Feeds and 'Casts

Today has been new media day - I've subscribed to several podcasts (mostly of the crafting variety) and added feeds for several new blogs (from some of the ladies featured in the 50 Most Influential 'Female' Bloggers article that Christine pointed to via Twitter).

The podcasts I'm listening to while crafting - a great way to multi-task in my current television-and-Netflix-impaired world. The feeds... we'll see how I like the new sites and whether I'll keep them. I like the idea of following more sites, but the LISNews feed is SO busy, it makes it hard to keep up as it is.

I've thought about dropping LISNews, but it's so useful for keeping up with what's going on in the library world - if I could subscribe to a "half-feed" sampling, I totally would. But I can't, so I just have to resign myself to occasionally marking the backlog as read without getting to them. It is painful, but less painful than looking at 50+ unread posts.

Pictures!

After ages of not taking, much less uploading, any pictures at all... lately I've been snapping like mad and this afternoon I uploaded at least 30 of them. Beer drinking, flower admiring, wine tasting, Getty garden strolling - it is all now represented in my Flickr stream. Go see!

A preview:

Music

Note to self - George recommended Melody Gardot (site - warning plays music). Very nice smoky jazz style. Remember for later when one has cash to spend on music.

Update to add this fun one from Dinah - Jill Tracy (more music playing), interesting gothy vampy atmospheric stuff.

Keeping It Digital

I just wrote a paper on how government agencies are handling email and the fact that many of them "preserve" emails by selectively printing them. Looks like some have realized that's ass-backwards, though according to J. Timothy Sprehe , they're not going far enough: Keeping It Digital.

I agree that legislators and government agencies in general don't really understand electronic media. This is a really SCARY thing when you think about how dependent we are on it to function - how much of our information is stored there, and how easy it is to lose or tamper with it.

Kindred Spirit

The cashier did not even blink when I came to the register with a beer, a small container of olives from the salad bar, and nothing else. She just smiled and complimented me on the color of my nail polish.

It's awfully pink. The picture doesn't do it justice.

Countdown: 6 days

The wedding is in 6 days! There's still loads to do. But I've gotten a kicky new haircut. Less glam than the last one, but probably more me.

I like it. I'm thinking I may need to get some hair rollers to try to reproduce the volume at home.

Also, it is HOT.

Discoveries

Cleaning the chaise, I found:
- 1 vacuum bag full of cat hair
- 1 pecan
- various crumbs
- 1 wrapper for Sky Blue Alpaca's organic cotton yarn

Then I covered it with a nice, purple jersey-knit sheet, so that when company is here on the weekend I can just whisk it off to reveal cleanness beneath. Loki is not particularly happy with this turn of events. He sniffed the whole thing very suspiciously before grudgingly curling himself up into a very tiny ball in one corner.

Funny story about that chaise. It is maybe not a good idea to take casual dating partners furniture shopping with you, particularly if you are indecisive or a pleaser-type personality. P made one such mistake, and I certainly never would have TOLD him to buy a chaise lounge - it is, after all, not very masculine, no? - but when he asked me if I LIKED it, well, I wasn't going to LIE about it. He bought the chaise. We dated for a while, then stopped. 6 months later, he called and asked if I wanted first refusal on the chaise - it really was just too big for his living space, and unless you're VERY friendly, only one person at a time can sit on it, making it not so great for entertaining.

Which is how I acquired this very loungy, cat-attractive piece of furniture. Which I never would have bought first hand, because it was too impractical. But used for half the price.... well, okay then.

***

Side note: I will mention that since my regular internet connection is dead, I am STANDING OUT IN THE YARD stealing my neighbor's wireless to post this. I've been using their connection for weeks, but for the last 2 days, it just won't work from inside my house anymore. Le sigh.