[This was started and mostly finished early Friday morning, with some additions Saturday morning.]
Things are normal here—great in some areas, horrible in others.
I am almost completely exhausted after Dr. Hjørland’s visit (more in a moment). I have not been sleeping well, and despite it going well it has been a strain. I have come home the last several days completely exhausted. I even have been in bed by 8:30 the last 2 nights.
Communication backlog
I owe several people replies to comments, emails, etc. Unfortunately, some I owe email replies to will not see this.
Nathan, your comments and email are great! And fine. I will do my best to respond as soon as I can, but no promises as to timeliness and/or how comprehensively. But I greatly appreciate your efforts. 
Versifying
For those who have seen my photo and what I will very loosely term a poem … please do not worry. Certainly no more than normal. I have no desire to explain it but, yes, it is about me (and much more). These sorts of things are always below the surface roiling around and once in a while they bubble “up.” The “scary” part for me is not the thoughts themselves but that I actually recorded them. And then shared them. It would be silly to claim that I rarely think in verse; it is just that it is usually other people’s verse.
Dr. Hjørland’s visit
Dr. Hørland’s visit went wonderfully for me; hopefully it was great for him. But for some reason it was quite a bit more stressful than I’d have thought. Not in the direct sense and certainly not in interpersonal interaction, but more in the surrounding spaces. Not sure why; but it left me exhausted.
I went to the student brown bag lunch, the Research Fellow lecture, helped lead Metadata Roundtable (MDRT) with David Bade’s more-than-able help, and then had my personal meeting with him.
During MDRT I was given a writing assignment. More about that in the future.
LEEP Weekend / Python class
This weekend is LEEP weekend meaning the distance students are here. My Python class is a LEEP class and I have my all day oncampus class today. This also means some of my friends are here. I look forward to hanging out with them (assuming I have the energy to do so) this weekend.
Python regular expressions have so far evaded me. I compiled my re just fine and I’m even pretty sure it is doing what I think it is supposed to (i.e., what I coded it to do). I know it is matching the strings I am asking it to, and it knows full well where they start and end. But. The use to which I am then putting my matches is failing, though. It seems that I am not actually capturing the string(s) I am matching.
I have had various suggestions, checked the textbook, the web, spoke with the instructor and banged it all with some very big rocks. Nothing is making any difference and it is all syntactically “correct.” Still. Something that needs to happen is not happening.
Having spent over 20 years in the Army I know full well how to bang lots of things with rocks and bang things into and through rocks (e.g., ground stakes and tent stakes). I have a lot of respect for “rock banging!” But at the moment it serves me no purpose. I need an explicit answer to what is missing from my program to so that I can make use of my re. That is the only thing which will allow me to make any conceptual progress at all.
Once it is working, I have plans to make it break so that I can start banging away again. And from that banging I shall learn much about how regular expressions actually work.
As several folks have said, one should have lots of methods to attack learning problems/situations. And I agree that usually learning mostly by dint of your own efforts is a good thing. But once in a while you are at a point where the only way forward is to have something shown and/or explained to you. Even if I were to somehow stumble on what the issue is in my program I would not conceptually understand why it is the case that that is what was needed. I will only (perhaps) know that it is needed. And while the one is far better than nothing, it is still pale in comparison to actually understanding why it is that way.
Perhaps I am a bad learner and/or bad librarian, but I need an answer.
==Saturday finish to the post (although I changed a few words above)==
Near the end of class we had a chance to ask about anything Python related that we were just not understanding. Having little shame or pride I was more than happy to ask about my re issues.
With a version of the program I did not turn on the screen and a class of approx. 30 folks looking at it it took about 25 minutes for the instructor to recognize what the issue was. Turns out I made a most illustrative error for the edification of the whole class. Dave promised them all that they would make a similar mistake at some point. Always happy to serve as an example. Perhaps they learned something; I know I did. And now I can go on an finish the simplistic thing I was doing with regular expressions and then do something much more useful and complicated for my next program. In fact, something in which beating with rocks will again make a lot of sense.
ASIS&T
ASIS&T 2007 Annual Meeting: Joining Research and Practice: Social Computing and Information Science is in less than a week. At this time next Saturday I will be at the 18th Annual SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop. I am really looking forward to it.
Lots of things to be done to prepare. Lots of things to catch up on. I have lots of things on the slate for today and tomorrow and I will be happy if I can get most of them done along with some relaxing with LEEP friends each evening.