Four Year Plan

Liveblogging p&p summit, day 3, designing for performance

2009-10-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, let's all agree that all apps must have a performance plan.

Highest-priority scenarios - could be response times to user input, or server throughput, or other. I'm thinking data response times too.
Articulate Bad, Good and Excellent performance - e.g., on startup 10 sec is bad, 3 sec is good, <>
Do coarse estimation if "good performance" is in jeopardy - if uncertain, prototype and measure more; if bad, redesign.

Design design design design. "If you have a performance catastrophe - 10x, 100x from acceptable - then you either have some serious bugs or the flaw is in design. If it's in the design, then you're screwed. You cannot fix this late in the product cycle. You have to start over and redesign the app from scratch for version 2." You don't say. J.f.C.

Measure. Use real numbers. Measure early. Don't skimp on this. Performance is not free.

You cannot commit to features or designs until you know how much they cost, and to know that, you need real facts and real numbers. Use references (consults?), past experience, and experiments/prototyping to determine what things cost. You can only make rational decisions about how to build things if you know this. (I am sure this must apply to aspects of decision-making beyond just performance.)

Multi-threading. Ugh.

A symptom of blocking - you have a ton of stuff going on/waiting, but the machine's CPU is not fully utilized. This means something's hanging on some thread while the machine has idle threads to spare. Points of communication between threads will then be the bottlenecks. It's fine to share RO data between threads because each thread can keep its own hot copy.

Disk is 10,000x slower than RAM.

"The problem with caches is they only work the second time." D'oh.

("Argaments"?)

Memory is not a primary metric - time is. It only matters inasmuch as it affects time.

Takeaways:

1. Care.

2. Plan.

3. Measure.

4. Design.

5. Measure some more.

Liveblogging p&p summit, day 2, keynote

2009-10-13T09:27:00.000-07:00

"Don't allow an unbelievable schedule to live."

Not just don't, but here's why not:

When people don't believe the schedule, it undercuts their belief in anything else you say.

When everybody "knows" you can't make the schedule, if you're not actively managing that, they'll start making their own decisions and judgments. If this is under the table, then they won't do it the way you (the manager) would want. E.g., if they "know" the ship date isn't realistic and no one is talking about that, maybe they'll speculate about how much it's going to slip, and start working to that assumption. If you (the manager) don't know what they're speculating and aren't giving realistic, believable input into that judgment, then you won't have any influence over that decision they're silently making about how to work. Yowch.

The usual solutions are to change the ship date or change the scope, to bring about a believable schedule. Both of which are the right things. I suppose there is another possibility, to convince people that the original scope & schedule should be believable, by providing lots of supporting facts and Gantt charts and suchlike. The problem here is that this is more like browbeating, most of the time. If your developers don't believe the schedule (assuming your developers are minimally competent and are at least somewhat able to explain their concerns rationally; if not, then you have a much bigger problem), chances are you should listen to them instead of trying to talk them out of it. As well, not listening to them makes all of the above outcomes worse.

"Working harder is a short-term solution." Death marches R bad, mmmkay?

Liveblogging p&p summit, day 1, more

2009-10-12T11:09:00.001-07:00

Gratified to see that my team isn't the only one with an unhealthy fondness for layer cake metaphors (and Visios)!

"Customer doesn't care whose fault it is; they just want things to work." Good reminder for me, personally.

Got to talk to a very delightful p&p program manager/session presenter in the coffee line while a different session was going on. If I were actually any good at this "networking" thing, I would have figured out a way to snag a business card or thought of a thought-provoking question for further follow-up. Live & learn.

"When [users/developers] get a new version and have to spend all their up-front time fixing compatibility issues, they tend to not want to use your app at all." Not that Microsoft would know, of course. ;)

Much later in the day...

Experimental 15-minute "lightning sessions" debuting this year. The first one was a Program Manager discussing transition to Agile, which was disappointing because it didn't cover Agile in very much depth. In 15 minutes. I know! Really! (Ahem, kidding.)

The current "lightning session" covers a concept called Behavior-Driven Design. I love it. This is either something we are already accidentally doing, or something I wish we were doing. Either way, it seems to me that it would fit well within the methodologies we already use. Awesome.

I exercised restraint and did not "mention" the speaker, @ElegantCoder, in a tweet, even after other attendees did and his TweetDeck notifications started popping up on his presentation laptop. The temptation was tremendous.

So he uses the word "scenario" for the "given/when/then" construct describing a desired/expected behavior. We also use the word "scenario" and I'm trying to figure out whether our usage is reasonably compatible with this standard definition, or if we're abusing it. We use it to describe automatedly-testable behaviors, so it does seem to fit together, but it doesn't really describe our internal architecture, so maybe not so much.

OK, this is cool. Third lightning session on SharePoint development seemed ridiculously irrelevant to our team, but instead, here he is demoing the concept of Inversion of Control, which is perfect for some of the team members we brought along, and the examples are simple, and he's explaining the value IoC adds to the process. Hooray!

That means 2.5 out of 3 lightnings are useful so far.

Last lightning round: Billy Hollis. Always a total, major win even if he doesn't fully appreciate that there may be female coders in his audience (or in the universe) when he writes his jokes. Ahem. *dusts shoulder-chip* I'll still give him full credit for "useful". 3.5 out of four, nice work p&p.

Liveblogging p&p summit, day 1, intro & keynote

2009-10-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

ZOMG it's Martin Fowler. Right now! I knew he'd be here, but, first! #fangrrrl

"We need to reduce our emphasis on quality so we can fit more features into the next release"? No, that's definitely never happened to me. Nope.

Attendance is way, way down compared to two years ago. Our own delegation this year is half the size (or smaller?) than ours then, and I'd really guess the overall crowd size is similarly proportioned. Which makes me wonder about last year (immediately mid-meltdown) when we couldn't attend at all. Don't know if it is valid to think of us as a bellwether.

Lord, this clacky Dell keyboard is already not making me any friends here.

Key concepts from the Martin Fowler leadoff keynote, part 1:

External quality, which is negotiable with the users/product owners (e.g., they get to prioritize bugs vs. new features), vs. internal quality (architecture), which really mustn't be.

Accidental complexity vs. essential complexity. Code debt!! Initial accidental complexity is the principal and working with the accidental complexity when implementing new features/changes is the interest. This impacts the effort required to do that new work. It isn't just "debt", it could be on the scale of a technical subprime mortgage. Not that I would know. Nope.

Debt planning (refer also to the debt payoff line graph):

Deliberate/prudent: "We must ship now and deal with the consequences"

Deliberate/reckless: "We don't have time for design"

Inadvertent/prudent: "Now we know how we should have done it"

Inadvertent/reckless: "What's layering?"

Event sourcing:

(This is relevant to my interests.)

We log all events in an insert-only store, and we trust our log, such that at any time we could rebuild the entire current application state (e.g., dB) by parsing the log. This also means we have a solid audit trail, and we could rebuild the entire historical state of the application (presumably someplace else) just by dialing back the date. Or diff two states. In other words, this stuff isn't just for version control systems any more.

Also useful for various other things which hopefully one of my colleagues took notes about. Oops. #shortattentionspan

OK, now there's a dude in front of me taking pictures of Martin Fowler. Unless he's part of Microsoft's PR division, that means I am not the only #fangrrrl in the room! I am sorely tempted to take a picture of him taking a picture.

Coffee time!

Algebra in real life, part II

2009-08-24T14:31:00.000-07:00

This post is dedicated to the memory of Mr. Earl Wog, who taught us about Joe Pythagoras and also taught me how to drive. :)

I've needed to know this two different times in the last six months or so, and had to figure it out from scratch both times, so it's time to document it for posterity.

