:: While leaving Sobey's late this evening, I noticed a large amount of water on the road while driving on 23rd Avenue just east of 142nd Street. When I arrived home, I called the City of Edmonton and reported it. What I didn't know was that a flood was happening in my house at the same time.
Those who know me know I am not a "tool time" kinda guy. I look forward to doing home renovations and repair in the same way I look forward to contracting a terminal disease, sticking needles in my eyes, or eating Ratatouille. Nonetheless, much progress, with the help of friends, has been made since last Friday regarding an overhaul of my living room. The walls have been painted, the carpet removed, the baseboards stripped from the wall, the front entrance tile ripped out, the carpet underlay torn up and bagged, staples pulled from the floor, and those small pieces of 1"x1" pieces of wood with carpet nails pulled out of the floor with a prybar. All of this, in anticipation of Geoff's visit tomorrow afternoon to begin installing the laminate flooring.
This evening, I worked hard to complete the removal of the underlay, the wood pieces, staples, and tile. After three hours of work, I rested a bit, then went to Sobey's to buy something to eat. Upon returning home, I unpacked the groceries, opened a can of meatball stew, and prepared to watch a bit of tube before hitting the sack. Nature called, and I slipped into the downstairs washroom for a moment, only to find the floor covered in water. Not yet in Panic Mode, I checked around the toilet to see if there was a leak, and then felt a drop of water hit the top of my head. I looked up, saw that the ceiling was soaked, so I ran upstairs to the other washroom to find the toilet there overflowing ever so quietly, plugged up and still running for some reason. I grabbed the plunger and used it quickly, the water retreated and the toilet flushed, and I grabbed a whack of towels and tried to mop up as fast as possible. The water had leaked onto the adjoining rug at the bathroom door. I grabbed more towels, returned to the downstairs washroom, covered the floor with them, ran to my office where I had two large plastic bins that were once part of two separate paper shredders (long gone), and took them to the downstairs washroom to put one under the ceiling leak.
I notice then that there were other wet spots on the ceiling, and that the paint on small sections of the wall near said ceiling had expanded, having filled up with water. I decided to tap the ceiling where it was dripping with a very small nail, and the water began to flow out in a steady stream. When it began to subside, I mopped up further, and grabbed the heavily soaked towels to take to the washing machine in the basement. Little did I know what was happening down there.
I went down the stairs to the basement, only to discover that the water had seeped through the main floor, and soaked a large section of the basement, wetting cardboard boxes, soaking sections of the parquet flooring, and parts of the false ceiling. Grabbing more towels, I continued to clean up as much as I could. Realizing that few clean, dry towels were remained, I grabbed my sponge mop to continue the work downstairs.
The walls and ceiling in the bathroom are a mess, as is the basement. I'm too tired to be angry, but it does suck when you live alone and are without home repair and maintenance abilities when something like this happens. All I knew to do was to unplug and flush the feckin' toilet, and clean up as much water as possible. Now I have a bathroom with a hole in the ceiling and parts of a wall that look like shyte, and a basement that has been flooded for the third or fourth time, and looks like double shyte. For all I know, the upstairs toilet had been ever-so-slowly overflowing all day.
At least the living room floor is ready for laminate flooring. Adding the laminate will increase the value of the house, so I'm told. Then again, having a three-level water leak will probably bring the value back down to what it was before the laminate is installed.
Ha ha ha. Oh what bloody fun it is to own a house.
What a crock a' shyte. And how was your day today?
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (5)show comments right here »
:: The living room walls are painted. Yesterday I ripped out the rug from the living room. It sits in pieces in my car port at the moment. Today I began tearing out the underlay, lifted staples from the wooden floor, and removed a few of the pieces of wood (with the tiny nails that cling to the underside of the carpet) that surround the perimeter of the living room. More to do tomorrow, and Friday, and Saturday....
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (1)show comments right here »
:: Help, my web site is drowning!
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (1)show comments right here »
:: Most of the living room painting was done today. The east half the room was painted a shade of dark blue, the other half a shade of light blue in the same colour range. Kathryn came by around 10:15 or so, and was an enormous help throughout the day (as she was last year when the pink wallpaper was removed and the hall painted Scotland Road green.) We stopped at lunch for bowls of her homemade seafood/fish soup, with some delicious Pugliese bread from Sobey's, plus a bottle of Stewart's root beer for me. Then it was back to work, with most of it completed by 5:30 pm. The goal is to have the walls painted before Heavy G comes by to rip out the carpet and install laminate flooring.
