Yesterday I bought a suit and a haircut,
and now I’ve got the world on a string.
At least until the string’s cut,
then it won’t mean a thing.
Interviews, moving, assignments,
fond farewells and
fond hellos
and
the
d
i
s
t
a
n
c
e
that beckons like a drum,
that thrums through the wires;
the distance between home and home.
It was never a choice,
but it was always hard not choosing.
I was playing around learning “Hit Me Baby One More Time”, and I started playing this instead. Funny how music works.
Happy Easter, whatever it means to you. 🙂
Ahniwa Ferrari – untitled guitar tune
[audio:https://www.ahniwa.com/blog/uploads/easter-melody.mp3]
silence marks keep filling up the page
angled lines of desperation stretch across
margin to margin like evening shadows
reach across the endless winter
what of that pink railway carriage
what of those blue cushions
we’d have never reached out
had we but known
City lights glowing through the blizzard;
the air infused with falling faerie
dancing gently down to rest in piles
among their silent brethren.
Twenty minutes through the blizzard,
or through the sunny cold,
or the tepid spring;
that walk to class down
charming city streets.
The closeness of the east,
one city piled atop another;
this family of cities
that I never took the time to see.
Energy. Frenetic energy built
around community; the
we-are-all-in-this-together-ness
that made each word bearable.
The thrill of the hunt,
bringing down that big assignment so
we could feast during winter.
And more, perhaps. Perhaps more
than I can say. But
I can say,
Oh, things,
how I long to miss you.
On one of my recent flights home I had the fortune to sit next to an interesting woman who happened to be in marketing. We got to talking about libraries a bit, and she sympathized that if people only knew the breadth and depth of the services their libraries offered, they would want to move in. Given her field, it’s no surprise that her advice was, “You guys need to get in touch with us.” It’s true. In my experience, libraries like to market themselves, and it probably works to some extent. Marketing is not our specialty, though, and our efforts at marketing are probably akin to the results we might get if we gave a marketing expert a book and asked them to catalog it (sure, it sounds easy until I ask you what the 245 MARC field is for, and then you’re baffled). Maybe it’s time libraries went to the experts for their marketing.
Wyoming Libraries are there already, and their campaign is awesome. It’s intelligent, sassy, and multi-modal. They have a library mud flap girl, a library Eiffel Tower billboard, and two radio spots. From the site:
Wyoming’s libraries are as expansive as the state, and as close as down the street.
Libraries offer more than many people realize, and we want to reach out beyond our regular users to let people know this. The new statewide marketing campaign is designed to increase understanding, use and support of Wyoming libraries.
I don’t know about you, but their campaign makes me want to move to Wyoming and use a library. I’d love to know how effective the campaign has been so far in bringing new users into the library, but that’s always a dodgey statistic at best, and I imagine it will take some time before any valid results can be analyzed.
In the meantime, I need to find myself some of those mud flaps …
In the grand tradition.
There once was a library lad
who wanted to graduate, bad.
He wrote every essay,
but oh what a mess, eh?
There always were more to be had.
It’s not entirely accurate because at this point the end is certainly in sight (I’ll be HOME in about a month), but there is still plenty of residual “this-will-never-end” feeling to last me for awhile.
On the upswing, things are going well with my application process, and I have a videoconference interview coming up … on my birthday. After the phone interview, this is another first for me, so it’s exciting but I’m a little nervous about it as well. Maybe one day they’ll even want to meet me.
To wrap up, I’d like to drop in part of what I wrote over at La Casa today, because sometimes even I can appreciate my own writing, and because where I stand on creating comics is also where I stand on creating any content; perhaps most topically, it’s where I stand on self-creation, on developing one’s self as a human being, as an artist (of any kind), as a friend, as a lover, and as a professional. The idea is that we create something of worth and offer it to the world; ideally, something unique that we’ve learned, through introspection and hard work, how to offer.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of comic I want to create. La Casa has been a journey – no, an experiment, really. It’s been a ride. It’s been something, anyway, but a lot of times I don’t know where to go with it, and I don’t know if it’s the story that I want to tell. There are thousands of comics out there, all of them telling stories, all of them with their own worth and audience and humor, and I’m happy that ours has been one of them, but at the same time I somehow want to find a way to make our comic different. I want to find the story that will be our comic, the characters that will drive the story, the merge between art and writing that will, at the very least, be uniquely ours. I’m really not talking about popularity, just the idea that in creating content and putting it out there for people to see, one has a responsibility to make that content … worth something. To somebody.
We start with a dream, and one by one pluck down the stars to light our path.
