Librarian Avengers

I spent a few minutes on my walk to work this morning watching a muskrat. Hunched under the footbridge uprooting plants, he didn’t mind as I clopped along in my optimistically-chosen high heels.

He was intent on his business, wringing small hands around in the mud, looking for the muskrat version of breakfast, a bagel, coffee.

In honor of the first Water Rat of Spring, here’s an excerpt from The Wind in the Willows:

When they got home, the Rat made a bright fire in the parlor, and planted the Mole in an arm-chair in front of it, having fetched down a dressing-gown and slippers for him, and told him river stories till supper-time.

about herons, and how particular they were whom they spoke to

Very thrilling stories they were, too, to an earth-dwelling animal like Mole. Stories about weirs, and sudden floods, and leaping pike; and about herons, and how particular they were whom they spoke to; and about adventures down drains, and night-fishings with Otter, or excursions far afield with Badger.

he New York Review of Books contains reviews written at great length by people who wish they had written the book in question and are slightly bitter about it.

easons to move here:

• Sunday Brunch with friends and mimosas
• Spring in the park
• Grocery delivery
• Street food
• Skiball in bars
• Chill city dogs

Got me a portfolio. It’s just screenshots right now. I’ll continue working on it tonight.
Suggestions welcome. I haven’t even checked it out on non-OS X/Firefox machines yet…

ou were born in the year of the Dragon, during the month of the Dragon. You are a Double Dragon. Thus, your life will be like a terrible Allisya Milano film vehicle: badly written and full of kung-fu.

Your birthday today was a symbolic rebirth. The snow falling on the Northeastern states was a baptism. You will awaken tomorrow and find that your apartment has been cleaned, you’ve learned Icelandic, and you can sing Etta James without cracking the final key-change.

A month has passed, Aries, since you re-framed your life. As the weeks go by and your brain reboots, put your trust in the words of Walter.

This is not ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.

Plover and I in our new home

lyse Sewell came in second place on America’s Next Top Model. I know this because I spent two solid days watching it on YouTube this winter while battling the flu.

Why should you care about Elyse Sewell? Well, she’s funny, she has a livejournal, she’s smart as hell, and she visits libraries for fun. Libraries like the François Mitterrand Library.

Enjoy, and remember: Librarians can be hot and models can be smart.

And vice versa, probably. But we don’t talk about that here.

ocking down your in-home wireless network is like paying the cable company to take your neighbor’s money.

It’s to everyone’s advantage to fill their neighborhood with wireless access. It should be a municipal service. We benefit as a community when a resource is widely available. The tragedy of the Commons only applies when the shared commons is a limited resource.

The only people who don’t benefit from open community networks are companies who profit from the marketing-created illusion that bandwidth is rare, precious, and costly.

Do you scream at your neighbors: “get your OWN cell phone network and stop using mine!”

Do you call the cops when someone takes a shower using YOUR aquifer?

Does your radio’s signal belong to you?

Remember when it was illegal to make a free long-distance call? Were we going to run out of phonelines? Or was it because, for awhile, “long-distance calling” was the only established business model available to consumers, and eventually legislation built up to protect the market?

Once cellphones created a different profit model, did free long-distance calling stop being “wrong”?

“Ownership” of a wireless network connection is marketing, not reality.

Nobody is going to break into your computer. Nobody cares about capturing your keystrokes. There are better ways to secure your computer than hiding inside a little ComCast/TimeWarner-generated moat and trembling in fear of imaginary baddies who want to eat your bandwith.

Bandwidth is not a limited resource. You are not gonna run out of Internet.
Do you know anyone who has ever run out of Internet? No.

Get a firewall and quit whining.

spent five fun-filled hours waiting for the cable guy to show up and give me Internet this afternoon. The next-door neighbor figured out that I’ve been freeloading her wireless, and locked down her router.

Curse you bittorrent! Curse your deadly allure and telling bandwidth consumption!