Year: 2013

Minor Reno

Dear Internet,
As you do, I was meandering around the web recently and came across a site that had exquisite minimalist detailing for its presentation. I was so struck by how much I liked the design, I decided to dump my current design and start somewhat fresh to mimic what I had seen. Within a few hours, I found a similiar theme and the glory of it is how little I’ve had to hack it. It literally was plug and play. But if some things are broken, please let me know.
The struggle with me is I want the site to be primarily about my content and not about flash whiz bang design BUT I also want people who come here to easily find my contact info, and my other projects without having to hunt/peck too much. So a menu or widgets have to be in order in the theme, at least one or preferably both and they cannot be obnoxious in placement. But it seems theme designers are all or nothing – you can have ALL THE WIDGETS or ALL THE MENUS or you can have nothing. It’s annoying. This is why I warmed up to the current theme so quickly when I found it that it provided both in easy to find ways but did not over power the content.
Speaking of contact, I found out a week or two ago the contact form has been broken, and more than likely it’s been broken since the move over to the new provider. TheHusband is aware and we’re looking into it. If you need to reach me, you can find me via various social media outlets or you know, email me. (Interestingly, while I’ve always had my email address and other forms of contact prominent on the site for years, I received more notices from people via the form. Go figure.)
For those of you who are curious about the huge influx of The Lisa Chronicles entries showing up in the CCCs, I’ve been working steadily through the back log to get the content into site, but I seem to be stuck in 2003 or 2011.  It’s the luck of the draw of the backup.
Meandering through 2003 has been smile worthy as well as cringe worthy. There are one or two things I wish I had done differently, made a broader leap into the unknown but I console myself knowing unspoken agreements exist now and that it is understood it was always wanted but timing was always broken.
Love is everything.
x0x0,
Lisa

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: June 1, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

Cunning Tales from a Systems Librarian

The Lisa Chronicles

Listening

  • Eurovision soundtrack
    Eurovision is everything American Idol wants to be, but amped up 100 watts and on speed. Nearly 40 countries from around the European block (and then some) compete in a song off where each country submits its own entry to the contest. Over the course of three nights, two semi-finals and the grand finale, all of Europe votes for their favorite entry. The songs are often ridiculous, over the top, and borderline absurd. But that is what makes it so goddamned much fun. We caught Eurovision for the first time in the spring of 2010 when TheHusband and I were on our honeymoon and were able to watch it live. We were entranced. Every year we track down ways to watch, most often on delay. We are seriously considering planning our 2014 vacation around getting to a country to see it live (and by live, we mean live telecast).  Eurovision has kindly put the videos of all the contestants up on YouTube for your enjoyment.

Reading

Finished

Watching

  • Elementary
    Much to my chagrin, I found I rather enjoyed Elementary. The gender bending of Lucy Liu’s Watson and Johnny Lee Miller as Sherlock is fantastic, even more specifically Miller’s Sherlock is a mixture of sexualization of the Robert Downey Jr. interpretation and the staid, uptight Benedict Cumberbatch version. The fact that Miller is tattooed and a bit punk rock also doesn’t hurt. The final twist at the end was a twist I certainly didn’t see coming, and it was scarily clever. I dismissed the show based on the earlier trailers and I’m glad I owned up and started watching. I’m curious now how the second season will most definitely play out.

Weekly watching: Rectify, Borgia, DaVinci’s Demons, Mad Men, Nurse Jackie, The Borgias, Veep, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, The Vampire Diaries.

Links

What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in:

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: May 25, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Watching

Weekly watching: Rectify, Borgia, DaVinci’s Demons, Mad Men, Nurse Jackie, The Borgias, Veep, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, The Vampire Diaries, Elementary.
What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2003

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: May 18, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Watching

Weekly watching: Rectify, Borgia, DaVinci’s Demons, Mad Men, Nurse Jackie, The Borgias, Veep, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones,  The Vampire Diaries, Elementary, The Americans.

Links

What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in:

 

Conference Summary: Punk Rock Librarianship at ACRL

In April, I drove down with a colleague to Indianapolis for ACRL, the biennial national academic librarian conference. While not as large as ALA, it was definitely as overwhelming.  Since this was my first ACRL, I put together my schedule for the conference online to keep me in check and because the official mobile app was terrible.
At conferences like this, I do a lot of my best learning, sharing, and connecting while networking in social and impromptu situations over sitting in conference rooms listening to a presenter drone on.  Because there is so much over simulation, I’m going to wrap-up a few key pieces for me.

