What did you do this year that you’d never done before? Got somebody pregnant! (Funny how you go your whole life trying to avoid that scenario and then, just like that, it's the objective.)
Did anyone close to you give birth? My sister had a baby girl named Emmerson Raye.
Did anyone close to you die? No, thankfully, but we did attend on funeral even though we were away from home. It was for one of Shea's distant relatives - an uncle of her mom's who Joan stayed with for a summer when she was a teenager - and whom we'd gone to visit in Chatham only a few months earlier.
What countries did you visit? USA. (Now, if it said "counties" - Bruce, Huron, Oxford, Middlesex...)
What would you like to have in next year that you lacked this year? An income.
What date from this year will remain etched upon your memory? January 3 = Orientation Day. December 8 = Last Day of Classes.
What was your biggest achievement of the year? Getting my Masters degree in a one-year accelerated program taking the full load without breaking for co-op or reducing my schedule at all.
What was your biggest failure? I feel like there's so much more that I wanted to do beyond the everday schoolwork to try and make the MLIS program better, more useful and/or entertaining for those who come after - helping to improve the Council web site, starting the ball rolling to implementing a student council fee, making sure that the Lunch Bucket Speaker Series and Nameless Movie Series would continue.
What was your biggest surprise? Winning the Spirit of Librarianship Award in my first term was pretty surprising since I didn't even know about it until Christina told me she was nominating me. (Looking back, I don't know how I didn't know about it since a former winner, Sabina, was my peer mentor. But she was pretty good about not talking about it...at least compared to me! )
Did you suffer illness or injury? No. I didn't even catch a cold all year if you can believe it (when I normally get sick once or twice.)
What was the best thing you bought? Digital camera or MP3 player - I'm still a gadget-geek at heart.
Whose behaviour merited celebration? Most of the people at library school are pretty cool and everything but there were a few that simply radiate goodness - maybe one person per term if that. Those people definitely merit celebration.
Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed? I'm working on being more open and understanding of all viewpoints and motivations. But I was always disappointed when I saw people at school acting in what I felt was a non-librarian manner - from not sharing information or helping others to being outright rude or <gasp> even talking about how much they didn't like books!
What did you get really, really, really excited about? Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio.
What song/album will always remind you of this year? Bright Eyes - "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning" was my constant companion walking to school in first term. Hawksley Workman - "Treeful of Starling" in second term. Third term was Sam Baker - "Mercy" and Tragically Hip "World Container."
Compared to this time last year, are you:
Happier or sadder? Much happier.
Thinner or fatter? Probably the same.
Richer or poorer? Poorer because of student loans but poised to be richer because of the earning potential of my new degree.
What do you wish you’d done more of? Travel around Ontario seeing more tourist attractions - both well-known and lesser-known.
What do you wish you’d done less of? Even though Shea and I told ourselves that we were going to enjoy our year "abroad" and not deny ourselves any trips, restaurants, concerts, conferences, etc., I feel a bit guilty about how much money we spent doing so.
How will you be spending did you spend Christmas? Very relaxing visiting with Shea's family for half and then my family for half. Our "price limit on gifts" mentioned in a recent entry really helped keep the stress level low.
Who did you spend the most time on the phone with? I literally do not use the phone anymore. I spent a heck of a lot of time on e-mail (50+ per day I'd bet) and one big adjustment being out of school is only getting maybe 5 messages per day. I miss the deluge in some ways but appreciate the extra time not having to deal with so much e-mail gives me.
What was your favourite TV program? The Daily Show/Colbert Report
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? No, I hate all the same people.
What was the best book(s) you read? No pun intended but I "bookended" the year with "Revolting Librarisn Redux" and "Our Singular Strengths: Meditations for Librarians" and both were excellent in their own way.
What was your greatest musical discovery? Sam Baker although Elliott Brood are up there too. (I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Buttonfly are great too of course!)
What did you want and get? Everything I wanted out of the past year, I got - the experience of living in a different province, my MLIS degree, a whole new circle of friends and acquaintances, the opportunity to look into many topics of interest to me and much more.
