the pod bay door

:: 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.

:: 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.

:: 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. 😉

:: 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.

:: 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.

:: 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.