Right back where we started from

I was told by my new employers, the New York Law School, that I would only be sent to one conference this year. The choice was easy. The Innovative Users conference held in Anaheim the week of May 18 would be my 14th out of the 17 that have been held. My immediate supervisor, Paul Mastrangelo was there to accept an award for being present at 16 of them.

I had told my wife how easy it is to take the train to Queens and then the monorail to JFK. With an 8:10 flight, we felt confident that taking the 6:07 train from Merrick would get us there in ample time. The monorail, which supposedly runs every 6 minutes, took at least 10 to arrive. Then, at every stop along the way they waited for 2-3 minutes, even though nobody was getting on. Finally we got to the JetBlue terminal only to find out that they had moved into a new wing, and we had to walk a half mile to get to the ticket counter. Then security took forever, so we barely made our flight.



The flight across America was long but uneventful. There were low clouds over LA, so we could not claim to have seen both oceans before noon. We caught our cab easily enough, but the cabbie overshot, ended up miles south of Disneyland and tried to take us to the wrong hotel. At the right hotel, we got right into a room, but it was right over the swimming pool. No matter, because we were off to Disneyland and California Adventure for an afternoon of concentrated fun. Donna had read up on the system for getting advanced passes to the more popular rides, so we made out extremely well that first evening, finishing off with dinner at the much-sought Blue Bijou restaurant. This is a very up-scale restaurant, but it has to adhere to the strict Disneyland rule of No Alcohol. Otherwise, we were very happy with our meal.

After six hours of Disney fun, we were not only jet-lagged but exhausted. We always try to stay up until at least 9:30 or 10 on coming in to California, but I passed out at around 8. Later, Donna said something like - "Were you shaking the bed?" No. Back to sleep. That was that until the next day when somebody mentioned the 5.0 Earthquake that hit the LA area the past evening.
Just my luck, sleeping through the whole thing.

The next morning, I was walking down Harbor Blvd. to get to the Hilton in time for the opening ceremony. Jerry was polite enough to keep 1000 people waiting a few extra minutes until I sat down. This was the 17th IUG gathering, and awards were given to people who had made it to at least 15 of them. This was my 14th, so I just missed the cut, but they told me I may be in luck next year in Chicago. In spite of the economy, attendance was fine and the number of IUG institutions was growing slightly. Jerry then spoke briefly about the state of the company, which is doing quite well. Disclaimer here - in past years I was told not to report on anything at IUG that would be of use to their competitors, so I will not talk about any new III products or services, but rather concentrate on things like CSS and Javascript that are not unique to Innovative.

The keynote speaker was Michael Johnson, from Pixar, who is in charge of the development of new motion picture projects for the wildly successful company.

He said that they have a similar problem to librarians – providing analog materials in a digital world. He quoted a friend: “Pain is temporary. Suck is forever.”

He came into the company later and didn’t know the reason for the name. The most likely is a blend of pixel and artist. They merged with Disney in the 1990s when they had 800 employees. Takes about 3 or four years to go from an initial idea to a finished film.

Storyboarding is the art of story re-boarding. Movies are recorded before the visuals are created. “Do something so we can change it:” the story reel. B&W prototype of the entire film. Notes will go out about problems with the film. Solutions re proposed in a timely manner. In the case of the Incredibles they eliminated a pilot character who was killed off early in the original script. “Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity.” (I prefer my own aphorism: "Reality is only a theory"). Most of the early visual work is done without computers.

“An animator is an actor with a pencil.” Walt Disney

Did 125,000 pictures in storyboarding Wall-E. Johnson worked out way to get storyboarders working in digital format – easier to share, format. “Passion will get you through.”

The first program I attended was one I planned to see even before I found out that my good friend Karen Perone was speaking. This was an introductory course in CSS, which I sorely needed. I'd been able to manipulate a few of our CSS files since coming to NYLS, but it was trial and error, with an emphasis on the latter. With her usual calm demeanor and great command of the facts, Karen helped me along quite a bit. We saw her later, and I promised her that I would treat her like I do Bob Duncan: If I've hit an absolute brick wall and can't get anywhere with a file, I'll ask her to help.

She suggested the following tools for improving CSS files:

Firebug add-in from SitePoint. Tools.sideburner.com/codeburner gives an add-in to Firebug. CSS Validator: Jigsaw.w3.org

The next day I went to a program about leveraging online content into an opac. The presenter had added a lot of the obvious free marc sites like Making of America, but the thing he was most proud of was getting links to things like NASA records working when he had no specific informaiton about the web site - just the title and SUDOC number. He took the time to hand check each URL in his spreadsheet before generating a marc record and adding it to the catalog.

Next was the single most useful program I've ever seen at an IUG: Richard Jackson from the Huntington Library speaking about Regular Expressions - a shorthand way to generate massive searches of a catalog in list creation. The classic example is a search of the records for anything that has a check digit of 4, but the 4th digit is not a blank or a quotation mark. I tried this when I got back to New York and found a few dozen records that were lost to a title search because they were mis-tagged. This method is used in other systems, but Jackson was the first to realize the true potential of this for Innovative systems. You can see more at

sciug.ucr.edu/docs/sciug2007_matches.pdf . Strongly recommended.