Day 53: Old man yells at cloud

Or more accurately, young woman yells at internet.

Same difference.

My internet has been generally uncooperative all day. In fact, it has been for a couple weeks, it's just gotten worse. I'm not sure if this is a sign that my computer is dying, or that the internet quality in my area is just that bad. Could just be both.

In any case, as a result, I probably won't be able to publish this until tomorrow. But them's the waters.

Today's lesson is actually entirely unrelated to my rage against the (interconnected) machine(s).

Lesson 51: Google keeps a fully accessible archive of all its past Google Doodles, including the interactive ones, so you can go revisit, and play with, the best of the best in perpetuity. Including the PacMan one, and one of my all-time faves.

And this is totally MLIS related! First of all, I found this while doing my Dialogoogle project for Information System Design while googling halfheartedly for Google. Which kind of makes me wonder if googling Google on Google is like dividing by zero... But also, archives! Even fun, seemingly frivolous things need archiving! Particularly when they're as gorgeous as a lot of Google Doodles have been.

In fact, Google Doodles are so pretty, the Google store will even sell you some of them on t-shirts.

You know, even despite this Dialogoogle project, which is designed to make us hate Google, I still love it.

Can't take away my Google love!

Another fun fact: Google actually works via Pigeon. But that doesn't mean displaying a picture of "parrots posing seductively in resplendent plumage" will have an effect on your site's ranking!

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.

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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

Day 31: Stuff just got real.

Today's lesson is a little more intense than the usual. But today we were learning about the history of libraries, archives, literacy and publishing, so that's a pretty hefty topic to cover.

The Chinese invented movable type. This much I already knew. 

They had it made of clay, wood and finally metal before Gutenberg was even a glint in anyone's eye. But a very eurocentric lecture about library and archive history made me wonder about this original iteration of movable type. 

While it is undeniable that while the Chinese did it first, it didn't explicitly create the massive waves that affected the very structure of the society we are currently living in the way Gutenberg's press did. 

But why didn't it? What social effects did it have? 

So that's what I started looking into... It's hard to find reference to the Chinese invention, and subsequent Korean attempts, beyond "Gutenberg did it, but the Chinese did it first". But my extensive research (by which I of course mean, Googling till I got what I was looking for) gave me my answer.

Lesson 31: The Chinese invention of the printing press did not have the same impact as Gutenberg's printing press, and is therefore rarely mentioned and often overlooked, because the Confucians (aka, the group in charge of China at the time) actively prohibited the commercialization of printing and the invention was restricted to governmental use. 

So while the Chinese (and Koreans using Chinese characters) had been using movable type for centuries before Gutenberg, the citizenry at large had never encountered, used or benefited from it, so its impact was limited to the scholarly. For instance, we are grateful to it today, because it saved, recreated and revived a lot of pre-3rd century (A.D.) Confucian learning.... which likely had a profound, but subtle, influence on the Enlightenment, rise of humanist thought and by extension the society we are currently living in. But it didn't seem to create any grandiose, "first great ideological revolution" like Gutenberg's press allowed in Europe. It created no wave of skyrocketing literacy rates, or increase in public education,  or emergence of the middle class the way Gutenberg's press paved the way for.

Well, and also: racism, colonialism and eurocentrism. But despite those things, we still attribute the invention of gunpowder to the Chinese, so it was obviously something extra keeping it quiet when it came to the printing press.

Day 17: What even just happened...

Very nearly got to do a project about the history of organized crime in Canada, but turns out, that's not a viable topic. Too bad.

Anyways, today's lesson is an unfortunate truth about scheduling at McGill.
 
Lesson 17: All classes are scheduled to start at 35 minutes past the hour and end at 25 minutes past the hour. Unfortunately, most professors have decided this means that they can start their classes at half past with no issue. I'm sorry, but that's an issue to me. Class is scheduled for 8:35, I will probably show up at 8:33. I am not late. Stop making it so that I seem to be. I do not appreciate it.

Sad Panda.

Day 12: Chickens Shouldn't Fit in Potholes

My first experience of ultra intense Wednesday has been completed. Information System Design followed by a lab for the same class, followed by Information and Society with the irrepressible professor back from Greece with candies in tow.

So exhausted by the end, but all in all it was fun!

Lesson 14: Primary and Secondary sources aren't as black and white as I had always thought. A scanned copy of a journal actually doesn't qualify as the same as having the journal in hand. Basically, I need to go back and redo every bibliography I've done ever made...

Yikes.

[and yes that title is serious: the mayor of Dorval was paying people 5$ if they found a pothole they could fit a chicken in]