Category Archives: Conferences

Follow-up of iPad use at ILA conference

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This a followup to my Iowa Library Association Conference post from last week, which was written on an iPad (at home), about the use of the iPad at the conference.

All in all, it worked great. Thankfully, there was fairly reliable wifi in both the hotel proper and the conference center portion of the Coralville Marriott (which, by the way, is wholly owned by the city of Coralville. Nice!).

I never did figure out how to make a link in the WordPress app but then I never tried again either.

I primarily used the iPad to take notes and to check email, RSS feeds, twitter and facebook. The iPad came configured with lots of apps on it from the Briar Cliff University (BCU) Library, most of which I had no interest in or needed to use.

I used Safari to log into GMail, an app called Reeder for logging into GReader, Twittelator for twitter, and friendly for facebook. For note taking I used Plain Text. The beauty of Plain Text, besides being free, is that it syncs with DropBox automagically. Thus, no worries about what device I am on or if I forgot to get my notes off of the iPad before returning it the library where it was completely wiped and reset to the default setup when I returned it.

Now this setup—in some cases there were alternate apps available—worked for me as I just had to log into these assorted apps with my account info and I was ready to go.

On the other side of the usability and convenience fence, there were two things I did not like or didn’t work well.  The minor one is that in friendly (facebook) there was no F.B. Purity. I swear by F.B. Purity. Facebook still sucks somewhat with it (it is facebook after all) but I despise trying to find the value in facebook without F.B. Purity installed and up-to-date.

The more major issue was that 750words just did not want to act right on the iPad. To even begin to use it at all we used Atomic Browser (paid version)—which is more useful on the iPad than on my Touch—and told it to report itself as desktop Safari. Leaving it set as a mobile browser meant it wasn’t going to work. Even with setting it to spoof as a desktop version of Safari it still had issues.

What I was attempting to do, and was ultimately successful at doing with some heartache, was to copy and paste my notes from that day’s sessions/sightseeing into 750words. It did not like that at all. It would only show a small portion of what had been pasted in, there was no way to force a save, and eventually it would show you all of the text pasted in but the word count stayed at what you had written by hand, if any. You had to leave and come back and then maybe nothing was there or perhaps it had updated but you had to log in again because it wasn’t remembering that you had just been there. In the end it worked but it was a pain in the rear.

In summary, I have several online accounts for which there are multiple apps available that only require one to log in and be on your way. The iPad as set up by the BCU Library worked great for me at this conference, but my needs were reasonably light.

Iowa Library Association Conference

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Tomorrow morning we head halfway across the state for the ILA conference in Coralville, next to Iowa City. We are looking forward to it for assorted reasons, but a little networking is near the top of my list. What is at the top, though, for both of us, is checking out Iowa City. We got a ton of great suggestions from three friends. Thanks E, Mikki and Julia.

I am writing this on an iPad that I have checked out from the Briar Cliff University Bishop Mueller Library. Yep, my library has loaned me an iPad for the conference. See Sara’s post for more info on the BCU Library iPad loan program:

http://librarienne.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/update-on-library-ipad-program/

In penance for missing my poetry class I have to do 2x the work for this week. Thankfully it is almost done though, and I got a start (barely) for next week’s.

We found out Greg Brown is playing in a benefit concert in Iowa City Friday night so we decided to stay an extra night. Woohoo. This will give us more time to see Iowa City on Sat. AM also. And thankfully Iowa is playing in Michigan this weekend so no football traffic/crowds to deal with.

So far writing this blog post in the WordPress app is pretty straightforward, except I cannot figure out how to make a link. That is why that URL sits sadly naked and exposed above. I can certainly state that I would not want to write a normal blog post in this app but for shorter ones with little or no linking it works OK.

I have no plans to get an iPad any time soon, for assorted reasons, but perhaps I’ll have more to say about the experience of using the iPad in general, and also for conferencing. I am leaving the laptop at home. I am taking my Touch in case I need a backup for some reason and since my music is on it.

Casual-leisure Searching – some comments

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Wilson, M. L., & Elsweiler, D. (2010). Casual-leisure Searching: the Exploratory Search scenarios that break our current models. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 22 August 2010. Presented at the HCIR 2010, New Brunswick, N.J. Retrieved from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ryenw/hcir2010/docs/HCIR2010Proceedings.pdf

When clearing out my aggregator a couple weeks back I came across this article in ResourceShelf (29 August 2010). It is a short, 4-page article which I printed and read on casual-leisure searching.

