my saturday morning

7:00am
you may have noticed in the past two hours I've posted more to this blog than I have in the past two months. i'm currently sitting at work, where I've been for the past 2 hours, waiting for the servers to come back online from their new location. It was supposed to happen at 5am. It didn't. But I still got here at 5. The magic of the morning is steadily diminshing. I brought a coffee pot, grinder, whole beans and tablespoon to make some good coffee but I forgot filters so I had to use the company coffee pot which is grungy artifact of really bad coffee making years. Also the coffee pot that was left with it doesn't actually fit. Thus I managed to make the worst pot of coffee I've ever made. I'm currently sitting alone in the office which is rather strange. I did get caught up on most of my blog reading that i've missed as well as reading this morning NY Times. I've been trying to convince myself to do this, that is, get up early and read. The reading has almost made getting up this early worth it.

8:32 am
servers are up and servers are....down. awesome.
8:37am
and the servers are up and holding steady.
8:46
waiting for hardware test to begin/finish; I've should stayed in bed. Was really thinking I would be out of here by 9am and out to the Doylestown Presbyterian Church for their, supposedly, sweet book sale. Hopefully will still make it. I do have a pretty sweet "ridiculously-early-morning-waiting-at-work" playlist going consisting of The National, both Boxer and Alligator, Pedro the Lion, Jacob Golden, Portishead, PatternisMovement, The Hold Steady, The New Pornographers, The Postal Service, Caribou, John Vanderslice, Rage Against the Machine, Zookeeper, Iron & Wine, Unwed Sailor and Thom Yorke. Eclectic and loud.
9:38
middle of making sure services are back on. dubservers still down therefore can't test anything ...and servers are down again

and up...

10:36 am
and done.

Addendum:
The book sale was awesome. I got there just as it was closing but they were gracious and let me scrounge. I gave them 5$ and they gave me a paper shopping bag. It was pretty scant pickings as I was looking to round out my collection of Grass and Vonnegut, none of whom were in evidence. It was also the last possible minutes of the sale so that might have had something to do with it. Among the good things that accompanied me home:
snow falling on cedars---guterson
short novels of thomas wolfe--wolfe
the crucible--miler (haven't read it yet)
Galatic Pot-Healer---Dick (according to the first couple pages the character can heal pots; you would pick it up too.)
Trojan Women---trans. Sartre
Mortal Coils---Huxley
The Promise---Potok (a really nice hardcover)
oh that old hotel--mitchell

Cuba lifts ban on home computers

Rivalry Played Out on Canvas and Page

this article is good for two reasons; this exhibition has works by DeKooning who was at the Bauhaus with Wolpe.
It makes fun of art critics. What else could you want?
The opening and closing sentences encapsulate the entire article in a sort of Schenkerian analysis. First sentence: "Art is long, art criticism is often very, very brief, its Internet afterlife notwithstanding. "
Last sentence "Neither critic was impressed but, as is so often the case, art went on without them."
It all gets reduced to Mozart in the end.

So It Goes

Can't tell you how excited I am about this book coming out. I've got a deep enjoyment and appreciation of Vonnegut's work. I've read most of it at this point. I was reading TimeQuake this week which is closer to being a collection of aphorisms rather than a story in the typical Vonnegutian vein. I read Man Without A Country, Vonnegut's last published work, last year and there are some definitive shared stories between the two. Sharing between stories is nothing new for Vonnegut I think it's one of the most enjoyable things of reading his works is the act of actively collecting the connections, based on characters, phrases, bird-calls, and seeing how those are reset, re-worked or re-introduced into new settings.
Vonnegut's work is also intriguing because it can be read, possibily to its own detriment, at two different levels. There is the first superficial level where the reader can simply collect the details of the story and work through the story as fiction without picking up any connections. Vonnegut has a very deceptive style postulated as easy to read but he hides rich detail and ideas within his works. This is the second level at which his works can be read. I had to read Man without a Country twice before I realized the almost minimalistic end-result of Vonnegut's writing is purposeful, developed and definitively not accidental.

The Kids Are All Noisy: British teens not welcome in libraries

The Kids Are All Noisy: British teens not welcome in libraries

One of the best quotes from this article in understanding how to approach teens in the library "...we should resist trying to force them to act like previous generations; that was then, and this is now." this is a crucial step to moving the library and library philosophy forward to reach out and embrace new technologies and new approached to pedagogy in information literacy. It's not forcing these next generations to act in the library or to approach the library as we or our parents did but to take the tools they are used to using and see how those tools can interact wityh and mold future ways of thinking about the purpose of the library and its future as its future is truly in the hands of these kids.

Higher Offer by Microsoft Brings Yahoo to Table

back again?