etc.

The weekend began with a night out with a bunch of non-librarian friends at Crocodile Rock for $2.75 drinks and a whole lot of gabbing and general catching-up. The highlight of the evening for me was spreading the word of the 26,000 librarians that are expected to descend upon the city in June (ALA/CLA, joint national library conference which will be a big deal, in a good way) and having the news met with a whole lot of whistling, high-fiving and chest-bumping by all my single male friends. For whatever reason, this made me very happy. It was nice to get out and see people again, as I was sure to have informed everyone last night, I have been in hibernation this winter, coming out on rare occasions to gather essentials and see some folks. This trend is definitely on the wane, it’s + 10°C today (it took me a while to reloate the plus sign on my keyboard, even though it sits right next to the minus sign, with which I have been far too intimately acquainted this winter) and I am on my way out for a walk in the neighbourhood. After that, my book for a couple of hours, some library-lit reading I have to finish this weekend, and then to-morrow to my parents’ place for a visit. Suddenly I am very happy to be venturing forth from my musty little apartment.

It took an award for me to finally jump on the blogrolling bandwagon. And on the link theme, I’ve made my bookmarks public here. Some links are IP dependent (work stuff and subscription-based journals and articles) so won’t work for you, and others are password-protected (and no, this is not an invitation to hone your hacking skills). Most are public friendly and those are the ones meant for sharing. The list is a lot more up-to-date than linkage, which means that linkage is probably on it’s way out.

This is a big, juicy, satisfying novel that I’m glad I took my time with (for the most part although I read the last half in 3 hours, in time for the book club meeting, which has to be the overriding downside to book clubs: the deadlines). It is about three families whose lives are intertwined against the backdrop of multicultural London, a city that is often intolerant of the multiculturalism that defines it. There’s Archie Jones, an ineffectual, dimwitted yes-man, who quite contentedly skims over the surface of life, and his best friend (and “mentor”, he admits in the end) Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi immigrant who tortures himself over what it means to be a “good Muslim” in the West and raise his sons to also be good Muslims while attempting to filter out Western Corruption. It’s all tongue-in-cheek of course, because by all accounts Samad is anything but a good Muslim, hence all the self-loathing and mental anguish. And all this loathing and anguish is exacerbated by the irony of his first son’s atheism and almost complete embrace of English culture (ironic because he was the one of the two sons who was sent back to the Homeland for soul redemption) and his second son’s abandonment to an extremist religious group. And then there are the Chalfens, a very clever, very white family whose internal relationships are no less dysfunctional than the Jones’ or the Iqbals’ even though the parents purport to have the happiest marriage they know of and boast an open and progressive relationship with their four boys. This is a busy novel with as many different voices as there are political and moral opinions and points of view, which are all thrown into one pot and stirred around furiously. The results are tragic, hilarious, miraculous and never dull.

n. pl. dai�sies
Any of several plants of the composite family, especially a widely naturalized Eurasian plant (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum) having flower heads with a yellow center and white rays. Also called oxeye daisy, white daisy; A low-growing European plant (Bellis perennis) having flower heads with pink or white rays. Also called English daisy; The flower head of any of these plants; Slang One that is deemed excellent or notable.

Source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

The Pierre Berton reading was great, he’s a witty man, in the old-fashioned, comedy-of-manners sense of the word. No real surprise that my favourite part of the reading was the Q & A, and my favourite part of the Q & A was Berton’s response to a question from an aggressive, young, fireball of a journalist from a local TV station, who was suitably rigged in big hair and a navy blue pantsuit, trailing a camera crew. Berton was reading from his new book The Joy of Writing: A Guide for Writers, Disguised as a Literary Memoir, so obviously the questions revolved around his experiences as a writer. But our intrepid journalist kept trying to swing the conversation to the war in Iraq question, in an attempt to solicit some sort of inflammatory comment from Berton, given that he has always been a champion of peace and has argued at length about the irrationality of war as an answer to any sort of conflict, local or international. She probably got her inflammatory comment too (he said something like (and I’m paraphrasing): it has always been stupid to believe that war is the solution for peace and we can’t seem to get that into the head of his highness south of the border), and everyone else in the audience but her seemed to get the fact that Berton wasn’t there to debate politics. Still, it was a great way to spend a Monday afternoon, but I have to stop going to so many readings because my budget is suffering for all these hardcover books I can’t resist buying to have signed.

