Jogging Friday

Every Friday after work I go jogging round the river with my friend. As we jog, we chat about our week, the things that annoyed us, the things that we liked, and then about the direction our lives are going in, life balance, our partners, philosophy, current affairs, you name it! By the end of the hour we're feeling pretty good, de-stressed, and ready for the weekend. We've only missed a couple of Fridays in the last few years. I took this photo on our run today.

On kindness

So today I had to do something that I didn't want to do, something that made me uncomfortable. I had to phone two people and tell them that they didn't succeed in their job applications. I spent a bit of time working out how I would word it, based on how I would want to be let down - that is to say, gently. I wanted to be completely honest at the same time. Kindness and authenticity are traits that are really important to me, that I try to enact with all my interactions with people. The phone calls went well, considering.

Here's a quote from Dalia Lama XIV, who is in Australia at the moment -

"Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible."

Small library chaos

Today was a funny day at the library. It started out with me not being able to get in. The automatic sliding door had jambed and broken in the closed position, accompanied by a loud beeping alarm. I had three interviews lined up for a casual position, so this was not the start to the day I was looking for! The technician came within an hour and set out his tools and ladders all over the entrance. Lucky it's the mid year break with not too many students around. When he went into the ceiling he found some cable that had burn damage which caused a bit of panic and calls to the electricians, campus manager, building manager and so on. The sparkies arrived and spread out their equipment over the remaining free space on the floor. I got busy thinking about the location of the fire equipment, how to use the fire equipment, the fact that the burn damage was right over the only library exit... A fire can start so easily! But - false alarm, the cable was an old one that wasn't connected to anything and had been heat damaged by lights that had been removed long ago. The automatic door was quickly fixed, the vacuum got rid of all the dust and fluff that had fallen from the roof and the library was restored to normality about 5 minutes before the first interview of the day.

Making

Rarely a day goes by when I don't work on making something - usually it's a bit of knitting, or planning the next thing I want to sew. My queue of projects waiting to happen is enormous, and lives in Pinterest and Instagram. Today I had a making-marathon, and I finished a dress in a day! It's the first dress I've ever made, and I couldn't have done it without the help of my mum (who sews, quilts, prints, stitches, dyes and does everything, and has all the equipment for everything). I'm so happy with how it turned out. I learned so much from my mum about sewing techniques and skills today. Also, it was so nice to spend the whole day doing it - so often the fun and relaxing things (like reading!) get relegated to the end of the day when we're already tired, why is that...

When inspiration doesn't strike

On the weekends I try not to think about or do work or library stuff, so I was a bit stuck as to what to write about today. But as usual, reading other people's blogjune blogs has delivered the inspiration -  I'll write about what's going on with me right now, in list format (like Kate and Con did).

I'm reading - Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins

I'm watching - A friend lent me The I.T. Crowd, which I'm just about to start

I'm cooking - raw food salty peanut chocolate slices (ok, that's not actually cooking), and lentil & pumpkin stew

I'm drinking - hot herbal tea

I'm thinking - about how to make extra money on the side to fund my hobbies

I'm taking - a day off work on Monday for some ME time

I'm missing - Japan - the food and the craft supplies

I'm enjoying - making stuff and wearing winter clothes

I'm making - another knitted jumper (a little bit each day) and sewing a winter dress (which should be finished tomorrow)

I'm planning - my extended trip to Sydney for NLS7 and holiday

I'm listening - to a CD called Night Cafe 

Futures

It will be a short post today as I'm completely exhausted after an all-day vendor roadshow, followed by a 7 km run with my bestie, and then a shopping marathon at the sales in the city.

The vendor roadshow was great, they had so many new things to show us and they are always thinking of the future. They are preparing for a world where BibFrame and linked data has replaced MARC cataloging, where library books are searchable through Google, and where circulation and everything else is in the cloud.

Are libraries as motivated to prepare the future as profit driven companies are? So far, I would say we haven't been, but I'm seeing more and more signs that we are thinking about it more seriously and more collectively than we have in the past.

Good night 😴

Photo storage

I got a message - would I like to install the Google Photos app? I almost always say yes to see what it's about so I did, and felt happy about its promise of free unlimited storage across all devices. My phone's doesn't have much space left, and every time I want something new, I have to choose what to get rid of, so the photo app seemed an easy and convenient solution.

Then I realised it's got this amazing capability to search. Type dogs and pictures of dogs will come up, even though they're not labelled or tagged in any way. That's not all - the app will actually sort your photos into albums of 'Things' and 'Places' without you doing a thing. The photos in my phone for 'Things' got sorted into the categories of beaches, cats, food, screenshots, and flowers, and for 'Places' it was Perth and Mexico. I haven't actually got any photos of Mexico on my phone so that was a bit random. Did I mention that it can make animated GIFs too?

When I logged in to Google at work today, I checked my notification and there was one from Photos. The 'assistant' had created a slideshow of one of my categories that started playing on full screen. It's amazing, but I'm still undecided whether it's cool or scary. Once again I am trusting Google with so much of my private data. And it's only a matter of time before they work out how to sell the data we're providing with these photos. Would you trust them?