The Black Pearl

Originally uploaded by Musebrarian
A 1962 Schwinn Traveler. Critical Mass here I come!

On Tuesday my iBook started having random and unreproducable kernel panics. I’ve slowly been working down the list of possible fixes but have yet to find the magic touch that will make my Mac happy again. Its not completely sad, just a little depressed at the moment. Although I’m now only a few steps away from having to re-install OS X from scratch. eeek.

Of course this all is happening just before I head off to another round of conferences and I’m weighing the the risks of reinstalling (which still may not solve the problem) vs. having an operating, but somewhat unreliable platform. We’ve already decided to swtich it out for the M&W presentation.

At least it gave me the needed motivation to get everything backed up appropriately. Especially my mail. I am now seriously considering forwarding all my UIUC mail to Gmail for the simple reason that I’d still have access to an archive of mail in the event of a crash. Due the limitations at UIUC and the amount of e-mail traffic I see, I still am POPing mail down (and because the Mail indexing is so freak’n damn fast).

Grrr. I’ve got enough on my plate over next few weeks. Adding a limping computer to mix isn’t making me happy.

Update 1: Bit the bullet and am trying to reinstall OS X. Crashed after the first install disk finished. Not a good sign.

Update 2: I am now convinced that I am suffering from a loose Airport card. Unfortunately this is something buried deep in the guts of my machine and requires complete removal of the iBook shell to fix. No way this is getting fixed before I leave. Now wondering whether its even worth luggging it along to SF. Will now only boot in Safe Mode.

Update 3: Mac still sad. Finally got a chance to sneak away from M&W and went to the Apple store here in SF. They confirmed that I have a bad Airport, but were not going to be able to fix it before I leave. Lusted after shiny new MacBook Pros.

Update 4 Since I’ll only be on the ground (and running at that) for less than the time it would take to ship iPopeye off to Apple for fix’n I’ve taken an alternate route. After an intensive search I finally found a 3rd party USB wireless adapter that has a secretive OS driver (Belkin f5D7050 Wireless-G USB). Apparently this product has revolved through a number of chipsets, mine is a ver. 4000 and I found this discussion useful and am using these drivers. Once I get the Airport fixed this can go on the PC and eliminate the snaky wirehazard that currently is my living room.

This is a test of a little piece of software called Ecto that Seb Chan at Fresh + New mentioned in a post today. A few contributors on Musematic have been having trouble with the Rich Text editor, so I thought I’d give Ecto a whirl here to see how it works.

Just back from MCN 2006 and getting caught up. More to come soon.

Technorati Tags: blog, editor

I installed Jerome’s Technorati tags for WordPress, future posts will include tags that link to posts with similar tags.   Once I have enough tags, this plugin also lets you display a tag cloud.

Today is (was?) Blog Day. I’m slipping in under the wire with a few blogs that I’ve enjoyed over the last year.

• Information Aesthetics: Data Visualization & Information Design. I just love visual information, IA keeps me happy.
• fresh+new: chronicles the work on the Powerhouse Museum in Australia. Their recent release of “OPAC 2.0″ is breaking ground for how museums share information about their collections.
• Grand Text Auto: A group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art.
• Caveat Lector. A fairly new addition to my blogroll, but I’ve been enjoying CavLecs personal style.
• Since all work and no play makes us a dull blog, here’s some places to have some fun. Physics Games and Select Parks

As you may have noticed, I haven’t written much of substance recently, thanks in large part my my thorough enjoyment of this last summer before starting the PhD program. I’ve been a little hard on myself for not accomplishing all the grandiose plans I laid out at the begining of the summer, but my colleagues here in Chambana have encouraged me to lighten up. OK, so I only moved my blog, configured a few wikis, worked full time, and got to see Tom Waits twice. Not bad work for a summer. And I’ve moved..again…to another nice old house in Champaign. After I moved into the last place I went to the local history archives at the Urbana Free Library (as the seat of Champaign County, Urbana holds the best collection of local history records) to do a little research. This weekend I made another trip back to learn about my new abode.

It always feels good to go back and do historical research. I’ve committed a lot of time to make resources available to researchers online, with some gut feeling about ways to do that. Sometimes I worry that I’ve gotten too far removed from the real work to still have a clear sense of what needs to be done. A little research trip now and then usually fixes me right up. I had to consult about 6 different databases, an unindexed folder of materials, newspapers on microfilm, and my best resource was still going year-by-year through the city directories. This isn’t to impugn the good work done at the Urbana Free/ As research experiences go, the local history archives does provide a lot of help, access to great resources, and a supportive and friendly staff. But it does suggest the large number of opportunities to improve access to these types of resources.

