bizgirl

Crikey. Michael Klim makes an extra effort with the whole swimmer-fish metaphor thing.

That is all.

[via Tam I Am]

Found via Mandi's Imagination - the harrowing tale of a German couple struggling to have children. Why? After fertility tests they were told they were both perfectly virile and shouldn't be having any troubles conceiving. The doctor's were baffled. Questions were asked...

"How often are you having sex?"
"Sex? What do you mean?"

Aha. There you go. Apparently their strict religious upbringing had totally avoided any hint of sex education. How totally depressing. As Mandi points out: "One things for sure...I'll bet they are saying 'Holy Moly! We could've been doing this for 8 years???'"

Since I stupidly claimed to think that cataloguing was 'stimulating and challenging' when I applied for my current job, I've been seconded into the cataloguing team to cover a gap while one of the old pros - Mrs Strathsprey - is away on maternity leave (she's at least in her late 40s, and this will be her third child, the other two now being in their 20s! There's a whole other story there, I'm sure, but I know nothing of it, minus some fascinating innuendo and tea-room speculation: perhaps another day...).

So, for three mornings a week I'm stuck out the back, doing the thankless task of cataloguing our new books. It's quite good in that it's uninterrupted, and easy to get into a rhythm (especially with my discman on), but quite bad in that it's actually very boring, and even nailing down a dewey number to 7 decimal places no longer gives me the the same satisfaction it did when I was bit of a cataloguing ingenue.

And to make matters worse - Norma (the girl? woman? she's my age - surely I can call her a girl?) - who they've got to do the other half of Mrs Strathsprey's shifts is, for the want of better words: totally useless and awesomely lazy. I thought I was lazy, but, for about three months now I'm pretty sure she hasn't done any work, at all.

Mrs Kambaa, head of the cataloguing department, has a well-laid out 'to-do' list we have to work our way through each week. Things get shifted and prioritised, and sometimes there is work that pops up that isn't on the list, but, I'd say at least three quarters of our total workload does show up on the list, and I'm doing all of it.

I mean, I'm a procrastinator with the best of them, and I'd be lying if I said wasn't this very moment writing about the problem of slacking off at work while actually slacking off at work. But the way I've always worked is that if someone gives you a list of tasks, the trick is to turn what are (realistically) 15 five minute jobs into (believably) 15 one hour tasks. I figure there's some sort of unspoken agreement between employers and highly-skilled-but-underpaid professionals (like, for example, librarians), that allows this sort of give-and-take to go on. But it's the slacker's end of the bargain to get through at least their two or three hours of designated work a week, and not leave it all up to their ever-so-slightly-more-industrious co-worker to rein in the slack.

So yes, I came in this week, and even after two afternoons of uninterrupted time to herself in our shared workspace, nothing in our cubicle area had even moved. The book I had left open for her to complete cataloguing remained open, a sheen of dust over its bibliographic details page. I logged on to the system and clicked through her IE history list. Aha! She'd spent most, if not all of last week browsing around fancy dress sites, playing an online game, checking her hotmail, and (god, no) spending a lot of time on OldFriends and NZDating.

There are, as far as I can see, several solutions to the problem...

1) Dob her in. Tell the boss. Fink. Her Out.
No, not cool, is it?

2) Tell her to pull finger.
If I wasn't so passive-aggressive...

3) Instead of just ticking off each item on the to-do list, also add my initials to indicate that it was me that did the work.
Ohhh, yes, this is far and away my favourite. If, as I suspect, she's fallen out of the habit of looking at the to-do list properly, it could be days before she's onto my little scheme.

The downside to all this is, of course, that once management click onto the fact that I'm doing the work of two, they'll realise that I can do the work of two. Norma will probably get a demotion to permanent shelving or returns or some other library penance job, and I'll be kept on secondment, doing the same hours but the same amount of work.

God, no-one ever told me it would be so tough being competent!

I was on duty at the reference desk when the phone rang. It startled me. I had forgotten the desk even had a phone.

"Reference Desk."
"Hello, is that the reference desk?"
"Yes it is," I confirmed.
"Does the library keep old weather maps?"
"Yes. The library keeps many national and international newspapers in which there are weather maps."
"Could you email them to me? I have hotmail."

Ahaha. 'I have hotmail'. Trouble written all over this one. Time to lose the loser (or, as the online kids like to say: loose the looser).

