Ever.

Here’s a story from the Marshall, TX newspaper about my mother.

and the commercials don’t lie. They’re better. Period.

My wife got a Windows Vista laptop a few months ago. I could not believe the amount of complicated nonsense she had to go through to get the thing to just work. Her machine sometimes can’t find our home wireless network, frequently needs encouragement to connect to it, and drops it more often than it should. My Mac just connects.

Bootup time isn’t even comparable. The Windows machine isn’t even in the same league.

Safari is pretty good, but I still had to switch to Firefox so that I could keep using Zotero. iChat owns. Keynote blows Power Point out of the water. Apple Mail + Gmail = email awesomeness.

I spoke with my mother-in-law this weekend about her need to make the switch, as her Windows XP machine tends to be a constant source of frustration. Her comment was that she didn’t want to learn anything new…. but when she gets a new computer, it’ll be something new anyway (Vista). She might as well get something better.

Some of you know this, but I am a librarian. What that means isn’t quite as clear as it once was, but I work in a library and work with information.

My job, in a nutshell, is to facilitate the creation of digital collections which are available to a wider audience than a paper and ink collection. Anyone, from anywhere, can view the collections that we maintain in the Texas A&M repository, as opposed to a paper collection, that can only be seen or used by a person that is physically in the library.

This brings us to a collection, the Geologic Atlas of the United States, that actually predates my time here, but I have done some metadata work on it. This collection is a set of 227 geologic folios that were produced by the U.S. Geological Survey from 1894 to 1945. Included in the set are folios for New York City, Chicago, Milwaukee, and even Austin. (Be warned… the files are LARGE and will take a long time to download!)

Now, these map folios aren’t really rare, but a complete set is hard to come by. Many libraries have partial sets, including folios for their area. Texas A&M had a complete set, and set out to digitize them, and did it right.

On Monday, this email was sent out to a listserv for map librarians:

The Library of Virginia is giving away the following folios of the Geologic Atlas of the United States. They are listed by number only, but I have included a couple of links to Texas A & M Libraries’ digital collection of the folios, so you can see what’s what.

If you would like the folios, we request that you accept all of them.
Preference is given to libraries.

The folios are as follows: 2, 5, 6-8, 12-22, 24-25, 27-31, 44, 60, 76-79, 81-139, 141-182, 184-185, 187, 193, 195-199, 201, 207-210, 216-217.

http://txspace.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/2490

http://labs.di.tamu.edu:8080/geofolios/handle/123456789/2

What this means is that the Library of Virginia is so pleased with the digital versions that Texas A&M has produced and made available, that they are getting rid of their own paper copies. Texas A&M’s collection has become their collection.

So for those of you that really don’t know what I do or why it’s important… here it is.

Okay, as silly as it seems considering I’ve had such a hard time keeping up this blog, I’ve started another blog. A few posts back, I mentioned my experiences with my mother’s bypass surgery. That event led to a family-wide New Year’s resolution to get in shape… spearheaded by my uncle, my mother’s younger brother, who has had his own heart problems already. I have jumped into this resolution with both feet, but I have learned that without outside influences, determination won’t last very long for me.

One particularly disconcerting fact… one of the parts of the resolution was to watch the NBC reality show The Biggest Loser. It is a very inspirational show, but this season the contestants are in teams of two, and there is one team of brothers (the black team) that weighed in at the outset of the competition at 293 and 285. I weighed in at 302, more than either of them.

My new blog, which will be very uninteresting to most people, is my attempt at full-disclosure on daily progress toward my fitness and weight loss goals. I will log my daily eating and exercse routines, as well as use a few tools on the side for at-a-glance type updates. While I may mention my efforts here occasionally, comments on the day to day activities will remain over there.

This new fitness blog is http://jaykoenig.blogspot.com. I wouldn’t suggest adding it to your RSS feeds, but I would appreciate a look every now and then, encouragement when I’m doing well, and some admonishment when I’m not…

I am up here for a conference… the Institute for Scholarly Communication to be exact, and I was ridiculously unprepared for this trip. I had to stop in a Walgreen’s earlier to buy a hat and some gloves. It’s really cold here, but not unbearable.

I took a walk up Michigan Avenue, which was decorated and very busy with shoppers. I also walked over the Bataan-Corregidor Memorial Bridge and down to to Daley Plaza to visit the Christkindlmarket and got some very good apple strudel (only a half). A very relaxing and enjoyable walk through my absolute favorite city, even though it was snowy, cold and wet.

Tomorrow morning I am off to the Newberry Library, which I didn’t get to visit when I was here in 2005. The conference gets going at noon, and then it’ll be work for the rest of the trip.

Though I am a lifelong Texan, I really enjoy this city and even this weather. Check the Flickr pictures on the right for some of the shots from my walk earlier this evening.

It seems like it’s been like months since Thanksgiving at this point, even though it’s been only a little over a week. This last week has been unusually rough. I’ll spare you the gory details of most of it, but here’s the run-down: two broken down cars (and a $3000 total bill… have fun in Disneyland, Mr. Mechanic!), two sick kids with two different illnesses… and what this post is ultimately about: my mother’s quadruple bypass surgery this morning.

Last Thursday night, I received an email from my sister that my mother, a school teacher in rural east Texas, was admitted to the hospital with pain in her chest and arm and was going to be kept overnight. Her originally-scheduled-for-today stress test was moved forward to Friday morning.

