jessamyn

There are 269 posts tagged jessamyn (this is page 35 of 39).

represent

lily

A very busy week is wrapping up here. A very busy week is starting tomorrow. Today is a missing empty day between them.

Last week I went to Providence to give a talk that I briefly mention on librarian.net. It was about agitprop which is a topic that I always assume people know about, but apparently they don’t. It’s just a shortening of agitation/propoganda, the trick being that you need to both explain your good ideas but then urge people towards them. It was of some use during the Communist Era and activists often use it as a tactic. So, this talk that I gave to a bunch of librarians and information scientists talked about my activist background and the idea of getting people to do the things that you think are a good idea. In this case, I meant using new technologies (where “new” still means stuff like email, lord help us all) as well as changing things in a traditional culture generally. I even got to talk about William James and his “genuine option” idea which is one of my favorite hobby horses. It was one of the most heartfelt talks I’ve given in a while because I didn’t have to pretend that I wasn’t some sort of anarchist, or that I don’t really have an issue with the corporatization of librarianship. I got to talk about the danger of palliative technologies that stultify us and make us soft in the face of decreasing social liberties and increasing government nonsense. I was happy with it.

Then I drove home on Thursday in a rainstorm to greet the skiiers that were staying at my place. I belong to a few “hey come stay at my place” websites, most notably Couchsurfing.com and HospitalityClub.org. People rarely take me up on it, but I feel that regular deposits into the Cosmic Karma Bank keep my good luck flowing. So, I got home and was unpacking when my incoming guest called and said he’d be in around 2 am, not 11 pm as he had earlier hoped. I was exhausted and barely awake as it was so I left some lights on, left a note taped on the door with information on where the guestrooms were, and went to sleep. I woke up briefly in the middle of the night hearing footsteps and then woke up in the morning to young men in snowpants wandering around cooking and packing on their way to Killington. They were nice guests who mostly did their own thing and I did mine. They were gone this morning before I fully got out of bed.

I only mention this in detail because I feel like I get inundated with oogy boogy talk concerning just how much risk there is in the world nowadays. My bank tries to make me afraid of identity theft, my insurance company tries to make me afraid of fires and floods. My students’ computers try to make them afraid of their computers being “at risk” when what they are really dealing with is more of a Norton Protection Racket than anything else. There is risk in taking a shower, risk in eating seafood, risk in leaving your car unlocked, and risk in talking to strangers. We hear about these risks all the time, seemingly constantly. But there are also rewards too: being clean, eating tasty food, ease of access and the fact that real people are more interesting than abstract free-floating anxieties. I just figure every so often someone should tell the good stories.

140/160

I always write a lot on my various blogomachines when I have a talk to prepare for. I’m going to Michigan this week for a flyby visit to Lansing and the Michigan Library Association conference. I was writing an update to this post from last September and realized that my various archives are sort of fucked. So I had to go and move include and archive files around and now they’re mostly okay and wow there’s another hour gone. I have this real back and forth about the time here, whether it’s “need another hour” or “get rid of another hour, please!” This set of weeks is the best for it because all the clocks, in an effort to be helpful and set themselves for us, have derailed us. All the Windows machines at school say it’s an hour ago. Most of my clocks at home say it’s now. My new-to-me car doesn’t have a clock at all, and my wristwatch is … someplace. So this means I’ve been showing up at work sometime between early and on time, not knowing which until I walk in the door and I’m still a little amazed that works as well as it does. But I had other numbers to talk about.

I upgraded the RAM (2 GB) and the hard drive (160GB) in my year-old laptop (details here, nothing special) which was a process involving a few screws, a few hundred dollars, some savvy online shopping, and a half an hour. And, as always, I think about the people I work with who are still at the Mousercise stage of their computer learning. The fact that you can now do a lot of this work yourself makes computers in some ways more affordable. The fact that it’s still thought of as esoteric mojo, going under the hood so to speak, does not. We’re working on some open source chicanery in Vermont, getting serious about an open source online catalog at some of our small libraries. Part of the plan is to have geeking sessions where people actually bring their CPU and we install server software together, transfer records and data together, hammer things out together. This has always been the way geek projects have worked, to some extent, but in a profession with more of a sense of “authority” getting people to trust each other and not people higher in the food chain has been a challenge. I’m excited for it.
prepared, waiting
And, speaking of exciting challenges and what got me sitting down to type besides my current Distraction Initiative, I’m checking in on how last year’s “do exercise, eat well, be fit, look fit (and don’t look bad in photos)” plan is going. It’s not bad. Since I started this all last Fall, I’ve lost a little over twenty pounds with what I considered to be a medium amount of attention and no amount of deprivation. When I first started — after what was already a few months of exercise and attention to eating, but a serious dread of the scale — I weighed 161. Today I weigh 140.

