Finally managed to get through the Simple Kid album and its a gem, a bit glam in places, bit folky in a Dylan vein, some odd electronica, a post-modern album. Clever oh! So Clever..... Buy it, it even has a go at Diana, and I've long maintained there is a market for a band called Diana Roadkill... (how I laughed at the James Dean Driving Experience as a name too, I might be a little sick though).
The instructions from the AA kinda work. Starchaser was interesting. They were at pains to emphasise they weren't about Steve the mad rocket man as the press invariably suggest but are a dedicated and hard working team. It must be said that they are, they are achieving amazing things for a company based in the backend of Manchester. Trouble is I've watched way too much Scrapheap Challenge over the years and couldn't help feeling all the while I was there that Robert Llewellyn or Lisa Rogers (or better still Cathy Rogers but then a fish can dream) were going to gong the gonger or yell that there were only 4 hours left into a loud hailer. Worth a vist and Cal made a rocket which was fired using a pneumatic launch pad up to the warehouse ceiling much to his delight. Home via the dreaded Trafford Centre because Tom needed for get a dog (the stuffed toy variety) for Ashleigh and Cally was after a Thunderbirds DVD from Tom. So we had a pleasant chinese meal, into the prole shop for the DVD. While there I checked the Ella Guru situation and sure enough '3 Songs From Liverpool' was on display amongst the new releases as it was in Liverpool's prole shop. So whoever's behind the distribution is doing a good job. I also came away with the Simple Kid having downloaded 'Supertramps & Superstars' the other day on the basis I knew that Ella Guru had played with them.
So we're off to see Starchaser who have an open day to let people know about what they're up to with their X-prize bid. More on the prize bids from Google directory. Now to find where we're off which is apparently here. The route being 0.0 0.0 Uncl. L26 7, Mersyd Follow local signs to ------------------------ 1.0 1.0 A562 Hunt's Cross Follow signs Halewood A562 ------------------------ 2.0 1.0 A562 (edge of) Halewood In 0.5 mile at roundabout take 2nd exit ------------------------ 2.7 0.7 A562 Junction for Hale At roundabout take 2nd exit ------------------------ 3.8 1.1 A5300 Junction with A5300 Branch left (signposted Manchester, Southport) and at roundabout take 1st exit A5300 ------------------------ 6.6 2.8 M62 Junction with A5080/M57/M62 Branch left (signposted Manchester) At roundabout take 5th exit to join Motorway M62 ------------------------ 13.6 7.0 M62 Junction 8 (BURTONWOOD SERVICE AREA) TRAFFIC BLACKSPOT - CALL 401 100 from your mobile* ------------------------ 26.7 13.1 M60 Junction 12 (M60/M602) Branch left (signposted Leeds) then take left-hand lane to join Manchester ring road, (Motorway M60) ------------------------ 29.7 3.0 M60 Junction 15 (M61) Take right-hand lanes ------------------------ 34.2 4.5 M60 Junction 18 (M62/M66) Branch left (signposted M60 Ring Road (EandS), Oldham (M67) then at roundabout take 3rd exit ------------------------ 35.4 1.2 M60 Junction 19 (A576) Keep forward (signposted Ring Road (EandS) ------------------------ 38.8 3.4 M60 Junction 21 (A663) Travelodge (Oldham) Forward (signposted Ring Road (SandW) ------------------------ 39.7 0.9 M60 Junction 22 (A62) ------------------------ 43.6 3.9 M67 Junction 24 (A57/M67) Branch left (signposted Sheffield) Take left hand lanes and at traffic signals forward to join Motorway M67 (signposted Hyde, Sheffield) ------------------------ 46.1 2.5 A627 Junction 3 (A627) Leave Motorway (signposted Hyde) then at T-junction turn right A627 ------------------------ 46.3 0.2 A627 Hyde ------------------------ 46.5 0.2 Uncl. SK14 1, Gt Man You have reached your destination.
Gotta feel for poor Bobby Robson as Arsenal beat Newcastle hope he wins a few games now we've beaten them. Still it's good to bounce back from the cheating Mancs experience with a win. Makes the weekend easier to cope with too now it's all out the way. You can tell its all been a bit stressful by the following message that appears when I try to go to the Arseblog for news. Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later. Apache/1.3.28 Server at www.arseblog.com Port 80
Librarian.net is following the OCLC v Library Hotel ferrago with a passion even including an OCLC Press Release which at least explains why the suit is being brought. Apparently it's down to them to defend their trademark. Alternatively it's down to them to display no sense of humour and not recognise something that could promote DDC. Don't know why I'm bothered though, I use Bliss.
Tom is here, hit the wrong train so he was late, thankfully I'd dragged a book along and had a cool pint of Black Sheep while I waited. Back home food, Tom and Cal head upstairs to play cars and now the pair of them are sat infront of the Thunderbirds.
