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Grab Bag entry today - vignettes and other small things that don't get their own entry.
I ended up spending half a day inhaling floor sealant chemicals today - the joys of a shared building...and the forehead-banging situation where the chemicals were probably applied and then it was assumed they would cure and dry overnight. It was pretty bad - took a walk outside to clear my head here and there. Eventually, the branch closed for a bit to deal with that. Tonight, they're applying another coat, and they tell us that things should be cleared off by the start of business tomorrow. In a building where everything has run behind schedule.
The longer I have to be a responsible adult in the responsible adult world, the less I feel like I'm actually able to hack it. It's no longer Impostor Syndrome, becuase I'm not worried that someone's going to discover that I'm not actually competent and have been faking it all this time. I'm increasingly convinced that I'm not fully competent at this. I feel more like a flawed item among the company of the flawless - the ducks on the pond problem instead. Now, for most people, this would probably be the opening that allows them to stop putting so much pressure on themselves and come to a comfortable agreement with themselves. For me, it's more like "No, now I'll never be able to achieve my goooals!" Some of that might be just that I don't feel stable enough in the necessities. Other parts of it might be the classic struggle between wanting to leave a significant mark on history or to be the best at something and the knowledge that such things are unlikely in the local and infinitesimal in the cosmic.
I know I've mentioned it before, but I...envy? admire? people who can put their creative output out there fearlessly. (Says the guy with the blog.) Some of the Idol prompts have probably helped get some new things out into the blog, but it's not like I have spontaneous outpourings of creativity unbidden - they're prompted by events in the news, or someone else's topic ideas. So it always feels like I'm piggybacking on someone else's idea. Yeah, the geniuses need the aggregators and such, but sometimes you want to be the one making the ideas rather than the one collecting them and expanding them.
D'you want to know the easiest way to make someone happy at a library? Read. The signs are posted. The manuals exist - sometimes even in the branch you're at. While all library workers appear to have infinite patience in dealing with the public, like all retail and customer service people, the truth is, we'd be much happier if you took care of reading things and trying to find them on your own first when it comes to the simple tasks, like "where are your bathrooms", "do you have tax forms", and "Do I need a library card to check things out?"
Related to that, I have a sneaking suspicion that most people do not know how to file an informative bug report. Which means that when we turn staff loose to test something we'll be turning out to the public, I wonder what the quality of our commentary will be when someone discovers an unexpected result, a bug, or doesn't understand how one of the features works. I almost feel like I should create a short tutorial about "How to file a bug report" and have it available for launch time. And then wonder whether anyone would actually read it.
Ah, and one question to the audience before we wrap it up. If you had to point someone to a web resource that would teach them HTML5, assuming they had never been exposed to the language or any programming or document model concepts beforehand, which one would you show them? I'm building one from scratch at this point as a lecture series because I can find tutorials to teach HTML4.X / XHTML 1.X from the ground up, and then tutorials that will teach HTML5, assuming that you've already done the previous tutorials about HTML4, even though the HTML5 standard, as it's shaping up, will take many of the concepts and kludges you learned in HTML4 and give you one elegant tag to use to fix those problems, plus let you do all sorts of other cool things, too.
Finally, I finished Mira Grant /![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanan_mcguire's Deadline (Yeah, I know I'm late, with Blackout coming out in a month), and I have received no compensation in any way, shape, form, method, or other manner for the following statement: There are not enough oaths, expletives, blasphemies, interjections, invocations, and bangs to describe what happens in this book and the twists that it takes. Since Blackout's coming in a month, you'll soon be able to snag the entire Newsflesh trilogy from your local library and read it start-to-finish. It's worth the ride through After The End Times, and we might finally figure out the real secret to the reasons why we haven't been able to beat back the zombie virus yet. And just how far and how deep the conspiracy to keep it that way goes. Once there's a record in the library catalog, that's totally going on hold.
I ended up spending half a day inhaling floor sealant chemicals today - the joys of a shared building...and the forehead-banging situation where the chemicals were probably applied and then it was assumed they would cure and dry overnight. It was pretty bad - took a walk outside to clear my head here and there. Eventually, the branch closed for a bit to deal with that. Tonight, they're applying another coat, and they tell us that things should be cleared off by the start of business tomorrow. In a building where everything has run behind schedule.
The longer I have to be a responsible adult in the responsible adult world, the less I feel like I'm actually able to hack it. It's no longer Impostor Syndrome, becuase I'm not worried that someone's going to discover that I'm not actually competent and have been faking it all this time. I'm increasingly convinced that I'm not fully competent at this. I feel more like a flawed item among the company of the flawless - the ducks on the pond problem instead. Now, for most people, this would probably be the opening that allows them to stop putting so much pressure on themselves and come to a comfortable agreement with themselves. For me, it's more like "No, now I'll never be able to achieve my goooals!" Some of that might be just that I don't feel stable enough in the necessities. Other parts of it might be the classic struggle between wanting to leave a significant mark on history or to be the best at something and the knowledge that such things are unlikely in the local and infinitesimal in the cosmic.
I know I've mentioned it before, but I...envy? admire? people who can put their creative output out there fearlessly. (Says the guy with the blog.) Some of the Idol prompts have probably helped get some new things out into the blog, but it's not like I have spontaneous outpourings of creativity unbidden - they're prompted by events in the news, or someone else's topic ideas. So it always feels like I'm piggybacking on someone else's idea. Yeah, the geniuses need the aggregators and such, but sometimes you want to be the one making the ideas rather than the one collecting them and expanding them.
D'you want to know the easiest way to make someone happy at a library? Read. The signs are posted. The manuals exist - sometimes even in the branch you're at. While all library workers appear to have infinite patience in dealing with the public, like all retail and customer service people, the truth is, we'd be much happier if you took care of reading things and trying to find them on your own first when it comes to the simple tasks, like "where are your bathrooms", "do you have tax forms", and "Do I need a library card to check things out?"
Related to that, I have a sneaking suspicion that most people do not know how to file an informative bug report. Which means that when we turn staff loose to test something we'll be turning out to the public, I wonder what the quality of our commentary will be when someone discovers an unexpected result, a bug, or doesn't understand how one of the features works. I almost feel like I should create a short tutorial about "How to file a bug report" and have it available for launch time. And then wonder whether anyone would actually read it.
Ah, and one question to the audience before we wrap it up. If you had to point someone to a web resource that would teach them HTML5, assuming they had never been exposed to the language or any programming or document model concepts beforehand, which one would you show them? I'm building one from scratch at this point as a lecture series because I can find tutorials to teach HTML4.X / XHTML 1.X from the ground up, and then tutorials that will teach HTML5, assuming that you've already done the previous tutorials about HTML4, even though the HTML5 standard, as it's shaping up, will take many of the concepts and kludges you learned in HTML4 and give you one elegant tag to use to fix those problems, plus let you do all sorts of other cool things, too.
Finally, I finished Mira Grant /
seanan_mcguire's Deadline (Yeah, I know I'm late, with Blackout coming out in a month), and I have received no compensation in any way, shape, form, method, or other manner for the following statement: There are not enough oaths, expletives, blasphemies, interjections, invocations, and bangs to describe what happens in this book and the twists that it takes. Since Blackout's coming in a month, you'll soon be able to snag the entire Newsflesh trilogy from your local library and read it start-to-finish. It's worth the ride through After The End Times, and we might finally figure out the real secret to the reasons why we haven't been able to beat back the zombie virus yet. And just how far and how deep the conspiracy to keep it that way goes. Once there's a record in the library catalog, that's totally going on hold.
