I started this wanting to talk about a very specific thing I finally took the time to do over break but I looked at the date and it seemed like I should talk about something more monumental or general or interesting… Instead I’ll just keep going.

One of the things I wanted to get done over break was switching my default browser from Chome to Firefox:

• Bye, Chrome: Why I’m switching to Firefox and you should too https://www.fastcompany.com/90174010/bye-chrome-why-im-switching-to-firefox-and-you-should-too
• Google denies altering YouTube code to break Microsoft Edge https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-youtube-microsoft-edge-intern-claims
• And also Google just owns too much of me already, so why not switch at least this one thing

Anyway, the main reason this was going to be such a chore is a bad habit of mine - storing passwords in Chrome. So basically until I got my passwords out, getting over to Firefox was going to be a pain. A second thing I’ve been hoping to get done is starting to use LastPass, and, of course these two things worked together (mostly) well.

Cornell has enterprise LastPass for all faculty and staff so I signed up and activated that. This was easy since we’ve all long since been forced into two-factor authentication, which was the only prerequisite.

I already had Firefox but only used it for Facebook because of their Facebook Container add-on. In celebration of 2019 I’ve deactivated my Facebook account (again) so I can stop using Firefox just to quarantine Facebook.

I set up LastPass with my institutional ID and I linked it to my old personal LastPass account that I had once had good intentions of using but never really did. This added about 70 sites to my vault. Up to this point, everything was pretty simple. LastPass offered an installer that would put the LastPass extension on all my browsers and also cleanup passwords lying around my computer. I downloaded the Mac version because I was going through this on my work Mac.

The installer worked as intended for Safari and it did clean up passwords on my computer and put them into my vault. For whatever reason (permissions, I assume), it did not get the extension installed for Firefox.

To begin with though, I mostly needed the extension installed for Chrome so I could get my passwords out of Google and into LastPass. After installing it, I was informed the Chrome extension for Mac does not let you export passwords out of Chrome and into LastPass.

So after about a half dozen multi factor authentications on my Mac to get this going, I had to switch to my Windows laptop.

This went smoothly at least and after repeatedly authenticating into Cornell and LastPass and Google and everything else, I got my passwords out of Chrome and into my vault, bringing my vault up to 300+ sites, although many of them were junk like local dev desktop Drupal sites. Then I went back to the Mac, got the Firefox extension installed and authenticated everything again.

I logged into LastPass, and with the Firefox addon, I now had access to all my passwords that were formerly trapped in Chrome. I can log into my GMail account- even though I have no idea what new password I gave it in the middle of all this. (And, yes, still using GMail - one thing at a time.)

Last, I removed Chrome from my dock and told Firefox to startup on login, hopefully cementing a new habit.

I added LastPass to my phone and that went smoothly, I just had to remember to tell it to use LastPass as a source of passwords.

Overall this was a moderately high level of annoyance if only because having to two-factor over and over for Google and LastPass was irritating. My path was a little more winding and higher in auths than it needed to be because I didn’t quite know what I was doing.

At any rate, I’m off Chrome (for now) and into LastPass (for now). Better passwords and (maybe) more privacy in 2019!

I haven't posted in a while, mostly because the Monday after I returned from Code4Lib I interviewed for a new job at Cornell and spent the next months in the bizarre limbo that is being an internal candidate. I did my first interview in about 13 years and my first all-day academic interview ever.

Inspired by this article on how (little) librarians negotiate, I did make some effort to negotiate on by own behalf. I got something but not what I wanted, I did not get my offer rescinded or any of the other things people worry about. Negotiate!

Anyway, I'm a month into my new position as a metadata operations librarian and things are going fairly well. I have spent most of the last month working on our rare and manuscript collection deparment's migration to ArchivesSpace and specifically the part that relates to exchanging marc data between Voyager and ASpace.

I started a plugin for our custom import mappings which kept me playing in Ruby, which is nice, while also doing close reading of marc records which is something I really have not done before. A good bridge between my old and new.

