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Animal Recordings. Dotcom.

Eat my educational interactives baby! The Cornell University Lab of Ornithology project I designed won second place in Science magazine’s 2006 Visualization Challenge.

Plus, we were on the front page of Der Spiegel last week, so Germans love us!

What does this mean for you? It means you can now go online and visit the world’s largest collection of animal sounds and video. Listen to animal recordings and watch videos for free. Explore the crazy world of animal behavior.

Right now you can use Realplayer to listen to sounds, or you can download our plugin that lets you watch and manipulate spectrograms in real-time. Which has never been done before, incidentally.

So, to summarize, alligators, elk, robins, and whales, all online and free. Good? Go nuts. Version two should be out in a few months.

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It’s hard out here for a digital library interface designer/product manager


Photo by パックマン

10:40pm and I’m still at work.

Science Magazine is publishing a blurb about our library of animal sounds on Thursday. We got an award for second-best “educational interactive”. Yay.

Unfortunately, this means that a huge group of people are going to visit our site.

And our site was, up to a few weeks ago, still half-baked. We’ve got one of those higher education software teams, consisting of five underpaid geeks and a couple of CS students. Ebay, we are not.
These last few weeks have been a blur. Everyone on my team is pulling dot com hours, working for twelve hours on Sundays, and generally being foolish with work-life balance.

Tonight we ate dinner at the mall food court.

The weird part is, I love this.
I love the focus.
I love the commiseration.
I love the feeling of doing something good for the world that I get working at a nonprofit.

But right now, I would really love a beer and some sleep.
Goodnight, all.

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Staff picnic

The staff picnic is today. There are a few firsts this year, including the availability of beer (gasp!) and wine (eek!) provided by our generous overlords. This is a controversial move. Alcohol and Campus Events are a lawsuit-attracting combination, and it takes a brave administrator to go down the Dark Road of Official Permission Forms. avengerhero.pngUnless, of course, the intent is to butter up potential funders, in which case let the vino flow!

Mary, my mentor, boss, and friend has foolishly volunteered to orchestrate an hour of children’s games. In the interest of preserving her sanity (that I might make use of it in the future), I have volunteered to help.

Mary’s plan: lots of candy.
My plan: Superhero games.

Who can jump the highest?
Who can turn invisible?
Who can talk to animals? Quick! Rescue that heiress!
Over there!
Waaaaaaay over there!

For your amusement, the HeroMachine. My superhero has bat wings and an electrical aura. Neyah.

Wish me luck.

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Overheard at Cornell

I was shopping for cat litter at Target yesterday because my life is a nonstop carnival of spectacle and decadence, when I overheard a fascinating conversation. The conversation was seriously not work-safe, so I sent it along to Overheard at Cornell, whose readership is much less litigious.

Enjoy! The gentleman in question was loudly hopeful that things might turn out well.

We’re all cheering for you man.

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My new shopping technique is unstoppable

(apologies to mnftiu.cc)

I visited the Cornell Dump & Run this weekend, an ingenious fundraiser that sells the cast-off detritus of graduating students. I went last year and got a pretty good idea where the good stuff was located. I made a beeline for the bags, dresses, lamps, and women’s tops.

For $28, I came away with:

  • Gucci handbag
  • Banana Republic handbag
  • Kate Spade handbag (washable stain on bottom)
  • Paul Frank monkey wallet, new
  • Liz Claiborne purse and wallet
  • $360 red BCBG dress (looks new, fits!)
  • Banana republic jeans that mysteriously fit my body
  • Ann Taylor cashmere sweater and shell
  • Esprit fall jacket, new w/tags
  • University of Chicago hoodie, looks new & warm
  • DKNY party skirt to Ebay (size 4, free to any interested anorexic readers)
  • A variety (20 or so) of nice work clothes from various high-end retailers
  • A variety of nice work clothes that don’t fit me but will fit friends
  • Wood beaded necklace
  • Benetton blazer, one loose button
  • Chrome clamp-on desk lamp, looks new
  • Various office supplies
  • Swanky Lexus Keyring

Ladies and gentlemen, beware my discount bling!

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Take my Comics…please

feazellcat.gifI’ve started a library at work. My cataloging system is the whiteboard over my desk. My patrons are co-workers and student employees whom I bully into taking books. My material? Comics. I’m on a mission from Groo.

When I was a young Librarian Avenger, I spent many happy years working in the world’s largest cataloged collection of comic art, located at Michigan State University. There I met some majorly kickass librarians who were kind enough to allow me to shelve books, type tags, sort through boxes, occasionally catalog (ah, young dorkiness) and induge in a whole lot of secret in-the-stacks comic-reading.

As a result of this intensive training, I can now walk into any fluorescent-lit basement-level industrial-carpeted D&D-riddled comic shop and pick a fight. Ghost Rider vs. Punisher? No problem. Spawn eats them both. First edition copy of Watchmen? Own it. Portrait of myself inked by David Mack? Got it. Personalized CynicalMan convention souvenir by Matt Feazell? On my wall. Every issue of Scott McCloud’s Zot, stolen from an ex-boyfriend? Yuppers.

If I had several lives to live simultaneously, I would take out a loan and start a comic shop. I believe that some of the best art and writing of my generation can be found in the pages of comics. Transmetropolitan. Sandman. Optic Nerve. La Perdida. Dykes to Watch Out For. Fun Home. Understanding Comics. Kabuki. Y The Last Man. Zot.

So, lately I’ve been biking my trade paperbacks up the hill and distributing them. I need someone to talk to about this stuff. It’s lonely here at the top.

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Typical Ithaca Bike ride

I just took a ride around Cornell’s Bebe Lake, a mile-long loop where the Loch Ness Monster is said to be submerged, having being used as a prop in a silent film back in Ithaca’s glory days. I took the bread-ends that we’d saved in the freezer all winter, hoping to feed the ducks, but they were ungrateful today and paddled off.

We saw an Amazon rainforest-caliber slug on the way back. It was as long as my hand, and had tiger stripes and two sets of antennae. Also, a horse chewed on my bike handle. We biked up to the horse barns, and the foals were friendly and curious.

This afternoon there were cardinals, goldfinch, titmice, doves, junkos, hairy woodpeckers, flycatchers, robins, chickadees, and a Northern Flicker hopping around our bird feeder. Hummingbirds zoomed around the garden, and two male deer with a full set of horns trotted down the road in front of our window.

I live in a Disney movie.

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Teenagers at the Library

Even nature sanctuary libraries have problems with unruly teenagers hanging around in the parking lot. These geese are at the awkward stage between being yellow fuzzy poofballs and tall feathery adults. As a result, they listen to emo music and wear heavy eyeliner. Someday they will grow up to be bankers. In the meantime they cause trouble and occasionally mess up cars.

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