I went running this morning, if you can call it that, on the Confederate Trail in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.  The island is very picturesque and the trail is breathtaking in spots.  I’d been told that the fox population is quite high, but didn’t see any until this morning.

On the outbound trip I came close enough to pet a large red fox.  He stopped, dropped his head low, and watched me.  People must feed them.  We watched each other for a couple of minutes before he lifted his tail and jogged off into the tall grass on the side of the trail.

On the return trip I was stunned to watch a fox, perhaps the same fox, chasing a chipmonk.  I had the advantage of height watching the scene play out in a grassy spot lower than the trail.  I had to wonder for a moment whom I should root for before realizing that it didn’t matter to either of them what I thought.  They were both beautiful and the sun was still low and golden in the sky.  Flowers all around.  A perfect morning.

I haven’t posted in awhile.  In fact, I’ve again been considering taking down this blog and closing my twitter account (again).  Part of the problem is one of scope.  I keep thinking I should pretend I’m a corporate drone and try to hide that fact that I have opinions and a personality.  Other times, I think perhaps I should be myself and let the chips fall where they may.  If a future prospective employer doesn’t like something about me and is willing to act on it then perhaps it’s better to weed them out as early as possible.  I’ve been called idealistic before, obviously.  There are also questions to be asked about what the value of blogs, in general.

The truth is that I do a fairly good job of white-washing my identity.  I don’t share a lot of life details with others, even those I know in meatspace.  Why, then, blog and twitter?  I do not know.

Some days I feel like because I’m a librarian I’m supposed to be in love with every new website that comes down the pike.  Twine, brightkite, friendfeed, ad nauseum.  I think I offended some people by trash talking Facebook recently.

The interface makes me want to scream.  The applications make it difficult to find information in profiles.  Sending hugs and turning people into zombies is not a compelling use of my time.  In fact, I wonder what people are thinking when they engage in these activities.  I mean, these people are educated professionals with demanding jobs who find time and interest enough to pick out ‘gift’ images to embed in profiles of others.  Why?!

And so.  Now I’m trying to engage Facebook and find a way to integrate it into my life.  I do find it somewhat useful to reconnect with people I’ve not thought about for decades.  I haven’t decided that my life has improved as a result, though.  It is interesting to see what some people I only know professionally do in their real lives, but again, I’m not sure about added value.

Oddly, I really like twitter.  I like having an idea what friends and collegues are doing.  I’ve found points of collaboration and shared interests with others.  I’ve said and read some innappropriate stuff.  I like they way the UCSD/SDSC guys use it; they use twitter to meetup for drinks.

n.b.  If this post seems pointless it’s because I wrote it just to make Brandi happy.

I’m voting Republican! You should too.

You know, or not.

Man, I love Chicago. Driving down the Kennedy Expressway toward the loop I just got the feeling I was home again. We’re staying under the L on Jewelers Row and we’ve been walking up to Gold Coast, River North, and shopping the Magnificent Mile. We went to dinner last night for our anniversary at Carmine’s. We used to go there when we were dating in college so it’s a full-circle come-around. I also forgot how much I hate Chinatown. I expect anyone with any interest in animal rights or cruelty issues are probably similarly disgusted in Chinatowns everywhere.

We’re having a great time. It’s time to leave, though, for Macomb to see my family. Then we’ll drive to Effingham to see Brandi’s family. Hopefully we’ll be able to drop by Champaign-Urbana to hang out a bit. It’s funny just how much a few years in CU changed my life. I’d probably be living in New York training with Sensei Serge Clark and doing massage now if it weren’t for a fateful, snowy day gazing out the window of Larry’s archaeology lab. Things are going pretty swell the way they are.

Edit:  When I say ‘under the L’, I don’t mean it in an Elwood Blues sort of way.  The Silversmith Hotel is great.  We were really disappointed to see our old hotel, The Cass, was bought by Holiday Inn and consquently sucks.

Brandi tagged me with the Passion Quilt Meme- “Take/make a photo and caption it with a statement that you feel passionate for children, students, libraries…”

Here’s mine:

I’m a digital librarian and love technology, but in the end, it’s about people and freedom.  It’s about empowering people and leveling the field.  That’s one of the reasons I wanted to become a librarian.  I spend a lot of time at a computer, often working in isolation from users as my project isn’t a user-focused endeavor.  Still, it’s the people that are important.