It appears to be a preprint from an ACM journal but the real info is lacking. I did some Google Scholar and Google searching and determined it to have been a presentation from HCIR 2010 last month. Daniel Tunkelang’s blog was most helpful, even including having the presentation embedded and linking to the mentioned Technology Review article, “Searching for Fun.”

Fourth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval 22 August 2010

Update: The entire proceedings are available as a (big) pdf from the HCIR 2010 site: Proceedings [pdf: 18.2 MB]  Hmmm, Zotero linked to the entire proceedings; when/how did that happen? The individual article pdf is linked in the 1st paragraph (the one after the citation).

I also found a copy of the preprint at the first author’s uni site.

Casual-Leisure Searching

It turns out that, in fact, it is not only librarians who like to search. Some folks do it just to do it. The authors work in the realm of “exploratory search” and based on two different studies they have done have noticed that information retrieval (IR,) information seeking (IS), exploratory search (ES), and Sensemaking models are all incomplete.

“ES is defined as trying to resolve an information need when the searcher has limited knowledge of their goal, domain, or search system [13], normally involving some kind of learning or investigating behaviour [9]” (28).

They provide a very quick overview of these models and how they assume an information need, and that searching occurs to find information. They then discuss personal tasks versus the work-based focus of most of the research in these areas. Stebbins work on non-work and leisure activities in brought in, situating these activities as hedonistic. The area of the least research on information behavior, especially information seeking, is in this arena of casual-leisure. Some of this is now occurring and they do point to the work of Jenna Hartel and others.

All of these previous models are information-focused but in their work they are beginning to see searching for its own sake.

They did a study on TV-based casual information behaviors and one on harvesting real search tasks from Twitter. This is preliminary work but it is exciting. In the TV-based study they were able to look at both behavior and motivation. One might, if a hard-headed enough nit-picker, describe the behavior as still “wanting to find” but it is the motivation that shows the behavior is tending towards search without finding. These folks still, to me, wanted to find something. But their criteria was so loose that, perhaps, many different things could satisfy what they were looking for.

To me, it is the 2nd study, of Twitter, that shows the most promise in expanding our views, and theories, of search. One could get in a huff and say this is only browsing, except that under the previous models browsing is still assumed to be goal-directed and that it is browsing for something.

Have you ever found yourself endlessly browsing etsy.com, or ted.com, or just sort of leisurely following hyperlink after hyperlink to suddenly notice that 2 hours have elapsed? That sort of browsing or searching has no real goal except to pass the time and, as they note, this can be either a good thing or a not so good thing. But often we do just do this for the experience of it. And I must say that this is one of the few current uses of “experience” that I can get behind. People do, in fact, sometimes search for the experience of it. There is no goal except to pass the time, hopefully in a reasonably enjoyable and non-frustrating manner. But other than that, what is found is of no consequence.

This is another area of daily, mundane, life that as usual until recently has been neglected in science—social or otherwise. Info seeking research began by studying scientists and then corporate work life. Eventually studies of nurses, children, janitors, etc. came along but they were still generally work task related. Only recently has the personal, casual, leisure angle begun to be explored. Now that it is the lack of coverage of our models is beginning to show. Even the more recent exploratory search aspect of information seeking is limited in the same way.

Those who claim that “it is only librarians who like to search, everyone likes to find” are, and always were, wrong.

Long time gone

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[This post title is, for me, multi-meta in that it refers to several things.]

It has been a long time since I’ve been here. Part of me is sad about this fact and part of me thinks that is just fine.

A lot has happened since I last wrote here:

I quit my job as a serials cataloger at the University of Illinois so I could concentrate on (then) upcoming weddings and our move.

Sara and I were married in late May in a small but wonderful ceremony amongst family and friends in a cabin on the banks of the Sangamon River.

At the very beginning of June I started prepping for our move to Sioux City, Iowa.

A couple of weeks later, my daughter got married in Oberlin, Ohio in an even simpler, but absolutely lovely and moving, ceremony to a wonderful young man that I couldn’t be prouder to be related to.

