Allergy alert stickers

allergy_stickers.jpg

I have a life-threatening peanut allergy. My lungs fill up and my throat closes and WOW are nuts a bad thing. Which is why I want these vinyl “No Peanuts” stickers by Jeeto.

Chuck and I have been trying to translate the word “peanut” into 30 languages whenever we go to a restaurant. It would be nice to have a visual aid.

When I was a kid, nobody had heard of “allergies”, so I didn’t get a lot of cred when I pouted and refused to eat my snickerdoodle. My folks fought for me when they could, but there were plenty of incidents. There was the Evil Girl Scout Leader with the PBJ, the home economics class with the peanut brittle, my forgetful grandma and the cracker jacks.

Having it in writing might help a kid stick up for herself.

So, yay to Jeeto and a generation of militant parents! Yay for continued access to oxygen!

I DOOOOO! RAWR!

bridezilla rawrCurrent TV has a segment called “Target Women” that I absolutely love.

In this episode, Sarah Haskins, who is frikking hilarious, introduces us to the helpful and empowering phenomenon known as Wedding Television.

She gently mocks shows like Bridezilla, Rich bride Poor bride, Platinum brides, and other affronts to sanity.

As you know, marriage is only for skinny rich people. At one point, Sarah appears in bike shorts and a sports bra, comparing her normal body to the “horrible fat future” picture used to scare a woman into bridal fitness on a show called “Bulging Brides”.

This video made me feel so much better about my lazais faire approach to wedding planning. See ya in Detroit in December, friends.

I’ll be the one wearing some sort of dress.

Zombie Dating Site: Zombie Harmony

BrainsThere’s a great new dating site online…for zombies!
Hurry and join zombieharmony.com!

I wonder if eHarmony will be as cool as Linden Lab was about parodies?

Linden sent the maker of a Second Life parody the opposite of a Cease and Desist letter. Since, like most sane people, they realized that parody = fair use, and fair use = the foundation of cultural exchange.

Now we’re BFF with the EFF, and there’s one less dumbass lawsuit in the world.

I love this line…
“Moreover, Linden Lab objects to any implication that it would employ lawyers incapable of distinguishing such obvious parody.”

Another Data Mob at Freebase – Ethnicity

Wanna enrich some data? Got OCD? Tired of trying to get a foot in on popular Wikipedia entries? Try helping out with Freebase.

It’s a database. Of stuff. Free stuff. You can mush it however you like. You can compare stuff. You can edit it. And this week? This week you can join a few hundred of your fellow data nerds and join a data mob.

The topic is Ethnicity

Here’s an update on the current state of the datamob. Go forth librarians! Go forth and link up nodes! For the furture! For the children!

On Graduating from School and Getting a Job

I was crawling through my archives this morning and came across this little rant that I wrote years ago, during my first, horrible, post-grad school job at the Cornell University Library. I know several of you Gentle Readers are in school right now, and I thought you might enjoy the sentiment:

First of all, and lets just get this out of the way: a full-time job is actually a pretty shoddy reward for 2.5 years of graduate school stress.

Yes, I’m grateful and all, glad to be here, nice to meet ya, etc. but frankly, I think I was looking for something along the lines of “congratulations on your degree, here’s your houseboat, now get out of here you scamp.”

I suppose having a stable schedule and slightly-more-realistic paychecks is reward enough, but lately I’ve had to face what seems to happen any time you put enormous effort into something. Which is, a rather slow transition into something different that requires enormous effort.

Like learning not to scream when someone suggests you attend the Metadata Working Group Meeting.

Wikipedia entry on a Second Life location

I took a stab at writing a Wikipedia stub on one of my favorite Second Life locations, Caledon, the steampunk/Victorian sim. I’m a Wikipedia n00b, and my stub got flagged for deletion (rightly) due to a lack of notable references.

wikiclock

Any of you SL-lovin’ librarians out there wanna take a crack at improving it?

Link to deletion discussion

Notability guidelines

Link to Caledon Stub (fictional places???)