shadowspar

I really wish all the story headlines, tweets, etc, floating around about how the administration at UofT and Western knuckled under to Access Copyright could be rewritten from

Canadian Universities Submit to Completely Dumbass Copyright Agreement

to

Two Canadian Universities Submit to Completely Dumbass Copyright Agreement

We are not all cowardly dumbasses, and in fact, I would venture to say that the majority of us are quite wroth with the doubtless small number of administrators who approved this deal at a small number of admittedly major Canadian universities.

Decent lesson today despite not having had much of a chance to practice last week -- spouse and one child elected to get sick over the weekend, so taking care of them trumped viola practice. (The nerve!)

Continuing to work on basic coordination stuff (lh fingers always above the fingerboard -- don't let the third and fourth fingers sneak underneath; don't pull fingers far away from the fingerboard even when they come off the strings), cleanliness of bowing / purity of tone (good contact, adequate pressure, using enough bow), and timing (resisting the urge to cut half notes short; using large swaths of bow and bowing more quickly for quarter notes and more slowly for half notes).

My intonation is still far from perfect, but is definitely getting better. It's still shocking that every now and again, I can put my fingers down on the fingerboard without even looking at them and have notes come out in tune! It's pretty wild.

My supervisor keeps musing about possibly taking up the violin. I'm trying to encourage this, since two of our staff have children who play violin and cello, respectively, and that would give us a string quartet. Maybe we could serenade the patrons from the mezzanine of the library; I'm sure that would go over well. =)

While the best improvement is probably not having any, Esther Derby's piece on improving meetings is very constructive and helpful.

Sometimes, stronger measures are called for, though. A favourite from a former workplace was the sound clips that made the rounds to be played on conference calls -- most notably, the one that'd be heard whenever discussion got sidetracked onto stuff that should really be dealt with outside the meeting ("♪♬ Rrrrraat Hoooooole! ♫𝅘𝅥𝅯")

Personally, I'd like to see meetings required to use Parliamentary rules of order and address. It'd reemphasize what a waste of time the meeting is repeatedly throughout its duration; possibly best of all, anyone can move to end the meeting and if a simple majority agrees -- done! Besides, wouldn't your meetings be more tolerable if they were punctuated by bits like "Mme Speaker, I rise on a point of privilege!" and "The Hon. Leader of the Database Team has the floor"? =)