Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:10 PM

I really should be running out the door and head down to Simmons for Jessamyn's talk (in 55 minutes), but I just want to draw people's attention to this post by Elkins. Particularly for anybody attending BloggerCon. It makes some very interesting points about the migration from Usenet to blogs, and whether that's actually a positive development or not.

Damn, I want to write more about this now, but I can't if I want to attend the talk. Maybe later. [Bowling Alone, anyone?] I may bring along a copy of this post to BloggerCon and try to bring it up if it fits with any of the discussions tomorrow, so you might want to read it ahead of time.

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:25 PM

More responses to this week's meme have started trickling in:

• AilsaEk's questions:
  1. How's the black kitty with the funny tail doing?
     Well, now that Dave's back home, she's spending her time with him and we've resumed keeping our door closed. Sometimes when she notices us, she tries to make a break up the stairs. But that's usually just as we're leaving, so the door's already shut. [She's not very bright] Every so often she still mews outside our door, and the other night she extended her paw in the gap between door and floor and was waving it about. (Freaked me out for a second before I realized what it was -- it was dark, and there's this long black thing with claws groping about trying to get in.) A couple times when she's done this, we've let her in -- she runs straight for Boopsie's foodbowl, eats, and then wants out again, so it sure isn't our company she's missing...
  2. How's your cat recovering from the ordeal?
     Okay. Boopsie still hisses at the door occasionally when she notices Persephone's about on the other side. I think the experience has made her a bit more aggressive/assertive -- she's actually hissed at me a few times since then -- and that was something she rarely ever did before.
     She's a crotchety old girl, but we love her.
  3. (And on a completely different subject) Have you ever read A Pattern Language
     No, I have not. Should I? [Given the cryptic nature of this question, I'll probably see if I can find a library copy at some point...]
• CedarLibrarian's questions:
  1. Are you a comic book fan?
     Yes. I've got about ten boxes of comics (that desperately need organizing) and another shelf or more of graphic novels around the house. There's a famous saying that "the Golden Age of comics is 12" but I think it's more true that the golden age of comics is shortly after you started reading them. I got into comics at a good time -- 1987, just post-Crisis and Watchmen. I could probably ramble on and on about favorite titles and ups and downs, but I think I'll spare you that for now.
     My interest has been waning the last several years and fewer new comics are grabbing me (though I am reading more TokyoPop manga, which I wish were cheaper). But I still have a subscription box at Outer Limits in Waltham, and stop by to see what's new every several weeks.
  2. Why are you a librarian?
     Back in 1998, I was feeling a bit burned out at work. Somebody recommended I get more intellectual stimulation and suggested I look into taking some classes. Checking around the local college brochures at my nearby public library, I picked up the course catalog for the Simmons College GSLIS program. The Master's degree required 36 credit-hours. I started flipping through and quickly found over 36 classes that I would've been thrilled to take. I'd found my match -- all my interests and passions and favorite skills, things I didn't even know one could study academically -- and here were all these courses to further my knowledge and hone my skills. One of the toughest things about the program has been all the courses I couldn't take because I only had so much room in my schedule. I didn't actually intend to become a professional librarian; I was just taking these evening classes for the sheer fun of it, with some hopes it would help my career within IBM. [The fact that a few months earlier Knowledge Management became the big buzzword and new company direction certainly didn't hurt matters, either.]
     When I lost my job two years ago, my layoff benefits included a certain amount of education assistance good for the first few months of unemployment. I looked at where I was in the program and realized that if I could cram a lot of credits into the summer, I'd be able to earn my degree the following May with only a part-time schedule in the fall and spring (classes I could take around full-time work). As it turned out, I didn't find a new job until a few month or so before commencement, but those were the breaks.
     Although I earned the label with the degree, I've still never worked professionally as a librarian.
  3. If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be?
     Oh, gawd! Only one for the rest of my life? I'd go mad! I'd wind up reading cereal boxes or something like that just craving words...
     Seriously, though, I can come up with three possibilities:
     1. A really good translation of the complete works of Shakespeare,
     2. A copy of the Tanakh, the modern JPS translation, or
     3. A really good encyclopedia (multivolume, but one work)
• browngirl's questions (which just slipped in under the wire as I was about to post the preceding answers):
  1. Will you do NaNoWriMo again this year?
     It really depends upon whether I have a feasible idea and what else is going on in my life around that time. Immediately after last NaNoWriMo, with the experience still fresh in my memory, I considered it unlikely. [Good point -- the presidential elections are also this November, so I may want to be blogging during my limited writing time, rather than taking myself out of circulation like NaNoWriMo requires.] But I haven't made a firm decision either way, and who knows what will happen in the intervening six months...
  2. Who are three favorite Harry Potter characters of yours?
     There are so many different ways I could parse this statement -- favorite as written by J.K. Rowling, favorite in fanfics, the ones I find most likable, the ones I feel are most realistic/complex... Hmm...

