Bad books aren’t worth talking about. Good books, however, should stand up and be recognized. To that end, I invented a new thing that I’m going to act like I’ve been doing for ages: The Librarian Avengers Stomp of Approval. As you know, Librarian Avengers stomp around quite a bit,…

Last week I spoke at OSCON Ignite, the evening entertainment bit of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference and the Google Awards. Talks took the traditional Ignite format of five minutes, 20 slides. Slides auto-advance after 15 seconds, ready or not. Speakers were encouraged to address their personal brand of geekery….

Chuck works on motorcycles, and I’m a kitchen clean freak. We used to go through a shameful amount of paper towels. Like, buy in bulk, hate-the-earth, bulldoze-Costa-Rica amounts. Then my friend Skud gave me a great idea. I cut up a cheap jersey sheet I had kicking around (those things…

Librarian? Data junkie? Obsessive compulsive? Come to the Freebase hack day on July 11, 2009 here in SF. There’s food, drinks, an excellent network, plenty of powercords, and a nice room full of geeks to chat with. It’s a fun way to dive a bit deeper into making cool data…

A listing of grievances: Two stupid girls have a hair-tearing fight on the bus Liquid and curly fries fly everywhere The guy in front of me puts up his arm, so I do too The fighting high school girls roll out the door as it stops I continue listening to…

Oh hello Library of Congress. I didn’t see you there. Nice running into you like this! You know, I’ve always admired your electronic resources and open-minded collections policies. My undergraduate university and career have both profited from your generous grantmaking, and your reading room sure is fun to visit when…

Dear Librarian Avengers: Gus Andrews, nerd savant and mastermind behind The Media Show‘s MySpace-whoring puppet twins, writes the following: Hey, if your readers are looking for unusual work at a really neat and forward-thinking library, they should watch the Teachers College Library jobs listings over the next few months. Most…

A lovely fellow from The Austin Chronicle wrote to my fellow South by Southwest panelists asking for a definition of our enigmatically titled presentation. He wanted to know what a “Funologist” was, and rather than sadden him with the news that our moderator made it up, we all took a…