I'm now officially certified as a lifeguard by the Red Cross. apparently this sort of thing runs in my family. My Dad was a lifeguard and so was my grandfather (on my Mom's side). I explain more about the story with the accompanying Flickr photo but here's how my week went.

I had class from 4-9 pm each night Monday through Friday. Most nights we were done by 8 but some nights we weren't. The other students in my class were three VTC students, one high school kid, one other guy from the community about my age and two lifeguards who were training to be lifeguard instructors. The instructors were two no-nonsense women sent by the Red Cross. We split the classes up between watching Red Cross videos, going over and practicing first aid, and going over and practicing drowning and rescuing. Then we'd have tests on these things culminating in an all-day testing situation on Saturday from about 9 til 1.

I do good on tests. I have an okay head for numbers and first aid mnemonics. I am a strong swimmer. What I am NOT any good at... is drowning. Part of the class involves pairing up with other students (the female instructors make sure the women in the class are teamed up with the guys because they want to make sure the guys get used to grabbing women in rescue situations where usually they'd be more like "um, excuse me") and practicing rescuing each other. In most ways in the class I felt like I was holding my own as a (relative to the rest of the class) old lady, but I was the worst drowner of them all.

I could tell myself it's because I have asthma and I'm not good at holding my breath or whatever but the truth is that waiting under six feet of water for some high school student to drag me to the surface when I KNOW there are better options is just not something I'm good at. I was sort of happy with myself for being able to just suck it up and do it. As I get older, there are fewer and fewer situations where I need to suck it up to do anything or accomplish anything. I've sort of created my life this way and overall I'm pleased with that. However it was nice to know that for a good reason, I could suck it up and just take orders in order to learn things.

Every night after Monday I came home sore and every day I'd take ibuprofen and drag my ass back to the pool and do more practice rescues and swimming and tests. It's not like 30+ hours of class is all that grueling, but I think they normally break it up over a few weeks. By Saturday morning I was feeling feverish and just out of it, but I made it through the tests okay -- as did everyone, I think the goal is for everyone to finish up cerified (certifiable?) -- and I came home afterwards, popped in to a friend's house to say hello and then went home and slept for almost twelve hours. I woke up today feeling much better -- even went for a little hike -- and didn't even think about going to the pool. Normal swimming will resume on Tuesday.

Labels: lifeguard, me, pool, swimming

I haven't been driving the new car much mostly because the radio isn't as good as my other car and there's no AC and the windows crank, but I did get new plates for it. This was a heavy driving weekend. I must have gone 500 miles just getting to two dinners and a doctor's appointment. It involved some amazingly lovely parts of route 100, both under 89 and above, and some not-that-interesting parts of route 89 that I'm already sort of bored with.

I got two add two photos to Wikipedia [Buels Gore and Hancock] and decided to update my 251 club status. I have 38 towns left in VT that I've never been to.

We've had thunderstorms here. Enough so that I was driving down a pretty empty part of Route 100, just north of Stowe and I heard the Emergency Broadcast Signal and then the "this is NOT a test" message and a warning about "quarter-sized hail" I came around a bend and I could see the massive thunderhead full of lightning spraying all over the place, in the direction I was driving. I got to Stepahnie's house just as the winds were picking up and got to sit around watching the lights blink on and off for a while but the hail never materialized. I got home several hours later and all the appliances were telling me that my power had been off too.

Labels: 251club, cars, driving, me

The pool is going to be open until 10 pm. This is great news. This means there will be something to DO at 9 pm around here during the week.

I went to the movies again, this time with Rick and Sarah. We saw Ratatouille and then it started to pour rain so we skipped out on Pirates of the Carribean 3 which is okay by me. Then a bunch of social stuff fell through (mixed signals plannign a lake trip, too many clouds for flying) and I knew I was back to my old self again when I shrugged and thought "oh, well I guess I'll have some free time to do a bunch of stuff around here" And I did.

I took all the recycling out. I cleaned up the kitchen. I took the hanging baskets with the fake plants on them off the kitchen ceiling (you'd have to see it to really get it) and put them out on the porch where they look nice and are more easily dusted. I mopped the floors. I paid the bills. I did the laundry. I unpacked some stemware that I'd brought home from my Mom's place months ago and put the box out in the garage. I planned the Nova Scotia trip. I updated my blog software (well, I'm in the process now). I finished a blog project for a friend. I started another blog project. I downloaded some music. I changed lightbulbs. I did a little dusting. I threw out a bunch of bottlecaps with pithy sayings because I didn't have anything to do with them. I wrote a few letters. I made plans to move my 401K from the random people who were managing it to Fidelity who has the rest of my investment-type money. I called the fuel oil people.

