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Month: May 2007

Eight Random Things

Published by Iris on Monday, May 28th, 2007

There goes Josh, making me think of random things… Some day I will repay him. Some day…

  • I am unable to make this into an ordered list. Blogger hates order? Perhaps. More appropriately, though, I’ve simply never taken the time to explain the ordering of lists to Blogger’s CSS. This must change. Eventually.
  • I’m working today, even though it’s Memorial Day. I can only think with irony of the email our college president sent out calling on us all to “take a moment” to remember blah, blah, blah… Well, I’d rather take a day. And yet I giggle as I anthropomorphize my institution and watch it ask, “Days that are holi? I do not understand. What are these days you call ‘holi’? And why won’t my mail be delivered?”
  • I love to anthropomorphize things, especially pets. My pets speak to me, and I speak back. Trees and tables and weather also have personalities. It’s just the way things are.
  • On Friday my sister gave her last concert prior to her graduation. I’ve been going to amazing choir performances by elite student choirs for just about 8 years because of her, and I’ll miss this activity. She’s ended up in some truly fantastic concerts, and I’m not just saying that because I think she’s amazing.
  • My online life has become more important to me than I ever considered possible (or healthy) before I started this whole adventure. I’ve met the most amazing people and learned the most amazing things. I’ve even gone on to meet some of you in a non-virtual sense, and that’s priceless.
  • I drink a lot of tea.
  • Students on my campus are still here because classes go to the end of this week and finals are next week. Why is that? Because we run on the quarter system. Stupid quarter system.
  • I come from a family of four siblings, and each of my parents come from very similarly sized families (4 and 5 siblings, each of which has a family of 2-4 children). And all of our layers of family are very close (though not in a spacial sense) So unlike Steve, I find gatherings of 40-odd related people to be quite normal, if a little overwhelming.

And that’s 8 (I think, though counting bullets is not easy). And no, I don’t do the tagging thing, at least not formally. I tag YOU.

And now back to catching up from being gone for 3 and a half days…

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Some Days I Actually Feel Like a Librarian… Some Days I Don’t

Published by Iris on Thursday, May 24th, 2007

I often feel like I stumble through my job by pretending I know what I’m doing. There’s always the lurking fear that if people really knew how much guessing and bluffing I do, they’d never set foot in a library again.

Well, today has been both good and bad. At first I thought it would go down in the annals of my career as the day when all those strategies I was taught in library school, and which I always wish would work every time (but which almost always never really seem to pan out), actually worked! Here’s what happened. We have a new professor coming in the fall who teaches Quebecoise literature (focusing on the postcolonial yummy-ness of that whole colonizer-turned-colonized dynamic that happened in Quebec). Well, the library just isn’t outfitted to serve this type of curriculum yet because our books are bought by our faculty to support the classes they teach. And this whole area has never been taught before. Ergo: no collection to support such an area exists just yet. Not only that, but she wanted a particular edition of a particular French language book because she wanted her students to read the preface of that edition, but she didn’t know which edition it was. After a bunch of messing around in catalogs, I finally interlibrary loaned a bibliography of this author’s works and there it was! The editions of the book were all laid out in one place with descriptions of what changed in each (including prefaces). So, dusting off my 10-year-old French, I deciphered the descriptions and found the appropriate edition. Now I’ve sent the request off to acquisitions and was feeling very, very librarian-ish. Was.

In the midst of emailing this professor to confirm that this was, indeed, the correct edition (and that my tortured memories of French hadn’t betrayed my efforts), a student came up to the desk wanting a 1920s translation of an early Einstein paper. Of all places, after searching in all the “correct” places, Google turned up a footnote explaining where this seminal translation can be found, and Wikipedia turned up a PDF copy of it. So now where do I hand in my library school diploma for shredding?

I guess in the spirit cosmic balance it all evens out. Librarian-ish tenacity and the sussing out of appropriate pointing aids are great sometimes; Google and Wikipedia are great other times. So I guess what makes me a librarian is the fact that I try both places? Who knows.

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Want Walt?

Published by Iris on Monday, May 21st, 2007

For all of you who’ve thought at one time or another, “Hmmm, I wish I had a Walt working here,” now’s your chance. He’s officially on the job-hunt, and I sure wish I could hire him. He’s a thoughtful writer and an engaged thinker, and he’s been a good and supportive friend to me ever since I got into this online life of mine. My own wishes and desires are thwarted, though, by my lack of hiring power (being a fairly low-level grunt here), so I offer the best that I can do: a blog post.

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Beating Rocks Together: Print Styles for Blogger

Published by Iris on Friday, May 18th, 2007

Long story short (ish)…

Walt liked a blog post but reminded me that I’ve never been able to figure out how to make blogger cough up a good style for printing posts.

I whined that I don’t know how to fix it.

Dorothea and Steve worked HARD to help me fix it.

Steve was the first to come up with an absolutely fantasta-brilliant solution, to which I added a little bit of nothingness to just so I could pretend to have participated in this effort, and which I now offer up to the blogger world. (Hint, if what I write makes no sense, check out my source code. It’s all there … Oh, and what I’m writing is not in “real” tech-speak, because I don’t speak that language very well. Also, Blogger “cleans up” tags in the body of posts and makes them invisible, so I sometimes have to describe tags rather than type them. Sorry. Blame Blogger.)

First, wrap all of your current style like this:

@media screen {[all styles go here]}

The opening curly bracket goes just above /* Defaults and the closing curly bracket goes just above ]]> and the closing b:skin tag, which I can’t type here because blogger WILL NOT leave it in the text.

Then, between your new closing curly bracket and the mysterious closing b:skin tag, put your print style, which looks like this (except that you bracket the style lines with “<" and ">” like regular HTML, which if I do here blogger “cleans up,” so I’ve left off the <> brackets):

[opening bracket here]style media="'print'" type="'text/css'"[closing bracket here]

body {
background: white;
font-size: 12pt;
font-family:Palatino,'Times New Roman',times,serif;
}
#sidebar {display:none;}
#bottom {display: none}
#footer {display: none}
#blog-pager-newer-link {display: none}
#blog-pager-older-link {display: none}
#blog-pager {display: none}
.feed-links {display: none}
.profile-datablock {display: none}
.profile-textblock {display: none}
.profile-data {display: none; }
.profile-img {display: none; }
.comment-footer {display: none; }
.description {display: none; }
.post-footer {display: none; }

[opening bracket here]/style[closing bracket here]

After this comes that mysterious b:skin tag, and then the closing header tag. And now things should print beautifully. Happy printing.

p.s. Wondering why I talk about beating rocks? Wonder no longer.

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