Walt at Random

I begin to see why more and more blogs have capcha-style validation on their message forms.

Yes, Spam Karma 2 has been capturing spam–but because at least one valid comment was flagged as spam, I’ve been trying to check its harvest.

And the harvest is just getting too big, up over a hundred a day. I don’t know what these cretins think they’re accomplishing (one semi-spam got through, but I deleted it), but their automated forms result in way more than I’m willing to look at.

I’m not wild about capcha techniques, particularly since the image can be hard to decipher (I haven’t used this one yet), and there are accessibility issues (you can always send me email if you have trouble commenting, noting that the email is intended to be a comment; if it passes muster, I’ll add it myself). But I don’t want to turn off commenting, I don’t want to require registration, and I don’t want to spend more time checking lists of spamments than I do writing posts…

Two things have happened since then:

1. When I tried to see how Capcha was working, by using my wife’s notebook, the routine failed for some bizarre TrueType reason.

2. Checking here after three hours, it’s clear that the spam just keeps on flowing. Which suggests to me that this Capcha, if it’s doing anything at all, is downstream of Spam Karma for some reason. Which means it’s useless.

So I’ve deactivated it. For now.

One consequence: I don’t expect to keep checking the Spam Karma logs for erroneous spam capture. There’s just too many to go through, particularly when I’m away from the blog for a few days. So, if you post something and it never shows up, chances are Spam Karma didn’t like it. Sorry about that.

That’s a literal statement, one that Conde Nast would do well to pay attention to.

A couple of days ago, a thick issue of Conde Nast Traveler arrived–one of my favorite travel magazines, but my wife (who suffers from asthma) doesn’t read it partly because the paper/ink combination is a bit odoriferous.

This issue was different: As I unwrapped the wholly pointless resource-wasting plastic bag (not quite wholly pointless: It let Conde Nast bundle in full-sheet ads for other magazines that I have no intention of subscribing to), I nearly gagged: The magazine stunk.

The culprits were predictable: Two full-page perfume ads, with those foldover strips that supposedly release just a hint of the wonderful expensive perfume if you open up the strip.

Except, of course, that what they really do is shove the stink down your throat immediately, making it a whole lot worse if you’re stupid enough to unfold the strip.

I ripped out the two pages and took them out to the garage (and then to recycling). The magazine will eventually return to its normal low level of paper/ink smell. If my wife had opened the magazine, she’d be running for her inhaler.

Bad enough that Macy’s, which we sometimes shop at (for lack of better alternatives, and neither of us will shop at stores that regularly advertise fur coats), has taken to including perfume inserts in their Sunday flyers. Usually, it means that even after removing the insert, I just have to take the whole flyer out of the house; my wife can’t cope with the flyer.

I suspect there are a lot more asthmatics than there used to be, thanks to the chemical saturation we all deal with. Relatively few people around here wear heavy perfumes, fortunately (in 25 cruises, we’ve had one, but just one, case in which my wife had to leave the table during dinner because she couldn’t breathe, thanks to a perfume-soaked woman at an adjacent table). We really don’t need to be assaulted by perfumes in the magazines we buy. If it happens again with Conde Nast Traveler I’ll cancel the magazine, much as I like many of its articles and features. It’s just not worth it.

I wonder about these scent-heavy magazines in public libraries; I assume that “women’s magazines” have a lot more of these stinky ads. Maybe ventilation is enough more aggressive in public libraries that it’s not an issue? (Yes, my wife uses the local public library; no, so far she’s never had a problem there.)

The Astral Factor, 1976, color, John Florea (dir.), Robert Foxworth, Stefanie Powers, Sue Lyon, Elke Sommer, Leslie Parrish, Marianna Hill, Cesare Danova. 1:36.

IMDB says The Astral Factor was a working title, with Invisible Strangler the final title. In any case, it’s an odd little movie with a cast better than it deserves. Foxworth is a detective; Powers is his girlfriend (there strictly as eye candy, apparently, unfortunately given that she’s a decent actress). The rest of the women…well, a prisoner at a state hospital has figured out how to turn himself invisible (and kill people with his deadly stare, but that’s secondary), escapes, and sets about killing the beautiful women who testified against him after he murdered his beautiful mother, with his insane conviction that all of the other women are also his mother. He also kills anybody who happens to be in his way, but does that with his magic stare (and I’m guessing he has to be visible for the stare to work; the women, he strangles invisibly). The transfer-to-invisibility visual is like a low-budget version of Star Trek’s transporter effect. Elke Sommer, drink always in hand, survives; the rest don’t. The movie? OK—probably better with a couple drinks under your belt. Not the high point of anyone’s career. Damaged print brings it down to $1.

