Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

So it's hard to say I am currently admiring a woman who left computer science, and it's certainly not Ada Lovelace Day material, but let me flail for a minute.

So to start with, quoting allen:

Went to see viennateng(with highceilings opening) show tonight. I went with deborah and cnoocy. cthulhia showed up a few minutes after we did and sat behind us. ursamajor we met up with at the merch table between sets. momijizukamori found us after the show and walked back to the T with us.

The concert was excellent, too, in addition to the impromptu meet-up.

If it's not clear, all of those meetups were unplanned and coincidental. I also ran into M, a friend from high school.

Anyway, Vienna Teng. She got a BS in Computer Science at Stanford in 2000, and worked as a programmer for two years. Then career shift, boom, music, and that was her career for the next 8 years - and then she turned around and went back to grad school (dual Masters, MBA and Environmental Studies). And now she's making music again.

It's just, man. I'm currently working on my third completely unrelated Masters. (Library Science can be related to both Computer Science and Children's Literature, but I'm not interested in the overlaps, except inasmuch as I'm a programmer as a librarian and archivist.) And looking at how Vienna Teng has happily decided she can be a musician along with her other skills and studies, reminds me that this can be a successful way to be, rather than just undecided flailing.

And her music is freaking gorgeous.

In honor of Defective by Design's Day against DRM, I'd like to take a moment to provide free advertising for EMusic. It's a subscription-based service with no commitment (and an available free trial). Depending on the subscription purchased songs cost anywhere from $.22 to $.25/song, and they are all DRM-free MP3s which the company trusts you to use legally. The songs are almost entirely independent label -- those songs which you really don't hear about because their labels can't afford to buy huge displays at the front of the record store. Because they are so inexpensive (and already paid for, given the subscription mechanism) I've purchased a lot of songs from tiny bands I never would have heard of otherwise, and have expanded my music choices a fair amount. And it's all DRM-free!

(See more DRM-free stores here.)

Remember, the giftgiving season is coming, and a lot of the latest gadgets this year contain digital rights management capabilities which severely limit your abilities to use the content you have legally purchased in ways which are completely legal under current United States law. If you buy a DRM-enabled song from iTunes, you are technologically prevented from using that track in all the ways which are legal for you to do so. Think about digital rights management when you are making holiday purchases, or when you are purchasing electronic book content for your library. Libraries are very concerned with making sure that the rights of license holders are protected, but the license holders are going out of their way to make it difficult for libraries to enable even legal uses.)