I am tired, my hands are dry and cracked, and my back is sore, but the hard part is over. See a short video recap of the day's efforts here.
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (7)show comments right here »
:: A four-day weekend begins. Tomorrow, well, later today actually, a friend and I will paint my living room. I hope we can get it done by dinner time. Then, in a couple of weeks, Geoff will come by and help install laminate flooring, after ripping out the carpet. Wishing you all a Happy Easter weekend.
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (1)show comments right here »
:: Word is out that President Bill Clinton has been added to the list of general session speakers at SLA in Toronto. From a post on SLA-ENG today:
This morning it was announced to the Board, that former President Bill Clinton recently agreed to be a general session speaker for the SLA Toronto meeting. He will speak on Wednesday morning , from 9:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. This is really exciting news! We wanted the conference planners to be among the first to hear. Promotional and PR Information is being developed and will be sent out as soon as we are able to the entire membership. We do not foresee this conflicting with any division programming, except as mentioned earlier, Wednesday morning sessions will now begin at 7:00 a.m.| TrackBack (0) | Comments (1)
show comments right here »
:: Saw William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice on Saturday night. Film versions of Shakespeare plays are usually a bit beyond me, primarily because I haven't studied the plays, and get lost in the dialogue. Of the few film versions of his plays that I've seen, this was the most enjoyable, with great performances from all cast members. The problem I have in any film version of a Shakespeare play is twofold: trying to hear what the characters are saying while simultaneously attempting to process it, or put another way, translate Shakespeare English into the way we speak now. Two factors always work against me: the sound system in the theatre is never top-notch, and the lines delivered by the actors are often done so in the midst of extraneous noise, like music, laughter, or shouting, and the actors' enunciations are not consistent, nor is the volume used to deliver their lines. Now it's time to read The Merchant of Venice For Dummies Official Teacher's Giude, so I can better understand what I saw this evening.
:: Friday night after work I spent three hours with a new friend, and had a lovely time, visiting with her and sharing stories about work, music, ambition, and other things, and testing with my new digital camera on each other. A wonderful way to start the weekend.
:: Today I continued work to purge "stuff" from my house. It will take long hours to do this. In between this lengthy project, renovations are being planned. The carpet on the main floor on my home will be replaced with laminate flooring, with the living room walls being painted beforehand. Friends have said they will help, and I will graciously accept it when provided. I'm also fighting off a minor but quite annoying chest cold. I am tentatively planning a two-day trip to Lethbridge for the Easter weekend.
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (1)show comments right here »
:: This is work-related, but I'll share it with you anyway. The March/April 2005, v3 n1 issue of Ei Update is available for viewing, featuring updates on faceted searching and the forthcoming study: Role of Information in Innovation 2005. Ei is Engineering Information in Hoboken NJ, the company that produces the Compendex database, which indexes and abstracts the important engineering literature of the world. Some of you may remember the many trips I took to NYC between 1993 and 1998, all of which were to attend a committee meeting at Ei's offices in Hoboken, followed by a few days of hanging out in Manhattan.
The Librarian's Corner for this issue of the Update was written my your humble engineering librarian-type weblogger, and is called RSS: Moving Into the Mainstream.
| TrackBack (0):: Via Rafael's site, a link to David Sifry's "State of The Blogosphere, March 2005, Part 1: Growth of Blogs". He reports that Technorati is tracking >7.8 million blogs and 937 million links. The Technorati site today lists 7,926,598 weblogs watched, and 950,105,944 links tracked. The blogosphere has increased in size 16 times in the past 20 months, and ~30,000 - 40,000 new blogs are being created daily. It's not all good, Sifry reports, as part of the growth can be attributed to spam blogs.
30-40,000 blogs a day? I don't feel as bad now trying to keep up with Tony's prodigious output. ;)
| TrackBack (0):: Via Rafael's site, a link to David Sifry's "State of The Blogosphere, March 2005, Part 1: Growth of Blogs". He reports that Technorati is tracking >7.8 million blogs and 937 million links. The Technorati site as of just now lists 7,945,854 weblogs watched, and 950,635,179 links tracked. The blogosphere has increased in size 16 times in the past 20 months, and ~30,000 - 40,000 new blogs are being created daily. It's not all good, Sifry reports, as part of the growth can be attributed to spam blogs.
| TrackBack (0):: I've been fortunate to have received paper copies of The Onion for a number of years. This is because a friend of mine who works at U Wisconsin Madison collects and mails them to me in a big fat envelope every few months. The Onion began as an amateur campus publication in 1988, before hitting the big time in the mid-1990s. Now comes word that there will be an Onion movie, called The Untitled Onion Movie, at least so far. For more detail on the newspaper and its history, read The State of the Onion, from the U Wisconsin alumni journal, On Wisconsin.