I feel like I should throw in some links but if you're working in ASpace, you know the usual culprits. Work at Yale, the Bentley, UNLV and Harvard have all been extremely useful to look at.

Because I moved from a position where I was Samvera focused, I can't help compare the two OSS communities here a bit. ASpace feels very quiet after the raucousness of Samvera but I'm looking forward to seeing how it may be possible to get more involved. ASpace gets to enjoy more focus and a much narrower spread of use cases. The rate of change seems slower, but given how many people wanted Samvera to slow down, that may not be a bad thing.

My bags are packed and my brain is melted, it must be time to head home. I didn't schedule my travel as perfectly as I would have liked so I won't get to see all of today's keynote but I should catch most of it.

Yesterday we had a full day of programs, some that made you feel like Python can let you do anything and some that really made you despair for the state of our algorithmic world.

In the evening we went to the Library of Congress. I had pretty carefully preserved social resources to be able to go, and, tbh, threw money at a Lyft in order to get myself out the door. The reception was beautiful, I got to chat a couple of people's ear off (yay for fellow UX-er Nik) and see the exhibits. I have to confess that looking at the exhibits I mostly thought about the fact that LoC has definitely not been decolonized. That said, the people from LoC who were at the conference were amazing, so I have some hope.

Taking the Lyft to the reception also gave me the chance to see our capital buildings. They are still there. They will be there after 2020. Seeing the capital gave me hope too. I envy people who get to live in DC.

A few links from yesterday:

• Notes from the Spotlight breakout
• Python for Data Transformation
• Data Analytics and Patron Privacy in Libraries: A Balancing Act
• Auditing Algorithms in Commercial Discovery Tools
• Beyond Open Data

Yesterday we started on Code4Lib's main conference which is held in a single-track format. We all sit in a large hotel ballroom and everyone at the conference watches the same presentations. The idea being that some of these presentations will be directly related to your work and some won't, but watching all of them gives you a larger perspective and the ability to work better in your library.

Right from the start yesterday there was exhortation to do better - in the form of a keynote from Chris Bourg. It's well worth reading in no small part because it offers suggestions and not just ranting. Chris said she wanted to "equip the choir" not preach to it and I appreciate that sentiment.

Less encouragingly, there were questions about how to get indifferent management to care more about doing better and there never seems to a good answer to that question. I don't even have any pithy commentary to make about it, sorry.

There was also a great deal of frustration expressed about the obsession with the "pipeline problem". Talking pipeline lets people ignore the women, people of color, disabled people and queer people right in front of them, in favor of talking about imaginary people who will be there "someday".

The Q&A and discussion following Chris' keynote was intense and distressing and it's unfortunate that these discussions create so much emotional labor for the people most affected by the issues. I understand the "people are talking and that's good!" attitude, but I don't really feel it.

After Chris' talk there were a number of great presentations. If you're looking for recommendations on slides to review, I found these to be particularly interesting:

• Airing Our Dirty Laundry: Digital Preservation Gaps and How We're Fixing Them
• Systems thinking: a practical field guide
• Using Glitch to Make Apps with Library Collections

Now for coffee and day 3 (which is really day 2 because Code4Lib indexes at 0 but whatever)!

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/iceninejon/1956393838

Two pre-conference workshops for me this year: Transforming MARC and Metadata into RDF-based Applications and Creating Data Dashboards Using Angular and D3.js, both were great and there were several other workshops I wish I could have attended. Someone in Code4Lib needs to create a time turner.

I was most anxious about the Transforming MARC workshop because it was the first technology-based workshop I'd attended in a while that was using technology I don't already use every day. Fedora, Ruby, Solr, yawn... But Python 3!

I tend to be pretty obsessive about making sure my laptop is prepared before workshops because I'm afraid of being behind right from the start. I spent a good half hour in the morning freaking out because I already had Python 2 on my computer (I only use it very occasionally) and and when I tried to run Python at the command line I could not get it to run Python 3 instead of 2. I had installed pyenv because I was used to Ruby version managers but couldn't figure that out either. I gave up trying to "fix" this five minutes before the workshop so I could go register.

