Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:50 PM

Due to lack-of-job monetary reasons, last night's evening at the movies was what I have to consider a rare treat to myself.

But I want to see it again. Real soon. This weekend, ideally. It's just that effing marvelous to the eye. And I want to catch the lines the full fannish audience drowned out with laughter. And I want to pick up the nuances I might've missed that might not be recognizable on the small screen when it eventually comes out on DVD. And I want to see it with Ian, both so he can see it, and so I can discuss it with him, because I so often appreciate things more with his company and insights.

But given our current financial situation, I can't justify the expense to myself, at least not until it hits second run prices. [Maybe we could talk enough other people into going to a drive-in with us to make the cost reasonable, but (a) our car is too small that I doubt it would be comfortable for people in the back seat, and (b) the double-feature this week is atrocious. (They paired it with Scooby Doo 2, of all things! Why can't they just pair it with Shrek 2, another flick I still want to see.)]

BTW, for other movie-loving cheapskates in the Boston area, I just found Free Screenings, an LJ listing of previews, contests and other free movie showings. I'll confess, I'm a little reluctant to share the URL, since that may increase the competition for things I want do see. [Damn it, I want to win the two free tickets to the IMAX Prisoner of Azkaban; particularly since they're saying it's uncut, and I haven't actually seen anything but the science documentaries in IMAX format before, and it's just that good that I want to see it again.]

Finally, on a lighter note, how about some Friday quizzy goodness:

I'm not entirely happy with the answers to the quiz, since they didn't list the browser I test most in (Opera) nor my choices of drink (tea, Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper or Sprite). But still, not bad.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:45 AM

Yes, I AM that much of a geek.

However, one good thing about being laid off is that I don't have to report to work tomorrow morning. And the movie really is worth it. I don't want to spoil anything, but... Bloody brilliant!

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:45 PM

By the way, while searching for jobs, I found two listings at Tufts that, while I don't qualify for, sound perfect for people on my friends list. Both openings are described as Programmer: Perseus/Classics, and just get a load of the requirements they're asking for:

Requires Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and three years' experience; advanced degree in Classics or some other area of the Humanities a plus. Must possess background in Java, C and UNIX with three or more years of programming /software development experience. Must have working knowledge of PCs, Macs, and UNIX/LINUX workstations. Extensive knowledge and proficiency in computer programming and system architectures is crucial.

I have a feeling I know that person, a programmer with advanced degrees in Classics... Anyway, if you fit that description and are looking for work in the Boston area, Tufts is hiring two.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:35 PM

When I'm not busy applying for jobs, I've been occupying distracting my mind with a steady dose of avoidance, largely through reading (more on this in another post for another day).

The latest issue of Dork Tower includes "Clanbook Mopey" for Vampire: the Masquerade, written by Phil Masters. Pretty funny stuff if you're at all familiar with the White Wolf universe or gaming system. But what really cracked Ian and I up was the list of archetypes: Nightclub Philosopher, Movie Buff, and I.T. Support Techie.

Yes, I.T. Support Techie is an archetype, and a rather accurate one, too. Just to excerpt:

Speaking of comics, I know several readers of this blog who will be interested to know that a new issue of Girl Genius hit the shelves yesterday. Undauntra, we've got an extra copy in our pull box at Outer Limits for you. If you want to go down there yourself and ask for it from my box, that's fine. Otherwise let me know if you want me to cancel that subscription so Steve can put it back on the shelves.

And on a more serious note for a moment, I would greatly appreciate recommendations for contracting or temp agencies and headhunters in the Boston area. Also if there are any places you suggest I avoid, warnings against them would also be useful. Thank you.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:29 PM

For a couple years, I've been hearing vague plans that the city was going to do some major reconstruction work on the street in front of our house. Looks like they're starting. Over the past couple weeks we've seen mysterious lines painted on our sidewalks and the road, presumably indicating where pipes are buried. The last two days, we've had construction equipment in front of our house, and they've been doing something with the water pipes. [They turned off the water to the house for a while.] Noisy and somewhat inconvenient when we have to get out of the driveway (they're very polite about moving the equipment for us, but it still means waiting for them to move the equipment for us). But it looks like they're done for the day now.

