In which I write about my evening as though it appeared in a social column: Librarians-turned-Software-Goons Sarah Dilling and Erica Olsen spent the evening discussing religion, the raising of rhetorically skilled children, and workplace mentoring this evening over mojitos at local bistro Luna Park. Rumor has it that the field…

San Francisco, my adopted home, offers a municipal compost service. They give you a big green wheeled garbage bin, and you can toss in everything from coffee grounds to wooden crates. It’s not gross, like home-composting, in that you don’t have a huge bag of festering goop in your house….

Tonight I walked home from the 24th and Mission BART stop. It was Valentine’s day, and the neighborhood celebrated by being outside. Stores stayed open late. Perfumed Latino guys pushed and egged each other on, nervously buying flowers for sweethearts and would-be sweethearts. The bodas civiles joints lubricated their trade…

I visited my local Bernal Heights library branch this afternoon, in search of a place to sit and read. It turned out to be one of the last weeks the building is open before it closes for an extensive renovation. On a kid-filled sunny spring Saturday, the current building gives…

2 AM awake Awake, asleep, and awake Foghorn on the Bay There’s no sky today in San Francisco, just fog. Outside, buses and dogs and flowers are memory-distant. I’ve never heard the Bay foghorn from my bed. I happened to wake at the right time. My dad was raised on…

Want $40? Got 90 minutes or so? Want to get paid to check out a 3-D virtual world? My employer and I are looking for local San Francisco people with NO experience using Second Life to help us evaluate some possible changes, tweaks, and/or new features to our software and…

The nerd social event of the season:

My work name is Erica Linden. Everyone who works for Second Life gets a Linden last name. This makes us weirdly popular in-world. There is a huge bouquet of stargazer lilies on my desk. Got ‘em for myself. Who needs boys? Not me. Nope. My mom phoned at 8am to…