50 cups of coffee

i’m sad enough that i have to kick out teens in the first place. but two of the guys are not cooperating. cute and funny kids, but they’re repeat offenders. i know them by name. i kick them out about once a week, esp. if they are at the internets and there are lots of other patrons that they are bothering (i end up kicking them out myself because i am usually stationed at the internets staff desk). if it was just me in here i could just zone them out (unlike the kid throwing a screaming fit in the ladies yesterday). but of course, it’s not just me in here. today we had more complaints than usual. so my supervisor wants to now contact their parents and let them know their sons are acting inappropriately. and if there is still no improvement, issue 30-day bans on them (will we hang 86 signs with their pictures and an expiration date on the staff side of the circ desk?).

word from the teen center across the parking lot is that we won’t see improvement. one of the guys in particular is quite notorious with the military police. oh guys, please behave!

I’m paranoid. Senses are raw and sharp. Noticed on the way home all sorts of small details I haven’t noticed before. Having a hard time calming down. Feels kind of good actually.

I’m 100 pages into Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Yes, that Cory Doctorow. I know I’m only less than a third in but so far I’m super jealous. Little Brother is a book I wish I wrote. Here’s what has happened so far: In the not-too-distant future, set in SF, high-school senior Marcus and his buddies are romping around town playing a game of Harajuku Fun Madness, an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), which sounds like live action Vampires meets geocaching meets Six-Degrees of Separation (= awesomeness). They’re closing in on a clue when the city is jolted by a booming attack: terrorists have simultaneously destroyed the Bay Bridge and the BART tunnel buried directly beneath it. Mad panic ensues. Marcus, Darryl, Vanessa, and Jose-Luis (or Jolu) seek shelter at Powell Street Station, only to be crushed in a mob. Discouraged, they surface back up to Market Street only to find that Darryl had been stabbed by someone in the crowd and is losing blood. Panicked, Marcus halts a vehicle for help. Only the vehicle turns out to be a Dept of Homeland Security-issued Hummer. The kids are held at gun-point, bagged, blinded, forced into the vehicle, and driven off to an unidentifiable detention center where they are beaten, punished, and questioned. They think they know something about the attack. They want to know passwords to cellphones and email accounts. They are curious about Marcus’ souped up gear: RFID sniper, wifi finder, and flash drives. Oh yeah, Marcus is also a major hacker, (going by the handle w1n5t0n) who has thwarted his school’s disturbing and powered-up security system. After relinquishing all sense of personal freedom and rights, and threatened by the Department not to breathe word about the abductation to anyone, Marcus, Van and Jolu are released back into SF. But wait. What of Marcus’s best friend Darryl?

This story hits me on such a sweet spot. Maybe it’s because it’s about American civil rights and privacy and how the United States government messes with both. Maybe it’s because it’s set in San Francisco, a city dear to my heart and that I’ve always felt that I should have lived in but have not yet done so. Maybe it’s because Mr Doctorow drops terms like RFID library tags, doujinshi, and Atom, and I’m egotistically proud that I don’t need the explanations as to what they are. Maybe it’s because Marcus’s dad is a cool outside-the-box librarian, the kind I sometimes fantasize to be (instead of average YA/Reference kind I am happily now). Anyhow, it’s cool so far. Doctorow’s voice and general theme reminds me of Rick Dakan’s Geek Mafia, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I already ordered a copy of Little Brother for our library late last year when it released but I was browsing B&N today and on a whim picked up a copy for myself. I recommend others to do the same.

Doctorow, Cory. Little Brother. Tom Doherty Associates (New York), 2008. 382 pp. ISBN 0765319853 (hc), $17.95. Bib.

i have merged Bookslug entries into here. i initially intended to keep Bookslug as my library blog and 50 Cups as my personal, but there is no sense in keeping two sites i don’t update. it’s all pretty much the same story anyhow.

my job is sometimes really cool. at yesterday’s staff meeting the director announced she received additional funds to put into the library program. i was tasked to put together a list of videogames that we can bid out… 20K worth (for three libraries). wowza. makes me feel that subscriptions to gaming newsletters aren’t a total waste of time.

today marks 6 months on the new job. wow that went fast. here was my day:

9:00 Sign on to tutor.com for an online seminar, or webinar. Demo and case study of a library participating with tutor.com, a live chat homework help service. It’s a neat service, but I don’t think we have a big enough user base to be worthwhile. Maybe though.
10:30 Check email
11:00 Prepare flyers and brochures to take with me to Newcomer’s Luncheon. The DFMWR (Dept of Family Morale, Welfare and Recreation) arrange for sponsored lunch for new soldiers to the garrison. Local vendor sponsor the event and get to give a three minute pitch. Libraries also get to give a pitch. Librarians rotate doing outreach at this weekly event. My table is not as popular as the JN Automotive, but it does okay.
13:00 Attend librarians meeting. Three-hour meeting for all libraries at all three branches. Including discussions on our programs.
16:00 Sit at the public internet staff desk. Among other things, I help a soldier resize his photos to upload to an Army required web site, remind teens to vote for in the playlist contest I coordinated, help a woman scan and email her lease documents to her husband stationed in Iraq.
17:30 Call it a day and pack it in.