This photo was taken at the Katherine Dunham Center in East St. Louis.  My wife, Brandi, is in the backrow.  Her class, LIS 451 Introduction to Networked Information Systems, build computers and a a lab for, and provided instruction to, neighborhood kids in one of the most imporvershed areas of the country.  Although my job here doesn’t look much like my job there, it’s still about empowering people.

My Civic has a digital indicator that displays remaining oil life in 10% increments.  When asked how it worked, by time, miles, or some other factor, the salesperson mades some vague, sweeping claims about the car recognizing city versus highway miles, dusy conditions, and several other factors that go into the calculation for oil life.  It’s now clear that the counter expires at 5,000 miles.  He also swore that it would be simple to reset it myself.

Yesterday I received my first coupon from the service department at Leith Honda.  I was pretty stunned.  I guess they’re the home of the $70 oil change.  Click and Clack tell me not to rotate tires.

I finally finished installing soffit venting yesterday which should improve the ventilation in my attic which should reduce the load on my HVAC which should reduce the power we use. That isn’t my point, though. When I finished and cleaned myself up I really felt like having a sandwich. It was a beautiful day and I thought I’d go to the local neighborhood grocery store, Kings Red and White, for bread. I could have easily walked the extra half block to Compare Foods, which is much larger but non-local. Or, I could have walked the opposite direction and gone to a panaderia or one of the other tiendas on Roxboro. I talked to a couple of neighbors on the way there, read some fliers on King’s local events board, and walked home with a couple of neighborhood kids. The algorithm at Walk Score seriously underestimates my neighborhood.

That little hike to the store reminded me of house hunting. We bought the house we did, in the neighborhood we did, partly for the ability to walk to stores and restaurants. Another important factor was proximity to the regional mass transit stop so I could catch the bus to work. I was reading the Atlantic this morning and The Next Slum? seemed to sum up perfectly why we didn’t want to live in a cul-de-sac suburbia.

We have friends who live in a giant, sprawling suburban McMansion development of enormous houses and it’s always so surreal to me. I’ve been in their neighbors houses and always had the impression that they’re just squatters. To a household, they all seem to have 1,000 square feet of furniture in their 5,000 square foot homes. With soaring ceilings and yards of the same paint throughout the houses I always have an unsettling feeling and can’t imagine how the occupants find it comfortable. On the edges of their development the houses are going to rent and crime is starting to rise. The article above could have been written about their completely un-walkable ‘neighborhood’.

Because I don’t want to talk about the FGDC Geospatial Metadata Standard, which was written before XML, I’ll post a picture of my backyard instead.  This is a screen capture of a Linksys camera pointed at my back yard.  It is awesome.

My next objective at work is to transfer some data to Library of Congress. I have the option of pushing data up the Abilene Network and will probably give network transfer a try, but the bulk of the data will move in two 1TB USB drives via Fed Ex. I’ll load them up and ship them to LC where they unload them and ship them back. Back and forth until they get everything.

I have an 11 page document specifying the organization, naming conventions, etc,. The most important point is that I need to create a UTF-8 text file at top-level directory containing the path and checksum (MD5 or SHA-1) for each file.

So, I have 5 1TB ZFS slices sitting in a storage array in our server room. Here’s the df -h:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/storage/ndiipp1 977G 975G 1.9G 100% /storage/ndiipp1
/storage/ndiipp2 977G 972G 5.2G 100% /storage/ndiipp2
/storage/ndiipp3 977G 804G 174G 83% /storage/ndiipp3
/storage/ndiipp4 977G 826G 152G 85% /storage/ndiipp4
/storage/ndiipp5 977G 820G 158G 84% /storage/ndiipp5

There are a couple of issues I need to think through. Hopefully I have enough free space after formatting (haven’t decided on a file system to use on USB drives) to perform a 1:1 copy from partition to USB drive. Of course I still need room for my UTF-8 manifest file. It seems like I’ll have space.

We’ve got 4GFC Firbre Channel switches in our storage area network, but I’ve only got a 100BASE-T LAN connection to my workstation. I’m very curious to find out how long it will take to both transfer the data from the SAN to the USB drive (probably using tar over SSH) and how long it will take to checksum the up to 85,000 file in each partition. I’m sure I’ll be glad I kept my old Xeon workstation to chew data. I think I’ll look around for a utility to grab some network statistics like collisions and resent packets.

Luckily, this may be network, processor, and time intensive, but it’s pretty automation friendly. That’ll give me some time to figure out why Fedora doesn’t seem to want to deploy properly in Sun Java App Server. Then I can start mapping data models between the DSpace and Fedora repositories.