We had another strike vote, and have approved unlimited strike action that we'll apparently have a vote weekly(?) to renew...
But yeah, yeah, I did it, I'm a terrible person. I've crossed the picket line. Much as I may disagree with the tuition hike, I can't afford to pay for classes and not attend them either. Class was so under-attended today, I think it actually improved the discussion...
Lesson 94: Some aspects of this program feel incredibly redundant, but the best way to deal with it is to sit back and enjoy the company of your classmates.
Or dress like Batgirl.
That made my day infinitely better; spending it dressed as my favourite female librarian.
But I digress... There are really only so many times you can talk about the information seeking models of Belkin, Dervin, Kuhlthau, Taylor, et al. and library anxiety before it just all starts to blur together. Your peers are your best option to avoiding losing it entirely.
Hooray for friends!
Showing posts with label social. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Day Whoa: Hospitals and Interprovincial Healthcare
Sorry I haven't been on top of updating, I've had a rather complicated past week.
After taking a soccer ball and later an oblivious and unintentional fist to the nose within a week, the resulting headache got abruptly and exponentially more intense without reason or warning on Wednesday afternoon. That is generally not a good thing.
So I went to see a doctor here in Montreal (and worried him quite a bit), who sent me to the ER here in Montreal, where an even more concerned triage nurse allowed me to take my 9pm bus on Thursday night in order to get home to Ontario as long as I promised to go to the ER again when I got there.
Upon arriving in Toronto at 3am, a very close friend of mine, Hoben, picked me up from the bus station, drove me to Guelph and even stayed with me in the waiting room of the Guelph ER for a bit. The doctor there saw me after a much longer wait than in Montreal, and despite the headache being so bad that tears had started to flow, proclaimed that there was probably nothing wrong with me, otherwise I'd be dead already.
Regardless, he gave me an IV of drugs that were "gang-busters for headaches" as he said but that "wouldn't make you loopy", so that I could make a decision about whether or not I should get the CT scan he was willing to give me, but really didn't want to. Turns out those IV drugs shouldn't have been given to someone in my situation at all; lets just say that a drug with known interactions with breathing and intracranial pressure don't pan out well for asthmatics with headtrauma... But it still helped a lot!
Jon showed up during the IV drip and came home with me when I was ultimately released with hardly a glance after the drip was done.
Luckily, my friend Dev lived nearby and was willing to give us a ride home when I asked, because she's absolutely amazing and such a sweetheart.
I got home, and after well over 24hrs without sleep, Jon and I were finally able to get some rest.
When my family came home, I was able to scare each and every single one of them because no one was expecting me. I even managed to sneak up on my grandpa when Kristie, Hoben and I stopped by the LCBO on our way out of town.
The weekend in Barrie that followed was (nearly) as amazing as I hoped it would be! The mild-concussion and hospital drugs put a few unfortunate kinks in my weekend, but ultimately, I got to see a lot of marvellous friends I've had trouble seeing for the past few years because of my own personal problems despite still living so close, and spent a weekend chilling with them.
I'm even finally more or less caught up with where I wanted to be homework-wise before the whole concussion/ER/medication combo knocked me for a loop.
So we now return to your regularly scheduled programming thanks to the combined efforts of medical personel across 2 provinces and 3 institutions, Hoben, Dev, Kristie, Bree, Matt, Tommy, Hayley, Hindle and, of course, Jon.
Come back tomorrow for a brand new lesson!
After taking a soccer ball and later an oblivious and unintentional fist to the nose within a week, the resulting headache got abruptly and exponentially more intense without reason or warning on Wednesday afternoon. That is generally not a good thing.
So I went to see a doctor here in Montreal (and worried him quite a bit), who sent me to the ER here in Montreal, where an even more concerned triage nurse allowed me to take my 9pm bus on Thursday night in order to get home to Ontario as long as I promised to go to the ER again when I got there.
Upon arriving in Toronto at 3am, a very close friend of mine, Hoben, picked me up from the bus station, drove me to Guelph and even stayed with me in the waiting room of the Guelph ER for a bit. The doctor there saw me after a much longer wait than in Montreal, and despite the headache being so bad that tears had started to flow, proclaimed that there was probably nothing wrong with me, otherwise I'd be dead already.
