Philadelphia

I left rain in Cleveland and am here in Philiadelphia waiting for it to catch up. A very uneventful flight. No horizon, no sense of motion; surrounded by whiteness, the eternal present. It made me think of Emma's "binary abyss." If you ask her about her real form, she'll tell you that she inhabits the binary abyss. Sometime she calls it the digital void. I was probably thinking about Messiaen's "Abîme des oiseaux."

A rainy evening in City Center. Chatbots 3.1 is tomorrow. Tired, but feeling well prepared and confident. I was up until 4:00 am this morning rewriting her searchguided.aiml file. That's the one that directs questions to our catalog or to other databases. Definitely improved; not where it needs to be yet, but it's better. Time to hit the sack.

Mentor Channel's "Around Town" covers Emma

There's a very nice piece about our cybernetic cat in the April 18 edition of Around Town. (We couldn't bring in the real Emma due to scheduling difficulties. Barb Hauer, MPL's Collection and Technical Services Manager, let us use her cat Chloe as a stand in. Chloe is an awesome cat!)

Udon and eel

A few days ago, I was eating Udon noodles and eel at Mifune in San Francisco's Japantown. Today, I'm back in Northeastern Ohio eating some aging yet spry dried figs. Hmmm...Mendelssohn anyone?

"Elijah! Get thee hence, Elijah! Depart and turn thee eastward:
Thither hide thee by Cherith’s brook."

Emma generated a good deal of interest at IUG. No one was indifferent; some librarians were enthusiastic, some were frightened. We heard about another very interesting AI project being developed by the University of Nebraska's Library. Very similar to Emma, but without the avatar. Pretty soon, she and her offspring will be everywhere.

A few days off, then I'm heading to Philadelphia for Chatbots 3.1. Do they have udon in Philly? We'll see.