Hello, Sailor!

…photos are up.  :)

Weeks after it was promised, her is the final installment of my Spring Break with CaliGirl.

I’m hoping to get photos posted this evening, but I’m not sure that will happen.  Some of you know that my computer has been in the process of dying for, well, an age.  It made a death gasp earlier this week and made me cry while working on my final project for a class.  So, C bought me a new one and it seems to be working just fine.  It is a Vista machine, which doesn’t make me giggle with glee, but I’ll learn, I’m sure.

Okay…

So, Friday of Spring break was a busy, busy day.  We made t-shirts with robots on them.  CaliGirl’s said “Danger!” and mine said “Warning!”  I think I’ve mentioned before that I believe in truth in advertising.  Since we couldn’t wear the shirts for twenty-four hours — in order to produce the best bond between the decal and the shirt — we did not wear the shirts on Friday.  Instead, we went to the University and took some more photos of CaliGirl with Coach Bear Bryant — well, with his statue.  We went home and made butcher-paper body prints — a messy process that I can’t recommend enough for ANYBODY.  We made an attempt to use non-acrylic paints, because those stain so horribly, but, honestly, the acrylic works the best.  Water colour was a total wash.  We had dinner at Chipotle and shopped at Ulta for more toenail polish.  C selected a colour for my toes that I would have never picked and it is now my absolute favourite.

Saturday was our last full day together.  We put on our robot t-shirts and drove to Northport to see the McDonald’s that Ronald Reagan ate at in 1984 (there’s a shrine), a statue of a big red dog and a fire ant monument.  We had dinner at Coworker’s place and spent the evening playing card games.

Sunday, the saddest day of the week, we ate, again at Newk’s and drove CaliGirl to the airport.

I know, a really pathetic final installment — I should have stuck with things and finished my entry.

So, why didn’t I?  Well, things have been really, really busy.  One of my classes had two final projects, an instructor who wouldn’t (and still won’t) return e-mail, and moving due dates.  The other class just had the unresponsive instructor.  I have to decide what classes I’m taking this summer.  I’m leaning towards taking three classes — it will be busy, but I’ll be half-way through the degree if I do that.  And there was Alumni Weekend.  And we put C on new anti-seizure meds.  I completely forgot all of my April birthdays and have pretty much continued to check-out on life.  Not that this upsets me.  We have also decided to get cable, so we’re back to watching Animal Precinct and showing the dogs just how good they’ve got it.  I think they understand.

Photos forthcoming…

Yes, yes, I’m going to finish talking about my Spring Break.  I promise.  I’m even going to post photos.  But probably not until this weekend at the earliest.  I have a lot to say, but I’ve got a major project — the last one — due and I really need to focus on it.

That being said, C sent me the following article and I want to share it.  I also want to clean-out my e-mail inbox.  So, here it is.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=315039&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1
 

What a Librarian Can Teach You About Privacy
Mark Hall

April 14, 2008 (Computerworld) Librarians will go a long way to defend the privacy of their patrons’ reading habits. How far will you go to defend the privacy of your customers’ information and your employees’ personal data?

 In 2003, the chief librarian of the city of Santa Cruz, Calif., was able to warn her patrons about whether the FBI had served a National Security Letter (NSL) demanding information about who was reading what books. She managed that task despite specific provisions in the USA Patriot Act at the time that prohibited librarians or booksellers from revealing to anyone that they’d been issued an NSL.

 So, how did the librarian get the word out? By regularly reporting to the library board that no NSL had been issued to any of the city’s 10 branches, which was perfectly legal. Everyone knew that if the chief librarian failed to report that nothing had happened, then indeed an NSL had been served.

 In 2005, Windsor, Conn.-based Library Connection Inc., which serves 27 Connecticut libraries, received an NSL and, instead of following its gag-order provisions, went to the American Civil Liberties Union and took the government to court. After a bit of legal threats and maneuvering, the next year, the government decided to stop defending
the gag order.

 ”Protecting user privacy is an ethical obligation of librarians,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director in the office of intellectual freedom for the American Library Association (ALA) in Chicago.