A few minutes into the workshop I learn that you just have to type python3 at the command line instead of python and it works. My installation was fine, I'm just a little derpy when I'm nervous.

The workshop itself was good but speedy. I was able to keep up for about the first half before I needed to ask the instructor for a pause to catch up. It was a heavy typing workshop and the more nervous I got, the more I made typos, the more I fell behind. The instructors were gracious about stopping when folks needed to and I was grateful for that.

We used bibcat to transform our MARC and the steps are well-documented on the slides.

I left feeling inspired to think more about the solr index I work on that is bringing together data from many sources, wondering whether a triplestore behind it would make our overall architecture more robust or just more complicated. :)

The D3.js workshop was also very satisfying and was an interesting contrast in teaching techniques. Asking us to do very little typing, the presenters walked us through the code to create the dashboard by having a completed app with the relevant code commented out. So as the presenters explained each step in creating the dashboard, we would uncomment the related code.

This was a very nice learning experience, especially as I was really, really exhausted by the end of the day. It introduced both the concepts and possibilities of Angular and D3 while simultaneously giving us the body memory of having built a dashboard. No one seemed to fall behind or get stressed out and everyone was pleased with their dashboard at the end. We didn't learn the syntax ins and outs or learn a bunch of new code, but in three hours we weren't going to anyway! Instead we had a very nice learning experience and are going home with a good example to study.

That's my wrap up from pre-conference day. The hotel is nice, the food is good, and the company is great.

It's only February so my start of the year ambition hasn't faded just yet. I've been intending to make 2018 a year in which I write more so kicking tires here and doing a little revamp seems like a good idea. I also share the general sense of disgust directed at Facebook and other social media platforms, so I'm anxious to make my small corner of the web more active. Still the blog will never be as active as github or twitter (for better or worse), so those are linked here too.

The blog is hosted by Digital Ocean on their $5/month plan and it is a one-click install of Ghost. I haven't made any modifications to Ghost yet. I did try to get things up and running without following the directions at first and that was a mistake. If you want to get Ghost running on DO these directions are important:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-the-digitalocean-ghost-one-click-application-for-ubuntu-16-04

Following them has the added bonus of setting up LetsEncrypt for you so you can run your blog over SSL which is a bonus. I didn't realize it would be that easy.

Onward!

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stckboy/5247246425

Today I presented on impostor syndrome for CUL’s career development days. Here is the Ada Initiative impostor syndrome training that I used for preparing for the presentation (and as a basis for my slides).

One of things I talked about today was how exposing your process to others can help them better understand that they are not alone in needing to learn and struggle with their work. Rather than just seeing your fabulous product and being left to wonder how you make things so easily, people benefit from seeing how you brought your project into being.

Given that, I wanted to write about what it is like for me to present. Right now, it’s 830p.m. Six hours after my presentation ended. I still feel terrible. I feel like I did something awful today. I feel like my body is still a little nauseous and like my brain still can’t quite calm down. Every time I present, I spend the hours afterward telling myself that I don’t ever have to do it again. That that’s that. Never, ever, ever again if I don’t want to.

Sometime later I get to have a feeling of relief that it’s over. Sometime later after that (much later), something will come up and I’ll feel the need to stand up and talk again. And I’ll be so invested in whatever it is that I want to talk about that I’ll forget what it feels like when I present. What’s missing in there is celebration and ownership of giving the talk. Because there is so much anxiety wrapped up in all of it, I can’t think about it too much.

Once the relief sets in I have to shove the whole event out of my mind and almost pretend it never happened, in part so that I’ll be able to do it again another day. Obviously this is something I need to keep working on, I worry a little that if I don’t work on it, sometime I will really make good on the promise to never do it again and I don’t think that would be a good thing.If you’re reading this and thinking about how hard it is for you to present, I hope you’ll also keep talking and trying and doing it again. I know it’s hard, I feel that way too.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aftab/2640901551