math right, I’ll have to sell 130+ copies before I have even paid off my (quite capable and terrific) indexer, much less me. I wonder what it’s like to actualy do writing for a job as opposed to writing because you can’t not write? My landlady keeps asking me when the book is coming out because she thinks that once it’s out she can read it and know how her computer works. I do wish that were so but it’s probably not.

Meanwhile we’re having the last snowstorm of the season and I’m reminded that having a slightly porous memory can be helpful so that I don’t remember that I’ve said this “last snowstorm of the season” thing before. I went down to MA this weekend where there was enough spring-pollen-ish stuff in the air that my seasonal allergies (and some associated vertigo) kicked in. In other Jessamyn-health news I went for a checkup and am in terrific outward shape but probably need to do something about my cholesterol and the weird ache I have in my shoulder. The health insurance I have through work actually gives me money [well gift cards, which are sort of like money] for getting an annual physical. And, since I have multiple jobs, I have an additional workplace wellness program at the other job which gives actual money (not gift cards) for doing a bunch of crossword puzzles about health-related topics and keeping track of my sleep schedule.

There’s a new tapas place in town which I know looks like a typo but is true. I went there with some friends last week and am going to check it out again today. Pretty sure I can get cholesterol-friendly tapas. Today is the first day of the rest of my winter.

the long dark teatime of tech support aka the bbq hangover

So I was gone to Texas for a week. I had a terrific time. My panel went well, my panelists were wonderful. You can read the notes over on librarian.net. The best part of the whole thing, besides being a small part of what The Atlantic called “The Year of the Librarian” at SXSW, was that my panel was over by 6 pm on Friday meaning I had the rest of the conference to just schmooze and hang out. I am not a natural schmoozer (I know people who know me may disagree, but this is all hard work!) but I managed to have a terrific time meeting people, scooting all over the place, eating a lot of BBQ, taking the last bus home, staying at friends’ places and spending a lot of time saying “We should do this more often. And inviting people to Vermont, sincere invitations that will mostly never be taken up on. So some meetups

  • The Old Timers Ball, a place to hang out with people you hung out with at SXSW 2000.
  • The MetaFilter meetup, a well-attended get together of internet people
  • Lunch with a friend of the family I randomly ran into in an elevator
  • Lunch with a good friend from San Francisco who I don’t see nearly enough
  • Dinner with my co-workers from MeFi (and Andy) where we ordered one of everything from the dessert menu (N=6, we’re not that crazy)
  • Dinner with folks I’d never met who are friends from a mailing list
  • A party containing many of the people from the other meetups
  • A old-timers dinner for some of the same people from the first night
  • An open mike night where people told stories.
  • Panels that both my co-workers gave [Josh did Worst Websites Ever and Matt talked about community moderation.]

And I had some other food. And then I came home and everything was broken.

Actually I lucked out with travel as I tend to. So I got home Thursday [after an overnight at Jim’s] and fled Boston in true Evacuation Day spirit the next day. The DSL that was supposed to be installed was not installed (all my internet comes from my tethered iphone this week). The page proofs for my book that were supposed to have fixed the errors in the first proofs were not fixed. My blog was down with mystery failures. I was tired, cranky, full of digesting BBQ, cold. However, I was amped with a week full of nerd hugs and sharp people and their crazy ideas and I dug in to these projects like a marathon runner. Now, by the end of the first full day, things are mostly calm. My edits are back with the publisher. My blog is back up for now. The DSL folks swore on Twitter they’d look into this. And Jim’s on his way up to visit and I have dinner from the culinary arts kids in the fridge waiting to be warmed up when he texts me that he’s hit the Vermont border. It’s melty and muddy here. And I’m taking the weekend off.

bending towards spring

springpleaseohplease

I wrote a post about the Digital Public Library of America over on librarian.net, you can go read it there. It may not make too much sense if you don’t do some of the linked reading but hopefully you’ll get an idea of what it was about.