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (1)show comments right here »
:: I am a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters Edmonton & Area. There are different mentoring opportunities available to volunteers. Last year, I began as a Digital Hero - it's like being a digital pen pal. The student and I e-mail back and forth through a monitored web site. The student asks me questions, and I try to help, and we get to know each other. Today I began another program called In-School Mentoring. I was assigned to a boy in Grade 6 at the Academy at King Edward. The school is in a beautiful old building that was built in 1913, and is a historic site in the city. The use of the word "Academy" to describe it is appropriate.
I met the student, Scott, today with the BBBS caseworker, and we discussed interests, activities he likes doing, and so forth. I will meet with him for 40 minutes once a week, over lunch hour. I learned very quickly some of his interests, including mechanics and electronics, robots, music, sk8boarding, and puzzles. He also told me he likes classic rock (Pink Floyd!) and SNL, so we hit it off quickly. We plan to play Scrabble next week.
I've not done this kind of volunteering before, but felt comfortable today. The meeting place will be the library, which is cool, given that I'm a librarian. I spoke with the library technician, and promised to compare notes at a later date!
:: Today while driving home from work, I heard a siren. An ambulance was approaching, so I pulled over with another vehicle, into a left-hand turning lane. As the ambulance passed, we began to move back into the lane, only to notice an idiot barreling up the same lane at high speed. He had chosen to use the ambulance as a wedge to clear other vehicles out of his way. He almost clipped my car as he sped by me.
It's another example of a disturbing trend, what I like to call obliviousness. I'm not sure this idiot even knew what he was doing. Another example is when someone bumps into you while they are talking on their cell phone, unaware that other sentient beings are sharing the same space as they are as they walk and talk.
:: In the spirit of Christmas Letters Past, I'd like to report that today, I bought some pants.
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (3)show comments right here »
:: Siding with the NHLPA in the current hockey lockout? Listening to this might change your mind.
:: I tend to feel like this on Monday morning, and this on Friday afternoon.
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (1)show comments right here »
:: These things happened:
show comments right here »
:: It was a sombre mood on my campus today. One week ago on March 3rd, 2005, four young constables of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were gunned down by a deranged loner outside of Mayerthorpe, a small town west 130 km northwest of Edmonton. A national memorial service was held today in Edmonton, at the Butterdome Universiade Pavilion at the University of Alberta, where I work. Thousands of RCMP officers, and police from across Canada and the United States attended the service. Dignitaries included the Prime Minister on Canada, Premier of Alberta, and the Governor-General of Canada.
There was a massive police march on the west side of campus before the memorial service. It was apparently quite something to see. Along with two colleagues, we left our office to watch it, only to discover we were late, led to believe it began at 11:30, the time given in the local papers; in fact, it was over by 11:00 o'clock. I did not attend the service, which ran from 1:00-3:00 pm, but walked about the Butterdome area before and afterwards. Classes were still in session, and chances of getting a seat inside the dome were remote at best. I snapped a few pictures with my new digital camera along the way. I spoke with a few officers, includings ones from Victoria, and Ontario. The officer from Victoria said that he was amazed at the glorious weather, noting that it was warmer here than in Victoria. It is still winter, yet the sun was bright and very warm. The average high is -1C, but the temperature was in the low teens. Perhaps a higher power was at work today. In the past 72 hours, most of the snow in the city has melted.
The death of four officers at once was the largest loss of life in the history of the RCMP, and has devastated my country. Having happened so close to where I live makes it seem all the more real. One constable's wife is expecting their second child, and another was engaged to be married. I watched some of the service on television this evening, and the eulogies delivered for each of the four officers were very moving. We can only hope that their families are able to find some comfort and solace from the support they have received from across the continent, and within their own communities.
:: Checking the CBC site for information on the aforementioned service, I see this headline: "Jetsgo ceases operations; travellers stranded". Well, this blows chunks. I have a flight booked on Jetsgo to fly to Toronto in June to attend a conference.