What did you want and not get? I guess one thing is that were a few classes I wish I could've fit in but didn't because of scheduling conflicts or just lack of space within the 15-course limitation. I'm sure I've talked about which classes I wish I'd taken elsewhere so I won't repeat the list here.
What were your favourite films of this year? Films? Who had time for films? Okay, we did get to a few - "Borat" pops immediately to mind for how funny it was. "The Departed". "Clerks II". "V for Vendetta". "Death of a President". "An Inconvenient Truth". Uhm, and probably some other ones. Oh, I know - "The Aristrocrats" was by far, my most anticipated and favourite film of the year. Loved it!
What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I think I skipped a management class (my only skip of the year) and went to a pre-conception appointment with Shea which was pretty exciting (and a form of "Human Growth Potential" that I'd much rather learn about! )
What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Er, winning a lottery? No idea really.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept this year? Jeans and t-shirts, just like every other year.
What kept you sane? I'm not usually a charms and superstitions kind of guy but last year (in 2005), I had to sell books for my old job at the International Indigenous Librarians' Forum that was held in Regina. I got to sit in on all the sessions for that conference since the displayers were in the same room as the speakers. Needless to say, this was amazing. During one break, I ended up talking to a young Maori librarian from New Zealand. I mentioned that I would like to be a librarian someday (I hadn't applied yet but would, roughly a month later.) He pulled a necklace with a green charm stone on it. "Here. This is for you to help you in the future," he said. I was a bit surprised by this unexpected show of generosity from a complete stranger and went home that night to find something to give to him the next day to reciprocate the gesture. Anyhow, that's a long way of saying that I wore that necklace pretty much everday through the year and it helped me keep perspective, especially when things got stressful (as they often did.)
Who did you miss? My parents and family since I didn't get home all year (though M&D did make it out in April to visit for two weeks.)
Who was the best new person you met? Oh man, there were dozens of amazing, cool, intelligent people in library school that I now consider friends. One of the best benefits of going back to school, right up there with the actual education.
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned this year. "Maximize access to information."
Quote a song lyric that sums up your year? "Libraries gave us power/Then work came and made us a free" - A Design For Life - Manic Street Preachers
What do you hope the next year brings? A healthy baby, a good job that I enjoy and continued maximized enjoyment of life.
(PS - sorry if some of those answers show up in italics. The cut & paste from the site where I found the meme idea kept some weird formatting I couldn't get rid of. I also deleted a few irrelevant questions and maybe added one or two that they were missing that made sense to include.)
Here's another year-end meme where you record the first sentence of the blog entry that began each month. I started this blog in late February so there's no January but otherwise, this is a surprisingly good encapsulation of my year:
February Well, I've finally gotten on the "blog-wagon"...
March As I mentioned in my last entry, there's a web meme going around in the blogosphere
April TEN REASONS I HATE GEORGE W. BUSH
May Way back in College 1.0, I wrote a satirical essay in one of my writing classes which I think is appropriate at this time as I sit in a Montreal hostel, looking through the books on the history of the city
June Instead of taking a fifth class, I'm doing an independent study this summer on the relationship between book publishers and public libraries in Canada.
July Just in time for all my classmates' co-op interviews, Michael Stephens has posted: Ten Rules for the New Librarians which includes some tips for interviews in the comments.
August I presented my 697 Individual Study findings to the 501 class on Tuesday and it went pretty well.
September For anybody who's new to this blog, the "Friday Fun Link" is something that I've been doing in one form or another since the late 1990's.
As I've mentioned before, my favourite web site on the Internet is MetaFilter - a community weblog where any member can post and comment on stories which range from technology to news to pretty much anything else you can think of. The site has members from around the world who encompass all worldviews but tend to skew leftist/libertarian overall. The fact that the co-administrator is a well-known librarian adds to the site's appeal for me as well.
MetaFilter has developed a few other "sister sites" including AskMetaFilter where members can post questions on pretty much any topic and as on the "blue" (ie. Metafilter, so named for its background colour), members can respond. (I think that I've talked about this site as a possible model for the future of library reference in a technology-focused world.)
