Leaves and teams and ducks

So where have I been, what have I been knitting and what have I been writing?

Answered in no particular order, I've been spending time on Facebook, Ravelry, Twitter, Angel Learning at SLIS/SJSU, SLISLife, Second Life, and well, you know, IRL -- work.

Knitting? Lots and lots of not terribly successful swatches for the back of the fish afghan but more recently, I've branched out to leaves. I know, bad.

But seriously, somewhere on the web, I got clued into the International Fiber Collaborative Tree Project at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and was inspired to play with some experiments.

I ended frogging back most of the first one I did and I'm not entirely certain how many I will end up sending but it has been fun and seriously more portable than the floundering fish afghan with its mocking ends and other issues.

Most of my writing has been skewl, school, skool, and more of the same.

I finished LIBR203 early although not as early as I'd planned.

I had a tough time with some of the assignments mostly because I wanted to write about things that interested me but I also needed to seriously self edit and not pick areas that trip my trigger but are too complex to cover adequately in the time I have available to devote to school.

I can see that this is going to be a continuing trend through this process.

For example, sick and twisted that I am, I really wanted to dig into stuff about metadata and discovery or privacy rights, discovery and web 2.0/social networking but just like when I fall down the rabbit hole of stats and all things numbers it just sucks me in too much.

Seriously, I still read court opinions for "fun" and I think that Marchionini on Information Seeking in Electronic Environments is a great read.

I'm pretty well resigned at this point to having no life to speak of, not like that's anything new, but at least now the main point of the sacrifice (school) has some promise of getting me where I will be in a position to have not only a life but a life that suits me a little better for this phase of my life.

The team/group exercise has been exhausting so far but I really, really like my team and when push comes to shove we just plain rock.

When I took a break from our marathon session last weekend, I got everyone some silly bonding stuff from the little slice of crazy that is Babette Schwartz. Had budget not been such an issue any one of these other highly relevant items might have also hit the shopping cart for me or for the team members.

Late yesterday we got the packet with the "other" group's project write up/design and my initial sense is that I'm even prouder of our team did and that all the work was worth it to have a pretty cohesive voice and view point.

It is also very clear that my field of knowledge/understanding when it comes to things like database design and how that tracks back round to metadata and such is not as widely shared in places other than my geeky techno work world.

The other team included their database (we did too) so there's a lot of good opportunity to keep trying to figure out the software we're working with.

So far, I'm not a huge fan and I can see why a non-traditional collection poses such a challenge with this tool. We struggled hugely because we (maybe I) wanted to build a relational tree and the software does not seem to make that an easy thing to do.

It was pretty late in the process when I triggered on a work around to effectively (I hope) store the multiple search categories any given record might fall into and though would have been in my original vision, a branch or link.