“A woman with AIDS is filmed briefly, every day, for 90 days, and the changes she undergoes are dramatic. The very end may make you weep, but perhaps not for the reasons you expect.”
Aids PSA Topsy from Human Music & Sound Design on Vimeo.
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One from the archives. A cute shot of Pace on his first birthday where he seems to be saying “Where’s my cake?”
Commodore is apparently releasing a new computer with modern specs but featuring the old-style casings.
As the C64 was the first computer I worked on *way* back in grade six, I think I may just have to put in a request to Santa Claus!
Here’s a really quick nerd test – do the following two lines of code make you happy? If so, you’re a nerd!
Gotta love it!
Now, there are numerous phrases you hope you never hear your child say. Things like: “Fly, kitty, fly!” or “Daddy, I made a swimming pool in the hallway.” (Both of which I’ve heard by the way.)
But Pace might as well stop talking forever because yesterday’s comment is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard him say. Of course, I didn’t think it was funny when Shea and I were sitting in our living room, watching the news and Pace decided to ask “Daddy, do you have a penis in your mouth?”
I did a very classic double-take and blurted, “WHAT DID YOU SAY?” He repeated it exactly but since he sometimes mis-speaks, my mind began racing for words that rhyme with penis – “Do I have a weenis in my mouth? A genus? A meannus?” Nope.
I looked over at Shea who was fairly nonchalant about this sudden development, all things considered.
“Did you hear what he just asked me?”
“He asked if you had a penis in your mouth,” she replied as if Pace says these kinds of things on a daily basis.
Again, my mind is racing – what raunchy comedians have I watched lately that he could’ve overheard? Could some older kid have taught him this at daycare? Did his cartoon channel accidentally get switched to the gay porn station by someone asleep at the switch? (It happens.)
“Well, any idea where he might’ve got that from?” I asked, only slightly verging on panic at the thought of Pace holding court in the back corner of the daycare playground doing Andrew Dice Clay routines.
“Oh, I know. The other day he wanted to count my teeth. Maybe he saw my uvula and thought it was a penis?”
So if you thought the words out of Pace’s mouth were unexpected, I found myself saying a couple phrases I never thought I’d utter: “Pace, first off, just because something is fleshy and hangs off your body, it doesn’t mean it’s a penis. That thing in everybody’s mouth is called an uvula. Second, mommy and daddy are happy that you used the proper name for penis even if you weren’t referring to an actual penis. And come to think of it, we won’t even get into words that rhyme with uvula right now. Finally, please don’t ever ask anybody that question again. Oh, except your grandpa – you can ask him.”
Yep, it’s fun being a parent!
Here are two recent AskMetaFilter threads that are somewhat related and have some great suggestions – Tips for New Managers and Tips for Executive Assistants.
I’ve been thinking about this post for awhile but a few different things have brought it to the forefront.
Soon after starting this blog, I got permission to reprint a list called “10 Things I Wish *They* Had Told Me When I Started Out In Librarianship” by Wendy Newman and this idea is sort of a take-off on that.
I was also recently re-reading some of my personal journal entries from when I first started journalling (~1990) and although I didn’t do one called “Promises to Myself”, there were a few times where I tried to predict what I’d be doing, what would make me happy, what things I’d hope to achieve in the future and it was interesting to see where I was on the mark, where I was off, how my values may have changed and where they’ve stayed the same.
The final inspiration was a recent retirement at RPL.
Between the changes brought by a recent re-organization and a move to a new province-wide ILS as well as the reality we all hear about the aging workforce, there have been a fairly high number of people leaving or retiring from RPL in the past year. (I don’t have stats on this – it’s just a gut instinct that numbers have been much higher than usual.)
One of the people who retired most recently was a librarian who had twenty-five years of service at RPL and who, like me, got his start at Southeast Regional. I’d known him ever since he hosted a “What does the community want from the library?” forum which I attended as a representative of the Sask Publishers Group a few years back. I don’t know the exact date but it would’ve been somewhere between 1997-2001 – long before professional librarianship was even seriously on my radar.
We weren’t best friends or anything but because of his similar starting point and that short interaction when I was at SPG , I always felt an affinity with him. This was only heightened during a session I facilitated for our professional library staff last fall when I did a round-the-table “What would your dream job be?” ice breaker exercise and this person replied to me, “I’m probably retiring soon but if I was starting over, I think I’d want a job something like yours.”
I get the sense that this person had a long, fulfilling career with very few regrets. But his comment also made me realise there are always forks in the road, things we could do differently and ways that we change as our careers develop. With that grounding, I wanted to write a list of promises to myself that I’ll do my best to keep, no matter where my career goes.
