Bad Karma

Bad karma......Over the weekend I was at Scout Camp. It was the second weekend of NE-II-143, the Wood Badge for the 21st Century course. My job was that of Scribe (Paper), and I was responsible for the handouts, and the daily newsletter, plus taking photos.

We got to Saturday lunch time, and all had gone very well. We had talked about how well it was going. Never do that!!

Part of the concluding presentation is a Power Point slide show with photos. It is timed to work with a sound track, and runs 8 minutes. It is about 230 slides, and runs for 8 minutes. I had put in about 180 or 190 slides (saving periodically) when I got the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.

Ever get that? It is bad. Very Bad.

Two of the other folks on staff are very talented technicians (and work on PCs for a living). They went to work for about an hour, and then the bad news. It lost its boot sector. It would not start even with an XP boot disk. Pain.

Well there was an extra laptop, and I created Sunday's daily newsletter. I did not get much sleep on Saturday night because I was re-creating the slide show. (Most of the photos were on a mini-CD or two, and the rest were in electronic form on another machine.)

The course ended well.

Today, my laptop went to the Library's tech vendor. We'll see what happens next.

Countries I have visited

Well, this is much less impressive:



create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

And it is quite misleading. For where I have been in the US, see the prior entry in this blog. I have only been to border towns in Mexico, and only a few places in Canada (Toronto, for ALA; driving across Ontario from Niagara Falls to avoid Detroit). My trip to Argentina was courtesy of Rotary, and I visited only Buenos Aires (but it was a GREAT trip). My European travels were 35 years ago, when there still was a Berlin Wall, and concern about Russians. I guess I need to broaden my horizons...literally!

States I have visited

Let me see if I can post this, which idea I got from Walt Crawford.



create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.


There is certainly a pattern, and someday, I need to do the Northwestern part of the country. I'd also like to visit Michigan's U.P. (which is colored in because of my many visits to the "hand" of Michigan). I'll even claim extensive travel in the six New England states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. I've also seen a great deal of Illinois, Iowa, Arizona, and New Mexico. Many of the other have been either plane hops in and out (Louisiana) or "drive throughs" on the Interstate.

Hmmm. No I'll have to do the world map.

Profile of "the" judge

Janet C. Hall ruled in September in the case of ACLU vs. Gonzales. Yesterday's (10/1/2005) Connecticut Post had a great front page story about her. Read quickly, I don't know how long it is free! If you have to go to the hard copy/microfilm, it starts on page 1, at the bottom.

When is it OK to ban someone from the library?

Whew, this is hard.

Deep in my heart I believe that library service should be provided for all. At the same time, how do you make other people behave and take responsibility for their actions?

Today I did one of the hardest things I am called upon to do. I banned someone from the Library.

This young man has been an Internet regular for quite some time. A few weeks ago his behavior started to change. He began "chatting up" some of the staff. [Ironically this has been a thread on NEXTGENLIB-L for about the past week.] He was told to stop doing this. He then started asking very personal questions of staff (women staff), and did not stop doing so after several requests. He has also been following one of the other regular Internet users (a young woman).

Today, I talked with him and banned him from using the main library building for 3 months (until December 21). With me, he was acquiescent. I tried to get an address so that I could send him a letter to outline specifics and his right of appeal to the Library Board, but he refused that. I am glad that the police officer, whom we had called, was present. Now, even though he is banned from one building, we have three other branches open, and he can go there.

Where do you draw the line? Part of my responsibility as an employer is to provide a safe workplace for the staff. That is the line which this person crossed. In my career I have only "fired" three people. Once was many years ago, someone who was nearing the end of probation and was not meeting the standard of performance. The other two were in the last couple of years, and both were because the staff members fired (one a man, one a woman) were sexually harassing fellow staff members.

This spring, I encouraged then drove a staff member to the police station to swear out a complaint against a patron who was harassing her. It put an end to that ugly situation. And he was banned from using that branch.

So...grump. And this was after we had a false fire alarm in the building this morning, just before we should have opened to the public. Ugh