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Month: September 2007

And So It Has Begun

Published by Iris on Monday, September 10th, 2007

Today classes started. I survived, but I’m completely exhausted. All day long there was noise and bustle. In the morning I was working out the last-minute details for some student worker training I’m co-coordinating, planning library sessions, and answering emails. All afternoon I was sitting at the reference desk. And then in the evening the president of the college hosted his beginning of the year garden party, so I went there to eat shrimp and chat with people.

Now I’m lying on the couch in the gathering dusk soaking up the silence and the stillness. Even getting left-overs for dinner seems like an insurmountable challenge. I can’t bring myself to turn on a lamp, listen to music, or even turn on the TV. Instead, I’ll lie here for a while listening to my cat breathe. Only once I’m able to contemplate dinner, or a lamp, or even scratching my itchy ankle… only then will I let myself think about and prepare for tomorrow.

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Google Calendar Soups Up It’s Calendar Publishing Function

Published by Iris on Monday, September 10th, 2007

A co-worker pointed out this morning that Google Calendar has added some interesting functions to its calendar-publishing functionality. I used to have a choice of making “Month View” or “Agenda View” available to anyone who happens onto my public schedule. At first, these were frustrating views for me. Month View is pretty unworkable unless you only have 2 or 3 things happening in a given day, and unless nobody cares when your events end. So I used Agenda view, and just made sure to write that I was “Available between 2:30 and 4:15,” for example. Well, now I’m allowed to have “Week View,” which is much easier to take in at a glance since it’s got the familiar bubbles of filled-in time.

So when my co-worker pointed out that this was now possible, I jumped on the opportunity to make my schedule even easier to understand quickly. Not only that, but since I’m now allowed to include multiple calendars in my publicly viewed page, I could add in the times when I’m at the desk so that my students would know where to come look for me if they wanted quick help or to negotiate a better meeting time.

But now I’ve realized that my system may not work as wonderfully as I had thought it would. Now my available time shows up looking like an appointment rather than like a space between appointments.

Ok, I thought. Why not just change the whole thing into a “times when I’m busy” calendar rather than a “times when I’m available” calendar. But I’m strangely reluctant to do that. I liked having something analogous to office hours, even if my office hours were intended to be by appointment, weren’t consistent day to day or week to week, and changed minute by minute as I agreed to meetings and was no longer “available.” I also liked the straightforward message: “I am available for you now.” It’s just more welcoming and encouraging than the implied message of a “busy times” calendar, which says in effect, “I’m not scheduled during these times, but that doesn’t mean that they’re inherently good times for me to meet with you.”

Then the practical side of me gets up and laughs heartily at this musing side of me. Does it really matter that much? I know full well that of the students who come see me, only a fraction of them depend on that calendar when making their appointments. It gets used more often by librarians at the reference desk who want to refer a student to me for private consultation, by faculty, and by librarians at other schools who want to set up meetings with me. And all of these groups of people should be able to navigate the system even if it’s not absolutely perfectly designed.

And yet I want to get it right. So I guess I’ll do what I always do: try out various ideas until I either decide it’s right or I decide it’s impossible to make right.

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Feeling My Way

Published by Iris on Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Warning. Extreme navel gazing is about to ensue.

This week has been one of those hard weeks. I’m not prone to annoyance, and I generally face life with an optimism that borders on the pathological. But what with one thing and another my personal bubble of good will and sanguinity weakened and finally burst into a shower of self-pity last night. This is probably my least favorite emotion. Not only is it distinctly on the “not happy” side of the happiness continuum, but it’s also just about as embarrassing and unhelpful as a state of mind can be. It’s the kind of emotion that makes strangers edge away to find somebody else to meet and causes friends to wonder how best to change the subject or, better yet, excuse themselves and go home.

Thankfully, in the rare cases when I plunge into intense self-doubt and questioning, I can rarely sustain it for long. But last night the question was to blog or not to blog, or perhaps to change the kinds of things I blog about. And I think this question bears thinking about even now that I’m not “in the pit of dispair” (as one albino once said, horsely).

I’ve always just been feeling my way here. There’s no plan, just a general sense that I want to explore these topics in public. At one point this blog was mostly a space for me to remember what I’d seen or learned as I finished my first year as a librarian. Then I thought for a while that it should be more “libraryland news”-ish (and I discovered two things pretty quickly: I’m not interested in writing that way, and almost nobody is interested in reading the “news” I write). More recently I’ve been writing a combination of “things I’m thinking about” and “things that are happening to me,” with the balance starting to lean toward the latter in recent months.

