MLIS Land Lubber

It has been quit a while since I last posted, due to the unexpected hurdles I encountered on vacation to Alaska. I knew ahead of time that I would need an internet connection to keep up with classes, so I brought my trusty Macbook and planned to use the ship's wireless internet (for anyone who has not cruised before, many cruise ships now use a satellite service for internet connections). In fact, I had successfully completed and submitted homework assignments for my MLIS 2000 class when I was on a cruise to the Caribbean during the Fall 2008 semester, so I was confident that the same scenario would occur.

This was my first time going to Alaska, so I had no idea that the internet connection, even on the ship, would be dubious at best (and nonexistant most of the time). I tried several times to connect to Pitt's library services, but received nothing but time outs or pages that refused to load. It was simply impossible to do anything other than send short e-mails before the connection was lost. Incidentally, the ship had a library, and I attempted to use the public computers to connect to the Internet, but had no more success than with my laptop.

I flew from Seattle to Chicago to Harrisburg this evening. I finally, finally completed Assignment 2 and made the bibliographic data and RSS feeds available to Professor Tomer. It took me a bit of time to figure out how to create RSS feeds linked to my Scopus searches, so I hope everything turned out okay.

In other news, I start a new job tomorrow. I'm hoping that the jet lag will disappear by the morning.