Larocque and Roll

Test 2 July 23, 2008

Tired. Still testing.

Your crappy blog won’t write itself* April 10, 2007

*Special thanks to the Shout Out Out Out Out song “Your Shitty Record Won’t Mix Itself” for providing me with an inspiring title to get off my tush and blog about something. Anything. (And it’s kind of an awesome song, too.)

I owe you stuff. Like,

~ What I read in March. Hey, last month I was early, so if I’m a few days late this one it all balances out on the big karma scale.
~ Why I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook.
~ Where I was this weekend.

Well, I’ll answer the last one first. I went home for Easter to see the folks and the siblings and the cats. And maybe some green grass and buds on the trees; alas, they had as much snow there as there was in North Bay. Don’t colour me shocked about snow at this time of year - yes, it was unfortunate that it fell around this particular religious holiday when you would expect to see flowers blooming and grass growing and various animals frolicking. When my sister had her First Communion many moons ago, there was a freak snowfall - in mid-May. And from credible sources, I’ve heard tell of near-freezing temps in Timmins in July. A little snow early in April? Pshaw. I sneer at it.

(An aside - you know what I miss the most about Southern Ontario, besides jokes about Dunnville and Wainfleet? The fact that there are no less than fifteen classic rock stations, and that at any given moment, at least one of them is guaranteed to be playing Led Zeppelin. So! Awesome!)

Anyway, it was a great weekend of reading, watching hockey (we are die-hard Hab fans in our family) and curling, and, as the kids say, chillaxing. We also played a lot of Heroes of Might and Magic III, because we’re old school like that.

Thoughts on blogging February 25, 2007

One of the benefits of staying home sick is having a lot of time to watch TV without interruption. The downside is that occasionally you come across a video getting waaaaay too much airplay, and it gets stuck in your head. I’m looking at you, Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” - damn you and your “to the left, to the left” [1].

The other thing it gave me time to do was come up with five reasons why I blog.

1. Keeping in touch.
Everyone in my family participates in regular email correspondence with each other, some of us more than others. I’m somewhere in the middle as fas as consistency goes, and I like to think that my blog is a way of filling in the bits I forget to tell them in my irregular emails.

It’s also a way of keeping in touch with friends and enemies across the country and in other exotic locals.

2. It’s all about me.
I’m not so modest that I’m not going to say I don’t enjoy having a soapbox on which to stand and have my say or show off my talents and hobbies.

3. A sequence of events.
I’ve never been good at keeping a diary or any other sort of time-monitoring device because I tend to get distracted, or I forget, or something like that. Having a blog helps me to remember roughly what I was doing around this time last year.

4. Creative outlet.
When I was in high school, I loved to write, and I did it quite a bit. Then I hit university, and… not so much with the creative writing any more. It’s been like that for a few years, and having somewhere to write where it’s read.

5. I don’t have a fifth reason.
Seriously - two days lying on the couch and I couldn’t come up with a fifth reason.

Another thing I couldn’t come up with? Enough people to tag. Let’s see - J, Julie, Randal, and Mary-lynn. And anyone else who wants to do it.

[1] Which, as I’d sing along with the video, I’d inevitably point to the right. I’d blame the fever, but I’m usually that spazzy without illness.

I love you - I really do! February 17, 2007

Sometime last week when I upgraded WordPress, I lost some stuff which I haven’t been able to recover [1]. Such as the original About page, my NaNo excerpts, and my Blogroll page. That last one is the one I’m most disappointed about, because I don’t have a backup of it [2] anywhere else.

I’ll do what I can to get it up and running again tonight.

[1] Jody did what he could to help, but alas, it was not meant to be.
[2] Not that I had backups of any of the other pages, but I’m not as sad about loosing them.

Welcome! October 13, 2006

Hello! Hey there! Welcome! It’s my new blog, same as the old one, really! Except it’s shiny and has that new-blog smell to it, don’t you think?

It’s not like moving everything over here was a long, pre-meditated process, where I went from liking Blogger to loathing it, to deciding to set up a new blog, then doing everything involved, and then doing a big unveiling. It started with an email from Jody asking if I was interested in joining his merry band of bloggers in sharing server space, and me saying, “Hey, why not?”, then Jody saying “well, you can move your blog over here too, and oh, by the way, I’ve set up WordPress for you to use,” and me saying, “Cool - thanks!”

Then there was a whole lot of back and forth about how to register domains, ftp stuff, set up WP stuff, tweak the template code, get the RSS feed working, and so on.

But! Here it is! It’s still a work in progress, but so was the other one (just because nothing obvious changed on a regular basis, doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening!)

(Many many thanks to Jody for all his patient help. Muchly appreciated.)