 Cindy Hill, past president of the Special Libraries Association in Alexandria, Va., and now vice president of information management services at Outsell Inc., a market research firm in Burlingame, Calif., says virtually every librarian will comply with a court order
or subpoena, where a specific suspect has been identified by law enforcement agencies.

 Leonard Kniffle, editor in chief of ALA Magazine, agrees, saying, “No librarian is not going to comply with a legal process.”  But librarians also know where to draw the line. Both Hill and Kniffle say librarians will balk at what they consider “fishing expeditions,” where the government simply wants to know who has been reading this or that book.

 Let’s face it: When it comes to keeping data secure, there’s plenty that IT can learn from librarians. Just as ALA members ensure that their patrons’ reading habits remain strictly private by establishing privacy audits, so, too, can CIOs audit their systems to ensure that
customer and employee data is protected, says Caldwell-Stone. Privacy audits keep customer and employee content under wraps and can protect companies from embarrassing revelations.

One recent example of this was when news broke in February that employees of WE Energies in Milwaukee were accessing customer databases for personal use, such as checking up on their boyfriends.  But Hill says it goes beyond mere PR gaffes. CIOs for global companies need to take into account the privacy laws in different countries when designing IT systems. For example, what’s legal for managers to glean about their employees differs from nation to nation, thus making HR applications, and the information they contain, cross-border regulatory land mines.

 Hill cites an example from her past as a corporate librarian at Failure Analysis, a company that tested how and why technology failed. For one particular experiment, Hill says engineers needed to know specific physical traits about testers, such as their weight and foot size. Yet without explicit voluntary approval from the worker involved, just gathering, let alone storing, the information could violate worker privacy in more than one country.

 Librarians have been trained to consider privacy ramifications surrounding access to content. They guard those rights vigorously and are a great example for CIOs designing secure systems. Just ask them.

Quietly, of course.

Last week was my Spring Break.  Contrary to popular belief, I do have friends and, occassionally, I leave the library.  This Spring Break, CaliGirl (my BFF) came out to spend the vacation with me.

Poor C spend his Spring Break (the week before mine) trying to get better.  I still don’t think he’s up to snuff, but he’s made some improvements.  I’ll be posting photos of my Spring Break when I get around to it.  Don’t hold your breath. :)  Sorry, but this is going to read a bit like a list.

Friday (21 March), CaliGirl arrived at 4pm.  Good thing it was late in the day.  I couldn’t get my butt in gear and C, well, C was still ill.  After four car crashes on the way to the airport, I get my hands on her and she’s right here!  We were both excited enough to be a spectical.  Nothing out-of-the-ordinary, but a standard, airport spectical.  We ate sushi at Taste of Thailand and bought a cooler and ice at Fred’s to take sushi home to C.  We went to Edgar’s for dessert.

After all the food, I took her to see Vulcan and look out at Birmingham’s night lights.  Birmingham is a pretty city anyhow — lots of green and trees and nice architecture — at night, it’s stunning.  Of course, she’s fearless.  She walked all around Vulcan while I sat at the top of the stairs absolutely sure that the stone pillar was swaying around me.  I am a chicken.

Saturday, we bought shoes.  One of the things that I like about having CaliGirl around is that she makes it okay for me to dress like a girl.  A real girl.  A girl who doesn’t mind being noticed.  A girl who doesn’t hide her girlyness in a cloak of modest femininity.  I love the shoes I buy when I’m with her.  They are pieces of art.

C took us to Newk’s for lunch — a lunch that fueled an afternoon of toenail painting.  Let me just say that we both painted our toenails roughly fifty times.  There was much bedazzling of the toes, too.  Between the nail polish fumes and the singing of Disney favourites, C gained sainthood.

We met a coworker of mine for dinner at a local mediterannian place.  Yum.  Since we needed to walk off too much food, we wandered around the University and took some night pictures — saw the sights and gave CaliGirl a bit of a preview of campus.  We tried to get everyone to do headstands, but it turns out I’m the only one actually capable of that.  There was much laughing.