Session: Planning Programs for Bridging Cultures: Muslim Journeys Bookshelf

GRCC Library is a proud recipient of the MJB grant and by the time the conference was approaching, we already had one event planned, Muslim Journeys Poetry Night, which turned out to be a huge success. The MJB round table was the chance to connect with other institutions who were also awarded the grant and find out what they were doing for MJB, how they are doing it, how they were marketing/promoting it, as well as outreach, and everything else in between.  I got a lot out of this round table, and also a  lot of great resources to use for future planning of events for the rest of the academic career.

Keynote: Henry Rollins

Henry Rollins is a punk rock icon, writer, publisher, traveler, musician, actor, and activist. And that does not even cover half of his interests. Rollins was selected as one of the primary keynotes for ACRL 2013, and he is the main reason I decided to attend. Henry’s passion for protection, curation, and preserving information is contagious. He spent his much of his keynote regaling the audience with stories of his own preservation works, starting when he was younger by collecting flyers and promotions for bands he knew, saw, or played in and his love for and about archives and librarianship. Rollins’ is immensely quotable, but one of his most accurate statements in this keynote is, “Life is short. Show up and do stuff.”

Session: THATCamp ACRL

The Humanities and Technology (THATCamp) is an all day (sometimes multiple days) unconference in which the sessions are collaborative, participatory, and most importantly, small. Having attended other unconferences in the past, this type of learning and sharing is definitely on par with my literacy style over say a structured lecture or something else along those lines. Since everyone in the unconference is participating, almost everyone involved is passionate about the topic, which makes sharing of ideas much more fun. The informality of the conference allows for flexibility and spontaneity that one normally wouldn’t find at a regular conference session, which also helps stimulate the projects and allows for growth that wouldn’t necessarily come.
I participated in the MOOC sessions, which was a small (less than a dozen people) group. The idea was to create an information literacy MOOC that would or could be dropped into instructors sessions and could be completely modular. So instead of creating a MOOC that is geared for say one class or say one college, this would be a general enough MOOC that could be dropped in a community college in Vermont or a big state college in California. While we were not able to complete the MOOC by the end of the day, there was a lot of interest to continue the work long after ACRL was finished.
Below is links to tweets, Google docs, and other materials for the MOOC as well as other links of interest for ACRL.
Interesting links of note about ACRL 2013

  • Twitter search #ACRL2013
  • THATCamp ACRL 2013
  • ACRL 2013: a first timer’s review in five words
  • Crowdsourcing an information literacy MOOC: a twitter story
  • Librarians Are Punks Too
  • Storify: Henry Rollins Keynote
  • Storify: Henry Rollins Keynote
  • Open Educational Resources
  • #ilmooc
  • GoogleDoc: ACRL THATCamp MOOC

Conference Summary: MLA Applied Technologies & Trends Workshop

On Friday, May 10, I had the pleasure of presenting at MLA Applied Technologies & Trends Workshop, If you caught my show before, at Library Tech Conference, you may notice some similarities. The presentation I gave at MLA is updated with a lot more content  and recent revisions as well as I even have a checklist put together that I PDFed for people to use that I promised to have for people back in March.
Since I was one of the last persons to present, below are my notes on the other presentations I attended along with links as appropriate.

Keynote: Good For Whom? 

By Matthew Reidsma / Grand Valley State University
Why are decisions made for design not carried over to digital tools? Meaning, why do we apply strict questions to physical items but not to digital ones.

  • Functional: How does it function?
  • Behavioral: How do behaviors change?
  • How to do it?
    • This is where most people stop.
    • These are internal questions, that we ask ourselves on everything.
  • “The library world has been fa too gullible, far too willing to regard any technical advance as a service advance.”  – Jonathan D. Lauer & Steve McKinzie
  • Human: How does this affect human experience?
    • Need to think more about the person who comes into our library, less about what we’re doing about them.
    • How do people FEEL?
      • How you treat people is more apt than what you did or will do. For example, if you treat a customer nicely, they will tell maybe 1 or 2 people. If you treat them badly, they will tell, on the average, nine people about their experience.
  • “User experience isn’t about expert intuition, it’s about expert listening.” – Whitney Hess
  • External questions: How to find how these technologies  are going to affect not just people, but work flows, and technologies themselves.
    • Adding the human element
  • A way forward: Ditching the label maker
    • Prioritize users over process
    • We could be reactionary (train industry of people to undo the work of crappy vendors) or say to the vendors, “Makes this easy to use.”  Demand it to be easy to use.
  • Prioritize users over processes

