Book review submitted
Wednesday I finally submitted my first book review for publication. Thanks, Walt, for recommending me to the editor. The book I reviewed is:
Budd, John. 2008. Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited. [WorldCat]
The short version of the review I would have liked to write is this:
Read. Discuss. Rinse. Repeat.
With serious emphasis on the discuss and repeat. I just hope the review is acceptable. I am reasonably satisfied with it but it was harder than I thought and certainly took longer than I expected.
New toys
To reward myself I went and bought a new computer, which I have been thinking about for a while now. But the first stop was to get a new phone since my 2-year contract was expiring with Verizon.
So …
My new phone is a LG enV2. A fairly basic phone has served me well for the last 4 years (actually 2 different basic phones) but now I have someone to text with and normal phone keypads really suck for even the simple messages I send and I generally refuse to “speak” in text-ese.
New computer and iPod Touch. Got a MacBook with 4GB of RAM to replace my desktop PC. My thinking is that if/when the PowerBook dies I will already have a laptop to replace it.
Seeing as the Apple Education Store is giving rebates on either iPod Touches or Nanos ($199 = base 8GB Touch) I got myself a 16GB Touch.
Today I went back to the Apple Store and picked up an external keyboard and mouse, an AirPort base station, and a 1TB LaCie d2 quadra external drive for backing up both Macs.
I, unfortunately, needed a new wireless router since mine got fried along with most everything else in the signal path a couple months back in lightning storm. Perhaps I need to get an uninterruptable power supply/surge suppressor with coax connectors for the signal. My current, otherwise excellent, UPS only has CAT5 connectors.
Pictures to follow at some point once I get my workflows restructured.
10th anniversary of my Army retirement
Today, 1 August 2008, is also the 10th anniversary of my “retirement” from the Army. I think “retirement” is a crazy word to use—wrong sense, at a minimum—as it doesn’t even come close.
Nonethless, whatever it’s called some truly amazing things have happened in the last 10 years.
4 responses so far ↓
1 walt crawford // Aug 1, 2008 at 4:02 pm
You’re welcome. This was truly a win:win:win situation–I win because I knew I couldn’t do a really good review and hated the idea of doing a mediocre one, you win because you get the book and a reasonably high-profile publication credit, the journal wins because it gets a better review.
2 Angel // Aug 5, 2008 at 3:48 pm
I ordered the book via ILL to read. I will post about it after I get it, but it does sound interesting. Best, and keep on blogging.
3 Mark // Aug 11, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Thanks, Walt and Angel. [Sorry for taking so long to get back to this. Life.
Looking forward to your comments, Angel.
4 Scholarly publishing « Into the Stacks // Aug 15, 2008 at 10:17 am
[...] about writing book reviews, which is something I’ve been thinking about doing ever since Mark first started talking about writing one. It’s something I’d like to try my hand [...]