The Galaxy Invader, 1985, color, Don Dohler (dir.), Richard Ruxton and other unknowns, including several Dohlers. 1:19.

An alien (with green rubbery skin, a glowing white ball, and a white ray gun invisibly powered by the ball) lands in the woods near a drunken redneck and family. College student spots the landing, gets professor involved. Various shenanigans involving the redneck’s family (who hate him), his redneck buddy promising riches, the professor and student, grabbing the ball, grabbing the alien, freeing the alien, and generally running around in the woods. Awful acting (a cast that mostly only shows up in other Dohler films, presumably all filmed with zero budgets), absurd screenplay, one decent special effect, and an ending that…well, “Independence Day” comes to mind, but probably not the one you’re thinking of. (Think country music, not scifi movies). And yet…for some reason, I found this inept pile of trash likeable. Damned if I know why, although there is one tiny bit of good scriptwriting: The professor (in shirtsleeves, no tie) and student go to get something to eat at the dive/roadhouse that’s nearby. The waitress offers menus if they’d like them and takes drink orders. The prof asks whether he can get a vodka martini on the rocks, shaken, not stirred. Waitress: “No.” Prof: “How about a beer?” Waitress: “Sure.” That’s the highlight of the film…and yet it works. By any rational standard, not worth a dime; I give it $1, and can’t really explain why.

Battle of the Worlds (Il pianeta degli uomini spenti), 1961, color, Antonio Margheriti (dir.), Claude Rains, Bill Carter, Umberto Orsini, Maya Brent. 1:24.

One reasonably favorable review at IMDB calls this “very similar to When Worlds Collide.” Well, sure, in much the same way that hamburger is very similar to a good porterhouse: They’re both beef. Battle of the Worlds is a dubbed Italian flick with one name star, Claude Rains (in apparently his last movie role) as a bitter old genius scientist who can figure out everything through equations. He recognizes that a planetoid (“the unknown”) isn’t going to hit the Earth (as it first appears) but is instead going to go into a slowly declining orbit. Pretty decent special effects for the time, a truly strange interior section on the planetoid/spaceship, and a thoroughly empty ending. Not wonderful, not terrible. $1.

Unknown World, 1951, b&w, Terry O. Morse (dir.), Bruce Kellogg, Otto Waldis, Jim Bannon, Marilyn Nash, Victor Kilian (uncredited). 1:14.

Concerned scientists are sure that humanity’s about to blow itself up and want to find an underground refuge. They develop a “Cyclotram”—a nuclear-powered vehicle with a drill in front—and, thanks to funding from a useless young rich man looking for thrills, take off to seek out the refuge. They start out at Mt. Nelee, an extinct volcano in Alaska, and just keep going down, with various perils along the way. They find their refuge at an absurd depth (you didn’t know that the earth’s basically just a honeycomb of tunnels with temperature about the same all the way down to 2600 miles below the surface?), but Something in the Air means the test rabbits breed sterile. Some of the explorers make it back to the surface, thanks to that little-known portion of the ocean that’s 2600 miles deep. Most of this movie is actors walking around in Carlsbad Caverns, sort of like The Incredible Petrified World on disc 1. A bit boring, preachy and dull, but not terrible. $0.75.

Californians use more gas than any other state.

Californians use less gas than inhabitants of 44 other states.

Those are both true statements (according to a story in this morning’s Chronicle), but only one of them is meaningful. Fortunately, although the story included them in the wrong order, it did include both. Unfortunately, most stories of this sort only include the equivalent of the first.

Glossing the two statements:

Taken as a whole, California consumes more gasoline than any other state.

Californians consume less gasoline per capita than inhabitants of 44 other states.

Statements in the first category are almost always meaningless, because they leave out the key fact (which people may “know” but tend to be fuzzy about): California has more people than any other state–and not just a few more. 2004 estimates are that California has nearly 60% more inhabitants than the second most populous state: just under 35.9 million people compared to Texas’ 22.5 million.

