The past two days have been relaxing, easy, mellow; and that’s because I finally finished the Semester from Hell. Nine units of graduate level courses while working full time and trying to lead an intensive Bible study at church, and retaining some semblance of a social life and hanging on to my sanity by a thread… No, I will not be doing that to myself again. This past semester I took Introduction to Cataloging, Interface Design for Information Systems, and Information and Society. Cataloging and Information and Society were both pretty interesting; for Information and Society I did a paper on open source source software for libraries, and did a brief presentation. Surprisingly, I think I got the entire class excited about the topic. I was impressed with myself.

Interface Design was not as interesting. I had thought it would be a blow-off class, so I stuck with it even past the drop date. Unfortunately, it was entirely theory — not an interface to design anywhere in it — and I found it frustrating. The instructor was not the most communicative, either; getting feedback from her on my papers was like pulling teeth. Ugh.

But now, as I said, it’s over.

And the Bible study is over too. That’s quite a relief as well. Disciple Bible Study is really interesting and I highly recommend it to everyone who would like to know more about the Bible or the Christian faith.

Meanwhile, today at work we got a pleasant surprise from the higher ups in the University: a gift, no strings attached, for our department to the tuen of a quarter of a million dollars. After my last few job settings, imagine my surprise to discover that I am working in a department which is actually growing. In a job that I like, no less, and where the other workers actually have good attitudes, and we’re working on really interesting projects and all that. Our manager brought in a bottle of champagne along with some cheese and crackers to celebrate. And right after that announcement and celebration, we had an ice cream sundae bar to celebrate the educational development director’s birthday. So, yeah, today was a good day at work.

Tomorrow, Jennifer and I leave for Ashland, Oregon, to partake of the Shakespeare Festival. We’ll be gone for five days. I’ve never been, but I’ve got friends who have been and they’ve all told me that it’s a great trip. Along the way we’re going to stop at the Shasta Caverns and do some exploring; good research for a Dungeons and Dragons game that I plan on running soon.

And, to wrap up this entry of non-news, I’ve launched two new blogs. The first, The Literate Penguin, is devoted to issues concerning open source tools and libraries. I’m still heady with my success with the presentation I gave in Southern California, and a paper I wrote recently has gotten some good feedback. I’m hoping that this blog will be useful to more people than just me.

The second blog that I’ve started is called Zero To Hero, and it’s devoted to my journey toward weight loss and physical fitness. This one I don’t see being of much interest to many people besides me, but I think keeping it will help me stay focused on the diet and exercise thing.

That’s it. No more.