I should also mention that as much as I like MetaFilter is exactly how much Shea likes AskMetaFilter. It's definitely an addictive site once you start checking in to see the new questions which pop up on a fairly fast basis.
So anyhow, I thought this post in the Administrative section of the site, MetaTalk (aka "the gray"), might be of interest to some people. The site owner had posted a link to a site where you could play old Commodore-64 games. Someone else posted a link to bit torrent files of Wagner recordings which was deleted by the site owner due to the copyright infringement issue. The person whose post was deleted questioned the double-standard of this deletion and a nerd's eye view discussion of copyright ensues.
[Edit: Here's another semi-related post that just went up today about musicians in the UK pushing to extend copyright.]
...sometimes you have absolutely nothing to say. (I've got a fun one lined up for tomorrow though - promise!)
For some reason, this emptiness of ideas inspired me to check my stats. As I suspected, my number of "unique visitors" are down by about 2/3 from an all-time high right around that "50 Ways To Improve FIMS Entry" earlier this month. Not sure if it's just a Christmas/New Year's lull or if it will continue at this level (or sink more, the further removed I get from library school.)
For a guy who's fairly open about sharing information, I have an issue about sharing my stats traffic. This is partly because I'm not sure how accurate it is (does my hosting company manage to filter out visits by spammers, spiders, and other non-traffic traffic?) Another issue is how misleading the numbers may be even if they are accurate (my ISP counts daily unique visitors but if somebody visits on a daily basis, they might count as 30 "unique visitors" in the month-end stats. Or if someone visits from multiple computers and/or using multiple methods - maybe using an RSS reader sometimes while coming directly to the site for articles of interest - that may screw up the stats too.) Finally, there's simply as issue of numbers for web visitors being meaningless. I know of one web site owner who's making a living completely from running a very targeted, niche blog/information portal which allows him to run a much larger group of sites that (as I understand it) aren't nearly as lucrative.
I'm not making any money off this site but what I'm saying is I'd rather have 100 readers who get a lot out of my scribbling than 1000 people who come here randomly because I happen to use words like "Lindsay Lohans" and "sex tape" in one my entries (just as an example.) And at least my site didn't go down due to the traffic for the third month in a running which is a nice change.
Anyhow, for having nothing to say that was...well, a lot of nothing (a skill that also came in useful while writing library school essays!)
For the second week in a row, I'm sort of fudging the Friday Fun Link. Last week, I did it by posting one video on LibrarianActivist and a different one on Head Tale. This week, I'm repeating something I already posted here (an entry about year-end lists from a couple weeks ago) over there. So there's no official Friday Fun Link here this week but if you want to revisit the original post, you can follow this link.
(Okay, I feel guilty about not having a new link so here's the Google Maps flight simulator. Pretty fun time waster.)
So it's 3:45am on December 28 and I'm back in my own bed after a few days of riding the sleigh around SE Saskatchewan (well, to Shea's parents in Weyburn, my parents in Indian Head then back to Regina today.) Right now, I'm surfing around to catch-up on my regular blogs and here's some of what struck me...
One of my main partners-in-crime for much of library school, Lindsay H., recently got on the blogwagon and since she's got me listed under "Awesome Blogs" (and since I'm the only site listed there...so far!), I thought I'd give her a shout out (or whatever the kids on MySpace say.) She's also promised to do at least a weekly entry to keep it "fresh" and "hip" (again, my words, not hers) and so far, her entries have been very enjoyable.
Quinn's put a link to his LinkedIn profile in his latest blog entry which inspired me to put a link to my own LinkedIn profile here as well. For anyone who doesn't know, LinkedIn is another social networking site but with more of a job/career/professional focus rather than a University/join random groups/put up pictures of yourself with a drink in your hand and/or cleavage showing-focus like Facebook (and how many people clicked on the Facebook link rather than the LinkedIn one based on that description? Be honest!)
The hardest part of social networking sites for me is finding other people on them that I know so if anybody reading this is on LinkedIn, feel free to add me as a contact.
