NYPL Web Resources Rock my Mundo

I got my New York Public Library card in the mail today.
rosettaspan.jpgAnyone who lives in New York state is eligible for a card, so I now have access to the library’s impressive collection of online resources.

I spent the morning refreshing my Spanish at the NYPL’s Online Language Learning Center. It uses the Rosetta Stone software, which now has a place on my desert island list of media resources, along with the White Album and the entire first season of The Dog Whisperer.

If you haven’t used or seen Rosetta Stone, it is Language learning software with the remarkable ability to hack your brain and force it to actually understand and remember all of those verb conjugations you had to memorize back in college. rosettaspan3.jpgThe lessons are reinforced with audio, video, writing and images, so it imitates an immersion experience more than a typical grammar-based language course. There’s even a module that has you speak into a microphone and shows you a waveform comparing your speech with someone who doesn’t suck.

I haven’t explored the other web resources, but I’m tickled at getting access to this one. The software is in the $300 range, and Cornell doesn’t have a license, so I feel like I’ve gotten my taxes worth this year. Thanks NYPL!

The secret to French dining…

If you have six or seven hours to dedicate to dinner and post-dinner drinks, you will discover the delightful absence of hangover or hunger the next morning. No wonder Parisians take so many vacation days. They are needed to eat properly.

Gentlemen take note: Gui brought roses to all the women at dinner. I’m just saying.

Air India

I won’t detail the series of bureaucratic ineptitudes that led to Chris missing his Air India flight, and the rest of us being transferred to a different airline without permission or warning that our flight would leave TWO HOURS early, but we did spend the flight singing the famous South Park song: “Blame Air India”.

Just to be clear: Do Not Fly Air India, no matter how cheap the tickets or how intriguing the meal selection. Avoid this carrier at all cost, unless you can somehow guarantee that you will be transferred to a different airline.

Paris is beautiful. I’ve been eating like a horse. But hopefully not eating actual horse.

Snails, however, are quite good.

Things seen in New York…

  • Man with a gun wrapped in a newspaper
  • Diner called “The Usual”
  • Brooklyn brownstones waiting to be demolished and replaced by a mall
  • City dogs, patient and tolerant
  • Fashion victims, many and hideous
  • Deli salad bars with better food than most Ithaca restaurants
  • Rat-like dog
  • Dog-like rat
  • Four drunken librarians
  • One Contemptuous waitress
  • Parents lugging strollers down the subway steps
  • Ice skating in the NYPL backyard
  • Park Slope, “where New York goes to breed”
  • Excellent hats, knitted by Alexandra
  • Anorexic woman doing extreme yoga in a store window
  • Giant whale

Tonight, we fly to Paris on Air India. Stay tuned!

Packing for Big Cities in which I do not live…

Tomorrow morning I’m getting on a luxury Cornell bus to New York City (the place I don’t live, despite everyone’s impression when I say I’m from New York State) for a week long vacation. Yes, I said vacation.

For possibly the first time in years, I’m traveling for non-work reasons. I’m meeting my librarian buddy Kara at the Newark airport and we’re going to spend four days hanging out with friends and being tourists, damned tourists.

We’re gonna shop, ice skate, lunch, and work on our French. Because midweek we’re jumping on a plane to Paris.

See, I found these $350 tickets on Air India, and my French friend and Cow-orker Gui knows this guy who runs a hotel, and he’s having a big birthday bash, and well, the stars just aligned.

So, moo ha ha, everyone. I’ll write some more on the bus tomorrow. I love everyone’s comic suggestions, by the way. That’s why you are the librarians and I am just the librarian-poseur who works on websites.

Off to pack my toothbrush and slinky red dress.

Did I mention Moo Ha Ha?

Michigan Alumni Nostalgia

I’m alone in the University of Michigan Science Library, enjoying free wireless (thanks to my alumni account) and a wealth of power outlets. I’m sitting in a window-alcove that overlooks campus, level with the green copper towers of West Hall.

During school, I came here to watch the University’s resident Peregrine Falcon as he perched on the tile roof and disemboweled pigeons.

It’s snowing in Ann Arbor, and I’ve got a big cup of mint tea. Below, a stream of overdressed undergraduates walks to class, wearing Uggs and fashionable backpacks. westhallsnow.jpg
photo credit: kwei

There are things I want to accomplish, but the luxury of a full day stretches ahead. Snow drops past the windows that surround my table. My favorite professor has her office hours this afternoon. I’d like to tell her that her two geeky research assistants are getting married.

