David Rakoff describes his summer job:
As anyone who's ever worked in an ice-cream parlor can tell you, two things end up happening really quickly: you get sick of ice cream almost immediately, and soon thereafter you fall in love with the nitrous oxide used to make the whipped cream. You Heart Whippets. This ardor eventually cools when you realize that it's been weeks since you've been able to subtract simple sums, use an adjective correctly, or spell your own last name. But at the first bloom of narcotic romance, you merely wonder where whippets have been all your life.
While clicking through local design firm AtomicPDX's website, I thought, how unprofessional is it to have something based entirely from the Dreamweaver demo template in your portfolio? Turns out they designed the Dreamweaver template. Yeah.The origins of the word "snob" are unclear, accoring to Joseph Epstein, author of Snobbery: The American Version. It may come from a permutation of nabob, a term for the wealthy and elite, as a snob is someone trying to get to that status. Or, perhaps it's from the French s'noble or the word "snub."
"Ladies and Gentlemen, this is NPR. And that means it's time for a drum solo!" - They Might Be Giants playing live on Weekend Edition
ClickTracks is a pretty interesting tool to visualize user statistics. Like sticking a sheet of vellum with bar charts right on top of your web site. Easier to intuit than Analog.
This job is probably freakishly coveted by the unemployed bloggers out there.
My computer just froze while I was listening to some streaming audio. The same four seconds kept looping. But it was this ambient techo song, so it took a couple of minutes to realize that it wasn't supposed to sound like that.
I'm attending the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries this week in the exotic locale of (wait for it . . .) the Lloyd Center Doubletree. Feels great to be back at a rigorously academic conference after the plethora of smaller vendor-specific or pet project show-and-tell-ish library conferences I've been at lately (though I've enjoyed them as well). But this conference has papers with sigma-laden equations, darn it. Leaves me craving a good CHI or SIGGRAPH. Some things I've gleaned from the first couple of days:
- Regarding academic libraries' copyright policies, keynote speaker Jessica Litman says, "When a student walks up to the reference desk, the librarian doesn't call up the publisher and say 'I've got a Class 3 female in blue jeans here. May she see your book? And if so, should I give her the upscale version, the educational version, or the version co-sponsored by Kmart?'"
- Do not use Comic Sans on your powerpoint slides if you want to be taken seriously.
- The Computer Science Teaching Center is a searchable collection of peer-reviewed materials for teaching Computer Science. Lots of source code, some syllabi, lectures, and papers.
- It is important to enunciate. One speaker gave an entire lecture on jalopies, not digital libraries.
- The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations is building a collection of theses at the bachelor, master, and PhD level. Students of all disciplines learn how to submit their theses in electronic form (usually PDF or XML), and are able to hide or timestamp portions of their research for patent purposes, if necessary. Schools join for free and submit only finished, reviewed theses. Instant, high-quality dissemination. I wish UO had been a member when I was a student. (Sidenote: Should you actually want to read my undergrad thesis, here it is in all its glory: The Effect of Animated Banner Advertisements on a Visual Search Task 350k PDF.)
There's a couple making out in the park across from my apartment window. I shouldn't be watching this.
Wondering about the blogorrhea here today, while I'm ostensibly at work? Well, as it's a Ghostship Friday (the library is closed to patrons and the thirty computers outside my office are frozen at the Win98 shutdown screen), I'm catching up on my CSS and XML techniques, most of which I'm grepping from websites. And the hyper nature of the medium leads to a bit of wandering . . .
Selected Ed Harcourt lyrics that are subliminally seeping into my consciousness through freakishly obsessive track repetition:
"There's a thousand things I shouldn't do / But if I do them I should do them with you"
"Little things, the insect's sting / I will walk through the long, long grass"
Note to self: The spam with the subject line "Keep porn free" means just that, not "Keep porn-free." Plus, do you really trust spam subject lines anyway? If you did, you'd be slim but ripped and have a really low mortgage.
It's not even 8:30. My mug of chai is empty and my eyelids are drooping. How will I make it until noon? Neil Finn's latest album, One All is the only thing keeping me faintly perky. He and the pretty Ed Harcourt rocked the under-40 crowd at the Roseland last night. At a later, more caffeinated moment, I'll write a coherent review. In the meantime, you can hear live performances from both men at Sounds Eclectic.
Two things I learned at the managers' meeting at work today:
- When attempting to make a vehement argument, the appropriate tool with which to gesticulate is not a palm pilot stylus.
- "Rah rah-iness" is a noun used to describe employee morale.
I haven't met many odd people in my life. At least not the sort that could populate a novel like The Corrections or a scene in a David Lynch movie (even a David Mamet movie, for that matter). In general, I tend to run into stable, reasonably intelligent people, whose worst pecadillos are off-key singing or obsessive work habits. (I suppose, technically, they could comprise the cast of a bestseller, but really, they'd need an author less bland than me to make them scintillating.) So, my encounter last night was rather unusual, and after reiterating the story to a friend and to my mother, I still haven't clarified all of the details in my mind, so allow me to blather here a bit about it.
Last night I was waiting for a friend after church. I loitered on the front steps as the congregation left and the priest shook people's hands. An oldish man was standing near me, facing the church doors, and I thought he was a greeter. So, I didn't mind when he started to chat me up. He asked if I was a student, and, when I said I'd graduated a year ago, he asked what I'd learned. It was one of those questions that begs a profound answer, but I waffled and said I'd learned quite a bit about Computer Science. Now, I don't remember how the conversation turned this way, but he proceeded to tell me that he didn't think the priest knew what he'd been preaching about, and that the Church (big C) was rather pathetic. Not what you'd expect from a seemingly kind old man standing outside a cathedral.
