It's official, I'm headed to De Lange...

I am officially paid up and registered for the De Lange conference at Rice U, and have been approved the necessary vacation time from work....woohooo this is gonna be fun. I need the break from work anyway and I'm just gettin' over being sick as a dawg the past few days.

I'm not trendy enough to be "blogging live" from the conference...yes, I have a laptop, but no, I won't be toting it along with me all day. I gotta walk all the way from Rice Stadium free parking, anyway...ain't draggin' that laptop along. Besides, my dad enjoys using it too much to keep up with CSPAN, CNN, and the latest dreadful MSM stuff of the day. He gets more use out of it than I ever would...I'm proud of my old man for that. He used to not go near my laptop with a 10-foot pole, but he just got too frustrated with his antiquated desktop unit, so he asked if he could maybe use my laptop in the house, and I said "sure".

Me, I thought I'd get more use out of it than I ultimately did when I first got it. But I just found I had to go out of my way to bring it to a Cafe or other wireless access point, I felt paranoid about leaving my laptop in my car (so I never did), and I found that I really hate typing on Laptop style keyboards...and do so only when I have to. I used it some down in Galveston, because it was also faster than MY cheap-ass desktop down there...plus I had an odd situation once where a couple of Anime DVDs I was trying to watch would NOT play properly on my PS2 machine (whose DVD functionality is about the ONLY reason I gave up my PSX, by the way)...anyway, I loaded the recalcitrant DVDs onto my laptop and viola, they played like a charm. The Anime was Gunslinger Girl , if any of you were curious, by the way. Henrietta rules! Triella's pretty kick-a, too.

Houston Public Library actually holds pretty decent Anime series in their YA Audiovisual collection at the central library. They got me hooked on Anime after a long hiatus...

As much as a printed books fanatic as I am, I've always harbored a secret desire to be an AV librarian, too. I used to positively LOVE browsing the AV library at UNT, while I was still in Library school...and the best thing was, graduate students (and I was one at the time) had checkout privileges for DVDs and VHS tapes just like professors did (for undergrads, the AV materials were in-library-use only)...the UNT A.V. library had some really unique/weird documentaries, artsy films, etc. It was awesome. I'd love to do collection development for an AV library, too. There's lots of very intelligently done, non-commercial AV material out there that will NEVER grace the shelves of BLOCKBUSTER or HOLLYWOOD VIDEO, but *ought* to be collected and preserved by Libraries great and small. Libraries that pander to popular tastes in AV selection are really doing everyone a disservice in the end. It gives the privatizers more ammo to go after libraries, ticks off the big vid chains for cutting into their business, etc.
Artistically outstanding but not-commercially-viable should be our guideposts to selection in my semi-professional, underemployed opinion.