I sent nine spams today to every teacher in the school. Not proud. #blogjune
Libraries and Bookstores in Portland.
When I was in Portland last year my friend Tebra, who I was visiting and staying with, showed me the downtown area of the city including the crazy big and very cool looking huge library building.
I somehow didn't take my own photo of the library despite going in there and using it at least six times during my stay. Image source: http://www.theironsamurai.com/2010/08/13/here-in-portland-we-are-just-plain-smarter/.
The library inside is pretty damn awesome looking, I didn't take any photos stupidly, but it had the usual collection of books, tables for people to read at and study, DVDs and music as well as a kids area. The library was four stories tall and had lots of nice little niches to just sit around in and write, which I did some days when I had time to spare and time to kill. A few days into my trip my friend Julia from university, who was in town for a convention with her husband, and I caught up for lunch and then went on a kind of tour of the library talking to the staff about the clients and the contents as well as the history of the building and some other stuff. It was a very librarian geek-out for the two of us.
It also had a nifty little bookshop near the entrance where former library books and some souvenirs were sold, I picked up a magnet and a small badge for myself as well as a copy of Cory Doctorow's novel Homeland which I didn't really enjoy as much as the first novel in the series(I think because in this one there was never any doubt that the main character was going to triumph over adversity, in the first one there was a chance of it), not the libraries fault.
After showing me where the library was I was then given a great little tour of the city and saw several of the sights before being shown Powells bookstore, the largest bookstore on the planet apparently and one of the two great bookstores I've always wanted to visit(Shakespeare and Company in Paris was the other one and I went there two years ago). I eventually collected enough books from Powells that I needed to actually buy a new bag to take home with me to fit them all in. Mostly because they were having a sale on Murakami titles and now I own nearly all of his works as a result, also because they had a ton of the more obscure sci-fi books I've been looking for on and off for years and I couldn't pass up the chance to get myself a copy. A book like The Forever War, one of the staples of military sci-fi which I've never been able to find a copy of in Australia, was just sitting on a shelf in Powells, begging me to take it home to Australia. I got a lot of stuff and now my pile of shame is slightly bigger than it was before. Yes, I still haven't finished half the books I got in that trip, but I'm working on it.
For reading and writing Portland was a great city to hang out in, I found the atmosphere and attitudes of the place to be pretty relaxed. I can see why it has such a strong artistic community.
My Day.
Today I became a spammer by accident because I didn't read the documentation completely for the thing I was playing with in the Catalogue.
To back up a little bit, Education Queensland uses a cataloguing system called Oliver Jnr, it's pretty okay with some kinks here and there but overall pretty decent for managing thousands of students across hundreds of schools and hundreds of libraries and collections.
One of the functions it can do is generate an overdue book list, but it doesn't do a grand total list, it does three lists, one for books which are only up to two weeks overdue, one for books up to two months overdue and one for everything else which hasn't been written off since the catalogue started. So there is no master list.
The system requires that you press a small link and it will generate a Word Document for each of these lists and then you can print them out and take each printout to the classrooms for the teachers to deal with. Except the system automatically emails the teachers the list of their students who've got overdue books, every time you generate a new Word Document.
So I was playing with the system, trying to see if there was overlap between the lists generated(there is a way to make a master list, I think I need to edit one of the existing three lists because I can't see how to create a new list but I don't want to break anything right now), and I generated about ten-twelve of these word documents while experimenting for a good hour or so.
I only stopped because I got a phone call from a teacher asking why I was sending her the same list several times over and over again and was I trying to tell her to get her students to return their books in some passive-aggressive fashion.
So tomorrow I have the fiddle with the system and get it to generate without sending an email. So that should be fun.
After work I went home, changed my clothes and then went over to my brothers house where I found him asleep, so I let him rest for about thirty minutes and then got him up so we could go to the shops to get food for the week. Ended up getting us some Fish for dinner at Woolies, I got one of those squeeze bag things that you just throw into the oven, was surprisingly nice considering how much I usually hate fish. Terryaki and Garlin flavour. Came out a treat with some Salad(Spinach, baby Roma Tomatoes, Cucumber, Red Onion and Italian Dressing) and some Pasta Salad from Woolies Deli.
Once dinner was done with I watched Good Game, then the Checkout and then a friend of mine from England, currently living in Japan, got in contact with me about my resume and asked me to send him a copy and he'd go over it and see if he could give it a once over. He used to be a head-hunter and knows a bit more about what people at the other end are looking for so now my resume is down to two pages from seven last week and three yesterday. It's great having friends in your life who can help out in situations like that, makes it less frustrating to actually go out and look for a job knowing people are rooting for you.
I have a busy day tomorrow, apologising to every teacher in the school a few times over for flooding their inboxes, filling shelves of books and testing some old 1980s era headphones. Should be a blast.