On Friday morning, I received another email that she was not having a stress test, but rather a heart cath, and probably would be needing angioplasty or a stent. Now, my father had had this same thing done just a few days before Thanksgiving, and felt great. He was throwing the football around with my boys and having a good time. So when I heard that my mom was about to go through the same thing, I wasn’t too concerned… no big deal.

About 11:30 on Friday, my wife called my cell phone and told me that the blockage was worse than they thought, and in a bad position in the arteries… and that meant that bypass was necessary. Let me note quickly that my grandfather, her father, died as a result of this same disease, at a much younger age than she is now. Needless to say, she was terrified of this surgery, and we were also.

I rented a car (mine was already in the shop at this point) but before I made it out of town, I was told that the surgery was rescheduled for Monday.

This presented a problem. I am scheduled to fly to Chicago tomorrow for a conference. Since I had already rented the car for the weekend, I decided to come up here anyway and spend the weekend, and stay through the surgery.

That brings us to today.

I was at the hospital before the sun came up, so that I could be there before my mom went into the operating room. The next six hours were among the most emotional and gut-wrenching I have ever experienced in my life, and I’m still not in very good shape.

As we sat there and waited, there were two sets of phones. One was a set that people from outside of the hospital could call and talk to people in the families. Early on in the morning, about 30 minutes after we had gotten the word that the surgery had begun, I had to take one of these calls… before I knew that it wasn’t the doctor. As I walked to the phone, I just knew something went wrong and that I was about the be the guy that got the bad news. Instead, it was just one of my mom’s friends calling to check on us. A nice enough gesture, but I told everyone that I wasn’t answering that _______ phone again.

The other phone was manned by a nice lady at a desk in the waiting room. Shortly after taking the call I just mentioned, I was told that that was the phone that the doctor’s would call on, and would probably call every hour or so to give us an update. From that point on, any time that phone would ring, my stomach would drop… and I would just hope that it was good news for one of the other families.

We got two update calls. Both times, my stepfather answered the phone, listened for about 30 seconds, hung up and turned to us with a thumbs up. Everything is going good.

The third call came about 1:30. My stepfather took the phone, and listened for about ten seconds and then leaned on the wall. And kept listening. For more than 30 seconds. Every second beyond what it would take to say, “she’s fine”, was absolute, honest-to-God torture. As I watched him listening, leaning against the wall, not moving, nodding… anything, I began to dread the news I was almost sure I was about to get. Finally, he returned to the area where we were sitting and told us that the bypass was over, she was functioning on her own, and that they were in the process of closing her up.

Good news.

I went outside, sat in the front seat of my rental car, and broke. All of the emotion building up over the morning took over. I don’t think it was joy. Relief, maybe? Hope returning. I broke down again an hour or so later after seeing her in the ICU, still not conscious, colorless, and tubes coming out of her mouth.

Let me finish with this: I am not what you would call “in shape” or healthy. I am overweight, and at 31, I already take medications for high blood pressure and high cholesterol. I am well on my way to my own bypass. My wife has told me over and over, if I won’t do the right thing for myself… then do it for her and our three kids. Those have been hollow words… until today.

I can’t and won’t put them through what I went through today. I don’t want my wife, or my sons, or my daughter to ever have to sit in an uncomfortable chair and dread the ringing of a phone.

I’ve been a critic of Dennis Franchione for a while. Since October 29, 2005 to be exact… that’s when Iowa State came into Kyle Field and beat the Aggies 42-14.

I forgave his first year, his second was an improvement. But in his third year, 2005, things fell apart. A fourth year win-loss record of 9-4 was great, but the truth was, eight of those nine teams we beat were really bad, and we struggled to beat some of them. The exception was Texas, who really was a shadow of their national championship team the prior year. This year went about like I expected, with the exceptions of Nebraska being so bad and Kansas being so good.

Then came last Friday and an absolute domination of the #13 Texas Longhorns. The final score of 38-30 is somewhat deceptive, the Aggies put it on them early and had a 21 point lead halfway into the fourth quarter. The difference was a completely different offensive gameplan than the Aggies had shown all year, and a fire I haven’t seen from Dennis Franchione… well… ever.

What’s really sad is that that type of play is what this team has been capable of all along, and Texas is a lot better than some of the teams that beat us in the weeks leading up to the game. If we had played that way all year, Franchione would still be our coach. In a year when the Big 12 South Champion has two losses, he very well might have been preparing for the conference championship game in San Antonio on Saturday, and possibly even a bigger trophy.

We saw on Friday, unfortunately for the first (and last) time, the coach we hired back in 2002.

Our office is an open area, similar to a cubicle arrangement, but we don’t even have the partial walls. Just a desk. This can lead to distractions coming from others workstations… like phone calls, video conferences, or music. Nothing kills productivity like Green Day or Radiohead coming from someones speakers, or even worse, spilling out of their headphones. If I can hear your music coming out of your headphones that you are wearing, you’re doing it wrong.

One of my coworkers is a musician, and plays french horn in the local symphony. He has been one of the Green Day offenders at times in the past, but today he has classical music playing. Now I like classical music, but I am very much a layman. I couldn’t listen to a piece and tell you who the composer was. I can’t expound on the moods and emotions certain musical keys and tempos can produce. I find classical music to be a good backdrop for work. It’s entertaining but not distracting. Very conducive to a work environment.

I have no idea what exactly is coming from his office at the moment, but I like it.