(tuesday) was a good day

1930 census

I was going to bed Tuesday night after a really nice day of talking to a radio interviewer on the phone, solving a bunch of niggling IT problems at work, teaching one of my drop-in students how to look up folks in the US Census, getting hooked and finding my own relatives in the US Census — I was able to find five out of eight great-grandparents — playing Scrabble with my boyfriend and teaching him to find his relatives in the US Census (Russian immigrants, the lot of them) and going to bed thinking “Hey I solved a lot of problems today and I didn’t set foot in the library once” vowing to actually note down that I’d just had a nice no-illness, no-travel, no-library day in the morning.

And then my website was down for days. I was savvy enough to know that the problem wasn’t mine. Historically, this sort of thing used to happen only when I’d received some major media attention and the outage seemed to be a sort of karmic “don’t get too big for your britches” warning. This time it just seemed like the response of an old teetery webserver — I’m still with eskimo.com and have been since 1996 or so — until I did a little Googling. Looks like the owner of eskimo.com was in prison and major bills went unpaid leaving the site down for days while the family and the remaining employee[s] figured it all out. Eskimo.com refugees took shelter in an Ubuntu forum while they figured out what exactly was going on. I’m still reading the details which are spotty. Looks like a family member has taken over. The site is back up. There’s a Yahoo group that has been started.

Meanwhile my boss Matt — best boss of all time — had a bit of a medical emergency which most of us heard about on Twitter. He’s off to get surgery today. The public announcement of this scary fact resulted in a massive outpouring of sympathy and love from the thousands of people on the internet his life and work have touched. I’m crossing my fingers for a dull and uneventful procedure and a speedy recovery.

So I’m in a decent place, happy and healthy in my pineapple pajamas, but things are pretty bumpy in the larger world. One of the toughest things about this living-in-the-future internet world is that there’s always a larger world where everything’s not quite awesome someplace. Taking the crunchy with the smooth, I suppose.

small groups of people, loosely joined

I went to a mini-conference thing over Halloween weekend. I was invited by someone I’d sort of met at a library conference. She was now pretty geek-aligned and asked me to come speak at this conference-thing. I keep not using the word “conference” because it’s pretty tough to call 35+ people getting together at a music camp in the Canadian woods to talk and drink and play Werewolf and dress-up really a conference. Maybe it was more of a skillshare. Only a skillshare with Really Good Tech. It was called BitNorth.

I did one of the keynotes which means I had 20-25 minutes instead of 5-10 to talk about… anything. I knew I’d be talking to tech people and so wanted to talk about something a little offline. I put together an assortment of slides talking about moss and why it is so awsome, but scrapped it in favor of talking about how to change stupid rules which refers to the back and forth I had last week with the Des Moines public library over their “no photography” policy. I was going to talk more and link more to all the wonderful folks I met there, but it’s now two or three days later and I see myself not doing this so I’m just going to click “publish.”

So, I didn’t talk about moss, I saved the mosslike Keynote theme I made and now I still want to make a Moss Is Awesome talk. Maybe for next year. Three cheers to Alastair Croll and the rest of the Bitcurrent crew for inviting me and putting on such a terrific event.

the ASKME

When I first got my ASKME license plate, a few people thought I’d get unwanted attention from it. I’m not sure what form this attention was going to take, but needless to say, it never materialized. I do get people commenting on it from time to time and I always consider it a sort of “outreach for librarians everywhere” situation. It usually goes like this.

Random stranger: *looks at license plate* Ask you what?
Me: Anything, I’m a public librarian!

And then they usually laugh and sometimes they’ll come up with some sort of reference question on the fly and I give them some sort of answer and we all walk away from it feeling nominally better about the whole thing. Friday night I got back late from my trip to Iowa [which went great, you can read more about my talks and adventures on librarian.net] and was driving through the parking garage exit/pay gate. It was late and I was a little bleary. When I got to the little kiosk, the guy there was already laughing.

Guy at kiosk: *laughing* Ask you what, dear?
Me: Anything, I’m a public librarian!
Guy at kiosk: *still laughing* Aren’t you precious. Well, could god make a boulder so big he couldn’t move it?
Me: I suppose so, if he existed. Don’t you think?
Guy at kiosk: Maybe so…
Me: I mean, I could get you a citation if you want one….
Guy at kiosk: *laughs* Nah, that’s okay. What library do you work in?
Me: Tunbridge.
Guy at kiosk: *laughs* Well okay then, have a good evening.

I’m not totally sure what the funny part was and I’m not sure if I botched the question and I usually hate it when people call me dear, but for some reason this exchange — in addition to seeing hippies playing Jenga in the airport when I got in at midnight — cheered me, the equivalent of a footsie-wootsie for my well-being.

someone’s fancy

I’m not so great at bragging and I always think that saying what I’m up to sounds like bragging so I’ll say this quick and be done with it. There is some good news.

