sarahbellum
 

Moving to Ottawa!

..:: diary ::..

I'm moving to Ottawa tomorrow, whee! Please note I won't be reading my email for a few days.
I've also updated my resume with some new information.
30 April 2004

Image Retrieval Systems

..:: librarian ::..

I've put some of my MLIS projects for this term online. One of my projects was on image retrieval systems. There are a lot of cool demos of content-based image retrieval systems online:

Warning - some of these require Java. Others seem to work only if you have the correct operating system / browser / daily horoscope.
8 April 2004

Soon to graduate, soon to move to Ottawa!

..:: diary ::..

This term I've been quite busy - classes, TAing, looking for work, all that jazz. Good news - Sean and I have found an apartment, so I'll be moving to Ottawa in May!
We talked about blogging and RSS feeds in my Advanced Cataloguing class. Reminder to get a blogging system running and update more often :)
25 March 2004

Sarahbellum Updates

..:: misc ::..

My resume is updated for January 2004. I've linked to it and my other website through UWO, which has a few of my MLIS projects on it, just under my picture on the right.
I've also been adding photos of all the snow and ice here to my photo gallery!
Cheers!
31 January 2004

Resnick Blindness Experiment

..:: science ::..

This term one of the courses I am taking is Cognitive Perspectives for Information Professionals. The other day we talked about how the way information is presented affects if it will be ignored or paid attention to. This has all sorts of implications, including advertising and how decision-making information should be presented. One neat demo we had in class of a related phenomenon was of Resnick's Blindness demonstration: the flicker in the demonstration disrupts our attention so we miss a big change in the photograph. The examples (another one here) are pretty fun to try to figure out: just try and find the difference.
31 January 2004

Creating Snowflakes

..:: science ::..

A physics professor at Caltech has a very cool snowflakes website, including photographs, how snowflakes are created naturally and artificially, why they all look different, and how to make ice spikes in your home freezer! Check out the movies of artificial snowflakes growing too.
It's snowing in London!
12 December 2003

Hellboy

..:: comics ::..

Ooo, I am such a Hellboy fan now thanks to the Dark Horse Comics Hellboy Zone. Check out the e-comics! There's also a Hellboy movie coming out in April 2004.
25 November 2003

Misbehaving

..:: web ::..

Misbehaving.net is an interesting blog by a librarian on women & technology.
26 October 2003

Photo Gallery

..:: diary ::..

Lookie! New gallery of my photos and stuff.
25 October 2003

What's that Lassie? Timmy's in London?

..:: misc ::..

When I first moved to London ON from Vancouver, I was struck by the overwhelming presence of Tim Hortons - everywhere! Turns out it wasn't just my imagination! I did a quick search one day using the nifty tools we have access to at work:

The city of Vancouver apparently has only 3 Tim Hortons. For those of you in Vancouver ravenous for donuts, the locations are here:

  1. 4191 Lougheed Highway, Vancouver, BC V5C3Y6
  2. 750 W Pender, Vancouver, BC V6T1Z2
  3. 1150 Alberni Street, Vancouver, BC V6E1A5

If I remember right, these are pretty evenly spaced through the city. This is the CITY of vancouver, note, not all of Greater Vancouver.

With a population of 545,671 (2001, Stats Can, funny, thought it was bigger), that's 181,890 people per Tim Hortons.

Meanwhile, there are 24 Tim Hortons in the city of Ottawa (where my co-op was this summer), popn. 774,072 (funny, thought Ottawa was smaller). That is a big jump to 32,253 people per Tim Hortons. But a decent Tim Horton's density.

London has FORTY THREE TIM HORTONS. With a population of 336,539, that's 7826 people per Tim Hortons. Holy crap. And this number does *not* include the THIRTEEN more mini-Tim's on campus at the University of Western Ontario.

Admittedly there are around 30 Tim Hortons if you look at the Greater Vanouver Regional District, and I know some of London's Tim Hortons are gas-station sized Tim Hortons. Note also the city of Vancouver has the greatest population density of all three cities.

Poking around a bit more though, it seems that the Tim Horton's niche in Vancouver is at least partially filled by, you guessed it, Starbucks!

Number of Starbucks in:
Ottawa = 8
London = 2
Vancouver = 43 !!!

Please note the above is highly unscientific. Probably should involve some extensive testing and eating of more donuts :)
17 September 2003

Back to school

..:: diary ::..

Well, I'm back in London to attend classes at the University of Western Ontario! My MLIS is chugging along... the classes I'm taking this term are:

  • LIS 521 Information Visualisation
  • LIS 670 Legal Issues for Information Professionals
  • LIS 675 Collection Development
  • LIS 677 Subject Analysis and Thesaurus Construction
It looks like it's going to be a fun term so far! Erm, excepting the being-away-from-Sean part.
13 September 2003

Montreal

..:: diary ::..

