Entries Tagged 'montreal' ↓

I was rudely rousted from slumber at two in the morning by the building’s fire alarm. Ten minutes later, four fire trucks showed up outside my window. Fifteen minutes later, they were gone and I was back asleep. It was worth it for the lights and the snow.

Sufficiently snowy.

I think that may be the first time in my life that as soon as I got home I felt I had to peel off all my clothes and immediately take a warm shower. It’s below freezing outside, it’s windy, and it’s raining. What the hell kind of weather is that!?

On the plus side, it’s neat when every branch of a tree looks like it’s been attentively wrapped in a little, clear blanket of ice.

With a title like that, I’m sure you’re excited to read on.

My Sony Dream System ™ arrived, and as I had feared it doesn’t have a digital audio connection. Also, it has an integrated dvd-player. WTF!? Okay, so I ordered it and I should have known. But I had thought to myself “NO WAY does a decent receiver in this day and age NOT have an optical port!” Well, I guess you showed me, Sony. FutureShop, for their part, were annoyingly vague in their description of available ports, and had no pictures on the website of the back of the receiver, which you’d think would be the most informative part to show prospective buyers. I thought that true DTS support required a digital audio connection, but somehow mine is still working through my handy red and white connectors. Perhaps my presumptions all this time have been wrong, in which case I blame Theo. Also possible is that the receiver is faking the DTS connection, but I don’t know how that would work exactly, either. In any case, my apartment is tiny and it actually sounds pretty good, so I decided to keep the damn thing, though I’ll try to sell it before I move for the summer. I’ll take a loss, that’s fine. No optical as a temporary situation is okay, but in the long term I simply can’t exist in such a state of squalor.

Did I mention that FutureShop has listed, as a recommended accessory, an optical cable? That’s just tricky, that is. The bastards. Oh yeah, and as a dvd-player it doesn’t have an hdmi port, which seems ludicrous what with television going digital and all. Here’s a link to the system, if you wanna see.

Some guy in Lawrence, Kansas wrote an op-ed piece essentially positing that libraries are worthless and obsolete. The write-up itself is incredibly annoying, but the responses to it have been really interesting. I forwarded the story on to my classmates, since it’s the kind of thing we’re going to have to stand up against soon enough, and we may as well start now. To briefly outline my description here, libraries are NOT worthless and are, in fact, AWESOME. These are facts, and therefore undeniable. So there, Mr Hirschey of Lawrence. I wrote a more eloquent proclamation (if you can imagine such a thing), in the comments proper. I encourage everyone to go and have their say. Lawrence could be a masthead for the library advocacy movement, if enough people took notice. Michael Stephens and the Librarian in Black have both posted verbose rebuttals, which is a start, but I think we really need to steamroll this issue. Their posts are worth reading, in any case.

My trip to New Jersey to see Abigail was fantastic. It was a slice of heaven, spread over a little less than two days, and that’s even considering the fact that I was suffering from some flu symptoms. Ain’t no disease was gonna get me down! The wedding itself was very sweet, and got us talking about how we want to do OUR wedding, which was fun in itself. If you’d told me a year ago that I would be making wedding plans in Jersey, I’d have given you my quizzical eyebrow look. Now it makes all the sense in the world, except for the Jersey part, of course. We’re looking at July of 2008, which will be right around our second anniversary, so it seems like a good time. Mark your calendars, etc.

I just finished watching season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which took me all of … oh, three days to get through. Maybe two. Much to my homework’s chagrin. But hey, once you start watching Buffy, it’s all over. I was powerless to resist its spell. It’s my first time through the series, as well, and a journey I began with Tim back when we were living together in Olympia. I’ll get through the rest of the series before the end of the year, and will finally be able to call myself a fulfilled and cultured individual. Until then, I have seasons 1 and 2 of Deadwood to keep me occupied, as well as, oh yeah, schoolwork.

Go figure. On one last note, the Pharmaprix up the street has Orangina for sale for $1.99 CAD per 1.75L, which makes me the happiest and orangest guy in the province, at least until Oct 13th or so, or until they run out. I bought four, which wasn’t nearly enough, but a guy only has so many arms. Until later, then: stake em if you got em.

Today I can feel the first gusts of winter, flush with cold, though I’m sure that it’s a meager herald of the coming ice age. I’m a rain-baby, you see, born and having lived most of my life in the Pacific Northwest, I know fancy words like “rainshadow” and I’m used to more green than white, even in the winter. Granted I spent quite a bit of my youth in eastern Washington, where there is a real winter, including temperates well below zero and snow up to your belly-button, at times. But it’s been awhile since then and from what I’ve been told the winter here will be make eastern Washington seem a tropical paradise. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Tomorrow marks the end of my first two weeks of classes. They’ve been going well so far. My classmates are - so far in my experience without exception - intelligent and interesting people, and though I wouldn’t say that I’ve made any “fast friends”, I’ve made some nice connections and shared some good conversations and conspiratorial smiles. We’re all in this together, after all, for the next two years, which means plenty of time to conspire, work, and share this experience called grad school.

The GLIS at McGill is modeled to resemble real-life work in a lot of ways. It’s considered a professional degree, so the studies rest much more on the practical than the theoretical, which I think is reasonable and very useful. The graded work in most of my classes is based almost entirely on group projects. Much as a real work environment, you have a project, people to work with (or you work on your own), and a completion date. Much as a real work environment, you generally have multiple ongoing projects at the same time, and you have to schedule the projects around other aspects of the job, in this case lectures and labs (which one could equate at work to time at the reference desk, or cataloguing, or other daily tasks). This is a good model for me because even though I’ve gotten much better at working in groups over the last couple years than I used to be, I consider it an essential part of effective library practice and it remains an area where I feel like I could still grow and learn. Working with people is always the most difficult, and most rewarding, part of the job.

I have some exams as well, and term tests, and individual projects to work on. I have plenty to work on, indeed. I’m not too stressed. Yet. Give me a couple weeks.

I’m working on creating a bibliographic database with a partner in a program called InMagic. We create fields - author, title, keywords, etc - decide how we want these fields to be searchable - term search, word search, both, or neither - and then enter records using the field information. We also have to identify our purpose and audience, and pick a subject, which for us is French Poetry. So far it’s been the most daunting of the projects assigned, though hopefully once we put some elbow grease into it then it won’t seem so insurmountable. For the moment, I’m just having trouble wrapping my brain around it.

Other projects involve creating a diagram describing how information flows within a library, which I’m working with two other people on, as well as creating original card- and MARC-format descriptive bibliographies for three books and comparing my records to records for the same books entered in other libraries. Like I said, I’m quite busy.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out my Flickr photos (I added some new ones on Sunday and now there is a link over to the right), and check back here when you can. I’m going to make an effort, now that my life here in Montreal is solidly underway, to be more bloggerish. No, really!