When you're trying to get payment from somebody via, say, an online credit card processor such as PayPal, and the processor takes a percentage of the total transaction as its transaction fee, how much do you need to charge in order to receive the amount of money you actually want? Here is the correct formula:

[amount you want to receive] ÷ ( 1 - [fee, as a decimal] )

The following, seemingly plausible formula does not work, and will result in you receiving less money than you wanted:

[amount you want to receive] + ( [amount you want to receive] × [fee, as a decimal] )

Pro tip! If you accidentally used the second formula instead of the first one, don't make an indignant post in the credit card processor's user support forums demanding to know why they're shorting you.

Thanks, Mr. Wog, wherever you are!

Update: I received a suggestion that the following formula may also yield the desired result:

[amount you want to receive] × ( 1 + [fee, as a decimal] )

However,

x(1+y) == (x × 1) + (x × y) == x + xy

which is the same as the second formula above and isn't correct. Thanks to GAM for helping me with the proof on this. Make no mistake, my algebra skillz are tenuous and that's why I have to struggle through formulas and post them on my blog. :)

WTF is it with Seattle and snow?

2008-12-20T21:20:00.001-08:00

I survived four years of Massachusetts winters in college. That's mostly where I learned to drive; I picked up some snow skillz during shifts piloting the (16-passenger, RWD, usually-empty) campus shuttle van. It just wasn't that scary.

One year I invited a Mass-native friend (hi Katy!) home to see Seattle during winter break, and my family wouldn't let us go anywhere after < 1" of snow fell on the city. She was disgusted; I was mortified.

So what is the deal with snow in Seattle? If, e.g., Bostonians, had our attitude about it, they'd be forced into hibernation six months of the year. Non-natives never seem to tire of pointing out what pantywaists we Seattleites are about this.

Most obvious reason: It rarely snows in Seattle. My entire childhood, twice a year (November and March), lasting 1-3 days, if we kids were lucky. This leads to side-effects, and not just the one where Seattleites hardly ever get to practice driving in snow.

Seattle and King County own fewer snowplows than other cities. Many or most snowplows are fitted with rubber blades to keep from damaging the extensive network of raised-button and reflective lane markers:

Roads crews are working around the clock to continuously plow and sand City streets.... Following the plows are the sanders to provide traction on the ice. Snow plows’ rubber blades do not remove ice.

(We use raised lane markers because it rains here. Ever seen the lane markings when it's wet in Boston? Neither have Bostonians.)

No wonder most of Burien today looked more like it had been polished than plowed, though.

Seattle and King County say it is not cost-effective to maintain any larger a fleet of snowplows or sanding trucks for how infrequently they are needed. This seems reasonable to me, unless these last few years of storms are harbingers of long-term climate change or something.

On the flip side of this, as alluded-to above, cities with regular heavy snowfall get good at dealing with it out of practical and economic necessity. People couldn't live there if they didn't. People would have to move to friendlier climes, like Seattle... hey, waitaminnit....

A related reason: Snow in Seattle is almost always wet snow. Even when it gets cold enough for precipitation to fall as snow, we're usually flirting with 32°F.

Several of you commented about the nature of the snow last night. Most of you are used to the large, dendritic crystals that fall when temperatures are near freezing...our usual situation. Last night you got to enjoy the type of snow they get in colder climates.

Most of the time, that means what little snow we got will melt away quickly, completely. But when we get snow of any quantity, often, it'll melt partially during the day and re-freeze as sheets of solid ice.

Also, wet snow compacts differently when driven on than dry snow does, which is especially relevant when the streets aren't getting plowed right away (or at all).

A frequent complaint: We don't salt the roads. The poor salmon! Think of the salmon! (Or is it "think of the undercarriage"?)

Another obvious, though debatable, reason: Seattle is really, really hilly. Stuff other places call "mountains", we call "housing developments" and "arterials". I have to negotiate several steep hills to get out of my neighborhood in any direction. Only one of these is ever sanded; none are ever plowed. It is claimed, however, that other actual hilly cities manage better than Seattle does. See above and below.

The oft-cited reason: "I can drive fine on snow... it's all those other maniacs." Does this refer to all those native Seattleites who can't drive on snow? The natives I grew up with refuse to leave the house at the first sight of flurries. Could it be all those transplanted drivers zipping around assuming our roads are as driveable as the ones where they came from? (Maybe it's just the free lobotomy given to both kinds of drivers when they buy an SUV.)

Case study: This super-awesome news story from yesterday, wherein two charter buses nearly plunged 20 feet onto I-5 after trying to take an icy hill without chains, arguably had several of the above causes:

Steep urban hills
Closure of an unplowed arterial
Icy Side Street of Death™
Some kind of driver cluelessness, or reckless bravado, which led the first bus to ignore pedestrians frantically trying to wave it off its ill-fated left turn and the second bus to make the same turn after the first bus was already sliding and the second bus' passengers were screaming at the driver to stop

What have we learned? I dunno, but Washington state seems to do reasonably kind of OK with that big ol' mountain pass we have (I-90, known elsewhere as the Mass Pike); we manage to keep it open most of the time, even during avalanche season, so somebody somewhere in this state must know something about making roads driveable in snow. Maybe just not so much down here at sea level.

In conclusion: A couple years ago, I waited a few hours after the snow had started to begin my trek through the city from work toward home. I Had a Bad Experience. Two to three HOURS of road closures, crazy heavy traffic on unplowed urban side street detours, unwise steep hill attempts blocked by other people's earlier unsuccessful unwise hill attempts, jackknifed Metro buses, and finally utterly fucking clueless pedestrian neighbors who let their kids and dogs frolic in front of me on the steep unplowed hill I was, at that moment, sliding down uncontrollably. ¡No más! I got nothin' to prove any more, and I ain't goin' out in this stuff if I don't have to.

Bonus update: Dear Science explains how your SUV is subject to the same Newtonian physics (hi lafe!) as the rest of us, no matter what the dealer may have told you.

Another bonus update: Cliff Mass wonders whether it's really more cost-effective for Seattle to skimp on plows:

It is true that having extra plows for city trucks are not free and that snow events like this are unusual. But the economic loss of allowing the city to be crippled by such modest snows is substantial...and major decisions (like the cancellation of schools last Wednesday when no snow fell) are made in the context of such poor snow removal.

It would be interesting to try to quantify, indeed.

Bold, bold choices

2008-11-14T17:12:00.000-08:00

Last night on Countdown, I swear* Keith Olbermann said something about how President-elect Obama's hypothetically possibly choosing Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State would be a bold move because it would place a woman in such a high office.

A few moments later he clued in and noted that the current Secretary of State is Condoleezza Rice.

Great job, Keith, except Madeleine Albright was appointed Secretary of State by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and served through 2000.

[insert "Worst Persons" ominous theme music here]

But wait! There's more!

This morning on KIRO AM 710, Dave Ross said something about how President-elect Obama's even-more-hypothetically possibly choosing Colin Powell as his Secretary of State would be a bold move because it would place an African-American in such a high office.

He did not manage to clue in that the current Secretary of State is Condoleezza Rice.

And, somehow, even though this was the whole point of the discussion, did not put it together that Colin Powell, having been appointed in 2001 by President GW Bush and having served through 2005, has already been Secretary of State.

In conclusion, people:

We have already had two female Secretaries of State.
We have already had two African-American Secretaries of State.

I realize that we are really, really enjoying the historic-ness of the present moment, but let's come to grips with the fact that the State Department's historic moment has passed.

Hell, I'm not sure even an openly gay or lesbian Secretary of State would be that bold a move... unless she or he has the temerity to want to get married or something.

(Seattle March for Equality tomorrow, November 15, Volunteer Park, 10:30 AM with keynote speakers starting at noon...!!)

__
* I did not rewind or write down the exact quote or look online for the video today, so standard disclaimers apply.

Election Day transcendence

2008-11-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

I tempted, no, taunted fate by wearing a RED shirt* to work on Election Day.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Kyle wore a blue one. (Certainly without as much "meta" or superstition as me.)

