Laurabelle's Blog

Some good and a lot of bad this weekend. My landlord, Pete, had a heart attack in Florida and had quadruple-bypass surgery yesterday evening. He's still alive though and was sitting up in bed today, although the attack and surgery took a lot out of him, and he's in a lot of pain. That's all [...]

You know, most of the time I like being right, but it's just not fun to be right about how much is going wrong in Iraq. I was also right that Lori was going to want to move back in. Jeff thought June, I thought May, but it's barely into April. Poor thing. It's time [...]

Stephen Meyer, a library student at the other UW has chimed in on the subject of technology and librarianship. I think he missed the point of what I was trying to say, and that's probably because I said it badly. I guess they and I are talking about two different things, and I need to [...]

Why doesn't this seem as unrealistic as it should? Hoping it will push them to the top of an increasingly competitive market, Internet portal Yahoo has added soul-search capabilities to its expanding line of search tools, company executives announced Monday. Capable of navigating the billions of thoughts, experiences, and emotions that make up the human [...]

A lot of people are making noise these days about GMail, Google's new, free email service. 1,000 MB of free storage can't be bad, right? But it comes with a catch — Google will use the contents of the email stored in your account for the purposes of advertising:

Dorothea says some really good things about the love-hate relationship between library science and information science, although she doesn't put it exactly that way. The fact is that there are a lot of stereotypes going around between old-school librarians and technologists, and none of it is helping the mutual-good-feeling points, but we all need each [...]

Dorothea claims that the way to tell a librarian from a library technician is by whether that person knows his own Cutter number or not. While I don't disagree that it can be hard to tell those with a degree in library science from those without (alas, I used to be one of those people [...]

I have no idea why, but for the past few months I've had regular nightmares. They're not terribly frequent, maybe one every few weeks, but given that I had never in my life had a nightmare before I was 18 and that the next one after that was about 5 years later, this is an [...]

I've been monitoring job descriptions lately, and this one at Tacoma Community College seems absolutely schizophrenic. I was considering applying for it until I realized that it requires managing three separate library departments, including information technology and cataloging, as well as creating and maintaining databases and working regular shifts at the reference desk. Excuse me?

It's gotten to the point on some of my comment-threads where it's kind of hard to tell who's replying to whom, so I eventually sat down and added some colors to help distinguish between levels of commenting. Check out the effect on a thread with lots of comments, like this one. I think it helps, [...]