I just spent my last weekend in Ottawa. Admittedly, I spent some of it in Montreal! Sean thought it would be neat to drive me there so I could see it before I left. Since it was a spontaneous trip, we spent most of the time driving around and wandering around a horticultural-sculptural exhibit, taking lots and lots of photos. Fun!

Today I was back at work... strange to not sleep in. But soon I'll be back to a student schedule :)
25 August 2003

Freaky Friday

..:: web ::..

Just found this link - satellite photos of the blackout last week, before and after!

I'm going back to school soon - and with classes comes the joys of lots and lots of group projects and the mandatory Power Point presentation. This WIRED article claims PowerPoint is Evil (yes, with a capital E) which I find amusing - what better way to distract the audience from the fact you are winging the presentation and don't know your stuff but with a shiny PowerPoint presentation? Whee!
22 August 2003

Power problemos

..:: diary ::..

Wowza, things have been busy. First of all, last Thursday there was a power outage across a sizable chunk of eastern North America. So this means I haven't been at work since Thursday. Tomorrow, possibly, we will go back for the morning. In the meantime, I have:

I've also confirmed that I will be returning to London the weekend of August 31st, and I have a place to live, yay! More updates later, hopefully...
21 August 2003

Happy Canada Day!

..:: diary ::..

Pictures of Canada Day!
2 July 2003

Long time no update - Concert

..:: diary ::..

Me groggy but happy. I went to the Theory of a Deadman Concert here in Ottawa last night with Myke, Sean, & Chris after Sean amazingly won tickets. It was a lot of fun. Myke took a bunch of up close and personal photos of TOADM.
21 June 2003.
31 January 2004. Update: Myke's photos aren't accessible online at this time. Doh.

Lawn care

..:: web ::..

24 May 2003.

Ottawa: a good day

..:: diary ::..

Sarah's Saturday:

  • get up and leave around 9am for hike with housemate Thomas & OHOC outdoors club
  • cross the provincial border into Quebec - my first time in Quebec!
  • begin hiking in Gatineau Park around 9:45am-ish
  • hike around Meech Creek Valley and Lac du Printemps, enjoying scenery and getting shoes very wet and muddy until around 3pm-ish
  • return home, wash shoes, and have a snack
  • go for a walk with Thomas to see if the flotillas are still going down the canal from the parade
  • return around 5pm and make slightly too spicy red curry for dinner
  • head out on bike just after 9pm with Myke and his buddy Chris to watch fireworks at the Rideau Canal locks - oooh, sparkly!
  • return to relax and eat raspberry and lime gelato (that the past housemate has kindly left in the freezer)
  • goodnight!
18 May 2003.

Fun tshirts and toys

..:: misc ::..

Fun tshirts

Fun toys
16 May 2003.

Ottawa: arrival

..:: diary ::..

I'm in Ottawa now, yay! Very happy. Just finished my first week at my job. Been walking LOTS. See pictures here: http://gallery.metalan.net/Sarah_Normandin (I apologise for often being out of focus.)
11 May 2003.

Moving to Ottawa

..:: diary ::..

Hello! I'm moving to Ottawa very soon! I got a co-op job with the Library for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. I'm very excited - even though I will have to get up for work at 8:30am rather than sleep in for classes starting at 11am, Ottawa sounds like fun! I'll miss my friends here though - have a good summer everyone.
1 May 2003.

Demihuman zebra demons?

..:: comics ::..

Favourite comics with animals as major characters:


25 April 2003.

Boing Boing

..:: web ::..

I found this neat site on Boing Boing today to link to... and then I found another neat site on Boing Boing... and another.. and and another! Why don't I just link to BoingBoing? :)
21 April 2003.

Music infomation retrieval

..:: misc ::..

Today one of the groups in my Research Methods class discussed Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and the lack of research into the importance of rhythm in music recognition in both humans and computers. The possibility of being able to search a collection for a song by humming part of it is pretty nifty. This sort of stuff may be applicable to helping listeners find new music.

Apparently some systems use melodic contours for music recognition, which has also been used to study geographical and cultural differences in music.

If you prefer to see your music as well as hear it, check out Shape of Song: Martin Wattenberg has created a Java program that draws arches between repeating patterns in a song to make pretty pictures. Oooh.
17 April 2003.

Be a proofreader for Project Gutenburg

..:: librarian ::..

