31.3.03 ... in which a discussion of book burning is invited

"... the military don't burn books any more: they sell them to the paper manufacturers. The paper companies shred them, pulp them and put them back on the market for consumption. It is not true that Marx, Freud or Piaget are unavailable to the public. In book form they are not. But they are in the form of serviettes."

-Eduardo Galeano

27.3.03 ... mr. blue sky






  [ œ .. ]

25.3.03 ... campus no-war media

There has been a lot of peace/anti-war sentiment on the campus I work at over the past few months. And, in keeping with the general campus tradition of creating media that can be both sensitive and hard-hitting, there have been a number of displays, posters, stickers, and banners that have caught my eye. A lot of the material I've seen has been poignant, astute and creative, yet due to its ephemeral nature has such a limited lifespan, so I started collecting what I could and I now have a formidable pile of pamphlets, posters, stickers and such. So I've decided that this pile will become a small archive. If similar media on a campus near you has caught your attention, feel free to contribute to the archive by sending the images my way. I will also be photographing the stuff that won't fit onto my flatbed (displays, banners, etc.), so photographs are OK too.

Note: Your submission should be small enough to view on an average monitor with minimal scrolling. I'm not restricting pixels, but if I have to edit the dimensions of any submission, I'm reserving the right to do so. Thanks.

31.03.03 update: Ever since I started collecting leaflets on campus, I've been preoccupied with the leaflets that are being dropped over Iraq and how much I'd love to get my hands on a couple of those (for purely archival purposes). Well I haven't quite managed to get my hands on any, but I have been feasting my eyes on these.   [ œ .. ]

21.3.03 ... randomly

• One of the neat things about working in a library is that you get first right of refusal on withdrawals. Last summer I scooped up a few travel guides (all 2001s!) and today I am going home with a sweet little volume called Driff's Guide to All the Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain. A 1984 imprint, but still.
• If you have contributed to or simply enjoyed the Mirror Project in the past, consider a donation to help with operating costs that threaten to pull them under.
• I was all excited about Where is Raed? when I first saw it on Tuesday [via Textism]: the lucidity of the commentary, the immediacy of the reporting, the historical value of it all, the notion that it is a primary narrative that should be preserved (I hope those archives are there to stay). But when I went home and told Michael about it, his reaction was less enthusiastic than mine. He's a skeptic on a good day and a cynic on a bad one, and that is by no means a criticism. He said: "how do you know he's in Baghdad? How do you know what his motivations are?" Others have considered this too. Why didn't I? It's almost like I believe in an unwritten code of honesty among bloggers (to a reasonable degree), even though I'm suitably critical about everything else I read, online or not. Still, I have no evidence that his motivations are disreputable, so I'm going to keep reading for now.
• Conservative politics in Canada angers me for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is attitudes like this. In the interest of civility, I should probably wait at least one hour before writing that letter.   [ œ .. ]

18.3.03 ... biding time

They tell me that lost comments will be restored through an imminent "resync", and I'm still tinkering with my end of the server, the painful loading time is less consistent, but still problematic. I'm moving to LISHost in April because my current host continues to piss me off on a frighteningly regular basis. Their cheap, cheap, cheap hosting rate was the reason I decided to go with them in the first place, and at the time you could access their support via a clunky but fast online console. But they've changed all that and for all intents and purposes you can only get in touch with them through email now, with no response time guaranteed unless you pay for premium support. Bad business anyone? I'd be happy to pay more for less if it came to that (I'll actually be getting a lot more for a little bit more at LISHost) if it means dealing with a person with a conscience. I can be infintitely more patient and accomodating with real people than with big faceless corporations that have, you know, zero accountability.   [ œ .. ]


... thaw

The snow is melting furiously, which is good but not great, especially if you live below ground in a 93 year-old house. In the past we've had floods in the furnace room (across from us), in the laundry room (adjacent to us), on the landing (outside our door), and only one minor leak in our actual living space which happened during the thaw of April 2001, the month we moved in, when Michael came home to a fearless puddle of unknown origin on our sisal rug. Unknown because it seemed to have seeped in from below, not through any discernible fissures or crevices even though we have plenty of fissures and crevices we could have blamed it on. However, nothing since and for this we're thankful, but still wary.