I would like it very much if we could follow President-elect Obama's lead and be less "red" and "blue" in our collective political thinking. This is not to say that I'm turning away in the slightest from my values, nor Kyle from his, which will make it an interesting exercise.
__
* Not a Star Trek reference.

Election Day synchronicity

2008-11-04T11:04:00.001-08:00

Interesting mix here in my Twitter feed.

Now go vote!

Suki Halloween Costume

2008-11-03T14:41:00.001-08:00

The Challenge: For Halloween, LG wanted to be Suki, Kyoshi Warrior from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The Mission: Design an awesome, accurate Suki costume for Halloween which would, we hoped, also be wearable for next year's Anime Con and Emerald City ComiCon.

The Staff: Lead designer and dressmaker: my mom. Headdress and makeup: me. Lead researcher, accessories and finishing details: LG's mom. Kyoshi Warrior attitude: all LG.

The Project:

We spent a morning at JoAnn Fabrics picking out clothing and costume patterns that contained different elements mom could piece together to create the final dress pattern. LG located fabrics that exactly matched the colors in our screen printout. I took some wild guesses at yardage. We picked up a few notions that we thought mom wouldn't already have.

Mom did some shopping for supplemental patterns in better sizes, and modified the design to be expandable in a variety of ways in case it needs to be altered next spring.

Barb picked up fans, two shades of gold spray paint, tassels, and other items. We each shopped for a variety of items to try for the facepaint. Very annoying that all the Halloween brands say not to use red around the eyes.

I designed and built the headdress out of a Clorox bottle and some chopsticks from Panda Express. I glued green bias tape to the wraparound headband area and added laces for adjustable sizing. We painted the pieces using Barb's gold spray paints and assembled with a hot glue gun.

Barb spray-painted the fans and applied gold medallions and tassels to finish up the costume.

On Halloween evening, LG finished dinner, suited up, and we sat down for a makeup application (which was long enough and unpleasant enough to give her serious second thoughts about her showbiz career aspirations). We used Clinique foundation base, white drugstore greasepaint (dabbed on with a makeup sponge), cornstarch powder to set the white, and then Wet 'n' Wild black eyeliner pencil and Wet 'n' Wild red lipstick (applied with a lip brush) for the designs.

The Result:

Perfection. Look for LG and a gaggle of proud grownups at next year's Cons!

Oh no he didn't

2008-09-03T23:36:00.000-07:00

From CNN's Political Ticker:

"A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is hitting back hard at Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's speech Wednesday night, calling it 'shrill...'"

"Shrill"?

Really?

Way to go, Harry. You're a fine representative of the principles Democratic voters hold dear, and I simply cannot imagine how your Senate majority's approval ratings managed to become so low.

Oh no she didn't

2008-09-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

I assure you, I am not making this up. I'm actually pretty late to the party.

From an Eagle Forum Alaska questionnaire in 2006, when Sarah Palin was a candidate for governor:

"11. Are you offended by the phrase 'Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?

SP: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance."

The original version of the Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892.

"of the United States of America" was added in 1922-23.

Congress declared it the official national pledge in 1942.

And finally, "under God" was added by Congress, at the urging of the Knights of Columbus, in 1954.

Maybe she meant different "founding fathers" than the ones in 1776?

D minus ten

2008-07-11T13:34:00.000-07:00

10 days to Deutschland!!

Newcomers, be sure to watch my TravelBlog for exciting and insightful posts throughout my journey to Old Europe. It'll update to my Facebook feed as well.

I do travel blogging over there, rather than here, because there's extra mapping and social networking and stuff. It's cool. Čech it out!

See y'all in August....

Gemini FTW!

2008-07-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

Loyal readers will recall that a few years ago, I got run over by a lying, scene-of-accident-fleeing sack of shit in a blue Ford Taurus.

Back then, I said I would be investigating options as to dealing with the miscreant. Investigate I did... my lawyer advised that no good lawyer would help me sue (I'd win, but miscreant has no money to pay my lawyers any percentage of)... but my lawyer also advised me to check with my own auto insurance company, because I had about 50-50 odds that my own Uninsured Motorist policy would cover my accident, a pedestrian hit-and-run.

Sure enough, mine did!

Thanks to my aforementioned lawyer, whom I adore, I was able to negotiate a nice little cash settlement from my own insurance company. Unexpected and pretty sweet.

Oh, but that's not all.

Tonight, I get a letter from my own insurance company, roughly along these lines:

Hi, as you know, we recently paid you a nice little cash settlement. It is our intention now to go after the miscreant who hit you, to try to recover for ourselves some of the money we just paid you. This letter is to advise you that we might ask you to come testify against the lying sack of shit if it ever comes to that; hope you don't mind. Love, State Farm.

Let the happy dance, on my skillfully repaired and rehabilitated knee, commence.

On the meaning of life

2008-07-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

Last weekend there was a bad apartment fire in Burien... 1.5 complexes were destroyed, 3 people died, 70-some are homeless, and arson is suspected (Blaze that killed 3 people was arson).

I hadn't been able to figure out where the apartments were located in Burien, and it bugs me to not know things about Burien. I had heard something about them being generally on SW 155th, and yesterday I happened to be driving on SW 156th... so... yeah. I wanted to check it out*. SW 155th isn't very long, so it didn't take much time to find the place.

LG & I cruised by and looked at the two burned-out buildings and the "ARSON" signs. As we passed, I noticed a memorial set up for the victims of the fire, and I mentioned to her, by way of imparting how bad a deal this fire really was, that a 7-year-old boy was one of the ones killed.

LG thought for a moment and said: "He didn't even have a chance to live his life."

Then: "He didn't even get to live as much of a life as I have."

Something about that, from an 8-year-old, struck me as really profound. That is all.

--
* Not trying to be disrespectful, but... yeah, I know. I did it anyway.

Everybody who has ever put a flag sticker on their car or worn a flag pin had better show up CHEERFULLY when summoned for jury duty

2008-06-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

I have completed my first real week of real jury duty.

Back in 1992, I got summoned in Massachusetts while attending college. I told the judge I was carrying 20 credits that semester, which I was, and that got me excused with some kudos from the judge for being so impressively studious.

A couple of years ago, I got summoned for service in Seattle on December 26. Seriously. I decided to serve it, rather than postpone it, at least in part because it pissed off my then-boss so much. :) Turns out when we all arrived for service, the clerk couldn't imagine why anyone summoned any jurors for the morning after Christmas... all the judges and lawyers were on vacation and no trials were scheduled for the entire week. She spent an hour confirming this fact, then dismissed us all outright. Sweet way to satisfy a jury summons!

This week, I served at Burien District Court. I participated in two selection panels, both for DUIs. I found it interesting how the jury-screening questions by the prosecutor and the defense attorney telegraphed their approaches to the trial itself. Granted, two is not much of a sample size, but in both cases the prosecutors asked a lot of questions about "reasonable doubt" and whether we jurors would be willing to convict in the absence of Breathalyzer test results or other scientific evidence. Would the "credibility" of the arresting officer be sufficient to convince us that the defendant was intoxicated beyond the legal limit? Most jurors said no, the officer's word, judgment, observation, whatever, alone would not be enough. Most jurors said no, it is not possible to know for sure whether someone is drunk just by looking at them, unless you know them well.

All this really got me wondering. If it's legal for accused drivers to refuse breath and/or blood tests, and I think it might be, and if modern CSI-watching juries will only accept the results of scientific tests as sufficient evidence, wouldn't that make DUI cases inherently unwinnable for the state?

A lot of people complain about DUI laws not being strict enough, and re-offenders seeming to get away with it time and time again, unless/until they kill someone, and sometimes even after that. Is that true? Is this why?

I totally, completely appreciate that the burden of proof is, and always should be, on the state to prove its case. I'm also pretty OK with protections against self-incrimination, and the idea of forcible breath or blood tests makes me uneasy. But DUIs suck. So what do we do?