From my experience working with document digitisation, I have found that there seems to be a trade off between the correctness of the text scanned in and the amount of time and effort to make the document. Distributed Proofreaders is a private effort to support Project Gutenberg's collection of free electronic books. They are looking for volunteers to proofread documents that have been scanned in and run through Optical Character Recognition. Get more information on participating or alternatively volunteer for other activities.
14 April 2003.

Unicorn Jelly

..:: comics ::..

Unicorn Jelly, an excellent online manga had its final episode today. It's one of my all-time favourite comics because of the depth put into the characters and the chaotic universe in which they live.
14 April 2003.

Smallpox and grid computing

..:: science ::..

Grid computing is being used to help process molecular research with the goal of finding drugs for smallpox and cancer. A friend of mine heard a talk on this given here at UWO - apparently I missed lots of free bagels, donuts, coffee... ahem, I mean cool science!

"Grid computing is a form of distributed computing that involves coordinating and sharing computing, application, data, storage, or network resources across dynamic and geographically dispersed organizations", including anybody with a personal computer connected to the internet!

SETI@home is one well-known example of grid computing being applied to determine if intelligent extraterristial life exists. You can download a free program that uses your computer's processing power when you aren't using it. Ditto for the smallpox and cancer research.

For those of you following the war and it's effects, you may be interested to note that Grid.org is also coordinating something called the PatriotGrid: "a family of research projects designed specifically to identify new leads for cures to diseases that are known to be potential weapons of bioterrorism."
14 April 2003.

Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate

..:: web ::..

Aujourd'hui mon ami m'ai donné une barre de chocolat - it was a chocolate bar from France. The label said Frey "Classic Branche Classic", and it was kind of like a Ferrero Rocher in the shape of a Twix bar. Mmmmm *munch* *munch* chocolately French goodness.

Did you know that the percentage of each colour of m&m's candies is different depending on the kind you buy - such as original or almond? If you are unhappy about this, you can always pick your own colours of m&m's, thankyouverymuch.

Some wonderful chocoholic has created a chocolate perfume. I'm not sure if this would make me more attractive to others if I wore it, as I'm sure I'd be drooling at my own smell the whole time.
12 April 2003.

Ice photography

..:: art ::..

Ok, I'm testing my blog. Test, test!

I found an interesting collection of ice photography the other day. The images are beautiful - I particularly like the closeups of air bubbles caught in ice. I've had a large number of comments that the first photograph disturbs people who have seen The Ring horror movie :)
Link via BoingBoing.net. 11 April 2003.


Sarah's links and notes on science, information, librarianship, books, comics, and other fun stuff!


sarah's resume
MLIS projects
Search Google

Desktop:
Sarah's current desktop wallpaper
..:: past desktops ::..
.. Bunny tsunami
.. Seaweed
.. Kings skyscrapers


Book:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.

..:: past readings ::..
.. His Dark Materials (Trilogy) by Philip Pullman.
.. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling.
.. The Emily Carr Collection, a collection of books by Emily Carr.
.. Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
.. Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind: Perfect Collection (Vol 1) by Hayao Miyazaki.
.. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.
.. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Rosenfeld & Morville (in progress)
.. Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro.
.. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin.
.. Briar Rose by Jane Yolen.
.. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
.. Coraline by Neil Gaiman.
.. Cryptonomicron by Neal Stephenson.
.. Enchantment by Orson Scott Card.
.. The Scythe by Ray Bradbury in: October Country (a collection of short stories).


Film:
Kill Bill. Directed by Quentin Tarantino.

..:: past watchings ::..
.. Matrix Revolutions. Directed by the Wachowski Brothers.
.. Animatrix. Short films directed by Takeshi Koike and Shinichirô Watanabe.
.. Under the Tuscan Sun. Directed by Audrey Wells, starrring Diane Lane and Sandra Oh.
.. Bowling for Columbine. Directed by Michael Moore.
.. Underworld. Directed by Len Wiseman, starring Kate Beckinsale.
.. Raise the Red Lantern. Directed by Zhang Yimou, starring Gong Li.


Food:
Cherry tomatoes
..:: past snacks ::..
.. Liberté Méditerranée Black Cherry Yogurt 8% MF
.. Sausages with mozzarella inside!
.. Garlic-stuffed olives
.. Goat's milk feta
.. Amaretto gelato
.. Walnut cake! AKA Cake of Evil Goodness
.. Hickory smoked almonds


Checked regularly:
LIS News
BoingBoing.net
The Amateur Gourmet
Globe and Mail Facts and Arguments
Le Français du jour
Reman Mythology
Zebra Girl


Brain:
This is a scan of my brain, taken when I was 19. Isn't it scary? But I'm still proud of it :) Sarah's brain

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© Sarah Normandin