Regardless, he gave me an IV of drugs that were "gang-busters for headaches" as he said but that "wouldn't make you loopy", so that I could make a decision about whether or not I should get the CT scan he was willing to give me, but really didn't want to. Turns out those IV drugs shouldn't have been given to someone in my situation at all; lets just say that a drug with known interactions with breathing and intracranial pressure don't pan out well for asthmatics with headtrauma... But it still helped a lot!
Jon showed up during the IV drip and came home with me when I was ultimately released with hardly a glance after the drip was done.
Luckily, my friend Dev lived nearby and was willing to give us a ride home when I asked, because she's absolutely amazing and such a sweetheart.
I got home, and after well over 24hrs without sleep, Jon and I were finally able to get some rest.
When my family came home, I was able to scare each and every single one of them because no one was expecting me. I even managed to sneak up on my grandpa when Kristie, Hoben and I stopped by the LCBO on our way out of town.
The weekend in Barrie that followed was (nearly) as amazing as I hoped it would be! The mild-concussion and hospital drugs put a few unfortunate kinks in my weekend, but ultimately, I got to see a lot of marvellous friends I've had trouble seeing for the past few years because of my own personal problems despite still living so close, and spent a weekend chilling with them.
I'm even finally more or less caught up with where I wanted to be homework-wise before the whole concussion/ER/medication combo knocked me for a loop.
So we now return to your regularly scheduled programming thanks to the combined efforts of medical personel across 2 provinces and 3 institutions, Hoben, Dev, Kristie, Bree, Matt, Tommy, Hayley, Hindle and, of course, Jon.
Come back tomorrow for a brand new lesson!
Monday, November 21, 2011
Day 51: Legend of Korra? Quorra of Tron? Nope, Quora
As much as I love "Avatar: The Last Airbender" and enjoyed "Tron", neither of those are the Korra/Quorra that I learned about today.
Today, I learned about Quora. It's a very knowledge management oriented site, aiming to get information out of people's heads and onto the internet where it can be useful to others.
Lesson 49: The Yahoo Answers format is not by necessity bad.
It's not that I have a big problem with Yahoo Answers, it's just that there's so much trolling, and in some cases downright abuse, that it's not always worth sifting through to find answers, plus the ultra hierarchical subject structure can sometimes make it difficult to find what you're looking for.
Quora uses a folksonomic system which allows for more discrete subjects and categories and easier natural searching and browsing. By folksonomic (pesky librarian vocabulary), I mean user-edited tagging, though Quora's is done in a more structured way than say, tagging in Delicious.
Quora is basically a better, smarter Yahoo Answers. It's apparently very popular in Silicon Valley, and it is frequented by a lot of big names across many disciplines. Heck, J.J. Abrams was on answering questions in the moviemaking category while I was on this afternoon!
There seems to be more moderation as well. Name-calling is not tolerated, and most of the responses are well reasoned, self-contained, and polite. It's more discourse than argument even in the touchier subject areas.
There is a lot of really interesting and accessible write-ups about very specific, but common, scientific questions. I've been particularly enjoying the "cultural faux pas" section, it's quite interesting.
Of course when I say that it's a better, smarter Yahoo answers, I suppose that should be modified with a "for now". Who knows how it might be destroyed when more people start trying to answer outside of their expertise and abusing the anonymous function. I've already seen one or two rather obnoxious homophobic and fatphobic responses, but nowhere near the levels of other forums, and mostly only in less fact, more opinion driven topics (ie/Etiquette).
I really hope it stays awesome...
Today, I learned about Quora. It's a very knowledge management oriented site, aiming to get information out of people's heads and onto the internet where it can be useful to others.
Lesson 49: The Yahoo Answers format is not by necessity bad.
It's not that I have a big problem with Yahoo Answers, it's just that there's so much trolling, and in some cases downright abuse, that it's not always worth sifting through to find answers, plus the ultra hierarchical subject structure can sometimes make it difficult to find what you're looking for.
Quora uses a folksonomic system which allows for more discrete subjects and categories and easier natural searching and browsing. By folksonomic (pesky librarian vocabulary), I mean user-edited tagging, though Quora's is done in a more structured way than say, tagging in Delicious.
Quora is basically a better, smarter Yahoo Answers. It's apparently very popular in Silicon Valley, and it is frequented by a lot of big names across many disciplines. Heck, J.J. Abrams was on answering questions in the moviemaking category while I was on this afternoon!
There seems to be more moderation as well. Name-calling is not tolerated, and most of the responses are well reasoned, self-contained, and polite. It's more discourse than argument even in the touchier subject areas.
