Because I Require Stimulation

Yeah, Star Wars Episode VI, better known as Return of the Jedi, is one of the greatest movies ever made, right?

Right.

And I’ve seen this movie at least, what? Two hundred times, right?

Right.

And I’m a total pervert, right?

Right.

So why didn’t I notice Han Solo copping a little royal feel on the Princess here? Seriously, I normally pick up on that kinda thing rather quickly. Weird, huh?

In my odd love for all things faceless, how could I have ever forgotten another hero of yesteryear? A man who was faceless and caffeinated by my favourite beverage. Damned right I’m talkin’ ‘bout PEPSIMAN!

(You have to shout it. It’s one of those names that you can’t just speak. It must be shouted.)

Witness the holy hell Jesus H. Christ awesomeness that is PEPSIMAN!

So you see, I have this thing with facelessness. It comes from many factors and many thoughts and many different sides of my personality. I will freely admit that my personality and my psyche aren’t your average things, which also contributes to the insanity.

Recently I found out that they’ll soon be releasing a large action figure of my favourite superhero, The Question. He’s a character that damn near defines facelessness.

Oh yes, dear readers, I will have one of these and, if I can, I will have two.

As a musician and a video gamer, I’ve long admired video game music. You can literally ruin a good game with lousy music and there’s been a couple of games that I will play only if the sound is muted and I can have some other music going in the background.

As it stands, the Legend of Zelda games have superb music. While the Zelda game in question may be better or worse than some other Zelda game, you can bet the music is quality. For instance, here’s a guy, and himself, along with himself, and accompanied by himself; he (they) are going to play the shop theme from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

It is fairly kick ass.

See here, I like all kinds of music. I love Celtic and I love Deutsch industrial. I listen to Brahms and I listen to Flatt & Scruggs. I dig on Lady Gaga and I adore Jonathan Coulton. Basically it works out to one thing, I’m a music junky. If I’m outside the house, there’s at least a 90% chance that my iPod Touch is with me. Why? Well shit, man, I can’t leave the house without music. I’d rather leave without my fuckin’ cell phone. I rarely need to call anyone, but I always need music.

But I have a weakness. I love all those artists and all those styles, and yet I have a favourite. It’s a weird favourite, which you might expect, but it is the thing that I will always stop and listen to and crave more of.

I fucking adore and worship surf rock.

The Ventures, Dick Dale, Omura Kenji, Surfaris, Nokie Edwards, Link Wray… I love them all and I will listen to surf rock all day if I have the opportunity. I know, because I’ve done just that. In my favourite groups of my favourite musical genre there exists one that I think is the coolest. They’re a Russian band bearing the unlikely name of The Messer Chups. While people might think I like them because my last name is Messer, in reality, my last name isn’t worth a dime’s bit of difference here. I’d love this group if they called themselves Ravaged Assholes.

First, they play killer, totally kickass surf rock style music. They’re quirky and they’re a joy to listen to.

Second, this is the bassist.

Yeah. Are there any further questions? If so, you may direct them to this video. Ladies and gentlemen, The Messer Chups.

This is one of those images where I have absolutely no idea what’s supposed to be going on here, and that somehow makes it better.

For those playing the home game, this Pokemon’s name is Raichu.

Anyone for a double standard?

Jeez, lady. Sumo need to go shoppin’, yo.

This is absolutely magical.

My son goes to a school in Mesa and, like many schools in Arizona, this school doesn’t have a lot of money to pay for the things that I took for granted when I was an elementary school student. They don’t have a school librarian and, as it turns out, their school library is really just a collection of books in a room.

Well, as any librarian will tell you, there’s a big difference between a collection of books and a library.

I went to a festival at his school and happened to speak to a couple of lovely ladies from the PTO. When they found out that I’m a librarian, they were immediately interested in the idea that I might be able to help their library. So I took a look at their space, their collection, and their technology and figured “You know, I could really go for a project like this.” So thus it came to pass that I’m taking the schools rather nice book collection and making a library out of it.

I’ve got the bare essentials in that I have books and shelves. There’s no ILS. There’s no online catalogue. There are no barcodes, spine labels, or anything else one might expect on a library book or in a library. When kids come to the library, all they do is look around until they find something they like. There’s no order at all.

Today I got started with fixing that. I set them up with an account on LibraryThing and I did that for a few reasons.

• It’s an easy method of cataloguing. I’m going to have to touch each item in there several times and scanning items into LibraryThing gets me a good list of what they have.
• I can export information from LibraryThing. That’ll become important later on when I set them up with an ILS and need to actually catalogue the items in that ILS. I love LibraryThing for this because it’ll export a CSV list of the collection and that includes the ISBN. If I have an ISBN, I can get a MARC record.
• For the time being, it provides the school with an online catalogue. It’s not perfect and it won’t tell them if an item is in or out. But as things roll along and I build the catalogue online and in the ILS, they’ll be able to at least see if their library has a certain book. That’s something they’ve not been able to do until now.

As for the tech side of things, the operating word is INEXPENSIVE. So it helps that I’m a Linux nerd and that I know about things like Koha, MySQL, PHP/Perl, Apache, and the like. Other than the need to get them a better computer, the software for all of this stuff is available for the low, low price of free. It’s hard to get more inexpensive than free.

So I figured I’d blog about what I’m doing as I do this as I’ve never really tackled a project of the magnitude before. It’s not a massive collection of books, but it’s gotta be around two to three thousand items. It’s going to take some time. There will be some challenges. In the end, I’ll probably learn a lot and the school will have a real library.

At least that’s my mission statement. Stay tuned.

If you like, you can watch the catalogue grow on LibraryThing.

I’m sure this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone tackle a horse.

This whole Symphony of Science thing is really taking off. Seriously, I think this is the best use of AutoTune there is.

Some images just make you feel good, you know? You’ll be sitting around browsing the net, not feeling particularly anything. And then you suddenly come across an image that makes you smile and giggle and feel all kinds of happy inside.

Here’s a picture of a Stormtrooper absolutely destroying Jar Jar Binks. Feel better?

Here’s one for the musicians in the readership…

And I am totally certain that this man got laid fairly soon after this picture was taken.