Stupid "Smart" website filtering

Just doing my small part to protest so-called "smart" webfilters. See the Boing-Boing report that started this all.

They also have created a guide on how to defeat unwanted censorware.

The monkeys are loose!

My little monkeys (student workers) have been busy...or, perhaps, not busy enough!

http://mrcuiuc.blogspot.com/

Is it time for bananas (rewards) or hammers (um...non-rewards)? Because it is well documented in the Media and Reserve Center that both items are appropriate tools for the management of monkeys.

They call me "the Hammer"

Well, my alter ego apparently has a thing for eyeballs. How I manage to dig them out using a sledgehammer, I think I'll leave up to the imagination.

Prickly Pear People Iced: Thirty Nine Car Bombs Planted: None. Pathetic. Favorite Weapon Sledge Hammer Arms Broken: One Eyes Gouged: Twenty Four Tongues Cut Off: One Biggest Enemy: The Arm Breaker Get Your HITMAN Name

And the really weird thing? At work I actually *do* threaten my student-workers with an encounter with a hammer if they don't check cases for DVDs before shelving them.

Ode to Josh

To the tune of "Mandy" by Barry Manilow

Oh Josh
You came and you left me a comment
On my last.fm post
But then you didn't leave your user name so that I could friend you, which would've been really nice of you, since I only have one friend on last.fm right now and being a social networking site, it would be good to connect with more people, but you don't even have your email address anywhere on your personal website, at least that I can find, so I couldn't send you a private email asking for your addy, and I couldn't IM you because...well, I don't really know why, but I didn't, so you'd better friend me or tell me your user name so I can friend you.
Oh Josh

Boogie down

I am a new member of last.fm. If nothing else, everyone will know how many times I listen to Rubberband Man by the Spinners. My disco-fetish will now be revealed to the world! Mwah-hah-hah!

Porny, porn, porn

Do you know how effin' busy I'd be if my job required this?! I can think of one patron that we'd have to kick out the minute they walked up to the desk to watch a movie (I have to tell our students to get me if he needs help with his sometimes "uncomfortable" subject searches)...and our anime section would likely need to be weeded. You know, it is hard enough to explain to people how to print a website page (use "print preview," for all that is holy) or how to search for a movie title, I can't imagine trying to explain what they could or couldn't look at on the web. Besides, as the American Library Association, says, "libraries are not the hotbed of looking at porn sites." Hee.

Policing porn is not part of the job description

Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.

Wiki-riffic

Partially I'm writing about wikis in order to get more space on my personal wiki, but I'm also writing to sing the praises of the Wiki which my Museum Informatics class uses.

I use the free PB Wiki for my personal lists. It tends to be a bit more flexible in structure than other free wikis that I've seen and has a nice, soothing color-scheme. Right now, my account is private, but I'll likely be making it public soon. It's just too messy to share at the moment, since I haven't pinned down exactly what I want to use it for, but I have fun with it.

The class that I am taking extensively uses the "unofficial" GSLIS wiki. I think we're the only class in LIS that is exclusively using a wiki for our course-planning and presentation. It's an interesting concept and allows us to do a lot of collaborative work outside of class time.

Anyone have suggestions about how to use wikis? One of the SCA groups that I'm involved with, the Slavic Interest Group, had a discussion about using a wiki to gather research information, but the main problem which we were anticipating was that we'd likely get a lot of "bad" information that we'd be continually having to delete or annotate on the wiki. Not a horrible thing in an of itself, but we just ended up not wanting to mess with the possibility of having to edit racist, nationalistic junk every hour or so. It's hard to figure out a way to allow freedom of speech while maintaining a civil discussion when you get into themes such as whether the early Rus' were Viking-origin or locals. But that's another blog for another day.

Yet another reason to love my job

Guess what I did all day? After fixing tons of problems at the service desk after being gone yesterday, I mean.

I added a TON of anime links to my bookmarks, investigated anime distributors and retailer webstores, poked around some fan sites, avoided (mostly sucessfully) opening any hentai sites (only because I'm out in the public view and would rather not deal with it), and started a wishlist of anime titles.

And I got paid to do so, because we are going to start developing an anime collection.

Gods, I fucking [heart] working in a library!

Can we add "pissed off" in there somewhere?

I may not be a librarian yet, but I will be sporting one of these soon. Radical Militant Librarian, indeed.

Starchy Roots

Earlier this week I grew potatoes in my hair. They were only a few inches across and most of them were Yukon Golds, while a few others were a hybrid of sweet potato and regular potatoes. In fact, if you broke them open, you could see the white and orange flesh mixed together. It pinched a bit when I pulled them out of the skin by my hairline, but I could also just comb through my hair and they would pull out easily. My scalp is itching right now, while I am remembering what it felt like. It wasn't unpleasant, but it felt downright weird.

I didn't try eating any of them, but they looked tasty.

And yes, this was all just a dream I had. But what did I learn from all this?

That I really should wash my hair before going to bed after a very sweaty yoga class.