"Sorry, no, you'd have to come in and photocopy them, or I could put you onto the information for business team that will quote you a price for completing that request for you."
"How much would that be?"
"I really don't know. Would you like me to put you through?"
"Hmm, no. How much are the photocopiers?"
"20 cents a sheet or you can buy discount cards."
"Hmmm. How big are the weather maps?"

I dug out today's Dominion (a very useful reference tool, I've discovered). I flicked through to the weather pages. How big were they? Ummmm.

"They're about, uh ... three weetbix high?"
"Three weetbix? You mean lying flat on top of each other?"
"Oh, no, I mean as if you lay three weetbix down on a bit of paper, how much space that would take up."
"How many maps are there?"

At times like this, when I'm telling some confused person about the layout of their own daily paper, I really wonder about my choice of professsion.

"Three."
"So each one is about weetbix size?"
"Well, actually, even a bit smaller than that. Maybe cigarette box sized?"
"Hmmm, that doesn't sound very big. What do they show?"

I looked. I must admit, the weather page isn't something I look at in at great detail, even when it's stormy and cold like it has been here over the last week. I tried my best with the meteorological lingo...

"Um, the top map has a satellite photo with the contour line things over the top."
"A mean sea level barometric pressure map."
"I suppose so. And the other two don't have the satellite photo. It's just a green New Zealand on a blue sea. And the top one's entitled 'noon yesterday', the middle one is 'noon today', and the last one is 'midnight tonight'."
"Does the last one have that big low still off the east coast."

I figured the L with the tightly spaced contours off the east coast of the South Island was what he was talking about."

"Yes."
"Ohoho!" he proclaimed, "I knew it! We'll be in for a wet one this weekend! I have a theory on this..."

And so it started. The theories. He lulled me into it with the innocuous sounding Weather-Shotgun-Scatter-Theory. He prattled merrily about this for about five incomprehensible minutes before he segued into the Hertz-Interference-Sunspot-Theory (earthquake prediction method - he's plotted them all, he assures me, on a big bit of paper), before launching into a more technical discussion on his 'Council of the Gods' Planet-Alignment-Earthquake-Theory.

It eventually occured to me that he was so off the rocker I should be making notes, and even now I'm kicking myself for missing the first ten minutes, because it was all pure blog gold. His ranting touched on the cause of algae bloom, the reason behind NZ's high suicide rates, a long-term lake level prediction method, and (a real highlight for me) the implications of the impending north-pole-south-pole magnetism switch ("my high-school teacher, an ex-sailor, taught me all about it!").

I eventually stopped giving any sort of coversational affirmation: no "yes", no "I know", no "mmm". No verbal feedback at all. I just let him talk, and talk, and talk. I suspect I could have put the phone down, gone to help a reference-impaired patron drifting around the periodicals section and come back to him, but, as it was, I was busily googling away some of his more outrageous phrases , and he didn't seem to pick up or take offence at the keyboard and mouse chatter I was churning through. He also told me he had a special toll-calling plan set up so he could make personal calls to all the 'experts' he saw and heard on Holmes and Radio New Zealand. Lucky them, I thought. Eventually - I think he was debating renewable energy sources with himself - he seemed to run out of steam and abruptly signed off...

"Ah well then, I won't talk your ear off, have a nice day, goodbye."
My first words, seriously, in nearly half an hour: "Yes, cheers, goodbye."
Click.

I talked to my boss - Mrs Liddesdale - about it later, showing her my page of notes.

"Oh no, that was [the Expert]. How long did he blab on for?"
"The Expert? Um, twenty minutes maybe. Maybe a bit more? He did go on."

Mrs Liddesdale literally clicked her heel into the floor. "I must do something about him," she declared.

Turns out he's a notorious recidivist hassler of Wellington public servants. He slowly-but-surely does the rounds of all the local council departments (works, libraries, refuse, parking, parks) ensnaring unsuspecting employees into long-winded one-way conversations about his 'theories'.

Library staff have now been informed that there is a specific policy of 'get-a-name-and-if-it's-The-Expert-pass-him-on-to-Ms-Liddesdale.' Oooh, there's one conversation I'd love to eavesdrop on...

Although it played havoc with my layout (since fixed), the new blogger navbar thing there at the top of the page is soooo much better than the horrible old blogspot ad that used to take up bit of screen real estate. The thing I like best is the 'next blog' button - I've been finding all sorts of weird and wonderful blogs by clicking on it once I've exhausted my list of regulars.

