Interesting week

... and it's not over yet.

So far I have attended a bunch of meetings --including some last minute scheduled meetings -- a Norman Foote performance with Kiddo, and an impromptu preview Webinar for tomorrow's free Flash Basics course. I've also done some historical sleuthing (to determine the age of a map I'd scanned) -- I had to admit it was fun wearing my History hat, even for a brief period -- updated websites a-plenty, and tilted at a few windmills.

Tomorrow, I have the Flash course plus two trucks full of books to deal with. Also, at some point, I have to address the mountain of paper on my desk. Seriously, I think it ate my coffee mug. I have to clear my desk so that I can prepare to relocate -- the dominoes are finally starting to fall and it looks like by sometime in late May/early June I will have a slightly different viewpoint when I stand to look over the cubicle walls.

Outside of work, the weather has been super-random -- lots of wind and rain, so I had Hubby pick me and the bike up on Tuesday and I took the bus today. Of course, taking the bus is now the annoying option because to get to work by 8 I have to leave the house at 7:10 -- if I bike, I leave at 7:25; if I drive, 7:35 (but that cuts it close). So as long as it isn't too beastly in the morning I'll be back on the bike.

Today I learned about bad crotches.

[insert Beavis and Butthead laugh here] 

This morning, I headed to Fernwood to take part in a workshop on fruit tree pruning. The timing was right and the cost was attractive ($10 to cover the cost of the facilitator) so I had signed up as soon as I heard about it. 

The workshop was put together by the Lifecycles Fruit Tree project with the idea of building a group of people with the skills needed to prune and care for the trees harvested by the project volunteers. I have always wanted to volunteer with the project but haven't been able to squeeze time out of my schedule to do so. I'm on their email list now, though... so we'll see what comes of it.

In the meantime I learned a lot today -- including the titular information about crotches (where two branches meet; a bad crotch is less than a 45° angle as it encourages bark overgrowth as well as rot from leaves and water and other gunk that may gather there.) I also realized why the tree at the townhouse was such a mess -- I never paid attention to when I was pruning or where, exactly. Oh well, it's not my tree anymore. 

So, armed with this new knowledge, I had a look at the trees in our yard this afternoon. The mature apple tree looks to be well pruned and shaped; it'll need a little maintenance, but not much. The plum tree looks like someone pruned it with good intentions but no follow-up. It's going to take a lot of work. The two mid-size apple trees are a mess. I don't think anyone ever laid a hand on them. Ditto with the dwarf trees but they'll be easier to deal with. The coming weeks will be busy, that's for sure.

First though, we are off to Las Vegas -- in just four days! I can't believe it! I booked our seats on Friday (after almost an hour on hold with the uber-friendly WestJet owners/staff) and managed to find all of our passports. We bought three matching red carry-on bags today and now I am making mental lists of what exactly to pack. In fact, there's lots of lists. Lists of things we want to see and do, lists of things we might want to buy, lists of things we have to do before we leave, and a little list for those who will be checking in on our cat. 

Basically, there's still a lot to be decided but we did decide not to take any of our computers and our silly Virgin Mobile phones won't work in the U.S. -- there's no roaming contracts -- so we'll be digitally out of touch for four days.

Hey! I learned something!

And if you watch this little animated short from the BBC about Charles Dickens, you might learn something too!


If you want to learn more about Dickens, check out the Dickens Project at the University of California or David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page -- which includes a nice article about the illustrators with whom Dickens worked.

Science in Song

This made my day. I expect this video has been making the rounds and so it should!! (For the record, I found it over at the Brain of Shawn) It's a rap video about particle physics.

No, really.

If you like Bill Nye , Beakman's World, Daily Planet or Mythbusters, or if you have any interest in physics or science education, this video is a must see.

And if you like it, check out the Large Hadron download page with links to the lyrics, video, and mp3 single. :)

And if that isn't enough geeky music fun, go check out these videos:

She Blinded me with Science -- Thomas Dolby (classic 80s synth pop)
Weird Science -- Oingo Boingo (the lead singer is Danny Elfman, best known for his many collaborations with Tim Burton)
The Elements Song -- sung by Tom Lehrer with LEGO animation and effects by David White
The Science in Me -- song by Outbox, X-Files montage by XFRachgaz
The Device Has Been Modified v2 -- CyberCat (music video inspired by and using footage from the game Portal)
Fire on Babylon -- song by Sinead O'Connor, Babylon 5 montage by Hubby :)

Web 2.0 a-go-go

Two times the 2.0 fun today:

1. I had to drop out of planning for the UVic Libraries Learning 2.0 pilot program when I broke my ankle. Today I got word that I can still be involved (as a mentor) when the pilot launches later this fall. To make it easier for program participants to chat with me using their IM of choice I have now set up a Meebo account. (For me, that meant including my GoogleTalk and my MSN/Windows live (i.e. Hotmail) IM accounts.)

Once the pilot goes live we will be covering blogging, photo sharing (Flickr), Facebook, social tagging, and newsfeeds. If the pilot is a success, we will expand to include other Web 2.0 subjects.