The defense attorney in our second trial said something about how the burden on an arresting officer is "probable cause", while the burden in a criminal trial is "reasonable doubt" which is a much higher standard. Both sides asked lots of questions about what a drunk driver drives like... in other words, the probable cause-type stuff. It seems to me like it would be fairly easy to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant was driving really dangerously, and I'd be a lot more comfortable relying on an officer's credibility to judge that question. The way DUI laws are set up, though, in a DUI trial it's the influence of the drugs or alcohol that becomes the key question for the jury, and it seems to me like that is the more difficult question to answer. It also lets a lot of other dangerous drivers off the hook.

The problem seems to be that our penalties are linked to the reason for the dangerous driving, which is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, instead of linking penalties to the dangerousness of the driving itself. Sure, there may be laws against inattentive driving, driving while applying mascara, driving while juggling a cell phone, etc., but I don't think a DUI jury is allowed to return a verdict based on the quality of the driving. I think they have to decide on whether the defendant met the legal standard for intoxication. Without any scientific evidence. I don't know how that would work.

I didn't get seated on the first jury.

Interestingly, in the second trial, one of the other jurors on the panel spoke at length about being a 26-year member of AA, with numerous friends & family having a history of DUI, and he was furious about what he saw as a completely broken and worthless system that allows alcoholics to get away with DUI over and over again. He asserted that anyone who's pulled over for DUI is almost certainly guilty, and allowing them a jury trial is just a waste of everyone's time and an opportunity for them to game the system. A few others on the panel expressed agreement. After all the questioning was finished, the judge asked us if anything we had heard during the selection process might affect our ability to be fair and impartial in this case. Everyone said "no" (other than those who had already said they couldn't be impartial for other reasons).

The 18 of us were sent to the jury room, where we waited to find out which six of us would be selected for the actual jury. We waited a really long time. Like an hour and a half. When the court clerk finally returned, she dismissed all of us! I figure several things could have happened: last-minute plea bargain, last-minute dropping of charges, some kind of continuance or reschedule, last-minute waiver of jury trial in favor of judge trial... it just makes me wonder if either side blinked, and if so, which one? Was the possible "tainting" of our jury panel an issue?

Pretty awesome to see our justice system at work, even clunkily.

And that is patriotism, bitches.

Birthday contact lens emergency averted

2008-06-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

So, today's my BIRTHDAY and I've been having an amazing day... an awesome surprise present in my office (photos forthcoming), "Happy Birthday" sung at me across the hallway by my teammates, a fun lunch with friends, and a great dinner and movie planned with even more friends and family this evening.

Last Wednesday, I finally got around to ordering some more disposable contact lenses. I'm really terrible about over-wearing every pair I get. They told me my order would be in in a day or two.

This morning, one of my old lenses was irritating the heck out of me; I assumed I had a bit of fuzz in it or perhaps a scratch on my eye, which happens often enough and works itself out. As the afternoon wore on, it got more annoying, until finally I pulled the lens out to figure out what the heck was going on.

It had a little RIP in it.

No wonder it was irritating!

Never had one of THOSE before.

Well, hell, I didn't have any spare lenses, certainly not right there at work. Even my backup glasses were back at home... 25 minutes the opposite direction from work AND dinner.

I put the lens back in and tried to ignore those rough edges. No dice. By that point I was panicking about it tearing in half completely and the little fragments getting lost on my eyeball... or whatever.

As a last resort, I called my eye clinic and asked if they might HAPPEN to carry my prescription in stock in their supply of samples. "Toric?" "Yup." "No chance; those are special order only." Bummer. So I made plans to leave work early, drive back home, dig through the house for any old yucky lenses I might have forgotten to throw away, and as a last resort pick up glasses.

Great. We've got birthday dinner reservations at a restaurant with a patio, on one of the first beautiful sunny days of 2008 in this town, and I'm going to be stuck in my scratched-up winter glasses, no shades, squinting through dinner and then is it even worth it to try to GO to a movie after? Grumble. Glasses all weekend? Grumble. My own fault for putting off ordering backup lenses, but still.

I was about to head out for home when I glanced at my cell phone. Missed call. From University Vision Clinic. Like, 5 minutes prior. They couldn't've been calling me back... I didn't give my name when I called. In fact, I think they called WHILE I was talking to them...?! Voice mail: "Hi, this is [a different guy from the one I talked to] at University Vision Clinic. Those new lenses you ordered are in, you can pick them up any time."

WOOHOO!!!!

Took me like 30 seconds to get 'em and another 30 to put in a fresh pair.

Sunshine, dinner, movie, VISION. Might be the best birthday present of all. ;)

Feminist technology theory as it is realized in a Guitar Hero III Pro Face-Off

2008-06-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

Big news first. There's a vendor booth here where they're running a contest: beat one of their employees at Guitar Hero III Pro Face-Off, win free software (developer tools). I was too chikin yesterday, but today I showed up determined to play. That's when I found out their real GHIII player had to go home, so other booth staff are subbing in for him. The new rules? "You pick the song, you pick the difficulty, but no Expert. And if it's an upper-tier Hard you're pretty much gonna win." Heck. If I'd've known that yesterday....

Anyway, I picked the hardest song I can beat on Hard: Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Pride and Joy". I knew I was in trouble when I didn't complete one single Star Power phrase in the entire song. Beat him anyway, with 80%, which isn't a score I'm happy with, but not bad for a Pro Face-Off in front of strangers with no warm-up. :)

When we were finished, someone from the little group of spectators called out to the booth staffer: "You got beat by a woman!"

Hmm.

Didn't like that.

I prolly should've challenged the heckler to a duel right then & there. You know, on all the afterschool specials they say even if you fail epically, you'll win their respect. I dunno. Not my style. Whatever.

I filled out all the paperwork for my free software, and got my photo taken for the booth's "Wall of Shame" screen saver, which I gotta go back and check out later. That's awesome.

As I walked away, another conference attendee walked alongside and complimented my performance. "You really pounded him! Nice job. Do you play at home with your kids?"

Wait. What?

Super nice guy. Paying me a compliment. Loved it. But I cannot imagine that the hundred developer dudes here who've beaten the booth staff at GHIII got asked if they learned to shred by playing with their kids. The guy before me who pwned him on Iron Maiden didn't get that question from anybody.

At lunch, K & I got talking about assumptions, and how initial assumptions are generally based on past experience, and hell, even I would have to assume that a random girl I meet, even here at TechEd, probably doesn't shred on Guitar Hero and probably doesn't aspire to be a software architect. Can I blame other people for basing their assumptions on what we all observe together as the most common realities? Certainly not.

In our most recent architecture session, I looked back through the roomful of ~300 attendees and saw that I was one of only two females in the entire room. That percentage of women who are here at TechEd at all (you know, the ones in the Women in Technology Luncheon I blew off yesterday), almost none of them are in the 400-level architecture track. I noticed this, and I was proud to be one of the only girls in the room. I have started to feel like the more profoundly outnumbered I am, the more likely I am to find the content rigorous and interesting... the more likely I am to be exactly where I want to be. And that was before Guitar Hero!

I'm very seriously really hoping I'm the only girl on the Wall of Shame screensaver and will be disappointed if I'm not. I'm sure a girl who plays GHIII is perfectly capable of beating the booth staff, but I don't expect the girls, even here, to be likely to play in the first place. Even I make that assumption.

So perhaps it isn't the assumptions that cause the problem... as long as you're open to being wrong, open to individuals being individuals.

"No, I don't have any kids." Random TechEd dude was perfectly delightful after that, rolled with the punches, kept up the conversation. Well done, random TechEd dude. It's true... I only look like a girl. I don't really talk or act like one. I like it that way.

But it isn't really enough to throw "girls" under the bus and argue that I only need concern myself with people's assumptions about me: "sure, girls are lame, but I'm an exception." Not cool.

