Library War: Summaries

Thanks to the most excellent TangognaT for posting episode summaries and a few screen captures! Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are done and I'll be watching for more.

Ice Break on the Rillito: 2008

Yep, today's the day, folks: we've just officially hit 100°F for the first time this year. I believe we're going to actually go past it a bit - last forecast I saw was 103° - but today's it. Bye, bye, spring - hello summer!

My prediction, not that it's very difficult to do: another 100 days of 100+ degree weather. Not starting just yet, but in, say, another month? Yep.

Old Maids, Policeman, and Social Rejects

In the latest version of The Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, v.9, no. 1 (Spring 2008) is an interesting paper by Maura Seale titled "Old Maids, Policeman, and Social Rejects: Mass Media Representations and Public Perceptions of Librarians." Some serious analysis went into this research paper, which discusses the "five categories" of represented librarians (the old maid librarian, the policeman librarian, the librarian as parody, the inept librarian, and the hero/ine librarian). After reading it through, I have to say Ms. Seale is spot on; although almost of her references are older ones (late 90s-early 00s) I can find examples of each and every one of those categories in a media bit presented within the last year. I also have a few new articles to go check out, thanks to her reference list!

It's worth a read - check it out! (Originally via popculture-l; thanks to all the folks who also sent it along to me.)

Scary

Scary (Passion Quilt meme)
Originally uploaded by desertlibrarian

There's a nice little meme going about the biblioblogosphere to make a square for a library-themed Passion Quilt. This is my contribution... As usual, I'm late to the game, and everyone I would have tagged has already done one, so check out http://tinyurl.com/4h8qtk to see 'em all.

Urban Dictionary: bite me.

(Note: Links will more than likely contain NSFW language.)

So, thanks to Library Bitch, I was introduced today to the Urban Dictionary's definition(s) of "librarian". While I quite like Definition #1 ("One to be worshiped") I can't say much for #10 ("a librarian is a weird usually older(middle aged) lonely woman"), or many, many others. Read through 'em and be sure to cast your vote.

89° and slightly overcast. Whee.

More Made of Win

If I can keep knocking out the small-yet-annoyingly-frustrating issues like this, I'll be golden!

Today I figured out the display ordering rationale in the image gallery module. It's such an easy module to use that I didn't want to discard it in favor of custom-built views for every single gallery every time one was created or modified, or (and I admit it) learn how to modify the php template, but not being able to display the images in the order I wished - or use a specific thumbnail to identify a gallery - was really getting on my nerves. So today I played around with a test gallery, tested file name, title, etc etc - and finally realized it sorts in an absolute, last-in-first-out order. Now that I know that, I can work around it; I just have to remember it down the line. As usual, it's a very small thing that was causing my much larger frustrations... but now I've gone into all my galleries, rearranged them to the engineers' satisfaction, and it's all good. Hurrah!

I've also taken the "oh, boy, here we go" step of sending a final review statement out to all the staff. We are, finally, approaching the last step before going public with this and being done with this task! Woo hoo!

79° and sunny. :-D

Today: Made of Win

Today has been a pretty good day.

1) After battling the front page display of my new web site for a while, I threw it out to a local CSS expert (thanks, Mark!) and to the Drupal4Lib community. (I wanted dual background images, one at the upper left and one at the bottom right, and no matter what I did the front_page module was only showing one image.) I got a lot of great suggestions to fidget with things and arrangements, which led me to think about swapping which images were called from where. When I flipped the body and wrapper background images, it worked! Not only did it work, it works across every browser I've tested so far, even IE (!!!!), and under both Windows and Linux. (I'll test from the Mac when I get home, but I expect it'll be fine.) Needless to say, a happy dance was performed :-D

2) I got to play with javascript and replaced the static image on our main web page with a script that randomly displays one of eleven images. Makes me happy, and more importantly, it seems to have made the scientists and directorate happy. Thanks, JavaScript Source!

3) I get to shop for all the table decorations for the big "Under the Sea" party at SLA. Hee hee!

Currently 84° and sunny. (expect to see that a lot in the future, ha ha)