Caveat Lector

Can’t really call it “wildlife” because nothing in the DC suburbs feels wild. Even so…

We went to the movies a week ago, and came back through the patch of undeveloped land that (let’s be frank) hides the oil refinery from the mall and the townhouses. I stopped and bent down at a corner-of-the-eye motion, and sure enough! it was one of the tiny spring peepers I used to hear coming back from chorus rehearsal at night. Cute little thing, grayish-brown and maybe half the size of my littlest fingernail. We saw some raccoon tracks in the muddy ground, too.

Last night my husband asked me to come out on the balcony to look at something. I guessed it was something astronomical, knowing him, but I was wrong. Turns out that at night, the trees behind our apartment come alive with fireflies, dozens of little lazily-glowing lights in the branches. It’s beautiful to see, especially with a crescent moon hanging in just the right spot to be seen through a hole in the canopy.

This evening we walked to the noodle place for dinner, and noticed a footpath we hadn’t noticed before behind the strip mall it’s in. Further investigation turned up a young rabbit browsing alongside the path, the first rabbit I think I’ve seen in Fairfax. (I seriously doubt we have any near our complex, because there are feral cats about, not to mention the raccoons.)

It’s hard to live here and not feel suffocated by the sheer inescapable weight of humanity sometimes. Honestly, that’s the biggest psychic burden about this area, and I can understand why people live far out to escape it (though I don’t necessarily approve). Of the places we could have ended up living in around Fairfax, though, I’m glad we found one with birds and bats and lightning bugs and toads and butterflies and spring peepers and the occasional raccoon or rabbit. It does help.

I’ve been reading accounts of the ALA conference in New Orleans, most particularly those that mention leaving the tourist quarter to learn a little something about that bitch Katrina.

One such account (I fear I’ve lost the link, sorry) mentioned these folks being one of the few bright spots in the Ninth Ward. On investigation, it appears they can use computer stuff, particularly Mac stuff.

David’s erstwhile workhorse G4 is still good enough for them, and I have other oddments on their wishlist that I’m not using, so I emailed them with a list (rather than risk sending items they can’t use). I had a polite, useful response in less than an hour. Today I wiped the machine, and within the week I hope to box it up and ship it off.

$DEITY knows it’s a little enough something, but I hope my fellow librarians and Macheads will consider doing likewise.

Nova the PowerBook went all pear-shaped on me yesterday, and won’t boot. I am mounting rescue efforts today, but I am not entirely hopeful, because the home directory I want to save was FileVaulted.

It’s not an epic disaster if I can’t rescue the sparseimage; I have relatively recent backups, and the one file I would have committed hara-kiri over I managed to save before Nova died beyond rebooting.

It’ll reboot in single-user mode, so I’m not entirely without hope here. But I’m making no assumptions. Blogging will be sparse until Nova is running again.

Yep, Nova’s hard drive is hosed. I ran Disk Utility on it earlier today and it told me everything was fine, but that didn’t last. Apple’s SMART Diagnostic said “Failing,” and I can believe it—odd clicks and whirrs, slowness, general badness.

I did manage to rescue and CD-burn my data, so I can manage to be zen about the whole thing. Nova was a good little trooper, not breaking down until I had all my stuff.

It’s going to get fixed, but in the meantime, I’m using the Silver Surfer or whining at David to let me borrow his iMac. (Yep. I’m spoiled as a spoiled thing, no question about it.)

So I managed to get CVS running on Trogool the work iMac today. I also figured out how to export the DSpace 1.4 beta from Sourceforge’s CVS and import it into Trogool’s CVS, in preparation for re-hacking all my hacks via Eclipse for better hack-tracking.

(In passing: wow, CVS imports take forever!)

What I can’t quite seem to figure out is how to get Eclipse to pay attention to Trogool the iMac’s CVS. Anybody got any quick tips about setting up a new project to check out CVS from localhost?

I walked in the door today not quite sure whether I was gruntled or dis-. Just one of those up-and-down days.

It started off astoundingly poorly, and no, you don’t get details. A jaw-droppingly grunchtastic moment plunged my mood firmly into “seeing red” territory. Honest to goodness, it’s no wonder there are few women in IT. The wonder is that there are any. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

A fascinating conference is coming to MPOW’s law school shortly, and I emailed the organizers on the off-chance they’d let me archive stuff. I got a favorable response and am following up, which is good.

I did get my chapter done today, hooray! I’m just not sure it’s any good. I tried to add a library voice, because for all their general wonderfulness, many of the loudest voices in the open-access movement don’t really quite understand how libraries can help and why libraries should. I think there’s more to both questions than usually makes it into the discourse, and I tried to express some of it, but I don’t know if I got there.

Eh, I suppose we’ll see. I retain self-archiving rights (why, yes, I do read my contracts), so expect to see a preprint eventually.

And then I messed around with CVS for quite some time, and was very proud of myself for more or less getting it to work—but I may have inadvertently done Trogool some (reparable) software damage in the process. If I’ve really screwed things up, fixing them may involve an OS reinstall. Let’s hope not, because I really want to get hacking on DSpace 1.4.

I hadn’t actually seriously hosed Trogool; I’d just mucked up a bunch of permissions that I shouldn’t have, and OSX kindly helped me fix them. Won’t be so careless with chmod and chown next time.

After consulting my boss, I decided to install CVS on my staging server rather than on Trogool. Install went smoothly, I got the 1.4 DSpace beta in no problem, I got Eclipse hooked up to it, and now begins the dull but necessary work of re-hacking old hacks (for the last time, I dearly hope!).

(I do know about Subversion, by the way, but DSpace uses CVS and so does Eclipse, so my hands are tied.)

My phone was ringing off the hook for a Friday. Another new journal, some IE6 problems with the design of an old journal (damn you, IE! damn you!), a possible source of digital audio from lectures… if even half of that comes to pass, I’m a happy repository-rat.

Nova has gone off to the laptop doctor, and should be back sometime early- to mid-next-week.

Bit of a sticky situation involving me elseweb, but I am hopeful that it will be resolved with a minimum of drama. So all in all, I’m glad I ended my week with a day like today instead of a day like yesterday.

On balance, I have had a pretty crappy week. It hasn’t been entirely crappy, mind you, but the not-so-bad bits have mostly served to throw the truly astonishingly craptastical bits into sharp relief.

Today my gaming group came over and we played Kill Puppies for Satan. No, it’s a real game and everything, and it’s every bit as wrong and twisted as it sounds.

And the amazing thing is? I feel much, much better now.

So I’m hacking away in Eclipse, now that I finally figured out how to get syntax coloration for JSPs, when I just have this utter markup-satori moment, changing this:

    <table border="0" cellpadding="10" align="center"
        summary="Browse the repository by subject">
        <tr>
            <td colspan="2" align="center" class="standard">

to this:

<p>

I hope you are all enlightened. Would somebody hack line-wrapping into Eclipse now, please?

Nova has come back from its travels. The hard-drive noise is perceptibly different (yes, yes, it is a terribly geeky thing that I actually notice this), but otherwise, Nova is exactly as it was, right down to the stuff in my trash folder.

Whew. Glad that’s over. It was no fun.