"Beat by a woman" implies that the crowd expected me to suck... even after I finished playing. In their eyes, the fact that I won didn't prove anything good about me... only something bad about the guy I beat.

And that's why you TechEd dudes are not fully off the hook for how you think about us girls. Even if 95% of the females you've ever met or heard of don't show any interest in actual software development, even if they all end up on the BA or PM or UI tracks, even if they don't game, it doesn't mean girls are bad at the tough technical stuff. It just means they tend to be no-shows. You don't know why that is. You can't actually assume anything from that, and you shouldn't.

And that's why I have to keep being a girl here at TechEd. And that's why I, who am wearing a skirt today and everything, am gonna go see if I can beat that guy again. ;)

Update: it has been brought to my attention that kids, regardless of gender, are generally way better than adults, regardless of gender, at Guitar Hero. This is the sort of thing I would have been in a better position to have known if I had kids... and it is a worthy and valid point to consider. Perhaps developer dudes don't get asked about their kids because the answer ("my kids pwn me at Guitar Hero") is obvious. :)

Roller coaster

2008-06-04T21:09:00.000-07:00

Been looking longingly at SeaWorld Orlando's Kraken coaster, which is clearly, hugely visible from the south windows of the Orange County Convention Center. $70 admission to ride one damn coaster. It mocks me, there on the skyline.

Here inside TechEd, session offerings are listed at three "levels": 200-Intermediate, 300-Advanced, and 400-Expert. When I sat down with K to plan our schedules, one of the first things he did was filter all the courses for "400-Expert" and pick from those. I was horrified, firmly believing that I had no business attending anything labelled "Expert" level.

Yeah. OK.

I accidentally went to a couple of 400-level sessions. They were amazing. Fast-paced, chock full o' useful information, learned tons, and got it.

Then I went to a couple of 300-level sessions. Slow. Kinda repetitive of stuff I already knew. Made me wish for more 400s.

WTF?

Either the "levels" are totally inflated, or, hmm, I'm kinda expert.

So who needs the Kraken when there are such wild roller coasters right there at TechEd?

Sketchy programming day

2008-06-04T10:44:00.000-07:00

Conference presentation programming, not code programming. Well, maybe both.

I could tell I wasn't the only one who found this morning's offerings to be somewhat dissatisfying... I bailed out of two different classes, hoping to write code (DIY Hands-on Lab!), only to find the wireless network getting utterly hammered by other attendees having, perhaps, the same idea.

Dilemma of the day

2008-06-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

The "Women in Technology" Luncheon conflicts with a lunch-hour session on C# lambda expressions.

So... do I choose to be a girl today, or a coder? Stay tuned.

Update: Even worse. The lambdas session was full, so I skipped both and wrote code. Wonder what that means.

Core competencies

2008-06-02T11:00:00.001-07:00

Unfortunately for the health of this blog, the best lectures won't get the best blog posts because I'll be busy listening to them.

The Magic Seven core competencies for architects was, for me, greatly encouraging. (I'm trying to reassure K that the stuff I found exciting wasn't precisely the same stuff he objects to on principle.)

A lot of the Magic Seven, I already have.

I have at least a little bit of all of the different types of them.

Some of the things that separate architects from developers are the same sorts of things that cause me not to feel like a true developer sometimes. You mean there's a name for that?

Many of the competencies that I don't have, or need work in, I can think right now of very specific problems I'm having on my project that are caused or worsened by those very things (or the absence of them).

Finally, even supremely competent architects fail. In the middle of an ongoing epic fail, it's pretty much impossible to know whether the architect could have prevented the failure by successful deployment of core competencies, or whether the whole thing was doomed from the start, but one hopes to be able to learn something someday looking back. (Hopefully not looking back from the business end of an espresso machine, though.)

Friends don't let friends drink Kool-Aid

2008-06-02T10:44:00.000-07:00

The thing is, software + services is almost certainly the right model for us (the place where I work) whether we "like" it or not. :)

And yes, a major draw of "cloud computing" was its Microsoft-killer potential.

But it's still funny-sad to see how hard Microsoft propagandizes for desktop client software plus services, pretending as though their very life didn't depend on it (and as if they weren't also scrambling to get cloudy just in case). "Software plus services! What a great idea! Oh, no reason."

Pre-conference seminar for Aspiring Architects

2008-06-02T07:35:00.001-07:00

Turning software development into a true profession has been a wishlist item for years. If only we had a governing body, unity, standards, education and career paths to follow, networking, community, leverage. Some of my hotheaded friends even threw the word "union" around for a while. Now it's gotten even more specific: turning architecture into a true profession. In all the same ways. Which seems kinda odd considering the original software development profession thing hasn't been solved either. (At least, I don't think it has... hope I didn't miss a memo.)

Having said that, the presentation by the founder of the (non-profit) International Software Architects Association (IASA) was really interesting and useful. He's a good speaker, and he addressed so many of the things I struggle with... sure seems like I'm not the only one trying to get my brain around this.

"Architects are technology strategists." (I heard a lot of keyboarding in the room after he said that one, but I'm still contemplating what it means.) "The best developers don't always make the best architects," and vice versa. I do not think that actually means a bad developer can be a good architect, but it does seem to contradict the notion that an architect is someone who's been a developer for > n years for some employer-specific value n. Following that idea, "can architects be made?" From scratch? Is the architecture skill set a refinement of the developer set, or is it something else entirely? IASA guy says the latter. Interesting.

I'm glad for the focus on professionalism, rather than yet another list of articles and/or tools and/or frameworks... not necessarily because I think the pink-unicorn-dream of turning software into classical engineering or medicine or what have you is likely to happen, but because even short of a full-blown professional organization, talking about the professional issues seems to be the right path toward applying architectural ideas to real problems.

Who are you and what right do you have to call yourself an "architect"?
What do you need to know to be any good?
Once you learn that, what's next?
How do you get the support you need from your employer?
How do you get them to listen to you?
How do you prove your value to your employer?

P.S.: I had some doubts about whether Microsoft really was going to be totally on top of every single little detail at this conference. (TechEd veterans may point & laugh at the n00b now.) I needn't've worried. They've got it all covered. E.g., I guess OCCC doesn't necessarily have wireless coverage throughout the center, which seemed like a major oversight, but, duh, Microsoft brought in their own.

Resistance is futile: Microsoft TechEd NA 2008

2008-06-02T05:31:00.000-07:00

"But this is Microsoft! Why wouldn't they have their pre-eminent developer conference of the year in Seattle?"

The fact that I've now seen two business-suited Orange County Convention Center staffers zip by on Segways suggests an answer to this question. OCCC is mind-bogglingly huge. The quantity and density of hotels in the immediate vicinity similarly challenges the imagination. And, finally, here in Orlando there's stuff to do. Hell, that's all Orlando is, is stuff to do. The whole thing definitely puts the Washington State Convention & Trade Center into perspective: a very tiny perspective.

I've only been here an hour, and I've already seen exponentially more females than I expected. I have a feeling this is not so much a measure of any different ratio than I expected, but rather of the huge size this conference is going to be.

I shall be trying to stay attentive to what they're teaching here, shying away from Kool-Aid but remaining open to actual knowledge. :) I shall also be trying not to fall apart from feeling way in over my head. Stay tuned.

Secret life of my brother

2008-05-11T22:06:00.001-07:00

My brother is notorious for falling off the family's radar for long stretches of time. We still know where he lives, we just don't hold our breath to hear from him. (At least, I don't. Mom still does, and then complains to me when she turns blue in the face....)

Anyway, I only recently discovered one facet of brother's super secret life... apparently, he's at least a medium-sized cheese on the indy ComiCon circuit. I knew he went to Cons, of course, but this spring he and a friend got themselves flown somewhere to staff one. This was the first I'd heard of him staffing them at all, and he's getting himself flown somewhere? Somewhere that George Takei is gonna be also?!

