how easy to forget that school is awesome because of the new people. what was i doing dissin’ 19 years of school in my last post? i feel like i’ve dissed all the new people i’ve met over those 19 years. apologies new people.

last night we gleefully happy-houred at hell, thanks to the quick thinking of trish who came first upon the closed library.

hell, which most agreed should be conferred “most favored bar status” (beating out henry’s and he’s not for the prize) demonstrated to the ample handful of new silsers that all the ribbing they’ve endured from friends and family on account of going to library school ends now.

if only because of happy hour, the school of information and library science will ROCK your face off.

i love that it is raining. i don’t love that the forecast calls for isolated thunderstorms for the next seven days.

i’m supposed to be doing this lit review for my last final project. and nothing in me wants to do it. and the ACM digital library has died. and it’s 3am. (but i have been going to bed at 6am the last few days). and it’s due at 2pm tomorrow. and all told it’s worth about 10% of my course grade. and all told i don’t care much about grades these days. at this point i pretty much feel i’ve learned what i’ve come to learn (as far as this class goes). grrr

just wanted to take a break from studying for my cognitive science final exam to discuss how i am studying for my final exam.

our midterm essentially consisted of identifications and definitions, so i kind of know what i’m up against. the prof had the class over two periods come up with a list of important topics we’ve gone over in the last half of the semester, so i know exactly what to study.

and i am looking everything up on google. even better, for the specific, but not too specific terms and concepts, i am loving google glossary–which is something everyone should check out.

so i’ve compiled a pretty good bunch of notes, a few images, and i may even read through everything right before the test, but essentially the act of searching for and compiling the short descriptions of the various concepts was the plan. i’m hoping it should help me commit enough to memory for the hour long test.

the conference on human computer interaction (CHI 2003) left me with a real distaste for usability. reminds me of my loss of faith in poetry. linguistics did not sit on the fence, it strove to be a science and it was. usability does not know whether it wants to be an art or a science. it probably wants to be more the latter but right now it is succeeding at neither. what do i want it to be? probably an art. a pragmatic art. i think user-interfaces are a sort of folkart.

if i don’t leave chapel hill as soon as i graduate, when will i? does it matter? this is not something i worry much about, mostly something people around me worry about for me. i think school makes it hard to see clearly. i think when i am done with school for good, and i have some time at work to just work, i’ll be able to plot out my next steps. right now it just doesn’t make sense to worry much about any of that.

occasionally i come home late at night to a dark quiet house from some less dark less quiet place and i go to the bathroom and take something out of my bag, a bottle of shampoo or some hand soap to replace a just now empty bottle and i have this feeling that my parents would be pleased to know that when inconsequential things run out, like soap, i get more.

so it just finally occurred to me how perfect it is that us info and lib science kids have been having our thursday afternoon happy hour at “The Library” (on franklin st). guess i just missed that whole librarians-library connection before.

and what’s up? this whole “thursday afternoon happy hour” has become like thursday binge drink into the early morning hours with a bunch of aspiring librarians. how cool is that?

and why is it that just recently (in class actually) i made the connection between “unix” and “eunuchs”? i wager that that goes over most folks heads, cause you’ve gotta know unix was a reaction against the bloated 1960/70’s-era OS, multics, thus “unix” is a castrated form of multics.