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Break Dance Baby

I was going to post this a couple weeks ago after seeing a link on Boing Boing (and as a way to drop a sly hint about what Shea and I suspected was pending). 

But then I just put it in the “drafts” folder and forgot about it for some reason.  It's still pretty crazy so I thought I'd post it now.  For anyone worried that this will turn into the “Baby Poop Blog” instead of the “Poop Around FIMS Blog”, yes, that is a distinct possibility at some future point.  But for the time being, I'll try to keep the baby content to a minimum and keep writing about my life in library school and what's going on around FIMS. 

With that said, I've got to comment on keeping this a secret.  After announcing it on the blog the other day, I went to school to find out a few classmates already knew – Lara because I'd said I had to miss a management class to go to an appointment with Shea (but it was nothing serious) then that Shea didn't drink when we went for supper with them and another couple. 

Lindsay said she knew because she works at the library.  “I knew you looked at my record!” I said.  “No.  But I do have to process the holds and if you're taking out What To Expect When You're Expecting, I figure it's not for a school project.” 

Sabina (and anybody else who visited our apartment and saw the collection of baby books from the library) knew as well. 

Who else knew?  I think Shea's parents suspected as well when she wouldn't have a drink with her dad when she was home for a visit at the end of July. 

So the moral of the story?  If you're pregnant and want to keep it a secret, don't do any reading on the subject and keep drinking like always.  I mean, it worked for mothers in the late 1960's – early1970's and  their kids turned out fine.  Turned out fine.  Turned out fine.  (Of course, I could've turned out like this kid which would've been worse!)

Posted 28 September 2006 § Baby § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

Too Tired To Think of a Title

My brain hurts.  Thirteen hour days with not one but two committee meetings suck.  That is all. 

Posted 28 September 2006 § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

Guess Who's Pregnant???

(Hint: It's the one on the left.  The other one is pregnant with beer, pizza and Cheetos…unfortunately.)
 

It's faint but the plus sign is there!

Posted 26 September 2006 § Baby § Main Page § Photo § Shea ‡ Comments (13) °

Family History

Does this handsome devil look familiar?


Spent a few hours working on the family history project I have to do for my genealogy class last night.  Luckily, not one but two of my family members have done some research so that's a big help.  I'm still waiting for one to send me her stuff but the other one had given my parents some information and copies of some old family photos during a trip to BC a couple years ago.  My mother was able to scan the photos and portions of a family tree for my paternal grandmother which was almost 100% complete for the five generations before me.  Now I just have to try to fill out the information going back a few generations for the other three branches. 

I can see why this gets addictive – seeing the paths that people took, getting glimpses into their lives (for instance, realising how many of my ancestors lived very close to where I am now before coming to Saskatchewan.)  We also started working on Shea's side too although that's not officially part of the assignment.  But it'll be nice to have all of that information compiled for some day when we have kids. 

I wish I could find a journal or diary (or whatever the 1885 equivalent of a blog was! ) that one of my ancestors had kept – it would be amazing to get a glimpse behind the birth dates and marriage dates and death dates to what everyday life was like.  I saw one that a great aunt kept when she was at teacher's college in Regina in the 1930's (?) that was just about the most engrossing reading I've ever done. 

(Oh, the photo is my great great grandfather John Brown who was born in Insch Scotland in 1840, came to Binbrook, Ontario (which is now a part of Hamilton which is about an hour and a bit from where I am now) in 1864 then moved west in 1885 and homesteaded at the site of our current farm on the edge of the Qu'Appelle Valley.  But shhh, don't tell anyone – everyone thinks Saskatchewan is flat and boring!)


Posted 26 September 2006 § Main Page § Saskatchewan § Shea ‡ Comments (0) °

Word on the Street – Kitchener-Waterloo

Even though it rained off and on, Shea and I had a great day at the Kitchener-Waterloo's edition of the Word on the Street Festival today.

Having been a board member of the Calgary edition for three years, I was looking forward to seeing what one of the other host cities for this national festival (along with Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver) did that was similar and different to what we did in Calgary.  But really, the basics are the same at probably every site across Canada (the festival is a mixture of author readings, children's authors & entertainers, panels/speakers on writing-related topics, main stage entertainment, booths featuring local libraries, publishers, booksellers, writers' associations, literacy groups and so on.) 

