Caveat Lector

So here’s the deal. I may be able to sneak into next week’s Project Bamboo meeting in Chicago, but I am not doing so at the behest of MPOW, and so I’ve got to dig up my own accommodations. Which is, um, expensive.

Is someone going who might be willing to split a room with me? Or is there someone who lives within public transport of the University of Chicago who might let me crash next Thursday and Friday nights?

Email me if you can help; all my email addresses are currently functional last I checked. I will be eternally grateful!

I inadvertently let the textartisan.com domain expire. I’ve renewed it, but until DNS catches up, my regular email address is nicely hosed. If it has to get to me, use dorothea dot salo at gmail dot com.

Yeah, don’t start, okay? It’s been a bad week.

Been a little quiet around these parts lately, and that is not likely to change soon. Nothing super-bad, just one of the every-now-and-then low spells I get and have to jolly myself out of.

There’s nothing externally wrong, so no fussing, please. Me and my brain chemistry just need to sit down for a chat.

Expect minimal blogging for the next two and a half weeks. I have half a book and a book review to finish in that time span, and it’s just not going to get done if I don’t throw myself into book gaol and toss away the key. (Note to self: Don’t move in the middle of a book project and an upcoming presentation. Superlatively bad idea.)

Home IM will be set to “away” a lot; if you need to bug me, bug me. I expect I’ll be even worse about answering email than usual. My Twitter feed may become an amusement for those who enjoy watching that sort of thing.

Have fun without me, y’all. Just not too much, ’k?

Everyone who needs to know first now knows, so I can officially announce:

I will be joining the University of Wisconsin System as Digital Repository Librarian effective March 19, 2007. My duties will revolve around Minds@UW, the state university system’s institutional repository.

Although Minds@UW and I serve the entire system, I will be based in Madison at Memorial Library. I look forward to (re)joining the good people at Wisconsin!

Passports, check. Photocopies of passports, check. Clothes, check. Presentation files both on Nova and thumb drive, check. Goth-kitties provided for, check. Zootibar, check. Dress shoes, check (though I almost forgot these!). Mail stopped, check. Hotel reservations, check. Knowledge how to get to hotel from airport, check.

What’s a Zootibar? Oh. It’s the name I finally gave the iGizmo I won off Elsevier. Not one of Dunsany’s prettier coinages, but it serves the purpose.

I think we’re just about ready to go. Should have wireless on the trip, but travel and blogging tends not to mix for me.

Y’all behave yourselves; I won’t be. Have a good week!

I heard this morning that my grandmother died last night. This was not unexpected, and all things considered it’s by way of being a mercy, but obviously it’s rather discombobulating, so I don’t expect to be doing much blogging for a few days.

I don’t know yet whether I will be attending the funeral, as it’s in an extremely out-of-the-way place that I will have considerable difficulty getting to since I don’t drive. My parents are calling this evening, and I expect to work it out with them then.

Hoping y’all’s day has been better than mine.

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.)

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.

I’m a bit late to the party, but nonetheless: there’s an opening for a job very like mine at the University of Maryland. Application deadline is the end of the month.

The job ad misspells the repository’s software platform, but a look gives it away. Unless someone’s willing to hack the living you-know-what out of DSpace, installs do tend to look alike; the little arrows in the sidebar navigation are a dead giveaway.

(My install looks a bit different because I did the hacking, but in my case the wording of the navigation gives it away. Eh, well. Someday I get brave and change it.)

As much as I whinge about DSpace, I do enjoy forcing it to submit to my imperious will working with it, and I have high hopes for its future. It’d be nice to have another DSpace librarian in the general area, so apply!