Category: Grad School

One that satisfies my artistic needs…

Sorry for all the coyness and secrecy, but now that I’ve made the necessary notifications at my current position and all, I am most happy to announce that I have a really cool new job. What’s more, I have a cool new job doing pretty much exactly what I went to library school to do. Better still, I am officially considered university faculty in the aforementioned job, so I get lots of time off and benefits and stuff.

If I can get through the next two months till graduation, I will be very content.

And did I mention that I love my husband for putting up with my middle-aged graduate student ass for so long?

Randomly Wednesday

First time in days I’ve had a chance to do some reading:

  • My neighborhood library branch in Pittsburgh is closing. It’s the oldest Carnegie Library branch in the city and has somehow managed to survive for 111 years,  and it’s a rather amazing space. I’m not happy.
  • Google Street View has finally covered Toronto.
  • On Jewish delis.
  • Anyone for a wedding on the steps of the Capitol?

Today might be my last weekday at home for quite some time. I’m torn between trying to get ahead on schoolwork and sitting on my ass watching movies all day. Of course, there are lots of other things I need to do, so it won’t be a day of pure sloth (or academics, should I choose that route) anyway.

Civil Rights Geography

I’ll post a link to the larger project later, but here’s something I’ve been working on at work this week. Mind you, I’m wrking on a much cooler and more complicated set-up for Groceteria when I get a second here and there. More on that later, too.


View Civil Rights Greensboro Location Map in a larger map

An Urban American Dream

The hubby pretty much blew the response I was writing to this post out of the water so I’ll defer, seeing as how he made all my points better than I could have anyway.

I wish I had the attention span or the energy anymore to write anything more than a paragraph long that isn’t a paper on data formats or metadata standards or a stupid post about people who write checks at the supermarket (OK, so even that wasn’t really more than a paragraph). Sorry. I’m having one of those “nobody reads this stuff anymore so why do I bother since I obviously don’t have much to say lately” moments. It’s probably just because I’m weary from school, or maybe because I haven’t had a  good night’s sleep since Tuesday.

I promise to be less whiny later, once I’ve had a conjugal snuggle. And there’s still that exciting upcoming announcement…

Randomly Monday

This collection of German curiosities from the 1960s and 1970s made for a nice break from homework. Particularly noteworthy: Johnny Cash’s German version of “I Walk the Line” and Sandie Shaw’s groovy cover of “Always Something There To Remind Me”.

Completely unrelated:

  • Ray Bradbury at the cafeteria. If you live in LA, you must start eating at Clifton’s regularly right now, and help keep it open and functioning till I can get there for my next visit. Would this be a good time to mention that I miss LA?
  • Brilliant idea: As I’ve mentioned before (1, 2, 3, 4), those few people who still write checks at the supermarket also tend to the the oblivious sort who wait until after their groceries are bagged and the total is staring at them on the display to even start looking for their checkbooks. Denying them food can only be a positive thing for the rest of humanity.
  • Keep in mind that I really only post about the whole “checks in the supermarket” thing about once every four years, so it’s not quite the obsession it may seem to be. But I am a little surprised at what a running theme it’s turned out to be.
  • Guinness now recognizes that the CN Tower is, in fact, a tower and not a structure. This is good, yes?
  • It just strikes me that I may not want to drive up to Pittsburgh a day early for this weekend’s conjugal visit.

OK. Back to learning all about link resolvers, OpenURL, and ERM. And making sure my CV is corrected and up to date. But more about that later…

All I Ever Wanted

After a very hectic weekend, I’ve just now finished my last paper for the intense summer session class. Even though I have two more days of work and one more class tomorrow night, I am now officially declaring myself on vacation.

Yes, it helps my mood that I actually slept last night for a change.

And yes, vacation will be in Pittsburgh (where I’ll still be doing some work and where my hubby will also be visiting me), but it will also involve as yet undisclosed side trips.

Randomly Wednesday

Random stuff for my first weekday at home in quite a while:

Got to read five chapters before class tonight. Tomorrow’s excitement: PHP maintenance on many sites.

Could my life get any more exciting?

What I’m Doing

Posts have been few and far between lately, which should indicate that I’ve been rather busy over the past two months or so.

So what’s been going on?

05-22-09_1237

Driving, mostly. I’ve been spending a  lot of time in my car, not just going back and forth to Pittsburgh dealing with the new house, but also to Greensboro, where I’ve been working and interning up a storm. I’m putting in one day a week at UNCG, working on a big digitization project to which I’ll introduce you shortly. I’m also working three days a week at a local museum processing an archival collection centered around a major local historical figure. The latter gig is a grant-funded named internship, which makes it more impressive, right? Either way, I’m enjoying it. It’s a good internship — one where I’m actually learning things rather than just occupying space, making coffee, or otherwise providing slave labor.

What scares me, though, is that I’m starting to think nothing of a daily commute that’s thirty miles each way. Unfortunately, Winston-Salem is not the cultural heritage epicenter of the Piedmont Triad. Given that and all the nasty budget cuts about now, my optimism about local job prospects upon graduation is somewhat lacking.

I assume Borders and Barnes & Noble will be going belly-up soon, though. Maybe my education will at least qualify me for a job at one of their liquidation sales.

Cutting the Cord

As of later this week, I will no longer have anything but old-fashioned antennae connected to my TV sets. After a vaguely unpleasant six-month experiment using Time Warner Cable rather than Dish Network, I finally realized that:

  1. There actually is a worse option than Dish. While their customer service may be slightly better, Time Warner’s product is awful. The interface and customization options on their turners suck, their DVRs are absolute garbage (hardware and software) and in the long run, they’re not even any cheaper. Instigating this change was not one of my better moves.
  2. I rarely watch TV anymore, anyway, and that’s only partly due to the factors above. Either way, I don’t watch sixty dollars worth of TV a month, so it’s hard to justify that expense with two houses to pay for and who knows what kind of job prospects upon graduation in December.
  3. Even when I do watch TV, it’s usually local news or Simpsons reruns or DVDs, anyway, none of which require cable or satellite.

I’ll miss TCM. But I’ll read a lot more, which can only be a good thing. So maybe swicthing to cable six months ago was a good thing too, in an odd sort of way.

The land line will probably be the next thing to go.

On a completely unrelated note, UNCG is using a finding aid I wrote and encoded with XML using EAD last semester as a class project. That was kind of a suprprising thing to discover by accident (and yes, they had permission).