jessamyn

There are 269 posts tagged jessamyn (this is page 33 of 39).

not melted yet

my namesake in card catalog

I got back from the super-techie (as opposed to super-tetchy which can sometimes describe library conferences) SXSWi conference in Austin Texas, drove home through the snow, went almost immediately to sleep and woke up today to a few things.

  1. The realization that the porch had not actually collapsed in my absence. Yay team!
  2. A toothache that I need to deal with soonish, one that I had successfully ignored with a steady application of Shiner Bock and distraction.
  3. The espresso machine that I had left on for six days which still made decent espresso.
  4. Three hours of work in rural Vermont teaching, among other things, the moderator of my town meeting how to open attachments and how to back up his memoirs to a USB drive, presuming he buys a USB drive that is.
  5. My Getting Started with Excel class complete with “oooh” noises when I showed people how to format a date and right-click to change tab colors.
  6. The fourth, I believe, request for the article about me to be deleted from Wikipedia.
  7. More snow.

I have been putting off writing this in the hopes that the whole Wikipedia debate would be closed and I could link to it without appearing to be shilling for people to vote against the article’s deletion. Believe it or not, I sort of trust in the Wikipedia process and figure it will be deleted if it’s supposed to be deleted.

I expect you’re all sick of my re-entry stories anyhow. They’re mostly the same. “Oh hey, I was someplace populated and then I came home and it was unpopulated and the night was dark and starry and I slept….”

My trip to Texas was a joy from start to finish. Flew out of Boston, so I got to have dinner with my sister on the way out. Arrived in Austin and was picked up by my puzzle hunt buddy who put me up (and put up with me?) for nearly a week. He then went to Houston for the weekend and left me to my own devices in his house with his girlfriend who I had not yet met, and an assortment of charming pets with amusing names. SXSW was a blur of friendly faces from the recent and distant past. The panel I was on went really well; my co-panelists — Gina, Annalee, Jeska — are amazing, hilarious women. I spent a day not in conferenceland visting libraries and got to see another Gutenberg Bible (my third!). I played kickball for the first time in I have no idea how long. I lost my camera. It was recovered. I went to a MetaFilter meetup. I went to a few parties. I attended several dinners involving more than fifty people and a few that were five or less. I ate lots of delicious foods including Mexican, TexMex, BBQ, and combinations of those. I went out for croissants at 2 am. I played with OLPCs. I took taxis. I listened to interesting speakers and met interesting people. I sat around with my laptop and people came and talked to me, or I walked around and talked to people sitting around with their laptops.

It was really the just-right conference for this time of year and my frame of mind. I’m really glad I went. You can see a few photos here.

emergencies, averted?

The pool has still not fixed the broken phone and I’m not sure what to do about it except continue to ask “Have you fixed the phone yet?”

I’m pretty sure I got enough snow off the roof. When I went to swim at the pool I realized that I am all bruises up the arms and legs and I was a little sheepish in the shower about it. “It’s okay, I did this to myself!” Clearing off the roof without further ladder climbing — because I decided that was crazy — involved borrowing my friend’s half-broken roof rake (thank you Forrest!) and manipulating it through the two upstairs windows that I could open and open the storm windows for. So, the whole process was a bit like laproscopic surgery where the roof is large and the window is teeny and the rake is long and I am upstairs inside the house, standing five feet away from the open window trying to get a good angle so that I can push the last pile of snow off the far end. Also, did I mention all the electricity and telephone juice comes in the house through the same window, the one that opens? True. Did you know that if you hit that insulator with a rake at a certain angle that sparks fly off of it? It’s true.

So we’re supposed to get snow or rain this week. The pile of snow in the yard — created by the backhoe that my neighbor brought in to put the snow someplace besides the driveway — is now approaching ten feet tall and the neighbor kids are sledding down it. I am not joking. I have to say that the combination of my nifty AWD car and the new socks I got at the Cabot Hoisery have really minimized my annoyances with Wintertime this time around. I’ll have to take some photos before it all goes away, it’s really something.

a few worthwhile things from the internet

coral snake fights alligator thing.

