Rowan's Round of Days

After all the technology meltdown this morning, I went out with Karin (a local Georger), showing her the ropes of geocaching. It was a very good first run! We found all four caches we looked for plus a benchmark. We found regular, two micros (very different kinds) and a virtual. I moved along some travel bugs and a coin. We then had brunch at Lillie's, a tapas place right on the harbour that was, disappointingly only serving a normal brunch menu at 1:30pm on a Sunday. I did have a very nice omelet.

I got back to my room about 3pm and hoped to have a bit of a nap but of course I logged my caches and chatted a bit with rubibees before crashing for a mere 40 minutes before running off to my first conference activity, a talk on an SQL-based OPAC system. It sounds all very well and good... for a much bigger library. I'm about to change my Filemaker databases to being web access and thought, as long as things are changing, I'd check out the more usual library systems. I think I go back and forth between wanting to be "more real" and being glad that I'm small enough to use homegrown, inexpensive solutions.

Then I chatted with the SPIE Digital Library people and the folks at Springerlink. Springer is bringing out a big new interface which looks pretty good (since historically their searching sucked anything would be better really). I am continually amazed at how long it is taking technology vendors to get decent search interfaces. They all imagine that everyone will be an end user and want simple rather than powerful. They reminded me they have a reception tonight at the Aquarium at 7pm. I had meant to go to that but I thought it was tomorrow. Or perhaps it is someone else tomorrow. *grin*

I found out an interesting thing by accident a couple days ago. If you search in Google images for "rowan fairgrove" or "rowanf" you get my Lj icons. My journal isn't indexable - but apparently my images are.