Thus, saying that California has the most X of whatever is usually a waste of ink, unless you’re comparing it to countries (e.g., “the sixth largest economy in the world”–compared to nations, not other states).

The second statement is interesting, particularly given that California is a long state whose inhabitants are used to driving long distance, with most cities really not designed for pedestrians. It suggests that all those Priuses and Civic Hybrids and regular Civics and the rest really do make a difference.

(Similarly, despite the fabled affluence of Californians and our reliance on air conditioners and all that other stuff, the 2004 figures for electricity consumption are pretty startling:

Residential: California average, 2367 KWH per capita. U.S. average: 4405 KWH per capita

Total (including industrial and transportation): CA, 7041 KWH per cap, U.S.: 12081 KWH per cap.

Interestingly, the percentage of all electricity devoted to residential use isn’t much different: 34% in California, 36.5% U.S. as a whole.)

Updated a few minutes later: One other calculation would make the energy-efficiency of Californians (drummed into us for years, successfully, apparently) a little more obvious. Namely, taking residential power consumption for the rest of the country on a per capita basis.

That yields 4688 KWH per capita.

Which means that Californians, on average, use barely over half as much electricity as non-Californians in the U.S. (50.4%).

Recycling numbers would be interesting (Mountain View substantially exceeds California’s 50%-diversion target, that is, manages to recycle considerably more than 50% of what was formally trash), but I haven’t looked for them.

There’s a survey on libraries and community-building that Chrystie R. Hill and Steven M. Cohen hope you’ll complete, to assist them in producing their book on libraries and community-building.

Since I’m not in a library, I’m not answering the survey. I’m posting this because Steven Cohen is asking for broad posting, linking back to this post.
Hmm. Library Stuff has just over 4,200 Bloglines subscribers (at least those using the feed I use). This blog has 138. I suppose a few of those 138 aren’t among the 4,200+…

Anyway, if you’re in a library, take a look.

Cites & Insights 6:7, May 2006 is now available.

The 22-page issue (PDF as always, but each section is available as an HTML separate from the home page) includes:

• Perspective: Books, Blogs & Style - Comments (my own and others’) about the relationship of books and blogs (and “blooks”!).
• Following Up and Feedback
• Trends, Quick Takes & Good Stuff - Five trends, two quicker takes, and two article commentaries.
• Bibs & Blather - Tweaking the sections, C&I and YBP Academia, two resources you need to be aware of, and a tentative plan for the next four issues.
• Library Access to Scholarship - Almost half the issue, but it’s been six months…
• Perspective: You Just Can’t Comprehend - Maybe off-topic. Maybe not.

Actual site visitors may note that, after an initial period of light activity, the Spam Karma 2 spam count is moving up relatively rapidly, on the order of 10 to 50 “eaten” posts per day.

It appears (although I’m not quite certain) that most of this spam was being stopped by WordPress’s “block list.” It’s still being stopped, but counted by Spam Karma 2. (I could be wrong, in which case there’s just a whole lot more spam, mostly repetitive.)

Sigh: One managed to make it through as well, although it’s now been disappeared.

If there is a hell, I’m comforted that there will be a special ring of it reserved for spammers and crackers. I should at least be in a less horrific ring.

[Yes, I know, it's another metablog. I do have a few "real" posts that I want to do. Somehow, time and energy are lacking. We actually went to a live play this weekend, for the first time in years--"The Sisters Rosenzweig," a first-rate play in a first-rate performance (Actors Equity professionals, not a local theater group) at Mountain View 's Performing Arts Center--then spent most of Sunday afternoon planting a second Blenheim apricot tree to replace a plum tree that didn't survive... But after one more C&I essay, I'll do some real blogging. Maybe.]

Have you been noticing similar posts from a fair number of library (and related) blogs–TameTheWeb, Hangingtogether, and a slew of others?

About losing some posts and comments and how they’d restore the posts but maybe not the comments?

OK, for W.a.r. it’s obvious: The URL includes “lishost.org.” If I’d started the blog a month later, after I finally set up waltcrawford.name, it wouldn’t be so obvious (given 1and1’s pricing, I’d probably just buy waltatrandom.org as a domain).

Blake lists some of the customers on the LISHost pages–but not all.

And does a fine job. Every system has hiccups once in a while. Rarely do you get the kind of personal feedback and attempts to correct the hiccups that we-all got at LISHost.

