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Category: Random Thoughts

Heaven help me

Published by Iris on Thursday, July 27th, 2006

I’m sitting at the gate for my flight to Boston (there’s a whole story in how I got here, but more on that later). And I’m terrified to find out who my seat neighbor is going to be.

Here’s the thing. There’s a girl here who has no mental sensors AT ALL. She’s talking to a poor guy she’s cornered, and she won’t shut up. She’s told the room at large her full name (middle name included), her birth date (she’s turning 29 next month, just so you know), where she lives, her favorite color, her roommates’ names, her parents’ names, … well, you get the idea. She’s also never been to Disney Land (that was apropos of nothing, by the way, because that’s not where she’s going today). Oh, and here’s a tidbit you didn’t need to know. Her father teases her by telling her she’s not his child. “But I know better,” she says, “It takes two to make a baby.” Oookayyyy…

Now she’s wondering if it rains on planes, since they’re so high up off the ground. She’s already chastised her friend for taking a picture of her, saying, “How much is it going to cost me to develop those pictures!?!”

[Update: She ended up sitting a glorious 21 rows away from me! Believe me, I’m grateful.]

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It Was Only a Small Project…

Published by Iris on Thursday, July 20th, 2006

The other librarians and I are going to experiment with online calendars next year. We’re moving away (possibly) from paper sign-up sheets for individual appointments with students, and instead we’re each going to use a Google calendar to display our availability to everyone on campus. We’ve decided that it’s probably best to embed the calendar in an HTML page, to keep our personal email addresses less visible, and to provide some instructions on how to request an appointment. So today I thought I’d through up an HTML page and see how this embedded calendar thing looked…

Now, to most people, this would be a project that might fill that down-time between your last big project and lunch. You know them, those few minutes after everything else is ready for you to go to lunch, but before it’s actually time to go. Yeah, that’s how long it should have taken. But then it looked so blah.

I know! I’ll jazz it up with some CSS! Great, only I don’t know CSS, like, at all. I understand that the HTML looks at the CSS when deciding how to look and where to put itself, but that’s about it. So I spent basically the rest of the day teaching myself CSS. I now have a page that has a header, a footer, a left-hand sidebar, and a right-hand sidebar. The middle even re-sizes itself depending on the width of the browser screen. I’m pretty pumped. Still no calendar in there… but that’ll come tomorrow.

Oh, and for any of you wanting to do ANYTHING with HTML or CSS, get yourself the Web Developer Firefox extension. It lets you look at, manipulate, and save HTML and CSS from any page you visit online.

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It Really Did Rain

It Really Did Rain

Published by Iris on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

Stormy Day
Originally uploaded by Pegasus Librarian.

Prior to today, it has rained very little this summer. So far we’ve had about a tenth of an inch 10 days ago, a quarter of an inch a month ago, a third of an inch 6 weeks ago, a third of an inch 2 months ago, and just over a third of an inch 10 weeks ago. Today we’ve had just over half an inch already! Yay!

p.s. This picture was taken at 9:45 in the morning!

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How to Become a History Librarian in Two Hours or Less

Published by Iris on Monday, July 17th, 2006
  • Get yourself one sick history librarian
  • Realize that 48 high school students, here for a week-long intensive course, will be filing through your classroom in two groups of 24 from 1:15 to 4:30
  • Get the assignment and powerpoint from the sick reference librarian
  • divvy up tasks between all the other librarians
  • reassure the sick librarian that it really is okay not to teach when you’re that sick
  • reassure her again (the first one probably won’t take)
  • Figure out why the examples that go with the demonstration are perfect
  • Decide to have the students figure out why the examples that go with the demonstration are perfect (after all, that’s active learning, right?)
  • Eat Lunch (with visiting sister) and get some of that yummy sorbet to sustain you on your walk back to campus in the scorching heat
  • Take Advil (not one, but two… you know you need it)
  • Stand up in front of kids and remember your acting classes (…picture yourself knowing exactly what you’re doing…hold that image…now GO GO GO!!!)
  • Stand up in front of the next group of kids
  • Go home and eat leftovers while watching a movie

Now, if I could just get into the Immersion WebCT site to turn in the paper I didn’t turn in this afternoon… As it is, I just periodically click “refresh” and hope that one of these times the site’ll actually come up. PLEASE!!!!!

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