September 26
So the national Do-Not Call registry is stalled...again. This time because the List exempts political groups and charities. And the telemarketers are saying that this is a First Amendment violation, blah, blah, blah. Well, they do have a point. It isn't exactly fair to decide that one group of people can do cold calls and another group can't. In my mind, the simplest solution is to say that if you are on the Do-Not Call list, then no one can call you. Not telemarketers, not political groups, not charities. No one. I signed up for the Do-Not Call list, and I know that I don't want to hear from politicians and charities any more then I want to hear from people trying to sell me siding.
And as far as the "unconstitutional curtailing of speech" - my apartment complex has a "no solicitors" policy. Which means that if you are a Jehovah's Wittness (or a Girl Scout, or a member of PIRG, or anyone else trying to peddle goods, services, or viewpoints door-to-door) then I can call the police on you. And this is perfectly legal and constitutional. And I completely fail to see how this sort of thing is any different from saying that you (you the amorphous mass of people on the other end of the telephone who call me trying to sell me on something or other) can't call me if I don't want to be called. You can't come to my door. So why should you be allowed to enter my home via my telephone line?
Yeah, people say that if you really don't want to be called, you should tell telemarketers to put you on their own do-not-call lists. Like that is a practical solution. Do you know how many telemarketing firms are in operation? Lots and lots. Not to mention the dozens that will start up tomorrow or the day after. And you would have to have yourself put on the list of each and every one of them in order to get peace. I have told telemarketers to put me on their do-not-call lists before...and that has not stopped them from calling me.
of course, if the telemarketers no longer call, then I won't be able to play with them by telling them that I am dead, do not speak English (in English), or asking for a pizza delivery.
September 25
In the car on the way to work this morning, they were talking on the radio about the Michigan Lottery, and how it has gotten up to some massive amount and no one has won it yet...and I started thinking about what I would do if I had a couple of million dollars. And that is when I realized that I have become way too grown-up and pedestrian. Because I would pay off my student loans, pay off my car, pay off all the rest of my debts, buy a house, and invest. Then send my parents someplace nice for a vacation. Then go on a vacation myself - maybe back to Cozumel for some serious snorkeling. Not five years ago I would have said I would buy a museum or a library or taken a couple of years and done the Grand Tour... something extravagent. Now... I have gotten dull.
Work update. Okay, so, I am still working on the childrens' catalog interface and I have been getting these really weird errors. And the error messages say that the problem is occurring at a line and column number that do not exist (column -1 ?????) in one of the XSL templates. So I call customer support. And the support person and I go back and forth for a while. At one point she implied that I had broken the profile by making some changes in the CSS file. (?!?!?!?!!???) Since when does changing a font color in a CSS file break an XSL template? And anyway, the problem had surfaced after I made a change to the profile using the vendor's own administrative interface. So I think I know where the problem is, and it is not on my end, thank you very much.
So the tech support person says she needs to consult with one of the development team and she wil call me back. She didn't call me back. (of course) She sent me an email, a single line of text, which reads: "I am transferring this log to Tier 2 for further research." Hmmm.
You know the end scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" where the government takes the ark of the covenant and nails it up in a box and then wheels the box into a huge warehouse for "storage". I feel like something similar just happened with my error log. It has been nailed into a box so that the vendor can easily forget about the trouble I have caused by reporting a unique and puzzeling problem. Will I ever hear back, much less get a resonable solution? Only time will tell...
September 24
One of the cool things about working in a library is the weird shit. And not just the weird stuff that you can find out by spending the bulk of your time in what is basically a temple to knowledge, but the weird books that exist. Do you know that there is a "Complete Idiot's Guide to Nazi Germany"? Its true. Look it up. Basically, it is a history text book for morons, but it sounds like it ought to be a skinhead instruction manual, doesn't it?
September 23
Today is the first day of fall. Guess I had better make the most of the nice weather - I figure we have about a week or so to go before the rains set in.
Finally finished with the upgrade on the server at work. Spent most of the day sitting in the server room adjusting settings and fixing files. I could have just sat at my desk and VNC'ed into the server, but that would have been a lot slower. Plus, I wasn't feeling too terribly social and just wanted to sit and listen to my MP3 player on top volume while I worked. Normally, I don't listen to my MP3 player at my desk, at least, not at top volume. When the phone rings here, we take turns answering, and normally I feel guilty that I am shirking my phone duties by listening to music. Not today. Today it was just me, Oingo Boingo (among others) and the server in the blissful solitude of the server room.
