Ramblin' with Roger

The power is off, on, off

The fact is that I often write a little bit here and there on my blog. Without any computer, though, that becomes tricky. If I don’t get to your site as usual, I will, I will, if/when the problem’s solved.

Yes, the lousy weather came. I decided to write the events of the last couple days in Twitter-sized bits; don’t know why.

I have stuff for tomorrow, but future postings may be disrupted by lack o’ access.

Th 6pm – Bible study xed by forecast, Indian food @ Shalimar. To corner; next walk so slick, need to grab lamppost to not slide into rd.

Th 8:30pm – short choir rehearsal. Friend Deb gives ride to store-rock salt- & home, inc. sleet. Take out trash. Read, sing to daughter.

F 3am – power out, then on. Wife up to reset clock. 2 min. later – power out, then on. Up c 5:30-computer won’t turn on, tho’ monitor is.

F 5:45am – can’t get school closings: computer, cable-attached TV whacked out. Use 7″ set. Most closed, not ALB, day care, wife’s school.

F 6am- ALB, day care closed, wife’s school not. I’ll stay w/Lydia. 6:20-wife’s school finally closed. She’ll stay with Lydia. To Y, work.

F 7:30am- no rball players @Y. Lock missing frm locker, buy new. Paged – wife calls. No power @ work, no one authorized to close office.

F 8:15am-call lib dir from Y @ his cell -no power means no phones. Call 9:15 on MY cell, it died, then pay phone. ALB lib open @ 11. Home.

F 1:15 pm- Go to ALB lib in midst of windstorm. W/ melting, brought down chunks of ice onto cars & people. Write this.
***
Well, that was going to have to be the post, but I went home, tried to figure out the computer again, and realized I could get it to work if I didn’t run it through the surge protector, but rather plugged it into the power strip directly. Good news – computer operates. Bad news – no less protection, which might fry the computer sometime.

The wife and daughter had taken a nap, but the wife got up. This would have been just the perfect time for us to watch together those programs we planned to watch together (Earl, Office, 30 Rock), except for one little thing: the cable was in this minimalist mode. We had no DVR service and had but five channels to watch : community access, some advertising channel, NASA, TV Guide Channel and, fortunately, the PBS affiliate. so I read and Carol did Christmas stuff.

This also meant I watched the news and JEOPARDY! in a way I’m unaccustomed – in real time, on the 7″ set. Did I mention it was in black & white? I prefer the time shifting.

All in all, a good day.

Could have been worse. Over 200,000 homes in the area were without power in my area, but we weren’t one of them – well, except for an hour around 6 p.m. last night, which seems to have fried (temporarily? permanently?) the DVR.
ROG

The HOW’S OBAMA DOING? Question

I’ve tried, really tried not to talk much about Barack Obama lately. Part of it is a deep abiding irritation that there’s been so much blather about how he hasn’t solved the economic crisis yet. The obvious point, of course, is that HE’S NOT PRESIDENT YET. I find that I’m even more annoyed with the incumbent, who, rather than trying to burnish his image in his last days, seems to have abdicated the position.

Then there’s all the talk, mostly from the left, about the formation of his cabinet. I identify as left of center politically, and I’m fine with his Cabinet choices. I must admit that I practically giggled when he chose Eric Shinseki as his secretary for the VA, a bit of in-your-face towards the Bush administration. Beyond that, nothing shocking. It seems as though some people were expecting Obama to create a Secretary of Peace and pick Dennis Kucinich to run it.

Some are making a big deal out of some recent Republican victories since November 4, suggesting that Obama’s lost his touch. Saxby Chambliss won reelection in the runoff for his U.S. Senate seat in Georgia, but he was leading before. John Fleming kept the seat of retiring Rep. Jim McCrery in Louisiana. Then, Republican newcomer Anh “Joseph” Cao beat a corrupt incumbent, William Jefferson, in a heavily Democratic Louisiana congressional district; he’ll be the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress and the first Republican to hold that seat since 1891, a seat held by both of ABC News’ Cokie Roberts’ parents, BTW. What all this really has to do with Obama is lost on me.

Headline from the Evans-Novak Political Report: Blagojevich arrest causes headache for Obama. well, not so much. The Illinois governor’s foul-mouth tirade after learning he’d get nothing for the Senate seat he wanted to hold hostage most observers found exculpatory re: the Obama camp.

I’ve found the whole “native-born American”/birth certificate issue both quite irritating and fascinating. The birth certificate issue I believe is dead, but the constitutional eligibility issue – his father, as a Kenyan, was a British subject – remains live. It’s discussed ad nauseum here, especially the comments, but I think the law will settle the issue favorbly.

Not incidentally, if Obama WERE declared ineligible to serve, what the heck would happen then? I’ve been looking at the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, but it offers no guidance.

There are those who believe that Obama Should Prosecute Bush Officials Who Designed Torture Policy. I’m good with that.

