Road trip!

My sister flew in from Texas this past week. We had a blast hanging out together! We went to Galena, Illinois for a few days. It's a picturesque little town that sits along a river. We got in just as the epic rain of the century hit: 13 inches in 12 hours! While the floodgates were shut to protect the downtown area, a lot of shops and homes still took in water. The next day, most shops were closed, phone lines were down, and the internet was out. Poor Galena! Some areas seemed to be under ten feet of water. The water did recede pretty quickly, though, and many shops were re-opened the following day.

I attended an ALA TechSource Workshop at a kind-of-nearby Culver's, which seemed to be the only place with internet. The workshop was great! It was "Delivering Innovative Mobile Services through Your Library" with my former professor Meredith Farkas. She shared a lot of great ideas, and I was happy to learn that my library is generally on-track with virtual reference services. I particularly enjoyed hearing what she had to say about location-aware technology and augmented reality, which are two topics that really fascinate me. I hope to write about this soon.

On a vaguely related note, we went out for brunch for my sister's birthday this morning. The ketchup bottle had a QR code on it! Even more surprisingly, my dad knew what it was!