Feliz Navidad, Biatches!!

I’m blogging from Changi Airport in Singapore right now…*squeeee!*

8 hours down, 16 hours to go. I highly recommend the foot massage here in Singapore, once you get used to it.

Sites this week – well, haven’t done much web trolling, can you blame me?

http://www.virtualtourist.com. This is where I did pretty much all my sight-seeing planning. In fact, I could really just go on here and drool at the possibilities all day. And if you do nothing else, well you could just read the horror stories some people post up there about shitty things that happen to them, if that’s what butters your bread…

And that’s pretty much it, sorry! Well done to me anyway, don’t you think? I might post you all some photies next week, if you’ve been good for Santa. Peace out!

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

8 Days to Spain! If one more person asks me whether I’ve started packing, I will shoot them and then have my passport cancelled so I won’t be able to go.

And while my diary isn’t quite going to Oscar Wilde’s (see above) I do plan to try and blog the trip to make you all jealous!

This week:

1) I’ve been grinning at what a turd-head Michael Crichton is: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/books/14cric.html?_r=1&ex=157680000&en=5f655def0e7d4adc&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&oref=slogin. When I’m a writer, I promise not to be anywhere near as much of a turd-head. The man makes Germaine Greer look like someone’s nice drunk Nanna…

2) I’ve been trying desperately to get in a holiday mood: I found http://babychaos.wordpress.com/2006/12/15/the-most-pathetic-christmas-joke-of-all-time/ on someone’s blog, and think I may have gotten my christmas spirit together

3) I read an awesome review of BNL’s latest wonderful album, Barenaked Ladies Are Me. http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/03/barenaked_ladies_are.html. What excited me even more is that it’s written by Cory Doctorow, who wrote “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” which I liked a lot. In the words of Homer Simpson, “Everything has come together in a neat little package”!

Until next week (mere hours before Spain!), God Rest Ye Merry Blog Readers. Let Nothing You Dismay. (Except for celebrity antics and crappy work christmas gifts…)

“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course…”

Well, I passed Enterprise Architectures, so I won’t have to repeat it – yay! Although I do miss the good old GPA-of-6.25 days… whoever said studying and working full time would work has a lot to answer for!

This week at work is REEEEEEEEAL slow – and it’s only going to get worse as Christmas rolls round. I have been doing plenty of….ehem, “research”…. over the past few days, and offer up the fruits of my not-particularly-labourious labour below:

1) One crazy project I’ve had this week is to explore the possibility of liberrian-ing in Second Life. Although my personal opinion is that my workplace is probably throwing themselves into this (and pretty much all other Web 2.0 technology) just for the sake of saying they can, lots of libraries are already strutting their virtual stuff in SL. Two of the most notable Aussie SL Librarians blog at http://virtual.librariesinteract.info/. Take a look if you like, crazy stuff. At least there’s not a virtual twin-set anywhere to be seen…

2) Fantastic Fiction (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/) is a wonderful resource, a database of fiction titles, series, authors and genres. I use it to BookCross. I use it to review. Hell, if I was a public librarian, I’d probably use it to choose 90% of my fiction budget (damn you, Economics!) I am notorious for finding parts 2 and 3 of a tetralogy and stubbornly refusing to get rid of them until I have read the series. At least on FF I can find the titles, then go on Amazon and whine about how I can’t afford the shipping. Good times.

3) If I die, I never want to come back as an ABS statistician…I’m now at least 85% sure that it was my ABS stats collection at work that gave me legionaire’s disease or whatever it was last week. So I’m directing traffic this week to the ABS website, http://www.abs.gov.au. The more hits they get, the more they might justify digitizing, and make my life that much easier (and less prone to the black lung!) Seriously though, their site has stats and figures for pretty much any Australian question you have. And now it’s free, so no more hassling the State Library! Leave them to cry over their ugly uniforms, and throw spitballs across the river at the City Council building! Get your own damn stats, people!

I leave you now to go back to (apparently) what I spent all that money to get a masters for – looking up my work on Technorati to find out what students are saying about us, and playing with the pie chart feature on indicators databases. 8 work days ’til Christmas… may it be a mantra to you too!

Sydney is Jeffrey Archer’s second favourite city on earth…

What does that tell you, eh?

Anyway, Sydney was marvelous to visit (couldn’t EVER live there), conference was reasonably good fun, and lots and lots of thanks to my lovely Sydney friend who showed me a good time around the city not once, but two nights in a row! (lucky girl!!)

Thought this week I’d share a couple of sites mentioned at NLS2006 (gasp! things librarians thought were fun!). I think this post counts as professional development, then. Maybe I get a certificate or something…

1) The President of IFLA, when he wasn’t showing off pictures of excellently tasty library buildings around the world [ie library manager porn] was showing off “You don’t look like a librarian!” http://www.librarian-image.net/. Images, news stories, articles etc about stereotype librarians vs real librarians. Oh, I don’t look like a librarian either, dear… left my bondage costume and comfortable shoes in the car again. What is it with Guybrarians?

2) This site wias given as the perfect example of Shaping the User Experience – http://movielens.umn.edu/. You log in, start rating movies you’ve seen, and after about 4 or 5 entries the database starts suggesting other movies you might like, going by what you’ve rated and tagged a movie as and what other people have rated and tagged movies as. Now people, no tagging Ella Enchanted as porn…

3) Not an NLS site, but also sent to me by a librarian – http://www.secondhandsongs.com. The site creator is doing a PhD on cover songs (“Meh?”, I hear you say? You heard aright!) and has a comprehensive database of songs and artists, who they’ve covered and who covers them. The random “Did you know” sidebar is good for hours of fun, browsing and inane dinner party conversation. “Did you know Hung Up by Madonna was originally written by Benny Goeran Andersson, Björn K. Ulvaeus and performed by ABBA in 1979?” Did you care? I didn’t think so…

Until next time, my dears – with a promise to be more prompt, and not let any silly little CRIPPLING DEBILITATING PLAGUE stand in between me and providing you with links to waste your time. I cough on you all!