Laughing

Kate laughing at something I said. That's from last weekend, in NJ.

Ugly shoes

My cast is off (yay!) but my foot and leg are still recovering, and pretty sore. I used to walk a lot, and it's hard to keep myself from overdoing it. So I went to a store in Seattle today and asked for a pair of sneakers with tons of padding in the heel. I ended up with a pair of Teva vegan (!!!) sneakers. Here's a link to a pair on zappos:
Teva Romero MT - Technical Terrain Women's Terrain (Heron). Note that this description is dead wrong: "for those that want to look fast even when standing still." However, they do have this: "Encapsulated Shoc Pad™ unit in the heel cup that evenly transfers energy of impact throughout the footbed and away from the heel." They at least work better than my pumas, which have almost no padding at all. I still can't believe I'm wearing shoes this ugly, though.

The NY Times had a reminder today that CS isn't the only field with few women at the top. Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?
We tend to focus a lot on the lack of women in CS, Physics, and other sciences, where women are usually scarce from intro classes all the way through college, grad school, and jobs. Law apparently has a lot of women who enter the field in law school, but only a teensy percentage make it to partner many years later. It's a really interesting look at a familiar problem in an entirely different field. For instance, they call out this:
One of the main bugaboos in this debate — and one that analysts says is increasingly cropping up as an issue for male lawyers as well — is the billable hours regime. Billing by the hour requires lawyers to work on a stopwatch so their productivity can be tracked minute by minute — and so clients can be charged accordingly. Over the last two decades, as law firms have devoted themselves more keenly to the bottom line, depression and dissatisfaction rates among both female and male lawyers has grown, analysts say; many lawyers of both genders have found their schedules and the nature of their work to be dispiriting.
What a different way of working from the dotcom world. We care more about what you produce at the end of day than how much time it took. And keeping track of 7 minute increments would destroy my concentration. Most days I don't even notice the time when I'm writing something until my dog starts poking my knee with his nose to let me know that he really needs a walk.
I have no great ideas on how to increase the number of women in either CS or law, but I did enjoy reading about how another industry grapples with the same problem.

nerf chaos!

My office window this morning. (I didn't shoot all those darts at the window, but I did wield the digital camera.)

fuzzy dog

There hasn't been a fuzzy doggy photo in a few days. So here's a fix for that.

Hamentashen

It's Purim today (or tomorrow? I'm not sure), so I should be making some hamentashen this evening. Esther & I made them for 4 Purims at Wellesley because it was, after all, her holiday. I also remember making them in Redmond with her once, but I somehow think that was in September, not March.

So in a related note, I saw a poster of Matisyahu on the wall in a coworker's office, but I wasn't able to ask him if the album was any good because he's OOTO. (For non dotcommers, that's out of the office, aka being on vacation or just telecommuting from a coffeeshop or something.) I mostly noticed it because I'd listened to a sample of King without a Crown on iTunes this morning. I still have the music store "page" up for the album in iTunes, actually. And I tried highlighting his name to paste into an amazon search box, but iTunes doesn't make the name in the top part of the store window highlightable. I can click it, but not copy/paste. I'm more suprised it took me until now to notice that.

Toppled Crane in Myrtle Edwards park

Wow, not every day something like this happens around the corner from my home.

A 100-ton crane toppled onto railroad tracks near Myrtle Edwards Park this afternoon, delaying freight and passenger routes through the Seattle waterfront area.

--seattle pi article
I left work late, but apparently Belltown was super jammed up because of the closed roads, which rarely ever happens. Traffic in this area is usually 3 cars waiting at a light.

toddler voicemail

A transcript of a voicemail I got today:

Kate: "Hi Aunt Wendy! Hi Aunt Wendy!"
Heather: "say who it is"
Kate: "Hi Wendy!"
Heather: "tell her who's calling"
Kate: "Hi Wendy!"
Heather: "say it's Kate"
Kate: "where she'd go?"
Heather: "That's her answering machine"
Kate: "What?"
Heather: "We're leaving a message!"
Kate, sounds like she's running away from the phone: "Hi Wendy!"