This week continues the travel thing, down to Boston for a friend’s 40th birthday party [celebrated by watching movies all day at the microcinema at the Somerville Theater] then back home to teach a class and then back to Boston to fly out to SXSW where I’ll be for a week. Making the choices between checking a bag and mailing some syrup down with me. My SXSW schedule is online and linkable. My talk is Friday at 5 pm. I’m doing a few meetupish things, probably not going to any giant parties. Trying to intersperse eating healthily with eating a lot of BBQ. Looking forward to seeing some friends who I only see this year at this time.

Amusingly then my next trip is back to Austin for TXLA in April. This is one of the best library conferences in the country in my opinion, and I’m excited to be one of the “featured speakers” whatever that means exactly. Other than that I’m not leaving New England for months unless my book gets published on time and I decide to go to ALA in New Orleans.

some library anecdotes

Charley

I went down to my dad’s for ten days to look after the place while he went and got some sun in Mexico. It was a pretty good time. Jim came down and we walked on the winter beach. My sister and boyfriend came down and we all had a big dinner with Jim’s son Milo. I got a PS2 and played some video games on my own system for the first time since I had an Atari 2600. I read the page proofs of my book and managed some tech-support-ish issues with the damned thing. If all goes well it will be sent to the printer in the next week or two. I wrote a long article about the process that will be published on Monday. I’ll be sure to toss up a link to it.

I also visited a bunch of libraries including the Westport Public Library and the New Bedford Public Library (a new favorite of mine) but neither of those were what I was going to mention. This week a photo of mine, a picture of the Somesville Library in Maine, got published, in print in AAA’s Northern New England Magazine. Someone had found the photo on Flickr, and dropped me a note offering me some money if I’d let them print it. I said sure. I’m surprised how many people have mentioned to me that they’ve seen it.

The other library is the nascent Digital Public Library of America, a new project from the Berkman Center and some other folks. I was invited to a big all-day meeting yesterday down at Harvard to talk about what this project might look like. It was an impressive group, I met a lot of wonderful people and made a few pitches for people to pay attention to usability and scalability but mostly listened. I talked about the digital divide over mealtimes. David Weinberger was there too and he wrote down some of his thoughts. I’m still a little out of it after nine hours of meetings and three hours of driving and eleven hours of sleeping all on the tail end of a long away-from-home-ness. The meeting took place with Chatham House Rules so that people could speak freely, so I had a hard time figuring out what was okay to say and not say. I took a lot of notes, both written and typed and hope to sum things up here or at librarian.net in the next few days. It’s a fascinating time to be a librarian.

taco holiday winter beach

boots

Skipped my usual Valentine’s Day post for reasons I can’t now remember. I made another heart outside in the snow with red sugar and printed some photos of it and sent them around. Here’s a photo. The above photo was taken during that short period where there were a few 50 degree days out here and Jim and I went for a walk in Destruction Brook Woods. Now it’s snowing again.

I’m down in Massachusetts for the week taking care of my Dad’s house while he is on vacation. Been getting in to a pet routine, waking up early to feed the dog, napping during the day. I’d like to say it’s been relaxing except that I’ve also had a lot of work ramping up including getting the page proofs to check for my book, getting ready for the SXSW conference and doing another piece of long form writing for a library blog I love called In the Library with the Lead Pipe.

Today I got up early to get interviewed on WDEV which is a terrific radio station in Vermont. I am not actually in Vermont at the moment, but thanks to the miracles of technology I could call in. Additionally, I could let people know sort of last minute via Twitter/Facebook so that people could listen in. It went well. I like talking on the radio and I feel that I’m pretty good at getting my points across in pithy but effective ways. Also I worked in a few of my favorite recent internet enjoyments such as the honey badger [link] and was happy to get someone calling in to promote the VT Community Broadband Project.

The fluish thing I was starting to get last weekend appears to be entirely gone, though replaced with a sort of “Zingzingzing I have SHIT to DO” nervous energy that I’ve been managing by taking the dog for long walks on the beach. Today is, I guess, a holiday. My plan is to find a place to get a taco.