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (2)show comments right here »
:: Deadwood, the brilliant Western frontier drama set in Deadwood, South Dakota in 1877, is back on HBO, and in Canada, on Movie Central. I was going to write about it, but then noticed Tony's post, so I will defer to his equally brilliant review
:: I exhausted from doing what seems to be nothing at work but writing. A letter to support a colleague's upcoming tenure, a column on RSS for Engineering Information, revisions to the chapter I am writing on the literature of petroleum engineering and refining. For one who does not consider himself a writer by any stretch of the imagination (I surround myself with friends who do it much better than I ever will), what I'm learning is that writing takes a lot of time, and a lot of energy, and can be simulateously very rewarding and mentally draining.
| TrackBack (0):: Deb and Steve Feisst are about to take a three-month trip to South America, leaving March 12, and returning June 12. Deb is a library colleague and kindred spirit. They will document their trip at aventura de suramérica.
Peter Binkley, colleague at the U of Alberta, has started writing at his new site, Quædam cuiusdam, aptly titled given his background as a medieval historian, in addition to being the Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian on campus. (Watch out, Peter! Michael Gorman just tossed a book at you!)
I met Diane de Rooy at the Steely Dan concert at The Gorge in Washington State, in 2000 and again at the SD concert there in 2003. Her blog is Big Thinker, Small Town: "My motivation behind this blog is to contribute something to the way people think, hoping they will become more aware of facts, and ultimately, they will become motivated to do one or two small things about issues that need attention." Sounds good to me.
Stuart Bayens has created Last Link on the Left:"The aim of The Last Link on the Left is to provide entertainment, education and observations of modern culture as reflected on the internet and in other forms of communication." Wow. Good luck sorting through that quagmire!
Meanwhile, Tony is writing up a storm at A Sea of Flowers. Good God, man, where are you finding the time? ;-)
| TrackBack (0):: As my friend Tony Dalmyn noted, I didn't include a link to Michael Gorman's original column in the LA Times, Google and God's Mind, in the previous post about his Library Journal column about blogs, so there it is. I mention this because I want to draw your attention to a new blog, Quædam cuiusdam by esteemed colleague Peter Binkley, Digital Initiatives Project Librarian at the University of Alberta, in which he offers an insightful, informed and educated response to Gorman's take on the Google project. Peter works on Peel's Prairie Provinces, a major digitization project to enhance and improve access to the history of the Canadian prairie provinces:
Peel's Prairie Provinces is a resource dedicated to assisting scholars, students, and researchers of all types in their exploration of the history and culture of the Canadian Prairies. The site contains both an online bibliography of books, pamphlets, and other materials related to the development of the Prairies and a fully searchable collection of the full texts of many of these items. As of September 2004, the Peel bibliographic database holds some 7,200 titles, approximately 2,500 of which have already been rendered in digital form and mounted on the Web site. These materials are extremely varied in terms of their content and provide an extraordinarily diverse picture of the Prairie experience. These items date back to the earliest days of exploration in the region and include a vast range of material dealing with every aspect of the settlement and development of the Canadian West. These sources are also highly diverse in regard to the cultural experiences that they reflect. Although English-language titles predominate, the databases contain a very substantial body of materials in French, Ukrainian, and numerous other languages.
The project is based on resources documented in Peel's Bibliography of the Canadian Prairies. Gorman calls digitization projects "expensive exercises in futility", easily interpreted by Peter as "wasting my time." Scholars working in this area would beg to differ. Tony notes that Google "is a dumb brute which brings up lots of commercial and promotional sites and lots of oddball sites on any given search." Fair enough, but it's here to stay and is indexing scholarly material (such as IEEE Xplore, for example), and thus providing access to thousands of peer-reviewed publications (among others), including the full-text, if the user is on an IP-authenticated computer. Students are using it before any proprietary, scholarly database more often than not. Librarians face the task on a daily basis of informing students of the scholary datatabases available to them in addition to, but not necessarily in lieu of, Google.
That said, with the advent of Google Scholar, as mentioned, anyone can run a search and receive dozens, hundreds of citations to publications found in scholary journals, conferences, etc. Someone working in electrical engineering can run their search on the IEEE db, run the same seach on Google Scholar, and receive more results, because other scholarly publications are indexed there besides the IEEE db.
