Today was the latest in a long series of crazy days, hopefully the last for a while with the holiday this week.
First thing in the morning the Dr. tells me I might have an ulcer. Sheesh.
Things definitely picked up after that, at least. Since I posted the docster article late Friday folks finally started getting
around
to reading it today (librarians don't work weekends). It generated a solid discussion on oss4lib-list but a lot of
the folks just don't seem to see the distributed model yet. I would let it slide but they can't use the old
"Metallica
sued us so we can't even ping napster.com" excuse like we can here... anyway there was enough positive
feedback to make me think we could tweak gnutella a bit and get a trial going with a few libraries soon
enough.
Highlight of the day was hearing John Simpson, chiefe editor of the OED
speak at Yale about goings on with the major revision. Evidently all they've done to change their submission
model is to take the slip format they used to use and make a web form based on it. I got a chance to speak
with him and another editor about creating an "appeal to hackers" a la their 100+-year-old "appeal to readers",
asking for help creating automated tools for managing 100s of 1000s of submissions and such. Fortunately
the second person he directed me to groks some perl and thinks it's a good idea worth exploring. He's
based
in CT too so I'm going to try to buy him lunch when I get back from the holiday.
Second highlight was my very own girlfriend making off with the snazzy event poster. M. if you ever see
this I'll make it up to you with homegrown mojitos. ;) It'll look good in our new place.
Played with zope for a while, considering building a jake version running on zope. It would be good to see
what sort of distribution and maintenance efficiencies might come about from leveraging some of the
available
xml services in there.
Made a condolence call tonight. Long crazy day indeed. Tomorrow we're off for Detroit in a rentacar.