There were a couple things they did that I wish we would've done in Calgary – the celebrity spelling bee on the main stage was a big hit for instance.  Having a brief Q&A after each author got a mixed reaction – one author had no questions but another had lots – but that was something I never even thought to try in Calgary.  (To be fair, we booked three authors to an hour versus the two they had so we had less time to fill.)   

I was trying to think of some Word on the Street highlights/anecdotes from my three years with the organization in Calgary:

– going to my first board meeting without paying too much attention to the address until I got there and realised it was in the law offices of one of the largest law firms in Western Canada on the 45th floor of one of the two “twin towers” in downtown Calgary.  (One WotS board member was a lawyer with the firm.)  I was in my typical non-profit outfit of jeans and a t-shirt and I think the receptionist even asked if I was delivering a parcel!

– man, did we have good catered food for those meetings! This isn't a direct WotS memory but one day when they ordered ribs and a few board members couldn't make it, I ended up taking some leftovers with me then stopping in the underpass heading back to my building and sharing them with some street kids.

– Poet Steve Gillespie, aka “EatLardFudge” took the spirit of the festival to heart and invited everyone in the Poet's Corner tent out in front of the hotel pub where it was hosted that year and did a reading from on top of a bench. 

– getting to meet the Calgary Flames' Robyn Regher as a celebrity reader (this was back when the Flames still sucked so don't tell him but we even had to scramble to make sure there was a good audience!)

– watching Christian Bok's poetry reading draw a massive crowd.  (He writes poetry written in a created language which sounds something like Klingon.)

– Will Ferguson running on stage to the pounding sounds of “Paperback Writer” by the Beatles and giving a hilarious reading.

– I started at the WGA in mid-September 2001 and the event was all but organized by my predecessor but one of the first jobs she gave me during my two-day training session was to write thank-you cards to all the authors who were booked to read.  I said “why do you do that too?  Don't they get a cheque?” and she replied with something that's stuck with me – “a thank-you card means more than money to most people anyday.”  Good advice and it really became clear me when the WGA board, to thank me for my hard work during a very busy time, gave me a gift certificate to my favourite restaurant and a thank-you card that all of them had signed with personal messages.  The gift certificate is long gone but I still have that card.  <a single tear rolls to the ground>

Okay, back to the present…

The event today had a really good panel on blogging and that was the other thing I wanted to talk about.  I should've broken out the “notepad of doom” but here's some random memories of what was discussed…

– Panelists were Aimee Morrison, an English prof at the University of Waterloo who studies various technology-related issues and has an anonymous “mommy blog where I post about poop a lot”, Alex Good who runs GoodReports.net, a site focused mainly on book reviews and book-related essays, and James Bow who runs a couple web rings (blog rings?) for non-partisan political bloggers as well as one for bloggers in the KW area. 

– 75 000 blogs created every day (I wanted to ask “yeah, but how many get a second post?)

– lots of talk about mainstream media versus bloggers

– “never put anything on a blog you wouldn't want overheard in a crowded restaurant” is common advice.  (That's a better analogy for e-mail.  I think a better analogy for blogs/online forums/message boards is “never say anything online you wouldn't say into the microphone in a crowded auditorium” because that captures that online communications are going to be heard and probably are put out there to be heard.)

– people often read blogs for controversial thoughts they won't get in other forms of discourse.

– blogs build a sense of community

– you shouldn't focus on how many people are reading your blog but who is reading your blog – if it's your target audience, you're doing your job

– only a few people make money off blogs and most people do it as a hobby on a volunteer-basis

– that's why personal blogs are so common, they're the easiest to do

– lots of blogs are about what colour socks a person wore that day and what they had for lunch.  This likely won't lead to a big readership.

– it takes a long time – possibly even years – to build a readership

– one way to build a readership is to post comments on more popular but similar blogs which can lead people to you.

– with that said, blogs can be good practice if you want to be a writer, build discipline and can lead to work (Alex Good says he gets more freelance work than he can handle via his blog.)  In my case, the scholarly journal I submitted my essay to came about after a person on the journal's editorial board contacted me having read the essay on this blog first.

Oh, and who's the one group that you want to get the apostrophe right for?


Posted 25 September 2006 § Blog § Internet § Main Page § PopCulture ‡ Comments (6) ° Tagged:

Are You A FIS Blogger?