It’s been a simple plan really, involving basically The Hacker’s Diet and a lot of time in the pool and lately, in the backyard doing garden stuff. There’s also a really short list of things that have been helpful which I’ll note for future reference.

  • Getting on the scale – if you want to lose weight to lose weight (not so your clothes fit better, for example) this is mission critical. I use a little widget called The Google 15 where I give it my goal weight, tell it what I weigh every morning that I remember, and it does a five day average and tells me if I’m getting closer or farther from that goal. It’s stupid easy. Everyone has their own technique for fitness and weight loss, but I really believe if you’re not getting on the scale, you may not be totally serious.
  • Exercise goals – while I’m probably not going to make it the length of Lake Champlain this year — thanks to shoulder injuries and a life that’s gotten busy — having something to work towards kept me going even on days I felt lazy or cranky. This was a good thing and I’m sure I exercised just a little more because I was, theoretically, going somewhere. Having an exercise buddy can help with this, but you have to make sure your goals are somewhat similar.
  • Cooking at home – not only is it easier to calorie check what you’re eating, you’re unlikely to make yourself too much food, as opposed to restaurants that pretty much always serve too much food for what I want to eat but it’s SO TASTY (mmm butter and salt!) that I’ll eat it anyhow. At the outset, I decided I liked food too much to really diet, so my other main option (really there are only two) was to exercise more. I developed a bunch of tasty not-super-high-calories small meals and just got used to preparing and enjoying them. I swap out a lot of stuff: tea for juice, fat free for lowfat milk, turkey for beef. If you’re really into doing all this stuff in slow motion, all you need is to eat 100 calories less a day and you lose a pound a month. One less glass of orange juice. One less cookie. Ten more minutes in the pool.
  • No bargaining – I think it’s an easy step to take, to make deals with yourself about eating and exercise, less now more later or vice versa. My deal with me is to do what the hell I want and let the scale (over time that is, it’s easy to see your weight shift 2-4 pounds daily, hence the Google averager) be the arbiter. So I don’t not eat food that I like. I let myself stay home from the pool if I want to. I’ll have a third delicious empty-calorie beer if I’m having a good time. I eat what my friends are serving. Once you make yourself your own opponent for health and fitness, you’re really having a different problem.

So yeah it’s been a slow process and one that I’m sure is ongoing. I felt like I’d mention it again. Maybe I’ll mention it once a year, since it’s good to remember just how much in our lives is actually under our control. As for me, I sort of like my jawline and I’m happy to have it back. I like the pool and I’m happy to be there a lot. I like it when people say “Wow you’re looking great.” The one downside, if there is one, is that those extra twenty pounds kept me warmer at low temperatures. I may have to invest in long underwear.

coasts and libraries

turnbuckles, sort of

I was really worried when the flight I was taking to Vancouver Canada was switched at the last minute and I was suddenly on a new plane with no seat reservations. I usually plan these trips pretty carefully — the connections, the things I’m going to do, the places on the plane I sit — and one small derail can send the whole thing down like dominoes. However, that’s not what happened.

I was going to Victoria Canada to speak at the Access 2007 conference, keynote actually. The week previous had been Glory Week in Vermont and I had a lot of fun visitors and things to do so while I worked on my talk I didn’t pay a lot of attention to things like “How to get to Victoria from Vancouver BC” and “How to print out my final set of notes for the talk.” I drove down to Kate’s place right after work on Tuesday, steeling myself for an early morning (well, 9 am) flight so that I could show up in Canada with a reasonable amount of time to figure out the rest of the travel stuff. And then my flight was cancelled.

What followed was a strange series of good news/bad news escapades. My United flight wasn’t flying because of some mechanical thing so they put me on Air Canada. Air Canada, in case you don’t know, is a superior airline. Seats with TVs and music players, really professional staff, decent connections. I even got good seats. Since United’s problem was “mechanical” and I nicely explained the whole “I’m giving an important talk the next morning” thing, they put a note with my old ticket to be cool and put me up someplace if Air Canada couldn’t get me there. Not bad. I transferred in Toronto instead of O’Hare (score!) and found out there was a flight leaving earlier than the one I was one and they were pleased to put me on it. Then I dropped my boarding pass into the heater vent by mistake which it turns out is no big deal — they just printed me a new one.

