Binklebonk

Ah, the sound of pinging reminders… so many tasks still undone… so little to actually say to you. Have made timetable look a bit less hideous by sharing out sessions with a colleague. Inbox looking relatively clear but I just know I’ll come back to chaos on September 1st.

Shall carry on with the great mapping exercise for the graduate attributes… fiddly task involving spreadsheets and four different colours and patterns (for those viewing in black and white, just like the snooker in the early ’80s). Meeting with a colleague later to chat more about our input into the PGCHET course. We were supposed to have half an hour each but as usual I’ve totally over-written and crammed my bit so it could last about 45 minutes.

CDG plans for Umbrella 2009 are coming together nicely

Dogger, Fisher, German Bight

If the post title means nothing to you, try either getting up much, much earlier in the morning (even earlier than Olympic Breakfast) or reading/watching the wonderful Kes / A kestrel for a knave. Yup, it’s the shipping forecast. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the resit computing assessment board, whiuch for mysterious reasons I got invited to and couldn’t quite bring myself to decline. Names: they read rhem out. Grades: they read them out. Discussion: minimal and inconclusive. Same old issues. But then right in the last 5 minutes the external examiner brings up referencing and I have to jump to attention to have my say. How can it only be 3pm? A member of computing staff has just invited me to a meeting for 4 hours ago, so his brain is clearly equally addled by the shipping experience.

This morning, met with manager and colleagues to start thinking about the next implementation plan. But we haven’t implemented the stuff from the last implementation plan yet. Should we rename this new document the ‘Fantasy plan’ or the ‘Completely unattainable bloated targetfest’? Feeling overwhelmed by targets, interim targets, personal objectives, oh and a truckload of actual normal work which still needs my loving attention. How on earth am I going to get everything done.

As a completely side issue, the Foo Fighters: what are they for? I don’t get them. I must have been three sheets to the wind when I agreed to be vocalist for a gang of 30- and 40-something rocker guys. Have made it abundantly clear that Cookie monster vocals were not part of my choral training. But the FFs I just don’t get, pure and simple.

Ho hum. Time for a bun. Or more likely time to get back to populating my graduate attribute maps. Don’t ask. Involves pink and green and all manner of wondrous commitments.

Cloning for beginners?

Timetables. A fine way to dampen any spirits, if they weren’t already sodden through with the current weather. Eveybody wants a piece of us. There are only so many bodies, so many suitable rooms and so many hours in the day. But of course everyone wants the same slots. And no I can’t teach 32 people in a room with 27 PCs, not if any of them need any help or attention at all.

Take all day to update one modest summer school presentation, due to constant interruptions, mainly involving simultaneous consultation of six different documents. Brain all to pot.

Manage to escape to the gym at lunchtime and get some exercise while hearing good news about Chris Hoy (pretty much the only athlete as far as the Scots are concerned).

Umbrellas at the ready; it’s time to go home.

Warmups required

Teach summer school students today for 2 whole hours and realise I am definitely not match fit. Keep launching into long explanations and then having to stop and catch my breath. Completely bamboozle thewm about e-books, referencing and all kinds. A few little surprises too as I test drive the new library web pages and discover various Shibboleth nasties.

Not much else to report. Tum ti tum. Completed my papers for officers’ meeting over the weekend, so hoping for a quiet week or two on the CDG front.

Anything for a free lunch

Feeling more sluggish than Malfoy… could it be the after effects of the burger and chips I got free for helping out with the intensive summer school? Should never have followed this with a blueberry Geobar. It’s slightly scary that the new batch of students were born in the 1990s. I am not officially Past It.

It’s fitting then that my mental distraction (everyone should have one of these on a Friday afternoon!) is coming up with a songlist for the guys. Let’s not call ourselves a band. More a motley crew of three guys whose wives want them out from under their feet occasionally, plus one more guy and his wife (moi) who’s stupid enough to go along and attempt to screech vocals over their combined racket. Latest plot is for everyone to suggest half a dozen songs, we agree a common list and work on those. But what to suggest…?

Suppliers have all crept out from under their stones this morning. One little victory - finally get new resource up and running. This will save on aggrieved phone calls from the engineers. Villain of the dfay is the company who seem to think we belong in the same pricing tier as institutions four or five times our size. Er, how?

Tomorrow will be rolling up sleeves and tackling the final revisions to the draft CDG Strategy. After which I shall have earned something red and fermented.

A little lightheaded

Today I feel a little lightheaded; ‘unpleasantly like being drunk’, as Douglas Adams put it (’What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?’ / ‘You ask a glass of water’). Having topped up the sugar levels just in case, I put it down to eyestrain from too much scrolling through online timetables. Ah, timetabling; a joyful experience. Trust no one; rooms don’t have the projectors they claim to have; some tutors have entered no data at all for their modules; I definitely haven’t yet mastered the art of being in two places at once. Otherwise right now I’d be sat at home with my feet up instead of at my desk.

Small and select gathering of just two book group members today, but we have a lively discussion over lunch about ‘Their eyes were watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston. Suspect some colleagues dropped out of today because the language took a bit of getting into. Deep South is a long way from Tayside. Next month we go youthful and tackle ‘What I was’ by Meg Rossoff.

