Laurabelle's Blog

I have to write an RFP for my systems administration class, and it’s actually rather an interesting assignment. It’s a good exercise to have to do one hypothetically, before actually being thrown at the problem when a real system is on the line. Besides, I get to make up lots of details that weren’t in the assignment, and that’s always fun.

On the other hand, I would much rather make pink pom-poms than write a seven-page assignment. The pink pom-poms are for a friend of mine who, last winter, requested a hat with ears and never got one. Her birthday is next week, but it looks like I’ll have the hat done before class tomorrow afternoon. (The RFP will be done too.)

It’s been a busy weekend, so I’m going to blog about it in installments.

On Friday evening iKnit (the iSchool knitting club) had its first beginning knitter’s workshop. At least, Jenine (the organizer) called it a workshop, but the teaching was decentralized. We had five teachers and three learners, so people paired off one-on-one and the extra two sat by and munched and knitted and chatted. It was great.

This is a time when I really wish that my blog from the past couple of years were still up, because then I could point to the entries that I wrote last fall, for the required class on information behavior (though I wrote a little bit about it and linked to my class materials over here). Information behavior is about the behavior of people with regard to seeking and using information (and any other activity that involves information). Our final project was a presentation on the information behavior of physicians, which is why I sat up and listened when I heard this piece on NPR yesterday morning.

Went to MSCUA this afternoon to work with my group on our final project for LIS559. The project is to work on some sort of digitizing project on campus, and we got assigned to work on a project to digitize art papers, mostly historical marbled book papers. (You know those pretty endpapers in some books? That's what we're talking about.) It wasn't an arbitrary assignment; we all expressed an interest in this project, but we didn't get really free choice either.

For the last two weeks of the quarter, my LIS 550 class is reading The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society by Manuel Castells and discussing it. So I've been reading it bit by bit on the bus, and I just finished a chapter called Virtual Communities or Network Society? which makes me think about my own Internet experiences, for obvious reasons.

Spring quarter started on Monday, and I attended two new classes. LIS521 (Principles of Information Services) looks really fun, which I had expected since it was the class that filled up the fastest at entry-code time. I also had LIS545 (Programming for Information Systems) that evening, and unfortunately it was less impressive. I hadn't realized how much programming for non-programmers it was going to be, and how much of the course material was going to be duplicated by LIS549 (XML by Bob Boiko). The emphasis on Microsoft-owned languages and programs, coupled with non-explanations of namespaces, classes, functions, and even arrays, gave me a definite feeling that I really didn't want to be in that class. So I dropped it and am now signed up for LIS550 (Information in Social Context).

I'm also planning to take a computer science course over the summer, even though I won't get LIS credit for it. It's stupid, because any real comp sci course would be much harder than 545, which I would get credit for. Ahhh, the absurdities of the academic universe.