I got to Vancouver before I was even supposed to have arrived and did some librarian reconnaissance to figure out how to get to Victoria. There are a myriad of ways ranging from expensive and fast to slow and cheap. I had time so I decided on slow and cheap and had a great time taking the bus to the bus to the ferry (which was an amazing sunset cruise which was a totally fortuitous accident). Inside the ferry there was actually a bus which you could get tickets for so I climbed aboard and took the bus off the ferry and down through Victoria. The bus dropped me off about ten blocks from the hotel which I then gladly walked. I even turned down the ride offer of some nice-seeming man on a Harley who kept driving by me.

Then I went to bed. It had been a very long day. The next day I got up and gave my talk which went pretty well though it was a bit of a stretch for me. I hung around for a while to talk to people and hear a few more presentations and then took the Helijet back to Vancouver in about 30 minutes. The previous day’s trip had taken almost ten times that but what a trip it was! I went to a MetaFilter meetup, stayed with a friend of a friend right in downtown Vancouver and took the bus back to the airport the next day.

By the time I finally got back to Logan — at about 1 am after a bunch of weird travel delays thanks to weather — the Red Sox had just won some major game and the taxi stand was completely empty when I got outside. If you don’t know Boston well you may not also know that all public transportation also stops running around this time. I waited and watched as the folks who checked bags queued behind us until there were about 40 people waiting for zero cabs. I was scheming how I could politely ask other people, when my time came, if they wanted to share a cab (I’m not that hip to cab lingo and etiquette) when the guy at the front of the line asked “Anyone else going to Somerville?” which I was. I squeezed in with two other people. Turns out he was going two blocks from my sister’s house and refused to let me pay for anything. I let myself into Kate’s place and was pleasantly surprised to see her still up and chatty, so I got to do a little debriefing about my trip and she told me about the baseball game.

This morning I’m preparing to go to Sturbridge MA for the New England Library Association Conference where I’m giving a few talks on social software, Firefox and library 2.0 pretty much in that order. I don’t think I was on the West Coast long enough to really have jetlag. I have a second bag of clothes here to bring with me so I don’t have to spend all day doing laundry. Also, since this is a conference I can drive to, I’ve brought my favorite pillow. I am usually pretty happy with whatever pillow I have available but figured there was an off chance that the previous three days would have been wretched and I might want something familiar and comforting during my three additional days away. Turns out I probably won’t really need it after all.

went to topsham, brought some back

front door

So. One of the questions I get asked a lot is “When was the last time you went up to your place?” I say “Oh it’s been a while…” but the truth is it had been almost a year and I had been putting it off and doing other things and generally enjoying myself while also secretly dreading what I might find there. My house in Topsham is a great little place that was never really set up to be a year-round house. Michael, who I bought it from, made a go of it and did okay but I always found someplace else to ramble to when I was there alone for too long. A series of caretakers, some good, some not so good, left the place a little worse for wear and the final straw came almost three years ago when a renter left early, left the propane on empty, and the place froze solid and really broke.

This all happened when I was in Australia and Greg was taking finals and things were never the same between me and the house, or me and Greg and the house again. I had to get a lot of expensive plumbing work done by a not-great plumber [okay work, lousy attitude, slow. I don’t expect more but I do appreciate it] and his last project was to put a drain on the house so I could leave it over the Winter which I had never been able to do before. So, I left it.

I went up once with my sister last year to pick up some things and was relieved to find the place standing. I have some sort of quirky dread that I’ll round a corner and see the barn as a pile of sticks. You can keep your “those are the joys of home ownership!” remarks to yourself. So, I went up again yesterday after getting an email from Ola saying she might be coming back stateside to take care of her sister in TN. I don’t know if or how much she might be up here but I figured I might want to have a Plan B in case my little honeymoon here was wrapping up. So I got in the car and went up there before I could talk myself out of it. There was no pile of sticks. The place was still standing. It looked sort of like I thought it would — distressed but not destroyed — but there was a lot I had forgotten.

ash shovel, with lichens

As I mentioned in the caption to this photo, I basically stopped the bi-coastal thing in 2003 and started a library job in Vermont. Greg started law school and we moved from Topsham to Bethel. At first we were coming up on weekends and we slowly did less and less of that. Bethel is a nice little town, Topsham is more of a remote outpost and you really need to like that “I’m at the edge of civilization” feeling to want to spend a lot of time there. I had forgotten how much I liked that feeling. I grew up in a fixer of a house that my parents worked on, seemingly non-stop when I was a kid. I felt at one time that maybe I wanted a house to work on non-stop. But my life is different from my parents’ lives; I may have felt like I lived on an outpost back then, but I didn’t really.