Resources/sites mentioned

Session: Cloud & Mobile Computing 4 Your LIbrary Resources & Services

By Michael Samson / Wayne State University

  • All the Google products, all the time
  • Chromebox / Chromebook instead of using vendor specific hardware
  • Hardware: Android (Nexus 4, 7, 10)
  • Tools / apps / gadgets
    • Creating custom search engine for faculty for their interests
    • Ability to share content via Google drive (presentations, documents)
    • Cloud is the new mainframe
  • Creating an entire workflow of tools in the Google cloud

Session: Sharing Technology Skills with Patrons and Colleagues

By Scott Skowronek / Lansing Community College

  • Uneven distribution of technology skills across staff and faculty
  • Creation of Tech Guides
    • 4 student staff per semester
    • Empowered to seek out and assist
    • Customer service focused
    • Roving support
    • Employee traits & Responsibilities
      • Keep the interactions time short (15 minutes) and then escalate
      • Know the GRCC core systems
      • Record each interaction (to identify peak times and keeps statics)
    • Training
      • Identify the “Big 3” technical problems and train the guides on these first. Example:
        • Blackboard problems
        • Forgotten passwords
        • Attaching files to emails
      • Find the technology pain points
        • Ex: Printer jams
      • Work with staff strengths
      • Collaborative training
        • Using iPads with Google docs to  train and track problems, seamless synching and updating
      • Encourage guides to Google for problems
    • Logistics
      • One tech guide on shift at a time
      • 3 hour shifts
      • Tech guide iPad
      • Peak hours
    • Pitfalls
      • Morale issues
      • Patron problems and problem patrons
      • Shift switching and absences
      • Staff technology ability
  • TechSnippets
    • Presentations that contain 10-15 minutes of content, open to faculty/staff
    • Maybe schedule 15 minutes  for discussion after
    • Schedule midday – more people on campus, this is when departments break for lunch, etc
    • Discuss single technology or a cluster of similar
      • Dropbox (Google Drive, iCloud)
    • Discuss singular concepts
    • Feed them!
      • Get a $100 convention oven, make cookies!
      • Use cookies to lure them into your lair
    • Marketing
      • Multiple channels
      • Multiple reminders
      • LibCal for sign-up and contact
      • Target a specific audience
  • Resources for ideas for Tech Snippets

Session: What to put on that new TV in the lobby

By David Hytien & Britain Woodman / University of Michigan

  • Content
    • Creative Commons content
      • Youtube. Vimeo, etc
      • From NASA, NOOA, White House, Internet Archive, Flickr
    • Content from various places like the above, plus student content, staff content, and public content available on campus, found content
    • RSS feeds
  • Logo
    • Recommend size is 1080×1920
    • Transparent
    • Should be png or gif as they are lossless
  • Videos
    • Create in iMovie, drop movies and logo just created
  • Resources

 
 

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: May 11, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

Cunning Tales from a Systems Librarian

Projects

  • things to do in leelanau county when you’re dead

The Lisa Chronicles

Reading

twwdal
The Woman Who Died A Lot: A Thursday Next Novel  (#7) (Amazon | Local Library | GoodReads)
By Jasper Fforde
I’ve been purposefully making time to read every day, even for 5 minutes, so that I can get back in the habit again. I know depression and other factors have been a huge influence on my attitudes towards things, so it’s even more important I make and keep habits to keep myself inline.
I started this title months ago, and in the last week have made great strides (a hundred pages!) in getting it finished. But I am finding that depression or not, this title seems to have less of the pizazz that was so prominent in the previous novels in the series. The plot seems to center around someone is trying to kill the real Thursday, and others near her, and replace her with day clones. We know it’s probably Goliath (so we’re lead to believe…), but what is the real reason?
Thursday is also named Chief Librarian of Swindon, and one thing I’ll give Fforde many hat tips for is how he captures the essence of librarianship without making Thursday come off as being cartoonish or stereotyped.

