Daily Post #10

Worked from home. Reinstalled solr in a directory that isn’t /tmp, figured out how to do mod_proxy and mod_rewrite so that both GET and POST requests redirect happily. Check it out @ http://archives.library.wcsu.edu/arclight/caoSearch/ ! It’s still got some kinks to work out, but it’s getting there. We’re really happy we were able to copy the index from the old/faulty installation of solr to the new one. It took a long time to index the 7000+ EAD files the first time and we weren’t thrilled at the prospect of doing it again.

I also vetted the “download an EAD file and edit it” assignment for Thursday’s class. It was straightforward. We’re probably going to a more asynchronous format — students’ lives are are more complicated nowadays and they might not be able to make a set class time.

In personal life, I finished off the leftover macaroni and cheese. I’m looking into getting cheese powder to make my own sauce–it might be more customizable than off-the-shelf mac&cheese. It might also be cheaper.

I had 3 hazelnut m&ms and one cherry cordial kiss. They’re very tasty, but not worth a trip to the store, so I should make them last.

Elvis is still really into the feather flirt pole. I eventually put it away slightly out of his reach and he huffed and whined until he figured out how to get to it.

Chris bought me a copy of Tabletop Simulator and we tested out playing Hanabi over the network. It went pretty well.

I’ve been listening to the Saga Thing podcast. I just finished the Egil’s Saga episodes, so I’m sadly nearly caught up.

Healthwise, I feel fine. Still a little congested. *jazz hands*. I coughed once today.

Fairfield County has 546 laboratory-confirmed cases. Danbury itself has 63.

Side project! A Filk Archive

A friend of a friend, Harold Stein, was very interested in filk (science fiction folk) music. He recorded filkers at conventions, he collected filk songbooks, he produced CDs. He amassed a large collection of filk recordings, filk songs, and filk-related objects. Harold sadly died in 2018 of cancer.

Our mutual friend, Merav Hoffman, asked me for help describing this collection to make it more accessible to the wider filk community. It’s a large collection–at least 52 boxes of paper, CDs, hard drive. So far, Merav and I have gone through and listed almost all of the paper items, in a Google spreadsheet. I’ve started putting together an EAD2 finding aid, which I’m using as an excuse to set up an Arclight server. (Arclight is a newish archival discover tool based on Blacklight.) So far, half the objects in the spreadsheet are in the EAD2, but the EAD2 is inelegant and needs cleaning up, since it’s mostly made through spaghetti Google Sheets concatenation code and hope.

Please see Merav’s website at http://filk.meravhoffman.com/ for more information.