Amanda Etches-Johnson who taught social software last term posted a link to a photo of her Christmas reading list and I've just recently read "The Long Tail" (two word review: beyond excellent), I grabbed "Paris 1919" in a random walk through the Sunrise Branch of the RPL right before heading to Shea's parents and I've now added "Ambient Findability" to my own reading list since that's a pretty strong recommendation when somebody end up buying the same book twice without even realising it! Oh, and I also see a link on her site to NaBloPoMo which makes me realise that November was National Blog Posting Month where you were supposed to post daily for one whole month. Apparently, I subconsciously realised this and am now going on what, three months straight in my own version - NaHaveNoLifeNoMo?
Renee S's blog is probably the most consistently entertaining one that I read (and since I know you're thinking it, my own blog is probably somewhere around #4 on the Top 10 list. And there are a few on that list of ten that would easily vault past mine if they were updated a bit more frequently. <hint, hint> It doesn't have to be daily like those of us with too much time on our hands but even weekly updates like Lindsay has promised help make it interesting. Who else is in that Top Three? At this moment, I'll say Jerome Martin and MeShell but that really changes on a daily basis depending on what people are writing about.)
Mike T. pushes that "too much information" button with one of the funniest blog entries I've read in a long time.
Cenobyte did an entry on her family's Buy Nothing Christmas and also how a friend donated to charity instead of giving her a gift. Both are ideas that have had some play in our household as well and I don't think we were the only ones thinking this way - the stores/malls that I did end up visiting this Christmas seemed pretty slow and empty. We couldn't convince the family to go completely "Buy Nothing" but we went with a $25 per person limit which is much lower than we'd usually spend. I liked that it made Christmas feel so much less stressful trying to run around and buy multiple gifts for everybody which end up sitting on a shelf unopened or whatever.
One of Shea's mom's co-workers made us a "Baby Guess Book" which is basically a scrapbook filled with baby-related clip art, poems, and a bunch of spots for family and friends to record their guesses about various aspects of our baby.
I thought I'd do a virtual edition and allow anyone reading the opportunity to play along as well. If you want to try, post a comment with guesses for the following categories:
As a bit of help, I can let you know that Shea's official due date is June 6 (although one six-year old cousin we polled guessed "Christmas Day" as his pick anyhow!)
So obviously, guesses can be fun or serious (my favourite guess for a name so far is by one of Shea's cousins who suggested "Heywood". He thought it would be useful to be able to say: "Hey, would you get me a beer? Hey, would you cut the grass? Hey, would you...")
Apparently some people make the game into a 50/50-type draw - people pay a loonie for a guess and then the collected money gets split between the baby's education fund and the person guessing the correct birthdate with the weight as a tie-breaker (in true Price Is Right fashion, closest without going over takes it.)
We're not collecting money but to encourage people to guess, I'm going to promise to send the winning guesser their choice of a free copy of one of the following books:
Those books have nothing to do with babies really (I think all are YA titles instead) but if anybody's interested in an excellent book about babies, I'd recommend Big Breath of a Wish by Richard Harrison, a poetry collection that was nominated for the 1999 GG Award.
Love Actually is right up there as one of my favourite Christmas movies of all-time and this song at the end of the movie is a big part of the reason why. We're heading back to Regina tomorrow after a few days split between Shea's and my parents place so hopefully I'll get back to some entries with a bit of actual content to them rather than cheating by just linking to YouTube clips everyday!
I was looking for a clip from a M*A*S*H episode set to "I'll Be Home For Christmas" because it has that perfect touch of melancholy that makes for perfect holiday music (see the Pogues clip I linked to earlier this month for the ultimate example.)
I couldn't find the clip I wanted (what? Every single piece of video recorded isn't online yet?) but did stumble across this montage of home movies set to the same tune and with a Saskatchewan theme to boot (honest, I have no connection to this video although some of the mullet headed guys in the background do slightly resemble myself in Grade 11.) The shots of the parents laying in bed with their baby are particularly heartwarming (well, they are this year. Last year, I would have found them mawkish and over-the-top. )
So anyhow, Merry Christmas (and/or Happy Holidays depending on how politically correct you prefer this time of the year) and thanks to everybody reading for helping make my year such a great one!
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