When is full text not full text, when the item is current. Our CAS service is consistently quicker than Proquest is able to deliver content, whinge, whinge, moan, moan. Even worse it's always the same user after the stuff.
Don't follow the directions pasted earlier you need to go here and follow the signs to the library. Found the place eventually. Listened to Dave Bromilow strutting his funky stuff and then disaster struck, my presentation was on a CD claiming to be unformatted. Quick rethink and plan B. Not the best way to teach Boolean logic but a quick set of venn diagrams and a series of hold x leg and y arm in the air and we're flying. If the sesh was nothing else it was fun. Approachable library is achieved and they won't forget it, and nor will I...
Prisoners just adding to my sense of having to speed through dragging together a presentation.......
Hit the prole shop in town today hence the MC5 and Prisoners. Mighty fine they are, I can see me wakin' the library to 'Kick out the Jams' or 'Night of the Nazgul' tomorrow as I panic to get the rest of my shit together. Good work by Sally today again, she let me know she didn't feel overly confident about showing someone how to search tomorrow, that's cool at least I know where she's coming from and it gives us something to work on. She'd be fine anyway, I have every confidence in her but if she feels like a bit of support I'd rather know now so I can give it than let her blow any confidence she has with a bad sesh. I need to find some more money from somewhere because the rate she's going I ain't going to want to say goodbye at the end of the 6 months even if Mo is coming back. So it might need a quick non-recurrent bid to be flung in via David, need to chat to Val. I reckon I can backfill with some of the SHA money that's covering staff costs just need to add a bit extra from elsewhere......
OK so I've pulled a fast web primer together which I need to feed to the web site for tomorrow, need to print out the odd search guide and get my shit together around Dialog. Totally lost Doevecot Mac when I tried to find it in preparation for tomorrow. Need to pull together some powerpoint stuff on searching still too.
Getting my shit together for the gig with the Associate Nurses tomorrow while listening to the MC5's 'Kick Out the Jams' and more importantly The Prisoners 'Last of the Fourfathers'.
Ranganathan for IAs:An Introduction to the Thought of S.R. Ranganathan for Information Architects an excellent piece by Mike Steckel on Boxes and arrows, which is a site I need to investigate more fully. Go read....
Steve returned the French album to me yesterday so here I am listening to it and planning on making a coffee before scrawling an ad e-mail for the SHA saying we're on the way. Trouble is I don't feel inspired in the slightest. I just feel knackered and perhaps listening to something laden with analogue synths isn't the best move at the moment. Still it's a mighty fine album that I think is going to grow on me so the more I listen the more I will love it. Still no scribble on my chartership report this week. Should write something.....
Sleep beckons a warm finger my way at the moment but I know I need to phone Tom my brother-in-law. He's doing his ECDL at the moment, I'm the idiot who talked him into it. Still it'll do him good. The downside is he finds the whole thing stressful and that ain't good at the moment. He has the odd thing going on that makes stress a very bad thing and with Margaret having heart problems (my mother-in-law) at the moment too things ain't hot in Scotland. I promised yesterday I'd call and I don't want to let him down. Apart from anything else he's due down here at the weekend and I'm kinda looking forward to seeing him. So to keep me awake, another entry..... Sally did her first gig on the road today down at the Sir Alfred Jones Hospital and even confessed to enjoying it a bit. Cool, this means I can throw more of this sort of thing her way, it's just one of many things that are impressing me at the moment with her work. In the meanwhile Alastair just keeps on pumping out the coffee and doing his digitising thang, which is impressive in it's own right. Good work is going down and they're keeping me on an even keel at the moment when I'm feeling that I'm flying around doing my thang and just letting people do there own thing. Just hope I'm being supportive enough. Realised earlier today that I'm getting close to the 1 year mark with this blog (only another 11 days to go). So I thought I'd check out the thing that started it off the Rapidly Diminishing Ken Clare's Blog and sure enough he hit the 1 year mark on the 24/08/03, so relive those first posts of his here. Freaky or what.
Punch gig at the Cunard Building was interesting as a content management system it looks relatively robust with nothing that isn't standard. So far so good, good document tracking, loses out in an FOI sense in that it don't keep track of e-mails. Somehow it lacked something for me. The search interface was adequate, the user tools good but at the price of it you'd expect that. I reckon part of it is I'm just plain mean. Anyway I grabbed the swag for Ken who didn't make it. It'd be an improvement on our current intranet. Nuff, said I guess. As for the guy selling it well he supported Spurs but you can't hold being a misguided soul agianst anyone can you. Meanwhile hit total supermarket melt down on the way home, just didn't know what to get for dinner. Aaaargh, too much choice. I chose badly too with Chicken Fajitas. So now I immerse myself in a bit of REM before I head off to deal with this Anaphylaxis stuff.