I listened to it three times, and I kept laughing at it. I love the image of Kate trying to sort out what this "answering machine" thing that ate her aunt is!

yummy

We went to lunch yesterday at Seven Stars Pepper (43 Places). There were eight of us, and I think I might be able to remember the eight dishes we ended up ordering:

1. chong gin chicken
2. house special chicken
3. hot pepper fish
4. sizzling rice shrimp special
5. hand shaven noodles beef chow mein
6. hand shaven noodles shrimp chow mein
7. baby bok
   choy and mushrooms
8. mongolian beef

After a lunch like that, which is like a greatest hits list of my favorite restaurant, every meal for the next week is just ruined right off the bat. We go there often enough that the waitress usually comes over to our table and reels off four dishes that we order a lot and we agree and add one or two more and then maybe get a recommendation for one last dish from her. Thankfully this time we drove down, because walking back up the hill after all that food would have been painful.

I'm at home tonight, listening to music & icing my leg. The airplanes landing at SEA are landing from the north this evening. My apartment has a whole wall of windows facing west, and where I'm sitting, I can see the planes go by, flying the whole length of my windows. One every three or four minutes. They're actually really pretty to watch, flying right over the tops of all the condo towers. (I hesistate to call them "skyscrapers" because those, to me, have to be more than 20 stories tall.)

Yesterday's suggested tune from the 365 tunes calendar (authored by matos) was Brighton Rock by Elastica. Just downloaded it from itunes, and it's pretty good. I've also been playing I'm a Cuckoo (Belle & Sebastian) a lot this past week- it's such a sweet little song. So over the last week, I've been collecting things that are unexpectedly tricky to do in a cast, and so here are the first two: change the sheets on my bed (it's against a wall, and it's a big pain to either pull it away from the wall or climb over it to deal with the sheets on that side), and walk down ramps or slanted sidewalks.

Spring has already started to arrive in Seattle. When I took a walk down 1st Ave yesterday, the cherry trees were beginning to bloom. There were buds on the tulips, and a few crocuses out! This weekend has been sunny and mostly warm, one of the weekends when I fall in love with our weather. The Olympics are crisp & sharp & gorgeous, and Mt Rainier even made an appearance.

Elephant Sheltie

My dog, the yogurt fan. I've been meaning to post this for a while.

more old, old photos

The last few days, I've been thinking a little about the quote below about the editing that photographers do when they frame an image. As it turns out, I've had a lot of time to look at pictures today with that in mind. I'm in a walking cast, and I've figured out that "walking cast" really means "hop around slowly cast." So in search of interesting things to do from my sofa while I'm icing my leg, I pulled out my negative scanner and went to work on my stacks of negatives from college.

I love this set. All the pictures above were taken on my little sister's first day of college outside my senior year dorm, with her boyfriend- now husband. They look so young! She asked me to take a few pictures of them that day so that she could have some photos to hang up in her dorm room. Looking at this set now though 8 years of experiences, I still see the same faces, but they're couched in different terms now. I keep seeing Kate's face in her dad's smile. Or looking at those trees, I keep remembering the pain I had a few days later in the darkroom, trying to burn in the sky behind the leaves while not overexposing the faces. And while I can't remember now why I clicked the shutter when I did, I do like the end result as a mini portrait of them as a couple. Her face in the last one always makes me smile- I saw that look everytime I annoyed her growing up.

the whole photoset

old zip disk fun

I found my old zip disk drive yesterday when I was cleaning up for my party (tons of fun- it was a great time), so this morning, after cleaning up all the glasses in my living room, I plugged it in & pulled out some zip disks that I still have. I found a few scans of images that I took in college, including this one, of me doing some 3-D design homework. Notice that I'm using a stapler and string to do my homework. Very artsy fartsy of me.

