Some days I feel like because I’m a librarian I’m supposed to be in love with every new website that comes down the pike.  Twine, brightkite, friendfeed, ad nauseum.  I think I offended some people by trash talking Facebook recently.

The interface makes me want to scream.  The applications make it difficult to find information in profiles.  Sending hugs and turning people into zombies is not a compelling use of my time.  In fact, I wonder what people are thinking when they engage in these activities.  I mean, these people are educated professionals with demanding jobs who find time and interest enough to pick out ‘gift’ images to embed in profiles of others.  Why?!

And so.  Now I’m trying to engage Facebook and find a way to integrate it into my life.  I do find it somewhat useful to reconnect with people I’ve not thought about for decades.  I haven’t decided that my life has improved as a result, though.  It is interesting to see what some people I only know professionally do in their real lives, but again, I’m not sure about added value.

Oddly, I really like twitter.  I like having an idea what friends and collegues are doing.  I’ve found points of collaboration and shared interests with others.  I’ve said and read some innappropriate stuff.  I like they way the UCSD/SDSC guys use it; they use twitter to meetup for drinks.

n.b.  If this post seems pointless it’s because I wrote it just to make Brandi happy.

Man, I love Chicago. Driving down the Kennedy Expressway toward the loop I just got the feeling I was home again. We’re staying under the L on Jewelers Row and we’ve been walking up to Gold Coast, River North, and shopping the Magnificent Mile. We went to dinner last night for our anniversary at Carmine’s. We used to go there when we were dating in college so it’s a full-circle come-around. I also forgot how much I hate Chinatown. I expect anyone with any interest in animal rights or cruelty issues are probably similarly disgusted in Chinatowns everywhere.

We’re having a great time. It’s time to leave, though, for Macomb to see my family. Then we’ll drive to Effingham to see Brandi’s family. Hopefully we’ll be able to drop by Champaign-Urbana to hang out a bit. It’s funny just how much a few years in CU changed my life. I’d probably be living in New York training with Sensei Serge Clark and doing massage now if it weren’t for a fateful, snowy day gazing out the window of Larry’s archaeology lab. Things are going pretty swell the way they are.

Edit:  When I say ‘under the L’, I don’t mean it in an Elwood Blues sort of way.  The Silversmith Hotel is great.  We were really disappointed to see our old hotel, The Cass, was bought by Holiday Inn and consquently sucks.

Brandi tagged me with the Passion Quilt Meme- “Take/make a photo and caption it with a statement that you feel passionate for children, students, libraries…”

Here’s mine:

I’m a digital librarian and love technology, but in the end, it’s about people and freedom.  It’s about empowering people and leveling the field.  That’s one of the reasons I wanted to become a librarian.  I spend a lot of time at a computer, often working in isolation from users as my project isn’t a user-focused endeavor.  Still, it’s the people that are important.

This photo was taken at the Katherine Dunham Center in East St. Louis.  My wife, Brandi, is in the backrow.  Her class, LIS 451 Introduction to Networked Information Systems, build computers and a a lab for, and provided instruction to, neighborhood kids in one of the most imporvershed areas of the country.  Although my job here doesn’t look much like my job there, it’s still about empowering people.

I finally finished installing soffit venting yesterday which should improve the ventilation in my attic which should reduce the load on my HVAC which should reduce the power we use. That isn’t my point, though. When I finished and cleaned myself up I really felt like having a sandwich. It was a beautiful day and I thought I’d go to the local neighborhood grocery store, Kings Red and White, for bread. I could have easily walked the extra half block to Compare Foods, which is much larger but non-local. Or, I could have walked the opposite direction and gone to a panaderia or one of the other tiendas on Roxboro. I talked to a couple of neighbors on the way there, read some fliers on King’s local events board, and walked home with a couple of neighborhood kids. The algorithm at Walk Score seriously underestimates my neighborhood.

That little hike to the store reminded me of house hunting. We bought the house we did, in the neighborhood we did, partly for the ability to walk to stores and restaurants. Another important factor was proximity to the regional mass transit stop so I could catch the bus to work. I was reading the Atlantic this morning and The Next Slum? seemed to sum up perfectly why we didn’t want to live in a cul-de-sac suburbia.

We have friends who live in a giant, sprawling suburban McMansion development of enormous houses and it’s always so surreal to me. I’ve been in their neighbors houses and always had the impression that they’re just squatters. To a household, they all seem to have 1,000 square feet of furniture in their 5,000 square foot homes. With soaring ceilings and yards of the same paint throughout the houses I always have an unsettling feeling and can’t imagine how the occupants find it comfortable. On the edges of their development the houses are going to rent and crime is starting to rise. The article above could have been written about their completely un-walkable ‘neighborhood’.

Here are a couple of pictures. First, this is the car we bought:

Second, here is photo of the side curtain airbags deployed. A comparable picture of our Kia would have shown razor blades being deployed probably.

And finally, we just liked the feel.

