I went running this morning, if you can call it that, on the Confederate Trail in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.  The island is very picturesque and the trail is breathtaking in spots.  I’d been told that the fox population is quite high, but didn’t see any until this morning.

On the outbound trip I came close enough to pet a large red fox.  He stopped, dropped his head low, and watched me.  People must feed them.  We watched each other for a couple of minutes before he lifted his tail and jogged off into the tall grass on the side of the trail.

On the return trip I was stunned to watch a fox, perhaps the same fox, chasing a chipmonk.  I had the advantage of height watching the scene play out in a grassy spot lower than the trail.  I had to wonder for a moment whom I should root for before realizing that it didn’t matter to either of them what I thought.  They were both beautiful and the sun was still low and golden in the sky.  Flowers all around.  A perfect morning.

The Digital Curation Conference is wrapping up. There were some salient take-aways.

1. The UK has a much more focused national strategy for digital library development due largely to the structure of funding organizations.
2. Relatedly, the one off, silo-ed, unfederated, independent architecture of US digital collections, both within and without individual institutions, is due largely to the grant situation in the US.
3. Holding a digital library/data center/information management conference 2 stories below ground without wireless Internet or mobile phone reception is both hugely annoying and enormously beneficial.
4. The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, while providing me with interesting work, doesn’t seem like it will provide the national direction that I think is necessary. I trust the digital preservation experience will be valuable to others, though.
5. Conferences that include food and Internet in the conference registration rock. It’s nearly impossible for most academics I know to request funding for Internet.

I usually don’t keep an eye out for upcoming conferences, but am trying to be better about it. Here are some upcoming conferences I’m thinking about.

• 3rd International Digital Curation Conference - December in Washington, DC
• Code4Lib 2008 - February in Portland, OR
• PyCon 2008 - March in Chicago, IL
• Best Practices Exchange 2008 - May in Helena, MT

I’ll probably try to present with a friend at PyCon and demonstrate some tools at BPE. I think there are some upcoming NDIIPP meetings, too. January in San Diego, I think. I was hoping for San Fransisco since SD is so played out, but no one asked my opinion. I mean, if I wanted to hang out at a real supercomputer center, I’d head back to Champaign. (Just kidding Robert and David)

I also came across a few pictures from the June 2007 NDIIPP meeting in Maryland.

We’re back from our East Coast trip. Brandi went to the Medical Library Association Conference in Philadelphia this May and I joined her for a quick vacation in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. We’re both completely enamored with Boston, though I’m sure it’s ridiculously expensive. The heat in New York was painful, as was the smell, but it was a nice trip. We were actually celebrating our 5th wedding anniversary. Life has been very good of late. See some photos.

As a bonus, I took a video from The Cyclone, the ancient wooden roller coaster at Coney Island. See the roller coaster video.