Mennen Ice Skating Hours

For me:
General Admission:
Mornings: 10 am to noon
Tuesday through Friday Afternoons: 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm
Wednesday and Friday evenings: 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Saturday & Sunday: 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Fee Schedule:
Weekdays: $4.00 all ages
Wednesday Daytime Special: $2.00
Evenings and Weekends: $6.00 all ages

Mennen Ice Skating

Geeking with Greg: Early Amazon: Door desks

This is great- Greg is doing a series of posts about old-skool Amazon. Here's his post on door desks:

Geeking with Greg: Early Amazon: Door desks: "In addition to being inexpensive, door desks offered a lot of surface area. Put your computer monitor on top and in barely makes a dent. If Amazon wasn't so bloody cheap, you could have put three more monitors up there. Plenty of space for all of your crap.Ergonomically, door desks leave a lot to be desired. Keyboards were usually too high. Typing for hours could be uncomfortable. And those angle brackets have sharp edges; accidentally scrapping exposed flesh against those was a mistake that wouldn't be repeated.But door desks came to symbolize the Amazon frugal culture. They took on a live of their own. Years later, in 2001, there was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake here in Seattle. We were in a different building by then -- the attractive PacMed building up on Beacon Hill above downtown Seattle -- but we still had our door desks. And I can't tell you how happy we were to have that door desk over our heads as the building shuttered and swayed around us."

Door desks are great. I love mine, it's more than 5 feet long, and insanely deep. Add a keyboard tray, and it's perfect. I have three computers on it, all my O'Reilly books, a coffeemaker, and there's still room to pile up papers and notebooks.

I really enjoyed reading his old amazon memories, so here's one of mine... I was hired in Dec 1998, but I still had a semester of college to finish up. So come May 1999, I began to think about my waiting job in Seattle. I sent my manager-to-be an email, telling him I was going to go out to Seattle for a week in May, to apartment hunt, and asking if I could stop by and say hello. He invited me to come by and meet everyone while I was there.

So I flew to Seattle, carrying a small thermos with water which held my fish, Puck. My friend- who worked at Microsoft- was going to watch Puck for me for my last few weeks before I moved out. I stayed with her up in Greenlake while I searched Belltown for a cheap apartment. (There were more of those then than there are now.) One day, I walked down to the Columbia Building and met my new teammates. I saw the Bat Cave, where most of the web devs sat. Everyone was using Emacs. I think Bosco showed me how to goof around with the desktops of people who had done "xhost +" by opening crazy windows on their screens. Then I went up and saw Pacmed, where we would soon be moving. And finally, I was invited out to a big lunch with lots of web dev folks, at what is now Dragonfish. That was a great lunch- I tried frantically to remember everyone's name and ingest all the moving-to-Seattle advice I got.

Two days later, I flew back to Boston and graduated. Then I flew back to Seattle, and settled into the apartment I'd found. My plan was to take 3 weeks to unpack and hang out before starting work. But quickly, I was bored doing nothing- I'd unpacked my boxes, I'd seen Star Wars Episode One at the Cinerama twice, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I asked my manager if I could start a little early. That Monday, I took a bus up to Pacmed to my first day as an official web geek. That was June 21, 1999.

We used to have paper badges, so my first day I got a little blue laminated piece of paper with my login on it. I set up my computer, and settled my fish onto my desk. The next day- my first real day of work- an email went out to all the developers. We were about to launch the toy store, and the photographers (who shot images of all the toys that would be on the site) had an emergency! Turns out, all the legos we had to photograph were in boxes. Photographs of boxes of legos are BORING, and so a plea was sent to the geeks of the company. Come assemble legos, and we'll feed you pizza! So my manager and I showed up, ate pizza, and assembled legos. We got our asses kicked by the 6 year old son of one of the PMs, who could assemble lego kits with lightening speed.

The part that killed me was that the toy store was a big secret, so I couldn't tell any of my friends that I had the greatest job ever, programming and putting together legos! After the store launched a few weeks later, I was able to pull up some toys detail pages & show off my creations.