Books and stuff

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To say that I have a lot of books is an understatement. Years ago when my wife and I left Canada to live in England we stored our joint library – the library you get when, as an adult, you start living with another adult and your book collection begins to merge, the duplicates getting sold off or given away – in her parents’ basement. There were probably about 3000 books there. Almost all of my philosophy texts were on those shelves – scores of books by or about Wittgenstein, and then another even larger though more varied collection of books centred on the theme of moral regret. There were novels, of course, and German texts (in those days I could read German passably). And there were also those books that come your way that you can’t fully categorize but can’t seem to part with either. My wife’s book collection was nearly as large as mine (pre-merger) but included a great many more art books, plays, and literature in translation. There were also many books there whose origin in one person’s collection or the other we could no longer recall. In any case we set all of these aside and left town, province, country, and continent with little more than a single suitcase each.

It is a challenging prospect to leave all your books behind, to start afresh.

The first few years that we lived in England I bought almost no books. First off, I had almost no money. And England, or at least Oxford and later London, is (or was) very expensive. Kathy and I would share a pint of ale (it’s cheaper to buy a pint than two halves). We never dined out. We would walk rather than take the bus. And of course we used the public library in Oxford extensively. And then there was always the Bodleian library, where I had managed to obtain a reader’s ticket, for philosophy books. I used to walk in to town each morning (about a 45 minute walk) and spend my day in the Philosophy reading room of the Bodleian. [Wow, that was a long time ago. I’d nearly forgotten how much time I used to spend reading, thinking, and writing philosophy. Anyway, books are my theme here not wistful reminiscences of earlier selves, and more specifically the books in one’s private collection.]

For about 3 or 4 years there we bought almost no new books. Nevertheless, a small collection of used books, library discards, and gifts from friends began to accumulate: the start of a new collection. By the time we were both earning real salaries we had reached the point where we knew we were not heading back to Canada any time soon. England was likely to be our home for the rest of our lives. So there was no longer any practical reason not to buy books. And with Oxford blessed with 3 mammoth bookstores there were temptations aplenty for our disposable income. So a new personal library began to form in earnest. This one did not have very many philosophy texts: Kathy kept hers in her office in her college and I, well, I had set my boat on a different tack. Mostly novels then. Mostly books that we shared, either reading them aloud to each other, or ones that one of us read and urged the other to read so that we could compare notes and talk about them. Is there any other reason to read?

Years passed and by the time we came to leave England we had accumulated approximately 3000 books. This time we left nothing behind. They all came with us back to Canada. This group of books forms the core of our current collection.

Now we have a house (for the first time) and so the time has come to gather together those books we left in parents’ basements or in the rooms we occupied growing up (I still have about 1000 books in my old bedroom in the house in which I grew up, books from high school and my days as an undergraduate – so a fair bit of poetry in that mix; well, I was someone else then). Acquisitions, or perhaps more accurately, re-acquisitions, such as these call for serious judgements. One’s personal collection of books, at least for me, says something about the person you think you are or wish to be. This is as much true for shared collections as for those of a single individual. Merging a whole collection of books, even if that is a collection you formed yourself in ages past, is inevitably as sensitive and anxiety ridden as that first adult merging of collections. The intimacies are real, and subject to the usual embarrassments. Did I really once own a copy of The Magus? One shudders to recall, so I decide that this book must be a rogue entry in our collection and it prompty gets culled.

Do I really want to live with a person who has so many books on Wittgenstein, even if that person used to be me? I realize that my general pattern in life has not been to synthesize; instead I have tended to compartmentalise. To pack an earlier self in to a box, label it, and then set it aside as I change continents and lives.

And so this post about books does in fact turn out to be a trigger for wistful reminiscences. The re-acquistioning, so to speak, is going slowly. Most of the books from all those years ago are still sitting in boxes. I’m working on it. But the re-integration will take some time.

Meanwhile there are new books which are being added to our library at a steady pace. We have a fabulous independent bookstore in Waterloo, Words Worth Books, that we both love. And Amazon is always tempting as well. So the collection grows and grows. And changes. Again.

