quotations

I’ve been turning this poem by Adrienne Rich over in my head the past few days. It does well to describe what been in my head:

Transcendental Etude
Adrienne Rich

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
—And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984

An exchange of three emails this morning between me and one of our network admins:

To: Jay and Rich
Subject: Passing on a sitebanned IP (low-priority)

I don't know if [the network admin group for Alabama libraries] contacts ISPs when they see users nosing around for files they shouldn't, but if you do, I've got one for you. Check logs for the past six days for [redacted]

I'm seeing some nosing around for obvious cgi-bin / htaccess holes as well as an attempt to use a known pixelpost exploit on 24 December [exploit text redacted]

I've done the obvious .htaccess IP ban but thought I'd mention it to you guys.

Reply a few hours later:

Sarcastically muttered near the peanut butter: “Holy shit! Thanksgiving is this week? Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me? When did this start getting scheduled in late November?”

Dear friends: it’s on. We have a candidate for tweet of the week. This tweet is an example of what happens when you introduce someone to barbecue, send him home to a land where it’s not easily obtained, and then taunt him via twitter that you’re about to have some of the tasty stuff:

@hsvlocals I CAN HAS BBQ? YOU MAILS. I EATS.

My work here is clearly done.

(I am ‘domesticat’ on twitter. I have my tweets set to ‘protected,’ which means you have to request access, but that’s easy to do.)

I had some advance warning that today was going to be long. I thought it might be interesting to actually document a day in the life of a webmaster. I think many people see it as glamorous, but I’ve always thought of it as very much a detail-oriented job. A webmaster, if they’re doing their job correctly, spends a lot of his/her day chasing down details. Making sure everything’s posted, everything’s right, everyone’s notified and everyone’s on the same page.

This is a day in the life of a webmaster who is trying to prepare her library’s website for summer reading.

I started this habit when Stephen and Misty began returning books to me with little removable flags, like Post-It notes but smaller, affixed to the margins of pages. What a great way to remember something that caught my eye, I thought.Months later, I stumbled across a set of the flags and promptly purchased them, stashing a dispenser or two in the rooms that I typically read in.