Tag: librarian

Posted on

Hot Librarian Necklace

From the department of products-inadvertently-marketed-to-librarians:

Hot Librarian Necklace


$40 USD – Handmade in Toronto and sold on etsy.com

Oh yes. Hot indeed. I believe some of us here can confirm that boys and girls DO make passes at folks who wear glasses. Especially if they are well-versed in database design, collections management, or bibliographic instruction.

Posted on

Drunken blog post #3

The Thursday night Linden Lab whisky tasting has degraded in the traditional way. I’m surrounded by tipy nerds, discussing the glories of JQuery. One of my co-workers is wearing a shirt that reads “The Age of Consent Tour 1997”. Nerdcore rap blares from the QA office.

Life is good.

Posted on

West Coast Phrases To Know

My mother, the real librarian (not a digital muckety muck thingamajig like me), will be visiting me here in San Francisco next week. Since she will be hanging around with non-Midwesterners, I thought it would be good to provide her with an introduction to west coast language. I know, right?

  • I know, right?

    Rumored origin: L.A.
    Literal meaning: “Can you believe this thing we are talking about? It goes without saying, and yet we are saying it.”
    Connotation: “We are all in agreement here. Also, I have never read Beowulf.”

  • Hella

    Rumored origin: NoCal.
    Literal meaning: Intensifier. “Their pie is hella good.”
    Connotation: “I am twelve.”

  • Yeah yeah yeah

    Rumored origin: Coffee-fueled Berkeley undergraduates
    Literal meaning: “I agree so strongly that it can be quickly dismissed with a rapid exclamation.”
    Connotation: “We are getting things DONE in this conversation.”

  • Chill

    Rumored origin: The 1960s.
    Literal meaning: “Good. Calm. Without trouble. Easy.”
    Connotation:”I have had lots of therapy and/or drugs.”

Got more? Send ’em in!

Posted on

Five things I love about Firefox 3

FireFox Logo

If you are feeling early-adopter-y, you can hop over to mozilla.org and download the new Firefox 3 Beta build. It’s faster, slicker, and has OMG HOT new UI tools that should make your day better.

Five Things I love about Firefox 3:

  1. Because this is a beta version, most of my extensions and themes don’t work in F3…and I don’t miss ’em. I’ve been using it all day and haven’t had a single withdrawal symptom.
  2. Fast. Hella fast. Hecka fast. So damn fast. The memory management of Firefox 3 is slick. It caches less, stores image data more efficiently, and plugs memory leaks from extensions before they happen. This all comes from of the kind of nerdy nerdy attention to detail that was a feature of pre-Moore’s law programming, when bits were carefully placed like bricks in an arch. Hooray for OCD programming!
  3. Oh Bookmarks! Ye annoy me less! You are now a one-click thing on the navigation bar, with a cute star icon instead of a time-eating top menu monster.
  4. Full Page Zoom. If you don’t like squinting, download this browser. Hitting Ctrl + makes EVERYTHING get bigger, including images. This feature eliminates the “Big Text Stomps Nice Layout” problem we saw in earlier versions.
  5. Tab quickmenu. Stop worrying about all those tabs stacking up in your window. You can get at them from a dropdown in the corner. No fuss. There’s more room for page titles too, so you don’t have to find the tab you want using only the first ten characters.
Posted on

Introducing a 7-year-old to the concept of “library”

Modern Day Prometheus or why my boyfriend is the greatest guy ever. Can you believe I get to kiss this man?

My first question was a slightly judgmental “where were his parents during all of this?”

adobe-orange-yellow.jpgI’m remembering week after week of library visits when I was a kid. We didn’t have any money, but we had all the books we wanted. My first library card was at age, what? four?

Apparently the parents were there checking out videos. Hopefully they will return.

Posted on

Hello? It’s Guybrarians.

Penny Arcade realizes that the word “librarian” doesn’t imply gender, except in issues of pay equity.

Webcomics’ newfound appreciation for the finest of underpaid professions is thanks to an encounter with the authors of Unshelved after the San Diego comic con.

This is the same comic con, coincidentally where my friend and coworker Jon, author of the excellent DogBlog, ran into Joss Whedon while both gentlemen were drunk and thanked him thanked him thanked him for making such excellent movies.

Jon has a photo to prove it, which he will show you at the slightest provocation. Walk quietly around him and don’t make any sudden moves.

Oh? And as they point out, there’s already a word for a male librarian. It’s Librarian. Or Guybrarian, if you buy into my pathetic merchandising attempts.

Posted on

Hello NYTimes readers. Radical Librarians welcome you!

I got a call about 20 minutes ago from a friend telling me that my website, this website, the website I HAVEN’T UPDATED IN WEEKS was mentioned in the NY Times. So, um. Hi. I’m updating! This is me. Updating. Just for you. La de da.

If you are interested in becoming a librarian, you might want to take this quiz.

If you know some librarians that you want to get gifts, I sell some cool t-shirts and mugs here.

Here are some of my favorite posts.

Here’s a quick summary of this website:
I’m Erica Olsen. I am a librarian (religion) and interface designer (profession). I just moved to San Francisco two weeks ago. I work doing User Experience at Second Life. I’ve been blogging since 1998, but in those days of yore we just called it “having a web page.”

If you wanna write to me and say hi, I’m ericaolsen (AT) gmail (DOT) com.