Back to China

I guess we'll call this my birthday / graduation present: we're heading back to China for 2 weeks at the end of August. Whoo-hoo! We're calling it a practice run for a potential sabbatical trip.

I want independance: from construction!

Sitting here at the end of week 8 of what was quoted as a 5 week job, I'm regretting a little bit not blogging the whole process: from the mis-sized windows to the mis-communications about paint, it would have made a good story.

But we're at the mercy of the people working for us. Once the house is taken apart, you're sort of stuck with them. It is nice to have them sit down with you and explain what's going on, but I can't help but feel like smoke is being blown up my ass. Disclosure is nice, but all to often it feels like finger pointing. 'We didn't know the sub was going to do it this way, etc. etc.' What you want to say is: 'Hey--the check to the sub doesn't have our name on it, it has yours.' Or: 'Hey--it's your insurance policy, not ours.' But then again, I have no idea who would get tangled up into the bullshit if things went downhill. But one thing I do know would definitely happen: work would grind to (even more of) a halt, we would continue to sleep on couch and twin bed in the mini-dining room, and it would be a huge mess.

So we smile, nod our heads, and I secretly reconfirm my decision not to tell this story day-by-day.

Fish on.

I feel like such a baby. I spent a little money today replacing some lost gear (fuck you burglars!) and learned a new trick--a trick I probably should have learned a long time ago. The trick is: take advantage of those pre-tied loops in your leader. Buy a leader one notch up from what you want and by some tippet material. Put a perfection loop on the end of your leader and to the end of a length of leader. Now you have 2 loops that you can tie together, and it's easy to take that knot apart. This way, you have a length of tippet to tie flies to. Once this tippet gets short, you can take it off the leader and put on a new length of tippet. This way--your leader never gets shorter. It will really lengthen the life of the leader.

Really glad for the advice. But like the shop owner said: the advice is always free.

Finding the best resources.

Lindsay has already recommended the New York Times and content from the BBC. I'll add a few other sources that are excellent:

• The Christian Science Monitor. Please don't confuse it with Scientology. It's very different, and this online-only newspaper is an excellent source of coverage of world events.
• The New Yorker. Most of its content is available for free online, and each week they will typically have two or three 5000 word essays which are excellent.
• The Economist. Staunchly pro-free market, this British magazine is a good alternative to openly political journals such as The Nation and he National Review.

But that's just the open web. The UO Libraries has a huge assortment of material available to you (we spend about $4 million per year). Try the topical lists of databases available for searching. These databases are especially good at finding news sources:

• Newspaper Source. A search engine that includes content from many different newspapers.
• Lexis Nexis. Has even more news content.
• Ethnic News Watch. An index of newspapers by and about ethnic minority groups in the US.

And this is just news stuff! I'm sure you'd get bonus point if you were to use scholarly journals in your work--stuff like a couple of the journals I have listed under geography on my blogroll. Try GeoBase, or some of the indexes under Political Science and International Studies to get a taste of what these are good for.

As for the cheese--when I returned to the coffee shop, I'm sure the two young ladies thought I was pretty smooth when I walked in and said "Excuse me, did you see a piece of cheese sitting here when you sat down?" I finally bit the bullet and rode my bike all the way back downtown. I had left the dang goat cheese sitting on the cheesemonger's table when she gave me her change. She had set it aside for me in a little wax paper bag. "I knew you'd be back."

Duck U blog options.

Lindsay's class has to put their blogs somewhere. If there's a high-octane geek in the class (and isn't there always?) they can always put it on their own domain. But that's usually not an option. So generally, students can put blogs on their local webspace (Hey everybody: did you know you can have webpages hosted by the university? It just takes up part of your disk quota.) or just let Blogger take care of things at blogname.blogspot.com.

Here's some essentials about getting a Blog started at uoregon.edu/~your_user_name:

• Getting a page set up on the university's server.


• I recommend putting a basic index.html page up just to test that you set everything up correctly. There's also a campus IT page with some extra file transfer help.


• Set up a new folder on your 'shell account' that is named whatever you want the url of your blog to be, such as: uoregon.edu/~your_user_name/myblog/


• You're all set to start following the instructions at blogger.com!

If you want Blogger to host your blog, start there. If you have a gmail account--you should be able to use that username to log in at Blogger.

Easy as pie.

But what about the cheese? On Saturday I went to the market for the first time all year (that admission by itself is a bit embarrassing). Strawberries, cherries, and all sorts of early vegetables are available. Often, I'll also buy a loaf of bread or a piece of meat. It's expensive, but it's almost always worth it. So Saturday I bought this beautiful piece of cumin flavored goat cheese, ingredients for the salmon chowder I made Saturday night, berries, cherries, and greens for a salad. Then I headed to the Goat for a morning coffee. When I got home and unpacked.....

...the cheese was missing.

Feed me!

In the past two years, I all but gave up on feed readers. I was committed to bloglines for about a year, but writing my thesis made me feel totally opposed to keeping current with library blogs. Besides: I kind of enjoy seeing the blogs I read regularly in their native format. In a way, blogs lose some of their appear when they look like webmail.

Anyway, I do want to introduce Lindsay's students to readers--at least to take their pulse to see if anyone is using them. I've never been a Google Reader user, but it does seem to be a popular option amongst my colleagues. Getting started is certainly a breeze:



Bloglines is much the same, and I use it to generate the blogroll to the right. I spent some time today playing with CSS to make them match the look of the GrowBlog a bit more closely, but those skills are REALLY rusty.

You might be wondering about the cheese. I'll explain as I continue to prep for Tuesday, but suffice it to say: if I was single, I think I would have just discovered a new pickup line.

Found my cheese!

Spring cleaning here at the GrowBlog. I'm visiting a class on Tuesday and need not only to show a few features of Blogger, but also show what a blog is useful for. So get ready for some rapid posts, a few template changes, and just a little bit of commentary on the weekend's food and reading.

First off: the class I'm visiting is charged with identifying news and/or reading items on a given topic each week, and writing a brief posting about them. As it's summer and all, I'm also catching up on a little reading. Starting in China, I checked in with one of my semi-regular Chinese blogs today which recently posted a whole bunch of commentaries on how June 6 was treated in the world media. I will note that my own campus had a panel discussion on that evening, but I was unable to attend.

The posts though, led me to a new site and introduced me to a blogger who is also an archivist. A great combination. I have heard of this Budapest human rights archive, but have never had an opportunity to check out their website. This here post is a reminder for me to do so at some greater length at a later date.

"Almost belligerantly unambitious"

Is how one of my coworkers described herself today. I thought that was f'in awesome.

3 more retirements.

Announced since I wrote that last post. All map librarians. Seeing as there are typically 3 jobs open nationally each year, this seems to be a big deal. 7 openings. Well, that's not exactly accurate. 7 positions vacant. Only one opening so far.

(note to my own colleagues: no, I'm not looking. If I was looking, I would only be getting a new roof and paint job instead of all the other renovations.)

I've just been slated to teach Library 101 in the fall--a 1-credit 1-hour-a-week course. In starting to think about how to go about it, I realize that there will be few places in the syllabus where they will actually have to touch a physical resource. I'm thinking about making attendance mandatory though. 5 random quizzes in 9 sessions? As one of my high school history teachers would say: "Gentlemen, take out....a half-sheet of paper.