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See me in Anaheim at Booth 1888 (and elsewhere!)

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Whew, week of shiny-new-job! I’ve posted my first post at the company blog. Expect many more — I’ll try to mention the best ones here, but you may want to subscribe.

ALA is imminent! I’ll be at the Equinox booth, 1888 — at least half the time, anyway — and I’ll be part of the crew doing presentations, one-on-one booth meetings, and general meet-and-greet.

I’ll also be presenting (or at least dog-paddling) at LITA’s Top Tech Trends, LITA’s Ultimate Debate, and Monday morning’s LITA Next Gen Catalog Interest Group. Plus I’ll be at meetings for Jim Rettig’s implementation task force, the Electronic Meeting Participation Task Force, LITA Forum 2009, and the OCLC Blog Salon.

So yesterday I started my new job as Community Librarian at Equinox. According to Library Journal, I’m “opinionated,” which I will generously interpret as praise (even though LJ’s archives suggest this is a word that for their reporters cuts both ways).

I’m still finding the bathroom around here, but I definitely feel “opinionated” about open source in libraries: it makes sense, and that’s why I’m getting involved in it. I plan to share my opinionations on blogs (Equinox and the Evergreen community both have blogs), magazine articles, presentations, one-on-one discussions, and whatever other venues allow me to opine.

(To clarify my whereabouts, I’m going to be teleworking for Equinox, with an occasional on-site sync-up, and for now we’ll stay in Tallahassee. This week I return to Tallahassee Wednesday early evening so I can fly out the next day.)

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Thanks, Delta Lady

Saturday, June 21, 2008

I have been on a wild ride for two weeks — and almost didn’t get off, thanks to another Delta error.

Due to a chain of events beginning with a delayed flight out of Albuquerque last Sunday, I never made it home. Delta ultimately rebooked me into Boston, where I was flying the next day, so I never touched down in Tallahassee. (But for this trip, I had lots of clean socks and undies from the trip to Target I made when Delta lost my bag for 36 hours… and let’s be clear: by “Delta,” I mean the baggage handlers in Tallahassee, on what was the quietest afternoon I’ve ever seen at that airport.)

Arriving in Boston a day early, I would have had to shoulder the cost of a hotel room plus one more day on the rental car. But my connecting flight from Cincinnatti was overbooked, so I volunteered to spend the night there. The Airport Marriott turned out to be a lovely new place with flat-screen TVs, fancy computer desks, and beds like angels’ clouds, plus I got 400 “Delta Dollars” and enough food credits to buy a nice salad. I reached my destination a little early, with a nice perk in my pocket.

So, all’s well that ends well, right?

I thought so, until I got suspicious early this morning when I realized I hadn’t received my usual “It’s time to check in” message from Delta.

The creative soul in Albuquerque who booked me straight through to Boston had made an error — notifying Delta that for very good reasons having absolutely nothing to do with User Error, I wouldn’t be on the flight out of Tallahassee. So I was a no-show, which meant that I was on the list of Naughty Passengers Who Don’t Abide By The Rules and Now Have No Reservations, as opposed to Good Passengers Who Get To Fly Home.

Now, I could fume at that person. Surely this isn’t the first time Delta has had to reroute some poor Ancient Mariner directly to a destination, bypassing some place in between. But it was a mistake by a pro handling a long line of confused people, including a guy behind me who paced and snorted, hands on hips.

(In such situations, I turn on the charm. If nothing else, it puts the desk people at ease, and I do understand they don’t break airplanes and in fact, would much prefer not having to rebook anyone, ever.)

But what I really appreciate is the woman who helped me today, despite the crack in my voice and my obvious inability to understand everything she was saying. (I kept saying, “But DELTA broke the airplane! I’m just the passenger!”) She was soothing and calm and efficient, and when I explained my phone connection was poor (or maybe it was the sound of the blood rushing in and out of my veins), she slowed down and spoke even more clearly.

Then, when I logged in to my Delta account, lo! There was Me, with My Reservation! So she wasn’t just pleasant… she was accurate. There’s a combo to remember.

All I need to do now is check in a little early and sign an affidavit. I’m still not entirely understanding the affidavit — which I suspect does not read, I, Karen G. Schneider, Being Of Sound Mind and Sound Body, Do Affirm I Did Not Break The Airplane and It’s Not My Fault — but at this point, I’d sign almost any document to get home and wash my clothes.

(Assuming my bag gets there, too…)

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Nick Carr and Google and GPS

Friday, June 20, 2008

(Speaking of reading: part of my “score” at an independent bookstore this week was Money Changes Everything, an essay collection about the love that dare not speak its name — I am of course referring to Filthy Lucre. I strongly recommend this essay collection for libraries, book groups, and personal reading; the essays are spot-on and often painfully perfect.)