This weekend was my first opportunity to see brother in action, at our hometown Emerald City ComiCon. I understood that he was a helper-outer of some sort, but that was all.

"What will you be doing?"
"I'm running the panel rooms."
Me, clueless: "Oh, sounds neat."
"I can comp you in, but not the whole family... that'd probably be overdoing it."
Me, still clueless: "Oh, OK."

In spite of the foregoing, my first inkling of the true gravity of the situation was when I showed up at the Con and brother, in his spiffy Con staff jersey and laminated badge and shiny Bluetooth headset, introduced me to "[guy whose name is the same as my brother's]" (also in a spiffy Con staff jersey et al.).

Me: "Oh, ha ha, another [brother's name]?"
Brother: "Yes, that's why I'm called '2.0'."

I'd been watching Con staff go by for about 20 minutes by this point, and brother is the only one with his name on the back of his spiffy Con staff jersey. Only it isn't his name, it is indeed "2.0". That's not all... his laminated staff badge also reads "2.0". Not even "[name] 2.0", just "2.0".

This is when I start to clue in that people around here know who my brother is.

Brother meekly asks [name] 1.0 for permission to comp me, gets it, and disappears back into the Con where he is busy busy busy doing things that require extensive use of his Bluetooth headset.

Later, I find out that [name] 1.0 is the Con organizer. My brother is known, to all, by a nickname which presumably was come up with as a practical matter because he has a name collision with the organizer, which means he's spending enough time around these people for such a thing to be inconvenient. Geez.

A few hours into the Con, we make our way to a panel room to see Wil Wheaton reading from his latest book. We notice brother's best friend scurrying to clear the panel table where a bunch of DC Comics luminaries have just spoken about somethingoranother for a packed house. We get seated, along with most of the rest of the Con attendees, except for the Con attendees standing around the back of the panel room after the chairs ran out. As everyone settles in, my brother takes the podium and makes a logistical announcement for the benefit of the crowd. Wow!

Wil Wheaton reads a bunch of funny stories about being a geek. I, being a geek, hurry to upload to Flickr my crappy camera photo of my brother at the podium at Emerald City ComiCon. No photos of Wil Wheaton, mind you, just my brother.

After he wraps up another geek story, Wil Wheaton surveys the highly appreciative crowd and offers to tell us one more story... "although," says Wil Wheaton, "if I go over my speaking time, [name] is gonna be really mad at me! [pause] Sorry, [name], I'm gonna do it anyway!" Wil Wheaton proceeds to tell another story, which I don't hear much of because I'm too busy inside my head:

Me, inside my head: "ZOMG! Did Wil Wheaton just speak my brother's name from the podium?! Hmm... maybe he meant [name] 1.0, who is after all the Con organizer. But maybe he meant my brother! Wil Wheaton knows my brother!"

Etc.

As we were leaving the Con at the end of the day, and saying our goodbyes to brother, I asked whether Wil Wheaton was talking about [name] 1.0 or...? Turns out brother hadn't even been in the room at that moment, having been running around Bluetoothing or something, so hadn't heard anything about it.

"What'd he say?"
Me: "He said, '[name] is gonna be mad at me for going over time.'"
Brother: "Yup, that'd be me."
Me, fangrrrl*: "ZOMG!"

In conclusion: in my brother's secret life, Wil Wheaton knows who he is, and at least pretends to phear his panel-room-runnin' skillz. Way to go, 2.0! <3

__
* More of a pathetic fangrrrl of Wil Wheaton, or my own brother? Answer should be fairly obvious from the above.

College fair... starting young

2008-04-25T13:42:00.000-07:00

So, this week I participated in a college fair which I thought was going to be for high school students (possibly because the email invitation I received said it was going to be for high school students). Yes, I did find it a little confusing that the location was the middle school next door to the high school I thought it was going to be for... and didn't I already do a college fair for this high school's district, last fall?

Things started to make more sense when students arrived and turned out to be middle schoolers.

I think the other college representatives at the fair, of which there weren't many really, may have felt a little baited-and-switched. I sure did, at first.

But for me, this was a great opportunity. I actually prefer, in some ways, to do recruiting among younger students. In this part of the state, and in this part of the country generally, parents and counselors have almost no good information about how to prep for admission to a highly competitive college. It's very satisfying to give them advice while there's still time to use it. (Take the PSAT early and often! IB is preferable to Running Start in most cases! There's such a thing as need-based financial aid! Look out of state!) It just took me a few tries to get my spiel switched over and figure out how to talk to these much younger kids and their parents.

I think the community outreach organization that helped put on this college fair is in a bit of a bind... baiting and switching isn't cool, but if they worried that most colleges wouldn't bother to come for middle schoolers, they're probably right. A companion problem, however, is that most full-time professional college recruiters don't have a spiel for younger kids and their parents. I'll be interested to see whether this particular fair takes off or crashes next spring.

Notice to stalkers and potential stalkers

2008-04-16T18:19:00.000-07:00

All those interested in following me around creepily, and/or assembling all the small bits of my online presence/identity into a vast and totally self-incriminating profile guaranteeing I can never run for public office, and/or selling my soul to Google (wait, I already did that), I present for your edification....

I spend a lot of time on Facebook, and that's a really good way to stay in touch with me. I just started using Twitter, which I automatically sync over to my Facebook status.

I share lots and lots and lots of photos on Flickr.

I link to loads of things on del.icio.us, which is much quicker and usefuller than posting nothing but interesting links on this blog. Yes, you will notice at least one unhealthy obsession there, and Flickr will help illustrate my reason for it. :)

I have accounts on all the major instant messengers, except Google (I use Trillian and am cheap); all are visible to friends via my Facebook profile. I have to keep ICQ... I have a 7-digit user number on it.

Um, I guess you found my blog. :) I have a WordPress one, too, but I never blog there... I just grabbed my name before somebody else did.

I'm on MySpace, where someone else has my proper name and this gravely offends me, but I got a reasonably close variant. I almost never log in there.

I'm on Xbox Live, with another reasonably close variant of my proper name. Watch me rock.

I'm on LinkedIn. Somebody just invited me to something called Blue Chip Expert, which I joined, but it seems a little MLMmy, so I'm not inviting others.

I'm on Classmates and Reunion and Alumnisomethingoranother and probably a few variants, but I don't have a premium account on any of them (because I'm cheap), so they're less useful as a means of finding me, but if you're reading this you probably don't need a way to find me.

Orkut pissed me off. A lot. I'm not there any more. Does it even still exist?

I have at least 15 distinct email addresses, probably more like 20, nearly all of which forward to the exact same inbox, but which are useful for sorting incoming spam, I mean messages.

I own my own domain (since the mid-1990s) and host a sad little website on it, only one page of which is ever routinely updated. Exceptionally clever readers of this blog might notice a way to find said website. My staff page at work is actually even more pathetic than my personal site; please pity it.

I've had my nickname since high school, it became my online identity and alter ego in 1992, and it's had its unusual spelling since I got a commercial email account in 1993, when email accounts were routinely still limited to 8 characters.

Within the last few months I've had a deluge of re-connections with long-lost really great friends from high school, college, and other places, with prospects of maybe kinda keeping connected in the future. This is largely thanks to all my online presences, and I'm incredibly grateful for it, so I guess I feel it's finally time to celebrate and wallow in said presences instead of being vaguely geekily ashamed of how many there are. :)

Happy Googling, or whatever.

Obscure skillz. I has them.

