Tuesday, August 17, 2004

a tempest, a home network and a fairly interesting article

It's pretty rough weather out there - I drove to the gym via the coast road, and a fair bit of seawater was dumped on my car along the way. Sort of like being in a car wash but without the big brushes.

Surprisingly, the gym was quite busy; it must have been all the frustrated joggers. Apparently it was less than five degrees Celsius at 4.30 this afternoon; it's certainly not very a comforting temperature now. In fact, the first time my feet felt warm all day was after I'd been working out for half an hour.

I am so glad I bought that queen-sized electric blanket.

Well, we're on high-speed Internet now. The boy went to Dick Smith's for a geek-shopping-spree, and the cable guy finally turned up. After half an hour's work by the cable guy, and several hours of hard work by my boy, both of our computers are now on a high-speed connection and on a wireless network too. Now we can both surf, and have a phone conversation, all at the same time. Along the way he found loads of software updates which my computer needed, so he dealt to all that; but I feel like a bit of a techno-cretin for not knowing to do this already.

This'll be boring if you aren't working in the library world (and possibly disappointing after yesterday's racier offering), but should be pretty interesting if you are - especially the bit about some US library school programes costing forty-five grand per year. It's a Library Journal article presenting some of the issues facing new library grads in the States. It constantly surprises me that people go straight from their first degree to Library School, without attempting to get any library work experience, and expect to get librarian jobs when they graduate.

2 comments:

No Milk Please said...

congrats on the high-speed :) i could never live without it now. i sometimes have to use dial-up when i am travelling and it is frickin slow :)

Simon Chamberlain said...

Makes $8000 for the VUW MLIS seem like small beer, really. Especially if you look at some of the salaries the Americans make. I was amazed to read on some blogs written by new American librarians that they had second jobs. Now, we're never going to be rich as librarians, but heck, I'd never expect to need to work two jobs.