My mom, sister and I are going to meet this summer at the Mall of America. Weíll be coming in from Detroit, LA and NYC, respectively and Minnesota is a good meeting place. There is more to this decision than geographical convenience. The Mall of America has a strange appeal. I wish that I could convey something our familyís oddball sensibility that compels us to make this decision. To be sure, it is not the shopping that we are interested in. I would like to say that it is a sort of irony or anthropological curiosity that leads us to do things like this, but that is not quite it either. Iíll keep looking for the words.

James and I were the victims of credit card fraud yesterday. Someone in Chicago purchased about $4,000 in art supplies. Fortunately, the credit card company detected it and called us. Still, big ick!

The sun is shining and I have been working way to hard. Time to get out.

After about five hours of work, about seven of the pages on this little site validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional. The only problem is that one of the sites that I link to has non-valid characters in the URL. It is a site about cleanliness, too, which is a very special topic for me. Sigh.

The style sheet validates as CSS version 2. That is a whole kind of clean in itself.

Here is a little tip about database-driven sites and standards-compliant markup. Donít outsmart yourself by wrapping lenghty output inside tags. At least not when that output contains markup. I have it set up so that my log entries are surrounded by paragraph tags.

This is OK as long as I remember to not use a close paragraph when I enter a log. It is not OK for entries that end in something other than a paragraph. Some of my logs end in a block quote or a list. When that happens, the result is a junk close p tag.

I did something to make the site validate, but it is ugly and will bug me until I fix it. Can you guess what it is?

I woke up to one of my favorite springtime events, buds on the maple trees across the street. They came out last night.

My article in A List Apart has started a few conversations.

Finished updating the site and it all validates. New navigation and an updated style sheet should make this site extra fancy. Please email me if this anything looks bad on your browser, though I have done quite a few checks.

James finished his dissertation. Two years and 314 pages (not including bibliography and front matter). Now we are going to play.

We are listening to Spike; this album always makes me a little sad, but it is a feel-good sad some how.

I have had it with Interland. The search for a new host begins today!

A very morbid dream woke me up early today and has cast a shadow over my disposition. Maybe more coffee will shake it.

I have been looking at ReadyHosting and DBWired as potential hosts for my fancy Web site. My sales rep at Interland suggests that my site would be just fine if I moved it from the $50/month plan to the $150/monty plan. “The server you are on is a hack,” she tells me, “Our tech people did not know what they were doing when they set that up.” I suggest that if they sold me a bad product, they should replace it with a good one, but she does not see it that way.

The buds on the maple tress across the street have turned into maple blossoms. My block is going to smell good this weekend.

“Ten years ago, Dr. Seuss took 220 words, rhymed them, and turned out The Cat In The Hat, a little volume of absurdity that worked like a karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane, and Spot.” - Ellen Goodman, The Detroit Free Press, Nov. 1966

And 13 hours ago, Sanders sent us a A Library Love Affair…

His is the latest library story.

For any out-of-work web developers who were into it more for the love of it than the money, think about spending the next year or two getting a Masters in Library and Information Science.

Hot Tip Number One: It is not just shushing and stamping anymore. Think digital libraries, open source software projects, information literacy programs, and online teen poetry journals.

Hot Tip Number Two: At the last American Library Association meeting, there were twice as many job openings as there were job seekers.

Hot Tip Number Three: Librarians have been organizing information for 2000+ years, and 18 months in formal study of this field will teach you a little something about taxonomy.

Hot Tip Number Four: There are some fabulous people in the field, and you would be able to hang out with them. See The New Breed Librarian.

Hot Tip Number Five: Job security. Good benefits. Smart colleagues.

Libraries need smart people. We need creative people. Hell, we need warm bodies!

Now that the dot-com hype is over, it is time to sit down and do the interesting work. Libraries are the perfect place to do it.

James and I pounded around the sunny city yesterday. We had no plan, just meandered from bookstore to bookstore.

Sometimes when I walk around the city, I think of what my streets would have been like for my Grandmother when she lived here. Iíll stand on a corner, stare at the people and the traffic, and think about the same scenario in a 1930ís setting. I can see her dressed in heels and gloves, smiling and laughing.

Now she is in Florida imagining me on her streets. Happy Easter, Grandma.

Here is more prodding for out-of-work Web designers to think “MILS.” First, grad school is the perfect place to hang out when the economy is bad. Second, library schools are offering some interesting new degree programs. This is what my library school up to now:

• Archives and records management
• Human-computer interaction
• Information economics, management and policy
• Library and information services

If you dropped out of college go work for a dot-com, good for you. You should be proud to have seen a good opportunity, and, more importantly, to have gone for it. Now think about going back to finish up. Having worked for a bit, youíll be a better student and youíll take more away from the experience.

End soap box.