YouTube Clip of the day.
The G20 bought out the best in this city.
When I was in Portland last year my friend Tebra, who I was visiting and staying with, showed me the downtown area of the city including the crazy big and very cool looking huge library building.
I somehow didn't take my own photo of the library despite going in there and using it at least six times during my stay. Image source: http://www.theironsamurai.com/2010/08/13/here-in-portland-we-are-just-plain-smarter/.
The library inside is pretty damn awesome looking, I didn't take any photos stupidly, but it had the usual collection of books, tables for people to read at and study, DVDs and music as well as a kids area. The library was four stories tall and had lots of nice little niches to just sit around in and write, which I did some days when I had time to spare and time to kill. A few days into my trip my friend Julia from university, who was in town for a convention with her husband, and I caught up for lunch and then went on a kind of tour of the library talking to the staff about the clients and the contents as well as the history of the building and some other stuff. It was a very librarian geek-out for the two of us.
It also had a nifty little bookshop near the entrance where former library books and some souvenirs were sold, I picked up a magnet and a small badge for myself as well as a copy of Cory Doctorow's novel Homeland which I didn't really enjoy as much as the first novel in the series(I think because in this one there was never any doubt that the main character was going to triumph over adversity, in the first one there was a chance of it), not the libraries fault.
After showing me where the library was I was then given a great little tour of the city and saw several of the sights before being shown Powells bookstore, the largest bookstore on the planet apparently and one of the two great bookstores I've always wanted to visit(Shakespeare and Company in Paris was the other one and I went there two years ago). I eventually collected enough books from Powells that I needed to actually buy a new bag to take home with me to fit them all in. Mostly because they were having a sale on Murakami titles and now I own nearly all of his works as a result, also because they had a ton of the more obscure sci-fi books I've been looking for on and off for years and I couldn't pass up the chance to get myself a copy. A book like The Forever War, one of the staples of military sci-fi which I've never been able to find a copy of in Australia, was just sitting on a shelf in Powells, begging me to take it home to Australia. I got a lot of stuff and now my pile of shame is slightly bigger than it was before. Yes, I still haven't finished half the books I got in that trip, but I'm working on it.
For reading and writing Portland was a great city to hang out in, I found the atmosphere and attitudes of the place to be pretty relaxed. I can see why it has such a strong artistic community.
My Day.
Today I became a spammer by accident because I didn't read the documentation completely for the thing I was playing with in the Catalogue.
To back up a little bit, Education Queensland uses a cataloguing system called Oliver Jnr, it's pretty okay with some kinks here and there but overall pretty decent for managing thousands of students across hundreds of schools and hundreds of libraries and collections.
One of the functions it can do is generate an overdue book list, but it doesn't do a grand total list, it does three lists, one for books which are only up to two weeks overdue, one for books up to two months overdue and one for everything else which hasn't been written off since the catalogue started. So there is no master list.
The system requires that you press a small link and it will generate a Word Document for each of these lists and then you can print them out and take each printout to the classrooms for the teachers to deal with. Except the system automatically emails the teachers the list of their students who've got overdue books, every time you generate a new Word Document.
So I was playing with the system, trying to see if there was overlap between the lists generated(there is a way to make a master list, I think I need to edit one of the existing three lists because I can't see how to create a new list but I don't want to break anything right now), and I generated about ten-twelve of these word documents while experimenting for a good hour or so.
I only stopped because I got a phone call from a teacher asking why I was sending her the same list several times over and over again and was I trying to tell her to get her students to return their books in some passive-aggressive fashion.
So tomorrow I have the fiddle with the system and get it to generate without sending an email. So that should be fun.
After work I went home, changed my clothes and then went over to my brothers house where I found him asleep, so I let him rest for about thirty minutes and then got him up so we could go to the shops to get food for the week. Ended up getting us some Fish for dinner at Woolies, I got one of those squeeze bag things that you just throw into the oven, was surprisingly nice considering how much I usually hate fish. Terryaki and Garlin flavour. Came out a treat with some Salad(Spinach, baby Roma Tomatoes, Cucumber, Red Onion and Italian Dressing) and some Pasta Salad from Woolies Deli.
Once dinner was done with I watched Good Game, then the Checkout and then a friend of mine from England, currently living in Japan, got in contact with me about my resume and asked me to send him a copy and he'd go over it and see if he could give it a once over. He used to be a head-hunter and knows a bit more about what people at the other end are looking for so now my resume is down to two pages from seven last week and three yesterday. It's great having friends in your life who can help out in situations like that, makes it less frustrating to actually go out and look for a job knowing people are rooting for you.
I have a busy day tomorrow, apologising to every teacher in the school a few times over for flooding their inboxes, filling shelves of books and testing some old 1980s era headphones. Should be a blast.
YouTube Clip of the day.
The G20 bought out the best in this city.
Click to view