When I packed up my house in Seattle, I left some things behind and mailed some things out to myself in Vermont. The bedroom in Topsham had a few of these only-partly-unpacked boxes in it from 2003. I had taken some books and some papers and my favorite mugs to Bethel and left behind a lot of storage and knick-knacks and furniture and stuff I’d gotten in garage sales. I had left bahind all my photographs, my printed photographs. I had left behind my Burning Man gear. Did I really wear a black bra that said “I love you” on the cups out in semi-public? I guess I did.

On Saturday, I filled my Subaru with stuff I thought I might want: my old iMac, my banjo-mandolin (no, I don’t really play), my engineer boots, my photos, my raincoat, my wooden boxes, my knickknack shelf made from an old printer’s tray. Being there was just really strange. I bought the place shortly after Jack and I had split up and I was thinking a change of scenery might do me good back in 1997. I was reading a lot of Mother Earth News and making plans to make braided rugs all Winter long. I never did settle in for good though, and moved back and forth between there and Seattle until I met Greg who moved out there and then decided to go to law school which turned out to also wind up being in Vermont but not close enough to drive to. We moved south to Bethel and when we split, I was set up here with a town I liked living in and a job I loved, so I never thought much about going back to Topsham for good. I still don’t have a good answer to what I want to do with the place.

Going back to it now, I can still remember all of my ideas I had for the place and they washed over me in an oddly poignant rush of “what might have been”s. Some of that was tied up with Greg, who left a lot of stuff there, but a lot of it was just being almost-40 remembering being almost-30 and looking at the world a little differently. In fact the queerest thing about being in Topsham is how quickly it took me back to a place before I’d known Greg, or Bethel, or a lot of my current local friends. It took me back to when I had a cat, to when I was sort of pseudo-married, to before my Dad was remarried (happy ninth anniversary guys!), to before my sister could drive. Back to when I had Fourth of July parties every year and a big sleepover on 12/31/99. It also took me back to before I travelled for work, before all this public speaking stuff, before I’d been to Australia, before I had what I now amusedly but happily call a career. Before I was published. Before I cut my hair. Before I started swimming. Before I drove a Honda. Before I worked at MetaFilter. All this stuff.

I’ve been in a good mood lately and so all this thinking and reflecting wasn’t at all bad but it was engrossing. I came home and got in the pool, then I went to hang out with Kelly and Forrest and some of their visting friends and had a great time meeting new people and experiencing Autumn in Vermont. Then I came home and slowly unpacked and took a look at the time capsule of stuff I brought with me. I never did turn the water on up in Topsham but, unlike the last few times I’ve been up there, this time I am looking forward to going back.

power, tech, quick and slow catch-up

I sort of like the zombietime that I have when I get back from travelling. There is always a morning — or if I’m lucky a day — where I just hang around in my PJs and catch up on things digital — email, blog updates, photo uploading — and do all the “I was away” things like laundry, opening mail, watering plants etc. The following days are for longer-term catching up like paying bills, going to work, unpacking, food shopping and the like. I’m at the end of catching up. It went well. I did some good work with some local libraries, I helped some folks do computer stuff, I planned out my next few months and I made these excellent homemade croutons out of some everything bagels I’d had in the freezer. I also caught up on a little YouTube.

When Kate and I decided that the Natural History Museum really wasn’t probably going to amaze us, we started riffing on it a little. I made a little movie with Kate in it called Halifax – Great people, so so museums. You can watch it.

I also found out that my favorite Channel 4 unwatchable-in-the-US TV show is available via YouTube. Granted, you have to watch a 25 minute show in three segments, but I find it to be worthwhile. The show is called The IT Crowd and it’s about nerds that work in an IT department in the basement of a big office building. What makes it amusing, to me, is that the guys are really nerdy they’re not Robert Carradine in high water pants and horn-rimmed glasses. They act weird, they talk weird, they interact with women weird; they’re spazzes. You can also peek around their office set and spy EFF stickers and Flying Spaghetti Monster propaganda and think “oh hey those look like the stickers on MY laptop”. Anyhow, you can look at some of the playlists on YouTube and watch it. I recommend this one which I think has all the episodes on it.