Entirely unrelated but clever is this.   [ œ .. ]

17.3.03 ... grrinddinng

Things have been running painfully slow around here over the past few days. And Haloscan is tweaking their server again. And some comments seem to have disappeared. So all is not well at the me pages right now, nor will it be for a day or two. I'm investigating.   [ œ .. ]

15.3.03 ... bye bye blues

The weekend began with a night out with a bunch of non-librarian friends at Crocodile Rock for $2.75 drinks and a whole lot of gabbing and general catching-up. The highlight of the evening for me was spreading the word of the 26,000 librarians that are expected to descend upon the city in June (ALA/CLA, joint national library conference which will be a big deal, in a good way) and having the news met with a whole lot of whistling, high-fiving and chest-bumping by all my single male friends. For whatever reason, this made me very happy. It was nice to get out and see people again, as I was sure to have informed everyone last night, I have been in hibernation this winter, coming out on rare occasions to gather essentials and see some folks. This trend is definitely on the wane, it's + 10°C today (it took me a while to reloate the plus sign on my keyboard, even though it sits right next to the minus sign, with which I have been far too intimately acquainted this winter) and I am on my way out for a walk in the neighbourhood. After that, my book for a couple of hours, some library-lit reading I have to finish this weekend, and then tomorrow to my parents' place for a visit. Suddenly I am very happy to be venturing forth from my musty little apartment.   [ œ .. ]

13.3.03 ... i'm on and updated

It took an award for me to finally jump on the blogrolling bandwagon. And on the link theme, I've made my bookmarks public here. Some links are IP dependent (work stuff and subscription-based journals and articles) so won't work for you, and others are password-protected (and no, this is not an invitation to hone your hacking skills). Most are public friendly and those are the ones meant for sharing. The list is a lot more up-to-date than linkage, which means that linkage is probably on it's way out.   [ œ .. ]

12.3.03 ... dai.sy



n. pl. dai·sies
Any of several plants of the composite family, especially a widely naturalized Eurasian plant (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum) having flower heads with a yellow center and white rays. Also called oxeye daisy, white daisy; A low-growing European plant (Bellis perennis) having flower heads with pink or white rays. Also called English daisy; The flower head of any of these plants; Slang One that is deemed excellent or notable.

Source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language   [ œ .. ]

10.3.03 ... war, not war

The Pierre Berton reading was great, he's a witty man, in the old-fashioned, comedy-of-manners sense of the word. No real surprise that my favourite part of the reading was the Q & A, and my favourite part of the Q & A was Berton's response to a question from an aggressive, young, fireball of a journalist from a local TV station, who was suitably rigged in big hair and a navy blue pantsuit, trailing a camera crew. Berton was reading from his new book The Joy of Writing: A Guide for Writers, Disguised as a Literary Memoir, so obviously the questions revolved around his experiences as a writer. But our intrepid journalist kept trying to swing the conversation to the war in Iraq question, in an attempt to solicit some sort of inflammatory comment from Berton, given that he has always been a champion of peace and has argued at length about the irrationality of war as an answer to any sort of conflict, local or international. She probably got her inflammatory comment too (he said something like (and I'm paraphrasing): it has always been stupid to believe that war is the solution for peace and we can't seem to get that into the head of his highness south of the border), and everyone else in the audience but her seemed to get the fact that Berton wasn't there to debate politics. Still, it was a great way to spend a Monday afternoon, but I have to stop going to so many readings because my budget is suffering for all these hardcover books I can't resist buying to have signed.

I've decided to retire stilllifes and bring miscellaneous daily images back to the me pages. Slightly more detailed explanation of why is here and archives will stay here.   [ œ .. ]

9.3.03 ... tieing up loose ends

I went back to my old library school yesterday and after about four hours there, it felt like I'd never left. But in a good way. Not a lot has changed (how much can change in 10 months?), the one difference I did see that I would have loved to have seen during my tenure there was the addition of paper towel dispensers in the washrooms. It was nice to be back, and I anticipate spending a lot more time there in the next few months. More on that soon.