I’ve decided to retire stilllifes and bring miscellaneous daily images back to the me pages. Slightly more detailed explanation of why is here and archives will stay here.

I went back to my old library school yesterday and after about four hours there, it felt like I’d never left. But in a good way. Not a lot has changed (how much can change in 10 months?), the one difference I did see that I would have loved to have seen during my tenure there was the addition of paper towel dispensers in the washrooms. It was nice to be back, and I anticipate spending a lot more time there in the next few months. More on that soon.

I had a total of 13 responses on my non-scientific poll on HTML coding and software use. The results: 6 respondents said they hand-code only (many of whom started out with one of the HTML editing software packages), 3 respondents both hand-code and use the software, 4 use HTML editing software only. The results sort of made sense, but I expected a lot more designers to hand-code only. But then I was hoping to hear from someone who designed websites for a living and no one copped to that. The reason why all this came up in the first place was because of that conversation I mentioned. There were 4 of us involved and all 4 of us did some web design/maintenance, and out of the 4 of us, 3 said that they used only Dreamweaver (unless they had no option and were stuck with a computer that didn’t have the software on it, in which case they used WordPad). The only one who didn’t was me. And while I too started with Dreamweaver, I started to find the software constrciting and annoying very soon after I started feeling comfortable with HTML. I just assumed everyone else felt the same. The 3 individuals I was speaking with said that using the software helped them keep up with new web design trends and new HTML/CSS versions (by upgrading their software), and that without the software upgrades they would feel antiquated and disconnected from the wider world of web design. I didn’t agree. I don’t feel antiquated or disconnected at all, even when I have my nose stuck in a text editor, because “View Source” is my very favourite web-learning-tool. Ultimately, while I didn’t agree with them, I attributed the difference in opinion to differences in learning venues; they learn from software, I don’t. If you still have something to say on the matter, I’d like to hear from you.

And you can get your pie here.

• The Waiting Project
• The Flux it Project
• View from my Window
• Web Culture Survey [via kottke]
• The Tornado Project
• LSE Card Catalogue Project
• The Lysistrata Project
• The Galileo Project
• The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project
• The Payphone Project
• The National Women’s History Project
• The Theban Mapping Project
• The On-Line Picasso Project
• The Government Accountability Project

Toycamera has redesigned and is now a streamlined, easily navigable site. Any site devoted exculsively to CPC is my kind of site, particularly if it is CPC of the photographic variety.

My fourth reading of this book and, like most classics, I enjoyed it even more than the third reading and I’m pretty sure it was the book, and not just my sparse memory, that accounts for me finding even more interesting and captivating little themes and textual nuances. Woolf does a tremendous job of molding those piddling, seemingly irrelevant and insignificant everyday tasks into flights of self-discovery on The Things That Matter, where a day in the life of one woman who is planning a party for her friend becomes as viable and worthwhile a subject as any. This is one of my favourite books of all time, which is why I read it again for the fourth time even when my list of to-reads is currently longer than my arm and my next-pile is a toppled over heap in my living room. And one of the main reasons why this is one of my favourite books of all time is because I love literature that sees the grandiose in the miniscule, that tackles the Big Questions in the mundane, prosaic everydayness of life, that mirrors the truly significant in the most insignificant of human acts. Not many can pull all this off like Woolf can and none of her other works provide as good an example of this sort of richly-textured, multi-faceted narrative as Mrs Dalloway does. And I can guarantee you that I will read it again.

• All the presidents of Italy’s universities resigned in December in protest of budget cuts to higher education. It seems to me that this was a gutsy, definitive action, but I haven’t been able to track down any press on the result of this large-scale resignation.
• Two recent books that appeal: Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes their Lives, by Jeff Schmidt and Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization, by Michael Tierno.
• 2003 to 2012 has been declared the “Decade of Literacy“.
• Duct tape is the new black [via memepool].
• Another virtual community of digital artists is just what the web needs. Meet Pleix.
• SpellChecker.net, the spell checking utility used by Blogger Pro does not recognise the words “blog” or “blogging”. Or “Blogger” for that matter. Maybe now, with all that Google money behind them, they’ll work on getting the word “blog” and all its derivatives added to the lexicon.
• People don’t like it when you say you made pie when really you made jewellery.