You get the idea. It felt GREAT. It's been getting cold here and tonight I had tomoato basil soup and a two-cheese grilled cheese sandwich to welcome the Autumn. The Virgo Month of Leisure begins on Thursday and I think I've gotten a lot of picky nonsense done that I will NOT have to do while I'm trying hard (and failing, as usual) to relax.

Plus I'm training to be a lifeguard. More on that in a few days.

Labels: autum, fall, friends, me, virgomonthofleisure

I got back from Seattle Wednesday morning the first and Wednesday was a sort of predictable sleepy haze. My sister arrived on Friday (see drive-in pic below) and there was a meetup at my house last Saturday for about 13 people. My friend Joanne stayed over so she wouldn't have to drive down the moose and bear highway late at night. Sunday Gordon stopped by briefly with his cheese head and I had a friend from libraryland swing by on a trip through the Northeast for the evening. Monday I hung out in Randolph with my friends' three cats. Tuesday my friend Peter stopped by on his trip around the US and I got to pick him up at the train station right in Randolph which is something I don't do very often. It's nice to get to walk to the train station. Gordon showed up at about 1 am on his way back from a punk show in Pennsylvania and he slept here brielfy before catching a morning flight. I drove Peter to his Dad's house -- one of my all-time favorite houses but alas I don't want to live there -- and then it was back to catland until Tom (MetaFilter user Meatbomb who sent me a lovely satchel from Afghanistan as well as this excellent hat) showed up with his fiancee on their first stop on their cross-country adventure. I made them some waffles in the morning and sent them off to Niagara Falls. Then it was back to clean-up and laundry and closing down the catsit for my friends' return. When my friend Finn showed up last night I wanted to take a photo of him holding a sign that said LAST BAG but forgot about it entirely and we went for a walk down by the river and ate some homemade foccacia and were savaged by mosquitos.

I went to bed in an empty house and woke up with a totally open day. Well, open until I have dinner with friends this evening and I'll probably hop into the pool before then, and I guess I have some errands to run. My plan is to spend the next few weeks doing some local visiting. I have friends renting a lakehouse up in Vermont and a few other pals with new babies a little farther out that I'd like to see sometime before things get hectic again. The hectic, of course, coincides with the Virgo Month of Leisure, as usual.

Labels: august, friends, me

I had a bunch of people over to my house for a pseudo-MetaFilter meetup. Then some of us went to the drive-in. It did not rain. I did not go alone. The weather was nifty and the stars were amazing. There was something really fun about watching Harry Potter on the big screen and seeing shadows flitting over the whitewashed plywood. Bats!

Labels: bats, drive-in, harrypotter, me

I have heard about people that lie to their psychiatrists. I almost lied to my mechanic today when I took my new (to me) car in for an inspection and some new tires. For some reason I was inordinately concerned with what he thought about the car and my ability to have gotten a decent deal on it. He liked the car and didn't call me any names when I told him, honestly, what I paid for it. Yay for new cars.

Labels: cars, me

This is a post I was meaning to write for a while. It was going to be the post of "where did my Summer go?" and then just about the time I got motivated enough to start typing, I was off again, and then I was down again.

The short story is that in mid-May my friend and good family friend Pat died. This was the most recent event in what has generally been a somewhat down year including dating a third year law student, breaking up with a third year law student, my Mom being sick, me having miscellaneous mystery ailments and a good dose of hypochondria, and this rainy swamp that passes for Summer around here and my everdamp and moldy basement. I've been okay but I haven't been great. I'm usually great. I was exercising a lot, all the time, and I knew it was going wrong when I realized that I'd already swam a mile, my third or fourth that week saying to myself "gee, I don't feel tired at all, how strange. I must be getting better at this..." but in fact, I was getting worse.

I torqued a few muscles including one chest-wall muscle that set off a "go get a mammogram!" scare and one groin-area muscle that I kept poking to make sure it wasn't a swollen lymph node. I have a good doctor who set me up with a good physical therapist who has been my coach and companion in getting better. Meanwhile I've been out of the pool. I just started getting back in it last week.

