Me vs. The I-Phone

I took the Xpress bus home today, because it goes right by my local library.  It means a longer walk home from the library, but I had a book that was being recalled--Too Many Curses by Gil Martinez.  I won't be doing a full book review, so here goes the quick version: Wizard with a castle full of various monsters dies, and his kobold apprentice is left to hold things together.  Good premise, but the execution is a little pondering.

But that's not the focus here anyway. The story really begins after I return the book, and decide to take out another one.  I try to scan my library card, but the barcode is too faded. So I go up to the librarian, and she tells me that I need to replace my card, which is what I figured.  Then she told me that replacement will be $3.  That's kind of annoying, since it's not my fault their cards use ink that fades fairly easily, but well, it's only three dollars, and I value the service the library provides.  So I pay up.  Then this happens:

"Are you still at XXX St?"
"Oh, no, I'ved moved. I'm at YYYYYYY Ave now."
"Well, then, we'll need to see a proof of address to issue you a new card."

This is not a new problem.  And I am still a student living in a building where the landlord takes care of the utilities, I don't have cable, and my phone bill is about three addresses behind at this point. So the only proof of address I have is the original lease.  And I certainly didn't bring that with me, since I wasn't expecting this problem to begin with. But--and imagine a lightbulb appearing over my head--I did have my iPhone. I could just present the digital lease copy that the landlords sent me.

And this is where the nightmare proper begins.

I barely ever use my phone to surf the Net.  I try to limit my use of online things except when I'm on a local network, and if I'm on a local network, I generally just use the laptop anyway.  So it takes me a little bit to locate the university website. Then a bit longer to figure out how to get to the email (our university has a fairly stupid web layout, and I usually just use the autofill on the address bar of my laptop to get to my mail). Then I have to log in, which takes a few attempts because it's not easy to switch back and forth between  capital letters and small case letters on the iPhone, in order to type the password. Then it's a simple matter of searching through 4000+ emails to find the one from my landlord.  Problem is--and I had no way of knowing this going in--the iPhone version of my university's email system doesn't have a search bar under the default minimal settings.  Or, as I eventually determine, regular settings.  Finally, I find a search option, but it only lists the first seven emails that contain the name of my landlords on the immediate screen, and I can't control the drag bar on the side because every time I touch it, the iPod thinks I've touched the edge of the screen and scrolls down on the main window rather than this sub window.  I also  take time to spend a moment cursing the fates, that my landlords' last name is also a very common regular noun, and is thus found in no less than 360 of my emails.  Of course, searching for them in the "from" category rather than "body" would have found them immediately, but the iPhone version of the email site doesn't have that option.  So I get the idea to sort all my emails alphabetically, and look for them that way.  Good idea, but the execution is slow: the option for next page is right above the option for previous page, and again, even enlarged, the links are too small for me to not hit the wrong one about one time in three. And when I get to the appropriate letter, I figure out that the email sorter is taking a very liberal perspective on the term "alphabetically sorted"--in short, their emails aren't where they should be.  So I set it back to chronological order, and start going through each page of emails--starting with 1 of 247.  Finally, after a good dozen or so pages, I realize that I can skip ahead by changing the number in the address bar. Starting on page 124 and dividing the remaining entries in two every time, I eventually whittle the correct email page down to 101. And I find the email.  And I open it. "Here's the lease, Michael!" and the attachment.

This is when I realize that I can't open attachments on my iPhone.

I explain all of this to the librarian, at great, great length, and eventually she lets me sign out one book, probably to get me to leave.

The worst part is, I can't even hate the phone, because thanks to it, I got to snap some pictures of a bad-ass snowman I passed on the way home:

These photos don't really demonstrate the scale of the snowman--my head came about up to the top of the middle ball.  He's a big fella.

To sum up:  Snowmen good.  Phones good for pictures.  Phones not good for library.

Later Days.


*EDIT: Crap, I just realized I had my laptop with me the whole time. I could have opened it up, logged on, and shown the attachment in under two minutes.  You know.... some days....

Insert Anecdote Here

About 3 weeks ago, circumstances conspired against me to create a defacto suspension of my library card.

Allow me to explain.

I couldn't find my card, and I really wanted the book that had arrived (Robin Hobb's Dragon Keeper, matter of fact), so I instead used a piece of ID--which is fine at the library, they just put a little flag on your file that says you need to present a card next time. However, since we went the ID route, they also took the time to confirm my address. No, I said, not thinking, I've moved since then. Okay then, said the librarian, we'll just need something with your name and address on it for your next check-out.

Problem. See, my current living situation is... complicated. I pay rent to my friends, who pay rent to the person they're subletting from, who pays rent to the landlord. So I'm three steps removed from anything with my actual address. And since I move again at the end of August, that meant it would be at least that long until I could prove I had an actual address, and was not, say, a vagrant homeless person. Thus, a defacto suspension.

Until today. Today, my reimbursement check for the contact lenses I bought in July came. And my first thought on looking at the check was--hey! Something with my address on it! Now I can get my library card. Followed by: oh, hey, 100 bucks. Cool.

It's all a matter of priorities.

(See, they're not ALL 3500 words.)

Later Days.

Toronto Part II: Libraries are the New Raves

My bike fell over yesterday, which means the chain got caught in the rear axle, which means I'm currently back to being without transportation. Further, since it's Labour Day today, the bike shop is not open, so I've got to wait till Tuesday at least to take it in. And since I don't feel up to the eight kilometer hike back and forth to the university, that means I'm working from home today. And as yet another direct consequence, that means I'm stuck using my keyboard with the broken spacebar, since my bike isn't my only possession with a tendency to crap out when I need it. And for added fun, my internet connection is randomly going out every few seconds.(In case you're wondering, I created the spaces for this post by copying a single space, then pasting it every single time necessary. YES IT IS TEDIOUS.)