Perhaps Mr Gorman needs to rethink his dismissal of Google's archiving project, drop the nasty tone ("Boogie woogie Google boys"? - give me a break), and revisit the issue. I wonder, is he upset because Google is undertaking something libraries might have be doing themselves, rather than in partnership with Google?
Discussion will continue. Mr Gorman's dismissal of weblogs, subsequent to his criticism of the Google digitization project, is ironic, given the interesting and thought-provoking discourse that has followed on so many of them. For that reason, he is to be genuinely thanked - many librarians and others outside the field are engaged in valuable debate as a result. Read Barbara Fister's "Google's Digitization Project - What Difference Will It Make?", in Library Issues, v25 n4, March 2005, for another perspective. Now I have to get back to work. (As posted to STLQ.)
| TrackBack (0):: Michael Gorman, Dean of Library Services at the Henry Madden Library, California State University, Fresno, President-Elect of the American Library Association, and considered by many to be a leader in our profession, is taking a beating online for his Library Journal column, Revenge of the Blog People. The column begins with (and maintains throughout) a condescending tone, as he writes:
A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People.
Ostensibly, Gorman's column is a response to criticism leveled at him by bloggers for an op-ed piece he wrote for the LA Times ("Google and God's Mind," December 17, 2004), in which he questions "the usefulness of Google digitizing millions of books and making bits of them available via its notoriously inefficient search engine." However, he also chose to use his column to condemn anyone who dares to blog:
It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.I do not recall ever reading something so hard-edged and mean-spirited in its dismissal of a new, exciting movement, There is little point in defending Weblog Nation, or the many diverse applications of weblogs being utilized in libraries today. In my library system, at least fourteen blogs are used for applications including dissemination of library news, project management, e-journal maintenance, software working groups, digital projects, management of our knowledge common, and more. My guess is that none of the participants consider him- or herself a charter member of The Blog People. The weblog, for what it's worth, has provided a new way for rapid distribution and exchange of diverse ideas, new ways to communicate, to share information and opinion, and create communities of like-minded librarians interested in sharing their knowledge and experiences with others. (As an engineering librarian, I introduced the weblog as a project management tool in 2004 to a number of engineering design classes in which I teach sessions on library and information resources, and continue to do so this term.)
The larger concern, however, is that he is the next leader of the largest library association on the planet, which means he is moving into a position of major influence in the profession. On his website, he stresses that he hopes to be "an effective advocate for our shared values and a leader who can help the association to seize its opportunities and rise to its challenges." In acknowledging his adamant disdain for weblogs and those who create them, I wonder how he plans to accomplish this without alienating a growing population of intelligent, articulate, and passionate librarians, committed to their profession, and who are already among the converted. I also wonder, what about younger librarians, those new to the profession or about to enter it, what might their reactions be to the dismissal, by one of its noteworthy leaders, of a relatively new but growing component of librarianship?
Of note, Jessamyn West reports that Gorman has since indicated his column was intended to be satirical, but does state that he is not a fan of blogs, and notes that he has "an old fashioned belief that, if one wishes to air one's views and be taken seriously, one should go through the publishing/editing process." Times have changed. That process still exists, and must continue to do so, but it should not be the only way to air one's views and be "taken seriously."
One of my favorite of many responses to Gorman's column appeared on library_grrls:"Despite the fact that this is indeed a satirical piece, I resent being compared to a B movie." Imagine the sequels... The Blog People vs Larry Flynt. 24 Hour Blog People. Ordinary Blog People. The Blog People That Time Forgot. Darby O'Gill and The Little Blog People. The Curse of the Blog People. Games Blog People Play. An Enemy of the Blog People. Where Have All the Blog People Gone? Blog People Who Die Mysteriously In Their Sleep. I Like To Hurt Blog People. Blog People Hate Me and They Hate My Glasses. The Best of the Village Blog People. All Power to the Blog People. Let My Blog People Live. Man of the Blog People. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Blog People. Blog People are Dead. We The Blog People. The War of the Six Million Blog People. OK, enough. Thanks, IMDb.
Jessamyn, who supported Gorman for the ALA Presidency, wrote the following in his website guestbook:"Lovely website, have you considered a blog?" My guess is, no. Then again, who knows?
NOTE: This post originally appeared in my work-related blog, STLQ; comments from that post are here.
| TrackBack (1) | Comments (6)show comments right here »
:: You must watch this short video, with or without sound. I wonder, did they practice first? Then, check the time.
| TrackBack (0) | Comments (1)show comments right here »