On the evening of 3 July we left Urbana, IL and headed for Sioux City. As of 4 July we are residents of Sioux City. This is a vastly different place  than Urbana-Champaign, in so many ways. We are still getting it sorted out but we will.

We had a good week and a half before Sara had to start her job and we made good use of it. Sara worked for 3 days and then we took a vacation to the Black Hills of South Dakota to spend some time in a couple of cabins with some friends of Sara’s from high school and their respective significant others and children. On the way home we drove through the Badlands. I have a couple of pictures up but I have 100s more to be tagged, labeled, decided upon and uploaded. Suffice it to say that it was beautiful! And being the against much of pop culture fiend that I am, we skipped Wall Drug (unfortunately not the signs though), Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse.

Once back Sara got back to work and is enjoying learning the ropes of this vastly different, and vastly smaller, university. I got back to work on organizing the house, merging two large book collections, much of which was in storage, along with merging two large CD collections, of which all of hers were in storage. There is still a bit to do on all the house organizing fronts but it is definitely getting there.

Shortly after we got here we bought ourselves a 32″ LG HDTV with built-in netflix streaming so we’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and some other things.

We’ve been taking an online class on HTML5 via SitePoint and in a few weeks will take one on CSS3. They were $9.95 each! So the last 2 weeks that is what we’ve been doing in the evenings when Sara gets home from work. (And, yes, I know the CSS3 course says it is $14.95 but by signing up for both at the same time we got a $5 discount!) I think that for the price they are quite good. As with any class it is (mostly) about what you put in to it.

Speaking of courses, Briar Cliff University has a 100% tuition remission policy for spouses so I’ll be taking a 1 credit class this fall called Madwomen Poets. About all I know about it is that it includes Sexton and Plath. But who cares what, if anything, else it might be? Who could ignore a class entitled Madwomen poets?

I know. I know. I’m supposed to be doing other things, “more important” things. And I am. But it is 50 minutes, 1 day/week. I figure it’ll help keep my mental chops in order. And at this point I still don’t know if I’ll be taking it for a grade or auditing.

As to that more  important stuff … I am ramping back up the work on my CAS thesis via several angles of attack. I am working on the paper proper and I am also working on a journal article, which will be highly related (as in with a little reworking can become a chapter), and I am thinking about trying to come up with a presentation for a conference in early December. The conference is “Semantics for Robots: Utopian and Dystopian Visions in the Age of the ‘Language Machine’. ‘The Language Machine’ is one of Roy Harris’ early books, of course.

As for conferences, I am really sad that I will not be able to attend ASIS&T in Pittsburgh this year. But seeing as we gave up about $40k in income with me not working there is little means of justifying the expense of travel and lodging. And, honestly, the registration cost is plain crazy for an unemployed non-student, non-retiree.

Sara and I decided that the Integrationist conference in Chicago in December, along with being far cheaper, is really more where I need to be right now. I need exposure to more Integrationists and Integrational thinking and I will get far more out of a small conference (as I always do) than a bigger one. Whether or not I can get something submitted (and possibly accepted) I am highly looking forward to it. Nonetheless, this will be the 1st ASIS&T I’ve missed since I started going in 2006.

And if any of my Chicago friends are reading this, I’d adore an invite to stay with you for a couple days in early December (2nd-4th, or so), especially if you are near the Univ. of Chicago.

Tomorrow night we are, thanks to a surprise from Sara, going to see Jackson Browne and David Lindley and the historic Orpheum Theatre here in Sioux City. I have been listening to (early) Jackson Browne for close to 40 years now. I haven’t really kept up with anything since the mid-80s or so but, nonetheless, I am stoked to finally get to see him live for the first time.

We also have a Super Secret Date night scheduled for Sunday night. Sara had that lined up well before we left Urbana. She offered me the chance to find out what it’ll be last night but I passed. I like the surprises! She’s done so well every time in the past. And it also makes me aware that it is past time for me to step up in the Super Secret Date Night scheduling department.

And in case anyone who cares isn’t aware of it yet, my son is in Afghanistan for his 3rd war zone tour. He left just days after we moved. Grrrr.

I guess I best end this for now. It is getting long and the simple shock of seeing a post from me is probably enough already. With any hope I won’t be gone as long before the next time.

ASIST 2009 in Vancouver

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In Vancouver, BC for ASIST 2009 Annual Meeting: Thriving on Diversity: Information Opportunities in a Pluralistic World.