A change coming on

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I feel a change coming on. It is an odd sensation, or possibly just an odd expression. It’s not as though I have a trick knee that reacts to sudden shifts in barometric pressure. The change I have in mind has nothing to do with the weather. Nevertheless I’ve been having the impression for some time now that a change is coming.

It is more like a hunch than a direct sensation, something that has me looking at things out of the corner of my eye and wondering whether this is it. It generally isn’t. But it is hard to shake this feeling. I feel like I need to be ready for something, ready to react quickly or possibly to be the initiator, given the right conditions. I must be coming to a tipping point, something that will send me off in a new direction. I’m not there yet, but I appear to be readying myself, getting set to spring. What will trigger it? I don’t know. I just feel a change coming on.

Typically, in the face of uncertainty, I make lists. The transition to a new calendar year promotes this habit. I tend to look back at the year just passed and make a fresh assessment of its actions and events as a prelude to setting goals for the year ahead. That list of course, my list of goals for a year, is always an open-ended document. On the 2009 edition I note a few additions. One of those has to do with reacquainting myself with the classical piano repertoire; this because for the first time in more than 25 years I have a piano at my disposal. It is no small challenge for me to (re-)establish the habit of practising: the hours spent on technique just to get my fingers in to shape; the embarrassing forays into pieces I used to play all those years ago; the need for more realistic goals and scheduling and a more modest initial set of pieces to work on. And every time I touch the keys I hear both the echoes of my youth and the more mature re-sounding which informs me that I can now choose my new relationship with the keyboard, I am not bound by what I did or didn’t do years ago.

I am not bound by what I did or didn’t do years ago. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that realisation has sparked this feeling of a change coming on. Maybe it is part of the realisation that the conditions for change are in my hands now. I can choose my own direction. I’m ready for it.

I feel a change coming on. A change for the better.

An office with a view

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When my wife and I decided to throw caution to the wind and purchase our first house, I never imagined how much it would change my life. Apartment dwellers for the past 25 years, the transition to the responsibilities of home ownership is a bit scary. I’ve never changed the air filter in a furnace before. I couldn’t tell you what the main breaker for the electrical service looks like. And don’t even mention gardens – what do I know from gardens?

Fortunately we had the benefit of some fabulous assistance: a real estate agent with whom we really clicked; a home inspector (what we would have called a “surveyor”, I think, in England) who was incredibly professional, thorough and communicative; a bank with a heart (yes – can you believe it?); and the generous helping hands of brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews. So, on 30 October we took possession of the house that will be our home for some years to come.

Of course for someone like me the thing I see most no matter where I live is a computer screen. However situating that screen in a nice office can in fact make a difference. My new office has a long window that reaches all the way down to my desk. I’m located upstairs and can see for some distance out the back of our house. The snows have already arrived. In the distance are the beautiful Seagram’s lofts. Closer are the white covered back gardens that other homeowners like me are probably looking out on with an admixture of pride and fear.

For now the house is a delight. My wife is happy. I am happy. And I have a great new office with view. About the shovelling of snow…not so much.

Find your comfort zone – an Ubuntu story

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About six months ago I changed scene, job, country, (life?). In July – all of July as it turns out, since Dell Canada just isn’t the equivalent of Dell UK or Dell USA – I ordered and eventually received one of those lovely new Dell Inspiron laptops. Mine is red, so you know it’s got to be good 🙂 As well as being rather slow on delivery, Dell Canada is also behind the times on operating systems. It does not offer any machines with pre-installed Ubuntu. Instead it is Windows Vista for home machines, and Vista or XP for business machines. Thus, after many years using Ubuntu as my principal (and principled?) operating system for my work and much of my leisure, I found myself in possession of a brand new machine running Windows Vista.

And I’ve used it now for six months.

I’m actually not that fussy when it comes to software. (Readers of this blog may find that hard to believe.) If it works, and it meets my needs I’m generally satisfied. I find Vista to be about equal to XP, given my needs. Maybe it is better under the hood, but I don’t tend to get dirty with my operating system. If it runs OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, and Subversion, I’m pretty much sorted. The stealth tax licence fee for the operating system is just that, stealthy. If you don’t think about it too much, you barely notice it.

So why have I been so down in the mouth of late?