2008-04-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

Jobs that no longer appear on my résumé:

Copy center assistant at the University of Washington

Allows me to claim that I've worked at UW since age 16

Barista before they were called baristas, in Seattle of course
Garageman at a SeaTac Airport rental car agency

Officially "vehicle service attendants" by then, but I demanded to be called the old-school term

Salmon processor in Bristol Bay, Alaska

Not recommended; mostly a scam

Industrial laundry attendant in Anchorage
Temp
Starbucks barista in Plano, Texas
Credit card call center associate
Home mortgage and community reinvestment data analyst
FoxPro programmer

Sometimes I do admit to this one on the résumé

Veterinary assistant at after-hours emergency clinic
Veterinary receptionist at day clinic

Not so much an interesting memoir as a source of nearly endlessly annoying anecdotes and trivial knowledge. Altogether, a good reason to keep me away from a second drink at parties.

More unit testing tips

2008-04-08T10:53:00.001-07:00

You don't need to write unit tests for private methods, as long as you write unit tests for all public methods and then make sure every private method is getting called by something that's tested....

We finally get an opportunity to learn VSTS....

2008-04-08T10:36:00.001-07:00

... and it turns out I haven't bought my team the proper licenses. No hands-on for us!

I guess this is where all those VSTS planning meetings I skipped might have come in handy.

This is so going on my perf eval....

Update: Proper licenses (and my job) secured. Now get to work. :)

Tips for a successful LD caucus

2008-04-08T09:01:00.000-07:00

Make sure to be a full delegate, not an alternate.
Do not aspire to state or national delegate status.
Have a firm presidential preference.
Sign in.
[optional] Buy candidate swag.
GTFO.

Following these handy instructions can save you an entire day. It was a bummer to discover, at 4:00 PM*, that I had accomplished exactly the same amount at the caucus as I would have by signing in and leaving at 10:30 AM.

--
* And all indications were that they had at least 2 hours to go.

Introducing TDD to an existing codebase

2008-04-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

When you find a bug, prove it's a bug by writing failing unit tests for it, then fix the bug. Now you've got unit tests around pre-existing code. Magic!

The Big Break LPGA Fangrrrl Report

2008-03-28T14:04:00.000-07:00

Nth in a series of "where are they now?" posts about my favorite women golfers from The Golf Channel's reality series The Big Break.

Name                            Season  As of 2008...
Danielle Amiée                  III     Last played FUTURES 2004
Rachel Bailey                   VI      FUTURES-E
Felicia Brown                   III     Last played FUTURES 2000
Tasha Browner                   III     Last played FUTURES 2005
Jeanne Cho-Hunicke              V       LPGA-C, FUTURES-E
Debbie Dahmer                   III     Pacific Ladies Tour founder
Divina Delasin                  V
Nikki DiSanto                   V-VII
Jan Dowling                     III     Last played FUTURES 2005; Women's Golf Assistant Coach, Kent State University
Jo D Duncan                     V       Director of Golf Instruction, Norwood Hills Country Club
Bridget Dwyer                   VI      FUTURES-E, Cactus, Pacific
Pamela (Crikelair) Garrity      III-VII Last played FUTURES 2006; Real estate agent in Florida
Ashley Gomes                    VI-VII  FUTURES-C, Pacific
Dana Lacey                      V       FUTURES-E
Kim Lewellen                    V-VII   Last played FUTURES 2006; Women's Golf Coach, University of Virginia
Laura London                    VI-VII  Cactus
Becky Lucidi                    V       LPGA-E (Q-School)
Annie Mallory                   VI      Cactus
Kristy McPherson                VI      LPGA-C
Cindy Miller                    III-VII Last played FUTURES 2006
Valeria Ochoa                   III-VII Last played FUTURES 2005
Ashley Prange                   V       FUTURES-E
Katie Ruhe                      V       Last played FUTURES 2006
Sarah Lynn (Johnston) Sargent   VI      LPGA-C, FUTURES-E
Sarah Sasse-Kildow              III     Last played FUTURES 2006
Kristina Tucker                 V       FUTURES-E
Liz Uthoff                      III     Last played FUTURES 2004
Karen Stordahl-Utrecht          VI
Briana Vega                     VI-VII  FUTURES-E
Julie Wells                     V       Last played FUTURES 2007

Season IX, Kāʻanapali, starts April 15!

Lori Atsedes                    IX      FUTURES-E
Dana Bates                      IX
Susan Choi                      IX      FUTURES-C
Courtney Erdman                 IX      FUTURES-E
Adrianne Gautreaux              IX      Last played FUTURES 2007
Samantha Head                   IX      FUTURES-C
Christina LeCuyer               IX      FUTURES-C
Tina Miller                     IX      Last played FUTURES 2007
Sophie Sandolo                  IX
Cirbie Sheppard                 IX
Elizabeth Stuart                IX      FUTURES-C
Kim Welch                       IX      FUTURES-E

Regrets

2008-03-27T15:27:00.001-07:00

When I talk nowadays to prospective Smithies about the college's amazing offerings, I can't help but feel a twinge about the chances I didn't take advantage of myself. Being the sort of person who goes after what I want (no! really?), I have a tough time getting my brain around the notion that some opportunities really have, permanently, passed me by.

A#1 biggest regret was failing to take a junior year abroad. It didn't occur to me that grownups don't just get to take years abroad later. At the time, I felt I had good reasons for not going. In my sophomore year, I went through a pretty rough estrangement from a family member, as well as some financial problems, and my Smith housemates became my replacement family and primary sources of support... I couldn't face the thought of never seeing half of them again. (Unfortunately, the ones I most relied on were already seniors and I had to cope with their "loss" during my junior year anyway. Denial is a sad, sad thing.) I also wouldn't have been guaranteed a space in my house upon return, and it didn't seem worth the risk. Considering how close I still am to so many Hopkinites, and how important it was for me to graduate with them, this might have been an OK decision after all. I suspect I'd make the same choice again given the same circumstances... but I can't help wishing I could have had it all, can I? :)

The other big regret was that I never made it into any of Smith's famous a cappella singing groups. I auditioned for two... the Noteables, as a youngster, where I went in unprepared, was terrified, quavered pathetically, and deservedly wasn't called back... and the Smiffenpoofs, later, where I prepared my heart out, sang my heart out, got called back, sang my heart out again, and didn't get picked anyway. That one hurt. Music was a big part of my life at Smith anyway, and if I hadn't had time to sing in the College Choirs for Jessel Murray or sing in Darshan with Cindy that probably would have been a great loss as well and I wouldn't even have known any better. But when my first-year recruits get into singing groups and immediately excel and are embraced by an amazing musical community, I can't help but wonder how it might have been to be a superstar myself. :)

However, I'm not sorry I quit the parli debate team as a first-year... I got all the good I was gonna get out of that one after I met my debate partner Heidi, and I still have her. :)

Strangely enough, I'm also not sorry I didn't get selected as a first-year-alum Head Resident, even though that was probably the most devastating thing ever at the time. I literally cried for days. It felt like a repudiation of me and my very Smithiness, and I do still wonder what it was about me that wasn't good enough. But nearly everything good in my life now was made possible by the fact that I was forced to find other avenues after graduation. If Smith suspected I was trying frantically to delay growing up, they were right, and I owe them my thanks for giving me the shove I needed. (But if they think I wouldn't have been a good HR, they can bite me.)

Which reminds me, I do regret that I wasn't able to return to my Grrrl Scout troop at the Clarke School after graduation... in spite of not picking up the HR post (with its cushy free rent and modest stipend), I had made certain promises that I'd move back to Northampton, get a menial job, live in poverty, and keep my commitment to those wonderful girls. I didn't, and worse yet, I was too cowardly to make any serious attempt to contact them over the summer to tell them so. That was uncool, and it does leave me with much to atone for... somehow.

No, we shouldn't wallow in regret, but once in a while we have to remind ourselves to live. :)

So much for more short entries more often.

2008-03-26T19:45:00.000-07:00

[eop]

Gender bending and breaking

2008-03-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

The NY Times had a great, detailed article on the subject of F2M transgendered students at women's colleges ("When Girls Will Be Boys", March 16). This is a topic with which I was already slightly acquainted on account of Smith's SGA changing some important charter document to gender-neutral language a year or so ago, baffling we alums who were under the impression that Smith is still a women's college (it is).