Library discussion lists have been mulling over Nick Carr’s lovely article in Atlantic, “Is Google Making us Stoopid?” Some have brought up another article, “Will GPS make us dumb?”

Quite a bit rests on how we define “stupid.” The GPS article states, “But, just like with spell-checker before it, some experts believe that the guiding device gives less than what it takes away. The price we pay for the convenience, they say, could be our sense of direction.”

Well, I have never had a sense of direction. I have always been map-smart and direction-poor. So the GPS means I no longer drive with my knees, map and highlighter propped against the steering wheel. Don’t you feel better knowing that The Lady (as I call my GPS) leaves me both-hands-on-wheels, as my mother taught me? (And what is it with those states that have self-importantly passed laws against Affixing Things On Windows?)

Was I smart, and now I am dumb? Dumb, and now I am smart? (Or just dumb and dumber?)

To loop back to Nick Carr and the Web, I think he makes very good points, and has done so elegantly and with a certain respect for humanity. I don’t always agree with him, and his argument isn’t new; but part of the pleasure of his argument is that he includes himself among the affected, rather than standing on the sidelines pointing at those sublunary beings who are no longer capable of Sustained Reading of Complex Texts.

We’re all in the higgledy-jiggledy short-attention-span world, and as I wrote a wee while back, the only cure is to strap our fannies into chairs and Read as if our lives depended on it, as indeed they do.

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Links on the Brink of the Solstice

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Note: my comment feed is broken. I probably won’t be able to fix it for a couple of weeks.

Over on Panlibus, Richard Wallis interviewed me about my new position as Community Librarian for Equinox. Fun convo!

Meanwhile, here are several links related to libraries affected by the midwestern floods…

By way of LISNews: an amateur video posted to YouTube last Friday shows Cedar Rapids Public Library under a few feet of water. On PUBLIB, Joe Schallan adds a little more about the library’s affected service populations.

The University of Iowa libraries batten the helms in the event of flooding, and Amy Ranger adds her impassioned admiration for their efforts, plus a reminder that El Jefe has a strong record of not stepping up to the plate.

On a minor note, I can’t say I’m spending a lot of time there, but I do have an account on Friendfeed. It combines all my other social networking presences (or most of them — I don’t see Dopplr) in one place. Not pushing this service — haven’t made my mind up about it — but it’s worth poking at.

Hard to believe another Summer Solstice is imminent. I am in a hotel room in Cincinnati, which I just learned how to spell (“Cincinnati,” not “hotel room”). It’s a long story involving broken and overbooked airplanes (I was a victim of the former and a volunteer for the latter). So I’ve earned my second Skymiles teeshirt this week — plus a free hotel room and some Delta miles!

My mother’s 80th birthday in Santa Fe (where she lives) was a wonderful celebration, and I was able to catch up with many family friends and also many relatives — uncles, aunts, cousins, and my delightful baby sister — plus I met my mother’s personal trainer. (Do I have good genes, or what?)

I remain peripatetic and not well-connected — this will not be a heavy-blogging week.

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Farewell, Tim Russert

Friday, June 13, 2008

Sandy and I called him the round-headed guy, and when the camera cut to him, we’d often crack up. Tim Russert didn’t have a poker face; it was obvious when he thought he was hearing nonsense, and in the last seven years, he seemed to be scowling a lot.

In our book he was the real thing.

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Retreat Notes

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

It’s funny that both Tayari Jones and Michelle Richmond wrote this week about knowing when to let go of a writing project, because that has been my week, during my tenure as self-appointed Artist in Residence at the Monterey Nonsmoker’s Hotel in Albuquerque (what a great place — more on that in another post).

First, I canned the idea of working on the big essay I thought I wanted to work on. I need to do more background reading. It can wait. Maybe I am not as pulled toward it as I thought.

Then I realized that no matter what, and regardless of all my noises in this direction, I don’t want to write a short story. Not right now. Not maybe ever. I am not interested in “graduating” to writing fiction of any length. If it happens, it happens, but with four days to write, bringing yet another amateurish short story into the world just didn’t seem important. The stuff fueling that story may become an essay. Who can say?

Then I sent an essay to a writing friend who had asked a question it answered, and when I skimmed it (don’t you always re-read your own stuff when you send it along, if only to wonder how you missed all those typos?), I had this tingly feeling. I have always had this idea that this essay was unpublishable, and maybe that’s still the case. But I am still fond of it and have always wondered if it didn’t need something I couldn’t see. When I looked it over (all a-tingle), I thought, “Start this on page 5, and you almost have something.” Maybe what it really needs is to lose the first third of its adipose self — a weight problem that isn’t visible because it feels so whole as an essay. So I shipped it off to my friend, this time for her opinion. Just seeing this essay anew was worth the experience.

