Librarian Avengers

If you are feeling early-adopter-y, you can hop over to mozilla.org and download the new Firefox 3 Beta build. It’s faster, slicker, and has OMG HOT new UI tools that should make your day better.

Five Things I love about Firefox 3:

1. Because this is a beta version, most of my extensions and themes don’t work in F3…and I don’t miss ‘em. I’ve been using it all day and haven’t had a single withdrawal symptom.
2. Fast. Hella fast. Hecka fast. So damn fast. The memory management of Firefox 3 is slick. It caches less, stores image data more efficiently, and plugs memory leaks from extensions before they happen. This all comes from of the kind of nerdy nerdy attention to detail that was a feature of pre-Moore’s law programming, when bits were carefully placed like bricks in an arch. Hooray for OCD programming!
3. Oh Bookmarks! Ye annoy me less! You are now a one-click thing on the navigation bar, with a cute star icon instead of a time-eating top menu monster.
4. Full Page Zoom. If you don’t like squinting, download this browser. Hitting Ctrl + makes EVERYTHING get bigger, including images. This feature eliminates the “Big Text Stomps Nice Layout” problem we saw in earlier versions.
5. Tab quickmenu. Stop worrying about all those tabs stacking up in your window. You can get at them from a dropdown in the corner. No fuss. There’s more room for page titles too, so you don’t have to find the tab you want using only the first ten characters.

With the recent news of Yahoo’s potential acquisition by vile Microsoft and its prior layoff of 1000 hardworking geeks, there was a bit of an air of piracy in the office last week.

Linden Lab is going into another round of recruitment, focusing on web developers, QA folk, and other nerdy types. If any web developers out there (you, yes, YOU Joy!) want to work in a more stable, hilarious, and weird environment, you might want to fill out an application to work at Second Life. Free beer, the Love Machine, and a frightening amount of RockBand can all be yours!

Linden seems to be where the socially-developed nerds go to work. There’s a much larger % of women, extroverts, parents, and charmers working at Linden than is considered industry standard. Which means you tend to not find yourself in conversations with dudes who can’t make eye contact with a girl, or folks who get REALLY EMOTIONAL about their code.

It’s good to be a god, too, even if it’s only in-world. You can read more about our wickedcool office culture in the Tao of Linden.

he nerd social event of the season:

I have an iPod shuffle that I use for running, trains, dull waits, and creep avoidance.

I misplaced the charger a few weeks ago and missed it terribly. The solution? This thing. It plugs into your shuffle on one end, and into a USB port on the other.

I like it better than the original charger because it takes up zero room and since it was $5, I don’t feel bad about just tossing it in my bag. It’s an older USB standard, so it’s slower, fyi. Still. Five bucks. Come on.

NYC game developers Large Animal Games have created a downloadable PC video game based on bird sounds and expertise provided by the Macaulay Library at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology.

Which is where I work.

The game is called Snapshot Adventures. It was recently was acquired by Yahoo! games, which is a great for both the Lab and for environmental education, since part of the money it earns will directly fund our ecology work.

You can play it for free here.

1. Queen Bees are expensive
2. It’s damned difficult to find a cat-sitter in Ithaca
3. Johnathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love me Yet is, so far, an absolutely perfect book
4. Tom Phillips is an artist who did a really great book painting featuring fictional books with titles stolen from Shakespeare
5. Roccapulco is a salsa club in San Francisco. I’m going next week with my friend Jake
6. The Lunch Meeting is the gold standard for interviews at eBay

Oldschool Metadata

7. You can randomly teleport somewhere in Second Life and end up getting juggled by a large pink elephant
8. Hotels in San Francisco are way cheaper than hotels in NYC. Jobs in San Francisco pay way better than jobs in NYC.
9. All it took for me to get my finances in shape was to get some software with a decent interface
10. The only cure for pregnancy-induced hypertension is childbirth (hi clay!)
11. My friend Josh has taken over things digital at the NYPL
12. Adobe CS3 will steal your soul with its compelling beauty
13. Google Analytics has a new interface that will steal whatever bit of your soul is leftover after Adobe gets done with you
14. Half of you people are still using Internet Explorer. I’m saddened. Please, for the love of all things holy: Use

I’m not sure I fully understand what is going on in these photos, but the one of an elderly woman holding a “WiFi Now” sign is propaganda gold.

rica! Where ya been?
Glad you asked.

I’ve been off avenging. Specifically, I’ve been avenging the less-than-impressive webhosting capacity of my former ISP-who-shall-remain-nameless. I switched to GoDaddy recently, and spent a good amount of time cleaning everything up, updating, and migrating my databases. I also spent a good amount of time berating the salesman about GoDaddy’s stupid ads which seem to assume no women could possibly be potential customers. Can you say heteronormativity? GoDaddy sure as hell can.

Three things I learned from migrating a self-hosted WordPress site over to GoDaddy:

1. You’re going to need a static IP address if you want to get everything set up and see how the site looks before switching over your domain name. Otherwise you can’t test your WP install and that my friends is playing with fire.
2. You’re going to want to do it quickly, otherwise you will lose people’s comments and you’ll have to keep going back and re-uploading the database. So no slackin’.
3. If you are using OS X (why would you use anything else? silly monkey.), Apple’s native ftp application Fetch is actually really good at grabbing entire directories and recursing them without a lot of permissions/ok buttons to deal with.

So here’s the new site, just like the old site but with better traffic-handling ability and more prominent text-link ads. Yay!
*Thanks sponsors! My car payment thanks you! My cat thanks you! My landlord thanks you!