I don't think there's been a week that I haven't been travelling in at least 18 months where I haven't been in the pool but this kept me out for a month, even a little more. I had gotten used to the release valve that was regular aggressive exercise and without it, things got a little discombobulated. I got depressed, anxious, moody. I slept well for the first time in a while but also too well. I had a hard time getting up and when I got up I didn't feel truly awake. I didn't feel sad or depressed, I just didn't feel ... anything. Wasn't hungry, didn't want to see friends, didn't want to do anything. This lasted for weeks. As my body healed, so did my mind. I just started, over the past few weeks, feeling like myself again. I was in Seattle raring to go, and I got hit with a big Summer cold that flattened me out for a few days on a friend's couch, but I managed to get my ass on to the plane and get home on schedule. Just gives me a good reason to go back to Seattle again.

So, it's been an odd Summer. I feel like I've missed some of it. I've been doing a lot of the things I norally do, it's just taken a lot more effort and seemed a lot less rewarding. I didn't really want to say anything until I knew I was putting it at least somewhat behind me, which I think I am. I'm now solidly behind in my quest to swim the length of Lake Champlain and I haven't decided yet whether to give myself a break and add a month on to the end of the challenge or just push hard once I think I'm ready for it.

Thanks to everyone who has given me maybe a little more slack than usual. I have a hard time admitting that maybe I can't do everything and this has been a pretty humbling experience. I'm typing this up after getting off the redeye flight back from Seattle this morning. I'm just waiting until it gets a little darker and then I'll be sleeping the sleep of the newly returned home, coupled with the rest of the "yay I've got my brain back." Welcome back brain, I missed you.

Here are some photos from Seattle. I didn't get out as much as I'd wanted, but I still saw some nice stuff.

Labels: depression, me, seattle

Here is a story about ways technology has enhanced my life.

I got a car. Here is a photo of it. (1) For some reason I like having two cars. Part of this may be that I like having a back-up car. Part of it may be that it costs almost nothing to insure a second car in Vermont. Part of it is that I've wanted a wagon for quite some time and the opportunity presented itself. So, this is my new (to me) car. It needs a name.

The way I got it wasn't really your typical deal. In fact, it's a neat story. My pal Erica just left her librarian gig at Cornell to start a nifty new job in San Francisco at Second Life. (2) She was selling her car on Facebook. (3) You might know Erica because her blog and my blog are the first and second blogs that show up on Google when you search for "librarian" (4) Yeah, that's us. I saw the photo and said "oh hey that's the car I need." My car is totally fine, but ever since a scary run-in with a guardrail last winter, I've been thinking I might want something a bit more AWD-ish. Plus, I've wanted a wagon or at least something I could, in a pinch, sleep in. I haven't slept in a car in a few years now, but I like having the option.

Since these cars are basically Vermont's State Automobile they're tough to get good deals on. And I don't really enjoy driving all over the place looking at cars from Craigslist (5). So, Erica's seemed decent and when I said the price was maybe a little high for me, she made it not a little high and I emailed (6) and said said "I'll take it". I sent her a check through my online bank. (7) It was forwarded to her in CA. She mailed me the title and the bill of sale. I called my insurance company. They emailed me proof of insurance. (8) I got a ride from my very good friend Forrest out to Ithaca (thanks Forrest! I met him on MetaFilter (9)) where we found the car in the Ornothithology lab parking lot with a note to me and the keys under the mat. Erica said "It's the one with the flying spaghetti monster (10) on the back, to distinguish it from the 45 other green subaru legacies in the parking lot."

We drove back in tandem keeping a sharp eye out for danger. The trip would have been shorter but Forrest heard on the radio (11) that there was a huge wreck on 87 North and we took a detour through Saratoga Springs to avoid it. I got home and made a few moves in an online Scrabble game (12) to chill out, answered some personal and work email, (13, 14) prepared a book to put in the mail for paperbackswap.com (15) and went right to bed.