Are you a blogger? Do you have things to say
about the profession (archives, museums, lis, etc . . . )? We're
looking to compile a directory of active FIS bloggers, so why not send
your details along and be included! OPML-based 'reading lists' will
eventually be created so that members of the FIS community (and
beyond!) can subscribe to a 'block' of blog feeds based on areas of
interest. For this reason, please be a specific as you can about your
blog's primary area(s) of focus. Here's what we need:
    * Blog name
    * Your name
    * Topic/area of interest

Thanks!
Sherri


Sherri Vokey: Digital Services Librarian – Faculty of Information Studies – University of Toronto
contact | sherri.vokey@utoronto.ca – 416-978-5768 | aim/iChat – sherrivokey [at] mac.com



This is a sort of timely e-mail to receive (thanks Gord!) as I just stumbled across the blog for 757 – Social Software & Libraries.  One of that classes' first assignments was to create a blog and the instructor has linked to all of the blogs from the course page to encourage the students to realise that they're part of the blogosphere (which is cool.) 

But clicking through and reading some of them, I think she may have made the same mistake that many people teaching these types of courses do – namely, defining what the students must post rather than encouraging them to post whatever they want. 

If all that students post are assigned responses to readings and other coursework, blogging is going to feel like homework and nobody is going to continue doing it after the class is done (which should be at least part of the goal of a course like this.) 

Not to mention that instead of having original, readable blogs, you have this homogenous mass of blogs that are all talking about the same thing which sort of defeats the purpose as far as I'm concerned. 

I look at the list of people in the class and see people with interests in esoteric philosophy, medieval history, Russian culture not to mention those with knowledge of specialized areas of librarianship (one whose mother is a medical librarian and would likely have lots of insight into the profession, many who've been on co-op and could share their experiences on that, etc.) 

I'm sure the instruction didn't restrict them to only writing about their coursework but if that's what is assigned, that's likely all a person will have the time to do.  I think a much better solution would be to tell the students to come up with an original theme for their blog (it could be specific, it could be as general as “what's happening in my life”) and make that the subject of their weekly post (along with the occasional response to the readings/posting of coursework to achieve the learning goal of making them think about the role of/problems with social software.)

How's that for a mini-rant?

Classmate of the Day: Barb very generously offered me a ride to Word on the Street in Kitchener-Waterloo tomorrow.  I'd been planning to attend in Toronto all year since I used to be a board member of WotS Calgary and wanted to see what the “big guys” did.  (In fact, my ambitious plan was to organize a rental van or even a bus trip to take intereste students.  If it was first semester, I might've pulled it off but as I mentioned, third-semester Jason is stretched too thin as it is!)  But pending assignments, the expense to go to TO for a single day and a few other things all factored into making me decide not to go. 

Still, I was glad to have the offer of a ride to the much closer festival with a local and am looking forward to seeing the KW version. Kathy Stinson is reading, there's a celebrity spelling bee and a handwriting analysis tent plus there's even a panel on blogging that I should probably go take in so I know what I'm talking about when I go on my mini-rants! 

Posted 23 September 2006 § Blog § LibrarySchool § Main Page ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged:

All Kinds of Thoughts & Things – None of Which Are My Homework

Scholarly Journal Submission Update
Just finished submitting the revised version of “Useless as Tits on a Bull: User Fees in Alberta Public Libraries” to Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Research and Theory.  As I said before, it's been an extremely educational process, I got some great feedback and even if they don't decide to publish it after this time around, I'm happy that my paper is 100% better than it was before.  (I doubt I'd revise it again it it comes back to me once more – at least while I'm still in school this semester.  It's been far too distracting as is.)  With that said, I would encourage anyone to submit your best essay to them.  Even if it doesn't get published, it's well worth going through the process.  I've asked for permission to reprint the two peer reviewers' comments and I'll likely also upload the revised paper at some point in the future as well. 

The In-Box Exercise
A popular job interview technique is the “in-box” exercise where you're given a hypothetical in-box full of memos, letters, reports, etc. and asked to prioritize everything, explaining your decisions.  That's what my first three weeks of library school have been like with an in-box filled with:
1) revising that essay for resubmission to the journal
2) student council stuff – both my required duties and a bunch of new initiatives we discussed at the last meeting
3) finalizing arrangements for the most ambitious Lunch Bucket Speaker event I've presented by far
4) trying to keep up with readings and assignments. 

In what might be marked as a “fail” in the real-world in-box exercise, the order I listed those things is also basically the prioritiy I've given them (you could probably also stick “write long, rambling blog entries” in at 3.5 before doing homework too!)  I've been amazingly lucky to not have a single assignment due until September 26 (how is that even possible in this program?) but the readings have been pretty heavy so far so that's time consuming as is.  My priorities will definitely re-arrange in the coming weeks…or else I'm in trouble. 

