things found while (mostly) at work

i hate those days where everything seems about half again as hard as it should be. i was processing unidentified photographs this morning -- a thankless task, let me tell you! -- and i kept getting distracted by minor details in the background: what's the nametag say? what's she reading? is that really the pru under construction? and i feel i often come very close to falling off the line that marks necessary staring at the details in order to figure out who the person is, where they are, what's going on, in order to describe and catalogue -- inasmuch as these photos are being catalogued; they're mostly just getting a home in a folder under a fairly general heading -- from simple goldbricking or indecisive "look at the pretty flower"-ness.

and you know you've been living in the same place for awhile when you come out of your workplace the morning after a storm -- in this case an ice storm -- and you're automatically considering which sidewalks will have gotten the most sun during the course of the morning and will, therefore, be at least partially safe for foot traffic. i mostly guessed right. and then, of course, the notification that the book i wanted from the bpl is waiting for me at the copley branch came after i got home. of course it did.

while i sit here "working" -- no, really, i am -- i thought i should pass on this photograph which i found this morning in a guardian.co.uk online exhibit. it's part of a teaser "flipbook" for a john gay retrospective exhibit in realtime being held at....some...really neat london museum that i can't even begin to remember. the rest of the mini-exhibit is really worth looking at, as is the 8 or so photographs from the viking re-enactment fire celebration in the shetland isles, but, anyway, i think this may be the only photograph taken of nobody evans in real life. i took anna's suggestion and figured out a way to mail neil gaiman the link as well; we'll see whether or not it is possible to tell if he is amused by it, too.

i also came across this scribd.com site while i was at work -- really, this one was work-related. i was trying to track down a photographer; we have a stack of contact sheets with his name and address stamped on them and i found plenty of bibliographic and old exhibit references to him but nothing current, sadly. anyway, one of the references i found was to an article housed on this scribd site and i thought it looked kind of cool.

i haven't spent a lot of time digging into it; from a quick glance or two, it looks like someone thought adobe acrobat and .pdf documents were a really good idea and wanted to build their own. the idea seems to be to offer storage and sharing space for people to upload their own documents in a kind of user-created e-library format. but, as i said, i haven't spent a lot of time looking at it. this is their faq page if you want to skip right to the description. it seems similar to me to the basic idea behind the directory of open access journals, but with a more "ground up" approach in that the scribd people want you to have access to the whole package to build the journal (if that's what you want) and the doaj people just want to know about it so they can list it.

and, while i'm "working," i'm also waiting for the clunk of the mailbox which will mean i have a 90% chance of a new netflix. in light of the forthcoming fourth entry into the terminator series and the fact that it will star christian bale, i decided i simply can't forego the possibility of spending two hours studying his cheekbones and therefore i have to go back and watch the third sequel which i have avoided 'til now. so we'll see if that's any good or if it's as bad as dragon wars which i tried to watch on netflix insty last night and ended up turning off because the total lack of logic was making me lonely for torchwood's weevils and, really, when you wish a weevil would show up just to make things make sense, things are pretty bad.