Minor note: It’s taking me a while to get used to the semi-WYSIWYG editor in WordPress 2, which Blake installed (at my request, before we realized that the hommas4000talat situation–still there at Technorati, but give it time–was a Bloglines problem, not a LISHost problem); if there are more aesthetic irregularities than usual, blame my slow-learner status.

Oh: And linkbacks, which I’ve always allowed, are actually showing up now. I’ll monitor them. If I find they’re being used for spam purposes, I’ll simply turn them off: Managed to live with them being invisible for a year.

I’m probably about the tenth to mention this, but Mary Ghikas at ALA has started blogging.

I’ve known Mary for, well, more years than either of us would necessarily admit to. She’s one of the (many) good people. It’s a pleasure to see the Green Kangaroo.

Note: this post confused two things that turned out to be separate: A LISHost problem that caused two days of posts and comments to disappear, and a Bloglines problem that caused the “hossam4000talat,” not only here but on some other blogs. Bloglines seems to be OK again. [Note added 4/21; post retained because that's standard practice hereabouts.]

“Newly-cozy”: Not only are the RSS feeds now named “hossam4000talat,” they’re also not working.

So both of you who come here directly are the only ones who will see this, until this gets fixed (I’m an optimist: I wrote “until,” not “unless.”)

Many thanks to David King for suggesting a way to retrieve and restore the (2) missing posts (although not the missing comments to any and all posts).

Since I can’t seem to FTP to the wp-rss2.php file that may or may not be causing this problem, the next step may be a “kick it in the side” attempt: Moving to WordPress 2 and seeing if that move restores the RSS.

That may have side effects, of course.

If that doesn’t work…well, there are two routes:

1. “It’s been good to know you.”

2. Cutting-and-pasting all 288 posts and trying to figure out what to do with the nearly 900 comments that didn’t get lost in the process, to build a new, working blog, presumably called “The ‘umble pseudo-librarian’s random notes.”

Meanwhile, back to my day job…

Additional followup Friday morning: While the lost (and restored) posts and the lost (and unrestored–I’ll look into that) comments were because of a LISHost problem, the “hossam4000talat” was apparently a Bloglines problem, one that also affected some other blogs. Bloglines was down for maintenance last night. The problem seems to be fixed, and I note a very large number of posts this morning.

Originally posted 4/19. Reposted 4/20 after host failure.

Is there a case to be made that a rising tide of blog readership lifts all boats blogs?

Maybe. All I can do is add to the confusion by offering up a few Urchin figures for this odd, random, infrequently-updated, heavily-conversational blog.

Let’s look at average daily sessions and pageviews (noting that this blog isn’t updated once a day), and number of unique domains for the month, starting with the first month of the blog (April 2005) and using some representative months.

April 2005: 161 sessions/day, 275 pageviews/day, 689 visitors (domains)
July 2005: 226 sessions/day, 519 pageviews/day, 469 domains
October 2005: 453 sessions/day, 854 pageviews/day, 644 domains.
January 2006: 821 sessions/day, 1,856 pageviews/day, 908 domains.
March 2006: 1,064 sessions/day, 2,337 pageviews/day, 975 domains
April 1-17: 1,048 sessions/day, 2,601 pageviews/day, 736 domains so far

Given that W.a.r. provides full-text feeds, it’s fair to assume that most RSS readers only come to the blog when they’re commenting. Stuck at around 140 Bloglines subscribers, I continue to assume “around 600″ readership. But maybe actual readership is growing; maybe the overall tendency is up, at a moderate rate (the big jump came last fall, in November and December).

These are, of course, tiny numbers compared to Name Blogs even within liblogging. As they should be.

The most intriguing figure: 3,598 distinct domains in the one year and 17 days since this blog started.

That doesn’t compare to the 21,446 unique visitors to Cites & Insights between December 19, 2005 and March 31, 2006 (or the 87,336 unique visitors from 12/18/2002 to 1/6/06: 12/18/2002 is when C&I moved to Boise State from the now-defunct AT&T site). But it shouldn’t; I’d expect C&I to have about five to ten times the visitors/visits of W.a.r., and having 25+ times the distinct visitors (over several years) doesn’t surprise me.

Comments, if any, have been lost, and I didn’t attempt to restore hyperlinks. Note that these numbers are provided as additional information on how ordinary blog reading is increasing.