This is turning into an unexpectedly long week, frittered away in email threads here and there, sundry admin and liaison tasks, and small snacks of a more or less healthy nature.

Hurry hurry for the sky is falling in

OK so this morning I’d like to share with you a picture of my home town: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7557834.stm

Scary, soggy stuff. My train was duly cancelled and my nearest and dearest drove me to work through an assortment of lakes and closed roads. For some reason our car doesn’t have a hovercraft attachment. Sadly had a meeting to attend otherwise might have angled for a day’s home working.

Two people have commented on this blog today. A worrying trend to visibility. Some of them are not librarians, so my musings will make even less sense to them than they do to the regulars at this poorly-stocked bar.

Need to come up with a slogan to put on some bookmarks, promoting our new Library web pages. All out of inspiration. As you may have noticed. General mood not helped by regular calls from a fax machine. Next time I pick up I may just beep back and try to engage it in conversation.

Launch yet another stock editing exercise today. Boy am I going to be popular. Have provided detailed instructions and pleas for people to mark spreadsheets using actual characters and not just colour highlights - you’d think database specialists would appreciate the finer points of Excel sorting, but not always.

All for now. My morning snack grapes tasted of the pepper salami I had packed for my lunch, consequently my appetite for said carnivorous sandwich is building. Hopefully I will get home without actually needing webbed feet tonight.

White bread for the sandwich

Been hard at it today preparing a session on information literacy for the next crop of unsuspecting lecturers on the PGCHET course. Not sure quite how we got this gig, but management showing a lot of interest so clearly this is regarded as premium content! Have chucked a spoonful of Brabazon, a pinch of CIBER, a proclamation and a couple of definitions into the pot, along with a little exercise, a discussion and of course a video clip from YouTube. Should be fun. Bound to be a few stroppy individuals in the group (whadda we have to do this fooooor, doncha know I’ve got groundbreaking experiments to set up and module descriptors to obsess over). I know; I am technically still one of the stroppy individuals on the course, having survived 2 modules and trying to gear up to get some material together for module 3.

While juggling powerpoints and generally cogitating, am finally sampling the benefits of Last.fm. Very cool music selections, can go into my happy space while I work.

But back to work now… need to leave early today to go to my unhappy place: the dentist. Then might juggle a few more CDG draft strategy revisions around into what is fast becoming yet another document of doom, albatross-on-a-roll, ticket to Confusion Central.

Apocalypse when?

Back to work after a nice weekend with visiting friend. Ate lots of carbs, drank lots of wine, watched lots of Olympics. Loaned and returned books: we are on a quest to find things that are positive and life-affirming, but it seems my whole collection fails this mission. ‘I see you have lots of F. Scott Fitzgerald’, says she. ‘Er, yes, that would be alcoholism, relationship and mental breakdown laced with the excesses of the Jazz Age’. We’ll keep trying.

Olympics: Nicole wossname thoroughly deserved her gold medal in the cycling road race. Made Headington Hill look like a gentle undulation, then there was the torrential rain… so many reasons why I’m not an elite athlete… Breakfast much improved by two golds in the swimming, even if our boys missed out on the diving. Hey they all looked fab to me. Really quite clever at somersaulting backwards off stupidly high places.

Last night I watched Apocalypto, Mel Gibson’s latest language-no-one-actually-speaks, bloodthirsty offering. Was quite good actually. It exposed my woeful sense of history though as I was puzzled to see Europeans turning up in nifty boats at the end. I thought the Mayans and Aztecs and those dudes were like thousands of years BC, back when we were mostly saying ‘ug’. Apparently they were still around in the 16th century. How have I missed this vital information? Could we not have skipped a few terms of spinning jennies and checked this out instead? Also I want my money back from Sid Meier as he always made theese civilisations out to be reasonably peace-loving.

Talking of Ug, I hope you’re familiar with Raymond Briggs’s Ug, boy genius of the stone age and his search for soft trousers. Marvellous. Poor boy castigated for questioning mum and dad about the value of sleeping under rock duvets when there are warm furry dead things lying about… Twas ever thus with progress.

Every day’s a heptathlon for the librarian

Well I’m looking forward to a bit of the old Olympics over the next few weeks, wonder how the Brits will do  - looking out for Tom Daley in the diving, such a nice lad, can I take him home? Wave 102 FM was proudly announcing how many Scots were in Team GB. I think it was about 31. I was in the gym at the time, being very un-0lympian yet equally smug. The Saltire is banned though, I could be amused at this but it may offend some of my regular readers.

Had a dream about work last night - got disciplined by Information Manager for playing too much Tetris. Chance would be a fine thing. I need the equivalent of a long orange one to make all my work problems fall into place.

Teaching is looming large on the agenda, busy updating and writing presentations, working out who’ll have IT accounts when, etc etc. Reassessments I’d forgotten about are back - will I never be shot of this assignment, which I was first marking in December? Really must get the old quality assurance hurdles cleared more smoothly otherwise liable to injure informatic hamstring.