Saturday, July 27, 2002

 
I showed Bill the blog. He happened to catch sight of my ToDo list for today. "You should put THAT in there," he insisted. So, here it is:

• Mail that fucking DVD player
  
• Get something to hack through jungle surrounding garden
  
• hack through jungle surrounding garden
  
• Weed and fertilize garden
  
• Write email to: MoM, JGS, Nan, CH, Sandy. Tell them about the blog
  
• Write email to DM
  
  • Comics
    
  • The sad stories
    
  • Bruce - the 2000 Orlando show, this tour
    
• Buncha other stuff

posted by Suzy 2:23 PM

 
Why is it that the longer I sleep, the harder it is to wake up? I went to bed at what's become my usual time, around 1:30. Woke up just a bit ago, 11:00, feeling like I'd been dragged through brambles by a horse who'd kicked me a few times for good measure. Even after the first cup of coffee I'm still not fully reconnected with this world. Sometimes my usual morning catechism of "Who am I? What planet is this? What's my name? Do I have a job? Do I have to go somewhere to do it?" takes hours to complete. To say that I am not a Morning Person is like saying Atilla the Hun is not a pacifist.

I never solved my XSL problem, though I worked on it far into the night. I'm beginning to wonder if there IS a solution.

I took a break to watch Odyssey 5, the only new show I watch regularly right now. Then I looked at the "Gaiman Live at the Alladin" video, which was fun. I was particularly bemused by a story he read about cats, opening with the same observation I've been making about our Hobo-- that stray cats have secret symbols they leave in front of houses that say things like "kind-hearted man lives here", just like tramps and wanderers did in an earlier time. Bill has been feeding a gray and white male for the past two months. When he first arrived, he looked at death's door, but after a few weeks of Nine Lives handouts, he's looking enormously better. He's still not exactly fat, as is Carrot, the permanent resident. She is not thrilled by the attention Hobo gets, but she tolerates it. She's basically an inside cat, the lady of leisure, while Hobo stays outside. I guess we now have 1-1/2 cats.

Need. More. Coffee.....
posted by Suzy 11:43 AM

Friday, July 26, 2002

 
LIFE IN THE SWAMP: Working at home while waiting for a plumber. This happens every few months, especially during the monsoon season when everything is growing like it's the green phase of the Sunbane. Roots invade the pipes leading to the overfull drainfield raising havoc with the bathrooms. The plumbers know us well; I keep telling them we should really just hire them on retainer.

I've spent all day wrestling with a XSL problem. It should be simple enough. I understand the logic of what I want to do (insert a named anchor each time the last name of a directory entry changes from one letter to the next) but damned if I can figure out how to get XSL to do it. It doesn't really have variables, so I have to somehow trick it into changing a value when it encounters the situation. So far I'm not even close. If I can get this to work, I'll have my first fully functional XML application, i.e., something that duplicates the web directory we have now. But the good part is, the data is in a separate file, and we can sort it and output in different formats for different purposes. Or so the theory goes. The project I'm really interested in, the Sandman XML, has been put on hold until I get this done. And I suppose it will also have to wait until I get the resume thing done too. If only I could figure out how to turn the Sandman project into a Sabbatical project. I need to come up with one by the end of September.
posted by Suzy 3:48 PM

Thursday, July 25, 2002

 
LIFE IN THE SWAMP: Lost power for 40 minutes this afternoon in the course of one of our patented king-hell thunderstorms. All the computers are on UPSs, so the house was full of their distressed and increasingly frantic beeps. I got everything shut down, even TiVo, but could not locate the cat. I searched everywhere, under the beds and in closets with the flashlight, calling her. Finally found her cowering under the coffee table, too scared to even move. When the lights came back, one of the phones malfunctioned, knocking out the DSL. What fun. Now that's been all fixed, and dinner is over, it's time to see if the ads really are gone from this site. Here's hoping.
posted by Suzy 9:37 PM

 
UPS was very good to me today-- not one, but two deliveries from amazon.com. A box containing the DVD of The Last Waltz, a "backup" copy of "The Rising" and the wonderful Thomas Inge monograph, Anything Can Happen in a Comic Strip was most welcome, but the one I really was glad to see was a book I'd been dying to read but never knew existed, The Radio Caroline Story from the Inside by Tom Lodge. I named my first unix server Caroline, and she hosted the original UF campus website for a year as well as the UF Library's website for six years. Like her namesake, she eventually sank beneath waves of corporate hegemony blown in on winds of change, her hardware outdated and worn out. Can't wait to read this.
posted by Suzy 2:35 PM

 
DEAD BIRD ALERT (as in, a cat proudly dropping a freshly killed trophy at your feet): I finally solved my problem of including canned header information in a web page created from XML via XSLT. And I got the solution quite accidently while looking through FAQ's on the blogger site-- talk about serendipity. It turned out to be a server side include. I am purring with self-satisfaction.
posted by Suzy 11:46 AM

 
Having some technical problems this morning. Editing the blog properties didn't take, and refreshing the blog in the browser results in a server error message. Re-entering the url gets me back to the unedited blog. My first (and second) attempt to publish this entry had the same result. Oh well.
posted by Suzy 9:03 AM

Wednesday, July 24, 2002

 
Another try at blogging, inspired by Neil Gaiman's great site. This week I'm thinking about his Coraline, which scared me silly when I read it over the weekend. I need to get copies of it for my two nieces (ages 13 and 11). Too bad it wasn't available when I met Neil at ALA in Atlanta-- just a few weeks too soon.

Picked up "The Rising" single yesterday. I wish the words were clearer on the recording, but the music itself, though deceptively simple, is deeply haunting. I still need to decide whether to go to the Tampa or the Orlando show, or both. Have hotel reservations in both cities lined up.

KPIG has gone silent-- my favorite webcast station has been felled by the Evil Cartel (tm). Dave Marsh predicted all this ages ago and he was dead on. as he so often is. I wonder how bad this situation is going to get before it bottoms out. Will music just completely dry up? I could live for a long time on the collection of CD's I already have, but I crave new stuff too. Where will I find it? How can I justify supporting this corrupt system when I do find it?

I've been working for days with XML/XSLT trying to apply the things I learned at the Charlottesville workshop last month. I've made some progress with a "real" application (a staff directory) but there are parts of it I just can't get. I think I'll shift my efforts to my resume. An edict just came down from On High that all faculty must have a current resume on file and updated yearly. Such an awful chore-- yet another reason I resent librarians here being classified as faculty. But if I put in XML, maybe I can get multiple uses from it, extract different subsets for different purposes, output it in different formats, etc. Worth a try.

TiVo has certainly changed my viewing habits. It makes it all too easy to go on binges. I've recently recovered from the Star Trek: Next Generation craze, and now I'm into the charmingly insipid Donna Reed show, of all things. I 'd never seen any of it before. Taking a look at some St. Elsewhere as well, although I'm so hospital-allergic it makes it hard to watch.

I may take a stab at the Sad Story here. But not tonight.
posted by Suzy 10:31 PM