Every so often I rue the fact that this part of my website is really more of a journally thing than a bloggy thing. Sometimes I have internet things that I want to refer to that don’t fit on librarian.net. This is one of those times. Here are those things.

  1. I made a post on MetaFilter about a chapter in the excellent book my friend Matthew gave me. The book is called Amazing Rare Things, about the history of nature illustrations with tons of lovely drawings, and the chapter I found links for was about The Paper Museum
  2. My friend Adriana made a few great posts on her blog about the poetry of ASL. You may want to read Flying Words and Good Things. A while ago I also made a post on MetaFilter about my favorite at-the-time YouTube trend of people who spoke sign language doing signed versions of popular songs. I guess it’s standard fare for ASL classes, and some of the people whose songs I enjoyed were clearly hearing folks, but I had a good time watching people signing songs I was familiar with and perhaps you will too. And, amusingly, my favorite of all these is a Mexican Sign Language version of Hips Don’t Lie (originally by Shakira) who is a singer Adriana turned me on to originally.
  3. I am speaking on a panel at SXSW next weekend. My panel is called Social Network Coups: The Users Are Revolting. It’s amusing because the name of the libraryland book I co-edited has the word Revolting in the title too and yet has nothing to do with this. The panel is on Saturday at 5 pm at the same time as seventeen other SXSWi events. If you’re nearby, stop on in, but I’ll understand if you don’t.
  4. Someone else on MetaFilter helped me remember a book that I loved from when I was a kid: The Animated Thumbtack Railroad Dollhouse and All-Around Surprise Book! by Louis Phillips and Lynn Braswell. As I related to someone, I can remember going to visit my great grandmother in Pennsylvania and she had this book, among other things as distractions for us kids while the adults did that boring “sit around and talk” thing they always did. I loved it and its wacky humor and think it went a good ways towards my love of Donald Barthelme later on in my adult life.

I can’t remember what else there was I wanted to show you, but I may add it here at some later date if I remember.

data

  • Talked to Ola and she says “April.”
  • Talked to my neighbor from Topsham. He had not called to tell me my house had fallen down, he had called to say hi and sorry for being a jerk a while ago. I forgave him.
  • My car, the one that was broken, that I gave away? Apparently it’s okay and I can maybe have it back.
  • I watched TV on two special days with the word “super” in them but since neither were at my house, my Nielsen rating booklet goes back blank. I’m keeping the dollar they sent me though.
  • I swear it’s been snowing nonstop for 24 hours. I’ve really been enjoying the snow this year with my AWD car.
  • I set up a Twitter account for Donald Barthelme. It was time.
  • I gave my first real talk of 2008 and it went well but not awesome which seems okay because it keeps me on my toes, though I always secretly hope for awesome.
  • I am going to be on a panel at SXSW on March 8th. I am going to be on at the same time as one of the more interesting people who is presenting there. Alas.
  • My Mom is on facebook, feel free to go be friends with her.
  • I succeeded in sending out some piece of mail — fun mail, not bills or anything — every day of January. The resulting deluge of fun mail in response, not from the same people of course, just general karmic response, has filled up my house (Ola’s house) with books and postcards and stickers. I’ll try to do this every January.

wolf!

sunny day

So, I know you’ve heard it before, but Ola’s coming back to Bethel. At some point. I got an email from her saying she was leaving Botswana tomorrow and I’m sure she’ll show up here eventually. So. I am having my friend Jill over to help me clean the house. I am moving stuff around, consolidating mainly. And I am thinking if there might be some place else I would like to live. I’m pretty sure I can stay here if I want to, but the sweet free rent deal would vanish. I am curious if I could find another one.

