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There is other stuff from work, not personal stuff, but stuff I can't write here. I did a really good bread and butter citation verification using a CD-ROM database. I don't get to do that many of those. I remember when I was an intern at Sci Tech at Syracuse. I was also an intern at the Mundy Branch of the Onondaga County Public Library.

From their web page, it looks like they have a new location. When I did my internship in the summer of 1987, the place was a store front. I really kind of liked it a lot. I miss Syracuse. To me it is an ideal of what a city should be. It is the city against which I judge all other cities. It is the only city of any size where I have ever lived. All the other cities and towns have been smaller.

Sci Tech is still in the Carnegie which is cool since Carnegie is a neat old building. The only problem with the set up is that the reference desk is way off to the side and not centrally located at all. Reference at Mann Library at Cornell was at an outpost in the big second floor reading room. You could not miss it, and the librarians were friendly too. Mann has one gorgeous web page by the way. You can even take a virtual tour of one of my favorite libraries. This one is even better and it reminds me of the stack directory on the little metal stairs that spanned nine floors. I loved those old stacks. When I say my present library is a small one, I am thinking of Mann.

By the way, the Mann I remember no longer exists. The entire building has been gutted and stuff moved around so that it is unrecognizable. No more cozy corners under the pipes in the basement or on top of the world on the ninth floor. There are only four floors now. I wonder how many books got carted off to the annex in the orchard.

In other news, the Call for Fighters went out again. I have one volunteer. I am going to hope I can dragoon Whitecrow into fighting. It would be nice. Call it summer duldroms. Call it whatever.

I treated Hertzel for fleas today and may have botched it. I am still finding live ones on him but the flea stuff may take a few hours to take effect. I sprayed the areas where I sit and sleep with disgusting stuff I bought at Publix. I have flea bites on my legs and they have been scratched open. A couple of them are infected. In short I feel like a violated mess. I hope the flea medicine works.

Posted by ZOID Rubashov 8/1/2001 01:26:50 AM

Look who I just voted for. Hey, what can I say I am a librarian you know, but Matt, the webmaster even has his own Sonicnet radio station. The site is graphically interesting without being too overdone. It is businesslike with a soft touch. I don't think they'll go all that far. I hope they do though. I should ask them for vote exchange.

I did no recruiting tonight. I had to sit through an hour long faculty meeting for LOTH University. This makes our library faculty meetings look good and that is no small feat. All my students who are not in serious trouble have handed in all their work plus the final. This feels good. I have one student who is getting an incomplete and I fear there is another I may have to fail. I've never failed anyone before. Tomorrow night I am going to find a way to celebrate the end of Libr1105. Having to race home to a LOTH University faculty meeting does NOT cut it except like a nice breath of flatulence.

Here is a site I did not recruit due to a broken link. The pictures and story on it are really interesting though. Please check it out. I wonder why the family friendly freaks never crack down on urban exploration sites. I mean these tales of real life adventure might tempt some bored ten year old to go drown in the neighorhood sewers or get hurt exploring the neighborhood attractive nuiscence. Oh well there are days that I'm glad children are somebody else' responsibility.

Actually I believe that reading about urban exploration exploits is a lot healthier than a steady diet of sorcerers, unicorns, and fairies. Abandoned buildings give a sense of history and sewers and steam tunnels help build an appreciation of how the "real world" works. That to me is real magic. The web has slowed to a crawl, so I am going to lay off blogging and get some rest. At least I am writing entries regularly.

Posted by ZOID Rubashov 7/31/2001 12:24:19 AM

I recruited five sites tonight. This was not one of the sites I recruited, because I recruited him a lot earlier. Brenden got tossed out of Site Fights for having instructions on how to make gun powder on his page. You can get this info in any academic library. If you are worried about children accessing stuff, better lock up all the chemistry books, all the books on anything military and better keep the little brats, barefoot, ignorant, and obedient forever.