     1. Draco Malfoy

     Not the most well-rounded character in canon (he got particularly short shrift in Book 5) but I like fictional sneering sarcastic snarky bastards... they're so much fun. [And my enjoyment of the character does predate Tom Felton's casting.]

     2. Hermione Granger

     Smart bookworm chick... self-identification, perhaps?

     3. ???

     Okay, 1 & 2 were easy. #3 is tough. Severus Snape certainly shows a greater depth/complexity than many of Rowling's characters, and there's certainly more to Neville that meets the eye (I expect him to bloom/shine in the next book), but I wouldn't elevate those interests into the realm of "favorites." I went to some of the complete character lists from Willow, the HP Lexicon, Marysia and Harry Potter Facts to see which names grabbed my eye. If there are any characters who really make me pleased to see them on the page. And nothing really stood out. So, when it comes right I think I'm going to leave this list at two.

  3. Who are three favorite non-Harry Potter characters of yours?
     Keep in mind, that these are my top three favorite characters at the moment. Were you to ask me another time, I might come up with different answers.

     1. Christopher Marlowe, as written by Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett in Armor of Light

     The characterization that started an obsession...

     2. Dawn Granger/Dove, created by Karl & Barbara Kesel for DC Comics.

     Hadn't thought about this one in ages, but as I started rambling about my comic book fannishness to cedarlibrarian (above), this was one of the first titles that came to mind. I admired Dove, who was an agent of Order, so her powers were (as described by one fansite) "to see the underlying pattern in all situations, and to rapidly assimilate that information, sort it, and make sense out of it." Really keen. I've had at least two dreams of being Dove. And I was so upset and disgusted with the way DC Comics treated the characters at the end of Armageddon 2001 (along with the Titans Hunt perpetrated by the same editor), that I mostly stopped reading mainstream DC comics at that point. [In my own personal Earth-Lis, those storylines never happened.]

     ...

     Again, third one's a toughie. Various things have come to mind only to be dismissed, including various current interests that I'll probably forget with time, a roleplaying character I created & played several years ago, a particular archetype that I enjoy in many different instances... But none of those really seemed important for a top three. I started looking back across my life, trying to recall my early idols and wish-fulfillment fantasies , and finally came up with:

     3. Robin Hood

     Probably my first real hero. The Disney animated version came out when I was three, and I was just smitten. My friends and I played at him on the playground, my parents have photos of me dressed as him for Halloween, and he really was a primal influence on certain aspects of my character... And even though I now recognize that it wasn't the greatest movie, the myth has inspired many other versions that are equally captivating (may I recommend Errol Flynn and Patrick Bergin). Mind you, I don't slavishly follow every reinterpretation of the character, but there's something about the character that generally translates well.
     [FWIW, my other earliest hero, from about the same time in my life, was Spider-Man, whom I've also continued to read and follow intermittenly (part of what made me the comic book fan I describe above), but I've already got one comic book character on the list.]

These are fun, if somewhat timeconsuming. One of the problems of blogging compared to other forms of computer-mediated-communications is that it can be so solitary. I miss the more conversational aspects of CMC. Yes, some blogs foster lengthy comment threads that turn into discussion, but it's still somebody else's space and always has that feel to me, unlike discussion databases and newsgroups, which are more egalitarian in terms of who can start topics and maintaining a coherent and connected conversation.

More?

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:35 PM

A comment by Kate Nepveu led me to do some digging, and I found this announcement by bradfitz:

New change:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/changelog/1336849.html

In summary: no syndication points anymore.

Anybody can add any number of feeds, but only paid users can create new feeds.

That was posted a week ago, and it looks like it is live now. I checked several places and no longer see point costs associated with syndicated feeds.

Cool!

So remember, this is riba_rambles, with an underscore between the two words!

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:20 PM

Only three people have asked me questions so far from yesterday's meme. I'm somewhat disappointed, but maybe in the hopes of luring more inquiries (for those rainy days when I have nothing else to blog about), I'll answer them:

