I don’t use twitter enough to merit the use of LoudTwitter for this blog.

When you use your Gmail Inbox as your to-do list, having it be empty engenders great joy.

Checking your online calendar after you get out of the shower is a really great way to make sure that you don’t show up to teach an introduction to research seminar in jeans.

• 15:33 DigitalCommons@ILR about to hit 10,000 uploaded documents: bit.ly/XeGu #

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So one of the things that I’ve been working on for the last few weeks is how to best draw attention to the fact that DigitalCommons@ILR is about to exceed 10,000 uploaded documents. The repository’s been around since the end of 2004, and my involvement began in early 2006, with me officially taking over management this past January.

As I said in the title, 10,000 is a nice round number, and we’re bringing attention to it in no small part because we want to get the word out about the resource that we’ve been putting together here at Catherwood, and making available to the world. But I also consider that number important because of the level of oversight each item in the repository receives during the upload process. Almost nothing is automated, and each item is processed by multiple staff members and frequently at least one or two student employees. We try to make sure each document is as useful as possible to anyone who downloads it, and that means there’s a lot of hard work on display in that repository.

Thanks go out to Steve, Fran, Angie, Julia, Clement, Lynette, Corinne, Katherine, Kayla, Susanne, John, and especially Mary Newhart and Suzanne Cohen (who were the driving force behind this thing when I came on board). I’m just glad to have gotten the opportunity to join up.

• 10:15 Just put up a new post at The Nascent Librarian: bit.ly/Oyya8 #

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It started with a presentation Chris Miller and I made at the Upstate New York Science Librarians Meeting on cloud computing, which ended up going rather well; you can check out the LibGuide Chris threw together as supporting materials here, if you’d like. (And my sardonic commentary on it here.) What’s really telling is that when I started writing this post I initially thought it had just been this past Monday, as opposed to two Mondays back. It’s really been that kind of Autumn, flying by like a reckless teenage driver and often feeling as dangerous. Or at least as heedless to its surroundings.

Seems like every day these last couple weeks has left my brain fried, unable to accept further input or produce further results; staggering home to dinner and maybe a touch of WoW seemed within my capabilities, but only barely. That being said, there’ll be something besides a level 76 rogue to show for my efforts before too long, some of which I’ll even be able to post about shortly. I’m shallow enough that the possibility of displaying the fruits of my labor makes the labor easier to endure.

And of course, this fortnight included Halloween, for which I finally provided some context to an oft-used icon by dressing up as Doc Gnosis: hero, pulp adventurer, and man of science.

This made me happy in a way which only confirms my earlier statement about shallowness. Sadly, my idea of using NaNoWriMo to write a longer tale involving the Good Doctor and the Raptormen of Venus has not materialized in any way. We’ll see if that changes, but considering how this week, fortnight, month, and season have been going, it does seem unlikely.

For a brief period of time, while I was working in Baltimore, I was a weekly purchaser of single-issue comic books. I enjoyed it, but after we moved back to Ithaca I gave up the practice (much to the betterment of my wallet). However, there are times when one must make exceptions to even the best of habits.

This is one of those times.

All I can say is: finally.

Thanks to the imagination of David Malki ! and the diligent effort of one Liam Cooke, the internet has now obviated the genre author.

On September 26th — less than one week away! — I’ll be taking part in Fight Gone Bad IV, a fundraiser to honor and support our injured service men and women and the thousands of people fighting and living with prostate cancer.

Fight Gone Bad IV benefits Athletes for a Cure and the Wounded Warrior Project. Last year they raised $627,000; this year, they are going for $1million. The event itself is a grueling workout, but I’m looking forward to the opportunity to raise money for some worthy causes. If you’re interested in donating, click on the link below to connect to my personal fundraising page.

https://www.rapidreghost.com/fgb/php/frpage.php?frID=28388

Yesterday I discovered through various means two links, each detailing a forthcoming work from an author to whom I’ve taken more than a passing fondness.

The first is from Scott Lynch, who many of you may know from The Lies of Locke Lamora and its excellently piratical sequel.* While he’s working on the next Lamora book, he’s also publishing a serial planetary romance novel for free on his website, called Queen of the Iron Sands. It’s tough to say which bit of the previous sentence sold me on the project, but initial testing indicates that it was somewhere around “also”.**

The second is from Scott Westerfeld***, author of The Risen Empire****. His new book is called Leviathan, and it’s set in an alternate WWI being waged between the Clankers of Germany and the Darwinists of England. But the reason I’m writing this is to link to very keen video trailer that the publisher’s produced to promote the book:

I’ve already requested that CUL get a copy. I’m not made of stone.

* I first got to know his writing when he did a very cool supers RPG called Deeds Not Words, but that’s neither here nor there.
** There’s some margin of error.
*** Huh, two Scotts. I feel like I should’ve leveraged that into a pun for the title of this post.
**** Which I’m definitely going to review at some point, I promise.*****
***** Fine, here’s the review: The Risen Empire (and its sequel, The Killing of Worlds) doesn’t just walk the line between “hard sci-fi” and “space opera”, it slams down the line at .1 light speed firing nanoweapons and accounting for relativistic effects. It’s got solid characterization, an engaging far-future setting, and heroes trying to make sense of a conflict waged between post-human AI-worshiping cultists and the undead. Highly recommended.

I am always amazed by how much worse traffic in this town gets once the Cornell students return. Since they rarely drive to class and only slightly less rarely leave East Hill — mainly to go to Wegmans — I tend to assume that there is some indirect mechanism by which they cause this effect. Of course, correlation and causation and all that, so I shouldn’t rule out the possibility that there is some Z factor snarling late August traffic every year.

The scholastic influx’s effect on the library is much less obscure. This week saw me giving tours, fixing links on the library’s web page, and selecting my slots on the semester’s reference desk schedule. It’s a hectic time, especially after summer’s languorous pace, but it’s also an irrefutable reminder of why we’re here in the first place.

It’s also cool to realize that in amongst the several thousand incoming freshmen there are a few people who are going to fall in love with this town and end up staying here long after they’ve graduated. They likely have no idea that this is the case; I certainly didn’t.