so has anyone noticed how hazy it has been in honolulu today? apparently the kona winds blew the vog (volcanic ash?) over to oahu, wreaking havoc on my allergies. i didn’t realise that i was allergic to vog. but last thursday when it was really bad i woke up with a yucky throat and couldn’t get out of bed. i thought it was another cold so i stayed home. but then friday i woke up and felt fine (relatively). puzzled, i went to work. yesterday a nice concerned coworker asked how i was feeling and i relayed the puzzling incident and she said “oh it must be the vog!” vog? this morning the sky was all hazy like i woke up in LA and sure enough my head was all fuzzy again and my sinuses are leaky. oh it is vog. the most puzzling part is that this is the first time in my eight point five years in honolulu that i’ve been affected like this. huh.

if you ever read a FRUiTS mag/book, under the photo of the fashion idol is listed their obsession. e.g. hitomi. obsession: snoopy, green plaid.

i’m not going to be profiled in a FRUiTs anytime soon, so i’ll just let it be known here my latest obsession is china. it’s based on absolutely nothing but perhaps a passing curiosity. it’s a huge country. i’ve been to china once, in 2006, but it wasn’t the typical itinerary consisting of famous landmarks such as tiananmen square, the great wall, terra cotta soldiers, etc. instead, i think what i did was fly into their equivalent of salt lake city (a medium sized city), drive (5 hours) to yellowstone national (gigantic park with many natural wonders) and stayed there for four days. it was to jiangjajie national park in hunan province. it was amazing. ever since, i keep thinking about china and the chinese. i don’t know much yet but the fun part of an obsession is the digging up info to the heart’s content.

I walked into work the other day expecting a usual Wednesday. But instead my boss pounces on me and says “Ms T is out sick would you like to do story time?” Um, okay. I don’t have kids, I don’t have nieces or nephews, not even hanai ones. I’m pretty inept when it comes to children. But sure, I’ll give it a shot. I looked at the two books Ms T had picked out for this week. As I read to myself I felt myself getting kind of nervous. Then the kids started trickling into the library and then I got more nervous. Then I was standing there with about 25 kids and their parents staring at me expectantly. Shoot I’ll just read the friggin’ books I guess. I watched Ms T do this before and they don’t pay that much attention anyhow. Only later I was shocked to look up and find most of them staring up at me. Was I boring them? Or novelty because I wasn’t Ms T? Don’t know. Just finished the books and made them go with Ms G to make cowboy hats. Cowboy hats? Yes, because I had just read “Dusty Locks and the Three Bears” and “The Gingerbread Cowboy.” That’s right, a Western theme this week. Imagine me yippeeing and yahooing. Funny, right?

So I guess one of the (mostly) good things about working in a smaller library is that I gain experience of doing all sorts of things.

I was leafing through some LOC authority files (because frighteningly, they asked me to original cat some korean language donated books) and was surprised to find Wikipedia quoted in a 670 field. The 670 in an authority file is for works cited, to give some credibility to the proposed subject or name. I was taught to use pretty established and reputable reference sources, such as subject specific dictionaries and generally recognized works. Not that Wikipedia isn’t. It has its uses and saves me a lot of time again and again. I just assumed that the unstable nature of Wikipedia wouldn’t sit well with most library circles. I guess we’re not as uptight as I assumed. My bad. Because right there, in the name authority file for Kim Il Sung (first ruler of Korea, North). It is, however, the third source, not the first or only.

i’m not feeling like we’re doing a good job if a patron is so overwhelmed by the steps it takes to get our computers to print that she says things like “it’s like it was almost easier in iraq.” that’s horrible. i see someone that is not so savvy on the computer, trying to do her homework for a course, and the technical aspects are too stressful. i know this kind of stress comes to many other people: middle school students who had a late start on computers, adult students returning to education later in their lives… but veterans? i feel like they already had a lot of other kinds of serious stress and something like homework (actually, computers in general. another guy yelled at me because he couldn’t get to his bank account due to security blocks) shouldn’t cause distress. the number one priority of my library is to support its community. how can we do this better?

i’m know that i paid for and received a great education in library and information science. what is most useful, however, on a day-to-day basis, for my present job that keeps me near the public internet terminals, is all the Microsoft Office skillz I picked up on the job at the old corporate job. I showed a patron how the resume template she used from Microsoft is actually a table. I clicked on the “show gridlines” tool and now she could see why her formatting was all wonky. She said wow how did you learn that? Um, not library school. Another patron wanted to make a matrix of football teams for a pool. Again, Tables in MS Word. I’m so grateful to my old job for making me look like a genius. I’m working on getting a coworker to track internet user statistics on Excel instead of pen and paper, but it will be a long tug-of-war. Obviously I would like in a spreadsheet so I can do some faster analysis of the metrics.