one more thing on last.fm, etc.

Instead of entering your Pandora username and password on a third-party site, you can use a Firefox plugin to scrobble your streams into last.fm. I love that.

Speaking of extensions, my library finally has a LibX toolbar plugin and it's great. I just added it today and I'm already instinctively going to it instead of constantly going to the homepage. The only problem is my toolbar is getting crazy crowded. Even though I use blummy, I have 21 bookmarks I use so often I need one-click access to them. If the meebo link wasn't staring me in the face, I'd forget to log in every day and I need to leave it up if IM at work is going to be useful. It's weird how everybody works differently. I like as few windows as possible, so I keep many, many tabs open as I work. My dream would be for everything in the universe to work like a combination of firefox and tivo.

hateration, holleration

Have you all been following Nancy Pelosi's doings as the next Speaker? I have, but that's not what I want to talk about right now. During my regular morning NYT browsing session, I came across this article* about Pelosi not selecting Alcee L. Hastings for the new chair of the House Intelligence Committee. The part that caught my attention was this quote from Hastings's statement:

“Sorry, haters, God is not finished with me yet,” he said.

For some reason, I love it when politicians drop slang like this.

*You might have to log-in to read it.

My life in beta

I just switched my blogs over to Blogger Beta. I'm already regretting not waiting to switch until I absolutely had to because now I can't see any of my comments. My current plan is to just wait a while and see if things resolve themselves. This is my usual M.O. and sometimes it works.

In other, more fun news, I started using last.fm along with Pandora, via real-ity.com. I'm not sure how much I'll use some of the features, but I'll give it a try.

Buried in RSS

So, when my Bloglines show 6170 unread posts, do I just give up? It's kind of like the 300 flagged for "follow-up" emails I have in my work inbox. How does this happen?

Rocking out and buying books

I don't have any standing appointments on Mondays, so I try to squeeze in as much collection development as I can every week. I spent the better part of this morning ordering the various faculty requests that have piled up in my inbox lately. I forget how fun and relaxing it can be. It's also a good time to listen to music. Today I realized the Smiths make the perfect book-buying soundtrack. I also recommend Wilco, which has the added benefit that I'm less likely to sing along to it.

Back on the CD tip. One especially savvy person sent over search results from MLA, which gave me a chance to test out our new link resolver. It works really well. I especially like that we recently added the option to search the unified catalog to which we belong and it executes the search automagically. I just wish we could do the same from our catalog, like I'm used to from University of Washington catalog to Summit. If only we were a III library--I miss that.

Speaking of my alma mater, I read that my grad program's student newsletter, the Silverfish, is getting a new name. This makes me a little sad because I liked the name and think it's unique and edgier than most. It's been renamed before, but I thought it was cool that the staff went back to the original name in 1996. Actually, I don't know that there wasn't an earlier name, but Silverfish goes back pretty far. R.I.P., Silverfish.

The state of my office/the state of my mind

This is why I can't think clearly:



That's actually after I spent some time cleaning up.

I had nine instruction sessions last week, and my first T&P packet was due Friday. My hot water tank exploded on Tuesday night and my landlady was in Mexico until Sunday. I've been super busy for the past month, with teaching mostly, but last week was the undoing of me. After five days of boiling water for dishwashing and bathing, I'm very glad I'm getting things repaired today. I'm trying to get back to posting, but make no promises that it will be interesting for a while.