Watching

  • Rectify
    Sundance is now throwing its hat into the ring by starting to produce original series content. Produced by the same people who give us Breaking Bad, Rectify follows the story of Daniel Holden, a man who may have been unjustly accused of rape and murder of his girlfriend at the age of 18. 19 years later, he’s freed from prison based on new DNA evidence that shows his potential innocence. TheHusband and I found out about the show after the first episodes ran so we ended up mainlining them in toot suite order. Verdict? Show borders on excellence, and this opinion by me surprises myself because slowness in television land has never been something that caught my eye. One critic said it makes Mad Men look like a pulp action thriller in comparison, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Rectify is deep character study of not just Daniel, but his family, friends, and others around him. There is some moments of implausibility  where it seems the writers are trying too damn hard to showcase the difference between 1994 and 2013, but those moments are few and far between. Watching Daniel struggle not only with coming to terms with the fact he never really grew up (he’s a man’s body but an 18 year olds brain) but also the intersection of past versus present, which is more compelling over whether or not Daniel is the killer.
  • Justified
    Will Ava go to jail? Will Raylan and Winona get back together before the baby is born? Is Raylan going bad, or has he always been bad? Will Boyd save his woman and the world? WHY DO I LOVE BOYD SO MUCH? I love this show far too much and now that the fourth season has ended, there is a loss in my heart.

Weekly watching: DaVinci’s Demons, Mad Men, Nurse Jackie, The Borgias, Veep, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones,  The Vampire Diaries, Elementary, The Americans.

Links

What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2011, 2011

Librarians as Doctor Who: A Wrap Up of C2E2

Dear Internet,
A coulpe of weeks ago, after many months of planning, myself and nearly a dozen of my closest friends met up in Chicago to hook up for C2E2 to present on best practices, programming, and more for graphic novels in libraries, have karaoke good times, and other fun shenanigans.
Overall, as a conference, C2E2 rocks the fuck out of all the other conferences I usually attend. The registration price is super inexpensive, it’s close by, we get work with great people like Toby who acted as our liaison to ALA, we get to meet new people from the Internet, and we get to have a lot of fun while doing our jobs. THIS Is what makes being a librarian awesome. From a comics and pop culture experience,  I also love C2E2 because everything is easily accessible, the guests are approachable, and the panels are excellent. This conference is a win-win situation all around. And the city itself ain’t too shabby either.
The cherry on cake this year? Several of us cosplayed as Doctor Who.

CMMRB Doctor Who
L-R: 11 (Kristin), 4 (Julie), 10 (Carolyn), Donna Noble (Sarah), Rose (Val), Captain Jack (Beth), 9 (me)

Hilights from C2E2, including vines and more:

x0x0,
Lisa
Credits: Me (Instgram, Vine), Kristin (Instagram, Vine), Val (Instagram, Vine), Carolyn (Instagram, Tumblr), Beth (Instagram), Julie (Instagram), and Rob (Instagram, Vine).
 

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2003, 2012

Anniversary Weekend: In Pictures

Dear Internet,
To celebrate our third anniversary, we took off for our cabin and get it opened for the season. We were beyond excited, I think me more than TheHusband. Wednesday? She was ambivalent of the entire thing.

Pug says hello.
Pug says hello.

Upon our arrival, as we started unwinterizing the plumbing and such, we couldn’t figure out why the water pressure in any of the faucets or toilets was inconsistent. Then we realized why: We were flooding our crawl space.
The plumber we worked with last winter told us we didn’t have to contact his company to unwinterize the plumbing when we came back in the spring. As long as we followed these steps (turn well on, turn water heater on, turn heating elements on, etc) we’d be fine. Except, he didn’t tell us all the damned intake pipes in the crawl space would have their valves open to prevent excess water from freezing during the winter.  Hence, turn well on, flood crawl space.
We called the plumbing company and someone was going to come out in a few hours to take a look so to kill some time, we decided to head to Good Harbor beach and walk the white sand. The drive to the beach is less than 5 minutes from our cabin.
 
County road ends at water.
County road ends at water.

5 minutes from our cabin.
Lake Michigan, 5 minutes from our cabin.

Sand cut by the recent rains.
Sand cut by the recent rains.

Snail shells.
Snail shells.

