Growin' Blog

Gardenin', fishin', bikin', librarianin'. And migratin'

6.26.2009

Fish on.

I feel like such a baby. I spent a little money today replacing some lost gear (fuck you burglars!) and learned a new trick--a trick I probably should have learned a long time ago. The trick is: take advantage of those pre-tied loops in your leader. Buy a leader one notch up from what you want and by some tippet material. Put a perfection loop on the end of your leader and to the end of a length of leader. Now you have 2 loops that you can tie together, and it's easy to take that knot apart. This way, you have a length of tippet to tie flies to. Once this tippet gets short, you can take it off the leader and put on a new length of tippet. This way--your leader never gets shorter. It will really lengthen the life of the leader.

Really glad for the advice. But like the shop owner said: the advice is always free.

6.22.2009

Finding the best resources.

Lindsay has already recommended the New York Times and content from the BBC. I'll add a few other sources that are excellent:
  • The Christian Science Monitor. Please don't confuse it with Scientology. It's very different, and this online-only newspaper is an excellent source of coverage of world events.
  • The New Yorker. Most of its content is available for free online, and each week they will typically have two or three 5000 word essays which are excellent.
  • The Economist. Staunchly pro-free market, this British magazine is a good alternative to openly political journals such as The Nation and he National Review.

But that's just the open web. The UO Libraries has a huge assortment of material available to you (we spend about $4 million per year). Try the topical lists of databases available for searching. These databases are especially good at finding news sources:

And this is just news stuff! I'm sure you'd get bonus point if you were to use scholarly journals in your work--stuff like a couple of the journals I have listed under geography on my blogroll. Try GeoBase, or some of the indexes under Political Science and International Studies to get a taste of what these are good for.

As for the cheese--when I returned to the coffee shop, I'm sure the two young ladies thought I was pretty smooth when I walked in and said "Excuse me, did you see a piece of cheese sitting here when you sat down?" I finally bit the bullet and rode my bike all the way back downtown. I had left the dang goat cheese sitting on the cheesemonger's table when she gave me her change. She had set it aside for me in a little wax paper bag. "I knew you'd be back."

6.21.2009

Feed me!

In the past two years, I all but gave up on feed readers. I was committed to bloglines for about a year, but writing my thesis made me feel totally opposed to keeping current with library blogs. Besides: I kind of enjoy seeing the blogs I read regularly in their native format. In a way, blogs lose some of their appear when they look like webmail.

Anyway, I do want to introduce Lindsay's students to readers--at least to take their pulse to see if anyone is using them. I've never been a Google Reader user, but it does seem to be a popular option amongst my colleagues. Getting started is certainly a breeze:



Bloglines is much the same, and I use it to generate the blogroll to the right. I spent some time today playing with CSS to make them match the look of the GrowBlog a bit more closely, but those skills are REALLY rusty.

You might be wondering about the cheese. I'll explain as I continue to prep for Tuesday, but suffice it to say: if I was single, I think I would have just discovered a new pickup line.

6.20.2009

Found my cheese!

Spring cleaning here at the GrowBlog. I'm visiting a class on Tuesday and need not only to show a few features of Blogger, but also show what a blog is useful for. So get ready for some rapid posts, a few template changes, and just a little bit of commentary on the weekend's food and reading.

First off: the class I'm visiting is charged with identifying news and/or reading items on a given topic each week, and writing a brief posting about them. As it's summer and all, I'm also catching up on a little reading. Starting in China, I checked in with one of my semi-regular Chinese blogs today which recently posted a whole bunch of commentaries on how June 6 was treated in the world media. I will note that my own campus had a panel discussion on that evening, but I was unable to attend.

The posts though, led me to a new site and introduced me to a blogger who is also an archivist. A great combination. I have heard of this Budapest human rights archive, but have never had an opportunity to check out their website. This here post is a reminder for me to do so at some greater length at a later date.

6.10.2009

"Almost belligerantly unambitious"

Is how one of my coworkers described herself today. I thought that was f'in awesome.