March 10, 2018

Last night I got six hours of sleep, woke up at six o'clock, ran on the elliptical, got ready, and went to work.

I got to work at 8:00AM, which was thirty minutes early, to make up for not getting paid for lunch today. Or at least to make up for half of that. I'll go in thirty minutes early tomorrow as well to finish it off. Anyway, when I got to the library I did all the upstairs stuff and then I went downstairs and counted the drawer with the other librarian. Then I refilled the audiobooks, DVDs, and my green books before we opened.

I was on desk for the first two hours after we opened. I caught up on the news, typed and printed the letters for my homebound patrons to let them know we'll be out a day early this month, and helped the occasional patron. Right before lunch we got a patron with a zoning question about a house in town. That was a fun excuse to play on the local GIS website, which I haven't done since I bought my house. There's so much information on all their different map layers.

I could have left the library for lunch but I went up to the cubicle so I could have more time, instead of spending half of my lunch break driving. I thought about only taking a thirty minute lunch but decided I wanted to watch videos and just relax. I don't take my regular breaks throughout the day so it probably wouldn't be the best idea to skip out on the one break I do take. Although I could have taken a thirty minute lunch, immediately followed by one of my fifteen minute breaks (or both of them), and called it good. But I'm fine with going in early tomorrow.

I read an interesting article today about archiving information so it doesn't disappear. They mentioned microfilm and how newspapers are transferred onto it because you can store more newspapers in a smaller form, and microfilm is more robust that paper. They also talked about archiving digital content, especially content that is born digital, and I learned that one gigabyte is apparently the equivalent of thirty feet of books. Interesting.

I was back on desk for two hours after lunch and it was pretty quiet. I helped patrons here and there but most of my time was spent messing around with the website, which I did for the rest of the day when I wasn't helping patrons or refilling displays. I liked the idea of the default hover box thing to display upcoming classes on the tech page, but they weren't quite right, and they had a tendency to spaz out during the animation. So I tracked down the code for a hover overlay thing I liked better, figured out how to add CSS to the website, and spent a lot of time tweaking things to make it look how I wanted it to, and to get the text to resize correctly.

And then I started to wonder how the hover thing would work on a mobile device. My phone has a thing where I can hover my finger just above the screen and it will act like a mouse cursor is hovering over the screen, but I don't know how common that is. So even though it looks pretty sweet, I think I might need to figure out how to make it so clicking will set off the animation and show the class information. Or maybe add in the code (which I think is a thing) that can detect if the site is loading on a mobile device, and have the click event happen instead of the hover event. I don't know. But I do know I'm spending way too much time on this, and probably going beyond what I'm supposed to be doing. But it's fun, and I don't want to do other things, so there's that.

I have previously helped an older gentleman a few different times to scan things for a book he is supposedly writing. It seems that he used to be a big deal college athlete back in the 1950s. He came back in today looking for help and circulation called me down. I scanned a few pages from his yearbook, emailed them to myself, went upstairs to move them to a Publisher document, printed them and didn't like the quality, reprinted them using the admin copier, and when I got back downstairs he had found another page he wanted scanned. So I did all of that stuff again. He was very thankful, though, so it was worth all the running around. Not too much later I was back upstairs and we got another call from circulation, this time saying they had something for me. I went downstairs and the lady at the desk handed me a handful of change. The older gentleman had given it to her to give to me, and he wanted me to buy a Coca Cola with it. Not just a Coke, but a Coca Cola. I thought that was pretty cool. I ended up adding it to our change stash upstairs for when we have to give someone change for printing.

When I got home I ate dinner, watched some videos, and then played CoD: WW2 for awhile. A few games in I was able to prestige again, so that was pretty cool. I then did some daily orders and contracts before ending on a bit of War. Nothing extraordinary, other than losing a lot but still coming out as the top player a few times. It would be nice if they could perfect evenly matched teams.

After that I got completely sucked into a rabbit hole on YouTube and it is now well after 1:00AM. Somehow I got onto bowling trick shot videos, which are fascinating, and then ended up watching a match of crokinhole, which is a circular board game with little discs that you try to flick into the center hole.

And now it is way too late and I want to go to bed, so I'm going to stop typing.