So, my question is in the title. How do you think Obama’s doing, given the fact that…well, I think I already mentioned that.

There’s no one as Irish as Barack OBama- Corrigan Brothers
or LINK

ROG

Everybody’s Talkin’ ‘Bout the Weather

I’ve been having a difficult time getting my daughter dressed in the morning, and it’s not really her fault.
On Sunday, it was 28-30 (all temperatures Fahrenheit) for most of the morning. But then the temperature went into a free fall. My wife came back from grocery shopping at 4 pm; not only was it down to 23 degrees, but the wind was blowing at 29 mph, gusting to 37 mph. By midnight, the temperature was a balmy 12.
Monday at 6am, the temperature was 6. It only got up to 19 degrees (3 pm), and went back to 13 by midnight.
Yet Tuesday at 6 am, it was 25 degrees and kept going up even after sunset, so it was 49 at midnight.
Wednesday at 6 am it was 53 degrees. It was 55 at 11am but 48 at noon and got colder during the afternoon.
Thursday started out slick and 27 degrees, but ended up with sleet and freezing rain and eventually snow.

Graphic captured at 5:30 p.m., 11 Dec 2008

So when I suggest apparel for the daughter, based on ever changing conditions, it’s tricky. I must convince her of the efficacy of snow pants and boots one day, and a jacket and sneakers a couple days later.

All the data, BTW, came from wunderground.com, a really useful site for historical weather data. Most references on the site are to 51 minutes after the hour, but I rounded to the next hour. Most temperatures are in tenths of a degree, and I rounded up (.5-.9) or down (.1-.4), the way they taught me in grade school.

ROG

Librarian chic

A friend of a friend of mine asked:

Please tell me what life is like for a research librarian. I’m IT support for several different libraries. I work closely with the librarians on a daily basis. Many of them are my age or older and not at all worried about age discrimination as they cross into their 60s and b beyond. The say that this type of problem is just not that important for librarians. I cannot say the same for the IT business. They tell me that it is a very good industry to?look at if I’m thinking about changing careers as I get older. Can you give me some idea of what your level of job satisfaction is? Thank you in advance.

Librarians have been told for years that they will become extinct as more and more information is made available on the Internet. We have not found this to be so. For one thing, someone has to be the gatekeeper as to what is good and what is crap. For another, there will always be specialized databases that you’ll need someone to access and search.

I think there is a librarian ethos of cooperation with each other. I don’t think it’s sexist to say that it may be a more collegial business at least in part because it tends to be a female-dominated business.

When I was in grad school in public administration in 1979-80, it was very competitive, with students actually hiding resources from each other. In library school in 1990-92, students were more helpful to each other.

There can also be a teaching component. We’re trying to get our folks to use blogs, to use Twitter and other newer technologies. This means WE need to know what that stuff and Facebook and other services mean, whether they make sense for us and for our customers, who are business advisors and by extension, the small businesses they serve. Occasionally the learning curve, plus doing what we’re hired to do (reference) is hard to fit in, but we usually manage.

If you have the sense of curiosity necessary to be a good librarian, you’ll do well. If you want something stagnant, probably not so much.
***
“Librarians are the secret masters of the universe. They control the knowledge. Don’t piss them off.”

– Spider Robinson, science fiction author, from The Callahan Touch
ROG

U is for the United States

visited 30 states (60%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or try another Douwe Osinga project

As you can see from the map above, I’ve been to 30 of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia.

The pictures interspersed in this piece are from my trip to my 30th state by some measure, Illinois, specifically Chicago, different shots from my piece on Chicago here. By other measurements, though, I’d already been there, since I’d been through Chicago’s O’Hare Airport 20 years ago. In any case, the descriptions below do not include airline layovers, and there now no states for which being at the airport is the only connection.

I started thinking: what were the circumstances of the first trip to each state I visited?

Born: New York

Day trip to adjacent state: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont.
When I was growing up, my friend Carol’s family had a cottage south of Binghamton, just inside the PA border.

State visited en route to another place: Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, West Virginia.
I feel guilty actually counting Delaware, since it was on a trip to DC. But I did eat there; the rest of them I’ve actually slept in.

Vacation: Georgia, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island
Is visiting your family actually a “vacation”?

Work-related, FantaCo: California, Wisconsin
California was a twofer. FantaCo flew me out to San Diego in 1987 for the Comic Con and I stayed with my sister, who had moved there a year or two earlier.

Work-related, SBDC: Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah
In fact the ONLY time (or in the case of FL, times) I’ve been to those states.

Finally, in 1969 or 1970, a bunch of us from high school traveled to Tennessee to help the folks in a very poor rural county. At some point, we were out wandering around without our adult supervision when we came to a sign: Now entering Mississippi. We walked about a half mile before we thought better of the idea of a bunch of northern high school kids of mixed races wandering around in rural Mississippi and returned back to the Tennessee farm we were visiting.

Pictures (C) 2008, Mary Hoffman. Used by permission.
ROG