Labels: health care, jessamyn, me, tek

So I went to bed as soon as it got dark last night and slept for 14 hours. The fact that I can still get away with this indicates to me that it's okay to keep taking redeye flights if it saves me some money. The loose outline of my trip is this

- Get to Portland late at night Friday and go out for beers with Sara and Steve. Marvel in that yokelly way how great it is to go out for beers at 11 pm and have a GOOD BEER. Crash out.
- Go out for brunch at the Vita Cafe and have corncakes and bacon with real maple syrup. Drink more coffee than is good for me. Yammer on about maple syrup and tastiness of same back home. Ogle all the great tattoos.
- Wandered around the Saturday Market and some junk shops. Started in with my tired "you know this is the sort of thing that everyone has in their barns back home and here they sell it to you for $50" spil. My friends are very nice to ignore this.
- Checked in to crazy hotel where the gal at the desk asked me "Oh are you part of the Arizona Wests, they're a wealthy rancher family..." I felt like I let her down a bit when I said no. Despite this, the rooms were nice. Fancy hotel but still, free Internet and coffee.
- Dinner with Josh and Angela at Bush Garden. Very nice chill time before the crazy party.
- Crazy party.
- Planning meeting with MeFi heads of State at a suitably late hour the next day. TravelFilter launches this week sometime. It will be fun.
- Got in touch with my friend Lisa DeGrace and spent a few hours helping her prepare for her Sundance Ceremony and also getting coffee and shopping for toilets.
- I got a haircut at Rudy's. It looks great. For future reference, my barber told me that the cut I like is a "Graduated A-line Bob" Good.
- Hangout time with Steve and Sara including Lebanese food that was totally OMG tasty. Stayed up too late.
- Chill out day the next day. Then walk around time checking out the library. Then dinner time with Steve and Sara and Hiram and Melissa (two new MeFi friends) including some excellent dessert and the movie Valley Girl projected on to the back wall of the dessert place.
- Dropped at airport, redeye home, work and doctor's appointment, then bedtime.

Labels: jessamyn, me, oregon, portland, travel

I wrenched my shoulder overswimming and now have to take it easy and do exercises according to my physical therapist (a nice Libertarian sort who uses words like "wimpy" and "freaky" to describe my physiology but I have to believe he means it in the nicest way) so I've been annoyed and a bit under the weather lately. Add to this that two of my other female colleagues seem to have fluish symptoms of eerily similar description and I've shifted from my normal low-grade hypochondria to full-on chemical warfare conspiracy theories. My guess is that I am only right if they've been able to somehow lace the toxic agent into the local pollen because there's certainly a lot of that around and I haven't had any of my normal Spring sniffles....

In any case, I've been tired and achey and taking it easy. I got back from NH only to head back out to go to my Dad's for Father's Day and a MetaFilter meetup in Marlboro MA on my way back home. This weekend I'm going to a wedding in Brooklyn and then I swear I'm staying home.

I had some good successes at work today, more Ubuntu happiness as well as more old people with new computers who seem to think I am some sort of super wizard lady when I explain how to open a program, follow a hyperlink or send an email. It's sort of low-hanging fruit I guess, but it's fun for me to do I also got to talk to one library about a long range plan that might include an open source library catalog and a media creation center for people to learn how to interact with their web environments. I'd be happy if that happened, but I was happy just to get to say it out loud and have someone seriously listen to me.

When I got home from my friends' house this evening, there was a phone message from JetBlue -- the airline that lost/stole my stuff in Puerto Rico -- saying they had forwarded the letter I had sent to their CEO to some central baggage specialist who would be calling me back in a few days. Apparently JetBlue may not want to go to small claims court over $70 worth of cables. I, on the other hand, would love to go to small claims court over $70 worth of cables. I have nothing but time and a burning distaste for getting jerked around over technicalities on stuff like this. I like JetBlue an awful lot most days, but I think they could have handled this with more class.

My only other recent event of note is that I bought a car, on Facebook, from a friend of mine. I need to go to Ithaca to get it, or get someone from Ithaca to drive it here. If you are Ithaca-linked in some way, please feel free to drop me an email.

Labels: flu, jessamyn, jetblue, library, me, ubuntu

Some neat things have happened in the lives of my friends and family, while I've been gallivanting around.