I should take a day off while the fall weather is still nice - go biking in the botanical gardens or something.
September 22
If I am ever visiting NYC and feeling extravagent, I plan on staying at the Library Hotel. Imagine! A whole hotel designed around books and the Dewey Decimal System. They really ought to offer discounts to librarians in my opinion...
September 19
Aaarrr! The pirate party was great, maties! (I was the only software pirate in attendance - everyone else dressed as traditional pirates) There was much playing of Seafarers of Catan (and other piratical games), watching a pirate movie (appropriately titled "The Pirate Movie" - a very very cheesy early 80s version of "The Pirates of Penzance"), drinking pirate drinks (okay, maybe Mike's hard lemonade is not too piratical, but we had rum also!) and eating various citrus-type items (to ward off the scurvy).
Today was also the Midrealm coronation, as hosted by Cynnabar. Thank god for good weather, which meant that we were able to have the fencing tournament outside and from 1:30-5:00, instead of in the hall and more tightly scheduled with the other armed events. I fought (well, I like to think) and also sang with the Collegium during high feast and in the dinner tavern. Lots of fun all around. Seems like a highly successful event to me.
September 18
Yeah, I have been busy. But since when is that anything new?
I am still working on the 2.1 upgrage at work. The good news - wiping the test server clean and starting from scratch worked quite well. Now the test server has become the temporary production server while I try to work similar upgrade magic on the production server. The bad news - too bad we do not have the option of wiping the production server clean and starting over in order to get a solid 2.1 upgrade. The worse news - our backup server, which I have been writing frequent ghost images to with every change I make to the test and production servers so that if bad stuff happens can be rolled back to the last image, has been acting up. The upshot of which is that if I have to do a rollback, there is a chance that everything will just get blown away, we will be screwed, and will have to restore from the most recent tape backup. Which is about a week old. But we won't dwell on that.
Instead, let's think about the party tonight! Yes, today is international "Talk Like a Pirate" day, and in honor of this august occasion, Zach and Janine are having a pirate party. Costumes encouraged. I am lazy and do not have a lot of spare time to put together anything elaborate, so I am going to wear one of my geek tshirts, bring a fully loaded 20GB MP3 player, and go as a music pirate. I will be bringing my camera with me. Pictures will be taken.
Update (4:00p) on the status of the 2.1 upgrade. Bad stuff did indeed happen. I was not able to do anything worthwhile with the upgrade or production server. Instead I spent the bulk of the day reading over the RFPs for a system migration. And, yes, that is every bit as dull as it sounds.
September 12
Let me tell you about fun. Fun is getting to spend an entire day at work rebuilding a server and the software that I am supposed to be testing and customizing. The server is your standard server rebuild. The software involves starting with ipac 2.01 - the earliest version we have on CDROM - installing it, upgrading from 2.01 to 2.02 and from 2.02 to 2.03, and then running a patch to bring it up to ipac 2.0301. Thenn we copy over all of the live databases, XSL stylesheets, etc, so that we have duplicate settings on the live server and the test server. Then we *knock on wood* test this to make sure it works. Then we upgrade to ipac 2.1 and I am back to where I started at the beginning of the week. Yay. I anticipate that getting the software on the test server and up to the current version that I need to work on will take pretty much all day (it is just before noon now) so once that is done I am going to just go home. After all of this there is no way I could get anyuseful work done, and on a Friday no less.
Of course, once I get home I am confronted by the fact that my laptop keyboard decided to randomly and spontaneously scramble itself last night. Now when you hit "i" on the keyboard, a "5" appears on the screen. Don't ask me why or how. And rebooting didn't clear up that problem either. So it is probably a hardware problem. If I am lucky, all I need is a new keyboard and I will be good to go. If I am unlucky, then the problem lies in the keyboard controller, which means that I need a new motherboard. Which essentially means that I need a new laptop. Please let me be lucky. This laptop is only 2 years old. I don't want to have to buy a new one, and I am not sure that I could afford one anyway. Please please let me be lucky.
