Image via Wikipedia

I came across this nifty page on ESPN.com that will compare your salary with that of top-tier professional players from the NBA, NHL and MLB. You get a breakdown of how long it takes a player to earn your annual salary (before taxes).

For instance, if you make $65,000 a year…

Peyton Manning makes $65,000 after the following…

.06 Games
.12 Touchdown passes
16.97 Passing yards
1.63 Pass completions

You will need to work 276.92 years in order to make Peyton Manning’s annual salary.

To find out how long it takes your favorite sports personality to earn your wages, enter your annual salary here.

Snow

I put away my winter coat today thinking that winter is over. I should have known better. Snow showers 30 degrees scheduled for tomorrow.

Aufbruch - Breakup By dolorix

It’s been a rocky relationship, and now it’s over. You really thought doubling the monthly rate would keep customers around? Later.

I’m gonna give BackBlaze a shot ….

stop! by StartTheDay

Because we’re connections, it doesn’t give you the right to automatically add me to whatever email list you send out. I’m not interested in:

Peruvian, Greek, or Brazilian vacation properties (or any real estate properties), healthy relationship retreats, secrets of Executive Leadership, any seminar (be it web or otherwise) on accountability or anything else

I’m also not interested in in joining your real estate club, your investment banking forum, invites welcome or whatever LinkedIn group you’re starting.

I’m pretty aware of what’s out there and, believe me, I have no problem finding it on my own.

galaverna By *_filippo_*

It’s so cold we’re getting advisories from SU Health Services, the Safety Department and the Environmental Health Office. It’s also such an issue that UPS isn’t delivering! Which stinks when you have much needed textbooks slated to arrive! Snippets of both emails are below:

From: order-update@amazon.com
Subject: Your Amazon.com order (#555-2222222-5555555)
Date: January 21, 2011 1:15:09 PM EST

Hello,

We’re writing about the order you placed on January 20 2011 (Order# 555-5555555-5555555).

Delivery of your package may be delayed due to extreme weather conditions or an unforeseen natural event. UPS will deliver the package as soon as possible. We are sorry about this unavoidable delay and we appreciate your patience.

————————————-

From: Email SUNews <sunews@SYR.EDU>
Subject: SU NEWS ALERT: Beware Cold Weather Injuries
Date: January 21, 2011 4:39:32 PM EST

SU Health Services, the Safety Department and the Environmental Health Office remind everyone that persistent sub-freezing temperatures projected for the next few days place everyone at risk for frostbite, hypothermia and other cold weather injuries.

While outdoors, it is critically important to avoid wet clothing, particularly wet socks. Other body areas at particular risk include the cheeks, the tip of the nose, the top of the ears and fingers.  During these temperatures, limit your time outdoors and wear scarf/hat/gloves if you need to be outside.

Signs of frostbite include dull, whitish skin and impaired sensation. If frostbite occurs, move immediately into a warm environment and remove and replace wet clothing. Do not massage affected areas.

For a fact sheet on cold weather injuries, see http://emergency.cdc.gov/disasters/winter/pdf/cold_guide.pdf.

QUESTIONS?

Contact:

- SU Health Services

So after almost a month, my ailing self-hosted WordPress blog appear to be healthy again.

On a lark I went and manually delete the last 100 or so ‘inherit’ entries in the SQL database.

Still have my fingers crossed but initial tests are yielding positive results.

Good thing as it was starting to drive me nuts.

As of January 16, 2011, it appears that I have been able to fix this issue.

If anyone’s good with WordPress, please holler. I’m having real issues and can’t get them resolved. Issues include:

• comments not posting
• links not resolving
• posts not updating
• ‘read more’ not ‘readmore-ing’

I tried:

• switching to the Twenty Ten theme to rule out any theme-specific problems?
• resetting the plugins folder by FTP & phpMyAdmin
• deactivated ALL PLUGINS
• re-uploaded the wp-admin and wp-includes folders from a fresh download of WordPress

Also, on certain, definitely not all, posts when I go to either save or update (I’ve resorted to entering many of my posts manually through phpmyadmin) posts from the WP Admin interface, I get taken to a ’404′ public page with this  admin (private/password protected) URL:

http://kitlas.com/wp-admin/post.php

Also, i get that same “’404′ public page” on some posts when I click the ‘Read More’ link or if I try to open that post directly from the WP Admin interface.

I tried this fix:

Solving “headers already sent” warnings

But it didn’t help.

I first thought it may be to post length, then i thought it was the ‘<–more–>’ code but that’s not the case. I’ve also deactivated all plugins too and have had no differing result.