Well! That got me going. I took an artsy, edgy essay that had received very nice rejection notices and gutted it, then rebuilt it with half the parts. I like it much more. I then gave one last (for now) hard revision to another essay which had made the rounds of two critique groups and looked up several places to submit it.

I moved on to a “light” revision of an essay I wrote for Malena Watrous’ class this spring (through Stanford CE) — it was a little thing and I expected it to stay that way, but I dug into it and couldn’t stop digging, and it’s a strong second draft. (2 down, how many more to go? Oh, at least 2 more. Maybe 4.)

Then today I had a marathon session pulling together a strong second draft of another food essay I started in Malena Watrous’ class. I was startled by how much research and work I had done on it (and forgotten I had done)… interviews, deep database searches, statistics, book-larnin’, and much more. Obviously it means something to me. It’s still rough, but it leaps out of the gate with a strong thesis and stays on topic. I’m surprised at how sound it is structurally, which is usually not my strong suit. Maybe I am learning something. Imagine that!

Finally, there are several essays I thought I might look at but I didn’t touch, and I know why. Because I’ve moved past them. They were my good friends, and they aren’t terrible. They just aren’t wonderful, and they never will be. There are no guarantees in writing, but given how rare and precious this writing break has been — I expect it will be at least another year before I have a siege like this again, and I’m going to be BIZZZZZY in my new job — I am reminded that I only have writing time for essays I deep-down-trulio believe I have a chance of pulling forward into “wonderful.” My little starter essays, thank you for what I learned from you, and please don’t take it personally.

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Speaking of GPS…

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I will keep this brief as my writing retreat ends Thursday morning, and it is just flying by. However,  someone at CBS News pointed me to this story and thought FRL’s readers would like it. I’m quite flattered,  but also mystified by the association.  FRL + teens + GPS? Though perhaps it’s because this blog has been accused of being all over the map. (Get it? GPS? Map? Nyuck, nyuck!)

Anyway, this is an interesting story that will no doubt push someone’s buttons in LibraryLand, and I did have an uneasy Cool River vibe when I watched the segment. But I spent two years as a records clerk in San Francisco Juvenile Court — this was 1977-1979 — where every morning we dealt with parents frantically seeking their truant children — kids who were mostly on course to bad adulthoods. I would rather see kids monitored by GPS then end up with ruined lives.

The problem becomes when that’s the solution for good kids… and then misbehaving adults… and then all of us. We’re tethered enough in life — how soon until we are all chipped? (In my case, some might say, “Not soon enough!”)

I will say having a GPS has made this leg of the vacation absolutely painless. If only airline baggage tracking were that precise!

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Delta, would you please return my suitcase?

Sunday, June 8, 2008

[update: suitcase arrived at motel at 10 p.m. Slept in my own jammies, Gottseidank, versus that Skymiles teeshirt Delta gave me.]

I am not going to go into blow-by-blow detail about how bad air travel is these days. We’ve all heard it.

But Delta, if you’re listening, would you please return my suitcase? You tell me you have my suitcase, and that it’s a lot closer than it was yesterday when you sent it on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, but you say you might keep it another 12 hours before it is “delivered.” Why is that, Delta? Are you trying on my little shoes or wedging your legs into my little pants? Are you smoothing my favorite sensitive-skin lotions over your face and hands?

Fess up, Delta: are you reading my books?

I’m sorry I checked my suitcase. I promise never to do that again. I will wedge every single thing I need to bring into a weekender (even for an 8-day trip where I need writing materials, as in, books) and if I still cannot fit everything in there I will simply layer clothes on my body, World-War-2-refugee-style, and waddle on the plane hoping the air conditioner doesn’t break. When I am close to my seat I will pretend to try to lift my suitcase over my head and into the bin, and then (as I have done so many times) wait for some well-meaning guy to get a hernia when he rushes in to help me.

But I won’t burden you with anything as annoying as, like, you know, luggage. Dude, you have an airline to run.

Just, please… the suitcase, ok?

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Links on the Grill

Friday, June 6, 2008

Tallahassee Farmers The truck farmers have arrived in Tallahassee — or, we could call them, purveyors of open-source agriculture.  This gentleman is at Lafayette and Magnolia most Fridays and Saturdays, and his sugar-sweet, flavorful melons made some scrumptidiliumptious sorbet this weekend.

But I have been absorbed in my own “fruitful” exercises…

ALA Techsource is once again actively publishing, with several new writers and a new editor at the helm, and Jason Griffey interviewed me about my new job at Equinox, open source, kittens, etc. Happy to see Techsource’s star in ascendance once again!

