Watching the Chiefs.....ugh!

Good Grief. There's no team unity at work here. Not among the players. Not among the coaches. And I don't think between the coach and the general manager. Mr. Hunt, whether you want to or not, you have some major, major, major, MAJOR decisions to make in the off season. This is not a good product I am seeing on the football field.

What song is this?

I originally saw this through BoingBoing.net and thought this video was incredible. Then it occurred to me that this guy had to literally study the English language forward and backward in order to get the effect right. Enjoy.

Plane, Train, or Automobile?

I know it's eight months away, but I am considering my travel options to Fort Worden, WA for the Lorenz family reunion. Three years ago, I drove to Lyndonville, VT with assistance from my aunt and uncle and turned that trip into a visit to Niagara Falls, the Baseball Hall of Fame, a visit with a college buddy in the Washington D.C, breakfast with a library school friend, and a night stopped on I-64 in West Virginia when two cattle trucks collided.

Fort Worden is about 2,000 miles away from KC. It's on the Olympic Peninsula thirty miles west of Seattle. I've flown into Seattle six times before and have enjoyed the trip, especially the delayed approach to Sea-Tac and the delayed takeoff from Sea-Tac so that passengers can gawk and take pictures of Mt. Ranier.

But for this seventh time, I'm considering two other options. One option is to drive. I calculate that it will take me four days to drive, accounting for things like distance and my well-being. I figure I would drive on I-29 north to South Dakota, connect with I-90, and drive straight to Seattle with stops in Rapid City, SD, Missoula, MT, and perhaps Richland, WA. One big cost factor, of course, is what will we be paying for gasoline this coming summer.

The other potential mode of transport is to take Amtrak. I've been studying the schedules on Amtrak's site and, unfortunately, there's no direct route from KC to Seattle. So what I'll have to do is travel to Chicago and travel directly to Washington and then perhaps rent a car so that I can drive to Fort Worden.

Perhaps it would behoove me to maintain open communication with other family members and then perhaps arrangements can be made for all of our safe travels to the family reunion.

Ice Storm Damage photos

My original assessment of the ice storm damage was in error. After taking a walk through the back yard, there's much more debris than I thought. Here's a slide show of the fallen branches. Click on the image to activate the show.

Shift Happens

This vid was originally uploaded in June 2007. But it deftly deals with what info pros like librarians have to face: the quick and broad disbursement of information and the ability of today's learners to retrieve information. The video is about eight minutes long but it's very thought provoking.

The Dark Knight cometh

I am reverting to the Star Wars-comic book-fantasy kid in me as I write this. I always thought that Christopher Nolan got it right with Batman Begins a couple of years ago. Now comes The Dark Knight which comes out this summer. I can't wait. Here is the trailer that has been circulating around the Internet.

Random Thoughts from Icy KC

1. We didn't get the brunt of the ice storm that the folks in Oklahoma City did but we got enough. On three different occasions power was knocked out to the house. I wasn't hampered much except the third outage occurred this morning when I least expected it. I had enough hot water for a shower in the dark. When I left for work, I noticed the power company working on a main junction down the road. So I'm assuming a large tree branch gave way early this morning, snapping a main line and cutting off power to the entire neighborhood. The combination of the power outage with the icy trees this morning made for quite an eerie scene.
2. Congrats to J and M on the birth of their daughter early this morning.
3. Finally, after a long wait and after many upon many questions from the public as to whether we provide wireless in our building, WE HAVE WIRELESS!!! I stayed an hour and a half after work today typing emails to my lab staff and fellow librarians on some of the issues we have including wireless for guests and placing hard copy of wireless procedures in the wireless procedures manual.
4. We have had some guests from Brazil use our computer lab. Apparently through the grapevine, they are staying(and working?) at a local KCK resort hotel and have been using the lab for their Internet access. This started the first week of December. The problem lies in the fact that we only allow a guest to use the lab three times before we suggest they get a library card. According to our out-of-town guest log, some of the Brazilians have used the lab 5 or 6 times. We'll see what happens. It could quite possibly be that they are here for the holidays. Stay tuned.
5. And finally, this is the second weekend in a row where I've had three days off. I've been using my Thanksgiving comp time for the first and second Friday of December. The first weekend didn't go so hot. The weather was brewing up this icy mess and I somehow got the stomach flu. So I didn't get anything Christmas-related done: cards, shopping, decorating the house, or growing my Santa beard. So, I'll have to make up for lost time this weekend.