Category: hi

Hi. Lots going on here in library-land. I made a GLBT display for the front entryway that has gone seemingly unnoticed [which is good in my community] but the books are disappearing. Let me know if you’d like a copy of my Lambda Awards flyer. Also saw my first patron looking at really raunchy porn yesterday. We have a “be cool” policy which means you’re free to look at pretty much whatever you want, but if other patrons complain, we may ask you to work towards wrapping it up. I find that while I’m pretty anti-filtering, and even pro-porn, I was a little embarassed sitting near this guy while at the reference desk and seeing people see what he was looking at, look at me to see if I saw, see that I saw, and then wait for the inevitable beatdown they expected me to give the patron, a beatdown that never came. If they had bothered to talk to me about it, we could have had a discussion about our Internet use policies and freedom to read etc. Instead, at least once, I felt like I got that look that said “We all know what you’re supposed to do now, right?” and that assumption, the assumption that we all think the same way, and all have the same standards of morality and the same values, is one that I’d like to work my way towards overcoming, for me and my patrons, even if it means looking at raunchy porn while I work

Hi. I decided not to go to ALA in Orlando today. I’m conflicted about this, but after looking at my workload at work and at home, talking to some more friends, and planning out all the travel, it just seemed like a lot of travel, air-time and couch-surfing in FLA for two Council meetings and one short post-conference talk. I changed my flights and now I’m only going to a wedding that weekend in Chicago. Contributing factors to this decision were:

1. lack of funding from work – with the exception of four hours professional leave and a gracious shifting of hours enabling me to attend at all this was going to be all on my own dime and it wasn’t going to be cheap.
2. lack of low-cost accomodations in Orlando – I had two roomshares and was seeking one more but unlike Toronto there are fewer hostels and other cheapie places a public transpo ride away. Schlepping your laptop-laden backpack around through 90 percent humidity is hell on earth.
3. airline vagaries – because of flight schedules I was going to get to Orlando Monday night and have to leave Thursday afternoon which means I missed most of the stuff I wanted to attend in order to attend 2 out of 3 of the things I should attend.
4. responsibility issues – it was becoming clear to me that going through insane hassles to get to Council meetings was not what “You should go to all Council meetings” strictly means. People expect other people to be reasonable, I’m just unreasonable with myself sometimes.

So, since I’m an At-Large Councilor to at least some of you, I wanted to explain and somewhat apologize. All friends have been put on notice that there are to be no more weddings during my very important meetings. I will not only be in Boston during Midwinter, I live a few hours north of there, so please send all travel inquiries my way, or plan a side trip to my house in Vermont afterwards.

Hi. I’ve been updating my links page, removing links about books, adding links about blogs. It’s still far from comprehensive [maybe I can get my RSS feed linked in there too] but it’s neat to see people getting their own domains over time, and amazing to see old time blog-style sites like What’s Gnu still at it.

Hi. I’m messing with spam filters this week. In order to staunch the tide of junk email to bogus librarian.net addresses, I’ll only be accepting mail via the mailto form, or email at the domain-name-that-is-the-same-as-my-first name. Any mail going to cutsienamehere@librarian.net will go to /dev/null. I’m a bit sad, I liked the cutsienamehere game but until I get tougher spam filters for this account, I’ll be playing it safe.

Hi. Changed a few little things here. If it breaks your browser or RSS reader for some reason, please let me know. I’ve been invited to speak at a Health Sciences Library Association meeting in December on a topic along the lines of the talk I gave a few weeks back. Would still love to hear any stories of librarians that have had to deal with HIPAA for any reason.