Ships Ahoy!

So I finally made it through August, and tomorrow I leave for my sea voyage in the Bahamas. I get on the boat on Saturday, and return to port on Friday the 7th. I will return to Montana on Saturday the 8th.

Providing a green moray eel doesn't eat me, I will return with more tales.

On another note, I will move to Qatar on the 18th. This gives me 10 days to get everything settled up and ready to go. Don't worry, though-- I've had time to think about what I'm doing. If there's one thing that's not lacking around here, it's time to think.

Americans cannot find U.S. on a world map

Wow...

Not knowing the exact location of a country is not a crime. Not knowing things is not a crime. However, lacking the initiative to learn about things one doesn't know about is.

Liveaboard!

I am going to go on a diving liveaboard in the Bahamas in a few weeks with Blackbeard Cruises. I leave Seattle late on the 29th of August, reach Freeport, Grand Bahama, on the 30th, and set sail on the 1st of September. We are back in port on the 7th, and I will fly back that day.

I'm extremely excited to be going, and even more excited to dive and dive and dive and dive and dive, until I'm tired of diving. Then I will dive some more :)

Continuing Fires

The big news around here is the fire season. In the afternoon, it can quite often smell like you're sitting around a campfire. The air quality is the same consistency too. Last week a fire burned through a T1 line, cutting most places east of Missoula off from Internet. I was surprised it got fixed the same day. Then last Friday we had a power outage, presumably after a different fire burned through the power grid. It only lasted an hour or so.

The Arabs

I am beginning to read up on the Middle East, and this is a very captivating read. Although it was written in the 1980s, David Lamb says many interesting things debunking Arabic stereotypes which still hold true today.

Bridging the Gulf

Here is an interesting article on Doha, sent to me by one of my new coworkers at Cornell.

Cool moth

I thought a leaf had blown into the house. As it turns out, it was a really cool-looking moth, having a kip on the floor.

Qatar trip!

I got some news on Monday from WCMC-Q, and I will be going to Qatar on Friday. My interview days are Sunday-Monday, with a free day on Tuesday. In Qatar, the business week goes from Sunday-Thursday, so this is why I'm working on a Sunday. I have to prepare a presentation though. The window is 45 minutes, so I was thinking if I could get 30-35 minutes, and leave time for questions/feedback, that would work well. I don't have a solid theme yet, but I am going to talk about some of the work I did with Japanese collections, particularly the cataloging end. I've got access to a lot of databases, so I can research. I've already done some research, though, as I wrote a short essay for my cataloging course on the difficulties of cross-lingual information retrieval when the second 'lingual' is a non-Roman language.

Weill Cornell Medical College Building

Here is the page describing WCMC-Q's building and its physical architecture. This is the school in Qatar where I am hoping to get a position.

So where's Qatar?

I've been asked a number of times now about the location of Qatar. To answer this question, I went to Altapedia and pulled this map.