For a while, I’ve been interested in this history of “apartments,” having lived in so many of them (and I blame watching too many Thin Man movies.. It seems to be an under appreciated area of architectural and social history. I haven’t found much in libraries within reach, but there are lots of leads in Amazon. Even architectural journals don’t seem to talk much about them (at least from a quick search). I brought 740 Park: History of America’s Richest Apartment Building home from the library tonight – we’ll see where citation chaining takes me from here. Even though these are some of the largest and most impressive houses in Champaign, local history resources appear to ignore homes that have been turned into apartments in favor of family-owned homes or those that have been put to institutional purposes.

My previous home was commissioned in 1893 by A.C. Burnham, who funded the first library in Champaign, the Burnham Athenaeum, later to become the Champaign Public Library. While the Athenaeum was being built the library briefly took up residence at the house I lived in (although probably not my apartment). The house was later sold to the Harris family, who made their fortunes by first ranching cattle and later as bankers. I lost track of it’s history after 1929 (not the best time to be a banker). By the early 1950s the house was already turned into apartments.

My new home has a similar history. Lura and Marion Tackett, another banking family, built it in 1903. It was noted by the Champaign Daily Gazette for it’s unusual “southern” neoclassical style. Between 1908 and 1912 William F. Goss owned it. Most interestingly however, the house became a sanitarium from 1912 until 1918. Anna Balding and Irene Howell ran the sanitarium for “non contagious” cases using the Battle Creek method. – aka Dr. John Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes. Although formally known as the Balding & Howell Sanitarium, around town it was known as the Battle Creek Sanitarium. I haven’t turned up any digital historical pictures yet. The house passed through a few other hands before being bought by S.K. Hughes, another banker who owned it until 1928 when the building was turned into apartments. Thankfully through all its incarnations, the house has kept many of it’s charms. The pocket doors don’t work anymore, but the woodwork hasn’t been painted over, the hardwood floors are still original, and though the fireplace doesn’t work, the mantle-piece is still in great condition.

Signing off from home sweet home, I have to get back to my corn flakes before they get soggy….

Welcome to my new blog, the successor to libraryLand where I had been writing from the perspective of an MLIS student. Now that I’m upgrading to the PhD program, I decided it was time to upgrade to a new blog as well. I learned about WordPress from configuring the Museumatic.net blog earlier this year and decided that it would provide a little more freedom than Blogger did. Plus, I’m now on my own hosted service where I can play with some mashups or other script goodies. All of the previous posts from libraryLand have been migrated to Inherent Vice for your reading pleasure and convenience (and for the benefit of newcomers).

What’s with the new name?libraryLand was my first attempt at blogging and I’ve felt a little confined by the name since I started it. While I am in Library school, my research interests really span all of the cultural heritage/memory institution sector. I decided something that wasn’t so library-centric would be better suited for what I plan to discuss here. “libraryLand” always seemed a little out of place in museum and cultural heritage blogrolls.

The SAA Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology defines inherent vice as:

The tendency of material to deteriorate due to the essential instability of the components or interaction among components.

Besides being one of my all time favorite LAM terms, I think it appropriately describes many of the challenges we face in digital cultural heritage. Digital materials are rife with inherent vice, from file formats to large complex systems. These vices will continue to challenge us as we provide access to our current collections and as our collections include increasing amounts of born-digital materials. We continue to struggle with issues of interoprability, especially in attempting to build shared metadata repositories and services. As twenty-first professionals, digital materials have introduced instability to our traditional roles and responsibilities that we will be sorting out over the next few decades. As a PhD student I will be looking at these issues as a researcher and as someone who will be educating future generations of professionals.

Is it a little snarky? Maybe. But those of you who know me might recognize it as my usual dry wit. As I’ve dipped my toes into the blogosphere I’ve stuggled with the divide between public/professional and private. I’ve enjoyed reading blogs from other colleagues that include a glimpse of who they are. I hope to inject a little more personality into this new manifestation by including a few more mundane and speculative discussions. I’d also like to hear more from my readers – really I don’t bite – feel free to leave comments, questions, or suggestions for what you’d like to see more of here.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy!