Monday, April 6, 2009

Verizon W.E.B. DuBois thing at library

The presentation was only about an hour long, but it was very interesting to hear Randolph W. Bromery speak. He told us how he went to Egypt and got the W.E.B. DuBois papers, and gave us a nice history lesson. I don't know much about W.E.B. DuBois, and Bromery is a good speaker. He got a standing ovation when he was done. Made me glad I went.

After he spoke MaryNell Morgan talked about her time using the papers to do her research and then she sang a song, and made the audience sing along.

After that we got the usual boring stuff. Verizon representative giving the check out, President of UMass speaking, and all the political stuff. I think the highlight was definitely Bromery's speech.

The reason for all this? Verizon gave the library $200,000 towards digitizing the Du Bois papers.

Now just to be clear, I still loathe Verizon. They told my husband and I that we would have high-speed internet at our house before we bought it, and then after we moved in we found out we couldn't get it. My husband is a computer geek. I cannot tell you how much having dial-up access at home really sucks. I just bought a new laptop, and it doesn't even have a modem built into it. I'm going to have to go out and get an external modem if I want to even use the dial-up access. If Verizon had told us the truth, that dial-up was not available for our home, we never would have bought it, and we'd be living somewhere else now.

Okay, gotta run for now...