I had a day of human resources type training today, followed by an evening reference shift. Verrrrrrrrrrrrry long day. I left my apartment a little after 8 am and got home a little before 11 pm. The training was designed to teach people how to work in a team environment. I just find it curious how theories and practices from the corporate world get grafted on to academia. My last lengthly exposure to this type of thinking was a library administration class in grad school, which was useful in the sense that it solidified my feeling that I never wanted to be a high level administrator of anything. I do wish I’d taken something more practical like a library systems or subject reference class instead

One of the exercises that we did involved making something out of clay while being blindfolded. I hear that tomorrow I might get to make a tower out of paper and tape. I brought some knitting along today and that made me very glad. Doing something with my hands actually kept me more alert and less resentful about sitting in a classroom for 7 hours.

I was so zonked out at the reference desk at the end of my shift that it took me a couple minutes to remember about Encyclopedias, I was thinking internally “Let’s see, a book is too much information for this particular question. An almanac will have some information, but maybe only a page…what’s that thing, that thing with more in-depth articles that this student should use….”

I found the right Encyclopedia though, and the student was happy.

I haven’t been able to prepare for the class I’m teaching on RSS later this week in a very systematic manner. I guess that’s what I’ll work on tomorrow evening after another day of training. This announcement about the bloglines API sounds big. I actually use both bloglines and FeedDemon, I downloaded the latest version of FeedDemon , and I’m looking forward to playing with the new features when things are less hectic. I know I have different subscriptions in bloglines and FeedDemon so the ability to synchronize the feeds I subscribe to in both applications will be useful.