Daytrip to Olympia

Saturday Cely and I drove up to Olympia Washington to check out Wagner's European Bakery & Cafe. June had been there when she visited Jutta and Vincent when they lived there. She gave it a rave review. It was not bad but not really out of this world. Which leads me to my general complaint about the lack of really great bakeries. Have we lost them all in the US? I have not found one in Corvallis and there certainly isn't a good bakery in the Quad Cities. The South Town Bakery is the only one in the area that approximates a good family run bakery with sweets and breads. The South Park has good homemade donuts and sweet rolls but not much else. Wagner's in Olympia is nice but didn't have a large selection and no impressive breads. So we had a sandwich for lunch and sampled a few of their sweet rolls. Then we took a quick look at the Olympia port. We saw a ship being loaded with logs. Who knows where it was going but there were a lot of them.

On the way home we stopped in Portland to see a movie. The French movie, Cache, starred Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. It was really interesting. Cely thought it wasn't too good, and I have to admit it was really slow. The camera shots were very long and static but the mystery drew both of us in. Cely's complaint and that of some critics was that it left open too many questions. I kinda liked that. Roger Ebert has a review that I think catches it.

The oddest thing about the day was that when we were looking for the theater we drove past the weekly no fur protest in downtown Portland. As we drove by we saw a barebreasted woman participating in the protest. Not something you often see in the Quad Cities and it seemed too chilly to be topless. That's what is nice about life, if you keep your eyes open there is always something new that keeps it interesting.

One more thing. I was listening to the Siegel-Schwall cd that they released last year, Flash Forward. There is a funny tune on it by Jim Schwall called The Unqualified Blues. It is one of the best send ups of George W. Bush I have ever heard. The little sample is a small sample.

That Old Time Music

This whole thing with Bill Graham and Wolfgang's Vault started me thinking about all the great music that came out of the 60s and 70s. Wolfgang's Vault has a audio stream of concert recordings from some of the great bands that played in Graham's concert. So I have been listening to some tunes from the greats. The thing that really impressed me was the vast array of concert posters and memorabilia they have for sale on the site. If my kids read this they would make me a happy man if they bought me a poster from one of the Siegel-Schwall gigs that are for sale! Just like this one!

So I started thinking about the concerts that I went to as a kid. I was remembering the teen club that was in my home town, Arlington Hts. Il. It was called the Cellar and some amazing music happened there. Read the article. It gives some sense of all that was going on there. Listening to Joe Kelley's Blues Band was the best education a white kid could get. So I Google Joe Kelley and find Teardrop Records and who else records for them but J. B. Ritchie. I sat next to him in Mr. Turock's History class! The biggest mistake I made was skipping the Muddy Waters concert at the Cellar! J. B. went and told me all about it the next Monday. I still regret that. But I did go to hear Howling Wolf, and Albert Collins, and the Siegel-Schwall Band. It has been great to stroll down memory lane. Now Sam Lay, the best drummer in the world is playing with Siegel-Schwall when they play their fantastic reunion concerts. Corky played in the atrium of O'Keefe Library at St. Ambrose University when I was library director there. And my old friend J. B. Ritchie is recording for the same label as Joe Kelley! Life goes round and round.

Code4lib

Warning, to those of you not librarians, this has a lot of library stuff.

For the past couple of days I have been hitting the Code4lib conference here at OSU. It was a pretty big deal with people from all over the country, Canada, and Europe. A lot of it was about programing and the plumbing that works behind the stuff that I normally see so, much of it went over my head. But it is good to hear about this stuff because it begins to make sense after a while. The keynote was from a group from Georgia who are developing an open source Integrated Library System (ILS) for the public libraries there. It looked pretty nice. They were not getting the service they wanted from their vendor and they didn't think the system could scale up to the size of the database they hoped to create. The system would be mounted on one server system and would manage centrally around 8 million records. It made me think about the QuadLinc system. There aren't that many systems around the country that run like that. The speakers talked about how they sold it to the Georgia legislature by emphasizing how having a central sytem saves all the local libraries so much money. I certainly knew what they were talking about. The QuadLinc system really saved St. Ambrose a lot of money. It is hard to convince others how well it can work. I also wondered how well the QuadLinc software would scale up when they expand across northern Illinois.

What I really wonder about is how I am starting to hear about people making big changes to the online system catalogs. First there was the recent buzz about the North Carolina State University home grown catalog. Now this "Evergreen" system and the group catalogs that OCLC is doing around the country. I think that more and more people are going to be producing systems like I saw at Universitat Freiburg. There they had three separate systems that each were designed specifically for their function but would talk together. It seemed to solve the problem where the commercial ILS's try to do so much and library staff have to put up with compromises. There are probably others who are developing homegrown systems. Its kind of funny that originally libraries designed there own systems, like Ohio, Illinois, and California. Then the commercial vendors created systems that could do more and had all the bells and whistles. Now we may be seeing new technology enabling libraries to solve their own problems again.

The conference was very successful. Jeremy Frumkin from the OSU Libraries put it together.