It has also been a week of taxes (I often file extensions, which means my accountant and I are both a little saner when it’s “my” tax time, but that bird eventually comes home to roost), writing my last super-secret internal MPOW report (this one on Shibboleth, which I keep accidentally calling “Chimera” — was it Jung who said there are no mistakes?), and getting ready for essentially three weeks on the road, with quick scoots back to home base: New Mexico, Cape Cod, Atlanta, and Anaheim, from June 7 to July 1.

Georgia Public Library Service has an interesting position open. If you’re savvy but not a developer, don’t let the word “software” stop you; note the emphasis on project management, Evergreen, lee-ayzing, etc. Looks like a great job for someone with excellent project/people skills and a passion for quality library software!

I heard tale of the latest draft of ILS-Discovery recommendations from the Digital Library Federation by way of John Mark Ockerbloom (whose wonderfully syncopated name surely deserves a nursery rhyme: “John Mark Ockerbloom/Saw an ILS;/John Mark Ockerbloom/Said, “What IS this mess?”).

Dopplr now calculates carbon footprints for your trips. I stopped using Dopplr because it was too much fuss for the value — one more place to record stuff, not enough “network effect” to really make it social — but the personal carbon footprint calculation alone might be worth it to me. Might. Possibly. We’ll see.

I often find myself in situations where I want to record a good thought or send a reminder, and cannot write… in a car, a line at the airport, etc. Per Liz Lawley (“Mamamusings”), I finally tried Jott. As Liz says, “when you call their number it listens to your message and transcribes it for you,” then off it goes to your email or calendar or what-have-you. It’s utterly satisfying magic — I’m hooked! Give Jott a try.

Speaking of situations, I have elected to reduce the opportunities for those, and have ordered a GPS. (It was $359 the day I bought it — today it’s $413! I bet Amazon was going toe-to-toe with CostCo, which had it for $349.)

I have rented a GPS a couple of times on business trips where I had to drive in unknown areas, and it was love, love, love. A GPS changes the trip, which is its own reflective post for the future. I rationalized the purchase because some needed car repair came in well under what I thought it would be. (You see why I am not an accountant — though a high-end GPS in a fifteen-year-old Honda has its own logic. The car has outlasted at least five computers, come to think of it, and is still spry, fuel-efficient, and a comfortable ride. Go you, my little red friend.)

While looking at my accounting for last year and observing some minor billing for my web-based fax service (a great way to eliminate the hassle of incoming faxes), I reflected that I have received no faxes in the last year and sent only three (and at that, under duress — I usually persuade people that snail-mail will work fine). I coped with great slurries of faxes in California (despite my pleas and arguments to the contrary) but expect those agencies have Moved On by now.

I expect to post a little en route, and more once my “writing retreat” ends and I am romping with my baby sister in Santa Fe. We’ll see!

On to the last day of work…

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Ah, MPOW, I hardly knew ye…

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

This Friday is my last day of work at my current job and I’m galloping through an assignment… well, it’s more like gallop, canter, stop and stare; gallop, canter, stop and stare.

Anyone following my job moves since we left California is likely getting whiplash at this point. She’s interim head of systems at an ARL! No, she’s freelancing as a writer/presenter! No, she’s writing internal reports for a statewide network! No, she’s the soon-to-be Community Librarian for an open-source software company!

I spent five years at the same job in California, and could have done it a couple more years, except Sandy found work here and it was definitely her turn. Since then things have been a bit more up-and-down. But I’ve spend close to a year in a very nice organization I will sincerely miss, filled with nice, smart people who are the cream of the crop of LibraryLand.

Best things about this job, from a workabee point of view:

Average IQ of its employees. (High, just to be clear.) It’s nice to work with smart people.

Average diplomacy skills of said employees. A friend commented that their Place Of Work was filled with people who are rude. People here are overwhelmingly not rude to one another. I once observed to a friend that it is far easier to take a group of nice people and guide them in an area they need to grow in than it is to take a group of mean people and make them nice.

Humane working conditions. Offices and cubicles are pleasant — not fancy, but not pre-Glasnost-drab, the way some libraries are. Staff technology needs are supported well. When I’ve had technical issues, someone shows up and helps me and checks back to make sure it works. When I said I had trouble syncing my Curve, nobody pulled out a union card and shouted “We don’t support Blackberry!” Instead, the support folk came in while I was gone and upgraded my client software.

Humane leisure conditions. How many places have I worked where the “staff lounge” reminds me of a juvenile detention center waiting room (and just to be clear, my experience there comes from working for a Juvy)? Here, the staff lounges are comfortable and attractive — a place where people enjoy sharing their breaks and meals, which builds collegiality.

Good travel care. If you travel a lot, you know this can be huge. The travel person here is friendly, caring, and detail-oriented, and doesn’t make me feel like a moron for making errors in the system. Reimbursements — electronic, thank you — are prompt. None of that is an accident. This organization believes in doing travel right.

Bye, ol’ MPOW… you all keep rockin’ on!

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