Between seven and ten more students need to get finals and the rest of their work to me. I keep anticipating a ton of grading tomorrow, and a mad scramble on Wednesday. At least I won't have to agonize over grades. I have a spread sheet that calculates them automatically. I don't know how people handled teaching and grading before databases and spreadsheets. Yes, it is the grand finale of Libr1105. I learned a lot from my students thi summer who were the smartest bunch I have ever taught. I will miss them and miss the course. I won't miss the mad scramble though.

I have one casualty in the yard and need to make a graphic gift for one sick RAOKster who is probably chronically ill. I feel bad about that. The RAOKster is not getting my green rose or my super duper thorny rose either. At worst those will go for pressies. At best I'll make them into graphic sets. I think the super duper thorny one will grace the Unfettered Soul People's University Library which is currently an unholy mess of dead links. Once I clean up the mess, I'll treat the page to a graphic update. I still don't know what I'll do with the green rose.

I am thinking about asking permission to use the graphics but am afraid I'll be refused so I may have to withhold credit. That's just the way it works. Right now my job is to scrape, resize, position etc.... I need more pressies like I need a hole in the head, but I'll probably end up with a few. I need to get off this rose kick. I used to think roses were the world's worst visual cliche. Oh where have I gone wrong? Maybe cranking out a new graphic gift will help me figure it out.

Posted by ZOID Rubashov 7/30/2001 12:52:38 AM

No graphics tonight I recruited eight (8) sites this weekend. Here is number eight. Go pay Wet Dog a visit. He has a very interesting site.

Right now Hertzel, my boy of joy kitty, is killing a towel that is hanging off the back end of the computer room chair. His eyes are big and his pawsies occupied. He is a sweet and graceful recently neutered tom with boy kitty titties on his belly, long skinny legs, and ears that are pink as shells. Diana said he always looks worried due to his brow ridge. He just looks like a young boy kitty to me.

OK, here is a find and there is a story behind it. Back in January, I visited my grandmother's and swiped a copy of Flower and Garden Magazine In that magazine was an image of a green rose. Yes, there really is such a thing. It does not look like a rose at all but it is beautiful all the same. I wanted such an image for a graphic but could not find it. I did find some petal-less Helenium which are used at The genuine article! Check it out. Now the only question is what will I do with it? I want it to be more than just a pressie. Well I'm glad I found it.

Well Hertzel has now made a nest in the towel. The towel is on the ground, and he's washing his privates. He keeps his privates nice and pink and clean. Oh well it's back to work in the morning.

Posted by ZOID Rubashov 7/27/2001 04:49:42 PM

Today I retake my voice. Last night I walked out of Vampire Kitties. I walked out before I burned out. I walked out because:

Vote exchange clubs offer no personal choice.

Vote exchange clubs make for a two tiered system of high powered and ordinary campaigners.

Vote exchange clubs and their two tiered system are responsible for horrendous distribution, that at most competitions is masked and at Fantasy Fights and Golden Elite is left for all to see.

If I vote exchange through a club like Vampire Kitties, I am part of the problem rather than the solution.

Also my efforts need to go elsewhere. There are new competitions all over the place yet there are only at most two hundred of us who know how to campaign. There are less than a hundred hard core campaigners. Most other fighters are shills. This system is guaranteed to drive out or block out intelligent fighters with full time jobs or coursework. The system is growing and the base of bodies is more or less shrinking. I need to be recruiting and recruiting as far outside the walls as possible.

I have been to visit Little Dragon Castle and that competition has a "personality" almost opposite of ZOID. It is time for ZOID to express and stick by its personality. It is time for ZOID to develop its personality through its bylaws and to get incorporated. It is time for ZOID to recruit those fighters who can not compete elsewhere. I also need three to five more personal vote exchangers, but that is a secondary concern and with my Outblaze/Instant Portal mailer down it can wait until early in the next fighting cycle. I also need to fiinish the RAOK Summer Friendship Parade. With my plate clean I can begin recruiting and I am going to do it openly. You'll hear a lot about it here. I want to reach the point where we exhaust our ballot at ZOID and it's not through votes I have bought wholesale. Yeah, I can wish, can't I.