My panel

SXSW

good company

And, I don’t know how to really say this, but I am judging a New Yorker’s photography contest. I KNOW RIGHT? Here is where you can see my name on the blog announcing it (a great blog, btw). You have five days to upload a photo of your pet to The New Yorker dressed as your favorite literary figure.

What more joy could this week bring? Tomorrow I go to Iowa.

lunar travel ups and downs

I am going to have to admit at some point that as much as I am blase sounding about these wacky travel plans that usually go right but sometimes go a little weirdly wrong that secretly I like them.

That is, I don’t like the worry that I’ll miss my connecting flight when the airlines say they’ll “try” to hold the plane [I try very hard not to get all Yoda on their ass but really, you can’t just do it? or even not do it?]. I don’t like getting stuck in Utah at 11:30 on a Wednesday evening with no rental car where the rental car is supposed to be. I don’t like the fact that I somehow manged to make my reservations home for the wrong day and only noticed I’d screwed up when I went to print the boarding passes and the airline website was like “What? You’re not travelling tomorrow.” I don’t like eating road food for days.

But I do like the story of how they held the plane. And I like the story of how the rental car guy got out of bed at midnight and picked me up and drove me through abandoned Salt Lake City and would have let me take the RV to Nevada but as it was gave me a free tank of gas. And how I got to Elko Nevada at 3:30 am and the lady at the hotel desk told me stories about how she’d met the Rolling Stones. And I liked the part where I got home on the right day anyhow, and it didn’t cost me much more money and I’d saved all that money on the rental car anyhow after the guy said “Oh man I’m sorry about this, I’ll take care of you.” and did. And I like how most of the road food I ate was Basque, and incredibly delicious and worth all the extra time I’ll spend in the pool this week, and next.

And I love this photograph which, in the spirit of the cow that ate all the grass and went home, is the salt flats at 1:30 am, more or less. You’ll have to trust me on this. It snowed here today. It’s been a surreal week.

misdirection

thegoogle

Because I have a rich online life, I sometimes have to nudge myself to have an equally rich offline life. I’ve been finishing a few more books lately, and yesterday I went for a drive. I have a family friend, who turns out to be a relative, who is 96 and who I just learned was a sort of neighbor. That is, he lives in Vermont which is neighbor enough. I made a plan to go see him saying I was going to be more or less in the area and made a plan, then, to be in the area. My relative is Irving Adler, my second cousin twice removed. He is 96 and he has strong opinions about health care. I spent some time visting with him and then did some catching up on the 251 project I’ve been working on for the past five years or so.

To catch you up, I want to visit all of Vermont’s 251 towns. I’m 90-someodd percent there. Before there was a widget for everything, I made my own web page to track my progress. I have a Delorme gazetteer that I cover with highlighter pen to track where I’ve been. Now there’s a widget that sort of does what I want but like all widgets, it’s imperfect. Through some concerted efforts and marathon driving, I went to sixteen new towns yesterday, though I missed three — Middletown Springs, Somerset and Windham — that assure I’ll be going back. The widget says I am 94% complete. The widget does not track gores and grants.

The gazetter is also imperfect. Even though I crosschecked with Google maps to see that the road that they said was a road was, in fact, a road, it was not a road. It was a road up to a point and then the road became a riverbed and then the riverbed became a footpath for goats. I turned around, which is awkward when you are in a car on a goat footpath. The nice people with 4×4 trucks, beer and few teeth were incredibly nice to me as I drove back past them and asked politely if the road I had been trying to drive on was, in fact, a road. “Not for that car!” they told me. I think AWD is sort of hot shit until I hit roads like this.

You can see my rough route in these two google maps (down, up). I checked my email twice during the day, once from the burrito place and once when I pulled over to take some photos of a nice looking lake. I pulled out my laptop to use my EVDO card to “check my web” and I saw that there was a nice four-bar signal coming from … someplace, called linksys. Now I’ve got 2-4 towns to visit in each quadrant of the state including the vexing Lewis which I swear can’t be reached by road. If anyone would like to go on a doomed hiking trip with me sometime in early spring, do give me a call. I can’t guarantee success, but there’s a 90-someodd percent chance of fun.

make your own fun!

The big deal in Vermont is that a lot of times you need to make your own fun. This is much easier if there are other people who share your views on fun. Last night, as the result of an Ask MetaFilter thread, Forrest and Kelly and I tested a recipe for non-tooth-breaking Popcorn Balls. I think we were successful. Then we both went home and uploaded our photos (mine, theirs) and told people about it.

It’s easy to sort of hang out in your cozy home as the days get shorter and suddenly look around and realize that while the internet and cooking and putting stuff away in filing cabinets is useful and possibly interesting, it’s rarely fun. It’s good to get started on this sort of thing before it’s too late.