• Julian's questions:
  1. Where will this comment appear?
     First in my comments box (I noticed you had some problem and accidentally posted multiple times; I deleted the duplicates) and now here.
  2. Should I become a blogger?
     That really all depends on you and what you want to do. If you like to write and want to write with the possibility of an audience, blogging can be good. Private blogs are also good as personal reminder pages, whether of links you wish to recall or if you wish to take notes and are more likely to have internet access than a pad of paper handy.
     Even if you don't plan on doing much writing yourself, LiveJournals can be useful if you read a lot of other LJs. Allows you to create an aggregate view of all their posts rather than checking each blog individually, gives you a consistent id when commenting upon other posts, and will enable other people to permit you to see their locked posts (if they so desire).
  3. What's the big rush to see checks?
     Oh, I just get impatient. What's the point of blogging something if nobody sees it? 85 people get my feed from LiveJournal, which is a pretty hefty chunk of my known readership. So when I'm writing posts, I do tend to keep an eye on when LiveJournal will be checking and updating my feed, so the most people can see it as soon as possible. Sometimes I will rush a post to meet LiveJournal's hourly deadline (as I did yesterday); other times, if I notice the next check isn't for a while, I may write with less urgency.
• Rosamund's questions:
  1. What book are you reading?
     I'm honestly not at the moment, which I find somewhat sad.
     King James and the History of Homosexuality has been sitting in my bookbag for the last month or so, but I'm just not getting anywhere with it this goround. I checked a stack of books out of the library last week, and just finished reading four YA books by Gail Carson Levine (best known for Ella Enchanted), along with Call of the mall, a fascinating look at shopping malls by a retail anthropologist. I have three other books out from the library, none of which I seem able to get into at the moment: Cartoon History of the Universe, volumes 1 & 2, along with Cleopatra's nose...
     Yesterday, cedarlibrarian raved about Story Time by Edward Bloor in a way that makes me want to read it. I'm also sorely tempted by the RetroHugo nominees.
     But mostly right now, I've been occupying my mind with other things -- techie noodlings, household stuff, and I'd like to find time for some actual writing at some point, so any reading that isn't online may get shelved for a while. [I've read over 40 books so far this year, I think I can safely take a break.]
  2. If we build that time machine and hop back to nabble Kit, what would your first question to him be?
     Ooh, first question, hunh? Probably something along the lines of confirming "So, you're Christopher Marlowe?" or "Can I buy you a drink?" or "Would you be my guest for dinner?" -- some sort of invitation to actually start a longer conversation.
     I know the eventual question I'd want to build up towards, though. I want to make a business proposition with him -- how much would he charge me for a poem and story. The poem I would commission and it should be about me. The story is his biography, which he can tell me privately and in strictest confidence. [I could realistically promise him that nobody else alive at the time (excluding any other time travellers I take with me, who I'd presume would be part of the audience for this, and assuming the nonexistence of earthly immortals) would find out from me.]
  3. Here's a researchy-type one. If banns of a marriage that subsequently did not take place were published in Canterbury in the 1590s, would there be a record of the event?
     Ooh, tricky one... I honestly don't know (yet) but just asked the folks at humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare, which is generally my first resource for minutia about Elizabethan record-keeping. No response yet, but I'll keep you posted.
• Rachel's question:
  1. If you had the option of having one thing happen magically, that would directly affect only *you*, what would it be?
     If I were limited to what's plausible, I'd want a cure for a certain personal longterm medical problem that I've been going through. Or possibly just general better health all around.
     If we head out into the realm of fantasy, I would ideally like the ability to evaluate myself, my abilities and limitations as a character sheet from any extant game and the ability to modify my stats at will, whenever I choose. All purpose self-evaluation and personal improvement: Use GURPS to make myself a Multimillionaire with Independent Income. Then switch over to a Champions view to give myself powers (since GURPS Supers isn't terribly). Maybe use Call of Cthulhu to bump up my Sanity, or TFoS as a barometer of my relationship with my parents... The possibilities are endless.
     Incidentally, if I was ever offered three wishes, that latter formulation (or a variant -- since I'd like Ian to have these abilities as well) would definitely be Wish #1. After that, and after I bump up my intelligence (to ensure I choose and word well), my second wish would be a selfless one for the betterment of humanity/the world. [One wish that comes to mind would be the simultaneous discovery by numerous people around the world of a cure for AIDS in an inexpensive non-endangered plant that grows worldwide, through a preparation so simple that anyone can do it at home with no dangerous or unpleasant side-effects. (All those qualifications are to ensure the cure will be as widespread as the disease, and would hopefully prevent exclusivity or price-gouging.) Although at this point, I'm beginning to think hate and prejudice are a bigger problem than any single disease. My goal is to avoid a Monkey's Paw that makes matters worse, but I've been wondering what the effect would be if we could increase everybody's empathy levels...]
     My third wish would be for ownership and the ability to operate a vehicle that is a cross between a fully-functional TARDIS and Gay Deceiver from Heinlein's books. That would give me the ability to travel through time, space, and into fictional worlds, in comfort with room to bring any of my friends along as companions.
     And I know that's just gone way beyond your initial question, but hey, you only asked the one...

Any more takers?

