I did a group phone interview on Monday for an internship and, get this, the woman with whom I would be working is a graduate from GSLIS (the school I attend, for those of you who aren’t paying attention. She took 315, the class I’m now a ga for, and took that class with Matt Beth, who is now one of the people I work with. Wow, what a small world. Brandi, dear wife that she is, points out that I said “um” around 700 times. How sweet. The end of the semester swiftly approaches.

The “Summer 2004 Internship Race” is heating up. There have been some very, very strange developments as of late. More as it becomes clearer. Speaking of internships, check this out:

LIS 360 Practicum Opportunity Available at Abbott Laboratories, Abbott Park, Illinois

LIS Practicum

The practicum is an excellent way to gain work experience and library and information science skills in a wide variety of professional settings. It also provides an opportunity to explore career options within the profession.

Description
There is an opportunity for an MS student to enroll in a LIS 360 Practicum course affiliated with Abbott Laboratories in the Spring 2003 term. In this practicum, students might participate in activities around the design, development and maintenance of an internal employee portal. The practicum student would work primarily with the cross-functional eBusiness team in the International division; the 4-person team consists of an Information Scientist in Taxonomy (Leslie Owens), IT developer, eBusiness development manager and eBusiness manager. Some of the activities the team is working on include:
1) Usability testing
2) Taxonomy creation: Expanding the site map to include new sites and ensuring intuitive navigation through the portal.
3) Optimizing search engine functionality
4) Developing a custom classification scheme for document management
5) Gathering requirements and designing interfaces for our next platform, IBM WebSphere 5.0

We can tailor the practicum to the student’s academic and professional goals. The practicum will be a good fit for anyone interested in cataloging and taxonomies, user-centered design, knowledge management, content management and information retrieval. In addition to the work on the portal, the practicum will provide the opportunity to learn about many aspects of corporate librarianship and the chance to spend time with some of the 40+ members of the Abbott Library team.

Requirements
Students can contact Lxxx Oxxx via phone: 847-936-xxxx or email: xxx@abbott.com, attaching a resume and including contact information. Upon acceptance at the practicum work site by the Site Supervisor, the student next secures a GSLIS Practicum Faculty Advisor and completes the Practicum Contract with the Site Supervisor and Practicum Faculty Advisor. Submit the signed Practicum Contract to I. Dale Silver, Practicum Coordinator (see contact info below).

For more information about LIS 360 and the necessary forms, see http//www.lis.uiuc.edu/gslis/degrees/courses/practicum.html.
v If you are interested in a practicum, contact your Academic Faculty Advisor for consultation regarding your curriculum, or please contact Assistant Dean Dale Silver for more information about LIS 360.

On related notes, I’m posting a link to the speech given by Bill Gates recently at UIUC as well as an excellent article written by RMS on word attachments. Brandi is here in Champaign for some library workshop so we get to hang out on campus again if only for a day.

Time for “Ironic Moments” with your host, Jim. Exactly one person showed up for the workshop at the library and that person wasn’t there to learn about buying a new computer, but rather to learn how to use the one she has. The next one is on secure computering. I’m not sure how much preparation I’ll be putting into that one. My cat has taken to sneaking into the room and attacking my feet as I type. How cute.

I’ve posted the screenshots as well as more pictures of my job. Eric was working so hard tonight he almost missed attending the Bill Gates Show at Foellinger Auditorium. I lectured to the 315 class today about system administration in Windows 2000 Professional and Red Hat Linux 9. Maybe next semester we’ll use Fedora Core, the free successor to Red Hat Linux. Oh, the camera I bought at the Maxwell Street Market in Chicago is excellent. It’s a Canon EOS Rebel G (mine’s the black one). I love my Pentax K1000, but it sure is nice to have a quality light meter and flash. auto-wind is nice, too. I really wish we had space for a darkroom.

I went home for the weekend and had a great visit with family. It’s such a hike to Macomb and back. I spent all this week doing an inordinate amount of homework only to discover that not one bit of it was due this week. It’s kind of funny-usually I’d make the opposite mistake and not realize the homework was due until very late. Woo-hoo. If you live in CU you might find this interesting. The IMC. in cooperation with others want to build a citywide free, highspeed wireless network. See their website. A couple of people have expressed their misunderstanding of the current state of the Linux desktop so I’ve taken some screenshots that I’ll post on Tuesday that they may see it’s modernity.

I’m hosting a workshop on buying a new computer at the Helen Matthes Library tomorrow. The jist of it is you probably don’t need it and if you do, you probably need a lot less of it than you’re going to buy. The handout is here (pdf). Today I turned in all the homework that I thought was due last Friday. While dumb, it was nice to have all of my stuff done early. I also think I got the intro to linux security doc (pdf) done. Brandi’s coming up tonight to go out with me and Dennis and Chu.

The class I ga for, LIS315 (Changed to LIS 451) has reached a critical point where I need to be there for labs, which means I have to be in Champaign an extra day. This is not a happy development around my house. I’m having a good time at work, though. I’m writing a best practices primer for Redhat 9 and I recently built a very solid dhcp and caching dns server based on Redhat for Prairienet. I’m thinking of installing Linux on some of our public access workstations, also. Still, I’d rather be at home.

3 things today. First, sorry Dad, you didn’t say that, but I thought it would sound funnier if I said you did. Second, snow days rock. Brandi and I went sledding Monday and Tuesday, which was great fun. Who knew that one of the funnest sledding hills in the Midwest was hidden in the ‘ham. Third, it’s snowing in Champaign and I wanted to share it with everyone, especially Brandi. So, here are some pictures- 1, 2, 3, 4.

Today is my first day back at ITO this semester. Wow. I think all of the fun just got sucked out of this job all at once. Hey, that’s life, right. I mean, my dad says it’s not a real job if you don’t hate it. (Just kidding, Dad) Anyway, for obvious reasons, I can’t really say anything. At least I get to see Martin more.