We did a lot of exploring along the beach, collected rocks and shells, and followed inlets that were created from all the rains. TheHusband skipped rocks across some of the flatter pools of water and we talked about spending lazy days on the beach this summer.
Amg! Just leave me here to DIE!
Amg! Just leave me here to DIE!

The pug was not amused at being left alone during all of this. Ever. But her age and arthritis makes it impossible to do long walks, so she pouted at home.
Our original plan was to come up on Saturday morning, unpack, take note of what we needed, make a run to the nearest village to get supplies, THEN take a walk on the beach and do a fire on the sands while drinking a variation of sparkling wine while toasting our anniversary. Sunday and Monday would be lazing around, with plans to leave late Monday morning.
Quack.
Quack.

Instead we flood the crawl space, find out TheHusband burned out the elements in the water heater, and by the time the plumber was gone1, we had enough time to get supplies and then come home and crash on Saturday. And of course, with discovering other things that needed to be immediately done around the cabin, we made a second trip to get home supplies Sunday morning.  After spending a life time in Home Depot and Lowes, we come home to get shit done.
I used the reverse camera function to guide where to hold the wrench while TheHusband tightened bolts in the toliet tank. #realmarriage
I used the reverse camera function to guide where to hold the wrench while TheHusband tightened bolts in the toilet tank. #realmarriage

One of the problems was discovering the seal had broken on the 1st floor toilet and the toilet on the second floor had some mechanism wrong. We spent most of Sunday in various positions under toilets either fixing or cleaning them.
hellofirepit
Hello fire pit.

The original plan was to have a beach campfire on Saturday night, eat s’mores and swig sparkling wine from bottle like the classy fucks we are. Since that didn’t quite work, and TheHusband wasn’t digging any of the fire pits we were finding in various stores, we built our own fire pit at the cabin.
At some point in the cabin’s history, someone spent some serious cash on landscaping due to all the intricate circles, trails, and other formations of rocks everywhere2, so I followed a trail of them and gathered them to create a circle around a small pit dug by TheHusband. Thanks to the knowledge of YouTube, we had a blazing fire going in minutes.
thepugagrees
The pug agrees.

We had stopped in our village earlier that day and picked up a bottle of local sparkling wine for the evening’s festivities. After finding out it was our anniversary, the clerk serenaded us in front of the store’s growing line of an audience. Overly friendly people make us nervous, so we made haste to the cabin where that evening, we had a feast of salami, crackers, s’mores, and swigged the wine from the bottle just as the good lord intended.
theduck
The duck. (Temporary location until we get furniture.)

On Monday, TheHusband changed out the shower head in the bathroom, we finished out a few small projects, and then packed the car to come home.
It's all about the tots.
It’s all about the tots.

We decided to stop in Glen Arbor for burgers at Art’s Tavern and cherry lemonade at Cherry Republic on our way out of town. We discovered that Wednesday was turning the interior motion alarm on inside the car so it took minute to figure out how to turn that off.
Ping pong, 7PM Wednesday.
Ping pong, 7PM Wednesday.

Then we can home.
Our plan is to start going up every weekend we can, hit as many festivals as possible, and learn how to relax, without the use of drugs. You may need to pray for our souls.
xoxo,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2003, 2010


1. Due to the misinformation relayed to us by the plumber from last winter, the plumbing company did NOT charge us for the house call or for fixing the broken on Saturday. Now we know that just as we schedule to winterize, we must also schedule to unwinterize.
2. Or aliens.

May the 4th Be With You: Happy Anniversary

cabin2
Dear Internet,
In all the excitement of the last six months, I forgot to mention something big:

We bought a cabin.

If you would have told us 15 years ago, when we were living not quite hand to mouth in San Francisco, one day our lives would be 180 degrees from it was then? We would have thought you were lying. I think we both would have recognized we would have end up with good lives but to the baller extent we’re apparently living up now?
Inconceivable.
And yet, here we are.
Today is our third wedding anniversary and to celebrate, we’re heading up to Throbbing Cabin to open it up for the summer. The cabin needs a lot of inside work (more like it needs to be gutted), it has no furniture or working appliances, but it’s on 1/2 acre of land, 5 minutes from five miles of white, sandy beach, and we’re in spitting distance of all the awesome places in northern Michigan.
And it’s all ours.
x0x0,
Lisa