And I think it’s this most recent shift that I’m questioning now not only because it’s potentially not as interesting but also because it may make my task of balancing the personal and the professional even more difficult than it would be otherwise. For one thing, if I focus too closely on what happens at work, people at work (by which I mean people on campus, not just in the library) may get nervous, especially now that I have more than 3 or 4 readers. In fact, just about the only editorial criterion I use before publishing a post is one of fairness: is what I’ve written fair to the people I work with and respect. I take this criterion very seriously both because it’s, well, fair and because I really do respect and enjoy working with 99% of the people on my campus. I can honestly say I’d never worked in a place with such a large proportion of wonderful people prior to coming here. The last thing I want is for these people to get nervous.

I’m also on a campus where blogging is not the norm. Its conventions and implications haven’t been explored before. What does it mean to explore topics in public? Who is the audience? What happens when I first say Twitter seems ridiculous and then end up completely addicted, all within a few months and all in public? Is it appropriate to publicly explore work-related issues in the same way that I publicly explore social networking tools? More importantly, how far do you trust somebody who could, if she wanted, publish the goings on at private meetings? How comfortable are we, as a library and as a campus community, with the idea of letting others in on our half-formed ideas? What happens if our half-formed ideas turn out to be wrong? Do we want others to know that we had a moment of weakness? What are the implications of having projects written about as they happen rather than presented in cohesive form at conferences or in articles? Does the library or the campus have the right to ask that material be added to or subtracted from a blog? Weighing the benefit of generally good publicity against the danger of airing dirty laundry, how much should personal blogs be encouraged, allowed, or governed? What does it mean for our campus when bloggers develop ever-widening circles of friends and contacts in libraries all over the world? What does it mean when communication sidesteps the conventional (and perhaps mythological) pathway of employee to supervisor to boss to wider world? I can imagine any of these questions swirling around in the minds of co-workers and higher-ups. In fact, this is just scratching the surface of the possible questions and fears.

Just as I’m always just feeling my way with this whole blog, I’m also just feeling my way through this post. I don’t know where I’m going with this except to say that these questions are real, and they’re important, but they’re not easy.

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Stranded by Single Sign On

Published by Iris on Friday, September 7th, 2007

I’m in the midst of a mini-crisis at the moment. I woke up thinking about it, which is why I’m here, typing away, long before my alarm would normally wake me up. The crisis is, I can’t log in to any of my work accounts. Not my email, the library’s proxy server, an internal library staff blog… nothing.

I noticed this at about 8:00 last night and sent an email to the IT help desk on campus (using my gmail account because, remember, no work email for me). A really helpful IT guy emailed me back saying he’d unlocked my account (note that this is well beyond normal working hours for the poor guy). I tried logging in, but nothing happened. This cycle repeated itself several times between 8 and 10:30-ish, all to no avail.

As far as we can figure it, the problem is Zimbra calendar’s iCal feed. Apparently, the feed needs to authenticate against the LDAP server, or something, and right now any feeds I have from my Zimbra calendar to anything else are trying and trying to authenticate using my old password (I had to change mine on Tuesday). The feeds try and try and fail and fail, and then they lock my account. Unfortunately, even after I killed my iCal feed to Google Calendar*, my account was still locking up. Now I’m sitting here wracking my brains and trying to think if there are any other feeds out there.

If this is the problem, and that’s still a big “if” at the moment, then people on campus are in big trouble. [See update below. It turned out not to be the iCal feed.] In Zimbra, if you want to share a calendar, your iCal feed is prominently displayed among the sharing options. And in the Zimbra training we received, we were all told that this was our iCal feed and that Mac people could continue to use their iCal programs. One of my co-workers even has his feed displayed on his web site for anyone else to import into their iCal-compatible systems. And if feeds have to be killed and regenerated every time we change our passwords (every 3 months), we’re in major, major trouble. Because, you see, nobody is used to the idea of a feed not being shareable, especially when the feed is included in the “share your calendar” dialog box. But the way this seems to be set up, if you share your calendar and then change your password, you’re hosed.

So here I am, frustrated and worried that I’ll have to go through the day with no access to any of my normal work tools, including the network drives that house a bunch of the projects I need to work on. All this on the last day before classes start. I could just about scream … or cry. Instead I’ll sit here, stare at my computer screen, and will my account to unlock itself. That should help.

[Updated to add: As it turns out, it wasn’t the iCal feed after all. What a relief! Instead it was a forgotton copy of Zimbra Desktop. I’d installed Desktop version, never used it, and forgotten about it. But unbeknownst to me it kept merrily syncing itself up with the server using my old password. Thankfully, everything is back to normal now.]

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*I feed my calendar to Google Calendar so that I can see when I’m busy and fill in the spaces where I’m not busy with my “availability calendar,” when then gets fed to my public schedule page. It’s a terrible workaround stemming from Zimbra’s inability to publish to an HTML page. Until everyone on campus has migrated to Zimbra, though, we need a way to publish our availability. And even after everyone is on Zimbra, sometimes it’s easier to just scan a week or two rather than set up an appointment, invite me, see if I’m free, and then click “next day” over and over looking for a time that works well for everyone. Because of this, we’d decided to maintain our published Google Calendars.

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