Summer Lessons: The Cardinal Sins of Internet Browsers

I'm feeling especially grouchy today. Maybe it's because a fire alarm was going off in the hospital I work in and it gave me a headache. But regardless, it's inspired me to be rather snarky. I apologize in advance...

Watching people use computers, and watching people teaching me things on computers has brought to the forefront of my mind some things which should really never be done when it comes to browsers. I'm going to start the compilation of a list here, and I may add to it as I see fit.

1: Thou shalt not open, and especially not go out of your way to open, Netscape or Internet Explorer when Chrome or Firefox are offered to you.

It just gives me the chills that I've even seen this happen... perfectly good browsers waiting on the desktop to be used, but you're going to go into the program menu just to open IE? I shudder to think.

2: Thou shalt not enter the address "www.google.com" in the address bar of Chrome in order to go google something. It's GOOGLE Chrome. 

Really? Congratulations, you just divided by zero.

3: Thou shalt not type "http://" before a web address. Even typing out "www." may be taking it too far, but for that you can be forgiven.

Your browser knows these things. Unless you're worried about secure browsing and you're afraid you won't automatically be redirected the "https://" (the s stands for secure!) it's just nails on a chalkboard unnecessary.

Summer Lessons: A Project in Connection

I'm considering starting a project.

I'm going to make myself a little kit. It will have envelopes, paper, pens, stamps... and every week, I'll write a letter to someone. Maybe it will be a friend, if I can get enough of them to send me their up-to-date contact info. Maybe it will be family. Maybe it will be a politician, or a celebrity, or someone I know of who's incarcerated. Maybe it will be someone I remember from long ago.

But I'll write a letter a week.

Connect with people in a personal, if archaic, way.

I hate when people knock on technology and decry our use of it as being too wired, too impersonal... Humans are social creatures, and much of our use of technology is simply extending that even further. I even read a great article which refers to the proprioception that arises from the use of social media.

But that being said, sometimes being a sprinkler gets tiring.

All that whirling, making sure every blade of grass gets watered. Sometimes you have to get out the spray bottle and give specific plants a little TLC. A lot of our relationships are like grass; make sure they get enough water and you don't really run a risk of them shriveling up and dying away. They may not thrive into towering trees or flowering shrubs; but it's grass, that's not what it's for. Not every relationship in your life can, or should, be monumental. Heck, the human brain is only cognitively capable of maintaining 150 true friendships.

But some plants you baby and pamper. You tend them carefully. Not because they're more important than the grass; but because they're the ones you want to see thrive.

I guess I just want to make a point of doing that in my life.

My family never was very good with plants.

Summer Lessons: Why Buying an iPad Was The Best Decision for Me

I know I've let it fall by the wayside so far, but I'm really hoping that I'll be able to post at least once or twice a week over the summer… I do have a ridiculously overwhelming schedule, but I'm finding that writing, period, is becoming a big priority for me. I find that even if I'm not writing about something emotional, it's still emotionally impactful for me. I suppose it's just the fact that writing organizes my thoughts in a way nothing else does. But that's tangential to the topic of today's post.

Before I get to that though, for those who are interested, my overwhelming schedule is as follows: work from 9am-3pm Monday to Thursday, 9am-4pm on Friday. Practicum from 4-7pm Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Plus trivia at 8 on Mondays and potentially a weekly movie night at my place on Fridays.

The Fiancé's in the process of moving up here, and I think he's going to be a little disappointed with how much time we're actually going to have together… But anyways, on to the main show!

As per the title of this post, my iPad was definitely one of the best purchasing decisions I have made. It has allowed me to take all my class notes, study efficiently with all the class lectures in one easy to read place, schedule my time more effectively since it turns out I'm much more likely to use a digital agenda than a paper one, research concepts, record lectures... all without dropping the huge chunk of change needed to replace my old dying laptop with a new, useable one. And yes, even have some fun; though I haven't yet found a way to play World of Warcraft on it!

And yet despite its usefulness, I feel like I'm constantly confronted about it. When I had a laptop, that was fine; students need laptops. But an iPad? What do you need that for? What luxury! What extravagance! How dare you!