Note to self: this might be a good evening to to to Dominick's and drink.
September 11
Somehow it seems appropriate that on the twin towers anniversary that the server at work should blow up. Not literally blow up, of course. But the RAID is critically failing. And the upgrade on the test server that I have been working on has been so FUBAR that the common consensus was that it would be best to ghost my test server, blow everything away, reinstall the OS, and start over from there. But what with that and my having to rebuild the test server my afternoon plans for getting stuff accomplished at work are shot.
Right now the test server has finished ghosting and I am doing a complete reinstall of Windows server 2000. And since the partition is reformatting before installing, this will take the rest of the bloody afternoon. It is 2:00 right now. As soon as I have the OS back up on this computer I am going home and mixing myself a stiff drink.
I still have my PSC stuff to do - which I may just blow off today. And I have singing practice, which I probably shouldn't blow off considering coronation is just around the corner. Though I really feel like just blowing everything off tonight and sitting on my balcony and reading and dringing. I really just want to do that.
But I will probably go to the PSC and do my work there and then go to singing. Damn. Why do I have to have this work ethic?
September 8
I went a bachelorette party Sunday. Even though this is the first bachelorette party that I have gone to, I suspect that it was not very representative of that sort of party. We went to a paintball range and spent the bulk of the afternoon shooting at eachother on a variety of fields. The teams were the old favorites of boys versus girls. And I am happy to report that the girls beat the boys four games out of six. Thus proving once again the overall superiority of our gender
With great forethought I brought along a cheapo disposible camera, which I brought out onto the field with me. I didn't get a lot of pictures during the actual combat portion of the games - had I stopped to take pictures I would have been shot. Even a combat photographer is not immune to being fired upon when they are carrying a semi-automatic and sbout 250 paintball rounds. There are no time-outs to take pretty pictures. So most of the shots are probably of everyone between games, reloading and drinking water and downing snacks. I think. I can't really remember what all I took pictures of. But as soon as I drop them off to be developed, get them back from being developed, scan them, and retouch them, I will put them up on my site for all to see!
That is one more thing down from my list of stuff I need to do this summer. Check off paintballing. I think I might actually work my way through the whole list - except for going to the beach. I think that it is past the point where that is possible...
September 5
I have been working most of the day (and most of the past couple of days as well) trying to set up, customize, and test iPac 2.1 on the test server. For non-librarians, this is the online catalog software. Currently we are running version 2.03.01 on the live server. And right now I am very glad for the test server since this so-called upgrade is a pain in the #$%$.
All of the directories and files are different - instead of installing peacefully over the old version, it boldly broke new ground and placed all of its own files in a new directory. At least it copied over the relevant admin settings from the previous version. Otherwise I might as well have done a freah install.
To make what might otherwise be a very long rant short, it has a lot of display and functionality problems. And as an interesting note, the support website for the company that created the software has been down all day. This does not instill confidence.
September 2
You get some great responses from patrons when they get email notices of overdue books, etc. They seem to really want to reassure you that they are "on it" with regard to their local library. Some will freely share disturbing amounts of information about their personal schedules to us. (Please, don't tell us that you can't pick up the boook that is on hold for you because you are out of town!)Here is this morning's gem: "hi there, I apologize for being overdue on the books. i have been out of town, i plan to either recheck them out or return them tomorrow along with my daughters. thank you.". Just return the books, please. We don't want your daughters.
Well, I guess I should try to play some kind of catch up. Or at least a decent explaination for my long silence. Last week was pretty grueling, and I needed the entire holiday weekend to recover. (Though if you check around in my photo pages you will see some new additions, so I didn't completely abandon work on my site) Most of last week was spent doing what is known in librarian-speak as "branching". Basically what this means is that you (the librarian) get up REALLY EARLY (5am - and I am not a morning person) and go to the various branches of the library (in this case, Genesee District Library) and try to get all of the computers in that branch udtated with the latest builds before the branch opens. The reason you do it like this is so that you don inconvenience (god forbid) the patrons. This doesn't always work out. Often we are still working on computers when the branch opens, and patrons need to be gently steered toward computers that are already finished. So I spent last week in pretty much a constant state of sleep deprivation. But I am better now.
Summer is over. Hello fall.