It’s raining and thundering a lot this evening. Anyone wanting to get to VT before the leaves are gone probably has about 5-10 days to do it in.

number of ways technology has enhanced my life. also: my new car

new (to me) car

Here is a story about ways technology has enhanced my life.

I got a car. Here is a photo of it. (1) For some reason I like having two cars. Part of this may be that I like having a back-up car. Part of it may be that it costs almost nothing to insure a second car in Vermont. Part of it is that I’ve wanted a wagon for quite some time and the opportunity presented itself. So, this is my new (to me) car. It needs a name.

The way I got it wasn’t really your typical deal. In fact, it’s a neat story. My pal Erica just left her librarian gig at Cornell to start a nifty new job in San Francisco at Second Life. (2) She was selling her car on Facebook. (3) You might know Erica because her blog and my blog are the first and second blogs that show up on Google when you search for “librarian” (4) Yeah, that’s us. I saw the photo and said “oh hey that’s the car I need.” My car is totally fine, but ever since a scary run-in with a guardrail last winter, I’ve been thinking I might want something a bit more AWD-ish. Plus, I’ve wanted a wagon or at least something I could, in a pinch, sleep in. I haven’t slept in a car in a few years now, but I like having the option.

Since these cars are basically Vermont’s State Automobile they’re tough to get good deals on. And I don’t really enjoy driving all over the place looking at cars from Craigslist (5). So, Erica’s seemed decent and when I said the price was maybe a little high for me, she made it not a little high and I emailed (6) and said said “I’ll take it”. I sent her a check through my online bank. (7) It was forwarded to her in CA. She mailed me the title and the bill of sale. I called my insurance company. They emailed me proof of insurance. (8) I got a ride from my very good friend Forrest out to Ithaca (thanks Forrest! I met him on MetaFilter (9)) where we found the car in the Ornothithology lab parking lot with a note to me and the keys under the mat. Erica said “It’s the one with the flying spaghetti monster (10) on the back, to distinguish it from the 45 other green subaru legacies in the parking lot.”

We drove back in tandem keeping a sharp eye out for danger. The trip would have been shorter but Forrest heard on the radio (11) that there was a huge wreck on 87 North and we took a detour through Saratoga Springs to avoid it. I got home and made a few moves in an online Scrabble game (12) to chill out, answered some personal and work email, (13, 14) prepared a book to put in the mail for paperbackswap.com (15) and went right to bed.

really back

So I went to bed as soon as it got dark last night and slept for 14 hours. The fact that I can still get away with this indicates to me that it’s okay to keep taking redeye flights if it saves me some money. The loose outline of my trip is this

– Get to Portland late at night Friday and go out for beers with Sara and Steve. Marvel in that yokelly way how great it is to go out for beers at 11 pm and have a GOOD BEER. Crash out.
– Go out for brunch at the Vita Cafe and have corncakes and bacon with real maple syrup. Drink more coffee than is good for me. Yammer on about maple syrup and tastiness of same back home. Ogle all the great tattoos.
– Wandered around the Saturday Market and some junk shops. Started in with my tired “you know this is the sort of thing that everyone has in their barns back home and here they sell it to you for $50” spil. My friends are very nice to ignore this.
– Checked in to crazy hotel where the gal at the desk asked me “Oh are you part of the Arizona Wests, they’re a wealthy rancher family…” I felt like I let her down a bit when I said no. Despite this, the rooms were nice. Fancy hotel but still, free Internet and coffee.
– Dinner with Josh and Angela at Bush Garden. Very nice chill time before the crazy party.
– Crazy party.
– Planning meeting with MeFi heads of State at a suitably late hour the next day. TravelFilter launches this week sometime. It will be fun.
– Got in touch with my friend Lisa DeGrace and spent a few hours helping her prepare for her Sundance Ceremony and also getting coffee and shopping for toilets.
– I got a haircut at Rudy’s. It looks great. For future reference, my barber told me that the cut I like is a “Graduated A-line Bob” Good.
– Hangout time with Steve and Sara including Lebanese food that was totally OMG tasty. Stayed up too late.
– Chill out day the next day. Then walk around time checking out the library. Then dinner time with Steve and Sara and Hiram and Melissa (two new MeFi friends) including some excellent dessert and the movie Valley Girl projected on to the back wall of the dessert place.
– Dropped at airport, redeye home, work and doctor’s appointment, then bedtime.