My name is Veronica and I am a poor, starving student deeply in debt and I have an iPad.

For my undergrad as a film production student, and as a graduation present from my parents, I got a big MacBook Pro in part because I really wanted a Mac, but mostly because my entire department was Mac, I was going to need to use Final Cut Pro. And yes, using Mac did suck me in. Apple took care of any and all problems I had with the hardware, and the software was accessible enough that I could do everything I wanted and configure it to my own specifications without sinking a lot of time into it.

But after my extended warrantee ran out, and at 4 years old, my beautiful Mac was showing its age. With plastic bits falling to pieces, it was more of a desktop than a laptop… if I wanted to keep using it, I had to stop moving it. At all. But I still had two years of University level education on the horizon at that point, as I was starting my Masters in the fall. I know from previous experience that hand-taking notes does not work for me. Typing my notes, having the ability to record lectures and the ability to look up concepts I didn't fully understand right off the bat (or that I found interesting and wanted to know about in more depth) were all vitally important to me and my learning process. And yet, I didn't have the money to replace my old computer.

So I toyed with the idea of getting myself a little netbook for my purposes. That would mean a return to Windows, which I wasn't looking forward to; but it was looking like that was what I would have to do.

But then my dad pointed out that I could get one of the least featured iPads for the same price as the netbooks I was considering, so why didn't I just do that?

And that's what I did.

And that was a fantastic decision.

Day 100: Officially Half A Librarian!

Happy Friday the 13th! And happy Day 100 and End of Year 1 as well! I'm half way there!

As a grand summary lesson for my 100th numbered day in Library School, let me share the most overarching lesson I've taken away from this year.

Lesson 100: You can do anything. Anything at all. You just have to ignore all doubts about whether you can, and just go go go.

This week has been quite the interesting experience, and very much proving the lesson, so let me spell it out.

Our final research proposal was due Tuesday. Luckily someone in my group was in Montreal and willing to hand it in because I was still in Ontario, just preparing to head back to Montreal. I was taking the midnight bus that night, so I did some shopping in Toronto (five-fingers shoes and fancy Sephora hair-ties) and met up with my friend Elissa for dinner (lobster grilled cheese and a raspberry mojito) before catching the bus.

After a fitful sleep full of interruptions, I was finally back in Montreal, and went home to catch some ZZZs before waking up (at 11) to go to work and complete the last of my final assignments.

On Thursday, our project management final and our collection development final were both due, four hours apart.

I did not sleep Wednesday night. A bottle of NOS kept me company while I stayed up to finish my collection development paper. Although at one point the bottle of NOS convinced me that rather than continue the futile quest to get WebCT to cooperate and allow me to download the PowerPoints I needed, what I really needed to do was read some fan fiction instead.

Despite the distractions borne of no sleep and too much caffeine, I finished the collection development paper and handed it in just under the wire thanks to Aimee being awesome and printing it off for me while I ran to SIS. Then we put the finishing touches on our project management paper, handed it in, and got some celebratory lunch as a group.

Then I had my first training shift in my new job at the Neuro-Patient Resource Centre... on ~6hrs sleep in the past 48-72hrs. Needless to say that afterwards I went straight home and got a proper night's sleep.

Today, I had another training shift at the Neuro followed immediately by a regular shift at the Life Sci. My new boss told me that she was very impressed with how high-functioning I was yesterday on less than no sleep. I still got it! ^.^

And to mark the official end of the semester, we had a party with wine and tasty food, mingling, and superlatives! There were many categories to be won; best dressed, info-retrieval wizard, most likely to be the first to become library director, most stereotypical, most likely to become a prof...

In a three-way tie, I won Most Stereotypical Librarian.

... Maybe I shouldn't buy those cateye frames I've been eyeing... It might cause a singularity of librarianship...

Librarian blackhole; Nothing can escape its gravity. Cats, knitting and baking supplies are pulled in with no chance of release. Knowledge is devoured and it is not known whether it escapes again in some form, but scientists presume that it must, due to the principle of the conservation of mass...

Full results of the vote as compiled by Alex Amar on the Library School facebook group are copypastad for your viewing pleasure here.