Posted by ZOID Rubashov 7/6/2001 01:26:23 AM

I'm getting out of practice again. That is sad. Oh muse, where is my voice? I put up a postcard site tonight. It is called Shampoo Ginger. It is powered by the same software that powers AngelEyes, Bow Creek, and Castle Mountain. There really is such thing as shampoo ginger. You can read about it here. This looks like another good page on the subject.

I went to the fireworks last night. Down here they are called Thunder on the Hooch. Hooch stands for Chatahoochee River. I walked six miles to see a short show with its share of duds, but the crowd was fun. Ground Zero, undisputably the best place to see any fireworks show is in Phenix City (yes it is spelled without the "o"), Alabama. There is an amphitheater and I caught the last of the God and Country Festival there. Yes, there is nothing like July 4, to bring out all the tackiness in everyone except the venal merchants who sell $4.00 lemonades and two dollar bottled water. They are too busy making a killing.

The crowd was great. It was well worth the walk to see the whole riverfront area carpeted in wall to wall people. Down here in a crowd people are so polite. They give me so much space, and no I didn't smell bad or anything like that. It's just the way it is, and they announce as people are leaving that there are actually pedestrians on the city streets. I had to laugh.

On the way back from the fireworks a huge ugly and stupid black labarador retriever followed me most of the way home. I could hear this shambling mound of a creature panting away behind me. It slobbered so much its spittle dripped on the ground. It was disgusting. I am glad it did not follow me all the way home. It almost got hit be car twice. I hope it found its own way home. It's owner should not have let it out without a leash. The owner was stupider than the poor dumb and ugly dog. Oh yuck!

Well I finally found out where Thdea's Page turned up. I found a link to her old site and it's there and updated and revised. Way to go. She is currently trying to get into the Golden Elite. I hope she gets in but she will have a rough time of it due to the fact that there are some tough fighters looking for easy wins who are already parked out there. Also many of the teams don't have leaders yet seem available for fighters. Thadea has one of these teams as her first choice. I wrote her and she is anxious about not being let in. Her site seems in compliance with the rules but who knows.... Meanwhile she is in Topsite competition and if you can see clear to vote for her, then please do.

Posted by ZOID Rubashov 7/2/2001 01:16:40 AM

Well I need to go to sleep but I haven't blogged all weekend so it's time again. Yes, I'm back to making graphic gifts, but I like these especially. I didn' t try to make them come out good. They just sort of made themselves, a kind of serendipity. I feel good, the way only doing graphics can make me feel.

This was the weekend I educated the jerks. Jerk number one is a sick jerk and I hope he flies through his heart surgery this week. It's quadriuple bypass. He is still a jerk though. He did not even have the template of his page or a weekly backup offline and when the editor at Angelfire ate the Vampire Kitties' voting board, he assumed he had been hacked. He forgave the hackers of course. God is going to get them on judgement day. OK, I believe in the wrath of God but why does Robert still have his password, and why wasn't the site adequately backed up? I do a fair amount of tweaking with the browser but NOT ZOID's Exhibition Space. By the way, addr.com was hacked a few months ago and the way I knew was my password suddenly stopped working. It was a sickening sensation. I have also had pages eaten by an online editor. No one is out to get you. Life stinks sometimes and that is all you can say.

So jerk number two was the guy on my channeling list who wants html email. I was willing to listen to list consensus on that one. Does that make me jerk number three? I checked out Yahoogroups help section and in order to suppress attachments we also have to supporess html. I am glad about this. Html email is a pain in the rear. And yes I moved channeling2@listbot.com to cbask-l@yahoogroups.com. Listbot is closing so we are out of there. Tomorrow I return to the real world. Yay! Tomorrow is very close to today.

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