There is a lot of really interesting and accessible write-ups about very specific, but common, scientific questions. I've been particularly enjoying the "cultural faux pas" section, it's quite interesting.
Of course when I say that it's a better, smarter Yahoo answers, I suppose that should be modified with a "for now". Who knows how it might be destroyed when more people start trying to answer outside of their expertise and abusing the anonymous function. I've already seen one or two rather obnoxious homophobic and fatphobic responses, but nowhere near the levels of other forums, and mostly only in less fact, more opinion driven topics (ie/Etiquette).
I really hope it stays awesome...
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Day 39: Stressed? Maybe?
I've had a revelation a long time coming. Kind of a slow boil, and now that I really understand it, I'm surprised it took me so long to fully comprehend.
Lesson 39: Being busy is not the same as being stressed.
In undergrad, looking back, I wasn't particularly busy. In fact, I was less and less busy the closer to the end I got. But I was perpetually stressed. My living arrangements, food quality, work or lack thereof and resulting money difficulty, school, lack of exercise, the very real worry that York would pull something on me and I wouldn't graduate, constantly being on edge for the next thing to go wrong, having no social life to speak of and being too far from any possibility of activities (6-10$ and an hour by transit as a minimum), it all meant that I was just a big, painful ball of stress. I felt like if I took anything extra on, the stress would kill me.
Compare that with now. I'm living within walking distance of nearly everything I want to do, in a good, un-infested apartment that I'm paying reasonable rent for. I'm eating in an appropriate and satisfying manner. I have work, it's not much, but it's something. School is intense, but things going wrong now feels like a rarity instead of an inevitability, and I feel like I'm working with a much more supportive administration. I play Quidditch, which takes up a lot of time, but it's physical and provides a fantastic social aspect. I really feel connected to, and involved with my classmates; I feel included. I get invited to events, and I actually feel like I can attend them. Even on a whim. Even as a split-second decision. And now, I'm even writing NaNoWriMo (there's an excerpt if you follow that link).
I am so very busy! I don't know that I could take on anything extra right now. But I don't feel stressed. I feel stressed only when things go wrong, like my database of doom debacle.
Stress is a sign that things are going wrong, I think, at least for me. Stress and anxiety go hand in hand and they feed on one another and spiral you down.
But I'm not actually stressed. I'm busy.
And busy makes me happy.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Something I couldn't find anywhere to fit in, here's a quote from my Information and Society class where we were discussing Information and Communication Technologies:
"Cloud computing sounds lovely, doesn't it? Care Bears live on clouds!" - Carolyn Hank
Lesson 39: Being busy is not the same as being stressed.
In undergrad, looking back, I wasn't particularly busy. In fact, I was less and less busy the closer to the end I got. But I was perpetually stressed. My living arrangements, food quality, work or lack thereof and resulting money difficulty, school, lack of exercise, the very real worry that York would pull something on me and I wouldn't graduate, constantly being on edge for the next thing to go wrong, having no social life to speak of and being too far from any possibility of activities (6-10$ and an hour by transit as a minimum), it all meant that I was just a big, painful ball of stress. I felt like if I took anything extra on, the stress would kill me.
Compare that with now. I'm living within walking distance of nearly everything I want to do, in a good, un-infested apartment that I'm paying reasonable rent for. I'm eating in an appropriate and satisfying manner. I have work, it's not much, but it's something. School is intense, but things going wrong now feels like a rarity instead of an inevitability, and I feel like I'm working with a much more supportive administration. I play Quidditch, which takes up a lot of time, but it's physical and provides a fantastic social aspect. I really feel connected to, and involved with my classmates; I feel included. I get invited to events, and I actually feel like I can attend them. Even on a whim. Even as a split-second decision. And now, I'm even writing NaNoWriMo (there's an excerpt if you follow that link).
I am so very busy! I don't know that I could take on anything extra right now. But I don't feel stressed. I feel stressed only when things go wrong, like my database of doom debacle.
Stress is a sign that things are going wrong, I think, at least for me. Stress and anxiety go hand in hand and they feed on one another and spiral you down.
But I'm not actually stressed. I'm busy.
And busy makes me happy.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Something I couldn't find anywhere to fit in, here's a quote from my Information and Society class where we were discussing Information and Communication Technologies:
"Cloud computing sounds lovely, doesn't it? Care Bears live on clouds!" - Carolyn Hank
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