I enjoy Ithaca, but it’s good to be in a place that feels more like home, if only because of the frequent sleepless nights I spent here churning out papers and code. I might run errands today and call old friends. I might just put my head down and sleep on this table.

I wish you all a peaceful snowy morning, full of potential.


ps. SI alums: The door scanner on the DIAD is still pissing people off after all these years. Good to know some things don’t change.

Labor Day

I’m going to Flint tomorrow. I’ll be in town through Tuesday.

I hope to visit my mom’s library on Friday, assuming I don’t expire from the cold I have developed.
For your envy and amusement, my itinerary: I’m getting up at 4am so I can leave Ithaca at 4:30am so I can get to the Syracuse airport at 5:30am so I can fly at 6:30am so I can tranfer in DC at 8am so I can arrive in Detroit at 9:30am.

All to get to Flint.
Has mankind ever made such efforts?
Has anyone ever had to work so hard to get to Flint?

Spain! Ham!

Spain!
Thanks to the noble efforts of our catsitter friends, the famous librarian-and-animal scientist couple Clay and Mike, our tickets to Spain arrived safely, and we spent six public transportation-filled hours in Madrid while we waited for our train to the north.

This might come as a surprise to some of you, but Madrid? Not a town for vegetarians. Within two blocks, we passed El Museo de Jamon, and Palacio de Jamon. Yes, that’s the Museum of Ham, and Ham Castle. Madrid was beautiful and huge and weird. We did a quick tour through la Plaza del Sol while searching for food. As the default sometimes meat-eater, I ended up consuming all things mysterious that arrived at our table. Which pretty much ended up being everything. We kept ordering things that seemed vegetarian, and they kept arriving covered in ham. Chris ended up eating a bocadillo and some cheese we brought from the UK.

The best library-related thing about Madrid was the Amazingly Clever and Fabulous Biblioteca Metro – sort of a bookmobile kiosk in one of the subway stations. It was charming, modern, well-designed, and the librarian helped us figure out the difference between commuter trains and metro trains. Sadly, we didn’t get a photo of it (or one of Ham Castle) because travel rule number one is: Sleepy people shouldn’t bring expensive digital cameras that they don’t own into downtown Madrid on a Friday night. So you’ll just have to imagine it. Mmm.

We couldn’t get a sleeping car to our conference in Gijon because they were all going to Bilbao, so we ended up sleeping in the brightly-lit second class compartment with our feet on our bags and cricks in our necks. Our guidebook, which shall heretofore be referred to as The Big Book of Paranoia, convinced us that every third person was a pickpocket, so that didn’t help with the sleeping. This morning was a blur, spent trying to speak enough Spanish on .2 hours sleep to convince the kind hotel lady to give us una cama de no fumando. We have now learned that the process of preparing a no smoking room in Spain involves removing the ashtray and spraying Drakkar everywhere.

Still, this may be the best hotel I’ve ever stayed in. I want the hotel decorator to come and visit my house immediately. Everything is modern and minimalist and ergonomic and just so not British. It’s Hotel AC Gijon. It’s a chain. I unhesitatingly recommend it, and not just because they gave us our rooms at 7am on a Saturday, when every sensible Spaniard is home with a hangover.

We to took a long hike around the city center this afternoon and walked along the sea, then returned to the hotel exhausted. Chris took gobs of photos of la Biblioteca Gijon for your viewing enjoyment. They have a cute and comfy reading room filled with middle aged men reading the newspaper.

We watched Pedro Almodovar’s Carne Tremula tonight on one of our laptops and now appreciate Madrid even more. I think this is one of Almodovar’s most accessible and least creepy films. If you want to check out a great piece of Spanish cinema but don’t want to yell “Oh God please don’t do what I think you are going to do” every five minutes, then this is the film for you.

Hi to everyone. I just read my London comments today and am Really grumpy to have missed the Women’s Library. But we also missed Westminster and The tower, thanks to some bad info about closing times. I also planned to become a reader at the British library, but we didn’t have time to return. So, feh. We’ll be back. And next time I’m bringing my 12 postgraduate degrees so I can stay.