Librarian Avengers

Salon has obtained an internal 117-page draft proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The document proposes to:

“limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.”

Read more here. I guarantee the final draft will be titled “Helping Endangered Species Act” or something similarly compelling. The “Saving Wolves Act” would be nice. Or how about the “Freedom for Endangered Species From Government Interference Act”?

’m in a parking lot in Owego, NY (an actual place!) borrowing bandwidth from an anonymous linksys router. Upstate connectivity sucks. There’s a German Shepherd dog asleep in the back seat. Her name is Fiona. I borrowed her for the trip. I just bought this car. One problem solved.

Don’t know if you’ve heard, but a version of Katamari is coming out for the Wii. Hope you aren’t doing anything this summer.

I’m reading Guns Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years. It gives an excellent overview of the evolution and intersection of human cultures. I’m not far into it, but it’s pretty captivating so far, like taking an anthropology course from Oliver Sacks.

Miles to go before I sleep. Woof to everyone.

oday was big and full. I’m tired, so here’s a list for you. Bullet points are less intimidating.

• I crashed our application today by accidentally deploying to Production rather than my localhost. Oops. But then I fixed it and felt all cool with my mad Linux skillz.
• I’m staying out at my friend’s farm, and this morning I woke up to giggling girls downstairs, local organic bacon and fresh bread, fresh carrot/ginger juice, friendly German shepherd dogs, showtunes, and the nicest snowy upstate NY vista you could hope for.
• Within 12 hours, I asked for and got $5000 from my bank for a new car. Frightening.
• I helped my friend’s daughter watch Sesame Street.
• I helped my employer research how to sell animal sounds for Second Life folks. Advice welcome.
• I drove out to Amish country in a veggie oil-burning truck and saw a tractor museum while helping my friends pick up a forklift that they bought on Ebay.
• We got pulled over for speeding, but were let go because the cop liked the veggie oil truck.
• I waved at Amish children playing in the street with a Shetland pony cart.
• I watched the sun set behind as a mile-long V of migrating geese flew overhead.
• My cow-orkers grilled outside at lunch for the first time. Someone brought venison. Fun was had.
• The pond outside my work window froze last night, and dozens of geese spent the day sliding on the ice with huge leathery feet.
• I received a kind text message.
• I set up my new laptop.
• I helped make a timeline for an NSDL grant.
• I patronized a 4-H bake sale and volunteered to do a beekeeping talk.
• I learned that rolling back to a previous version in Subversion is a pain.
• I stopped taking pain meds and the Frankensteinian curved laceration on my right shoulder has proven to be no trouble at all.

Goodnight. More adventures tomorrow as I travel to Pennsylvania to pick up a car and my motorcycle learners permit.

Stay tuned.

pring birds are yelling from snowy trees this morning. It’s spring, despite wind, snow, roaring wood stove, and other evidence to the contrary. I’m taking today off of work. I’ve got nine stitches. I can do whatever I want.

I finished re-reading Microserfs by Douglas Copeland yesterday. This book was important to me at a formulative time. It helped convince me it was cool to be a nerd. It introduced other tech-inclined women to my humanities-girdled world. It drew a model of unashamed geekery, separate and outside of a traditionally-female need for perfection and image. It was pretty liberating.

An excerpt:

Susan is 26 and works in Mac Applications. If Susan were a Jeopardy! contestant, her dream board would be:

* 680X0 assembly language
* Cats
* Early ’80s haircut bands
* “My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group”
* License plate slogans of America
* Plot lines from The Monkees
* The death of IBM

Susan’s an IBM brat and hates that company with a passion. She credits it with ruining her youth by transferring her family eight times before she graduated from high school - and the punch line is that the company gave her father the boot last year during a wave of restructuring. So nothing too evil can happen to IBM in her eyes.
…
Susan’s a real coding machine. But her abilities are totally wasted reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8.

Thanks for your kind comments last night during my Dark Night of the Beer. Friendly words were unexpected and wonderful. I often forget that there are people out there. Hello imaginary people. It’s as though my fictional heroes (Elizabeth Bennet! Harriet The Spy! Meg from Wrinkle in Time!) suddenly started interacting.

Off to haul wood one-armed and scour Craigslist for cars. What would your Dream Jeopardy! categories be?

runken blogging is ALWAYS a good idea.
I had minor surgery today, removing a non-dangerous-kind tumor from my shoulder. So, anesthetics. And beer, which also helps.

Want to lose a pound? There’s no faster way.

I’m taking tomorrow off work to search for a car and get my shit together. It’s been one hell of a week. Hell being the operative word.

Here’s some good stuff:

• new laptop. macbook duo 2gig ram. eat my processing dirt.
• friends.
• tattoo. I’m gonna have one hell of a scar. Researching scar-covering tats is keeping me entertained. There are some wicked literary tattoos out there.
• drunk. did I mention drunk?

Love ye all. Thanks for support.
xoxo
Ericalibrarydork

One more blizzard. One last blizzard. There have been storms since I returned, in one form or another. The snow is a fact. The storm is a fact.

Un-ignorable when you need to drive/shovel/haul wood.

By blizzard, I mean: Sideways snow total-white zero-detail pixelation of horizon, foreground, sky, and earth.

By shovel, I mean: The taller-than-me pile of shoveled/plowed effluent framing the driveway.

By haul wood, I mean: To keep the house warm.

By drive, I mean: My sexy rental car. To replace the Nissan I slid into a guardrail during the LAST blizzard.

I’m going to plunge into the snow for a few hours, shovel it into submission, and face the evening. Wish me luck.

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation, can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

Unknown Pema Chodron (1936 - ) western Buddhist nun (thanks Dwayne!)

pple has introduced a new product. I think you’ll like it. The IRack.

just spoke with a gentleman who helps run Second Life, and he informed me that there are, like, a billion librarians on SL, who own a string of islands and facilitate information exchange. Can anyone confirm this?

Are we cool or what?

Guy at mike: In the words of Walt Whitman, do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Guy next to me (stage whispers): Gay.

It’s deconstruct-jokes-day here at Librarian Avengers.

Walt Whitman’s status as an historical gay icon is key to this comment. His poetry is universal, but a Whitman reference in a different context is sometimes used to covertly signal homosexuality, a la “are you a friend of Dorothy?” The humor comes from the incongruity of the unfortunate speaker quoting Whitman in the context of a professional discussion, and having his comment sarcastically interpreted as a self-referential proclamation of his sexuality.

A similar situation occurred during the 2006 New York gubernatorial debates at Cornell University. Republican candidate John Faso inadvertently caused laughs among the student-aged crowd when he declared that he did not want to “force gay marriage down the throats” of New Yorkers.