Today is the 20th SIG-CR (Classification Research) Workshop: Bridging Worlds, Connecting People: Classification Transcending Boundaries.

1st session, which I’m in now, is titled: Crossing Cultural Boundaries: Indigenous Knowledge Organization. Moderator: Hope Olson. Papers are: Language, Text and Knowledge Organization: One Native American Story by Cheryl Metoyer; and, Martin Nataka’s “Indigenous Standpoint”: Toward a Theoretical Location for Indigenous Knowledge Organization by Ann Doyle. [These are not listed on the website. See link above for SIG-CR for titles of other papers below.]

2nd session will be Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries. Moderator: Barbara Kwasnik. Papers by Szostak & Gnoli, Ali Shiri, and Xiaoli Huang.

3rd session will be Crossing the Boundaries of Convention. Moderator: Corinne Jorgensen. Papers by Amelia Abreu, Kwan Yi, and Gabel and Smiraglia.

4th session will be Crossing System/Searcher Boundaries. Moderator: Dagobert Soergel. Papers by Marianne Lykke-Nielsen, Jens-Erik Mai, and Joseph Tennis.

Seems the paper by Timothy Patrick will not be presented.

There are also a handful of posters, including one by UIUC’s Ingbert FLoyd, Thomas Dousa and Michael Twidale.

Looking forward to seeing a bit of Vancouver and seeing colleagues again. I have already seen 3 of my 4 co-panelists from last year. In fact, they are here at SIG-CR.

When we head home we will be taking the train from Seattle over to Chicago, and then another to Champaign. I am really looking forward to that bit of the trip, too.

habitually probing generalist

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Change of blog name

I have changed the name of my blog. Again. This time it should not break any of the Internet nor should you need to change feeds; I hope.

3 years ago tomorrow I moved my blog to WordPress and renamed it Off the Mark. This was after a few years of blogging at Typepad under the name …the thought are broken…. I had put out a call for suggestions and for slightly different reasons both Walt Crawford and Richard Urban recommended Off the Mark. For those and other reasons I liked it. But over time various (possible) connotations have been bugging me. I was certainly aware of them then but I dismissed them, at least in my own mind.

A few months after renaming my blog I read an article for a class and my tagline was born. That tagline is now being promoted to the name of my blog. Henceforth, this space is to be known as habitually probing generalist.

I feel that that far better represents me and how I’d like to be known. For now, Off the Mark will be my tagline.

In the interest of disclosure, I feel that the primary reason for this change is that which I stated above—Off the Mark carries certain negative connotations which I no longer am willing to ignore and habitually probing generalist better represents the external face I want to present. Secondarily, though, I cannot deny that the phrase “off the mark” is heavily represented and used on the Internet. There is a greeting card company with that name (I have enjoyed giving a card or 3 to others from that company; check them out) and at least another blog or two, besides being a common phrase in its own right. “Habitually probing generalist” appears to be only used by me and a few others who have referenced my tagline. Thus, I am laying claim to it. Carole Palmer deserves a boatload of credit for it but I alone am responsible for this specific formulation.

Working toward this change I made myself a new favicon about 2 weeks ago. No longer is my favicon barely distinguishable pink flowers but is a blue background with a whitish “hpg” in it. I still need to do a little code editing so the fonts are switched for the name and tagline on the blog but that can wait. A looming physical move takes precedence.

With my blogging output over the last year a few of you might well ask “What is the point of a name change for a moribund blog?” Sadly, that is a valid question. I cannot make any promises but ….

CAS project

Friday I met with my academic advisor, Dean John Unsworth, about my CAS paper, for the first time in about 11 months. The gist of what we discussed is that things are settling down in my life (as much as possible for someone with a temporary job) and that I am ready, and looking forward, to beginning on the job of writing and defending this paper.

First, I must get physically moved across town and somewhat unpacked but then I should be able to devote far more time to it than I was willing to over the last year. The love of my life and I will live together and there will be no more of that whose apartment are we going to?, are you/am I spending the night?, blah blah. Perhaps more importantly, I will have research time once my 2nd year Visiting Professor appointment starts 16 August. This should make a major difference in my mental ability to focus on the task at hand. Also, S will be majorly busy and working many hours in September and October so I hope to use some of that time to get back in the flow of reading and writing towards a directed end.