….help….

MCCALL'S MAGAZINE, WOMAN IN FLOWERED HAT HOLDING COMPACT

For some completely unknown (to anyone) reason, the eSLib site (which I carved out all day Sunday October 3 to migrate and test thinking it might take me the day, at most, but would be officially up on Monday) stopped permitting uploads.  Lame. I spent the next 2 hours changing passwords, testing files, clearing out the caches on my assorted browsers (and on my laptop – command line prompts, baby!)  and whatever else I could think of all to no avail. I’ve worked on websites, intranets, blogs, all sorts of CMS (content management systems) from the front-end to the back-end and everywhere  in between (yes I did teach myself a bit of PHP, HTML and MySQL) and I’ve never had an issue like this.

I ended up repeating this process several times over until I just had enough. I contacted Dr. Qin (the PI on the eScience project) who was understanding but, understandably, wasn’t too happy, who in turn contacted the iSchool Systems Administrators. The next 3 days we all banged our heads against the wall, computers and whatever else was within distance. Nothing. Then finally Lisa Pawlewicz, Systems Administrator extraordinaire, rewrote the php.ini file and everything worked. I really have to hand it to her as she really tried everything and was terrific about helping out. So much time was lost/spent on trying to fix the thing but now it’s finally up.

As if on cue, as soon as the site gets fixed, my blog goes kerplunk. I’ll spare you the details, but my awesome interview with Thomas Mann of the Library of Congress would not load. No not the WordPress entry the ACTUAL interview. I cut and pasted and created new entries (literally, embarrassingly) all day long and I could not post more than the first paragraph. Every time I tried, I got the dreaded 404 page. I beat my head against the wall again, upgraded my hosting, uninstalled plug-ins one by one, troubleshot everywhere I could, read forums and nothing worked. It still isn’t solved. I eventually uploaded the content via the SQL table, but even there I couldn’t add Categories or Tags. Strange.

What I find to be the worst thing is the massive loss of time. Hate it. Especially with so many bigger things to work on (umm classes?).

So I say all this to say…eBooks? We’ve been talking about it off and on and would I hate to be at the end of some gripping novel only to have the thing fail on me. I’ll get one sooner or later, but outside of fire or flood, a book isn’t going anywhere fast.

And what pray tell does this image have to do with anything I’ve written about? I went to the Flickr Commons (a great place for stock photos with varying levels of copyright/ownership per Creative Commons), typed  ‘crazy’ into the search box and this was the first image that came up. In an odd way it’s pretty fitting as I probably would have driven myself nuts looking for an image that was, well, of a person looking like they had driven themselves nuts.

Smoke stacks (LOC)

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a first year MLIS (Library and Information Science) student at Syracuse University. I’m taking a class involving cataloging and metadata principles and am finding out that there are just an inordinate number of cataloging systems. In trying to find out how many of these systems exist, I searched high and low and eventually ended up at the Library of Congress. They HAVE to know, right?

So I reach out via their ‘Ask a Librarian’ link on their website. I’m thinking it might take a day or two, but this is the LOC and they’ll have a wonderful annotated list of resources for me along with an actual number of cataloging systems there are out there.

My first response looked like this:

Hello Joshua Kitlas

Thank you for visiting the Library of Congress Web site.
We suggest that you contact the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at ndmso@loc.gov. They will be able to better assist you with this query.
Best wishes,
The Digital Reference Section/am Library of Congress

That’s fine. I can totally deal with that. Though I did think it a little strange that they didn’t contact them directly in the first place, but anyway, I ask the good people at the Network Development and MARC Standards Office. You want to guess what their response was?

Hello,

There is really no way to know how many standards there are (new standards are created constantly). There is no comprehensive list.

One list I can think of is the Open Metadata Registry, but it is far from complete.

Wikipedia has several helpful articles. Search on terms such as Metadata, Metadata registry or Metadata standards.

Best regards,

NDMSO

WHAT!!! WIKIPEDIA???

Holy crap! This can’t be true. Oh yes boys and girls, it is. So wrong on so many levels – from the Wikipedia nonsense, the initial email ‘handoff’, the complete lack of thoroughness, carelessness and so on. This is exactly NOT what we’re being taught to do as reference librarians. I’m shocked and amazed. Whoever it was that failed me clearly didn’t go to Syracuse I can tell you that.

What makes this especially painful for me is that I just had an AMAZING conversation with Thomas Mann who works at one of the LOC’s reference desks. He’s very awesome and I can’e underscore that enough.