Finding myself in other blogs.

You know I don't often plug other people's blog entries here, but there are two that really hit me today. One was The Hacker Work Ethic and Personal Development Texts by Tom Bridge about how the information workers of today don't live the Puritan work ethic, but have their own. I identified with a lot of it.

A second post I found enlightening was by Mike McBride when he talked about his experiences as tech support about "a feeling that the employee is serving everyone else, never being served." That spoke to me as well.

In my organization I am still one of the youngest "professionals" and I am doing a lot of tech support. Both of these posts hit some of the things I have been feeling these days. I am expected to work like the others work and instead of being evaluated on results, I feel I am evaluated on the process. I also feel at times that I serve everyone else and never get served. I also do a lot of training and I know how it feels to get the heat for someone not knowing something, no matter how many times I've tried to teach them.

My thanks to these two gentlemen who unknowingly gave me words to describe why I was not in the most jovial of moods these past few days. Who says there's nothing human about the Internet?

Did I forget...

... to mention that it snowed yesterday? Yeah, I did. Did I also forget to mention that the forcast is for it to be in the 50s today. This winter is really odd this year!

Treading water

Three weeks, three sessions. All of them different. Two weeks ago I spoke to a group of mostly public librarians about blogging up in Norfolk. Last week I copresented to a group of UNL librarians and staff on open-source and free software. This week I will present some of my preliminary research on recommendation systems and how they affect libraries.

Prepping for these is taking a bunch more time than I thought. It seems like there are always last minute changes in whatever area I'm discussing, so bringing a prepackaged talk never seems to be the right option.

I'm not complaining. I really do like presenting these types of things, I wish I could do more. It just means my other work tends to get pushed aside. After being ill most of last month, concentrating on my tenure bid the month before, and now three weeks of session prep - I'm more than a bit behind. I also need to give myself some time off, otherwise I'll end up back in the hospital, so doing a work-intensive weekend is out of the question for now.

Luckily I don't have any more presentations planned until March 8th, so I'll have some time to catch up after Tuesday. Right now I just have to keep up until after this next session and then I can work on the backlog.

Super Sunday

As 90% of Americans could probably tell you, last night was the Super Bowl. I was but one of the tens of millions who watched it. I thought it was a good game. Some funny commercials as well, but nothing that struck me as worthy of high praise. I think the funniest were some of those that ABC put out for their own shows. I wonder if they had to pay themselves for the ad time.

The game was all right. It stayed close for a while, but I wish the Seahawks would have finished stronger. Maybe next year my beloved Buffalo Bills will find their way into the Super Bowl. Then again, maybe pigs may fly.

Blogging about blogging

I just wanted to put up a new post to welcome those who may be stopping by because of the sessions on blogging I did for the Northeast Library System yesterday. Welcome!

Oh, by the way: I wouldn't try every link in my blogroll looking for blogs. Some of those are just general news sites, some are message boards, and some are comic strips. If you want suggestions, post a comment or send me an email and I can give a couple of starting points.