I’ve taken to hanging out in the talk.origins newsgroup (you can find the website here). It’s a lively place, full of debate between Creationism and evolution. Personally, I have no trouble reconciling my religious beliefs with evolution, but there are a lot of people out there who do. And furthermore, some of the most ardent Creationists have a very strange way of arguing. I was able to summarize a typical Creationist argument this way:

The Scene: I hand Bob a piece of cake, which he scarfs and enjoys.
Bob: What a delicious cake! You must give me the recipe.
Me: There was no recipe. My wife made the cake.
Bob: Well, where did she find the recipe?
Me: I told you, there is no recipe. My wife made the cake.
Bob: Of course there was a recipe. How many eggs did she use? How much sugar? How much flour?
Me: Are you calling me a liar? Are you calling my wife a liar? I tell you there was no recipe! My wife made this cake!
Bob: But… Well, how long did she bake it in the oven?
Me: There is no recipe! Look, here’s this note from my wife that says, “Here, honey, I made this cake.” What more proof do you need that my wife made the cake?
Bob: But you can’t make a cake without a recipe!
Me: My wife is the cake maker. She made this cake! Didn’t you read the note?

Jennifer suggested that I could end the dialog with Bob replying, “But… you’re not married!” Which I think is even funnier.

But I digress.

The new semester has just started, and I’m now officially a second year student in the MLIS program at San Jose State. I’m taking three classes this quarter: Beginning Cataloging and Classification, Information and Society, and Interface Design for Information Systems. I’ve been looking forward to taking the cataloging class for months now (yes, I know I’m weird); it looks pretty interesting, but also pretty straightforward. In cataloging, you get a big book, the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, Revision 2 (2002 Edition), also known as the AACR2. And it’s basically a big book full of rules for how to describe a book or other document. How big is it? Use rule 1.D4 to describe the size. Who published it? Use rule 2.B2 to describe the publication information (I’ve got those rule numbers wrong). And then there’s MARC, a way of encoding all of this information so that a computer can read it. So a MARC entry might look like 300 ## $aThe Information $bThe Sub-Information.

Fascinating, yes?

Information and Society is kind of an overview class. What is a library? What kinds of libraries are there? What do librarians really do when they’re not shushing and stamping? (Those of you harboring “naughty boy librarian” fantasies about me will be disappointed to learn that I’ll probably be doing a lot of cataloging and computer programming in that spare time.) And Interface Design looks like it won’t quite be as I expected; I was expecting some hands-on programming and development, but this course looks to be mostly theory.

Still, I think it’s going to be an interesting semester.

If I can keep from developing an ulcer and permanent migraine, that is.

See, those three classes are nine units altogether. When I finish up this semester, I’ll be halfway done with the program, which is nice. But conventional wisdom dictates that if you’re working full time and intend to have any sort of life, then maybe you should take just three to six units: one or two classes. And I do have time yet to drop a class if that becomes necessary. We’ll see whether Jennifer decides that my stress level makes me unsuitable to live with.

I have been having fun, though. Last week, I was sick with bronchitis and couldn’t go to work, so I amused myself by building a Debian Linux server out of my old Gateway laptop computer to hold all of our book information (between Jennifer and me, we have over 1,000 books; the idea is to get them all entered into our Readerware database, which is on Lucien, the computer I built).

And last night, in between updating the MP3’s on my MP3 player and reading through the AACR2 for the first time, I set about hooking up a UPS to our main household server — the one that acts as our file, printer, and mail server. I wasn’t quite successful; the manufacturer claims that it’s compatible with Linux, and there is a Linux version of the controller software on the CD-ROM that came with it, but I haven’t managed to get it to work yet.

Boy, do I know how to have fun or what?

At work, my boss told me last week that a budget was finally approved that would let them hire me on full-time and permanently instead of as a temp that can only stay here for another year or so before being forced to leave the temp pool (yay unions). I am told to expect an interview sometime this week, but not to stress about it too much. “Unless someone comes along with really amazing technical credentials,” my boss told me a few weeks ago, “The job’s pretty much yours.”

Which would be nice. But I was hired on to make our website talk to Oracle, which I still haven’t managed to do. I’m feeling a tad stressed about that, and as I meet with more and more failures to do so, the stress is getting more intense. I know I can do it. I just have to find the right wand to wave over the server while chanting, “Serverum Repairus.”

Yeah. That will do it.