And of course he wanted to know what I thought. Rather flabbergasted, I said I didn't think it was my place to judge, at which he interjected, "Why, because you're a woman?" While snorting, I said, "No, because I'm here to absorb as much as I can, and to appreciate my surroundings." (Or something wussy to that effect.) And to change the subject, I asked him his name.
John, as I now knew him, was a poet. And, apparently, the editor-in-chief of an unnamed Portland publishing firm. And, a classical scholar. And I began to wonder if he was perhaps also homeless and a tad daffy. Meanwhile, everyone had vacated the steps, and it was just me and this old loon. I was considering dismissing him and walking away when he asked,
"If I said 'Between you and I,' would that be correct?"At which he smiled, and acknowledged that I at least knew my parts of speech. (And yes, I'm flagrantly ignoring the proper way to write quotations. Get over it.)
Amused by the grammar challenge, I explained that, no, you'd say "Between you and me."
"Why?"
"Because 'me' is the correct object of that phrase."
He wrinkled his nose. "Phrase?"
"Okay, clause, since it's not a full sentence."
His expression turned more sour. "Clause?"
"Alright, prepositional clause, because 'between' is a preposition."
He continued his challenge. "Can you do this?" He wiggled his finger. "Yes," I said, wiggling my finger. "Are you sure?" he prodded; "Can Christopher Reeve do this?" I said I wasn't sure, since Christopher Reeve was partially paralyzed. Not sure where this train of thought was going, I didn't mind when he waxed philosophical. "I'm also an epistemologist," he said. I smiled, since I'm a dictionaryhead and know the meaning of that word. "Do you know what that means?" he asked. Now, unfortunately, there are so many silly words in my head, that I made the minor sin of confusing epistemologist with etymologist. "You study the origin of words," I replied. At which he scowled and said that no, he studied the validity of thought. Damn, I lost points. And here I was having fun.
"Do you know your major word? You've said it eight times already since we met." Not sure what he meant, I asked if it was the word I'd used most frequently. He just stared. I considered it, and realized that I'd been adding modifiers like "perhaps" and "suppose" to most of my statements while talking to him. Fearing that he was logarrheically wacko, and not wanting a barrage of "whys" after every statement, I'd been intentionally weakening my points so as not to get tangled in an annoying semantic debate with this guy who'd just called my priest pathetic. I asked if either of those words was my major word, and he just scowled. "That proves that you don't listed to yourself. You're 24 years old, and you don't even know your major word." At this brusque and crabby reply, I asked him to clarify his criteria for this "major word," since I'd used a lot of articles more than eight times already. This, of course, led to a discussion on the proper use of "criteria" versus "criterion," and later "persecution" versus "prosecution" ("since so many words change in meaning with just one little letter." "Two letters, technically," I retorted.) I held my own, rather amused by this extended confrontation. Twenty minutes had passed.
Up walks another man, apparently homeless. Before he even reaches us, John asks the man if he is going to ask us for a dollar, and that he probably wants it for cigarettes, since John could smell him already. The man replies, no, he was looking for the priest. And that, yes, he did need a dollar, and a lot more, but only because he needed to buy a box of Depends. And, did I know what Depends were? I nodded. This new man needed to buy some for his mother, for whom he was caring, and Fred Meyers wouldn't trust him until tomorrow. He needed $6.95 for them. John arched his eyebrows. The homeless(?) man confronted John. "Have you read any Thomas Merton?" "I've read everything he's ever written" (of course). The two men traded barbs about what Merton would do in this situation, and proceeded to argue about another Christian philosopher, whose name escapes me. Now I'm really considering excusing myself. But it was just so darn odd! John said he was talking to "this young lady," so the second guy finally walked away.
"By the way, you can't do this [wiggles his finger]. Only I can move my finger. You can only move your finger. So you can't do this. Have you figured out your major word yet?" Unfazed, I asked if he knew the time. "Yes." "Would you please tell me the time?" "Yes." "Please tell me the time." And he showed me his watch. A half-hour had passed. "Now you know how to ask for things," he said. "Please tell me my major word," I said. He agreed to point it out if I used it again. It was the word "I." And "I" is really the major word of every person who is self-aware. And now I've been "inducted into the cognoscenti" because I'm self-aware. (Earlier he'd asked me if I was a member, but I said I didn't consider myself to have had enough life experience to be a part of that group, even though I'm well-read.) John mentioned that he had a book coming out, Is the Pope Catholic?, and I started to wonder if he was famous. He mentioned that he had a couple of PhDs. I asked his last name, (Kiley) and when he said he had a website (surprise!), how to spell it. He looked for a business card in his wallet, but ended up pulling out his AMA card, proving he held an MD, too.
I finally let him know that I was very late to meet a friend (true), but that I enjoyed talking with him (true). A search later on Amazon pulled up several works by John Cantwell Kiley, who is apparently a good friend of William S. Burroughs. (Wonder if he's ever seen Einstein's brain, which Burrough's next-door neighbor stole? But that's for another story.) The URL he gave me, jckiley.com, currently leads to nothing but a duplicitous domain-name placeholder, but I'll keep an eye on it. I'll let you know if the crabby old epistemologist ever rears his head online. One day, a more fictional and stylized version of this tale will end up in my memoirs, but for now, we members of the cognoscenti are content to ramble.
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