Getting Ready

On Friday Mr. Phillips expects me to submit my work on the GPS. I haven't really worked on it lately, ever since I became disillusioned with the project, but I had already done enough work over the first two months that I still have something substantial to show him. I don't know how good it is, but he's the one who decided to have me assist him with this quixotic project, so he gets what he paid for.

We travel to the conference next Thursday, and return on the following Sunday. This year the conference happens to be in Orlando. Why they chose a Florida location in August is beyond me. Ivan Large is giving his speech on Friday and Class War III is on Saturday.

I've been looking over a brochure for the conference and trying to figure out which presentations I might want to check out. Some of them I can rule out by the title, especially ones written in business-speak nonsense like "Maximize the Potential: Forging Impactful Library Services for 2010 and Beyond" or touchy-feely nonsense like "Affirming Values, Embracing Change: Diverse Perspectives for Today's Librarian". The titles alone are enough to make me shudder, so I think I'll steer way clear of those. More intriguing, if still a bit hokey, are the pretentiously technical-sounding presentations like "Relevance Optimization in Search Algorithms: A Systems Approach" and "Ontology and Description: Orienting Metadata with Global Classificatory Schema". I don't think I'll be seeing Mr. Phillips at these presentations, since this is exactly the kind of library or information "science" that he detests. One does have to wonder if the titles are as meaningless as the statements of that Ivan Large character, but they at least sound interesting (at least to a classification nerd like me).

Unfortunately, since it is taking place during Class War III, I will have to miss the scintillatingly-titled "Regimentation or Referentiality: Toward a Theoretical Framework for the Organization of Information".

Darn.