I’m sitting at a cafe with my infant daughter. I feel like a monster of productivity, having successfully left the house twice in one day, eaten actual meals, and avoided being covered in poo (for the time being).

Elizabeth is the daughter, three months old. She sleeps in the stroller I thought I would never use. As a non-parent, I had overlooked its function as a laptop/sweater/blanket/grocery/diaperbag-carrier, and had no understanding of the speed at which it knocks out a fussy baby.

The last three months have been a time of great change. I am clocking in at about one life lesson every three hours.

Recently I’ve learned:

• To type fast and not muck about with formatting while the baby’s napping. Editing is not for parents.
• If you can afford it, fresh fruit is always a worthwhile purchase.
• That you can’t go for a walk in my neighborhood without tripping over a stroller or a border collie.
• Sweden makes awesome baby equipment (Jané: the 4×4 truck of strollers)
• If you join a clan and are online regularly at 3am, you can make lots of friends in Finland, and Norway.
• Other Scandinavians mock Swedes out of some obscure national rivalry. The punchline of every joke is inevitably “Svensk”. If you understand this, please let me know.

Right, that’s it for now. Elizabear is waking up and we’ve got some major walking to do.

My daughter, Elizabeth West Firment, was born in early November. The last…ever since…has been a nonstop, nonsleep blur of boobs, love, fuss, and delirium. In the process, I have learned these five things:

• Ceiling fans are TV for babies.
• At week six, nursing goes from being a special woodchipper for your nipples to something fairly ok. Eventually, it will become rather pleasant, and you will be able to play World of Warcraft while feeding your child, like my friend Kelly’s wife does. I’m pretty sure she levels up faster by simultaneously breastfeeding and p0wning n00bz.
• The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold cold wet day.
• There is a 4am. It comes before 5am, which is that time  you read about once that precedes 6am. You do not have the right to a full night’s sleep. You have given that right to your baby, who may use it as she sees fit.
• Your baby’s smile generates a burst of hormones that if necessary will enable you to lift a car or cut out your own spleen.

Photos are up on flickr. Thanks for all the casseroles!

Instead of watching House episodes all day like a normal person, I spent one of my vacation days making a video about the media practice of greenwashing.

According to the world’s only remaining viable encyclopedia, greenwashing is the “practice of companies disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly.”

I’m interested in the graphic design motifs that seem to pop up whenever a product wants to advertise itself as Good for the Environment. I was inspired by my hilarious friend Gus’s Media Show episode on greenwashing, and I started thinking about all the sans-serif fonts and burlap lining the shelves of my local organic grocery store.*

This is my first video, and I was a bit nervous. I used iMovie to do the editing, and I slapped the whole thing together in an afternoon with the help of some coffee and a misplaced sense of social justice.

I’d like to do more of this. If you guys have any suggestions for other ornery Librarian Avenger topics, I’d love to hear them.

* I live in San Francisco. I patronize an organic grocery store. I don’t own a car or a tv. Live the stereotype!
** That’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing in the background, who is the boss of you.

Things today that made me laugh until I snorted:

• • Translating a boring work conversation into hula
  • Faygo Rock n Rye soda exploding in a Last Stand sort of way inside Chuck’s motorcycle case
  • Blurting out “stranger danger!” when surprise-hugged by my friend Rayne in the subway
  • Getting my butt handed to me by the office Galaga machine
  • My father-in-law’s introduction to the tapioca lumps in bubble tea
  • My new Frog Hat
  • Wearing my new Frog Hat on a video conference and demanding to be taken seriously

I can’t be self-promotional all alone here, people. I need your help! Vote for meeeee!

My proposal is up for voting right now on the South By Southwest Interactive Panel Picker. It’s a geek frenzy over there. Vote early and often.

VOTE HERE (login required)

Panel Proposal:

Video Game Research: Failing Our Way to Victory

Users are weird. They tell you one thing and do another. They click everywhere and read nothing. Erica Firment, a User Experience designer for Linden Lab/Second Life, chronicles fast and effective ways to make your software suck less by spending a few hours watching users fail.

1. How can video games win by watching their players fail?
2. What is video game user research?
3. What do you mean by “watch users fail?”
4. Can’t I just send out a survey? (NO!)
5. Why are 3D world interfaces hard to design?
6. What are some things in Second Life that got better by watching users fail?
7. How does Second Life collect information?
8. Why should developers and product managers invest in user research?
9. What are some easy ways for me to do user research?
10. What are some cheap ways for me to do user research?

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, railing against things and waving our arms around.

In this case, we’re stomping in approval of Lizzie Skurnick’s new book Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

Shelf Discovery is a compilation of Ms. Skurnick’s excellent Fine Lines posts on Jezebel, in which she lovingly scrutinizes Young Adult books read by bookish girls of the X/y/whatever generation.

I’m always surprised to find such quality writing just floating around on the web for anyone to read, and I’m glad there is finally a dead tree version available as well.

If I suffered from Pageant-Mom syndrome and wanted to create an exact replica of myself from the raw material of some random pre-teen girl, I would begin my narcissistic experiment in literary manipulation by having her read all of the books celebrated in Shelf Discovery.

Which is all to say that I love this book and you should too. So, yay.

Stomp stomp stomp stomp.

Erica undergoing a brief moment of Muppetface

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. I chose to talk about the Librarian Avengers Film Rating System, which addresses some movie metadata I’d like to see. Things like “This film contains a Creepy child Singing” and “Warning! Sylvester Stallone!”

OSCON Ignite is online at blip.tv here

My bit starts around (44:45), but stick around for the whole thing. Make sure to check out Kirrily’s talk on Geeky Things you can Do with Textiles, and Liz Henry talking about the barriers to wheelchair hacking.

The format kept everyone pithy, and although I had to speak before the amazing Damian Conway, I didn’t throw up from stage fright once!

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 pill up in about 5 washes, FYI) and I sliced up a couple conference t-shirts. We now have a canvas bag full of washcloth-sized fabric squares hanging in the kitchen.

This provides an endless amount of cleaning rags for just about any job.
They are washable, bleachable, and nearly indestructible. You can run them through the wash and re-use them, or if they are gross, just toss them into the compost.

It’s a great way to re-use otherwise disposable fabrics, and they are cheaper and more sturdy than paper towels.

Take that, Brawny!