Originally posted April 18, restored from Bloglines’ archive, thanks to David King’s suggestion

Today’s the hundredth anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake–which, combined with the fire that followed, was the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history until Katrina.

The San Francisco Chronicle has been running a series of long articles regarding the quake, its effects, and the likely results of an equivalent quake these days, along with lots of online features at SFGate (most of which I haven’t looked at). For the last few days, and continuing for the next few, it’s also running full-page facsimiles of the front page of the Chronicle of a century ago—and today’s paper came wrapped in a special section, comprising a facsimile of the four-page special edition of the Chronicle-Call-Examiner (I’m not sure of the full list, but it was all of the SF papers of 1906) published from Oakland the day after the quake, with additional stories in another four modern pages.

This is fascinating stuff, and a lot of it, carefully done. Carl Nolte is the lead writer; he wrote the text for a recent SF Chronicle book, The San Francisco Century. (Note that Chronicle Books is no longer associated with the SF Chronicle; it’s the one piece of the old Chronicle family-owned business that’s still owned by part of that family, who bought it from the rest of the family as they were selling off everything.)

I’d be surprised if a book doesn’t come out of all of this. There’s already more than enough text for a book, I think, and obviously plenty of good photographs. We’re spending way too much time reading the daily paper, because the articles are so well done. (We’re both native Californians. We were here for the much-smaller 1989 quake, living on a hill at the time. We live on flat bedrock, far from landfill, in a single-story wood-frame house. We should bolt a few bookcases to the walls, but otherwise we’re in pretty good shape–and yes, we do have an earthquake kit, renewed every six months or so.)

The digital preservation and usage angles? Those pages from the 1906 paper(s).

Some of them were scanned (digitally) from copies of the newspaper itself kept by historical associations; I’m pretty sure today’s 4-page edition is in that category.

The rest were scanned from the Chronicle’s archives–which means they were scanned from microfilm.

The good news: The results, blown up to full page size (possibly a little larger or smaller than the original page size), are almost always readable, except sometimes for a line or two at the fold, or in at least one case a portion of the leftmost column where the paper wasn’t quite level when it was microfilmed.

The bad news: “Readable” is the word. Easily readable–not so much.

I have no idea how OCR would work against this scanning. For those lines on the fold, probably not at all. Otherwise? Probably pretty well.

Of course, the scanned-and-printed results are a lot better than working with the microfilm itself, at least based on my almost-buried memories:

Long ago (late 1960s or early 1970s, as I remember) and not so far away (Berkeley), I had an idea for a book–and did the research and writing for the only book-length manuscript I’ve written that didn’t result in publication.

The book concerned local press coverage of the Free Speech Movement.

I reviewed the four or five daily papers most involved, in Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and (possibly) San Jose), every day during that period and shortly thereafter.

It was a fascinating story. I’m not sure it was all that good a manuscript. It was, of course, typed (on an electric typewriter, but still).

When I say “I reviewed,” I mean “I stared at one of those bloody roll microfilm readers with the facing-forward screens, in the UC Berkeley library, every afternoon after work until my head hurt too badly or my eyes couldn’t take it any more.”

The manuscript has long since disappeared. (It was submitted to, and kindly rejected by, one local publisher. I loaned it to a colleague…who never returned it, and disappeared.)

I can’t say I would never do anything like this again. I can say I’d only do it if there was no other way to do something I really wanted to do. It was agonizing, and I was a lot more resilient back then.

Addendum 4/20: Unfortunately, I have no way to restore the comments on this entry. I will note that a quite substantial photo archive of the Great Quake is available online, hosted by UC Berkeley’s Bancroft archives.

I seem to remember writing one or two posts between April 15 and now.

They’re gone. LISHost had a mishap, apparently unrecoverable.

Comments on posts submitted since April 16 or 17 may also be missing.

My apologies.

If anyone has copies of posts or comments that aren’t on the blog, you could do me a favor by emailing them to me at waltcrawford@gmail.com, so I can restore the posts (commenters can restore their own comments).

There’s another, truly mysterious, problem, apparently unique to this blog: The RSS feed — well, now, a whole host of RSS feeds — show up as “hassam4000talat” or something like that, with a tagline of “Just another WordPress blog.”

Since I can’t even find anything along those lines anywhere within the WP template, I also can’t seem to fix it.