Day 99: Last day of class?

Today's supposed to be my last day of class, but a ticket home on the 4th was less than half the price of a ticket home on the 5th, so instead of being in class I'm actually in Ontario.

However, a few of my classmates and I have taken to live-tweeting our classes allowing us to share insights, chat in a less disruptive manner, and a newly discovered benefit: allowing the absent to still follow along with class!

So despite not being in management today, I still learned about management; I attended my fiancé's "OB" (Organizational Behaviour) class, and got the insight from my own class through Twitter.

Lesson 99: Just because you're absent, doesn't necessarily mean you're missing out on class.

Of course, perhaps someone can help me puzzle out one insight I couldn't quite unravel through twitter...

One of our professors told the class about a co-worker in a library who had taken nude photos of themself, printed them and hid them within books in the circulating collection. My question is one of motivation, I can't understand what reason anyone might have for doing that to themselves. If they were doing it to someone else I could guess that the motive would be as a prank, or vengeance of some sort. But doing it to yourself, what kind of outcome would you even be hoping for?

... How unfathomable are the depths of human nature...

Day 98: Never, ever do that again

In a completely unexpected and unforeseeable turn of events, it turns out that leaving your house at 10 am, fully ready for the bus ride home but not actually catching that bus until 9:30 pm is a world of misery. Particularly when you compound it with 3 hours of sleep and schlepping around not only my own travel bags, but also a ridiculously heavy good deed.

Who knew?

The good deed? I'm transporting Zikomo bags back home for my sister. Being in International Development, she sells these bags on the behalf of a women's cooperative in Malawi. If you want to read more about my sister and what she's up to in "InDev" as they call it, she's started a blog too! She's going to be doing a work placement in Botswana next year so the blog is mainly to document that.

I haven't really learned anything so far today, except to be thankful for the caps on bottles of rubbing alcohol... In my sleep deprived state, I reached for my can of Amp Energy Drink and my hand came back with my bottle of rubbing alcohol instead. No, bad hand, that is not for drinking and will certainly not keep me awake through class!

Speaking of class, it was really bizarre today. Constantly contradictory and confusing, and at times disturbing. Here's an example of one of the lessons my professor wanted me to learn today...

(Faux) Lesson 98: Stalking is cute and romantic, but it is not ethical.

I was severely unimpressed. Stalking is not cute, it is not romantic. It is creepy, disturbing, unethical and immoral to boot. Don't do it!

Day 97: Mostly Serendipitous

Serendipity is a huge topic in librarianship. Heck, it's a huge issue in information and knowledge organization, period.

In fact, serendipity is one of the things most organizational systems are designed around. Dewey and Library of Congress, the two ways of organizing a library that you are most likely to be familiar with, both aim to "facilitate serendipity" by grouping similar volumes together. It's why you can go to "The Cookbook Section" or "The Canadian History Section"of the library and why we don't just organize all the books, fiction and non-fiction, by author's name or title. We want you to go to a section looking for a specific book and realize "hey, here's that book I was looking for, but this one right next to it is actually going to be better for what I need!"

We can get into all the arguments we want to about whether or not it's really serendipitous if it's been arranged that way, engineered serendipity if you will, but the fact is that it is useful, helpful and just plain fantastic whether or not it's "true" serendipity.

But I'd always just taken the word for granted. It's probably this or that Greek root meaning "divine guidance" or some such, peppered with a little Latin, left to stew in 3 or 4 different romance languages, before finally being looted by English. Or so I thought...

Lesson 97: The term "Serendipity" was inspired by a (mostly) Persian tale called "The Three Princes of Serendip" in which the titular three princes come upon information through happenstance and coincidence and are able to infer all manner of things.

The tale had been printed, reprinted, retold, reformed, combined with other tales, modified through the years adding elements from different tales from other locales or inspiring similar tales in other locales, but eventually made it to a book Horace Walpole read as a boy. It was this "silly fairy tale" that inspired him to coin the term "serendipity" in 1754.

If you're interested in reading a summary of the story, learning more about these Princes of Serendip and how the word serendipity came to be, I found this article in two parts that explains it all quite in depth.

Happy reading!