Test October 10, 2006

This is just a test! Don’t worry - you don’t need to study for it, so no need to feel all shaky and scared that you’re going to fail. Because even if you do, there aren’t any consequences.

Carry on!

Happy Boxing Day! December 26, 2004

Here’s to everyone and their families - that you may all have a truly slothful and relaxing day-after-Christmas to recover! May the lines at the Boxing Day sales be reasonable, the salespersons friendly, and that swanky black skirt be in your size! May the books that you sit around reading capture your attention and not let go until you’ve finished the whole thing in one sitting! May all the movies/sporting events you watch today sooth your frazzled minds!

I, for one, have spent a goodly portion of the day eating Christmas cookies and reading Kitchen Confidential (hence the mass consumption of gingerbread and icebox cookies). When I wasn’t reading, I was making tea or trying to get the internet connection to work. (It’s flaky - this morning it wouldn’t connect, but for no discernable reason, it works now.)

Happy Boxing Day from the ILP and everyone else at Chez Larocque!

I’m a Linking Badass! November 21, 2004

For the last…. 3 hours? Yup - 3 hours, I’ve sat here tinkering with my links (to see the full list of links, click on “Click Here to View” in the left column.) See, I wasn’t really happy with it because it meant that I had to maintain two Bloglines accounts - one for my personal use and one for the blogroll on this blog. The problems with this included:

• Throwing off people’s stats - it looked like two separate people were linking to their blogs, when it was actually me twice. Sorry guys.
• Updating - It meant logging out of one account and logging into another account to add blogs to my list.
• Non-RSS blogs - I couldn’t include blogs that I couldn’t subscribe to. I don’t have very many at all that don’t have RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication).

So… wait, I’ll back up a sec…

Allow me to slip into geek mode for a sec. Anyone who isn’t interested can go get a drink or a snack or something - this won’t take long.

The Blogger template that I’m using as the basis for this uses CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It’s a way of formatting everything, from background colour to underline style, in one place. For example, if I were using plain HTML and wanted all the section headers to be a different font, colour and/or size than the rest of the font on the page, I would have to tell it the font, colour, and/or size every time I wanted to add a header. With CSS, I can tell it that whenever I use header tags, I want them to be a certain font, colour, and size. It saves room in the body of the source code, because all the formatting info is in one spot. It also guarantees that if you change the formatting for, say, underlining, it’s changed everywhere, and not just in the places you remembered to tell it be dotted as opposed to solid.

You’re back already? No, this won’t take much longer - can you go change the CD? Thanks.

Anyways. The nice thing about CSS is that, since it’s all together and in one place, it can be stored in a separate file and linked to in the source code. Which is what I did. The file for the CSS for this page is stored off-site, which freed up some screen-space. (It doesn’t take up actual memory. But since the code was quite long, I had to scroll through a massive amount of stuff to get to where I wanted to edit anything - which was usually the Reading section.)

So now I have more screen-space to play with. Which is why I decided to change how I linked to other blogs and web sites. (Okay, you can come back now. I’m out of geek mode.)

(And to the real geeks reading this - leave me comments if I’ve FUBAR’d the explanations in any way, shape, or form.)

Now the links are right there on the page. Yes, it’s a lot longer than the snippet of javascript which Bloglines gives you for your blogroll, and updating it means poking at the raw code with a stick, and it takes up a load of space. However, the benefit for me is that it’s easier to add blogs and such that don’t have RSS-feeds, and it gets rid of the little advert at the end of each of the lists. (Bloglines is useful, and I love it, don’t get me wrong!)

The benefit for the people whose sites I’ve linked to is that if they search for sites that link back to their sites, mine will show up. So that’s one more person linking to them and giving them notoriety, and the fame and fortune and everything that goes with it.

As to the links themselves…

• You’ll notice there are a boatload more than there were. Pre-tinkering: 47. Post-tinkering: 73.
• “Commenting on Things” is the closest thing I have to a “Miscellaneous” category. Some of them are media/political commentaries, while others, like Boing Boing and J-Walk, are more generalists.
• “Secret Masters of the Universe” are librarian and library-related blogs. It’s based on a line in a Spider Robinson novel where he refers to librarians as being “secret masters of the world.” But I like “universe” better. So there. This is also the section I should work on breaking down somehow.
• “If You Can’t Stand the Heat” is cooking/food blogs.
• I have a list of blogs written and maintained by women, but not one for men. The problem is that I don’t have that many blogs written by men that didn’t fit into another category. I think the only strays are Ironpants, Postcards from the Reg, When Crustaceans Attack!, and Wil Wheaton. Hmm… two of them are Antipodean, so maybe I’ll group the other ANZACs together and call it “I Come From a Blog Down Under.” I’ll think of something.
• The assigning of blogs to one category as opposed to another was completely arbitrary. So, while Chicklit could be in either the Canadian or Literati groups, I put it where I did because the contributors are international, and the literature they profile usually has something to do with women’s studies.