Sunday, we cooked.  Turnip greens, black-eyed peas, kale, Boston butt, roasted taters, raw veggies and self-saucing chocolate pudding.  My coworker and his darling daughter, Princess, joined us.  When Princess had to go to her mom’s, the grown-ups played Chez Geek.

Monday was a Birmingham shopping trip.  Consignment rules — I purchased a pair of Lucky jeans for four dollars and CaliGirl got a White House Black Market shirt for three.  I think those were the two best buys, though there were also more shoes.  We ate very tasty Chinese Buffet.

Tuesday, I dragged CaliGirl to my job and showed her around.  We ate at a local eatery where she insisted on calling rolls biscuits — an affectation that vexed me to no end.  A biscuit is a biscuit and a roll is, well, a roll.  The coninued comments referred to the greeness of the place and the lack of concrete.  I have to remember that CaliGirl is from one of the most affluent areas of the nation and she was visiting me in one of the most destitute.  It had to be a shock.

We met Coworker and Princess at Moundville where we ran up and down hills, ran around lodges, stood on our heads, flipped cartwheels and swung ourselves senseless.  Coworker needed some time to himself, so CaliGirl and I took Princess home, painted her toenails and let her help us make lasagna.

Wednesday, we stuck close to home.  More consignment, of course, but we also hit some real retail adn a Cinnibun.  Did you know that the Cinnibun Four-Pack is just pennies more than purchasing two Cinnibuns?  Me neither.  Now, I do and my life is dangerous because of it.  C cooked us shrimp boil, fried okra, fried squash and boiled peanuts for dinner.  I haven’t yet mentioned that I love that man, but I do.  Between his fried foods and my  new information on Cinnibun, my new jeans don’t stand a chance.

Thursday, just because he was feeling a bit better and we didn’t want him getting too wild, CaliGirl and I took C to Chattanooga to See Rock City.  This is one of my all-time favourite places, and we geared-up for the actual touristing by eating at the vegan eatery C and I discovered on our last trip to this fine, fine city.  There were gnomes, there were flowers, there were rocks.  There are no words.

On our way home, we at at a new Indian place in Birmingham — Silver Coin.  We shared two entrees and bread, taking some home so that we each had room for our own dessert.  I could totally mainline gulab jamman.  And the restaurant has this giant statue of ganesh.  It’s located where my favourite Mexican place used to be, and it totally lived up to the rememory of the place.  We stopped by Whole Foods, too, for fresh honey roasted peanut butter.  I think their toilets shrunk.

MORE TO COME…

After agonizing about whether or not to stay with Cingular/AT&T for our cell phones, we received this letter in the mail:

As part of our regular review of customer accounts, we have determined that more than half of your wireless usage has been in an area that is not directly served by the AT&T network. One of the requirements of our national plans is that customers use more than 50 percent of their minutes on an AT&T-owned network and live inside an AT&T-owned wireless coverage area.

This situation is rare, occurring with less than one percent of customers on national plans, but when it happens, our operating costs increase significantly which makes it difficult for us to keep our rates affordable for all other customers. That’s why this kind of “off network” usage is contrary to the terms of your rate plan.

To maintain wireless service, you will need to find an alternate carrier. We recommend you select a wireless carrier that directly serves the area where you do most of your calling. If you choose this option you may be able to keep your current wireless number(s) and you will not have to pay an early termination fee.

We regret this situation has occurred. We recognize that no one is to blame for this situation; however, if you do not find an alternate carrier or voluntarily cancel service, your account will be subject to cancellation at the end of your billing period after May 16, 2008. Of course, you will not be charged an early termination fee.

We are available to answer any questions you have and help you through this process by contacting us at 866-704-0177 during business hours Monday-Friday, 7am-7pm EST and Saturday, 9am-6pm EST and referencing keyword: “Off-Network EO4B”.

Sincerely,
AT&T

Yeah.  They’re  breaking our contract because we use the phones too much.  So much for that “more bars in more places.” It’s actually “more bars, but only if you’re calling from where we want you to call from.”

The whole thing pisses me off.  How come they get to say things like “We recognize that no one is to blame”?  Why can’t we charge them an early termination fee?