Use it or lose it

In New Hampshire, at the end of the calendar year any unused public library allocations are supposed to go back to the city, town, or other taxing authority from whence they came. (In reality, I don't think they actually seize your checking account, but ...) Because our director position was vacant for nearly 6 months, we have some money left over, so the end of year spending spree is on. Today I ordered a video camera and all the fixins' (spare SDHC cards, camera bag, 72" tripod, USB adapter for the SD cards), and a blu-ray DVD player. I've already bought a Windows application called ConvertXtoDVD, which converts from many video formats (the X in the name) to a format suitable for burning to a video DVD that the typical home DVD player will recognize. I'm also buying a still camera, but there are so many choices in the $200 range that I will probably just go to Staples and Target and see what's on sale.

The new director is getting quotes to set me up with a real workbench down in the basement, complete with bench-level power outlets and additional network drops. (Right now there is only one network drop. Yeah. And that's for the OPAC server.) And he's going to get some quotes to double the number of network drops all over the building. Ten years ago I guess it must have seemed perfectly adequate to have two network drops in the staff room, two at the circ desk, one at the children's desk, a couple for OPACs, and a scattering of singletons in the public areas. Sort of like the way Intel thought that no one would ever need more than 640K of address space.

I've also gotten a go-ahead to start getting quotes for a website re-design, but I don't see how that can happen before December 31st. And we're going to do something for the Youth Computer Room; I don't have a dollar amount for that yet, but I'd like to see what we can do with Linux and our existing equipment, with help from a company like Userful.

Good times!