Today is the last day I can sign and turn in the agreement to get the generous one week severance pay. I'm somewhat nervous about this, and I will probably need the money, but I don't think I'm going to do it. I'm not entirely certain about this decision, but I don't think the amount of money they're offering is worth the rights I'd have to sign away. I'm somewhat tempted to return the paperwork with a note saying I won't sign unless they offer me more money, but I doubt they'd want to spend more money on me just for the promises not to sue or file charges against them. I'll confess, I don't like the thought of the company keeping my severance money, either, but it seems like the best of a bad bargain.

Matter of the files is going better. After I calmed down, I emailed my former supervisor regarding the issue (Ian was a great help here in getting the wording right), and got a reply back that they will copy the files in "My Documents" directory to CD, and if anything is missing, I can let them know. I replied by naming the one subdirectory of "My Documents" that I know is entirely work-related, which they don't need to send me, but if they're going to let me have all of "My Documents" (except that folder) that should be sufficient. Not happy, but I prefer this negative option than the positive list I thought they were going to require.

Anybody else planning on going to the Boston line party for Prisoner of Azkaban tomorrow night? The URLs have changed since my last post on the matter, but here's the outline of events and here's the timeline.

I still hate writing cover letters.

But I suppose I ought to get back to them.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:20 AM

from A History of reading, which I finished last night:

"I have sought for happiness everywhere," confessed Thomas à Kempis, early in the fifteenth century, "but I have found it nowhere except in a little corner with a little book." But which little corner? And which little book? (pg. 151)

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In the twelfth-century Life of Saint Gregory, the toilet is described as "a retiring place where tablets can be read without interruption". Henry Miller agreed: "All my good reading was done in the toilet," he once confessed. "There are passages of Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content." (pg. 152)

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[Regarding book-reviewer Margaret Fuller,] Oscar Wilde said that Venus had given her "everything except beauty" and Pallas "everything except wisdom". (pg. 167)

---

I am once again about to move house. Around me, in the secret dust from unsuspected corners now revealed by the shifting of furniture, stand unsteady columns of books, like the wind-carved rocks of a desert landscape. As I build pile after pile of familiar volumes (I recognize some by their colour, others by their shape, many by a detail on the jackets whose titles I try to read upside down or at an odd angle) I wonder, as I have wondered every other time, why I keep so many books that I know I will not read again. I tell myself that, every time I get rid of a book, I find a few days later that this is precisely the book I'm looking for. I tell myself that there are no books (or very, very few) in which I have found nothing at all to interest me. I tell myself that I've brought them into my house for a reason in the first place, and that this reason may hold good again in the future. I invoke excuses of thoroughness, of scarcity, of faint scholarship. But I know that the main reason I hold onto this ever-increasing hoard is a sort of voluptuous greed. I enjoy the sight of my crowded bookshelves... (pg. 237)

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That a book does not exist (or does not yet exist) is not a reason to ignore it any more than we would ignore a book on an imaginary subject. There are volumes written on the unicorn, on Atlantis, on gender equality, on the Dark Lady of the Sonnets and the equally dark Youth. (pg. 310)

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...raises the question of how (and why) certain readers will preserve a reading long after most other readers have relinquished it to the past. The example given is from a London journal published sometime in 1855, when most English papers were full of news of the war in Crimea:

John Challis, an old man about 60 years of age, dressed in the pastoral garb of a shepherdess of the golden age, and George Campbell, aged 35, who described himself as a lawyer, and appeared completely equipped in female attire of the present day, were placed at the bar before Sir R. W. Carden, charged with being found disguised as women in the Druids'-hall, in Turnagain Lane, an unlicensed dancing room, for the purpose of exciting others to commit an unnatural offense.

"A shepherdess of the golden age": by 1855 the literary pastoral ideal was very much a thing of the past. (pg. 315)

BTW, if you are considering picking this book up, please note that the title declares it to be A History and not The History. Chapters are thematic, not chronological, and most topics could carry an entire book of their own if explored in more depth.

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:32 PM

I forgot how much I hate writing cover letters. Needs to be done, but it feels like pulling teeth.

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:40 PM

Went through the various online job listing sites yesterday. Found slightly over a dozen worth applying for, including at least two I applied for long ago that appear to be open again. Anybody who's been in a job hunt recently care to share a decent recordkeeping sheet for jobs found, applied for and responses or further contacts? I'm just looking for a good system to keep track of all this, and am open to suggestion.