My time over the last year has by no stretch been a waste! I have read far more broadly in a vast array of disciplines, topics and genres, which has better prepared me to think about and critique the actual use of language and communication. I was on a panel at ASIS&T last year where I spoke about Integrationism in regards to tagging. I also attended the 1st Ethics of Information Organization conference this May.

I now have an idea for a draft proposal for a presentation at the 2nd Ethics conference next year. This also forms a small but core portion of my critique of the uses of the concepts of language and communication in LIS. Thus, working towards fleshing this out will be a big help in a key premise of my argument. I might also be able to then expand on it or shift it a bit to present at ASIS&T or the SIG-CR preconference next year in 2010.

I also have an idea for a way to have interested parties work with me to compile a “listing” of theories of language and communication used in LIS and citations of works that explicitly use them, well or not. On this head, though, I am first doing a bit of research to seed the list and to determine what might be the best tool to use for a (small, I assume) group to manage it while making it publicly available. Stay tuned.

… and this means what for the blog?

Well, I hope that I will blogging much of what I get up to. I will need to reread many things and refresh my memory of what they say. Summarizing these for the blog is a possibility, as is comparing and contrasting ideas. Bouncing ideas and/or draft paragraphs/sections of my paper or my conference presentation ideas off of my readers are distinct possibilities, too.

No promises. But. I hope that I can claim that—for the near future, at least—I am back.

Sing a song with a friend
Change the shape that I’m in,
And get back in the game,
And start playin’ again

John Prine. Clay Pigeons.

It’s like talking to the wall

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He’s incommunicado
No comment to make
He’s saying nothing at all

Yeah but in the communique
You know he’s gonna come clean
…

[Communique - Dire Straits]

Seems I don’t have much to say anymore. We’ve all read of the death of blogging. The move to Friendfeed and Twitter. XYZ.

None of those are entirely true. I have plenty to say and a fair bit to talk about. [I have a whole series of posts about the Ethics of Info Org conference I went to at the end of May planned out and started]. But there are other things that I have chosen to give my time to.

Work

Recently I was engaged in a project at work which involved us processing about 41,000 volumes of serials and monographic series out to our Oak Street remote storage facility in a projected 10-week period this summer. We managed to finish the project in 6 weeks.

I was the primary cataloger, 95%+ of the time. As in I was 95% of total cataloger time spent on it. This means that conservatively I had “critical eyes” on 1000 bib records a week.

I lasted just over 5 weeks before my mind shut down on me. Pretty much literally. Luckily El Diablo was there to step in and finish the project. By the time a couple days passed and I was ready to return they had wrapped it all up.

In other work-related news, I have accepted an offer for another year as a Visiting Serials Cataloger and Visiting Assistant Professor of Library Administration. Yay for knowing I’ll have a job in the near future. The current contract was over 15 August so this is none too soon. [Hopefully the Trustee's approval will be routine.]

Moving

I have met the woman I was destined to spend my life with. She is my heart and soul and shortly I will no longer live alone.

At the end of the work day, I go home to do every thing that our project team was doing. I am pulling, inventorying, checking, boxing and slinging the boxes for our move across town. “Life is grand.”

Well, life was grand. A wrinkle has been added which complicates things, to say the least. I am kind of stressing right now but will recover. I’d put my moving skills up against anyone’s. Sad as that may be.

In this department life can throw whatever it wants at me. I care little, even if it stresses me in the short-term. I am shortly moving in with the woman who I have chosen to give my time (and life) to. I shall give her as much of it as is required.

Another wrinkle has arisen in the time it has taken me to finish this post. If it appears somewhat disjointed I apologize as the several weeks it has taken has required several rewrites and as many removals and additions.

New Employee Recognition Day

A couple weeks back the library held its annual New Employee Recognition Day. Seeing as I was hired within the last year I was—like all others hired in the last year—introduced by the Dean. Based on the state of this humble blog in the past year I was horrified that the vast majority of my intro came from my About page here. My being named one of “The LISNews 10 Blogs to Read on 2008” was trotted out as I shrank in embarrassment. At least it made me realize I need to update that page.

The blog

Speaking of the blog, there are going to be a few changes around here soon. Does that mean I may finally start posting again? I can’t really say.

