shinylib

So long Vox, hello WordPress

In a fit of inspiration I started cleaning house in a major way today. Invariably I got tired of the dust and moved on to electronic housekeeping instead.

I’ve long been disatisfied with Vox and despite some of the good features and cute themes I have decided it’s time to take this show elsewhere. So you can now find the blog integrated with the rest of the shiny content over at shinylib.

Until I get my php and css up to speed I’m sure I’ll spend some time missing the ubercute themes here at Vox, but ultimately it’s that customization that I’m looking for. Well, that and the ability to embed your blog somewhere non-Vox.

I don’t expect the new address will lead to more frequent posting just yet, but you never know…

Catching Up

Phew. The impending arrival of finals week gives me a minute to breathe and compose a post. Of course the knocking on my office door from frantic students looking to find me does hamper the writing somewhat.

I can’t believe that my first quarter as an academic librarian is coming to a close. I have been following the First Year Librarian posts over at ACRLog and am relieved to see that many of my experiences are very normal.

First, there is the ever-present inability to go the heck home at the end of my shift. It’s not as though I mean to stick around the library for umpteen extra hours–it’s just a really long walk from my office to the door and any number of things are likely to occur on the way. Some examples include printer jams, discussions of cafeteria-induced food poisoning, who threw away whose perfectly good milk, and the occasional friendly chat with that one lunatic faculty member who does that thing with the thing. Imagine that I am, right now, making shifty eyes at you.

This relates to item the second, gossip. Gossip exists in various forms in all libraries, in all departments. I am learning to try to steer clear of this as much as possible. It doesn’t help that everyone knows I am funny and I like to talk– I suppose I seem like the natural choice for sharing gossip. I’m not, it pretty much goes in one ear and clatters around in there until I stuff enough other crap in after to consume the space.

I am horrified and amused to realize that my research skills are totally rusty. I have gotten so good at dumbing down my inner research geek to help students (sure, that’s the internet button, just click on it and away we go!) that I actually stared at Library Lit & Inf Science in consternation a few minutes ago, trying to sort out how to begin finding articles that speak to any sort of research interest whatsoever.

I vaguely remember going through a similar phase after the completion of my BA. I just forgot how to develop my own research topics and go after them. I recall soliciting essay topics on LJ just to have something to write.

Needless to say I don’t have anything resembling the time to write let alone to do research most of the time so this is an exercise in futility… or at least in collecting PDF versions of articles that I will likely never find a chance to read.

Absent in this list, quite notably from my perspective, is any discussion of the future job scenario. Like I have said before, I just don’t have the time to worry about a future job–I have too much to do with the job I have right now. That said, I still worry, a lot…

Updates on the shiny librarian and thoughts on the state of the world…

Less a real entry than a list of updates…

• I finally got around to putting content on shinylib.com. As ever there’s “more to come”. We’ll see.
• I am not sure where I was for the past several months, but I have only just become aware of the Jena Six controversy, in which several escalating racially-focused incidents at a high school lead to six black students beating a white student (who apparently was feeling well enough to attend a party later that evening).I don’t understand what I heard reported on NPR, which amounted to the FBI stating that hanging nooses from the “white tree” is not a hate crime and therefore there are no laws under which to charge the white perpetrators. I don’t advocate the beating of a white student by six black students, or really the beating of anyone except parents of small children left unattended at libraries. If you are not already following this case I would suggest you do so, the fallout is sure to be immense.
• Shiny! The college library I work for has just doubled my contract, meaning that I will be temporary full time faculty through the end of winter term, at least. I also am eligible for benefits now, and really–who doesn’t need health care?

Long time no blog

Hi. Long time no blog. I have been riding the post-graduation roller coaster: recover from visiting friends and family, have panic attacks induced by the unfamiliar feeling of doing nothing, realize that I have a “real” job that begins in a few weeks, freak out over the former realization, etc… All of this has resulted in what fellow yarn-addict and blogger MK refers to as “hibernate-and-twitch”. Glad to know I’m not alone in the need for solitude.

I feel particularly pleased with myself for coming up with a workaround to Six Apart’s stubborn refusal to allow me to embed my Vox blog in my website. [Ok, if I am being honest there is no website currently, but there could be...] Create a full post atom feed of my own posts, subscribe to it through Google Reader, share each individual entry (ugh, but currently I can’t figure out how to share an entire feed), and then use the GReader generated URL for my shared entries. It sounds excessively complicated but since I have my web life compartmentalized to the nth degree there’s nothing in the Reader account associated with The Shiny Librarian except that feed. You get the idea… at least it works. I am sure there are many other feed readers that could perform the same task as well or better, but I am loyal to Google (more on that in future posts… Helio anyone?) to a fault, most likely.

Speaking of Google, how much would I love to have the teahouse theme as my Vox theme? Quite a lot…

In terms of real news I can share that I have accepted a shot at a full time job. I know, what does that mean exactly? Basically it means that I am taking a full time interim position, knowing that it’s the only way I might prove myself as a teaching librarian in a short period of time–all in hopes of laying claim to the full time permanent position. If it doesn’t pan out I will keep the 10 hours a week already assigned me by this college. It’s an amazing opportunity, but I did have to leave my former position with a different college to accept it. Everyone there has been amazing, wishing me well in my new job. I do hope they know how conflicted I was– I’d hate for anyone to think I’d actually made a decision without agonizing over it. For instance I’ve been deliberating on eating some ice cream since I began writing this post. Signs are positive that ice cream is in my immediate future.

Of course as soon as I post this I go to check on my Google Reader workaround and find that this post, inexplicably, refuses to show up in my reader. I am sure that if I were not stubbornly attached to Google Reader (I don’t even like RSS feeds, if I am honest. I’m not a twopointopian, what can I say?) this would probably not be an issue–why else is that handy ‘share’ drop-down up there? More on this later…