My current pleasure reading is A History of reading by Alberto Manguel. Interesting book. It's not a linear history of writing or of books, but of how we (as individuals) read, and how that has been perceived over time. The introduction, which is mostly the author's own biography with relation to books, is rather dry and probably skippable, although his relationship with Jorge Luis Borges is kind of neat. To give a better idea of the book, let me sum up the first four chapters (I'm only on chapter 5 so far):

1. Physiology of how people read, with theories as far back as 5 BC
2. The notion of silent reading, and how that developed
3. On reading and memory
4. How people learn to read...

Some really nifty stuff -- in some ways, Manguel manages to verbalize things I had internalized but never even thought to put into words. And lots of fascinating trivia, such as the notion of "common sense" comes from a medieval belief that there was a general sensorial repository located in the brain which sight, sounds, smell, taste and touch fed into. If reading out loud was the norm from the beginnings of the written word, what was it like to read or study in the great ancient libraries? Early Christians popularized codexes over scrolls because the former were easier to hide or conceal. And how the increasing prevalence of reading silently (in a way no outsiders could clarify or offer guidance) led to the explosion of Christian heresies in the Reformation.

I think I'm going to like this one. It seems in a similar vein to another title I've read and recommend, Henry Petroski's The Book on the bookshelf (which provides the history of book storage systems, rather than books themselves).

BTW, some updates on old stuff I'd like to call attention to. For Harry Potter fen, I'd like to remind/point out that last fall, I found an Elizabethan recipe for buttered beere, which seems to fit J.K. Rowling's description of butterbeer fairly well, even if JKR claims she made it up.

Second, people may remember past illnesses of Boopsie's, when I discussed how difficult it was to medicate a cat. Well, this goround (she's got another UTI), pilling her has been absolutely painless. So, for other cat owners, here's the trick. There's a new product our vet sold us, Pill Pockets -- really stinky cat treats with a hollowed-out center just the right size to conceal a pill. We've been putting the daily pill in the cat treat and she's been gobbling them down. I worried it wouldn't work -- she'd taste the medicine once and refuse hereafter -- but she hasn't got tired of them yet, and even begs for more after she's been pilled. Just FYI.

Finally, I don't quite know why, but I've been getting a lot of hits from Google for this image. No clue why or how folks are finding it, but it's from this Quizilla quiz, which I blogged last July. Though I'll confess, if people are going to Google for silly photoshopped Johnny Depp, I much prefer this image I made of Kit Marlowe, from August.

And now, back to the grind...

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:09 PM

From today's Boston Globe, the Community briefing page, which contains paragraph-long tidbits about the various towns north of Boston. Compare the headline with the article and notice what's missing:

Dolan proposes shorter library hours
Among the suggestions Mayor Robert Dolan is making to bridge a projected $1 million budget gap next year is cutting back the hours of all City Hall employees by five hourse, from 35 to 30, and closing City Hall early on Friday afternoons and a half-hour earlier Mondays through Thursdays. Dolan said the gap has been caused by a $1 million hike in health insurance premiums. He presented a $50.4 million spending plan to the Board of Aldermen Thursday, which is a 1.5 percent increase over the city's current budget. Under Dolan's plan, City Hall would be open from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursdays, and 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Fridays.

Added later: This is in the Melrose section of the page, and refers to the city we live in. The budgetary shortfall is not news to us, nor the general need for cutbacks, though I hadn't heard of the one mentioned in the headline.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:58 PM

So I'm going through the various listing sites for librarian jobs (most of the links I posted last January are still quite useful), and I come across a listing which reads:

SALARY: $19.1010 - $22.9208

On first glance, I misread the decimal point as a comma, and thought to my self, "boy, I knew public library salaries are low, but that's ludicrous!" And then I realized that was an hourly rate of $19.10, and not an annual salary of $19,101... But I've been suckered into shock by this listing twice so far, so I thought I'd blog it since there's nothing else going on worth writing about. Ian and his father are building the third-story deck, I've been trying to figure out how to word a polite letter to my former bosses regarding my computer files (appealing to the fact that they've known me for 13 months and assuring them that I have no intention of taking anything that would harm the company), and I've been reading fanfic to keep my sanity in between all that.