Do we really need to arguing over the definition of refugee
at this point in time? Are these people going to care if they’re called refugees, displaced citizens, or snarfelbloxes, so long as they get the help they need? The pettiness of people never ceases to floor me..
I haven’t posted regarding the devastation in the Gulf states because I just haven’t been able to find the words. Every time I think about what’s happened down there, and what may happen in the next few days or weeks, I just find myself dumbfounded. Even now, I’m having trouble figuring out what to say. I tend to have an overactive imagination, and I can just see in my mind how it might have been to be stuck there, or what it might feel like to know that my home, my school, or my job are under 20 feet of water that will likely not be going away for a month or more. And I know that what I imagine can only be a shadow of the reality for these people.
Something like this really makes you think. We pretend that we’re lords of the world, with our technology, our guns, our sheer numbers, but then a storm like this comes along, or a wall of water like the tsunami in December, and we have to realize that we aren’t lords. We don’t control “Mother Nature”; we live and work and do all of the trivial mundanities that comprise modern life only by her sufferance. We can’t always predict her rage, and many times, even when we do have the foresight, the premonitions and predictions are ignored until too late or dismissed by the very people poised under her wrath. It’s an awesome and awful thing.
At a time like this, many seem to fall back on faith. I read an interesting story from the Times-Picayune blog about a rumor of divine intervention in the storm:
In the garden behind St. Louis Cathedral on Royal Street lies an incredible tangle of zig-zagging broken tree trunks and branches, mixed with smashed wrought iron fences. But right in the middle, a statue of Jesus is still standing, unscathed by the storm, save for the left thumb and index finger, which are missing. . . .Many in the Quarter are now saying it was the hand of Jesus, the missing digits to be precise, that flicked the hurricane east just a little to keep the city from suffering a direct blow.
It’s a curious occurance, one that will, no doubt, become another little piece of the crazy story that is New Orleans. The less skeptical part of me wonders if it might be true - if that statue is evidence of a modern miracle. The rest of me thinks it just got lucky, and that there are probably places throughout the city where there was minimal destruction amidst the chaos, but they aren’t mentioned because they have no religious statues to latch on to.
Anyway, if I had prayers that were more than empty words to offer to the survivors of the storm, I would. As it stands, I can only say that I feel for everyone affected by the storm, and that I plan to help out in the best way that I know, with a donation to the Red Cross.
Edit: and I’m not even going to talk about the various human responses to the whole thing, I’d be here for weeks.
Wow this illusion *really* screws with my head.
I could be doing something worthwhile with my time while the WoW servers are down, but instead, I’m sitting here, trying to remember what I was thinking about on my drive home. See, I had this interesting, profound thought on the way home that I was going to blog about, but alas, now it has flown away, probably to be lost forever. No matter, I suppose one can always talk about nothing in the absence of the profound.
I’m a little dismayed to find myself out of reading material. After finishing Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince and Snow Crash, I’m left with nothing to read and no real thoughts as to where to go next. I did stumble upon an interesting passage in Snow Crash that, in my infinite vanity, I’m considering quoting over in the sidebar because it vaguely relates to my semi-random blog title.
Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that. . .gave us the ability to think - moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world - a binary world - with both a physical and a spiritual component.
I find this quote interesting mostly because it very much follows the idea behind my blog title. Metaplanes.net came about as a domain because my husband and I were interested in so many other “worlds”, like Barsaive, an alternate (?) future, Norrath, Azeroth, and any number of others. In Shadowrun, the Metaverse is the magical term for the infinite span of universes, or planes, in existence. Amusingly, in Snow Crash, the Metaverse is simply a vision of the evolution of the Internet. Anyway, I always considered “metaplanes” to simply be a synonym for the Metaverse. The site itself could be considered one of my gateways into not only the digital or binary world, but all the other various “worlds” out there in cyberspace. Kind of an ironic thing, since I mostly latched onto the Babel aspect of my title because 1) I can’t concentrate on any one topic, so I tend to speak multiple “languages” (computer-speak, gamer-speak, etc) and 2) quite simply because I babble on endlessly (as you are all seeing right now) at times. Anyway, I really liked the line from the book because it seems to fit so well with my own thoughts for my site. As I said, it’s a bit of vanity to think that those lines are almost tailor-made for my site, but I guess we all have our little quirks. 
I’ve been working on Serenity for a while now, and I think it’s close enough to being finished that it’s worth pointing it out. Most of it’s major flaws in IE have been fixed. I haven’t checked it in anything else, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it breaks down somewhere, but for the two “major” ones, the design works. Sizing up the text in IE still breaks the sidebar; I’m not quite sure what to do about that. Eventually, the sidebar breaks in Firefox too, but you can at least increase the font size twice before it does. Anyway, I’m fairly pleased with how the design has come out so far.