Seen a proposal to develop a single taxonomy for the NHS using Snomed-CT developed by the College of American Pathologists. Seems to make a load of sense and they seem to want to incorporate Read Codes. The idea seems to be a single taxonomy embracing all elements from patient records to keywords describing a library book will enable quality information retrieval across the range of NHS resources, which we'd all vote for. However having seen the struggle to get good Read Coding in place the big question is, is the NHS ready for it? Answers on a postcard..... Then I find this 'LKDN/2003/47 Wessex Scheme Proposal The Wessex Scheme is an adaptation of the NLM classification scheme to suit UK practice. Having a single consistent classification scheme is key to implementing an overall Library Management System. After discussion the following were agreed :- that it was not clear how widely the Wessex Scheme is used in the NHS (some areas use Dewey or others systems; subject headings were thought to be useful to meet local need; there was a need to map against SNOMED CT; Newcastle system etc. A single agreed national system would be difficult to implement and resisted locally but could eventually save time and money if suppliers could process before delivery. Agreed to ask for volunteers from LKDN and Trust librarians to work with NeLH and others to investigate needs and options'. What bollocks, a single consistent classification scheme is not the key to implementing an overall LMS. The taxonomy is the key. If you have a single term to describe say primary care then use it conistently across many systems then searching for the subject is a snap. The fact I might shelve it at HLK or the library down the road elsewhere is irrelevant providing we can both find the bloody item on the shelves and deliver it to the user.
I'm away to see Punch a content management system from Harlequin which they're trying to flog on the back of FOI. More interested in seeing a few people it must be said as I'm not convinced that a content management system is a key part of FOI business. THat is unless it offers an easy ans simple document storage system. Had my first look at webalizer stats courtesy of whoever from the Ella Guru site came in to have a look here. That was kind of useful as I'm planning on employing it elsewhere, anyway it led me to a link to kultureflash which had a prieview of the Ella Guru gig at Water Rats. Go have a look not for the newsworthiness of the story because it should be tommorrows chip wrappings or whatever the e-equivilent is but because the site is a thing of beauty in its own right.
AGM went well as we spidered the place out. Think our stand did the job and looked reasonable. Need to find some route to A2 posters. Reasonable mix of people too, some NHS staff including at least one new practice nurse some school kids the odd other person from a public perspective. Good to see some other fine souls from the PCT, seems so seldom we all get together. Played some Ella Guru at them if they'd only have known. Another Ella Guru bit of press from of all things 'The Westmorland Gazette'. Bay movers launch their debut 'mellow' EP
Aintree Hospitals are an early adopter of 'Agenda for Change' going on Monst's experience seem to be losing the battle of convincing staff they aren't losing out under the new scheme. The problem with nurses pay seem to be the mysterious number of enhancements to which they are entitled. So overall salary wise Monst to me at least appears to be no worse off. However her perception is she's losing bank holiday enhancements and that night enhancements seem to be less than they were. In trying to understand it all the lack of transparency on how the hours for which these mysterious enhancements were paid were calculated as it doesn't seem to correspond to actual hours worked. So if anyone out there understands it all drop me a line because life round here is hell as I try and make sense of it all. I can see why the government want to change it all the whole pay thing is a mess, but then Agenda for Change itself seems to be a complete mystery....
Blogspot seems to be down, so I could write a masterpiece of a post and find nobody could read it. What the hell, how likely is that?
OK so I've packed the car, I've got the Subbeteo Pitch as a table cloth, I've poured a coffee and I'm watching Leon as the batteries for the laptop charge up. I'm taking two laptops (one in reserve in case the good Dr McCoy has trouble working his magic on the first) and we rock'n'roll at around 9.20. Need to tie a respectability rag round my neck (ties why do they instantly confer respectability? Discuss) and I'm ready to face the oncoming day down at the Maritime Museum. If you're in Liverpool come along, kicks off at 11.00 - 15.00.
One of the most interesting bands on the circuit, Liverpool's intricate, quiet and gentle Ella Guru are making a name for themselves with their shimmering, atmospheric pop. , John and co pick up more favourable press. This is good news as well as John, for Fade it confirms our Rock'n'Roll credentials!
Extremely pleased with Sally's progress, so much so she's off to talk to a bunch of first line nurses down and Sir Alfred Jones in Speke about what the library has to offer them while I'm off at the Punch gig down at the Cunard Building. She just needs a touch more confidence and she's away. Need to give her some support around her dissertation, it'd be a shame not to write it and get the letters.... No progress on my chartership report yet this week. Meanwhile I've been told I'm not good enough to read Cal's bedtime story. Not amused as the plan was to read him a from the delightful Mick Inkpen. Need to investigate Wibbly Pig sometime (really don't know who enjoys the books more, me or Cal).
