Saturday, July 5, 2008

Slave to the creeping green bar

G'day from Cooma in the Snowy Mountains. I checked into an internet-ready motel fairly early today, solely in order to keep working on these Koha citations, and I've been at it ever since, because this connection is sooooo sssslllloooowwww. Every single new screen to come up forces me to wait through 30-45 seconds of glacially creeping green status-bar "progress" before displaying the coveted "Done" in the lower left corner -- and this assignment demands a lot of clicking. I've got Sky News on TV for background diversion, and they've cycled through the same headlines so often they'll surely enter my dreams tonight (fishermen rescued off Australia's east coast, human bones washed up on Phillips Island, gunman loose in Sydney, father-daughter pot bust, blizzards in New Zealand; repeat). But at least the Goddess of Koha has heeded my pleas and is no longer pretending not to recognize ISBN numbers; they're all going through now. I don't know what was up with the earlier impertinence!

I'm still a bit baffled by Koha, however. What's a "z39.50"? Why can't we see author and title info on some of the pages? Why must we enter random numbers before proceeding? Hrmph. The system doesn't always run smoothly, either, occasionally yielding little snafus that actually wouldn't bother me much at all if I weren't on a connection whose speed evokes 1993. I dream of a future in which bona fide high-speed internet cloaks the planet... until then, my apologies for this text-only post, but a picture or video would take all night to upload!

Aw, OK, as a pittance, here's a link to a library cartoon.

from The New Yorker, August 12, 1950

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