Aaaaand…. it’s taken me another hour to write this up. Sheesh. For now, or at least until I redo everything, this is how it’s going to stand.

Breaking up is relatively easy to do November 20, 2004

One of the things I did manage to accomplish this week was to break up with my annonymous online journal. I started it last year, and was pretty good about keeping it up. However, the posting interface was clunky and limited, and I would sometimes have problems getting to it at all. I’d outgrown it, but wanted to make a clean break so that the last post people would see would explain why it was so hopelessly out-of-date. I’m not going to link back to it, since a) I don’t post there anymore, and b) it was meant to be annonymous. It’s not that I posted nasty things about people there, but I’d rather just let it go.

So, anyways, here’s what people will see when they go look at my old journal. May it rest in peace.

Sit down, we need to talk

I know that no good ever comes of conversations that start with “sit down we need to talk.” Some of the worst conversations I’ve had started out like that.

But I need to tell you something, something that you’re not going to want to hear. [Name of service], we’ve been great together, and I appreciate everything you’ve done for me - namely, get me writing on a regular basis. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that I haven’t been around for a while. My last post was in September - and that was a while ago. I know you’ve been wondering where I’ve been and why I’ve been so distant and uncommunicative. You’re not going to like this.

I’ve found someone else.

There - I’ve said it. It wasn’t easy, but you deserved to know. I’ve been seeing this other blog since August… yes, I know - we were still together then, and I was cheating on you. But you have to understand - I grew, and I needed more than you could give me. This other blog has challenged me to do things I couldn’t do here, like learn CSS. I couldn’t tell people about you, because you were supposed to be an annonymous thing, so no one (except for a very few people) knew who I really was. Now, I feel like I can be myself, because it’s all out in the open.

I’m so grateful for what we had, but it’s time I moved on. Thanks for everything, and I hope that you’ll find someone else. In fact, I know there are others out there who would love to have you. Go, be with the ones you love.

Good-bye ;(

Why I’m not (and won’t be) blogging about work November 13, 2004

Quite a few people who have blogs (and whose blogs I love) talk about their day jobs, along with other things. That’s fine and cool - sometimes, that’s why I read them.

But you’ll note that I rarely - if ever - talk about my job. Oh, I might mention co-workers current (Hi Karen! Hi Jeff!) and past (Hi Robin!), but I won’t talk about the specifics.

I am trained as a Librarian - I refer to myself as that, even though that’s not my job title right now. It’s just a lot easier to say “I’m a Librarian who works with other librarians” than try and explain what a Library Consultant (not actually my job title either) does. Since I graduated with my MLIS from Dalhousie in 2001, I’ve worked in a few different jobs, some of which included the word “Librarian” in the title, but basically I was always working in a library-type environment. But now I’m working in an office, and the job is slightly different. So why not?

1. Privacy of our clients. We work with a specific type of library in Northern Ontario. Not that anyone besides the organization and our clients would be interested in what we’re doing, but I’m not going to talk about what I’m doing for a specific client(s) because the conversations I have with them are confidential, as far as I’m concerned.

2. Privacy of my co-workers. I love the people I work with - they’re a good bunch. We have weekly meetings where everyone gets updated on what everyone else is doing, but again, not really of interest to anyone else but us. I respect their personal and professional privacy by not talking about them or their work.

Karen and Robin are exceptions. Robin and I started at roughly the same time, but she left in September. Karen still works for the organization. Both of them are friends I hang out with outside the office, so I will occasionally mention them. However, I don’t talk about what they do at work since I’m respecting their professional privacy.

4. Privacy of the organization. We do stuff. The people we do stuff for know it. What goes on behind closed doors stays there.

5. This is a personal blog. This isn’t a professional blog, where I’d post stuff targeted towards the clients. If/when I start a blog that is work-related (updates, articles, help, etc.) I will not be linking to here from there, and I will not be linking to there from here. I am making a conscious effort to keep my professional and personal lives separate. Here, I can post about stuff that amuses me (and my family, for the most part.)

6. It’s boring. Really? You’d start snoring if all I did was talk about work. I can pretty much summarize my workday thusly: get to work, change the message on my voice mail, check my email, do stuff, have lunch, do more stuff, and go home. There you have it - the exciting life of a Library Consultant in an nutshell. I’m doing you a favour - trust me.