Grand Central Terminal

I had a very short post-work amble today (my leg, which was mostly recovered in early May, didn't deal well with all the exploring I've been trying to do). I walked through Bryant Park, then headed over to Grand Central Market even though I was stuffed from dinner. I love walking through the Market, and this time I stopped at the chocolate stop. I was thinking of buying some salad as well, but I was afraid it would go bad before I'd eaten it. Instead, I just admired all the veggies and cheeses and fish. Yummy just to look at.

Mats

I took two pictures today that I wanted to post to flickr, but I sadly left the cable that connects my camera to my ibook back in NJ. Ack. If only my camera had bluetooth or wifi! One was of the Empire State Building on my walk to work this morning. I was standing out on the edge of 5th Avenue waiting for a break in the cars so that I could jaywalk across, and I looked up, and noticed it was really nicely lit by morning sunlight. On my tiny preview screen it looks like a nice photo, but it's stuck on the camera until I get ahold of my cable again. And I'm really seriously thinking about getting EVDO. I need to do a little more research on it, and try to figure out if it works out in northern NJ. My GSM cellphone doesn't work too well out there, so coverage might be pretty spotty.

I found a blogpost on how to cut mats for your artwork today. It's a great, clear guide. It also gave me flashbacks to Jewett at 4 AM the night before a project was due, attempting to cut my own mats. I don't know how I graduated with all my fingers attached, because exhausted college students and mat cutters are a bad mix. I usually prefer to buy pre-cut mats from Target these days.

Quotable Geeks

I collected a few goofy emails and quotes over my years at amazon, and here are some of my sharable favorites. There are a few which I love more, but I can't really post here. If you know me, you know which ones they are anyway. So...

"I don't think my ego has ever been more bruised. Imagine, being mocked by developers. Shouldn't I be taking your lunch money?" --A non-technical good friend, circa 2001ish

"Correct. The first set of numbers is an order id. Walk softly over the rice paper Grasshopper." --Alan

"The Fantastic Four is such a rip off of The Incredibles!" --Jonathan

Jon: "So this is SOL?" James: "Give or take."

John: "Let's reinvent the wheel." Jon: "Our wheels have to be upside down."

"Good morning Japan!" --David, 3:24 PM JST

"Let's replace the working software with Folgers Crystals!" --Scott

(after my friend's dog, Bandon, ran away...) "Thanks for all who helped look for Bandon. FWIW, he was where we suspected: smoking a cigarette, playing poker in the basement of the parking garage." --Greg

books

One of the things that I want to do when I get back to NJ is to ask my grandpa the name of the ship that he was on during WWII. Kicked off by finally reading a few more of my books on Bletchley Park (I've been mildly obsessed with it since college), I've been tearing through a bunch of WWII history books. In the last few days I've finished An Army at Dawn, The Liberation of Paris, Enigma: Battle for the Code, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, Codebreaker's Victory and Finest Hour. The Liberation of Paris I turned up in a used bookstore up on Capitol Hill, and read a few pages of it standing in the stacks. It's a very quick read- I think it took me all of 4 hours, with breaks, to go through it.

I also have Combined Fleet Decoded here, it's next on my list (and From Fish to Colussus on my amazon wishlist, which I might end up buying myself). Out of all of these, An Army at Dawn and The Liberation of Paris have been my favorites. An Army at Dawn has its own website and is supposed to be the first of three books on WWII campaigns. Hopefully the next two will be as engaging. The website just says they "will be published in the coming years".

Pop Conference

emplive.org - Visit - Education - Pop Conference: "The 2006 Experience Music Project Pop Conference-Seattle - April 27 - 30, 2006" It's the annual Pop Music conference at EMP this weekend. I'm going to try to make it over on Saturday, as a bunch of the panels sound interesting.
I'm trying to find some new songs to download from the iTunes store tonight, but nothing really looks interesting. I wish they had better recommendations, although honestly, my amazon recs are never terribly great for discovering "just been released by a new artist" stuff either. I have lots of thoughts on music recommendations and the new (to me) artist problem that might best be summed up by "I wish there was a way to make a taste template and then match new songs against that." Lots of work has been done in lots of places to define what a "taste template" might be, but I've never seen one that really works. For instance, I love hip hop, but how do I describe the songs that I love and the songs that make me switch the radio station? What attributes do I rank Ride on against Slowdive against Curve, and what of those attributes make me not like a lot of newly released shoegazing?

On a less geeky note, remember the feeling you'd get in grade school the night before the last day of school? Ahhh bliss. Summer vacation never really quite lived to what you might have hoped it would be like, and you knew it, but right before it started was always the greatest time. I liked it even better than Christmas or my birthday. So, I haven't felt this way since I was about 10, and I'm loving it.

Drambuie Cocktails

Traditional Scottish Recipes - Drambuie Cocktails: Warm Woolly Sheep
1 measure Scotch whisky
1 1/2 measure Drambuie
Fill with warm Milk
Mix Scotch and Drambuie, top with warm milk.

I always drink my Drambuie either straight up, or by putting a few drops of it on top of a small glass of scotch. I'm half tempted to try this one, though; I can't even imagine what warm milk and scotch would taste like.

Today I decided that I'm moving back to the east coast. I'll be just shy of 7 years at amazon- 7 years which felt like 6 months. I feel like I just launched the Kitchen store last month, web services last week, and blinked and then here I am. So here is my favorite amazon memory... in summer 2002, Russell got me to sign up for his broomball team. It was Jeff Bezos's team, made up of a bunch of people from various parts of the company. I'd played on Jeff's team before (I got a compilment from him on my creative goal tending skills one year when I sat down on the ball to stop it from being pushed over the goal line), and always one of the big problems was coordinating everyone out on the field. So we decided to hold a practice game out on the south lawn after work. It was an amazing August evening- sunny, warm, just beautiful. I went out and helped tape up some broomball sticks. Then we assembled on the grass and split the team in two. Jeff was out there with us- I seem to recall he was playing barefoot in his work clothes. I was marginally more sensibly dressed in some running gear. We all faced off, and played an hour of great broomball. At the picnic, we made it to the semi-finals, but didn't win. It was still a ton of fun.

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.)