We start with a dream …
I could say growing pains in reference to, say, the life of this website, but really the most recent change is that I have, essentially, downgraded my web hosting, so “growing” doesn’t really seem appropriate. Moving pains would also work, but then you would lose the irony.
Hosting with DreamHostfor the past some-odd years has been fine. They have decent starting prices for the first year, competitive prices after, and they offer ridiculous amounts of both storage and bandwidth. More, in fact, than anyone should ever need on a shared host. They’re inconsistent though, when it comes to uptime, though I hear rumors that this is pretty much on a server- by server-basis, so maybe I just got unlucky.
I’ve been investigating DreamHost alternatives for a long time now, with some good leads now and again. I used Precision Effect when I created the lissat.org website (one that, sadly, I’ve never developed), and was happy with their speed and support, though at $6 a month for their smallest package, they still weren’t inexpensive.
After more recent browsing, I finally moved this site over to NearlyFreeSpeech.Net, which is a hosting service with a neat idea. It’s essentially a pay-for-what-you-use service: you charge your account with moneys, and then pay as you go, starting at $1 for the first GB of bandwidth and then getting cheaper per GB as/if your site becomes more popular. They don’t have any one-click installs, no user-friendly services. They have a knowledgeable user base and a well-used forum for when you run into trouble (as I did quite a few times getting WordPress installed). Pricewise, I expect $10 will get me through a few months, at least. Speedwise, so far, I find it much improved over DreamHost. And no, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net does not have an affiliate program, so I’m not trying to sell you anything. Fact is, the all-manual approach to site management is probably more than most people want to deal with, so NFS isn’t for everyone.
I’m in the process of moving La Casa Comics over to A Small Orange. That was also a swinging deal, $20 for 14 months of hosting in their “Tiny” package, which will most likely be enough for us, obscure as we are. I’m still waiting for the DNS to propagate (after a freak accident where it propagated immediately, and much sooner than I thought it would, and I have to switch it BACK over to DreamHost to ftp some files out before the switch). Once I get things set up, I’ll report back. But so far so good.
I moved all of the domains over to name.com, which has been nice and easy so far, and cheaper than anywhere else (currently under cost, actually, for new domains). I always heard that domain registrars should be separate from hosting services, but I’d always been too lazy to change it until now. It’s nice to know, though, that is for some reason the hosting company really decides to suck, there’s no chance of losing my domains on top of everything else.
Alternative hosting sites that I looked at (of note) include: Laughing Squid and Bluehost. Laughing Squid is neat because it’s based out of San Francisco and claims to serve the artist community particularly. Still, even if you use their “starving artist” discount, it’s $8 per month, so I thought I’d hold off and try some cheaper plans first. Also, you can see their sticker in the photo above. Bluehost seems like a big, but good, solid web hosting company, with lots of space and bandwidth and a free domain for $7 per month, but still a little too pricey for me, who is trying to save ALL his pennies for the time being. What can I say, I’m cheap yo!
If you’re interested in hosting and you have no idea what you’re doing, find someone like DreamHost who has nice one-click installs on a variety of applications (they really are easy for first-time host users). Bluehost evidently has a WordPress one-click install, though I’m not sure what else. If, however, you want cheap and complicated, so far I’m pretty happy with both NFS and ASO. I’ll be sure to let you know if anything changes. In the meantime, things should be much more stable around here (and eventually over at la casa); that is, if you even noticed anything going on in the first place.
So that’s my story. What about you? Do you have a great host? Who with and why are they awesome? I’m always on the lookout for the best deal. On the other side of the coin, who is completely worth avoiding?
Bound to be your new, favorite library game. Learn everything you can about the library guru and then challenge your friends to out-six-degrees you. More fun than “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” because a.) It’s library-related, so obviously excellent; b.) It’s obscure, which as we all know means “hip”, and 3.) SDofKB gets easier and easier every day, and you like a challenge. Also, when it comes to Library Science, Ranganathan was like the coolest guy around. Theo did it in reverse, but he’s off to a good start with a hybrid Six Degrees of RangaBacon sort of thing:
1. Ranganathan died in 1972 which was the same year that the Pierre Hotel Robbery happened.
2. The Pierre Hotel was robbed by Samuel Nalo and Robert Comfort of the Luchese crime family.
3. Don Licio Lucchesi was a character named in the Godfather part III.
4. The Godfather Part III co-starred Sofia Coppola who was also in The Outsiders.
5. The Outsiders starred Matt Dillon who (6) was in Wild Things with Kevin Bacon.
Tasty.
If you haven’t seen them yet, you really, really, really need to go out and watch these two movies.
