A Plague on Both Their Houses

Spent another several hours trying to make Apache work with PHP, reading dozens and dozens of anguished messages on the forums from poor souls with similar problems.

Finally uninstalled the whole combo to try again, and now I can't even make Apache work on its own.

This project is cursed!

On the plus side, I have so far required less medication to stay upright today than yesterday.

Bleaaaaaahh...

It really sucks to be sick and have a backache at the same time. I wanted to spend all day in bed, sleeping off the worst of the illness, but I couldn't get comfortable there because my back hurt too much, so I figured I might as well get up.

Also, I did need more Tylenol.

I know: whine, whine, whine.

In other news, I didn't accomplish anything productive because I was too busy whining. I was kind of disoriented--I walked several blocks the wrong way down the street when I got out of the pharmacy--so my concentration was probably doomed anyway.


I did read this interesting post on Butterflies and Wheels that mentions the ways in which the work of journalism is changing.

In a conversation I had with a journalist recently, we discussed what he deemed the two temptations of our post-print era. One is getting mixed up in what he called the“information jungle.” The other is sitting complacently in a “filter bubble.” He suggested that the task of good journalism in the coming years will be to serve as a curator for the public, exposing citizens to, without overfeeding them on, information and ideas that challenge or deepen their firmly held beliefs. All right, but what shall we call it? How about “out-of-the-jungle, beyond-the-bubble Black Swan journalism?”

This idea that journalism may be more about a kind of curation that simply reporting facts reminds me of the idea that librarianism of the future (or of the present, really) can also be seen as more about curation than collection.

If everything (or a significant portion of the 'everything' that most people are likely to look at) is fairly readily available, which parts of it do we want to highlight and recommend to our users?

Except for historical or highly specific collections, it might eventually be less about collecting physical items and keeping them in a single spot, and more about linking to items in various locations online. And paying for them, of course. How many times do librarians roll their eyes when someone says they found a journal article 'free' online and turns out they got access because the library pays for a subscription?

Maybe journalism is looking at a similar problem, in that people find all their news 'free' online and don't really think about how someone--perhaps a professional journalist who might enjoy getting paid--may have been involved in writing and submitting the initial report.

Maybe promoting journalism as more 'curation' will make it seem more worth paying for, to at least enough people to keep news sites going?

Or maybe I'm too disoriented (and recently shivering, but now sweating!--it's the ague, I tell you!*) to actually think about any ideas.


*Incidentally, MeSH doesn't have a term for ague, but maps it to Chills, previously indexed as Shivering, which is much less interesting than the dictionary definition of ague.

Classic Ailments

Although I don't have malaria, I would like to claim the term 'ague' for my condition, because it sounds old-fashioned and severe.

Technically it means you have alternating chills, fever, and sweating, not necessarily as a result of a malarial infection, so I certainly can claim it. The real problem with the definition is that I haven't been sweating that much in between the chills and fever, so I should probably be wrapping myself in blankets and hot water bottles.

I tend to get a touch of ague half the time when I'm coming down with a cold. Like over the course of this weekend.

Yay! Weekend! Bleah.

This is one reason I like a flu shot.

Plain old colds give me headaches, chills, fever and joint aches for a day or more. Do I need that for a week? Yeah, I think not.

Not Feeling Fictional

November is coming up, and t'will be National Novel Writing Month once again, and I'm sitting around not having any inklings of ideas.

You can't start writing until November 1, so it's obviously OK not to have really fleshed anything out in mid-October, but in the past I at least had some loosely connected notions I'd been mulling over, and a kind of "here's where things will start" plan.

Now, I've really got nothing. Just not feelin' the inspiration. I'm feeling as if I may not get around to doing it this year, although I'll only be busier next year, so I kind of might as well go for it now.

I'm also concerned because the next Assassin's Creed comes out in November, and that will be very distracting. Veeeeeeeery distracting. Just thinking about it is distracting. Ah, to be climbing tall buildings right now!