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:00 PM

Just found out about this too late to attend:

PEN New England's website has more info on the panelists. I wish I could attend, but BloggerCon is all day Saturday, and I was considering attending Jessamyn West's talk tomorrow night at Simmons (I love the title: "Using Your Librarian Powers for Good: Tips for Aspiring Librarian Superheroes"). Which means I have to get stuff done tonight.

Grump. Grump. Priorities.

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:30 PM

Walking about the office park on my lunch hour I spotted several daffodils and two bushes of purple five-petalled flowers (pardon my botanical ignorance) just starting to bloom. I also saw a nearly tailless squirrel make a mad dash up a tree. Almost thought it was a chipmunk, but there was another "normal" squirrel nearby for comparison. Plus, of course, the swans by the pond. I think the first signs of spring have finally sprung.

Meanwhile, I'm terribly disappointed that I can't seem to find Cadbury Creme Eggs anywhere. The local Brooks already has its "summer" display up -- including candy corn colored red white & blue. They've got a teeny rack of half-price novelty-grade chocolates, but they had so much merchandise out the week before, there's no way they could've sold it all. So where did it all go? Do they throw them in a storeroom for redisplay next year? Sell them all to someplace like Building 19? Where are the day-old Peeps?

Oh, and one final Passover note that I'm blogging so I don't forget about it next year. The Kosher l'Pesach "beer" that Ian found is by Ramapo Valley Brewery.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:25 PM

FYI: I haven't been posting much (or reading much news or many blogs besides LJ) because I've been noodling around with some tech stuff. Feel free to send me links to anything you want to draw my attention to.

Folks who have been reading for a while may recall that the office park where I work stocks a pair of rental swans in the pond during the warmer months.

They're ba-a-ack!

Or, possibly a new couple has been brought in -- it's kinda hard to tell, since they mostly look alike. [Last year, I learned to distinguish the male from the female, sometimes even when they weren't adjacent, but that's about all I could manage.]

I saw them yesterday when I went for a walk over lunch.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:35 PM

Okay, I'm finally letting myself get sucked into one...

Via cedarlibrarian:

I want everyone who reads this to ask me 3 questions, no more, no less. Ask me anything you want. Then I want you to go to your journal, copy and paste this allowing your friends (including myself) to ask you anything. The fun is not in answering, but in seeing what crazy things people ask you.

Got that last sentence? I don't promise to answer everything (or even anything), but I'm curious what questions people might have. I've been writing a lot; now it's your turn.

[Aw, grump. I tried to rush posting this so I'd make the LiveJournal's next check of my feed, rather than wait an hour before it shows on LJ. Instead, Blogger must've been in the middle of writing the file while LJ was doing its ping, because LJ now shows an "Error Message: 404 Not Found" and because of that won't check again for another three hours. Sigh.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:20 PM

According to Chabad, Passover ends tonight at 8:07 PM. Not a moment too soon, as far as I'm concerned.

Oy, but I'm craving chometz. Somebody left a whole pile of Easter candy in the kitchenette yesterday, including about a half-dozen chocolate-dipped strawberries, which I could smell all through the room while I was grabbing my lunch. [I don't eat kitnyot, and most sweets these days use corn syrup.]

Of course, Ian is working until nine or ten, so maybe a late night stop for pizza or Chinese. And, I'm hoping, ice cream.

Tip for next year: whole wheat matza has three times the fiber of regular matza and is surprisingly tasty.

And boy do retailers clean their shelves quickly. I had to pick up a prescription Sunday evening, and they had already cleared away most of the Easter candy merchandise. No sign of a remainder table or anything. Fingers crossed I can find some half-price Cadbury eggs or something...

Anyway, here's hoping you had a great holiday last weekend, whatever you celebrate.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:15 AM

<Sigh> Some people have hot sexy dreams. But not me. I dream of political debates (however surreal) and blogging.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:15 PM

Checking the TV listings, looks like the post-sweeps reruns are over and this Wednesday will have new episodes of Smallville and Angel. Unfortunately, the new used TV set we got the end of last year appears to have given up the ghost. Nice audio, and we can see the TV-generated signals (the onscreen volume controls and channel numbers), but we get no picture, no matter how long we let it warm up nor how hard we thump it.

It's annoying considering buying a new TV since we watch only a handful of programs. Hopefully I can find something relatively cheap, because I neither need nor want most of the bells and whistles now availble. No point in digital, since we deal with reception static on most channels anyway. And most of the DRM features they've been adding to TVs also make me somewhat concerned about getting crippleware. Time to check Costco or Craigslist for something in reasonably good condition and price.

In the meantime, anybody in the Boston area able to tape Smallville and Angel for us if we can't get something working by then? Added later: We bought a new television last night (details in the comments to this post), so we're all set as far as catching Wednesday's programs are concerned.