I like it here a lot. I like Ola a lot. However I also like living alone a lot. Living with Ola isn’t just not living alone, it is like the opposite of living alone. While she is great company, our sleep schedules are about 90 degrees off. She’s disorganized (she says it, I’m not calling her names) and I’m… not. I like it quiet or quiet-ish, she frequently has the TV or the radio or both going. She likes strongly smelling stuff in the bathroom, it makes me sneezy. So, unlike last time I thought she was coming back where I was a bit more handwavey and OMG about it, now I’m more reflective. I also have a more regular job — my MetaFilter work has me as an official W-2 employee as of 2008 — so I’m less worried about money. This is a good opportunity to ask myself what I’d like to be doing for the next few years, in case what I AM doing isn’t quite it. I have a few interesting options and some more prosaic ones. As always, I’ll keep you posted.

This past weekend I was in San Francisco. Sometimes I swear I go on long trips just so I can take a red eye flight home and have that amazing experience of going to sleep dead tired at 7 pm and sleeping til 9 am the next day. There’s nothing like it, to me. The trip was fun, I wrote a bit about the meeting I was at over at librarian.net. I saw some librarian friends, saw my friends’ new baby, went to a MetaFilter meetup, went to a good friend’s birthday party, slept (well!) in a Murphy bed, went birdwatching and didn’t drive my car for nearly five days.

I miss the West Coast in a general sense, and it’s odd to me that I miss San Fran more than I miss Seattle. I felt like I had time to get sick of Seattle and watch many of my friends move away. Now in San Fran my friends are all moving closer to one another so that I can walk to a whole bunch of their houses without too much trouble. It was neat to do and I’ll have to do it again really soon. As I told James and Shinjoung, having a free rent option figures high on my list of “desirable qualities” in a place to live. Not like I’d move straight to Atlanta for free rent, but if a place I otherwise like — especially the way-too-spendy West Coast — had some weird live-in caretaking opportunity present itself, you can bet I’d be listening.

puzzling

I told my friend James that the puzzle hunt was like nerd Easter because everyone gets dressed up in their nerd finery and congregates at the nerd holy land (MIT) and gets to geek out together. We laughed about it at the time. The next day, after we’d all had a little sleep, James came up to me and said “You know, your metaphor is not quite right…” and explained why it wasn’t [churches are local to a region, we had people from all over the place and remote people]. We thought a little bit about better metaphors but didn’t come up with one. It was a big thinky weekend.

So last weekend was the MIT Mystery Hunt which, you may remember, I did last year. Last year our team came in second, this year we were third. I don’t know how many teams there were last year. This year I heard there were thirty-seven. That’s not bad, though really we’d like to win. I took more of a leadership role this year and did a lot of the exciting “calling in to headquarters to confirm answers” and “updating the wiki” parts. It was more fun than it sounded. We had a team of somewhere between 100-200 people. The hunt started on Friday at noon and, unlike last year’s hunt which was over by about 2 am Saturday night, this one ended at 8 pm Sunday. This meant the wrap-up was on Monday and I got home late Monday night, just in time to be around for one drop-in time (two students) and some un/re-packing and then I left early Wednesday to head back to the airport to go to SFO.

Almost everyone on our team had a really good time. We had several librarians, a lot of programmers, at least one lawyer and a few students. Our team had absorbed another team and so there were a lot of new faces both locally and remotely. We kept our work and communications on a combination of a mailing list, a giant wiki, a series of jabber chat rooms, Google docs and spreadsheets, about ten chalboards, some whiteboard material stuck to the chalkboards, and bits of paper scattered all over the place. The team running the hunt communicated with us by phone, email, their web site, and in person. It was a busy net of data transfer. This was especially so for me. I’m used to all the data buzzing back and forth in my day to day life, but not so used to sending and receiving it in a room full of people typing.

