Head Tale

Read at Work
is a site from the New Zealand Book Council that allows you to read classic books, poetry, samples from selected New Zealand authors and more, online and formatted to look like either the Windows XP interface and Powerpoint presentations.  Very fun and cool (though I do not, of course, advocate performing non-work activities such as this while at work!  Of course, if you work in libraries, this *is* work related…sort of.) 

(via Reddit though I don't have the original link handy – you can search if you really need it)

As for Shea being a computer genius, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Swift Current right now.  We made sure the room had an Internet connection as I've brought my laptop with me.  I plugged it in when we got here, checked e-mail then trundled off to the pool with Pace and Shea.  When we got back, Shea went to the computer and asked, “How come it won't turn on?”  I pushed the power button, sure I'd left it running when we left.  Nothing.  Again, holding it a few seconds.  Nothing.  “Oh fuck” is the non-paraphrased thought that came to mind.  I ran through the checklist…did the screen give out?  The motherboard?  The hard drive?  Hopefully the motherboard – that's the least bothersome major error.  The hard drive has a full back-up but would be PAINFUL to redo everything.  We're in a poolside room…maybe the humidity just temporarily short-circuited it or something?  Wishful thinking but maybe it'll work tomorrow if I crank the air and say a prayer to the techno-gods before I fall asleep.  So I'm laying in bed with Shea and Pace and Shea goes, “How long were we at the pool?  Do you know if the plug in you used was working?  Maybe it wasn't and the battery died?”  My battery life is down quite a bit from when it was new (now I get maybe an hour whereas back then, I got 3-4 hours) but w weren't at the pool that long…were we?  I plug the laptop into a different outlet and…voila…it boots no problem.  So I must say my wife is a brilliant computer-engineer level of intelligence that I am daily in awe of.  (Also, I was up and out of the house by 5am today to go do weeding in a distant community.  So I drove 3 hours round-trip, did six hours of weeding, then drove another three hours to get here.  So hopefully that's an excuse for being such a moron at why my computer “died” tonight.)  God, I need sleep…  (Oh yeah, I didn't plan to get up at 5am but I had a dream about being at the library weeding and the branch librarian had got her whole board of 10+ people there to help – but in exchange, they wanted me to help them move their entire library…which is in reality a big part of the reason why I was going out – to do a major weeding to help them prepare for an impending move.  But yeah…I dreamt about weeding.  I think I've reached the next level on the Librarian Nerd Scale! )