A gazillion years ago, my boss told me that the danger of working in non-profit organizations wasn't that the work was too easy, it was that it was too easy to let yourself get stretched thin.  She said the kind of people attracted to non-profit work tend to be the kind of people who can't say 'no' and get in trouble because of it.  (Er, do you see anyone around here who fits that description?) 

Groccery Checkout
Gotta give a big plug to Grocery Checkout, a locally-owned company that's about to celebrate their one year anniversary in November.  Shea and I have used them a few times this year to order and deliver groceries to us.  Their prices are comparable to most grocery stores, they save you the time and hassle of shopping as well as the expense of getting to the store (especially if you don't have a car and have to take a cab or don't want to always be doing “mini-runs” on the bus.)  They don't offer as many  “specials” as grocery stores do but you're also less likely to do all those impulse buys.  They used to charge a flat fee of $7.95 but recently revised their pricing so that the basic fee is $6.95, if you order over $100, it's $4.95 and if you order over $150, it's only $1.50!  Great for ordering heavy canned goods, great for getting frozen goods home in summer without them melting on the bus, great if you have a household with two or more people and can order $150+ in groceries at a time.  Their delivery schedules vary depending on how busy they are but we put in our latest order last night and had our groceries by 7pm tonight.  Give them a try if you get a chance!

Classmate of the Day Catch-up
Did I ever explain this for any new readers?  In addition to the Friday Fun Links, another recurring feature on this blog is “Classmate/Colleague of the Day” where I name somebody around FIMS who's done something cool or memorable or fun or somehow made my life more enjoyable (ie.  basically, any reason I want.)  So yeah, let's see if I can shotgun a few COTD's for the last week to “catch-up”…

Monday – I didn't get the name but the guy at the Registrar who gave me a form with the University's seal confirming my enrollment without charging me $5 like the woman at the front desk wanted to is my first CotD not connected to the program I think. 

Tuesday – Karina Miki-Douglas did an awesome presentation in our 532 – Journalism class with a display, props, handouts AND free Runts candies.  You could tell she took Instructional Strategies with Jennifer Noon!  (She also won a contest and its her photo of the clock tower that's on the front of the SOGS dayplanner.  Tres cool!)

Wednesday – everybody on Student Council.  We've got a lot of exciting ideas for new projects this term and if we even manage to implement half of them, it would be amazing. 

Thursday – Corey Redekop, who is a recent FIMS grad with a novel coming out next year gave me the honour of seeing previews of the four covers under consideration for it.  (Him and I disagreed about which was the best though!)

Friday – I spent an enjoyable few hours at the Grad Club this afternoon with two PhD students, Tami Oliphant and Margaret Kipp, discussing all manner of things from blogs to intellectual freedom to social bookmarking technology to the publishing industry (Tami is teaching a course on Publishing in Winter 2007 and everybody should take it – it's going to be awesome!) 

Posted 23 September 2006 § Internet § LibrarySchool § List § Main Page § Randomness ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Friday Fun Link – The Faces of YouTube (Sept 22/06)

The Faces of YouTube – heartwarming, melancholy, profound, beautiful all at once. (via MetaFilter)

Posted 22 September 2006 § FridayFunLink § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

"One of Today's Most Challenging, Interesting and Rewarding Environments" – Librarian Job Ad

“Are you interested in putting your library science education and
experience to work in one of today’s most challenging, interesting and
rewarding environments? Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions is recruiting for a Chief Librarian to manage the Detainee Library, under the direction of the Joint Task Force-Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” (via MetaFilter) 

I debated a bit about whether this was appropriate to post over at LibrarianActivist.org but I think that this is exactly where an activist librarian might be able to do some good (assuming they got past the security clearance/job interview of course.)  Probably should've just posted it as a straight link instead of a FFL but feeling that Friday pressure to get something up so this is what I've got.  (Update: I changed it to a regular post instead of a FFL.)

On a slight tangent, someone in the MetaFilter thread pointed out the huge irony in the ad noting that they're an equal opportunity employer. 

Posted 22 September 2006 § Jobs § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

Citation Styles

What is your favourite citation style?  Does it matter?  Discuss. 

Posted 22 September 2006 § Main Page ‡ Comments (5) °