My one regret — besides the fact that I don’t live my whole life like this — was that I could not figure out what was necessary to swim in the inviting pool that I passed on my way to the classroom/clubhouse. From what I hear, it’s the robot pool, a pool for aquatic robotics, but I bet I could find a way to swim there. Next year.

Update: a few other posts about the hunt with more details.

good choices made a long time ago

[sometimes I read my own sent email and I just like it]

Hello,

My name is [$NAME] and I am a high school senior. Two days a week I volunteer at the local public library and am very interested in making a career out of the library field. I read your blog (librarian.net) whenever google reader tells me that you have updated. Today I found out that you attended Hampshire College, the school which I shall be attending next fall. I was wondering if you could tell me about your experiences there.

With immense appreciation, [$NAME]

Hi,

I went to Hampshire sort of a million years ago [1986-1990] and Helaine Selin from Hampshire was my librarian role model because she could find things online [when online was fancy services you had to *subscribe* to mainly] that I had no idea existed. I was there when Adele Simmons was president. I lived in Merill dorms, then Prescott, then Dakin dorms, then Prescott again. Over the summer I lived on campus two out of three summers. I only lived about an hour and a half away so I could go home often if I wanted or needed to, but didn’t go home that much.

I studies linguistics with Steve Weisler and a few other people in the CCS school which I think is called something else now, and creative writing with Lynne Hanley. I took (well, passed) 16 classes the whole four years I was there. I graduated in four straight years which is unusual. I took classes at Amherst, UMass and Mount Holyoke as well. I got to take a writing class at Amherst from David Foster Wallace who is actually not much older than I am.

I always felt like Hampshire was where all the weird kids from every high school wound up and some of them decided to outweird everyone else and some of them decided that since they were now in a group of weirdos, they could just be themselves. I was part of the latter group. It was a strange time. There were a lot of protests over political correctness types of things. There was a takeover of one of the science buildings. It was the year after Andy Hermann killed himself live on public access TV which was a long time ago but still seems like a big deal. You can read more history from about that time at this link. Tim Shary and I went to Hampshire together.

http://library.hampshire.edu/archives/shary/Sharyhistory.html

Fascinating stuff.

I did some extracurricular things. I was part of a film and video club. I was on the volleyball team. I was an artist’s model. I worked at the Farm Center. I threw parties and helped bring bands to campus. I was part of the motorcycle collective. I sort of fit in at Hampshire and liked it there. I am still in touch with MOST of the people I lived with my senior year there and I’m always surprised when I run into other Hampshire people my own age in different places that they are interesting and have done interesting things with their lives. Despite my having enjoyed college well enough, it was in no way the “best times of my life” which I think is entirely okay.

As far as academics, I was pretty self-motivated and this was in my favor. I saw a lot of people drop out because they just couldn’t keep doing work when there weren’t grades or professors hounding them. I think some of those people were better off not being in college but for some of them Hampshire just wasn’t the right place and maybe another school would have been.

It’s an interesting place filled with interesting people. This is the good news and the bed news. There are a lot of people with a lot on their minds. Creative arty types but also just moody melancholy types, or both. There was a suicide or a suicide attempt every year i was there and a lot of drug-and-alcohol fuelled drama that may be typical for colleges but hasn’t been part of my life since.

I went on to library school at the University of Washington at the school they now call the iSchool. It was less of a big deal then, but I was able to get in with nothing but my GRE scores and that stack of recommendations that they call a transcript. I didn’t have any trouble segueing to graduate school. If anything, I felt it was LESS rigorous than Hampshire and all the focus on GPA seemed silly and missing the point of education. I have a weird collection of jobs now that make me pretty happy and I live in rural Vermont in a place not unlike Amherst and rural Massachusetts where I grew up before college.

Lastly, you know those scary dreams about being in some school hallway and realizing you have a test you haven’t prepared for, or a speech you have to give that you didn’t write yet? I never, ever, have them. I think that alone makes me feel that I made the right decision about college.

Jessamyn