Once is a story of music in Dublin, of love, and of chasing your dreams. And it’s completely, madly, absolutely brilliant.
Juno is, of course, the story of a young girl who gets pregnant, decides to keep her baby, and has some insightful, clever, endearing moments along the way.
They’re the two best movies I’ve seen in months, and they both have fantastic music in them. To further entice you:
Glen Hansard – Once Soundtrack – 01 – Falling Slowly
[audio:https://www.ahniwa.com/blog/uploads/01 Falling Slowly.mp3]
I need to learn how to play that.
Amy over at informing MUVEs is trying out a WP plugin called Photo Dropper, and it looked like it might simplify my inclusion of photos on ye olde blog, so I thought I’d give it a try as well. Honestly, I’m not sure what I think of it. Up until now, my current process for posting photos has been to: a.) Find a photo on Flickr, I try to use my own photos whenever possible; b.) download the photo to my desktop; c.) resize the photo so that WP can display it at actual size; d.) upload the photo using WP’s file upload function; e.) insert the photo into my post at full size with a link to the photo creator.
It’s not the most straightforward process, but it has the benefit of hosting the photos on my site, so that I’ll know as long as the blog is here then the photos will be here too. Photo Dropper turns my five-step process into a two-step process: a.) enter something into the search bar; b.) insert a picture using a given size. Simpler, sure, but the photo remains hosted over at Flickr, and if the user ever deletes it, or their pro account expires, or for any other reason the link degrades, my post is all of a sudden minus its visual element. In certain cases this could really damage the function of the post, assuming the content revolved around the photo itself.
Also, and feel free to call me Web 1.0 for this, I still like going to my content. I like reading blogs on their native sites when possible, instead of aggregating them, likewise webcomics, and I like looking at Flickr photos on Flickr. Surely I’m not the only one?
Time will tell if I stick with Photo Dropper, but right now I’m thinking I probably won’t. It’s just not that tough to open a new tab over to Flickr and find a quick image, a process which has a lot of benefits. Since I’m on the topic, though, I thought I’d mention some of the WP plugins and Firefox add-ons that I do like and use.
I tend to be a minimalist when it comes to WordPress. I abhor the WYSIWYG editor, and I try to keep my plugins to a minimum. That said, I find the following essential:
I’m a Firefox minimalist too, but I couldn’t live without FireFTP for my file transfers, and I find ColorZilla super useful from time to time.
Are there any that I’m missing? What WordPress plugins / Firefox add-ons can you simply not live without?
Crap, and all this time …
From Stuff White People Like:
#81 Graduate School: Tho’ thank goodness I’m attaining a practical degree! #75 Threatening to Move to Canada: Does it count as “threatening” if I actually did move? #72 Study Abroad: Does Canada count as “abroad”? What about that three months I spent in France? *le sigh* #68 Michel Gondry: Guilty as charged. #65 Co-Ed Sports: Well yeah, that’s how I met my fiance!
Also guilty of liking: Recycling, Bicycles, Natural Medicine, Juno (the movie), Irony, Vintage, Public Radio, Plays, Breakfast Places, The Daily Show, David Sedaris, Wine, Microbreweries, Tea, Wes Anderson Movies, Barack Obama, Organic Food, Farmer’s Markets, and Coffee.
That’s 24 of 84 things currently listed on the site. I guess I’m beyond hope at this point. Oh well, guess I’ll go drink some coffee and listen to This American Life, since it’s the weekend and I don’t have to go back to my graduate school classes in Canada until Monday.
I’m in an alliterative mood today. Besides, sibilants are sexy.
ABC News, among others, is a-huffle
over another Joss Whedon kerfuffle.
“Why can’t he”, they say,
“keep his girls ungay,
or at least make the sex more a-muffled?”
Double-meaning FTW.
The story is interesting itself, of course, especially if you’re a Buffy fan. Perhaps even more interesting are the current 113-odd comments of people calling for censorship and of people responding to the people asking for censorship, telling them that they’re uninformed idiots. Personally, I don’t know what the big issue is. (That was a comic book joke, right there.) BtVS had plenty of steamy moments in the show. In one episode, Buffy almost gets sexed-to-death as she and Riley get it on at a haunted party. Less graphic, but equally blatant in its own right, is when Tara goes down on Willow in the musical episode singing, “Lost in ecstasy / Spread beneath my Willow tree.” The camera pans up, of course, just as Willow begins to levitate over the bed. No, that’s not obvious at all.
