3 exams in 3 days.

woohoo!

holy good gawd has the end of term snuck up on me.

615 and 617 assignments due friday. another 615 on monday. 607 on tuesday. then the following week 615, 607 and 617 exams. finally 601 assignment due that friday.

and thursday it’s supposed to be 18 degrees (celsius)! if that’s not mother earth telling us that she’s pissed off, i don’t know what is.

oh – and go and see “for your consideration” – christopher guest makes everything feel alright. nearly fell outta my seat.

i got my new computer. it s so freakin’ pretty.

i’m a bit of a nerd about it and spent the afternoon playing on it and transferring all my files from my ibook. itunes makes it pretty easy to transfer all your music, and iphoto let me burn all my photos too. on the whole, the process of transferring my junk didn’t take nearly as long as i thought it would. here’s hoping nothing got lost in the transfer!

i should have been working harder on either my dialog assignment or my literature, but i’ll make up for it tomorrow. plus, now i have a super-fast processor on my computer (aka “babette”) so my work will go even faster! right?

it’s mostly due to an assignment i have due on wednesday for my 601 class which is causing me to do a lot of internet snooping… and since i frequently get lost when surfing, i thought i’d post the last 5 sites i checked out (see if you can figure out which ones have to do with my assignment on a small public library).

http://www.fluevog.com/
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~kuhlthau/recent_presentations/presentations.htm
http://nces.ed.gov/index.asp
http://www.hour.ca/food/food.aspx?iIDArticle=9670
http://techessence.info

but now my internet connection is very very unhappy, so i think i’ll hit the sack and get up bright and early.

bonne nuit! 

wow – it pains me how lazy i’ve been with this blog.

especially when i consider the fact that i LOVE reading new postings on other blogs and why wouldn’t i return the favour by posting mucho? i think most of that has to do with the fact that i don’t think anyone’s actually reading this (and why would they… i never post!)

in a bid to quickly recap the past 2 months of craziness at GSLIS lemme go through my classes.

information and society
i was so excited when i saw it on my required courses list. i *heart* theory and since there’s not a ton of it in this master’s since it’s so applied, i was really keen on this class. now i’m finding there’s less theory than i had originally hoped (though my final assignment can be pretty heavily theoretical if i so choose). the assignments are interesting, but it’s really hard to know what the prof is looking for. after handing in our first project, most people in the class felt they could just as easily get a D as an A.

organization of information (aka cataloguing)
i think i secretly hoped that taking this class would unlock some kind of crazy cataloguing instinct i have which until now has been dormant. unfortunately that has yet to happen. i didn’t stink up the first cataloguing test we had, but the answers didn’t come to me as easily as i had hoped. for the most part the coursework isn’t too difficult, so long as you’re comfortable with your good ole AACR2r. the prof wears an eyeball ring (not a ring on his eyeball… a ring with an eyeball embedded in it) which is all kinds of creepy.

bibliographical and factual sources (aka reference)
the prof will be the first to admit that he LOVES to talk, but that’s okay because he’s pretty interesting. he’s probably been teaching this course for eons but still manages to sound interested in what he’s talking about and usually answers students questions (none of which must be new by now) in a thoughtful manner. we had a quiz last week and most of the class felt they over-studied for it, though we have heard that the tendency to study hard will come in handy for his final exam when we’re given a reference question and have to cite which bibliography we would use to find the answer (and we’re talking an actual physical book – no cheating by jumping onto the web to find the answer).

information system design
good thing computers don’t scare me. the prof is great: funny lectures, answers questions in a “i’ve-been-asked-that-942-times-but-i-won’t-make-you-feel-stooopid” way, and is a snappy dresser. but the programs we are using are hilarious. inmagic seems to be leftover from the first round of library automation systems. building a database on it wasn’t so difficult, but getting it to do what you wanted it to (especially for those of us used to clicking a button on the screen to navigate) was unfriendly. now we’re playing with dialog which has so much information in it i feel i could get lost in there for days learning things. but since it was created by lockheed martin, i’m trying not to be too enamoured with it. and i’m stating this now for the record, this will be our hardest exam because no one in the class has done ANY of the readings – thinking this is a purely applied course – and i’m sure the prof is gonna nail all our asses to the wall for slacking.

other than courses there’s a bunch of stuff going on within the school: candygrams for halloween, hosting archivists from the prairies, a colloquium with an associate deputy minister from LAC/BAC, a chat with the not-so-liked director of libraries, and the occasional booze-up at

all this to say, i vow to blog at least once a week from now on. (i figure this’ll mean at least once every 2 weeks…)

already i’m a bad blogger… no updates in more than a week, oy vey this little project is gonna be tough.

my classes rock (that’ll be another post entirely) and my colleagues are really an interesting bunch (with an bizarrely large number of philosophy majors). and i met a girl from Gimli, Manitoba! see, i already know someone from gimli who played for my rugby club, and he made the town sound so teeny that i never thought i’d ever meet another person from there. but i did, and she’s cool (let’s me call her “gimli”).

i was also lucky enough to be elected VP/President-elect of the student chapter of the Special Library Association at school. i went to the SLA conference this summer in Baltimore and every person i met did a wildly different job but almost all of them had MLIS degrees. so i’m pretty pumped to be involved in the student group for the next two years!

i’m hoping to post a whole whack of entries over the next few days to make up for the neglect my poor blog has received over the past 10 days.