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Upstate fucking glory, books

Spring birds are yelling from snowy trees this morning. It’s spring, despite wind, snow, roaring wood stove, and other evidence to the contrary. I’m taking today off of work. I’ve got nine stitches. I can do whatever I want.

I finished re-reading Microserfs by Douglas Copeland yesterday. This book was important to me at a formulative time. It helped convince me it was cool to be a nerd. It introduced other tech-inclined women to my humanities-girdled world. It drew a model of unashamed geekery, separate and outside of a traditionally-female need for perfection and image. It was pretty liberating.

An excerpt:

Susan is 26 and works in Mac Applications. If Susan were a Jeopardy! contestant, her dream board would be:

* 680X0 assembly language
* Cats
* Early ’80s haircut bands
* “My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group”
* License plate slogans of America
* Plot lines from The Monkees
* The death of IBM

Susan’s an IBM brat and hates that company with a passion. She credits it with ruining her youth by transferring her family eight times before she graduated from high school – and the punch line is that the company gave her father the boot last year during a wave of restructuring. So nothing too evil can happen to IBM in her eyes.
…
Susan’s a real coding machine. But her abilities are totally wasted reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8.

Thanks for your kind comments last night during my Dark Night of the Beer. Friendly words were unexpected and wonderful. I often forget that there are people out there. Hello imaginary people. It’s as though my fictional heroes (Elizabeth Bennet! Harriet The Spy! Meg from Wrinkle in Time!) suddenly started interacting.

Off to haul wood one-armed and scour Craigslist for cars. What would your Dream Jeopardy! categories be?

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Farce, fiasco

Drunken blogging is ALWAYS a good idea.
I had minor surgery today, removing a non-dangerous-kind tumor from my shoulder. So, anesthetics. And beer, which also helps.

Want to lose a pound? There’s no faster way.

I’m taking tomorrow off work to search for a car and get my shit together. It’s been one hell of a week. Hell being the operative word.

Here’s some good stuff:

  • new laptop. macbook duo 2gig ram. eat my processing dirt.
  • friends.
  • tattoo. I’m gonna have one hell of a scar. Researching scar-covering tats is keeping me entertained. There are some wicked literary tattoos out there.
  • drunk. did I mention drunk?

Love ye all. Thanks for support.
xoxo
Ericalibrarydork

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Hellasnow

bendoverbackwards.jpgOne more blizzard. One last blizzard. There have been storms since I returned, in one form or another. The snow is a fact. The storm is a fact.

Un-ignorable when you need to drive/shovel/haul wood.

By blizzard, I mean: Sideways snow total-white zero-detail pixelation of horizon, foreground, sky, and earth.

By shovel, I mean: The taller-than-me pile of shoveled/plowed effluent framing the driveway.

By haul wood, I mean: To keep the house warm.

By drive, I mean: My sexy rental car. To replace the Nissan I slid into a guardrail during the LAST blizzard.

I’m going to plunge into the snow for a few hours, shovel it into submission, and face the evening. Wish me luck.

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Signifier, signified

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation, can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

Unknown Pema Chodron (1936 – ) western Buddhist nun (thanks Dwayne!)

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Second Life

I just spoke with a gentleman who helps run Second Life, and he informed me that there are, like, a billion librarians on SL, who own a string of islands and facilitate information exchange. Can anyone confirm this?

Are we cool or what?

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Overheard at SXSW

Guy at mike: In the words of Walt Whitman, do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Guy next to me (stage whispers): Gay.

Edit: I’m annotating this one for the non-literature/human-sexuality majors.

It’s deconstruct-jokes-day here at Librarian Avengers.

Walt Whitman’s status as an historical gay icon is key to this comment. His poetry is universal, but a Whitman reference in a different context is sometimes used to covertly signal homosexuality, a la “are you a friend of Dorothy?” The humor comes from the incongruity of the unfortunate speaker quoting Whitman in the context of a professional discussion, and having his comment sarcastically interpreted as a self-referential proclamation of his sexuality.

A similar situation occurred during the 2006 New York gubernatorial debates at Cornell University. Republican candidate John Faso inadvertently caused laughs among the student-aged crowd when he declared that he did not want to “force gay marriage down the throats” of New Yorkers.

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SXSW Interactive – Sunday

Guess who drank too much last night? Everyone!

It’s hangover day here at South by Southwest. The panels are slow and attendance is low.

This morning I went to a panel debating the merits of ignoring users. It matched my mood nicely.

User profiles are taking a beating this year.

Guess who was the only woman in the gaming room playing Guitar Hero and shooting bunnies with the Wii? You may call me Token.

Reverend Billy and the Church of No Shopping are here. They’re staying at our hotel, which was kind of startling when I crawled out of the elevator this morning.

I’m going to try and find someone from the Creative Commons who wants to come speak at Cornell about using the CC in scientific publications. If you know anyone, give me a holler.