- My lawyer friend Kelly got pissed off at what she thought was a spurious lawsuit and filed a press release when the case was finally dismissed (before it went to trial but after a jury had been empanelled). It hit the AP wire. Way to go Kelly!
- My uncle just had his lay ordination ceremony at the Vimala Sangha in Marin.
- My friend Stepahie who I stayed with in New Hampshire a few nights ago is going to be the new library director in Stowe Vermont, I'm happy for her and happy to have her and her family back in Vermont

I got home from New Hampshire this afternoon to see the DHL guy just pulling in to my driveway. He had a package for me, from Kyrgyzstan! A pal I know from MetaFilter works in Kyrgyzstan. I asked him to send me some stuff a few months back. Today it arrived. The package had a few postcards, a letter, a satchel made from some old rugs and a neat felt hat. The hat and the bag smell amazing, like woodsmoke and trees from other places. I'll put up a photo at some point, but my camera is out of batteries until I replace the charger that went missing from my bag in Puerto Rico. I did manage to take a few photos in New Hampshire with my old crappy camera. I'm back from the road and have no more travelling work for several months, just weddings and visiting and whatever comes to pass. I already have the fidgets but I think they'll smooth out over time.

Labels: kellygreen, me, peter, travel

I'd have a photo to show you of Puerto Rico except I don't have the cable for my camera. I don't have it because either I lost it or it was stolen/lost from my luggage. Either is about equally possible. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

I know that if you travel enough once in a while all the forces conspire to give you a truly bad trip. This trip is, apparently, mine. That said, it's not too bad. Here's what's been happening. I got up early on Sunday to get to the airport. I don't like getting up early but I accept that it's necessary. However, my flight was delayed. Then it was delayed again. Then it was finally cancelled. I was too busy fruiting around on the free wifi to get in line quickly enough to complain, so I got to twiddle my thumbs on hold (yay for cell phones) and figure out my next move. US Airways said they could get me out the next day. Jet Blue said they could get me out in a few hours. These two airlines don't really talk to each other in a computer fashion however, so it was time to shell out for a new ticket and hope against hope that the conference people would see this as a necessary added expense. As usual, my lack of "What would a normal person do in this circumstance?" sense means that I had far more nervousness choosing this route then I might have otherwise.

JetBlue got me out of there at 4 pm and then stuck me in JFK for a few hours, and on the tarmac in a rainstorm for an hour more. I got into San Juan at 1:45 in the morning -- this is totally a normal hour for me, not so much for other people on my flight -- and was in bed and asleep at the Intercontinental by around 3. My room faces the ocean. It's nice. The room they tried to put me in faced the highway and was right up against the elevators. I traded it in. I don't think I took anything out of my bag there. When I unpacked I realized that my stuff was soaking wet. Not like a little damp, like dripping wet. This was mostly okay. I hung stuff out to dry. One of my shirts may be a little screwed up. When I got back from my trip to Old San Juan today (more on that later) I went to offload my photos and realized my camera cable wasn't in my bag. Neither was my battery charger. Neither was my dongle, the stupid expensive dongle that I need for my laptop to talk to the projector. In fact everything in the side pocket of my bag was ... gone. Solving these problems takes time. I didn't lose anything I can't replace, but I do sort of need that dongle for my talk tomorrow. CompUSA has one I can buy, but I'll have to spend all day tomorrow on busses (or $40 on cabs) to buy one. I was hoping to go to the beach.

I've spoken to people at the places where I think I might have left my stuff, in case maybe this was my own fault. My day yesterday was pretty long, I forget things occasionally. I worried that when I told JetBlue that TSA left not one but two "we inspected this!" tags in my bag that they might hand off resposibility to them, but I guess that's not how they operate. They say they're treating this like a "pilferage" as if anyone wants my stupid cables. I'm treating it like a "some things fell out of my bag" case, but one that happened on JetBlue's watch. I talked to my contact here today and he mentioned something about being on "Carribean time" and said he didn't even know if my talk was going for 90 minutes as we discussed or 60 or even when it started. With this sort of approach, I'm not biting my nails down worrying about it, seems like they'd be happy with a decent puppet show and maybe a few duck jokes.

Labels: jessamyn, me, puerto rico, travel

When the phrase "radio silence" doesn't make me think of Thomas Dolby, it makes me think of a bunch of guys in a submarine turning off all of their soundmaking equipment and engines and floating quietly in the water looking nervously around waiting to see if something bad happens, expecting something bad.

So, I've been MIA because I've been waiting for some test results from the doc that turned out to be nothing but had a small chance of turning out to be something and I sat around with my noisemakers off for a week, worrying. I am developing a very very annoying [to me] habit of becoming irrational about my health during periods of great stress. Now that I'm back into rational-land [or "illusion of rational" land which will have to suffice] it's something I'm officially working on.

