thursday i wanted to do something a little “cincinnati christmas”. so some friends of mine and i decided to meet downtown and hit the cg&e model train exhibit. cg&e’s been doing this for many years now and it’s a true cincinnati christmas tradition. it’s not a super spectacular exhibit, but it’s still fun (it stays basically the same every year) and its enjoyable to watch the kids fascinated by the trains.
i was a big model train freak as a kid – i was into almost anything electrical or mechanical. but trains always had a sense of nostalgia with them. my mom and dad had bought me and my brother a lionel train set when we were real little, then sold it to buy ‘ho’ scale stuff that was the hot item – they are shooting themselves for such an act ’cause the lionel would be worth quite a lot nowadays. i think i still have the old lionel transforer – but it might have gotten pitched along the way…
anyway… the real discovery, well re-discovery, came after leaving the train exhibit. i parted ways with my friends and headed to the main branch of the cincinnati library.
to back track a bit…
i use to go the main library all the time. in the ’80s, i would pour over the computer and electronics books. i know i missed the main era of hardware hacking of the ’70s, but i was still a curious kid and loved the books tab publishing put out – little op-amp circuits, flashing leds, short wave radio, logic counters, flip-flops, music synthesis boards… and then progressed into more programming areas, assembly, c… i didn’t understand it all, but i loved it!
i lost part of that spirit in the latter high school years – well maybe not lost it, but redirected it into music. so the libary became a great place to get new/obscure/classical/experimental cds that i could sonically devour. (the green township branch replaced the main branch when they got cds since it was closer to my parents where i was still living at the time.) everything from john cage and philip glass, to coltrane and miles, to billie holiday and ella, to mozart and sibelius. even checked out some old lps, like cedona – which was a totally cool “meditation jazz thing” as i wrote on the cassette dub i made.
then i just stopped going. don’t know why.
about a year ago or so i decided to renew my card – and return a few cds that i never bothered to return before. it had been so long since going… like ten years, maybe more… that i wasn’t in the library’s computer system anymore – so i was able to return the cds without paying an astronomical fee! (although, i think they only charge up to the face value of the item.) having the card now, i went every two weeks to return and checkout cds – for a couple months anyway.
then i stopped again. don’t know why.
if you’ve been reading my blog, you know i’ve had a resurgence in reading over the past two years. and my thirst for reading material has grown, although my checking account has shrunk. so you can see the growing interest in the library. (there’s more to it as well… i’ve become addicted to learning… and to the history channel, learning channel, discovery channel, pbs, npr, etc…)
if you’ve read this much, you’re probably saying, “pat, get to the point!” ok…
the library is awesome! i spent three and a half hours there thursday. and i really didn’t look at cds – i wanted books.
of course i first went to the computer books – not great, but a nice selection. i wouldn’t go there for a programming book per se, but i did find some great history type books – like one on xerox parc, but i’ll save that for next time. i did get just for fun (the story of an accidental revolutionary) by linus torvalds and david diamond. (linux rules! i’m almost done with the book.)
i also checked out some of the books on the gospel of thomas and other apocryphal writings. i’m not a religious freak, but religion, archeology and the bit of mystery of it all fascinate me – i am on a sort of quest of my own for meaning/religion/whatever. i was sparked to look into the writings of thomas from the movie stigmata, which although somewhat hokey, i enjoyed.
my final mission was to look for the book the codebreakers by kahn. i put this on my list after reading crypto by levy. i first went to the history section – i was trying to find it without refering to the card catalog to see how much i remembered. within a few minutes i was perusing the vast WWII shelves and a few seconds later hit the spy and crypto section. wow! tons of books to put on my list! found battle of wits which looks quite interesting, especially if you’ve read cryptonomicon.
but alas, no codebreakers. so off to the card catalog i go…
well, of course it’s not really a “card” catalog anymore… it’s all online in the “cinch” system. i was impressed that the library had a plethora of machines to access cinch and even access to the web was provided. you can use cinch as much as you want, but web access is limited to 90 minutes after you enter your library card number and pin. it’s a bit slow – they’re using wyse winterms running windows ce and citrix clients – but pretty cool for a basically free service. unfortunately there were a lot of “patrons” playing yahoo’s online games like pool and such, but there were still many terminals available.
so it was a “cinch” to find the codebreakers. for some reason, it wasn’t in the history section, but in government and business. go figure… since the book is old – well 1967 isn’t too old to me – it was down in “storage”, but five minutes later i was holding it my hands. it’s a monster of like a thousand pages or so. i was happy.
ok, maybe i got a little to excited about my journey back to the library…
side note: i’d like to see this “storage” part of the library. i can only imagine what it looks like. i was in a storage section of one of the university of cincinnati’s libraries one time – it was cool, but kinda spooky.
[wow... this has got to be my longest post ever!]