The stuff I did on Friday wasn’t actually at the convention center, but it was related to ALA. My friend Mike and I went into DC and I had to get my hair braided for the honor dance that afternoon. Unfortunately, at the salon I chose, none of the hairdressers knew how to do a french braid! Luckily, the receptionist knew how to do something close, so she ended up braiding my hair. Afterwards, we went to NMAI and met up with Renee, a member of my tribe who works for the museum. She gave us a bit of a tour and we chatted about genealogy, tribal matters and other interesting things. We grabbed lunch at the cafe (which is ALWAYS excellent), then she went back to work and Mike and I visited the Identity By Design exhibit which was amazing.

That afternoon was the Honor Dance, so I dressed in my outfit and joined in. Mike took pictures which I put up this evening (http://flickr.com/photos/hhd/tags/nmai). The dance was wonderful. The area around the circle was full of people, and on all of the floors above you could see people looking over the railing to watch below. It was fun, but a bit daunting. After the dance, we headed to Silver Spring and ate at a tasty Thai restaurant, then hung out at Julie and Jason’s (where I’m staying) the rest of the evening.

The ALA Annual Conference is coming up soon, and I’m going! I’ll be in DC from late on June 21 through the morning of June 29 and will be staying with friends from CMU. I’ve really enjoyed visiting DC the two times we’ve been, and I’m looking forward to it. The only thing that stands between me and DC? A long week of work.

Since I’m taking summer classes, I’m trying to get as much stuff done as possible before I leave so that I don’t have to worry about it while I’m gone. This means that the last week has involved a lot of reading, writing, and work. I’ve also been making repairs to my outfit and jewelry in preparation for attending the honor dance for Loriene Roy, ALA President-Elect. She will be the first Native American president of ALA. I’ll be going to the dance at NMAI on the 22nd, and the inaugural dinner on the 26th. It’s too bad so much of the events at the conference happens at the same time. I really would like to go to all of it. Well, maybe not *all* of it… but a lot of it.

In the meantime, I have about 150 pages of reading and one assignment to complete for genealogy, three (luckily, short) papers to write for my reference class, and a site visit plus report about it to do for records management. It’s going to be a busy 7 days…

I’m reading the introduction to Printed Sources, the primary book for my summer genealogy class. It’s pretty interesting so far. In discussing sources, it mentions that you should evaluate a book in various ways to determine if the book is a valid source. One way to evaluate the book is to evaluate the book’s sources, and I just imagined an infinite loop (or perhaps just a very deep stack) of evaluating a book by looking at its sources and evaluating books in the source list by evaluating their sources and…

I guess it would be hard to have a loop because if source A cites source B, then it’s unlikely that source B, or a source cited by B, will ever cite A because of timing. (I’m such a computer scientist sometimes.)

Yesterday, I visited the Santa Clara Family History Center as part of an assignment. The Family History Library in Salt Lake City, supported by the Latter-day Saints, has branches throughout the world that allow you to access various genealogy materials. I’ve been meaning to visit one of the local branches since I first moved here, and this finally gave me the push I needed. The people there were quite friendly and welcoming (not that I was expecting otherwise), and it was a nice little visit. One thing I really liked is that they had a scanner available so that people could scan the information they find instead of having to print it out. Yay for saving paper.

Here are two pictures from my visit:

Update on the Blackboard situation: I can post without problem on my machine at work, running Firefox 2.0.0.4 (same version as home). There must be some interaction between the plug-ins I have in Firefox at home, or something with the connection between home and SJSU. I haven’t had a chance yet to investigate more, but I will this weekend because having to post with IE is driving me batty.

Back to reading…

Recently, the school upgraded the Blackboard server, and I’m kind of cranky with the new version so far. In the older version, I didn’t have any problems using Firefox 2.0. However, it seems that there is something incompatible between Firefox and the new version. If I try to fill out a survey (like the one asking about what time is good for my genealogy class to meet each week) or start a new thread on a discussion board, Firefox freezes. If I then close it, I also have to go to the task manager and kill the process.

It looks as if it’s freezing when creating the text box. I poked around on the web a bit, trying to find a solution. I found a reference to the VTBE (Visual Text Box Editor) and thought that might be the problem, so I disabled it in my preferences on Blackboard. That didn’t seem to have an effect. For now, I filled out my survey and posted my introductions using Internet Explorer, but I’ll keep fiddling to try to get it to work with Firefox.

I’m also not very into the new layout for the discussion forum. I think it’s harder to scan and use. For example, before, I could browse the list and quickly see that there was a new message because of the yellow “new” image. Now, I have to scan a column of numbers. I also found, in looking through previous courses, that the list of forums is now paginated, so you don’t get all of them in one big list. That will make it more difficult to browse, I think.

So far, the experience for me has been less than stellar.

Summer classes begin on Monday (so soon!). I was dreading the idea of spending the evenings with a warm laptop in my lap, plugging away at notes and assignments. There was a warm snap in April and I would come home and stare at my computer, knowing that I should get some classwork done but dreading the idea of just how hot my computer would get. Around 9pm, it would get cool enough that I could stomach the possibility, but by that time it’s kind of late to start writing papers.

Don’t get me wrong - I love my laptop. I just replaced my ThinkPad R51 (which went to my boyfriend’s sister) with a ThinkPad R60. I’ve been very happy with them, overall. Compared to the laptop I had before, which was a little like holding a just-out-of-the-oven glass pan on my lap, the ThinkPads run much cooler. It’s just that you can only stand so much heat when it’s already warm out!

Of course, I could always solve my problem by using my laptop at a table. But where’s the fun in that? I’d rather sit on the couch. It’s more comfortable than our chairs, and also means that I can watch TV at the same time. So to address the heat problem, I ordered one of these: Kinamax Notebook Cooler USB-Powered Quiet 3-Fan Laptop Cooling Pad.

It was delivered yesterday. Ahhh. It’s so refreshing to be able to use my computer without the threat of a burnt lap. I’ve only been using it for a day (well, less than that, really), but so far it’s wonderful. I can’t hear the fans running, meaning it’s no louder than my computer already is. It just sits under my machine and powers its 3 fans with a USB cable. Hopefully, I’ll still be singing its praises in June and July when it warms up even more.