We bought a 2008 Honda Civic EX (5-speed Auto) in Durham recently and I thought others might be interested in the numbers. We wanted to trade in our 2005 Kia Spectra 5 for something safer and more economical. We orginally thought about used Hondas, but the price difference between a new Civic and a 2 year old Civic was pretty minimal especially considering the warranty.

We did a lot of online shopping with the usual suspects including Edmonds.com, Yahoo Autos, and Consumer Reports. We also got quotes from the car buying services at the North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union and USAA. We got internet quotes from local 4 local dealerships including Leith Honda and Crown Honda.

NCSECU Car Buying Service actually got us the lowest price, but we didn’t buy with them. Car buying services rock, though. Call them up, tell them what you want, they call the regional sales office for the best price, and call you back. They’ll even pick it up and deliver it to you. The USAA Car Buying Service just sent us an email to take to the dealership instructing them to give us $300 above invoice.

We ended up buying from Leith Honda. We did all of the negotiating via email. I negotiated Crown Honda down, sent that information to Leith, they offered to beat it, I sent that back to Crown, Crown declined to negotiate further. No sales people!

Here’s the information our credit union provided us with about the cost of the car from chromecarbook.com:

Information from USAA:

Crown told us the MSRP was $20,145. They also added mudflaps for $199. They offered us the car for $19,293 and offered us $5,500 for our Kia. Ouch!
According to Consumer Reports, a good price to aim for is 4% to 8% above dealer their bottom line price, which is Dealer Invoice Price minus Dealer Incentives and Dealer Holdback. Here’s their information:

We ended up buying the car from Leith for $18,455 and getting $6,500 for our car. We got the promoted 2.9% interest rate, which is nice. We also paid the Documentation Fee of $398 and Sales Tax of $358.65.
We love the car and feel like we got a decent deal. Unfortunately, while we were at Leith closing the deal, our salesman from Crown called me and browbeat me on the phone. He yelled that we had a deal and how could I do that to him. I’ll never go there for service even though it’s closer to our house. No thanks.
Really, though, the car is fantastic. It’s much, much quicker than the Kia, more comfortable, quieter, and more economical. We get about 32 MPG city/highway (hard to differentiate since we drive both equally each week). The entire cockpit becomes an airbag and it has 4 wheel disk brakes. I wish it had traction control, but that’s life. It’s a great car and, although I couldn’t care less about cars, I’ve always wanted a Honda.

I’m not big into music.  I generally find it pretty annoying.  I realize that this isn’t a popular position, but it’s the truth.  I’d rather listen to just about anything on talk radio than music.  Anyway, we’ve been talking about how to deal with our massive CD collection and equally large, if less organized, digital music collection.  I’ve decided to start listening to Rhythmbox in shuffle mode and to discard anything I don’t like.  This is, of course, subject to mood, right?  No matter.

We’re digitizing the CDs or specific tracks that we like and are archiving the CDs in the attic for now.  I’ve got about 2GB of mp3s in my trash presently and have just started.   It’s amazing what I have.  Aphex Twins, Rammstein, Barbara Streisand, Kenny G., and other assorted crap.  I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned from this.  Although you can use streamtuner and streamripper to rip hours of Internet radio, you shouldn’t.  You end up with Kenny G.

What I keep, I’m hoping to generate metadata for with Picard and musicbrainz.  It seems all those kids on Napster didn’t use controlled vocabulary and authority files to describe their music.

Brandi uploaded some photos of our open house yesterday. It seemed to go pretty well. We had 58 guests and collected a lot of donations for the Animal Protection Society of Durham and the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina. We were pretty surprised we could fit so many people into our little house, but it was quite comfortable. The weather was perfect (about 65F) and the screen porch saw a lot of use. The party, the planning, and the idea to ask invitees to bring charitable donations are all to Brandi’s credit. This was so much fun, we’re thinking of doing it again next year.

Grieving is a strange situation. I’ve read a few books on losing a parent since my father died and have been open about how I feel, but I can’t shake the feeling that something is missing. (Obvious joke: My dad is missing!) Honestly, I didn’t expect this to be so difficult. I thought that I had come to terms with the man my father was, his abusive history, and my feelings about it. Still, his death has has a tremendous impact on me and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about it.

I dream of my dad most nights and often wake up crying. I haven’t cried in my waking life yet, which I find unsettling. Last night I dreamed my wife and I were there, at my father’s house, and my dad was trying to get us to take Lady, the dog we had when I was about 10 years old, home to North Carolina with us. He thought she’d be a good watchdog while we were away. I don’t recall why I was crying, though. Prior to his death, I did not often recall any of my dreams. Now, though, I frequently remember them with clarity and they’re often breathtakingly realistic to the point that I don’t know I’m dreaming, which is pretty unusual for me.

I feel sort of silly wondering what it all means and wondering what lessons I should take away from his life and death. I do, though.

I posted some photos of our weekend at a friend’s cabin on the New River near Galax, Virginia. We invited a couple of friends, Heather and Andrew, and their dog Ellie. It was pretty awesome. We did some hiking at Grayson Highlands State Park on part of the Appalachian Trail. See the photos.