goblin cartoons

If this is a somewhat rambling post, I apologize. I’m a bit discombobulated and I’m fighting back tears as I type this.

Next week, I’ll be co-running a session on Flickr and libraries at NEKLS Tech Day. I was brainstorming about it with Michael Porter, and he made this point: Flickr and other social web tools have created avenues for the two of us, him in California and me in Kansas, to have a cheerful conversation and have each other listed as “friends” on Flickr, MySpace and other sites–and we’ve never met face-to-face.

Which is really cool and important, but is, right now, just a way for me to lead up to this: Britt Daniel died last week in a motorcycle accident at the age of 39.

I never met Britt in person. He posted on a forum devoted to tabletop role-playing games, which I also posted on. He was contentious, mischievous and outspoken. At first, we had a tendency to disagree. But behind his snarky online demeanor was a very nice and funny guy. We discovered that we had a lot in common: a love of old comics (especially from the Golden Age), a love of sword and sorcery fantasy, and a love of redheads. We would occasionally send PMs to each other, making jokes and just being friendly with each other. I wanted to meet him in person, if only to buy him a beer and chat with him. But I never actually did. And yet, thanks to this new technology, this social networking technology that has suddenly become so controversial, I feel as if I’ve lost a real friend.

Goodbye, Britt. I’m sorry I never got to meet you face-to-face. But I’m glad I got to meet you at all.

Okay, so we broke down and bought a digital camera.

Okay, so I broke down and made my own MySpace page.

My week-long vacation begins…now. My wife and I are, for the next week, completely kid-free and job-free. So, expect blogging to be even more erratic than usual.

Happy birthday to the wittiest, smartest, sexiest, most beautiful woman I know, my hideeho gal. I love you.

I haven’t posted here in a while. At Library HQ, we’ve got employees on vacation, employees at PLA and CIL, and employees out sick. We’re stretched really thin, like butter over too much bread, which means I’ve had to pull a lot of long shifts on the desk lately. Now, I love working at the reference desk, really I do. I love interacting with patrons, I love helping them find information. Heck, I even like helping them with their computer problems. But it’s difficult to get desk work done when you’re constantly interrupted by patrons, so I feel like I have a backlog of work that’s not getting done. And I’m starting to get really sick of hearing the phone ring and listening to children whine and scream at their parents.

I’m in serious need of some off-desk time, preferably with a bottle of whiskey and a box of dark chocolate, and I’m not sure when that will be.

So, my brain is feeling pretty mushy. I can’t formulate thoughts well enough to blog about anything (except this, obviously). Just reading my RSS feeds on library stuff makes my eyes spin.

Expect blogging and ranting to resume when our skeleton crew gets a big more full-figured.