And all this cause-and-effect is to make this point: if this post comes across slightly peevish, the above events are the reason why.

Anyway, today's vacation topic is libraries. When I went to Toronto, I went with the goal to maintain my minimum hundred-pages of lit theory a day, a goal that had already been recently tarnished, thanks to all the time I spent on that Batman game. (Still worth it.) I managed to fulfill that goal for two of the three days I was in Toronto, which was about as good as I could realistically hope to have done. And most of this reading was done in the environment I still find most conducive for it: libraries.

All right, I realize that "The Libraries of Toronto" isn't going to become a popular walking tour anytime soon. But even if I hadn't set the comp goal, there was about even odds that I would have wound up in a library or two anyway. See, the truth is, I like libraries. Especially public libraries. I like seeing how the assortment of books differs from branch to branch. I like seeing how the interior architecture complements the building's function. I like the wide swathe of humanity that comes through the door. It's almost like a franchise store chain, where you can travel the world over and still feel like you never left home--only the libraries are allowed to express a sort of individuality that your average heartless conglomerate lacks.

(Incidentally, here's too things I don't like about libraries, and I'll admit both have a certain amount of snobbery on my part: the large swarm of people in public libraries always buzzing around the DVD section, because Heaven forfend you actually read something; and the fact that any given time, a university library seems more a place for undergraduates to sit and study on laptops than a place for people actually reading or looking for books.)

So anyway, I went to three different libraries during my stay in Toronto. The first was the big kahuna: since I was on campus, I went to the U of T main arts library, the Robarts. This is the Robarts:
The Robarts Library, I'm told, was built in a style of architecture called brutalism. Why someone thought that it would be a good idea to construct a building where the end result being considered brutal is the best case scenario is left to other minds than mine. Here's what wikipedia says about brutalism:

Brutalism as an architectural philosophy, rather than a style, was often also associated with a socialist utopian ideology, which tended to be supported by its designers, especially Alison and Peter Smithson, near the height of the style. Critics argue that this abstract nature of Brutalism makes the style unfriendly and uncommunicative, instead of being integrating and protective, as its proponents intended. Brutalism also is criticised as disregarding the social, historic, and architectural environment of its surroundings, making the introduction of such structures in existing developed areas appear starkly out of place and alien. The failure of positive communities to form early on in some Brutalist structures, possibly due to the larger processes of urban decay that set in after World War II (especially in the United Kingdom), led to the combined unpopularity of both the ideology and the architectural style.

You know what else is unfriendly and nonintegrative? The fact that in order to go beyond the first floor of the Robarts library, you need a U of T library card. Admittedly, any grad student in Ontario can apply for one, but that didn't do much good right then and there. I could have sat on the first floor and worked, but it would have been like working in an afterlife waiting room; you don't know if what you're missing is heaven or hell, but you do know you're missing it. And since the interior isn't much less brutal than the exterior, I went elsewhere.

Specifically I went here:

Here in this case being the Lillian H. Smith Branch. It's not brutal, but, well, we can't have everything. It was, however, quiet, and that was all I needed to get my work done for the day. If I had more time, I would have loved to peruse their Merrill Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy,but there was some sort of sign in policy, and after being turned away at U of T, I couldn't bring myself to face rejection again so soon.

I never made it to a library on Thursday, but I did go to see lots of second hand bookstores, which I'll talk more about later. But on Friday, I spent multiple hours at this library:
This is the S. Walter Stewart District library. I wasn't actually intending to spend quite so long here, but the theory book I was reading was a little harder to read than I anticipated. Ah, hubris. The SWS library was a lot like the area itself. Again, I'll be talking about it in more detail later, but I think I can give you a good idea what it was like just by saying that its most frequent customer is mid-twenty to early thirty year old new mommies with baby strollers. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it bears an interesting constrast with the student atmosphere of the Robarts library, or the more cosmopolitan mix of social classes at the Smith branch (in that the Smith branch got a mix of students, the elderly, what looked pretty much like hobos, young women, and children. The SWS was missing the students and hobos. That might be to its credit.). It also had the best graphic novel variety. Take that to mean whatever you'd like.

And that was the library portion of my trip to Toronto. According to the Toronto Library website, there are 99 branches in the city; I have now seen two. It's nice to know there's something left to do on the next visit.

Okay, that wasn't nearly snarky enough, given the conditions I'm writing under. If you really want to get my mood at the moment, just insert a random curse word every five words. Yeah, that does it.

Laterdays.

Anarchist or Communist?

This is tangentially related to my last post, but separate enough that I decided to put it... separately. (Logical, right?)
When discussing the availability of books for the 18th century course, the professor remarked that it is possible to arrange it so that the name of the person who borrowed it comes up under a public search, presumably to avoid the rounds of "I recalled it, no I recalled it."
"However," he concluded, "I have to say, I'm not really comfortable with everyone being aware of my reading habits."
Which was fair enough. The interesting part was my first, off-the-cuff response: Oh, so it's so much better that your reading habits are in the hands of the ruling elite?
First of all, it's probably telling that I consider the people who work at the library as the ruling elite. Second, it raised what I'll leave as an open question: does this thought imply anarchist leanings, or communist leanings?
Discuss.

Oh, and since it's Inauguration Day and I'm all about leeching off the popularity of real people of consequence, let's start asking unfair, loaded questions:
Is Barak Obama more a communist, or a socialist?



Later Days.