As I noted at LISNews, this would be an ideal opportunity to say “Well, that was interesting,” and just shut down the blog. But I don’t particularly want to do that.

With luck, we’ll find a way to restore this blog’s name (such as it is) and maybe even some of the content.

Arggh.

As I’ve noted or hinted at before, my wife and I find ourselves watching roughly an hour a night of TV (except Movie Saturday)–but most nights, it’s not really TV. It’s some of the great old series on DVD. (Moonlighting is at least as good as we ever thought it was; Remington Steele is as good as we ever thought it was; Greatest American Hero has its moments and is always fun; we’re finishing the catching-up process on Gilmore Girls–and there, unlike Buffy, Moonlighting, Remington Steele, I don’t think there’s much chance we’ll ever watch the series a second or third time.)

We’d picked up and watched the first short season of Northern Exposure, a series we loved in its day–but it was overpriced compared to the other series we’ve been dealing with, at a discounted $40 for eight episodes as compared to $35-$40 for 22 episodes. That’s particularly annoying because Northern Exposure is such a barebones DVD release: Double-sided DVDs with a few deleted scenes and outtakes. You get a strange little parka, but…

The second season’s just as bad: Two DVDs in a single-width case, seven (eight?) episodes, $40. And this time with music substitutions because of licensing problems. We held off. (No, we haven’t purchased the wildly-expensive Star Trek sets. Or particularly wanted to. We watched all the series, but…well, if we did want to re-view some of them, we’d use Netflix.)

The third season was a full season, 23 episodes, same price (still bare-bones packaging, to be sure, packing 23 episodes on three DVDs instead of the six that, say, Buffy would use).

And I had two Target gift cards (bennies of using good credit cards: $5,000 in purchases yields a $50 gift card). So, what the heck, we picked up seasons two and three. We’d already gone through the tiny first season.

Which is way too much background for this: We watched the second episode last night. And were blown away by the sheer quality and subtlety of the writing (and acting) on this series. The dialogue between Ed and One Who Waits, his 200+-year-old spirit guide, was nothing short of priceless.

The music substitution is dumb (but relatively harmless so far). The packaging and pricing are annoyances. The series…well, maybe the pricing is OK after all. What a pleasure to revisit Cicely.

I wonder whether the biggest problem for contemporary network television isn’t so much the proliferation of cable networks and amateur video as it is “competing with themselves”–competing for our attention with the best series from past decades, in better-than-broadcast video, with extras, and without commercials.

Here’s a post I thought I would never write:

I believe that Jack Stephens has it right in this post regarding a potential ALA Blogging Round Table.
Oopsie corrected!

Not only Right, which Stephens always is, but correct.

I thought I would never write it since Stephens has a nasty habit of attacking me at various times, in some cases because he’s somehow convinced that I’m anti-copyright. He doesn’t allow comments at akk, which makes things even more interesting. (I very briefly blacklisted him from commenting here, but lifted that blacklist after thinking it over.)

But in this case, I believe that blogging isn’t an equivalent library interest to, say, government documents or maps & geography or social responsibilities (not that I’m all that fond of SRRT…) or intellectual freedom or…

I could be wrong, of course. That’s a given.

As to his other post, in which he faults KGS for her most recent post on the potential Round Table…well, I’m not biting. KGS does link to the post in question–and that post certainly names the person KGS is disagreeing with. (That person is me, not Jack Stephens.) Doesn’t mean I think KGS is right; I don’t. Does mean I don’t see that she’s engaging in a blindside attack–in this case.

A couple of minor points relating to the KGS and Michael Golrick posts directly and indirectly cited here:

• LITA’s Fuzzy Match Interest Group, now disbanded, was not created to put on skits. It was created as a forum for research papers and other reports in the vein of the Journal of Irreproducible Results and ASIST’s SIG CON.
  Some truly remarkable papers were presented during the time the IG existed, including papers from some of the most prominent names in the field.The skits at LITA National Conferences were a special activity, involving the talents of some particularly creative Fuzzy Match members and the…um…singing and thespian talents of the rest of them/us.
• Michael: A teeny-tiny clarification that will only matter to ALA process mavens: I’m not a Past President of LITA, I’m a Former President. I was Past President, the year after I was President. That seems like it was a long time ago, maybe because it was. LITA, unusually, has conference ribbons for its Former Presidents, a nice touch.