I'm Back!

Well, my mother told me she thought my blog was crap. Her word. But I think I'm over it now, and am ready to leap back into the saddle and continue my record of life in the inner city.

It has been a busy time for me. My mother stayed with me for a week (and I forgive her criticism of my blog), I went to the ETD2005 conference, I went to Canberra for two meetings. It has been busy. The ETD conference was fantastic, I really enjoyed it. Electronic Theses and Dissertations. This is the area I have been working in since February this year. As libraries move away from print to digital storage, there is much work to be done on how to store a university's research work digitally. I've been working with a project called ARROW, which is building a digital repository system based on Fedora's open source storage layer, with an application layer being designed by ARROW and built by VTLS. My role has been to do use cases and develop content models for theses, research papers, interface with End Note, and now I am working on access control. It is a logical extension of my career, which has spanned library and information technologies through print, online, CD-ROM, and internet. This is a fascinating project and I am lucky to be involved.

It has meant learning another language though. I came home from the conference one night babbling about some of the interesting things I'd learned and talked about. Mum and Michael told me to stop, they couldn't understand me. Talk English! they said. I said I should have gone to the Conference Dinner where people at least spoke the same language.

In the meantime, back on the knitting front, I succumbed to socks. I borrowed my daughter's sock book and some double pointed needles, bought some sock wool, and despite the unfinished jumper have launched into my first sock. Struggling with all those needles made me feel like I was knitting with an octopus - they wanted to go every which way. I had to cast on and start knitting four times, finally getting it right. It is starting to go quickly, and is very exciting. I can hardly wait to see the sock develop. Pictures will be posted.

Finally, Sunday morning wouldn't be right without the Sunday papers. And the Sunday papers wouldn't be the same without spelling errors. This morning's crop included these:

City steals itself in wake of latest Bali terrorist attacks

This is a reference to the people of Newcastle. There was a group of people from that city in Bali, and many of them were injured, some killed. It is also, I think, a reference to the fact that Newcastle used to be a centre of steel production. Did the journalist (Amy de Lore) mean City Steels itself? Which would have been correct. But how can a city steal itself? Ridiculous.

Next, in the property reports, we hear that it was a young couple who lent casually on a wall who won the auction. What? Lent casually? How do you lend on a wall? Was this a new form of finance? Do you think the journalist (Michelle Singer) meant LEANT on a wall? I think she did.