10 Promises To Myself
1. With regards to customer service, I’ll treat staff as the first customer.
2. Somewhat related, I’ll try to always get along with people at all levels of the organization from the pages and janitors to the Managers and Director.
[Edit: A loyal reader points out that I’ve already broken promise in spirit by not capitalizing “pages” or “janitors” but doing so for “Managers” and “Directors”. She suggests an out in that I’m probably used to typing the capitalized forms of those words in my job. In all honesty, I could probably justify capitalizing “Director” since it’s a single person in a specific job. But yeah, if I don’t capitalize “pages” or “janitors”, I shouldn’t capitalize “managers” either. I’m not the most politically correct guy but at the same time, it’s crazy how ingrained some of these power relationship ideas are in our lives. But that gives me a good excuse to add a bonus promise: “I promise that I’ll admit when I’m wrong and not be afraid to say ‘sorry’ either. So apologies to all of the hard-working Pages and Janitors out there and…suck it lowly managers! ;-)]
3. As much as possible, I’ll find a way to say ‘yes’ to others’ ideas instead of saying ‘no’.
4. With that said, I’ll give myself permission to say ‘no’ to non-mandatory offers, requests or invitations when necessary.
5. I’ll be an advocate for the “little guy” whenever possible – both our patrons and our staff.
6. I will embody values inspired by online culture and the open source movement which I truly believe are the way of the future – collaboration, transparency, equality, creativity, risk-taking, play, empowerment, trust.
7. I’ll never put my job ahead of my family. (What this means is of course open to interpretation – do you miss one of your kid’s soccer games for the monthly board meeting? A playoff game? The championship game? What about a kid’s grad versus the annual city budget presentation? And so on.)
8. In my own small way, I’ll keep trying to be a mentor to new librarians in the online sphere with my blogging and via other outlets. (thanks to Michael Stephens for a recent link that talks about this idea that we’re all potentially mentors, even when we don’t realise it)
9. I’ll have fun no matter what. If I’m not having fun, I’ll move on to something else – either within the same organization or elsewhere.
10. I’ll never forget to stop occasionally – either to gaze at the empty stacks before the library opens in the morning or the patrons moving about while it’s bustling in the afternoon – and realise how fortunate I am to spend my days in a library!
How about you? What are your promises to yourself?
I did a survey the first couple years I had this blog to see what readers liked (and didn’t like) as well as what improvements I could make.
I didn’t bother to do the survey last year since I realised that the answers hadn’t changed significantly from year to year (people heavily preferred posts about Pace to posts about hockey – shocking!)
But now that I’ve moved to a new blog platform, a new hosting company and a new minimalist design, I thought it’d be a good time to resurrect the survey, a couple weeks into things where it’s been long enough that I’ve done a few different types of posts and built some content but still not too early to do wholesale changes if needed.
Here’s the survey. Thanks in advance for taking a minute to fill it out!
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.
My aunt has always been a prolific amateur photographer. Recently, she purchased a scanner for her computer and so she sent along a bunch of photos she’d scanned from her archives including a series called “Jason’s High School Grad”.
Opening that folder began a scary, sentimental walk down memory lane. The hair was big but the eyeglasses were even bigger – here’s your 1991 time machine…
Look at all that hairspray!
A few of my best friends from high school – all live in Regina but I rarely see any of them.
For a guest speaker, we invited our kindergarten teacher back to speak to us. (We were her first ever class!)
Two of my best friends accepting some award – possibly for top football players?
One of my best friends in high school (though it’s hard to tell!)
Joseph Gordon Levitt, child star of “3rd Rock From the Son” and blossoming movie star ranging from indy-hits like “(500) Days of Summer” to this summer’s cerebral blockbuster, “Inception” is also apparently a big Web 2.0, open-source, open-collaboration advocate.
Five years ago, he formed an online studio called HitRECord.org where anyone can contribute, remix and build on the works of others in a range of formats. Everything is licensed to be remixed and nothing is ever “finished” but if a product at any point does get licensed or sold, the profits are split 50-50 between the company and whichever people contributed to the work. (There’s a good overview video on the home page explaining this.) Levitt is very open that he intends to use his growing stature within the industry to leverage HitRECord productions into audiences and opportunities where possible.
Anyhow, here’s a video of him from a party held to celebrate HitRECord. I love his intro about how he can’t post this song on his own site since the song doesn’t “belong” to him but if you want to put it elsewhere on the Internet, “that seems to be okay.” What a perfectly succinct summary of the battle between old and new media.
(Oh, and if you haven’t seen the dance sequence from “(500) Days of Summer”, check it out too. By way of backstory, I do believe his character has just gotten laid by the girl of his dreams prior to this scene thus leading to one of the most the most joyful dance sequences ever captured on film!)
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