Sunday babs and I  hopped on a plane and flew to Long Beach to attend the Third annual California Web Accessibility Conference.  A mellow flight, the hotel was a mere .5 miles from the runways.  We figured there was something up when the windows had 4 thick  panes of glass.  Still didn’t help.  In case you were curious, planes take off from Long Beach about every hour until about 11 and then start up early in the morning around 5.  The UPS planes are the biggest and the loudest.   The conference  itself was filled with 3 days of Accessibility  knowledge and it was great to talk to people that are going through the same difficulties and challenges we face.  The plane ride home was not as mellow and twice the plane dropped a few feet.   We got back home around midnight, and I am looking forward to a three day weekend to rest and sleep.

Woke up an hour before the alarm and listened to the howling wind, rain and strange noises from the roof.  Got ready for work, logged onto the laptop and noticed none of my coworkers were online. Unusual. Quick phone call verified power is out on campus. ( Our servers on are a backup generator so the websites remained up. )   20 minutes later coworker calls and tells me campus is closed and not to bother coming to work.  Update the home page and settle on the couch and watch the news.  John goes back to sleep.  I am just happy the power/cable/internet is still on.  

Its that time of year again. Finals and we are open for 24 hours for the entire week. It’s about 2:30 in the morning as I guard my post. So far its been pretty quiet, around 30 people all working diligently. Around 1 a guy from the cafe came over and annouced there was lots of free pastries and people ran out the door to grab the goodies. They all came back with large brown bags full of bagels.  Man, are they starving or what.  Not one offered me anything but the boy from the cafe came back in trying to drop off more bagels.  He saw my lack of anything and brought me a yummy hot chocolate.  How sweet.

This is the last night of the 24 hours and usually we just get the people who have waited till the very last second and often they have a look of desperation.  Not so much this year, evryone seems calm and collected.  In fact very little printing is being done and even less conversation. 

One guy came in about 30 minutes ago and asked where the bathroom was, since they are in the hallway and you need to pass them to get to the second floor I made the educated guess this is his first time in the library.  On the last day of finals … at 2 in the morning.    Ahh been there!

I don’t hear much studying going on, in fact I hear a lot of plans for the party tomorrow, the logistics of transportation and who will be bringing the booze. A cute attempt at flirtation “You know I dumped the tall boyfriend … are you going to be at the party? ” and as each person leaves, there is an  almost scream as the doors open and they are hit by the intense and unpleasant cold.  It is very very cold.

So I get this call from a student this afternoon. She had signed up for the photoshop 1 workshop I am doing next week. But she had forgotten to ask about the fees. When I said it was free to all students, staff and faculty there was this almost uncomfortable silence. Then in a loud voice:

Oh my god, that is awesome!

We talked about the class and what she is looking forward to learning. It was a really good conversation and reminded me just why we do this.

<Insert repeated comment of busy-ness with new added flavour of tired>

Got a new website up at work. Wheeee! So far really good responses. Makes me happy! Working on the Library catalog right now. That is a bit more challenging. But there is just so much I can do in one day before I take a few days off to prepare for the Big Event.

As I may have mentioned (a lot) accessibility (web, instruction and more!) is a big project at work. I am on the ATI ( Accessibility Technology Initiative) listserv and one person wrote about a project. He has been evaluating many California Education websites in the past year and 1/2. He looked both the “main” campus web page, the “library” web page, and a few miscellaneous pages at approximately 375 higher education institutions in California that offer at least a AA degree.

It is rare, but possible, to to create a main web page with zero Section 508, zero HTML, and zero CSS errors. Six campuses have managed to do it. Similarly, five of the libraries managed to do it. Of the two sets of “zero-defect” web pages, there was only one campus that had managed to do both (yes, it is a CSU campus).

Why yes that was Sonoma! Wooo! This made me very very happy.