Just heard from Wayne Jones that the book to which I contributed a chapter, E-Journals Access and Management, will be published sooner than expected. It’s now due sometime in July as opposed to this fall. Good news!

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After I posted information about the latest issue of The University of Chicago Library’s newsletter, I found out that a new library building — not simply an automated storage facility as previously understood — is now being planned. The new library building will be realized with a $25 million gift and will be named The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library in honor of the donors. Joe Mansueto is founder of Morningstar, Inc. Check out drawings and links to more information here. Most of it will be underground, with the main visual clue to its location being a large dome sitting immediately to the west of the Regenstein Library where I used to work for a number of years. What’s interesting about this whole development is that U of C will hold a fairly distinct place among large academic and research libraries in that all physical collections will be housed on campus, whereas most other peer institutions have resorted to offsite storage. Oh and by the way, the new building was designed by Helmut Jahn. Pretty cool!

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I was glad to see the Spring 2008 issue of The University of Chicago Library’s newsletter, LIBRA, published this afternoon. This publication’s official audience is University faculty, students, and staff but it always provides an interesting glimpse into the Library’s workings and initiatives for those not affiliated with the University. This latest issue describes, for example, the reincarnation of the Eero Saarinen-designed D’Angelo Law Library into a 21st century space with emphasis on online resources and collaborative, inviting work space. This issue also contains an essay from Judy Nadler, director, that articulates her views on her participation in the Working Group for the Future of Bibliographic Control. This group’s work has been hotly debated and intensely scrutinized in the international library community so it is good to hear one representative’s perspectives about it. Another interesting article in this issue relates to a project called Project Bamboo, which I hadn’t heard about before.

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One of the most interesting — and sometimes the most entertaining — things that I track is search terms that someone used to get to my blog. There have been some real doozies or ones that just made me laugh but one I noticed today is one of the best: “i love cleaning and i’m a man”. Yep. Someone used that search phrase to get to FML. You have to know me personally to really get how funny that is.

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This weekend we’ve had our share of fun and games. Yesterday the weather was cool and rainy but today it was perfect: sunny and in the high 60s.

In addition to getting another van, which was exciting enough on its own, we made a trip to the Chicago Botanic Garden along with 10 million other people (or so it appeared) to see the Spring blooms. Cohen was a real stinker the whole time, running away when he was told to stay put, climbing on things he wasn’t supposed to, stepping in the flower beds, and on and on. Not sure what was wrong with him; maybe he was just more excited than usual. Brinley, on the other hand, was pretty quiet and meek the whole time. She has been unwell for a few days now with fever and sore throat so it’s no wonder. She slept on the way to the gardens and then sort of kept behind everyone else as we walked everywhere. Even though the place was crawling with people, more than we had ever seen before, it was worth the trip. The Spring flowers were gorgeous, especially the tulips. We went on some walkways that led out into the lagoon a little bit and were amused to discover a great big ‘ol carp looking for us to feed it, surrounded by a large school of bluegills. (I wish I had had my fishing pole to catch those bluegills!) Overall it was a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. On our way home we stopped and ate a nice meal at Chipotle’s. Click here to see the full set of photos from the trip.

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One of my least favorite things to do in the world is wait in the customer lounge at a car dealership waiting for my car to be serviced. That’s what I’m doing right now. Like airports and other public places, car dealerships are about the least inspiring, coldest and blandest places in the world to spend any amount of time.

But this time my situation isn’t as bad as usual because I am at a Honda dealership where there is wifi access. I can browse the Internet, do some work-related stuff, write this blog post, etc. and therefore feel like I’m not bored to tears and/or wasting a lot of precious weekend time. So today I give thanks for wifi! May it spread everywhere and become ubiquitously available wherever I go!

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Last fall I began a series of posts called “The Encyclopedia of Me” with the intent to go through the alphabet and in the process, describe more about myself, my family, my beliefs and interests, etc. Obviously that process stalled in a big way (I only got through B), but that won’t prevent from starting it up once more. Better late than never, I suppose.

I chose to focus this post in the Encyclopedia of Me series on contentment because it is a characteristic I admire so much in others, and one that I lack. I wish for more contentment. (Does that mean I am discontent over not being content? Forget that circuitous logic for now.) There are many definitions of the word but I like the definition that says contentment means “happiness with one’s situation in life.”

For some reason, most of my life I have struggled with discontent. The sources of my discontent are as varied and changeable as the wind but include:

• problems with people (relationships)
• work issues
• spiritual deadness and/or myopia
• thinking I don’t have enough money
• wanting material things that I can’t afford or don’t need
• dislike of my physical appearance, wishing I looked different
• striving hard toward a goal (e.g. buying a house) only to find that it doesn’t satisfy
• a deep sense of personal failure

I hope as I get older (and I am starting to really feel my age) I will learn to be content with what God has provided for me and my family. I hope to be like the apostle Paul, who learned contentment even in the midst of extreme suffering and trial, including beatings, privation, and imprisonment.

I think one key to understand is that I wasn’t born content, and I live in a world environment that bombards me with messages that promote discontent. I have to learn contentment. Sometimes I get fed up and frustrated with my situation and I do one of two things: I mope around, giving up altogether; or I rebel and fight hard to change my situation somehow. These are two extremes. What about the middle ground of contentment? What about just being satisfied with what I have and waiting patiently for direction and guidance if a change is needed, waiting for the Lord to open a door? What about accepting who I am, who God made me to be?

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The other day I decided to try “jailbreaking” my iPod Touch. As far as I can tell there is nothing illegal about doing this; it just invalidates the warranty from Apple. I didn’t have an original warranty to begin with since I bought it refurbished from eBay, so no worries there.

I’ve included a screenshot of one of the screens to give you an idea of how different you can make an iPod Touch look using a custom theme and installing third party apps. I think this is pretty cool! I know that the iPhone SDK is coming soon and I also realize there is some risk involved in doing this but I’m comfortable with what I’ve done in terms of being able to recover to the original state if need be. There are some incredible (free) third party apps already available including a full-featured pinball machine game complete with sound effects that is really nice. And there is a Labyrinth game that makes nice use of the iPod Touch’s accelerometer. Interestingly, one of the most innovative and full-featured apps is basically an electronic version of an Etch-A-Sketch complete with the ability to shake the iPod Touch to erase what is drawn and start over.

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Mark Lindner kindly pointed out to me today that some people may not know where the poll is that I mentioned in a post a few days ago. This is because if you read this post — like most people — via an RSS aggregator and go to the single post page on FML, you won’t see the poll at all in the sidebar. Instead it is only visible on the main page of FML. Doh! You’d think I would have thought of this and avoided it but no.

Anyhow, to make it easy on anyone who wants to participate, I’ve included the poll below as part of this post. Take a moment to tell me what you think:

[poll=2]

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