For example...

Le hamburger et le croissant - a blog completely in French by a girl who seems to have some sort of obsession with pastries, cakes and baking in general. Particularly liked this post.

Watch Me Turn 30 - which I've since added to my regulars list, so cool-looking is Holly P., the girl who runs the site. She's posting a photo of herself every day in her last year as a 20-something. (Co-incidentally enough, another of my regular reads, twist of kate, also linked to her recently - even on the blogosphere it's a small world.)

kat's scribbles - 'cos she looks so cool playing that guitar.

Chelsea Peretti - mostly because she reinforces my growing concern that America is full of scary crazies (not Chelsea, that is, follow this link to see what I mean). And she looks cool too...

The weird thing is, almost without fail, the blog I get is written by a female, and, more often than not (at the moment) English is either their second language, or they don't write in English at all. What's with that?

"Women big users of sperm donations"

A headline over at NZCity.com. Like, surprise.

[via pnn]

News from (where else?) Florida, USA this week...

Early Wednesday, still fused to the couch, Gayle Laverne Grinds died following a six-hour effort by rescue workers who struggled to lift the 480-pound woman and get her to a Martin County hospital.

Unable to separate the skin of the 39-year-old woman from her sofa, 12 Martin County Fire-Rescue workers slid both onto a trailer and hauled her behind a pickup to Martin Memorial Hospital South. She died a short time later.

Fused to the couch! It's times like this that I'm vaguely pleased the news articles doesn't have a photo. 480 pounds = 217kg. That is over three times my weight. And she was only 4 foot 10, a whole foot shorter than me. Crumbs.

[via boingboing]

Not the head-exploding type, but pretty close...

One of the drawbacks of being young(ish), (relatively) computer-savvy, and (generally) polite, is that I get called upon to help older, slightly more doddery librarians with all problems IT. Yesterday was a classic example. Mrs Oolong, one of the senior librarians, came and pulled me off returns to help her out with some scanning. She'd be struggling for nearly an hour, she told me, to scan in a book cover.

This didn't surprise me - the scanner we've got is turn-of-century vintage, and the supporting software (which I'm sure we could upgrade if someone let me have admin privilege - dreams are free) is counter-intuitive and buggy. Anyway, Mrs Oolong, despite having been walked through the process on about half a dozen previous occasions, was still struggling to get a usable image.

"Every time I scan in the book, the computer slows right down, and then when I save it, it crashes!" she admonished me (yes, admonished, like it was my fault. This is one of Mrs Oolong's major faults: projecting her IT problems onto the people around her). I got her to retrace the steps of what she'd done previously.

She opened the graphics package we use to (hooray! a good start).
She correctly selected the obscure 'acquire' command from the File menu. (Very good).
She set the scan type: colour photo (close enough)
She set the dpi: 1200dpi (!)

"Umm," I said, "that might be your problem - 1200dpi is going to give you a pretty big image. I don't know if this PC has enough memory to handle that kind of image size." (It almost certainly wouldn't, being about as archaic as the scanner it was attached to).
"But Mrs Kenilworth [fellow senior librarian - not equipped, I might add, to being giving advice on IT matters] told me that the higher the dpi number, the higher resolution picture we would get out of it."
"Well, yes, that's true but, well, 1200dpi is very high resolution. Magazines and most print material is done at 300dpi, and, well, what is this image going to be used for?"
"The web team are putting together a new books page. I'm supposed to scan in this pile...," she indicated a pile of about 20 books - about three days work at her current rate, "...for adding to the website."
"So the resolution doesn't need to be that high. We can probably get away with 72dpi - that's pretty standard for web stuff."
"But I still want them to look nice and clear."
"Well, you can scan in at a slightly higher resolution and then shrink them down, but I doubt the difference would be that great."
"How about we scan them in at 300dpi? If that's what they use for magazines, that would be good enough, wouldn't it?"
I acquiesced. "Yes, let's do it that way."

So, she put the book cover down on the scanner and hit scan. The scanner chunked and whirred its way through a painful-sounding two minute scan (like I say, it's an old scanner), and finally regurgitated the image into our graphics editor. Upside-down. And cropped.

"Well," said Mrs Oolong, "that didn't work properly, did it? Shall we increase the resolution to get the missing bit back?"

I love the way some people's brains work.

"I think we just need to preview the image first, before scanning - we need to select the correct scanning area."

