Randomly Friday

Randomly Friday:

  • Since one of my primary professional passions is making old newspaper archives available online, this is pretty exciting to me. I’m a little disappointed that the demo suggests there will be no built-in mechanism either for printing or saving the content in question, but it’s still better than nothing. I assume the print and save restrictions are part of the copyright agreement wit ProQuest and (presumably) with the original publishers.
  • Warning to candidates: don’t mess around with librarians. We will fuck you up. Or at least cause you mild embarrassment in a relatively polite and professional manner.
  • Speaking of libraries (sort of), I ran across this interesting book in my local one the other night. It’s a good read; the author derides such modern “geniuses” as LeCorbusier, Sert, and Gehry among others not merely for having needlessly expensive and  ridiculous-looking buildings that don’t integrate with their surroundings, but also for designing buildings that don’t even serve their stated purposes well, either because of generally bad design or through astronomical maintenance requirements. It might be worth owning, methinks.
  • The crazy week is over. I still have a lot of work hanging over my head, but I may be able to sneak out for a little drive this weekend, assuming gas prices don’t jump a dollar or so over the weekend like they did during Katrina.

The Week

It’s been a week of insanity, complete with 18-hour workdays, augmented by homework and one big family gathering on Sunday. I’m pretty well worn out and not really ready to start the whole thing over again this morning. This week should be slightly calmer, though. I think.

A few weeks from now, when I’ve lost all brain function, someone please remind me of how all this extra stuff I’ve taken on this year is really good for my career, OK?

Photos from our annual “It’s the Weekend After Labor Day” cookout, held Sunday in the lovely subterranean 1968 Room of MurderingStream Estates:

Updates

Notice that the archives links on the right now go back to September 2003. The migration of my old posts from HTML to SQL is moving along pretty quickly, I think. For reference, I won’t be correcting the internal links within the posts until I’m done. I’m also consolidating the rants and road trips into the journal entries so everything will be nice and chronological, but I’ll still have a page that links to them directly as well.

I’m hoping to finish up this project before all my school-related stuff gets too nasty. I fear I may have overcommitted myself a bit this semester.