I'm in that rediculous position where I'm thoroughly enjoying work at the moment. I keep coming home having laughed the day away with Alastair and Sally and I think we're producing a reasonable amount and delivering as a result. Just need Tracy back and the picture's complete. Margaret Thompson Medical Centre library is now sorted we just need to explain to Reuben how the library catalogue works, what a class mark is and how accession numbers identify a copy. Sally provided the labels, I provided the categories and I left the labeller there. Early dart to retirev it. Bit of progress on the Fade front, the core web site is up, you can click the submit button and you get a message 'No web site is configured at this address'. Which makes sense because Cairs have yet to do their stuff. Still the cool thing is we're moving forward. Sally dragged in an 80's CD earlier, 'Fade to Grey' amongst it, the suprising thing for me was the amount of shit I remembered about loads of the tracks. Spooky!
Printed, aditus logos added, tarty NHS logos too. I feel loads happier that we've played fair by the HCLU crew and can tie into the freebies they so generously donated. The weather is horrible, Sally and I journey to the lovely Margaret Thompson Medical Centre to put the finishing touches to there practice library today. For tomorrow I'm boxed up and ready to roll nearly. We need to pick up Val's spidery stuff. All set for a 9.30 kick off there.
Here's a freaky little story that seems to be breaking on the library blogs, the Library Hotel (having rooms based round the Dewey Decimal Classification is seen as a selling point? However it is the nub of OCLC's trademark infringement suit. Still given the erotica package in Room 800.001 the hotel offers I'd have thought Bliss would be a better classification system to claim just don't ask me the appropriate classmark). Christ you'd have thought OCLC would have had a sesne of humour and seen it all as a promotion of DDC.
Multi-tasking earlier as the end of the Man U- Arsenal game clashed with the start of Scrapheap. So while giggling at the latter I was swearing at Van Nistleroy's theatrics and I'm now doing the same at the stupid whinging Manc fans who objected to Arsenal players suggesting Van Nistleroy is the cheating little shite he is.
Just hitting a couple of aditus posters and then I really think I've got this AGM stuff sorted. Think we should have enough stuff. All ready to roll. Need to get some velcro pads and I'm done. Have to start cooking the dinner, while listening to the match and round it all off with today's Scrapheap, they have to dispose of bombs..... yikes. So today as a bit of variety try Robert Llewellyn's site.
The key feature of Cal being back at school is the Sunday fruit shop. He needs to take some fruit to school, a bag of crisps and that means the Sunday morning ritual of nipping to Sainsbury's in Woolton (another bizarre museum, the J. Sainsbury's Virtual Museum freaky but kind of interesting). Also used it to get some chocolate in for the Central Liverpool PCT AGM (Central Liverpool PCT Annual General Meeting and Exhibition - 23 September 2003 at the Merseyside Maritime Museum. The exhibition is open from 11am - 3pm with the Annual General Meeting taking place at 1pm. All welcome. ) Between this, the Aditus Mice, Mousemats, Aditus bugs, and our lovely range of leaflets, the range of spiders we are ready.
Big match today in Manchester, the Independent offer stuff on Tim Howard latest in what I'm hoping is Ferguson's line of flaky post-Schmeichal keepers. They also profile Martin Keown but for some reason fail to mention how he was thrown out of Wimbledon for hitting a ball at a ball girl (oops, my mistake I was believing the Keown profile in the Oxford Mail), he also get called ugly by the People (pot, kettles, black, Mick McCarthy) plus yesterday they had the inevitible Viera - Keane article. They also suggest the result is historically crucial and once more whinge about Arsenal's ability to create penalties (er, what about the other 19 clubs in the Premiership, want to start on that one start with the Mancs.... they have to get extra soap in for Van Nistleroy so he can clean his knees after every game he falls over that often). The Times meanwhile look at the role of Ray Parlour suggesting his future is not secure and the other inevitable Thierry Henry article mentioning the va-va-voom ad. Mind you I'd kinda like to play with the remote control airship in it.
Watching 'What the Victorians Did For Us' yesterday I was mightily amused by the devices to prevent people being buried alive. Thought I'd scoot around and see what was going. I didn't expect to find the Museum of Funeral Customs go to the gift shop and get yer choclate coffin. More suprisingly it doesn't seem isolated in amsterdam you have Uitvaart Museum, Budapest has the cheerily named Funeral Institute of Budapest, this sort of thing is clearly big in Germany with Hamburg hosting the Friedhof Ohlsdorf and Kassel the Museum fur Sepulkralkult�r and finally in Houston the Americans benefit from the National Museum of Funeral History. Why don't we have anything like this in the UK? We have the delightfully titled National Association of Funeral Directors who presumably have an advertising slogan of 'Dead, make sure your naffed'.