I had a total of 13 responses on my non-scientific poll on HTML coding and software use. The results: 6 respondents said they hand-code only (many of whom started out with one of the HTML editing software packages), 3 respondents both hand-code and use the software, 4 use HTML editing software only. The results sort of made sense, but I expected a lot more designers to hand-code only. But then I was hoping to hear from someone who designed websites for a living and no one copped to that. The reason why all this came up in the first place was because of that conversation I mentioned. There were 4 of us involved and all 4 of us did some web design/maintenance, and out of the 4 of us, 3 said that they used only Dreamweaver (unless they had no option and were stuck with a computer that didn't have the software on it, in which case they used WordPad). The only one who didn't was me. And while I too started with Dreamweaver, I started to find the software constrciting and annoying very soon after I started feeling comfortable with HTML. I just assumed everyone else felt the same. The 3 individuals I was speaking with said that using the software helped them keep up with new web design trends and new HTML/CSS versions (by upgrading their software), and that without the software upgrades they would feel antiquated and disconnected from the wider world of web design. I didn't agree. I don't feel antiquated or disconnected at all, even when I have my nose stuck in a text editor, because "View Source" is my very favourite web-learning-tool. Ultimately, while I didn't agree with them, I attributed the difference in opinion to differences in learning venues; they learn from software, I don't. If you still have something to say on the matter, I'd like to hear from you.

And you can get your pie here.   [ œ .. ]

7.3.03 ... various projects: some new, some not, most interesting, all followed

• The Waiting Project
• The Flux it Project
• View from my Window
• Web Culture Survey [via kottke]
• The Tornado Project
• LSE Card Catalogue Project
• The Lysistrata Project
• The Galileo Project
• The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project
• The Payphone Project
• The National Women's History Project
• The Theban Mapping Project
• The On-Line Picasso Project
• The Government Accountability Project   [ œ .. ]

6.3.03 ... note to self: post Holga pics

Toycamera has redesigned and is now a streamlined, easily navigable site. Any site devoted exculsively to CPC is my kind of site, particularly if it is CPC of the photographic variety.   [ œ .. ]

4.3.03 ... random stuff of some particular importance in no particular order

• All the presidents of Italy's universities resigned in December in protest of budget cuts to higher education. It seems to me that this was a gutsy, definitive action, but I haven't been able to track down any press on the result of this large-scale resignation.
• Two recent books that appeal: Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes their Lives, by Jeff Schmidt and Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization, by Michael Tierno.
• 2003 to 2012 has been declared the "Decade of Literacy".
• Duct tape is the new black [via memepool].
• Another virtual community of digital artists is just what the web needs. Meet Pleix.
• SpellChecker.net, the spell checking utility used by Blogger Pro does not recognise the words "blog" or "blogging". Or "Blogger" for that matter. Maybe now, with all that Google money behind them, they'll work on getting the word "blog" and all its derivatives added to the lexicon.
• People don't like it when you say you made pie when really you made jewellery.   [ œ .. ]


... recently re-dooced expectations

Dooce is redesigning and I for one can't wait until she returns.   [ œ .. ]


... how well have you flossed today?

I've never been much of a magazine person. My mind does not seem to respond well to anything that does not progress in a linear manner. Think "continued on page 197". Once I have left page 27 to read the rest of the article, which is printed on page 197, I want to continue reading from page 197 onwards and therefore miss everything between pages 27 and 197.

But then magazines started doing this thing where they would print the complete story on consecutive pages, and now I have more print magazine subscriptions than ever before. My most recent print subscription is to Mental Floss. In addition to printing complete stories on consecutive pages (thanks boys), they also have a website with neat daily stuff like Fact of the Day and Quiz of the Day. Archives of these features are here.   [ œ .. ]

3.3.03 ... monday

I slept, I read, I made pies all weekend. I saw one hopelessly mediocre movie and I did laundry. I know it's all relative, I know that weekends wouldn't be as precious if they lasted longer or if weekdays seemed like weekends, but I could really use a whole bunch of weekends, all strung together, all precious, all for me.   [ œ .. ]