Plus, there's all of this knitting to be done. It turns out I got way more yarn than I needed, but I wanted the free shipping that came with a $50 purchase!

Also, I'm a terrible judge of these things. It's like the time I needed to order an ethernet cable, and after considering the available lengths, decided 50 feet sounded about right.

Indeed. About right for when I need to take my computer out of the apartment and around the corner of the building. Which, you never know.

Be prepared by overestimating your need for everything, that's my motto.

This is why I really feel I should have about 8 or 10 novel ideas in mind if I'm going to tackle NaNoWriMo.

Eight or 10 ideas, 50 feet of cable, 20 balls of yarn, and a video game. That's preparation.

I AM THE ALL-EXPERT! (Not really)

I know and appreciate that all librarians are assumed to know all things, but I think it's funny how apparently randomly people sometimes select my library (and presumably yours as well) as a resource for their particular question.

For example, I work at a small academic medical library associated with a specific school, in Massachusetts. I'm really not sure why someone with no apparent connection to the school picked us as the lucky recipient of a general question on "is there a [specific health-related thing] in Massachusetts?"

I mean, I can look it up, but we don't speak for Massachusetts where I work, nor are we really experts on state policy. Maybe you want to ask the State Library of Massachusetts or some other specifically-Massachusetts institution? Just a thought.

These very general questions also always make me wonder how much time I should spend on the answer, because I wonder "did he also send this same message to 20 other libraries in Massachusetts?"

And if we're all carefully answering the question, well, that is not economy of scale.

But if no one else answers the question because we all think it's generic and someone else will get it, the poor questioner may wind up with no response at all, and I don't want that.

I am a librarian! I want people to get their answers! I just want it to happen in the most efficient manner possible, and sometimes, that means I really shouldn't be the one giving the answer.

So I try to write a quick, general answer that suggests possible (possibly more appropriate) resources for similar future questions, and it always winds up taking longer than I expect, so I just hope for the sake of economies of scale that anyone else who received that particular question ignored it.

Let's not duplicate effort here.

Grrr of the Day

It's always comforting if people on the internet have had the same annoying problems you have with, say, installing software programs and making them talk to each other.

Ideally it's even helpful, if they can tell you what they did to fix it. But when you see a lot of comments like "I don't know what I did, but it works now"--I'm not sure that's either comforting or helpful.

It at least implies that the problem can be fixed, which is good. On the other hand, it suggests that the solution remains a mystery, which means I could be fiddling around with the problem for 20 hours before I unwittingly stumble across the answer, or might potentially never stumble across it at all, and that's bad.

Hmph.

Stupid internet. Be more helpful!

Persistence, Persistence

I just could not seem to get a handle on my latest afghan square. I would misread the pattern (repeatedly, in different but equally wrong ways), or it would be too wide, or too narrow.

I tore the whole thing out no fewer than 5 times, and was seriously contemplating just moving on to something else. Yet I persevered, and it turns out the 6th time was in fact the charm. So that's done.


In unrelated news, I just completed 700 charge cycles on this laptop battery. Party!

I have no idea if that's a significant milestone for a battery, but it's a nice round number, so I'm going to stand by the call for a party.

I got the computer in January of 2007, so that actually doesn't even seem like that many cycles. It's only, what, about 12 charges per month? Three a week?

I suppose that sounds about right. It seems like I'm on the computer all the time and must need to charge it a lot more than that, but I guess most of the time when I'm on a computer it's at work, which obviously doesn't wear down this battery.

Anyway, the battery condition is still listed as 'good,' so perhaps I'll get another several hundred cycles out of it. I used to faithfully do the whole calibration process every couple of months, as advised in the manual, but I confess I've fallen out of that habit. Still, I am generally careful about disconnecting it once it's fully charged.

Basically, I'll do the best I can to maintain this machine without expending any additional thought or effort on the project.

It's literally the least I can do.