To be honest, I just miss Ubuntu. It was familiar, easy to understand, and, let’s be frank, fun! And hey, another Ubuntu version comes along every six months and it’s even more fun. There are some other reasons why I miss Ubuntu: I’m more comfortable working with subversion source code repositories in a Linux environment; there is lots of software that people recommend to me that does not run (easily) in Windows; I miss being visibly part of something good. And running Ubuntu in a VirtualMachine in Windows just doesn’t cut it.

When I’m out of sorts I tend to sit down and write lists. (Yes, I’m one of those guys!) Recently I was making a list of things that would make my life better, happier, right now, as we speak. And somewhat to my surprise switching back to Ubuntu was near the top. (There were other things, of course; computers are not my whole life after all 😉 ) And once I make a list, I find it immensely satisfying to start drawing lines through items completed. (I did say that I was one of those guys!) And thus, a day later, I am writing this post via an Ubuntu operating system.

Actually I now have a dual-boot laptop. It turns out this is now much easier to do than it was four years ago when I last had a dual-boot machine. Vista is remarkably sensible in recognizing that users may wish to have multiple operating systems. It supports shrinking of its own partition thus freeing up space for the alternate. Resizing a Windows partition used to be a real hassle, but this took all of 1 minute. In the 12 GB available I installed Ubuntu 7.10. And it all works 🙂 An added bonus is that this version appears to play nicely with my .odf documents residing on my NTFS partition: I can use them, edit them, and save to that partition, thus removing the need for a shared FAT partition (at least that’s my impression so far).

Using Ubuntu won’t really change my life. After all, I will still be using OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, and Subversion. There is probably even no way for you to tell what operating system I was in when I wrote this. But I know. And that’s enough. I’m back in my comfort zone and the future looks bright.

Building Communities: eIFL-FOSS

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When I moved back to Canada after 13 years in the UK, I had the luxury of being able to step back from things. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to think through what I might like to do with the rest of my life. But in fact I didn’t need any time at all. I’ve been heading in a certain direction, I think, for about 40 years. All I really needed time to discover was the next step along the way.

In July, I was invited to a meeting in Italy by the folks at eIFL.net: electronic information for libraries. I was being asked to take a fresh look at a proposal for a new program area for eIFL, one that would advocate the use of free and open source software (FOSS) in libraries across their member countries. The aim would be to raise awareness and understanding of FOSS, to facilitate eIFL.net member engagement with FOSS development communities, and to undertake projects of special significance to eIFL.net members. In fact, this was a call to do nothing less than build a new community of FOSS champions in university libraries from southern Africa to eastern Europe and beyond.

How tempting is that, eh?

Of course for me it was also a bit terrifying. First, I am not a librarian, so nearly everyone involved would have specialist knowledge that I do not. Second, I am neither a systems administrator nor a professional software developer, so I have very little of technical worth to offer this proto-community, least of all first-hand experience deploying the integrated library systems (ILS) Koha or Evergreen, which would be the foci of our initial project. Third, building sustainable communities is hard. Really hard.

Sounded like just the sort of challenge I was looking for 🙂

And so I signed up at the beginning of September. (I spent much of August with my parents after my father discovered he was in urgent need of a triple by-pass operation; completely successful, I’m glad to say.)

You might be wondering what I have to offer such a program given my list of shortcomings above. The truth is that I don’t believe in shortcomings. In fact, I will be treating each of those shortfalls as pluses.

First, I will be learning something new every day, and every member of this new community will have something they can teach me. Second, my focus will be on exploring the Koha and Evergreen development communities and sharing what I find. Everyone else will no doubt be focusing on the software itself and sharing what they find. Together we’ll take the steps necessary for positive engagement with these development communities. Third, of course building sustainable communities is hard – that’s why it is so rewarding!

Funding for the eIFL-FOSS proposal was secured from the Open Society Institute in mid-October. Since then I have gradually begun putting a public face on our new program. But they are early days. One aspect of the new program I can point you to, however, is my new work blog. I will be posting there on all aspects of the program and of our ILS pilots. It promises to be a grand adventure.

So is this what I want to be doing the rest of life? If by “this” you mean facilitating the growth of new sustainable communities, then yes, that sounds about right.