Jennifer from geeksmakemehot asked in my minipost if I was planning to release the theme, which kind of surprised me. I’m nothing like a graphic designer or what-have-you; I never figured anyone would like what I’ve done that much. Regardless, I’m still not sure if I want to or not, because the theme still needs a lot of work, but I guess we’ll see.
On another note, Jon and I were talking last night about the possibility of coming up with some sort of plugin for Wordpress that would allow for cataloging collections of things. I’ve been wanting to do a listing of our movie collection for a while, but I haven’t been able to locate anything that would really help me do that except that plugin that creates a tag to automatically search out titles on imdb or Amazon. I could just use those and keep a huge long Page with all the titles, but I’d really rather do something a little more elegant than that. Our current thought is to try to come up with something that allows multiple collections, so you could have a movie list, a music collection list, book list, or whatever else you could come up with. Some of those would have automatic link generation from IMDB or Amazon. Anyway, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is how one would present data like that. Working in a library has given me something of an appreciation for how hard it is to give a meaningful presentation to large quantities of data. Hopefully we’ll come up with something that’s really cool and works well, but at this point, I think I’ll just hope that we actually do something with the idea, rather than shelving it out of laziness like we usually do.
I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yesterday. It was a very quick read for me, covering maybe 6 or 8 hours total, despite it’s 600+ pages. Overall, I’m pleased with the book. It answered a number of questions, as was promised, but it introduced more than a few new ones, so I am a bit dismayed that I will have to wait however long to read the next (and last) book in the series. I’m going to get a bit more specific about what I thought, so consider the cut below your major spoiler warning - don’t click on the rest of the post if you don’t want to read about what happens.
(Continued..)
I have been very pleasantly surprised the past few days at work. We concluded our negotiations for a vendor contract and ended up splitting it between two different companies. The first one is a fairly new addition to the field, relatively speaking (meaning they don’t have 100 years of service under their belt :eyeroll:), but they have all but bent over backward to set things up the way we want them to. They sent a couple of company reps out to assist us in getting all the accounts set up and do some training with their online system, and these guys have been phenomenal. One of them has been mostly dealing with the librarians, but the guy who’s been working with us has been amazingly patient, taken tons of notes concerning questions (and has already had more than a few answered) we’ve had, he’s written down some suggestions that we’ve had for making their system better, etc etc. Their system is beautifully designed and easy to use, and, most importantly, it’s accurate (which is more than I can say for our previous vendor). We’ve been given the option to customize almost every aspect of our business with them to best suit our needs. It’s amazing, really.
I think what floors me the most is that I feel like this level of service just doesn’t happen, most of the time. Once a company has your business, there isn’t that drive to keep you really happy (especially when said business is very long-term contract-driven). Sure, they want to facilitate you spending your money, but very seldom have I heard of a company who goes to such great lengths to provide truly great service. So often, there’s that sense that they are doing you a favor, rather than you doing them the favor of your business. This new book vendor of ours really has made us feel like they are very glad to have our business and that they are overjoyed to be working with us. At the same time, they’ve never been less than professional. This kind of employee/sales attitude goes a long way with me. Even in the original pitch, they were never pushy or trying to wow us with the pretty stuff. I am amazed to find that companies of this sort still exist.
For all you Evil Overlords-in-training, here is a list of tips to keep in mind throughout your reign.
I had a realization this afternoon on my way to car from work. I’d been talking off and on with cruinh and Jon about what to name our Horde guild in WoW, and I’d also been reading a post over at the ‘forces about Brendan’s new design and his ideas behind it. It occurred to me suddenly how much I actually care about my online representation, both through the appearance of my blog here and the appearance of my WoW characters. I’ve never been one to give much thought to my physical appearance beyond the basics, but now, I care about what “I” look like online. I care how my online presence is represented. I care what my blog is named, what my characters are named, what our guild is named. It’s weird. In a way, I care a lot about what I say, because that’s part of what I look like online too. I’ve never been able to understand how so many people can use the anonymity of the ‘net to be horrible assholes - I can’t separate who I am from what I do online. But it’s strange to find that I care about things online that I don’t really otherwise..
That must have been what Christopher Nolan, director of the new movie Batman Begins, was saying going into this project. Amazingly enough, he pulled it off. One of Bruce Wayne’s lines from the movie pretty much sums it up:
Well, you know, a guy who goes around dressed like a bat’s got to have some issues..
And we finally get some insight into them.
cruinh seems to think I have some spoilers here, so I’m gonna break the page now. Don’t read if you haven’t seen and don’t want it spoiled.
(Continued..)