Or will, when I get back from Boston, and Puerto Rico, and Ann Arbor Michigan, and New Hampshire. I know, I know "Gee, Jessamyn can't imagine what in your life could be stressful!" Today I can mostly laugh at myself, yesterday things weren't seeming so funny.

But despite my seeming hibernation, a lot has gotten done. I helped install an online catalog for a public library. I used a reel mower to mow my lawn. I sent out some letters. I almost finished a book. I took a lot of people out to lunch in the past week or two and got taken out to lunch myself. Yay for lunch. Today I get in the car and drive down to Massachusetts. Check me out on this list of fancy people! I hope to be checking in here a little more often. Thanks, as always for checking in with me.

Labels: health care, jessamyn, me, submarines

So I got back from the Massachusetts Library Association conference on Friday. Monday I went to one of the little libraries I work with and installed Ubuntu on their donated PCs. They have two Windows machines and the new machines asked for a Windows product code key when you turned them on. Pretty annoying. I had been messing around with Ubuntu -- a user-friendly Linux distribution -- and was pleasantly surprised how well it worked on my new laptop. Previously I had messed around with Linux on old PCs and it had been a nightmare of drivers and missing fonts and me not really understanding enough to make it work right. That has changed.

So I installed Ubuntu and made a little movie of it. I'm working on my little movie skills as I'm sure everyone who reads this knows. Each time I try to learn one more new technique. This time it was the freeze-frames and I actually put myself in this one doing a small voice over spot. It took an hour or two to put the thing together, cheezy graphics and all, then I went to bed. Tuesday I got up and went to work, sent the video around to my friends as usual. I'm always happy when 30-40 people see them. YouTube has a lot of little statistics so you can see what people rate your movie, or who links to it.

So by Tuesday afternoon, I checked my movie page and instead of a few hundred views I had a few thousand. That was weird. I clicked around somewhat and discovered that my movie had been linked as the 802 Online VT Video of the day and Cathy Resmer had sent the link over to Boing Boing who also linked it. I got email. I always get a fair amount of email from random people thanks to working for MetaFilter and having the job that I do, but this was a whole new crowd. I got install advice & tips and just a lot of nice "you go girl" messages. The video makes installing Ubuntu look fun which has always been the sticking point for a lot of non-super-genius geeks like me, the unfunness.

So then I got home after some burgers with Stan (amusing recounting of this whole thing on his blog) and Ubuntu called. Actually it was a guy who does support and systems whatnot over at Canonical and we had a long rambly phone conversation about tech geekery. He said he'd send me a bunch of pressed professional looking Ubuntu CDs so I could hand them out to librarians everyplace. I said that was great since I go to library conferences all the time, and that my local conference was next week. I told my friends "Ubuntu called!" and their first question was oftn "How did they get your phone number?" but of course, my phone number has been on the internet since 1996 or so.

I watched my little video creep up the stat-o-meters over on YouTube for a while, replied to more email and IM well-wishes, took out the garbage and went to bed. I sort of feel like the continuous partial attention that the networked world gives us results in not just continuous partial friendship [as my friend David Weinberger calls it] but also continuous partial fame. When Boing Boing linked to me -- calling me an "Internet folk hero" which I find gigglingly amusing -- they linked to an old post they'd made about me from 2003 and I had a hazy memory of this sort of thing happening before. Meanwhile I had eight people at drop-in time yesterday, a new high for 2007, and I signed people up for PayPal, showed them how to "make a link," helped them make flyers for their Mary Kay spring sale, explained gmail and helped them with resume templates. To a person they were all like "Boing WHAT?" which is always a good keeping it real moment for me. Parlaying the Internet Folk Hero karma into Local Hero greenstamps is pretty high on my "to do" list. This all may help.

Labels: boingboing, folk hero, jessamyn, librarian.net, me, ubuntu, youtube

I made another little video, this one is actually decent and may transcend boring though I do use the adjective "little" far too often. It's just me walking around my town but I managed to put a vocal track (all in one take!), and and audio track and keep some of the original sounds and I think the mix works pretty well. Every time I go to the VT International Film Festival, I leave thinking "I'd like to make a little movie." This year I finally got off my ass and learned to do it. Like many technological things, it's not hard to do at all, but I'm finding it a real challenge to learn to do well.

