Posts

It's been some time since I've had a substantive post, and I don't really intend to write one now. I figured I should mention, however, that I've been featured lately in print and in the blogosphere. Jessamyn West of librarian.net interviewed me for an article ("Saving Digital History") in Library Journal netConnect. In addition, I was tapped by the wonderful folks at Booktruck for the latest installment in their "Ask a Male Librarian" series. I swear someday soon I'll write something much more interesting and less self-promotional.

While I fully intend to go over my full experience upgrading to the latest development release of Kubuntu, one of the things that I first noticed was that Privoxy didn't seem to work or to be speaking with Tor, preventing me from that lovely "anonymous" browsing experience. I noticed that in the upgrade the ever important "forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 ." line in /etc/privoxy/config wasn't in the upgraded version (actually, it shouldn't be). Apparently during the upgrade, I told it to clobber my config file with the one distributed, saving my old version (luckily) to /etc/privoxy/config.dpkg-old. Once that I added that line back, I'm now able to surf a bit more safely.

A few months ago (while I was at NACO training) I got a reader's card at the Library of Congress. For a while I pretty actively went and requested books on Saturday afternoons. In particular, I was interested in archival manuals from outside the United States. One of the most interesting books I found was S. M. Jaffar's Problems of an Archivist, a manual written in Pakistan in 1948. I was struck by the following passage ("Protection From Human Pests"), taken from pp. 28-29: "Human pests" and "White Huns" are the common epithets applied to human species acting as enemies of archives. History has recorded many such instances of vandalism as the wholesale destruction of priceless treasures of art and literature, the burning of big and beautiful libraries, the transport of camel-loads of books to distant countries and the sale of valuable manuscripts at ridiculously low prices. The transfer of artistic and literary treasures of subjugated countries by the conquerors to their homelands to adorn their own museums and libraries has depleted those countries of that wealth.

I won't bother waiting to be tagged to do this, because all the cool kids already are. I read too many blogs already, so here we go. Mary Eats is, as one would easily assume, a blog about food. Mary started the blog while she and her husband were living in Korea, and thus there's an overwhelming emphasis on Korean food and restaurants. She moved to Seattle relatively recently and began culinary school, too. My two favorite parts of this blog are when she makes videos and when she makes comics, like this one about konbu. Language Log is a blog written by linguistics faculty from around the world, wherein they tackle important and not-so-important issues like linguistic prescriptivism, 419 scammers, the Pirahà language, and cheese steak rolls served at Chinese restaurants in Philadelphia, all with a good sense of humor. Information Aesthetics covers all sorts of stuff related to information visualization. Essentially, it's just one massive blog full of data porn, from treemaps to Youtube videos using Isotype symbols.

First, via my associates at booktruck.org, I came across a review of the comic book Demonslayer v. 2.2, by a certain Marat Mychaels, et al. at Comics Should Be Good. While the fact that the reviewers pan the comic book seems only marginally of interest to those of us wading in archivy, I should draw your attention to a specific part of this issue. Apparently one of the characters goes to visit the Director of Archives at the New York Museum of Natural History, who has chosen to decorate his office in the style of some seemingly life-sized works by (fellow Peruvian) Boris Vallejo. Secondly, everyone knows how much of a pain digital preservation is, particularly in terms of born-digital cultural materials. So, who should archivists and curators look to for guidance? Kurt Bollacker, digital research manager at the Long Now Foundation (and formerly of the Internet Archive), holds up the pornography industry as a potential leader of the pack. He states that he guarantees "

I finally noticed that FeedWordPress, the plugin I use to maintain ArchivesBlogs, has been updated within the last month to work with WordPress 2.1 and higher. I hope to get this working pretty soon, but I apologize in advance if it ends up going down for a few days.

Today, Nancy Beaumont, Executive Director of the Society of American Archivists, made an announcement on the Archives & Archivists listserv that SAA would no longer retain the first thirteen years of posts from the listserv. During this time the listserv was hosted by Miami University of Ohio, and last September, the list was moved to an SAA server. This stems from a decision made by SAA Council that they not retain the archives for three reasons: 1) an appraisal decision informed by the SAA's archives at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 2) a consideration of administrative issues, and 3) a consideration of cost. While the appraisal decision is well-informed by the claim that the list archives do not have evidential value as SAA records, the belief that these records have little informational value does not sit well with me. The list archives document the development of archives becoming a stronger profession in the face of technology and the creation of a tight-knit social network.

I'm really behind on posting, and I apologize. There are a few action items that I should mention before I clear my brain to allow me to start posting things with actual content. ArchivesBlogs moved, but mail to archivesblogs.com was not working for a while. A few people mentioned this to me, but I didn't get this resolved until just last week. After who knows how many attempts trying to get something posted on Boing Boing, I finally made it when I had more information about the hottest chili peppers in the world. I now have a food blog, so if you're interested, check it out. It's called Feeding the Hungry Ghost. Now that that stuff is out of the way, I can start posting about "important" things again, like my trip to Georgia for code4lib 2007.

I know, I know - you're probably thinking "foams are so over," regardless which side of the molecular gastronomy fence you sit on. If you're a fan of the strange powders and physical state changes of food, you might be saying "C'mon, everybody knows that espuma is the new foam!" Yeah, right - and aire is the new espuma. They're all pretty much the same thing, and you've got to be bullshitting yourself if you think that Adrià and his ilk don't know this already. If you're convinced that all this stuff is mumbo jumbo designed to take away from traditional technique, then fine. I don't particularly care either way. I made a foam that wasn't really a foam ... or was it? I was bored tonight when I was about to make supper for myself. Yesterday I got a whole bunch of free samples from National Starch, but I haven't really been able to do anything with them since I've left them sitting in my office.

I left work early yesterday for a doctor's appointment, which left little time for lunch. On the way there, I snacked on some almonds and raisins to tide me over. By the time I finally got done with the tests and consultation my stomach was making unholy groans that sounded like ghosts were plaguing my GI tract. Since there were a few things I wanted to pick up anyhow, I headed to Whole Foods and stopped by the deli first to get a sandwich. For what it's worth, I got the "tuna niçoise" sandwich, which wasn't all that niçoise (it tasted alright, though). Despite warnings of the possibility of olive pits listed on the wrapper, I couldn't find a single piece of olive anywhere close to it except in another area of the deli case. The sandwich was much larger than the amount of food I've become used to eating in one sitting, so I roamed the aisles stuffed to the gills with tuna, bread, green beans, and hardboiled eggs.