the pod bay door

:: 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.

:: 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.

:: 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.

:: 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. 😉