Labels: bethel, jessamyn, me, movie, vermont, youtube

Just a note to say that I decided I don't like blogging on Vox that much. Too confusingly nonintuitive for me, too low tech, too chirpy. May be fine for you. Wasn't right for me. After all, I already have a blog. It's here.

Labels: jessamyn, me, vox

Some people get all their good ideas in the shower. I get a fair amount of good ideas in the pool but have to wait until I'm out and dry to write them down or implement them. However, often I get my good thinking done in the car. This is a bit of a problem since I don't like to drive much. I like the act of driving, but I sort of don't enjoy car culture, traffic, wasting resources etc. Since my car got a little banged up this Winter I go back and forth on the "Huh, do I need a newer car since this one is shabby now?" question and it's usually a good litmus test of my mood at the time [good mood = car is fine, bad mood = changeup the car situation].

Anyhow, I spent enough time driving in the past two days that my driving muscles are sore. I didn't know that this was possible. I drove down to Suffern NY to talk at a local area library conference. I gave a variant of my 2.0 talk and stuck around for lunch where I got to hear Pete Hamill give a really great lunch talk.

But, back to the car. The drive down was about five hours and the drive back the same. On the way down I took the Thruway and on the way back the Taconic State Parkway to Route 7. Nice easy driving, a lot to look at out the window. I had the radio on and didn't have to think much about where I was going and I got to plan out what the heck I'm up to in the next six to twelve month time period (upshot: more of the same but hopefully with some more focus and more actual vacation not work-as-vacation) and actually write a few things down. Even though I have a bunch of digital distraction widgets that were packed in the back somewhere, there's something nice and relaxing about just looking out the window at trees and rivers and the occasional groundhog to help gain some perspective on my whole job/career/path doing wireless, tech, teaching, moderating, typing and clicking.

Labels: driving, jessamyn, me

I am once agan confronted with the old travelling salesman/Jessamyn problem where I have to get myself from here to DC somehow. The good news is, this is easy. The bad news is, there are a ton of options. If I were going to LA, the answer would be simple "Fly! Find a cheap ticket!" but to DC the possibilities are all over the place. Drive? Bus? Bus + fly? Drive + train? Carpool? Rideshare? Trip + visit? Through NY? Boston? New Haven? Amherst?

I settled on a short drive + train + train plus a quickie stop in Brooklyn to see some friends and their baby who I haven't seen since she was about a week old. When I get to DC I'm staying in a hotel that costs more than I pay for a month of heating oil, but it's covered by the conference committee. I am going to be giving a fun talk on how to make Firefox (the browser) do the things you want it to do including make searching easier, make pages easier to read and putting more resources at your fingertips. I've been spending a lot of time mucking about with it this week. The real reason the train won out, of course, is that I can read on the train.

I can, of course, read here at home but there are a lot of other thigns to do as well. lately I've been watching James Burke's Connection series and relearning some of the science and technology history that I had long since forgotten. I have also been watching some old Hercule Poirot mysteries with David Suchet, many of which the library has.

It's supposed to snow here tomorrow. I suspect there will be cherry blossoms in DC.

Labels: abada, baltimore, dc, jessamyn, me, travel

Sometime in 1999 there was an episode of 0sil8 where Jason had people call his voicemail at work and leave him messages. Then he published them on a little timewasting page. I can't get them to play through the interface but all the .rm files are still there. I liked having an audiorecording of a story I liked, so I made a little web page with the text, and a nice looking picture and linked the story. Then I forgot about it for a long time.

Now that I've been making some little movies, I'm digging through some old folders labelled storage/ancient/reallyreallyold/misc crap/todo and finding things like this. I got a copy of Audio Hijack and made an aiff out of the story. Then I converted it to an MP3 with iTunes.
Then I put it here.
[crossposted from vox]

Labels: brautigan, jessamyn, me, rural, story

I have two links to show you.

• There was an article about Wikipedia in the local paper, Sunday supplement even, that has some quotes from me and even a picture. No, I don't know what is up with my hair. Close readers may notice that this is the second time I have been photographed for the Times Argus holding a laptop. I'm not sure what happened to that other picture, it was almost seven years ago.
• I went to see the Tunbridge 55th Annual Show (youtube link. their title, not mine) a local fundraising effort from the Tunbridge Civic Club. Apparently in days of yore this was a minstrel show and now it is decidedly a non-minstrel show (except for the guy in blueface?) with an introduction explaining what the show used to be like. I made a little movie of some high points. Still learning how to use all the camera + software + youtubery.

