I can't remember if the library has a "renew online" feature. I checked at the time, but the database was down. The database is almost always down for me when the library is closed. I assumed this was by design until I mentioned it to an employee there. They were all concerned and wanted to take my information and call me back with a solution, but I couldn't deal with it that day.
Which is to say that I couldn't deal with some tech person calling to give me some lame solution about how I needed to flush my cache or restart my computer or some other incredibly generic and almost always inapplicable solution that is always made all the more maddening when the person is taking an authoritative tone and you want to tell them that you do computer stuff for a living, except you know how lame that sounds because "computer stuff" can mean just about anything, and we all know that a person who can do XYZ on the computer cannot necessarily do ABC, even if they won a Nobel Prize for XYZ and any teenager with a boring Saturday night can do ABC.
We need a sniglet for "look, I have very strong common Internet usage skills, and I know that rebooting my computer is not going to solve a very specific and long-running problem of almost never being able to access your card catalog and my user info when the physical library is closed, even as I can access all other sites on the Web, including pornographic blogs with political secrets from China."
Not that I let it get to the point where anyone could offer me bad advice, so the unfairness remains in my court.
And, the library is closed right now, but the database is available, so chalk one up for their clever IT staff, always reading my mental blogs and making adjustments to my exo-crabbysphere before I can copy, paste, publish.
I prattle on about my little thoughts because... well, because it's my blog (damnit), but also because I have so little to say about Prey by Michael Crichton. Check out the way I'm not even bothering to Amazink it. (If you think that will catch on as a verb for "Amazon link," I will accept royalties via PayPal until its inclusion in the OED.)
I read Crichton for the problem-solving. That's why The Great Train Robbery is my favourite book by him and Timeline (plot holes! copouts!) is not. Prey is better than Timeline. It may be better than Disclosure. I can't remember if it's better than Airframe. Let this be your guide.
Now that I'm older, wiser, and more likely to over-scrutinize, I really must go back and see if most Crichton novels revolve around amazingly heartless conspiracies imposed by upper management upon slightly-maverick brilliant people.
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