First Google Reader, now Clipboard – a reminder that we don’t have as much online long-term security as we think we do. So forget everything I said before.

Haribo Strawberries and Cream – this fake strawberry flavor = the bomb. Also, strawberry pie season is nearly upon us!

“In short, we are bright people who felt rejected and perhaps had serious doubts about ourselves. We found libraries very pleasant places to be, even refuges. We thought of them as places of employment when other opportunities and fields did not work out. the fact that librarianship was considered a low-status, undemanding occupation may simply have added to its attraction. Here was one field where we thought that even we could make it!

Thus, our views are mixed. We like libraries but we have serious doubts about librarianship and librarians. Indeed we have serious doubts about ourselves, and we are, therefore, inclined to be querulous and critical of our teacher, our institutions, and our colleagues.”

Rothstein, S. (1985). Why People Really Hate Library Schools. Library Journal, 110(6), 41.

I’m done, done, done. I have a lot of thoughts on the experience…perhaps for a future post, but more likely to be held in my head while I job search and figure out this whole career/settling down thing. The perspective of time and paid employment will no doubt make future me wiser than new graduate me.

There’s nothing like actually HAVING SEASONS to make you appreciate the seasons. You can tell it’s spring for real because everyone has gotten over their winter riding cowardice and the bike lanes are full. The Schuylkill path is also full. Check out that genius with the hammock! Personally, I am thrilled to wear my TOMS classics, drink iced coffee, and enter my office and sit down to work without having to half undress myself.

I am very excited to welcome warm weather, even if it means sweltering jogs, a sticky face, and bunhead for the next six months.

Here’s a small selection of tweets:

These are all within the span of an hour.
I know certain types of people love to hate, and the hate might not actually be particularly focused on librarians (I have a biased perspective after all, and I imagine teachers might get the worst of it), but I’d be interested to see an analysis of Twitter’s most hated jobs.

screenshot from IGN

Ok, it’s been like 6 months but I will finally write my brief thoughts on the Washington fangirl game of 2012!

The Good: The storyline! Colonial/Revolutionary America is my favorite era. I REALLY like the whole starting sequence as Haytham. I actually think the structure of the game is great. The historical cameos (Sam Adams! Paul Revere!) are fun, or really cool (Thomas Jefferson!), or amusing (Charles Lee!).* Free running through the woods is a great feeling. I love the music. The ship stuff is awesome, once you get the hang of it, and I’m stoked about Black Flag.

The Bad: I had forgotten how frustrating the gameplay of AC could be. The mechanic of fighting wolves sucks (button mash!). Hunting is terrible. Many of the missions are trial and error, with no direction from the game itself except learning from failures and restarting the missions. One of the last sequences involves a chase through Boston and I seriously almost quit the game then and there – brand new mechanics (sliding under obstacles!), not being able to see your quarry on screen or on a map (hesitate=desynchronized!), you get the idea. The riding is awful, too, with horses getting stuck on every rock or invisible glitch.

Overall, though, it is a pretty good game, and I’m not done with it yet…
The Infamy! This is the first episode in the three episode DLC “The Tyranny of King Washington.” It’s an alternate universe from the main game, and gave me a funny feeling upon waking up to see my (Connor’s) mother. More wolves, ugh, but it pays off with a sweet invisibility power which I LOVE. More trial and error and dying to discover your power’s limits. Not enough Washington. Can’t wait for part 2.

*If you’re an actual historian (or a Canadian), it may just annoy you.

PS – Speaking of games, I have not written a post about my AC3 playthrough because I’ve been waiting for the Tyranny of King Washington DLC…I hope to have time to play it very soon…

It’s been one year since we arrived in Philadelphia. On that first day we visited Pat’s and Geno’s and stayed at the Holiday Inn in Old City. It was chilly and we were exhausted. Who knew we were just starting the best year of our lives to date? Philly is cheap and walkable. There’s history and good food everywhere you look. The people are honest and don’t put up with any pretense. It’s easy to hop a train to NYC or DC. But really, this city doesn’t require a long justification or explanation: in a word, it’s just awesome.

I LOVE PHILADELPHIA.

I’ve been waiting since December for snow, encountering little more than a light dusting or sleet or muddy ice. Finally I got my wish – snow in all its powdery, fluffy, bright white glory.

Scott Simon, NPR

I say websites because until a few weeks ago, Pinterest did not offer private boards, and while I don’t mind showing the world (not to mention my Facebook friends) style photos that I like, or photos of baby hippos that I think are cute, or which assorted aspirational apparel products look cool to me, I don’t really want my own wardrobe cataloged in public. So I had turned elsewhere for my private pinning needs. That elsewhere turned out to be clipboard, which is a pretty neat site. It has capabilities far beyond my limited use of it for clothing images – it can pin text, full html, retain formatting, and so on. It also has severe limitations – there is no uploading a clip, as you can do easily with Pinterest. This turned out to be a hassle for my personal clothing project, as I was photographing a few of my items, but I worked around it by uploading the photos to my server and then clipping from there. Another limitation is the weird layout of the clips – instead of a full view of every clip a la Pinterest, they are cropped and resized to fit them into a somewhat haphazard puzzle piece page. The second best thing about clipboard, after the privacy, is the tagging** feature. I can tag my own clip with “top”, “pants”, and so on, and the clips are sorted into boards based on my tags.

So I happily managed my little hobby with clipboard until Pinterest came out with secret boards. Each account is allowed 3 boards. I thought it would be nice to consolidate all my pinning action into my Pinterest account, so I started to move my clipboard clips over, but I quickly realized that viewing all my clips/pins in one board would be too annoying. For me, the advantage of organization lay in clipboard’s tag-to-board system. Maybe one day Pinterest will offer unlimited secret boards (more likely: they’ll charge for them), and at that point the playing field will level, but for now my content is still in clipboard.

UPDATE 2/3/2013 – Clipboard has changed boards to be a separate concept from tags. Now you have the option of organizing both ways. I approve.

*and may I add, nearly impossible to continue once broke, at which point any necessary replacement items must be sourced at H&M rather than carefully researched and mindfully purchased with a commitment to lifetime repairs…but window shopping doesn’t get old, and since the point of this attitude is consideration, there’s nothing wrong with a little patience for the future.

**or FOLKSONOMIC APPROACH, as we library students call it!