Snip out about 10 more minutes of technical toing and froing here, including a barely-understood demonstration on how to use the marquee tool to draw a bounding box. We eventually got there, and had the book cover correctly selected. Still upside down though - I didn't want to confuse matters (oh how I was to regret that decision), by getting her to flip it now. We scanned. The image popped into the graphics editor. Correctly cropped, but upside down. And massive.

"Well," said Mrs Oolong, "I think that size is about perfect. How do we turn it around?"
"Actually, it's about 10 times that size," I pointed out. "That's just the current display size. See the zoom indicator?"
"Yes?"
"That means we're zoomed right out, so we can see the whole image. It's very very large. We'll have to shrink it first."
"And rotate it?"
"Well, yes, but..."

Too late - Mrs Oolong had clicked on the 'rotate right 90 degrees' icon that stood out prominently amongst the otherwise impossible-to-decipher hieroglyphics on the toolbar. The computers hard drive started whirring and complaining as the PC's memory suddenly found itself having to deal with a multi-megabyte image transform. After about 30 seconds, the status indicator froze up, and the hard drive started making some bad noises. Freeze up.

Mrs Oolong humphed. "This is what it did the other times," she complained. I ctrl-alt-deleted and closed the graphics app, much to Mrs Oolong's amazement. Again, snip out five minutes of explanation here as to how to close non-responding software without resorting to turning off the PC at the wall.

Eventually we got back to where we were. I convinced Mrs Oolong that putting the book 'upside-down' in the scanner was key to our success, and that lowering the dpi to 150 (compromised on that one) might also help. We scanned, we got the image, things were definitely looking good. I gave up on the idea of resizing the images now - that was something the web-team could sort out for themselves, I figured. We just needed to get it to them in a usable format. Mrs Oolong hit the save button. The save dialog popped up, and she (unprompted!) entered a relatively meaningful file name for the book cover image.

Now, one of the many things that catches people out about our graphics package is that it saves to a proprietary format, and since we're the only people who seem to be using this bit of software, sending that format to anyone else is a total waste of time. Naturally, saving as a jpg would make it much easier to deal with downstream. Too late, Mrs Oolong had clicked the 'Save' button and saved the image as a xyz or somesuch.

"We'll have to save the image as a jpg so the webteam can see it," I informed Mrs Oolong.
"A jay peg?"
"It's a type of web-specific image file. The one we just saved is no good for the web, and the web-team might not have the software to convert it. It'd be safest if we just saved it as a jpg here to start with. It'll also make it much smaller, so we can email it without risk of the mail system freaking out over the size."
"We don't want to make it smaller do we? We've already lowered to 150dpi haven't we?"
"Smaller file size, I mean. The actual physical size of the image will stay the same."
"Really?"
"Yes."
"How does that work then?" she asked, suspiciously.

I would have launched into my very limited knowledge of image compression techniques at that point, but time was dragging, and I was due for a tea break, so I gave a curt "I have no idea", and walked her through the 'save as...' process (another painstaking exercise that took 5 minutes longer than it should have to master - problem being she had no idea where she was saving her images to). We fired up her email, and sent off the image to the web-team. I hung around for another ten minutes to make sure she could get through the whole routine on her own (only had to steer her right four or five times), and then scuttled off for a triple Milo (all milk) to relax.

Thankfully, twenty minutes later I was on reference, and thus not able to be pulled away when I saw Mrs Oolong pop out of the lift and start scanning the library for yet more technical assistance. I pointed her towards our new super-star boy librarian who was on returns, and saw him getting the 'come-and-save-me' look from Mrs Oolong. He dutifully disappeared into the lift with her, to return half an hour later, shaking his head. I haven't yet caught up with him about what he helped out with, but I suspect, goldfish-like, that Mrs Oolong had forgotten everything I'd told her in the previous hour, and had to start from scratch.

J-Lo - bald. And many more female celebs with their hair removed at this endlessly entertaining site.

Scary: Shania Twain, Calista Flockhart

Still beautiful: Uma Thurman, Cameron Diaz

Even more beautful!: J-Lo, Tyra Banks

This site is great. The site creator has used p2p software to trawl for personal photos that people have inadvertantly (or deliberately, who knows?) dropped into their shared directories. Having grabbed a few that he likes, he throws them all into a gallery for the world to see. Above are four, randomly picked (well, I picked the messy room one because it's not too far off what my room looks like) photos that grabbed my eye. There's absolutely truck-loads more on the site.