Author: Erica Firment

Erica Olsen Firment is an omnivorous mammal of the genus Ailurus, having an endothermic physiology and a long, furry tail. Erica's range extends to both deciduous and coniferous forests, and can often be found working on software user interfaces and creating information architectures in Silicon Valley.
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Yahoo! Games picks up video game based on Macauly Library sounds

snapshot.pngNYC 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.

picture-3.png You can play it for free here.

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Research obsession: Medical Students for Choice

I’m going to show my political underpants briefly (har har. briefly.) and write about Medical Students for Choice.

Lately I’ve tried to keep my politics off of this website out of respect for the wonderful diversity of people who have taken librarianship as an identity.*

msfctshirt1.jpgHowever, I promised to keep you updated on the research topics I pursue in my off hours.

One of the topics I follow obsessively is the state of reproductive law in the US. I attended the March for Women’s Lives in 2004, and I came away with a new awareness of the scope and diversity of topics affecting women’s health, including poverty, contraceptive access, sex education, sexual violence, racism, and medical research, to name a few. The topic of women’s health goes well beyond the ethics and philosophy of the abortion debate.

One of the groups I most enjoyed seeing were the Medical Students for Choice, young mostly female medical students dedicated to raising awareness of the need to train abortion providers among the medical community.

msfc.jpgImagine a sea of women.

Imagine the mall in Washington DC on a warm sunny day. Imagine the grass and the voices. Everywhere you look there are signs, women, booths, friends, groups, people walking, people sitting, young women, old women, men of all ages and stripes, people of every color, signs from every US state and territory.

Imagine a group of women wearing white lab coats with stethoscopes around their necks, walking in small groups, smiling, talking, and holding signs saying “Medical Students for Choice.”

Some wore badges saying “Future abortion provider.” Some carried signs showing the number of women and young girls who die or are injured from unsafe abortions.

It was like watching a herd of beautiful gazelles as they walked through the chaos of the largest protest in US history. These women snapped with intelligence, kindness, and competence.

Seeing them made me stronger.

I don’t write this to inspire the same old arguments among friends. We can all agree that women’s physical safety is important, regardless of our deeper beliefs.

I love you guys. I’ll get back to writing trivia soon, I promise!

______________

*Yes, I think librarianship is an identity as well as a profession. More on this later.

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Quick San Francisco update

Interview girl

Interview Girl

I’m in the Bay Area this week, interviewing and exploring the city for possible relocation potential.

I rented a convertible yesterday and had a great drive down to Silicon Valley. I haven’t had a chance in a long time to be the blonde-in-the-convertible, and I gotta say, it felt good.

I’ve got sand under my fingernails, the beginnings of a distinctly non-librarian looking tan, and I’ve burned off at least a few sad winters’ worth of Midwestern Ennui in the past two days. In other words, I’m having a good time. Wish you were here.

Dogblog is really good today, by the way.

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14 Weird things I’ve learned this week

  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

    7. 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
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Three things I learned from migrating a WordPress site over to GoDaddy

Erica! Where ya been?
Glad you asked.

credit.jpgI’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!