Jessamyn tagged me with the (seemingly totally unavoidable) “5 things you don’t know about me” meme. I really hate bloggy, email-y, chain-letter-y things… but who can say no to Jessamyn? So, with no further delay:

1. I am familiar with more than half the seasons of the Real World, though I’m not watching The Real World: Denver (this season) because I don’t have MTV any more. I have also had other guilty addictions to reality TV, although currently there’s only Wife Swap. (Watch it. It’s about developing understanding across classes and cultures. Or something. Really.)
2. Someday, I want to design and build my own house. Other things I would like to build: a boat. A big wooden one, with sails.
3. I have never broken a bone. (None of mine, and no one else’s either. Except turkey wishbones at Thanksgiving.)
4. I sometimes burst into song when I’m home alone. Loudly, and with feeling. This time of year, mostly Bing Crosby tunes. The cat thinks I’m a little nuts, but I don’t mind.
5. If I had been a girl, my parents were going to name me Amanda.

I hate to pass this on, but I’m sure if I don’t a tree will fall on my car or I will be forced to surrender my firstborn child to a mysterious dwarf. Or something. So, in honor of Time magazine’s person of the year, I tag… YOU. Enjoy.

I wrote an article in the current Library Journal on the development of the open-source Evergreen ILS. It makes an interesting case study for the development of a large and complicated piece of software from within a library consortium, and the resulting ILS and OPAC is pretty exciting! (Disclaimer: I was an intern on the project while I was in library school, so I’m biased.)

You can also find the article in the print issue.

Google is beta-ing a patent search. Cool.

They’ve used the same technologies as Google Book Search on the historical database of patents, so you get full-text searching all the way back to the first US patents in 1790. The USPTO database has offered the images for some time, but only has full-text searching to 1976.

This site used to be running on a machine at my house (which was quite constructive for learning how to administer Apache, but not so convenient during power outages). Because my ISP blocked outgoing port 80 for home accounts, I had to go through some contortions and there was an ugly “dystmesis.com:8081″ in my URLs. I’ve moved the site over to the hosting company that I use for other web stuff (the wonderful TextDrive), and it now features wonderfully clean “dystmesis.net” URLs, which are easier to remember and also play nicer with Technorati and other search engines and services. Through the magic of mod_rewrite, all the old URLs should still work, however.