Pardon My Hacking Cough

...Actually, it's not that bad. It just feels that bad. But after two days home sick, I'm back at work.

And I'm about to give the first of my 5 (6?) presentations this month, in a little more than an hour, at the North Branch of Denton Public Library. Melody Kelly (my boss's boss), Suzanne Sears (my boss), and I are going to give a three-part talk about censorship of government information, in honor of--you guessed it--Banned Books Week. If you'd like to see my wiki notes, handouts, or lecture text, you can always snag it off my wiki.

I've got my three presentations for San Antonio Public Libraries mostly done (not that you'd know it from my wiki page--for once I've been hand-writing my notes)--save for the screenshots, which of course will require no less than three hours of struggle and some mild cursing at my laptop. The Library 2.0 technologies and the "Keeping Up as a 21-st Century Librarian" talks both came together really easily--it's more the basic tech competencies for librarians that I'm struggling with. I think it's because I have an hour, so I want to do more than say, "this is what you ought to know--now learn it." But then again I only have an hour... and I can't possibly teach the intricacies of ten basic tech competencies in that amount of time. I'll have to find some kind of happy compromise and point them to some great resources to follow-up on their own.

In any case, I am very, very excited about the SAPL event. And my mom's looking forward to attending; I've been telling her than since she can't get Wordperfect 5.0 installed on her computer, and she hates MS Word, she really just ought to use a wiki. It's got the simple, code-revealing mark-up she wants (without really realizing that's what she wants), plus she can access it from any computer without having to save it to a USB drive or floppy or whatnot. And she can have all the old versions backed up... yeah, she's wiki-bound, I tell ya.

Well, I'd better sign off. I need to finish printing those handouts for tonight and down a few cough-drops.