One of my first thoughts upon hearing the Dean tell everyone assembled at NERD (Oops, I doubt they mean for that acronym to be used) was to simply kill it entirely. Oh, yes. I did seriously consider that.

But as several other libloggers have written recently, I like having this space in case I do want to share and get around to doing so. It’s nice to know it is here waiting on me.

Was having trouble getting in to my own domain recently for assorted reasons but finally got it figured out. Thus, I just upgraded from WordPress 2.7 to 2.8.1 with one click (after backing up). Plugin upgrades also only required one click each. Wow! Can I just say “Wow!”

Anyway. Enough of this blather for now. It is time to kill this thing and just post it. With any luck anyone still out there will be hearing from me again soon.

The Ethics of Information Organization

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I am at The Ethics of Information Organization conference in Milwaukee for the next two days and I am really looking forward to the presentations.

Hopefully I will find time to blog about this soon; unlike so many other things. With any luck the conference site will have wireless available. It is in the public library. If so, and I can find power, then I may be tweeting it with the hash tag #EIO09. Update: Seems they want #IOETHICS

More importantly, though, I hope to learn a lot and be given lots to think about.

ASIS&T 2008

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[Update 3 Nov 2008: Just uploaded a revised PPT with updated Notes which are much closer to what I spoke from. Although, they clearly are not what I said verbatim.]

ASIS&T is going well.  I arrived late Saturday afternoon in Columbus (OH) and am getting along fine with my roommate whom I met over the Internet by posting to my blog.

Our panel* went well yesterday and I am far happier with my portion than I thought I’d be. I have received some nice comments since, including one from a “luminary.”  I was asked if I’d be posting my slides and I said I would. I still need to make an explicit entry on my “Writings” page but here are the links for now.

http://marklindner.info/presentations/ASIST2008/mrlASIST2008.pdf [This is large! 6.2 MB PDF]

http://marklindner.info/presentations/ASIST2008/mrlASIST2008.ppt [3.1 MB Powerpoint]

My friend, Christina, blogged the panel I was on here. She is also blogging many other sessions at her blog, Christina’s LIS Rant.  She also told me that what I said was more important than my slides. While there are notes in the PPT they aren’t the final ones I used.  Perhaps I’ll post those at some point. Of course, they aren’t exactly or entirely what I said either.

Socializing is going well. I’ve seen several interesting posters and a few good sessions. And tomorrow night I’ll get to see my “baby girl.” That is, the one who turns 25 on Election Day.

* “Tagging as a Communication Device: does every tag cloud have a silver lining.” My portion was a suggestion that tagging researchers make an explicit commitment to a theory of language and communication. If you were to guess that I even had one to suggest—Integrationism—you’d be right.

Thus, I tried to give a very, very basic intro to Integrationism, show how community fits into/is described by the macrosocial (within the theory), and how tagging (as a user behavior) can be explained by Integrationism.  As I said above, I have gotten some nice feedback and interested a couple people in Harris and Integrationism. That, my friends, was the entirety of my scheme. Mission accomplished. :-)

Tis just a wee fuss for my friend Pikas

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Today is Christina Pikas’ (of Christina’s LIS Rant) birthday.  Seeing as I’ll be seeing her in pretty much exactly a month at ASIS&T and she’ll be able to personally kick me for this, I decided to write her a little birthday ditty.

Tis just a wee fuss for my friend Pikas

I awoke this morning all a twitter,
my friend she is a knitter.

Once a naval officer, always a veteran,
she’s the physicists’ friend and librarian.

Whether slogging her way to a PhD with reliance
or blogging about the intricacies of science,

Her work is very prudent
because she is a student.

Committed as any star ASIST member,
she was born once upon a far September.

Often, though, she may Rant,
steer you wrong she shan’t.

Her name it is Christina,
her mind as sharp as concertina.

Tis the birthday of a Pikas
so let us all make a bit of a wee fuss.

Happy, Happy Birthday, Christina! I couldn’t help myself. ;-)

Writing this reminded me that I had done this once before; that is, wrote a birthday poem and posted it here.  I also see I swore never to post my “poetry” here again. Ah well, not exactly a lie, I guess.

And technically, that previous post includes two poems as did the birthday card in which they originally appeared. The 2nd was called *”On the use of ‘beauty’”.  And, yes, that asterick implies that it was a “footnote.”