Vitanuova for 2004 March 14

Librarying

Speaking of libraries, Zack and I went down to the San Francisco Public Library on Saturday and got ourselves some library cards. Despite my vast admiration for librarians, I've used the public library systems in the places I've lived pretty infrequently, partly because I really like to own books if I can -- and that means Bookfinder and bookstores. (I did confirm the epigraph for my DeCSS Haiku essay over at the S.F. Main, and only a while afterward did I remember that I had originally come across it as part of the epigraph of Commodify Your Dissent.)

Now the San Francisco Public Library has been criticized by both Nicholson Baker and Don Marti for getting rid of paper books in favor of computers and other non-book facilities and resources. If I were ever criticized by Nicholson Baker and Don Marti over something, I'd be pretty anxious! And in fact the collection at S.F. Main is looking pretty small compared to UC Berkeley or compared to the New York Public Library. (It's probably very respectable in proportion to San Francisco's population, but not in proportion to its fame.)

I never used the Five College Consortium interlibrary loan, but I was actually eligble to make use of it for a while because of my little red Smith College Employee Dependent ID (one of the four photo ID documents I've ever possessed that depicts me without a beard). The Five College library system was particularly impressive because it included the entire collection of UMass Amherst. Even though I never actually requested anything, I used to have a great time searching the catalogue. (My Martin Gardner collection is finally better than the Five College Consortium's, but it wasn't easy!)

I borrowed Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego because Annalee told me to and I have to do what she says. Well, at least because I'm writing an article for her and she recommended Freud on group psychology. (My article is also, I hope, going to get to make use of my confabulation experience.)

Zack and I also ate at Tu Lan, making three meals in two weeks there for me.

Gentoo

I just spent about eight hours installing Gentoo Linux on a desktop machine I got from a friend. The installation went smoothly; it took so long because Gentoo compiles everything from source code. But I have a headache from watching so many hours of gcc output in reverse video.

Gentoo doesn't really have much of an installer. It's pretty much a matter of following some instructions in a text file. It's a great feeling to know that everything on your system has been locally compiled, though.

I may have mentioned that the system came to me installed with Windows XP, and that I used Windows for about a week -- my first time since 1996, with minor exceptions -- and took some notes on the experience. I'm going to write something up about that when I get the chance. It was really amazing. (Should I say "amusing, awful, and artificial"?)