Labels: abada, jessamyn, me, wikipedia, youtube

So, I'm getting to the point that I can reliably wake up before noon and this makes me happy. I wasn't always able to do this before I left even, so there is improvement. I like to keep track of minute details of my trips. The good news is that Kate does too. This is just one more reason we are great travelling companions. We have a color-coded Excel spreadsheet of all of our trip expenses. I'd offer to email it to you, but I think Kate may not want people to know how much she spent on her Koala Glamour Shot.

I know that a lot of people dont go to Australia because it's spendy and time-consuming to even get there, but I figured I'd toss out some numbers about our trip in case they help anyone think that a trip like this would be within their reach. Really, you should do it. Some things were expensive, relatively speaking, in Australia: internet, fancy coffee, soda; many other things weren't: lodging, library cards and food.

I booked the whole trip via Kayak.com. It turned out to be cheaper for the sort of trip we were taking [flying into one Australian city and flying out of another] to fly out of Boston and back into Manchester New Hampshire. The tickets were $1800 each. Not chump change, but in a dollars-per-mile, not crazy either. We flew the overseas part of the trip via Qantas who is really the only airline I would consider making that trip with, though I have heard that Air New Zealand is also sort of great. They gave us socks, toothbrushes, late-night cocoa, early morning apples, popsicles and just generally didn't act like they were going broke just ferrying us around which is how I feel when I usually fly US airlines. You can't pick your seats beforehand though, which is nervewracking. However, I mentioned that I have tinnitus and really wanted to be far from the engine noise and both times we wound up seated together someplace nice.

My inside-the-country tickets were purchased online direct from Virgin Blue while they were having a sale. We got from Perth to Adelaide and then from Melbourne to Sydney for something like $500 US for both of us. This includes the fact that I mistakenly booked one of the flights a month early and had to change my reservations (which I could do online, simply and easily). All of my travel was reimbursed by the people I was working for which was nice. However, they paid me via wire transfers which all wound up $25 under due to fees (I realized this once I got home) leaving me $50 under for the trip. Annoying, but how do you fix that? The exchange rate is about 80 cents US to $1 AUS.

We stayed various ways and places. One of the groups put us up in the Hilton early on, then we stayed with a friend, then we stayed in caravan parks and hotels on the road trip, then we stayed at a YWCA Hotel in Sydney. Quality and prices varied a lot, but we found that we could find a nice place that slept three for between $90-120 US. Of course internet would cost anywhere from $30AUS/day to $10AUS/hour to not being available at all. New amazing discovery was wotif.com which is a powerful search engine for finding last minute deals. When we were in a jam we actually used it to make Sunday night reservations at 9:30 pm on that same night and it worked great.

My biggest non-usual expense was postcard and stamps and internet. Kate paid more for birthday presents for our Mom and the aforementioned Koala shot, but all told, I think I spent less than $50/day, total and Kate spent even less. We got some holiday money from our folks which allayed some of that, and stayed with friends and travelled cheaply, but we didn't share rooms with backpackers we didn't know, and didn't eat rice and beans for any meals.

The bigger expense is really the time. It was 30+ hours from door to door both ways. On the way there it was more like 38 for me because I took a bus to get to the airport. I'm never one of those people who says "well my time is valuable!" when people want help or when meeting runs long. On the other hand, you really have to be ready to hunker down and wait for a trip like this. The major part too is the week after wuzzy-headedness that is just now starting to really go away for me. I'm going to sleep before sunrise now but it took a while for that to really work. Here are a few other notes and numbers from the trip.

Number of new library cards: 2
Number of credit cards blocked because I used them in Australia: 2 (aka all of them)
Number of bags I brought: 2 (same as in November)
Boxes of chocolate I was given: 2
Number of MetaFilter meetups I went to: 2
Number of librarian get-togethers I went to: 3
Number of libraries I went to: 8-10 (do rest stop libraries count?)
Tins of syrup I brought with me: 3
Number that were tasted by the customs guy: 1

Labels: australia, kate, me, money, numbers, travel