2. Toward the end of our Advanced Communication course this afternoon, we were told that the class would be producing a newsletter which meant we were all expected to submit articles and other content to fill out the newsletter. And we had to submit it by the end of class. Yikes! So, I offered to write about "Labour and New Media" -- I have submitted it to my facilitator (who will be editing all the content this evening) and, because I can, I am including it here (unedited) for your amusement:

Labour and New Media

You’ve probably heard or read news stories about Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and blogging but did you know these can be powerful tools for Unions, too?

While there is still, and always will be, a place for face-to-face communications, newsletters and notice boards, there is a growing trend among the labour movement to embrace the new media.

New media, also called Web 2.0 or user-contributed media, is immediate and can reach many people at once. CUPE 391, Vancouver Public Library, recently got a lot of mileage out of their Bargaining Blog. While they built the blog for their members after their employer shut down their internal email system, it soon became clear that reporters were checking it for breaking information.

Other locals are posting campaign videos on YouTube, reaching out to new members on social networking giant Facebook, and collecting photos of rallies, strikes, and community action on Flickr.

In response to member needs, CUPE has reworked the Advanced Communications course, “Making it Sing,” to include new media and to help guide CUPE activists in the best way to integrate new media into their own campaigns and communications strategies.

I'll let you know how heavily it gets edited once I see it published.

Parksville Day One

After a bit of a challenge finding the hotel, we made it here. We were surprised to find one of the best outfitted fitness centres we've seen in a hotel -- it even has equipment comparable to what I have been using at the physiotherapy gym (hooray!). The room itself is average (at least it's clean) and happily Hubby accompanied me, even though it means Kiddo is with her Nana for a whole week! To make that easier, though, Hubby has just set up Skype Credit so we can call Kiddo without spending a week's salary on hotel phone charges or cell minutes.

There's four other members of my local here (all women, oddly) out of what looks like close to eighty or so CUPE members each taking or leading one of five courses offered this week. Being at the Parksville school will mean I have been to all the major education schools available to our local at one point or another in the past 15 years -- Harrison, Naramata, Parksville and other local courses. In the past I have also attended seminars, conferences, conventions (CUPE BC and CUPE National) and even a think-tank at the request of and for the benefit of the local. Over the years I have been a steward, a health and safety representative, and member of several committees. Currently, I am on three committees: Libraries Technical and Organizational Change, Agreement Study (assessment of the contract in preparation for negotiations) and Communications (as chair). I find the union work interesting and am lucky to work in a department which is very flexible in allowing me to do much of the work inside my schedule, as time and workload allows.

.

Life in a nutshell...

Tonight I am pleased with myself: I whipped up an extra curtain panel for kiddo's room in a little over an hour. She had been complaining that with the lighter evenings she was having trouble falling asleep (it wasn't the light in particular, but the knowledge that it was still light outside and therefore not night; she sleeps with two small IKEA lights on over her bed).

Anyway, the panel I had was juuuuust barely wide enough to cover her window (a little light still bleeds through one side), and a little longer than needed. I hemmed both ends then folded the top down four inches and added grommets every four inches along, about a half inch from the top. I strung the full width along a cord which I attached by nails at the sides, for now.

I will go back later and install a curtain rod (I have one waiting) and hang the panel with some nice old shower curtain hooks or something similar, but tonight I just jurry-rigged it in there. Once it's up properly, I'll share photos.

...In other news...

I want to go to this conference: the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. I've asked my supervisor and my manager (and his manager), and I should find out soon but I am not holding my breath; it's pricey, even though it's being held in Vancouver this year.

We're all season finale-d out around here and I thought I could reasonably be expected to leave the TV off, but then I found out that NBC is playing out the last half-dozen existing episodes of Studio 60. Um.... hooray? I'll watch... but it's going to be tough, knowing there aren't any more.

Speaking of not any more; the idiots at CBS killed Jericho after closing the season with a cliffhanger. Apparently fans have sent in three tons of nuts to CBS executives in protest. Awesome.

Oh, there is one show we are still watching: the last of The Sopranos. It will be interesting to see how the writers wrap it all up (only two episodes left to air here) but I think they should have mothballed it a couple of seasons ago. However, I am neither a network executive nor an Emmy-winning writer or producer, so what do I know?

Carl Sagan Blogathon....

Carl Sagan. The astronomer/scientist/evolutionist who opened my eyes to the expanses of the universe and of time. He died 10 years ago today, and this is one of many blogs joining in to talk about the way he influenced us.

How many evenings we sat, as a family, watching Cosmos on PBS... space itself unfolding through ground-breaking animations to the soothing sounds of Sagan's voice scored by Vangelis' eerie instrumental works. "Billions and billions of stars...." he said, at a time before the number "billions" was really conceivable outside national debts. He stood beside a wall representing the time which had elapsed on Earth since its birth and gestured toward a tiny little line that represented human history in comparisson. Ouch. Humbling.

Of course, I'd seen Star Wars just a couple of years earlier, so my fascination with space was already active, Sagan just gave it a nudge toward the scholarly. A lot of what Cosmos covered was simplified, I later discovered, but at age 10, it was amazing stuff indeed.

I entered my first science fair at age 11, in no small part because of Sagan and the science education I got outside school, and continued to be a science geek right through high school. I still enjoy the popular side of science -- watching shows like Nova or Daily Planet and reading about everyday science. Heck, even shows like Robot Wars and Good Eats owe some of their popularity to geeks like me raised on Sagan and those who followed in his footsteps.

-