So what if Buffy gets a little saucy between the pages. Graphically, it’s nothing worse than what we see on the standard Image comic cover. Even DC and Marvel covers can get pretty racy these days. Ideologically? Well, considering chicks are making out on street corners these days (albeit in Canada) as a form of protest, I’d say that it’s only a matter of time before the taboo gets … well, less taboo.
In the meantime, good for Buffy, and as she so eloquently puts it, “Wow.”
Last time I could only get to 7. With Nick and Abby’s help, I made it to 10.
Top 10 Tubular Testaments to Wit
There are some runners-up as well.
First, Mensa says “‘Dese TV shows R smart!”
Then, Johnny replies, “Yar, where be me Simpsons!? Yar!” (Note that in this story, Johnny is clearly a pirate.)
Finally, I retort, “Guh, I don’t even know if I can list 10 television shows.” Yep, that’s me, always ready with a witty repartee.
I’ll try anyway. My top 10 smart television shows, old and new.
I can only make it to seven, and I almost feel that putting Monty Python on the list is cheating. Then again, Mensa mentioned M*A*S*H, so I don’t feel too bad. That show was awful. And yes, I included three Joss Whedon shows. But that’s because he’s an amazing genius, and his shows show it.
What about you, what’s your favorite “smart” show?
Graham over at The Inspired Library School Student asked me to write a guest post for him about how student associations at library schools can help to keep LIS students interested and inspired throughout their studies. It’s my first guest post, so that’s exciting, and I actually managed to get it to him fairly quickly.
I had a telephone interview last night – my first – and I think it went pretty well. Being out of the interview habit, and completely out of the telephone interview habit, I was a little rusty, and they asked me things I wasn’t as prepared for as I might have hoped. All the same, I feel like I presented myself pretty well, and I’m remaining optimistic. It’s important to focus on the positive selling points I made, rather than worry about the silly blunders. If everything goes well, I’ll progress one rung up on the applicant ladder; the next step being an interview with the Washington State Secretary of State. I don’t know if that would be on the phone or in person, but it sounds like an interesting experience either way.
The questions they asked were very job-specific. Did I have any experience working with virtual reference? A little. What experience did I have working with electronic database vendors? None, though some corollary experiences to share. What experience did I have as a go-between for customers and database vendors? Yikes, another corollary answer. I’m just a young future-librarian, yet, full of experiences I can use to relate to these experiences, but all the same with very little experience in what it means to be a real, professional librarian. I know that worked against me to some extent, but they mentioned they were emphasizing trainability and customer service, both of which are strong areas for me.
Thanks to everyone who consoled my consternation before the interview, and to all the well-wishers. It’s nice to know that in many ways, we’re all in this boat together, and the experience of one can work for the advantage of another. In the meantime, keep those fingers crossed (thumbs held), and I’ll let you know how it all turns out.
What I Learned Today had a link over to Tux Paint, which looks awesome. From there I burrowed my way through to Tux Typing and Tux, of Math Command.
Tux Paint is an open source drawing program supposedly for children ages 3 to 12, but the way it looks, I kind of want to use it myself. I haven’t tried it yet, but just from the screens I can see it has cool stamps and a fun, bubbly interface. I think we should design all our programs as if we were making them for kids.
Tux, of Math Command is an arcade-style, comet-blaster math game, much in the style of that typing shark popcap game that everyone has played. Alongside with a training academy, you can choose what type of math problem you want to work on, or you want your kid to work on if, you know, you’re gonna actually use these things for their intended purpose. But who would want to do that?
I don’t see any nifty screenshots for Tux Typing, but I can guess that it’s pretty straight-forward, and that it’s meant to teach kids typing skills. It probably even has cute graphics and nifty sounds. Really, what more do you want from a typing program?
Here are the download links for math and typing. If you’re a Windows user like me, go for the installer.exe files. You can download Tux Paint over on its website.
If you’re interested in other free entertainment software, check these guys out. They seem to be behind the Tux4kids apps, among others.
I don’t know who decided that “cellar door” was the most beautiful phrase in the English language, but I have to say that I don’t agree. Not even a little bit. I find it to be a somewhat ugly, clumsy phrase, with little lyrical quality and, visually, with too much slant to the right. I think about these sorts of things too much, I agree.
Every once in a while, I write a combination of words with which I become quite pleased, and, as I glance about the room, I silently preen for a few moments before I move on with my writing. No one ever notices, sure, but little literaku moments such as these sometimes make my whole day worthwhile.
Just now in an essay on censorship in Ancien Regime France, I wrote: curtailing scurrilous printing. You can leave the printing out, it’s the combination of curtailing and scurrilous that I quite like, and that will make today worthwhile.
Assuming I finish this paper soon.
