Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:20 PM

Hello, everybody. I know I haven't posted much in a while, but I've been busy -- in the good sense.

The career transition class was excellent. Anybody reading this who gets laid off by IBM, be sure to take advantage of this benefit. Based on what we learned in class, I've significantly revised my resume, though it's still not quite done yet (if ever). I've also worked out a pretty decent weekly schedule for my job search, and I'm trying to organize my desk and build .

Friday and Saturday was my KM class. After that, I had to write two papers that were due 9am today. Fortunately or un-, I won't be posting these papers to my website. One of them is about a standard Harvard Business School case study, which I wouldn't want to spoil for future students, and the other deals with my suggestions for a real-world situation within Lotus. [Fortunately, my instructor also works for IBM, so I could reveal some of those details to him without breaking confidences. But it's probably not wise to post it on the web.] Yes, I did get them turned in on time, but boy am I exhausted today.

I missed the Gay Pride parade this weekend, but on Sunday I got together with a bunch of former Brandeisians, many of whom I haven't seen in ages. A couple friends on LiveJournal have written about the "kook out" here and here.

Mind you, this week's schedule isn't that much more relaxed. All week, Monday thru Friday, I'm taking a class in Information Design. Cool class so far, though I think the school is getting a good deal off us. We're working on a real-world problem with the Simmons website. So, instead of the school paying for the redesign of their website, we're paying them for the privilegecredits.

Meanwhile, I'll share several nifty things I've found since I've posted here last:

• I'll just gripe that it's really annoying for a teacher to recommend such an addictive book as Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping point when I've got such a heavy workload already... Needless to say, I read it over the weekend between stints of writing my paper. That makes book number 75 for the year.
• Today, I saw a nifty book on the remainders racks at the BU Bookstore. Untam'd desire: sex in Elizabethan England I read the intro and part of the first chapter while waiting for Ian, and rather enjoyed it. It was $10, and after discovering that list price on Amazon is $30, I think I'll stop by and pick it up tomorrow. I have such odd tastes in reading material sometimes.
  Meanwhile, I've got a huge list of competitive intelligence and library science books that I want to read based on recommendations from classmates.
• The website for Neil Gaiman's new book Coraline is disturbing. Screensaver #2 on the downloads page is even more creepy. Falling asleep next to the laptop and being awoken by the audio from that screensaver... it took quite a while, but I think my heart has finally gone back to normal again.
• I've also been terribly amused this weekend by Library of Moria, a LOTR slash archive, with stories listed by pairing.
• Meanwhile, I'm working on a new essay that I hope to post to my Writing page later this week. It's a general "About Me" piece, including favorite books, movies, music, art and so on. I originally intended these for the journal, as an introduction to anybody just discovering my site, but I think it's getting a bit too long to post here.

And I guess that's about it for now. I need to get some sleep. Byeee!