The article mentions that colleges are dealing with trans issues more directly nowadays specifically because "adults who wished to transition historically did so in middle age. Today a larger percentage of transitions occur in adolescence or young adulthood."

I was inclined to some eye-rolling about all this before, but the NYT article brought me up short a little bit by pointing this out:

"In a sense, transgender and genderqueer students could be said merely to be holding women’s colleges to their word: to fully support women’s exploration of gender, even if that exploration ends with students no longer being female-identified."

Oh, right. That Women's Studies major I did, it said something about all that.

(Pwned! By the NY Times! On the subject of gender conformity! Oh, the shame.)

Anyway, I've read and heard now a few different attempts to explain or understand this new trans* generation:

It's a natural extension of postmodern feminism, in which the very foundations of gender (and, often, biological sex itself! I've done it!) are seen as social constructs open to be questioned. (In other words, it's my fault. :) )

It's a fad. Possibly a dangerous fad, given the longer-term implications of hormones and even surgeries. Being queer, being "bi-curious", getting pierced, whatever, no longer edgy enough... so trans* is the next envelope-pushing idea. (In other words, it's my fault. LOL.)

Something kinda strange occurred to me the other day, though, when I started putting this together with the huge amounts of reading I've been doing lately on the marketing of gender roles.

I guess I can't substantiate, but I believe, that our culture is imposing gender roles on children a lot more than was commonly done in the 1970s and 1980s. Even parents and aunties who don't want to participate actively in this phenomenon are fighting an uphill battle (see "Unisex Baby Hell", December 2006). Just yesterday on outside the (toy) box was this:

"...my wonderful nanny recently told me about a friend who asked her pediatrician what to do because her son kept asking for a stroller. Not a boy with a stroller! Someone DO something!"

What if, by pressuring our very youngest children to conform to restrictive gender roles, we're sending them the message that if they are interested in anything remotely gender-nonconforming, their only solution is to become a conforming gender?

What would that mean? If gender roles are constructed, does that make it a bad thing to want to uphold the construct but just switch to a different one? Don't we go into a culture war with the culture we have? I've even heard it suggested that those who transition might even be selling out the rest of us who nonconform in the bodies we were born with! I don't think that can possibly be the case... it's not like extremely conservative/traditionalist types love trans* people for upholding all of their preconceptions about gender. :D

I wonder what the complementarians think...?!

The great thing about democracy is, the people always get exactly the government they deserve

2008-03-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

I follow a bunch of blogs where people are freaking out about Hillary's alleged/apparent scorched-earth primary campaign strategy: she cannot win, they say, and yet she's so desperate to win that she's willing, maybe even happy, to take down Obama and the entire Democratic party with her by a variety of last-ditch efforts.

Certainly it is the case that at this point in the primaries, negative campaigning against either Democratic candidate will just save McCain money in the general election... we're doing the work for him.

And it does appear that Hillary is increasingly eager to go negative.

So, a few things.

I'm an Obama delegate, and in our February caucuses I confessed that I was conflicted in my choice, and felt a little disloyal to my fellow women's college alumna. But I chose Obama based on his integrity, the promise of a positive campaign, and the quality of his rhetoric. (I actually think those things will be more important than policy specifics, although I believe his policy specifics are of high quality also.) This is feeling more and more like the right choice.

However, if Hillary continues on this path, and if we Democrats allow it, then we deserve to lose in November. We deserve the humiliation of (yet another) defeat on the heels of the catastrophically disastrous GWB presidency. We deserve to be shamed in a Mondale-Ferraro '84 kind of way (apt, isn't it?). We deserve four (eight! sixteen!!) more years of Republican rule and the conservative-stacked Supreme Court that comes with it.

Isn't democracy great?

Score!

2008-03-24T18:44:00.000-07:00

I might have worked out a plan to time-share an iPod Touch for my Europe trip.

Background: I'm a smartphone addict. Unfortunately, I'm a stupid smartphone addict, as I got myself stuck in a long-term contract with a Palm Treo 700wx (reasonably OK) through Sprint (has served me well for years, but that was pre-smartphone).

With Sprint, no MMS, no native voice dial (they disable it so they can charge you to use their crappy dial-in-to-voice-dial service), can't upgrade from WinMo 5 to WinMo 6 on this phone, and worst of all, CDMA. So I'm planning a monthlong trip to Europe, I can no longer imagine life sans smartphone, mine won't work overseas, and an unlocked/global smartphone just for one trip is obscenely ridiculously expensive. Now what?

Enter the Touch. I happen to need a new iPod anyway, having finally outgrown my 4G 2gen green Mini. The newest version of the Touch is 32G, making it big enough to be worthwhile as an iPod, and it has wifi. As far as I know, wifi's wifi the world around. Safari browser, Google Maps... exactly what I use my smartphone for. Everything but the phone. Now I can get a cheap cheap unlocked/global GSM phone/SIM to use for phoning, and carry the Touch for browsing. Hunting for free wifi hotspots definitely isn't as on-demand as EVDO/EDGE, but this still seems like a reasonable tradeoff. Heck, that might even be a long-term plan for home.

Except for the $500 part. Ouch. $500 for "I hope I might find a few hotspots to use it at"?

Enter the timeshare. My good friend and hopeless gadget addict wants a Touch, but needs to unload his 80G 5gen classic iPod. Did I mention I need an iPod? Did I mention my smartphoning needs here at home are attended to for at least the length of my long term contract?

"Can I sell you my iPod at a cut rate so I can buy a Touch?"

"Hmm. Can I borrow your Touch when I go to Europe?"

"I can use the iPod then, right? Sure!"

Cha-ching.

And maybe somebody who's been a very good kid hoping for an iPod of her very own would have use for a 4G 2gen green Mini....

Update: Got it!! And, LG and I are in negotiations for a labor-based payment for the Mini.

Up-update: Chuck jailbroke my native voice dial! Thanks Chuck!!

The 2008 elections on whatever planet this is

2008-03-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

Red/blue (or, this week, black/white) visions of America, blah blah, whatever.

Back when there were still televised debates going on amongst both Republican and Democratic candidates, the most striking thing was (especially when they'd each run one on the same day) how it truly seemed like each party's candidates were talking about a completely different country than the other party's candidates.

The various media moderators didn't just allow it, they encouraged or perhaps even fostered it, by asking questions from two completely different countries as well. Or planets. Or something.

So this is the problem we have. Yes, Americans are hopelessly incredibly polarized, myself often included, but it isn't just that we disagree over the issues. We disagree about what the issues are. That's hard to reconcile. Someone from the "other side" passionately wants to work together on a solution to Problem X, but I strongly don't even believe X is a real problem, so no, I really don't want to put another moment into thinking or talking about it. Now what?

That's before we even get to all the things I'm passionate about in this election cycle that, apparently, nobody believes are real problems.

I took the cute "which candidate is right for you?" match quiz on CNN.com a while back, and on pretty much every single question, the correct (according to me) answer wasn't available on the list of choices, and "this question is asinine and I despair for our country that you're even asking" wasn't an option either.

In the spirit of more and shorter posts, I might hold forth later on what my favorite election issues are.

You can hit the delete key and be thought a fool, or hit forward and remove all doubt.

2008-03-20T16:22:00.000-07:00

I've made out like the problem with all the email forwards is how politically biased, disrespectful, "offensive" they are, but that isn't really the biggest problem with them. The biggest problem is that forwarding me a political hack job email, or a tiresome hoax, or even pictures of cute kittens, proves to me that you are an idiot. And when people I otherwise love very much turn out to be idiots, well, that makes me sad.

See also:

That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously.
Email Forwards Prove How Gullible People Are ("For those who enjoy receiving and passing along email forwards, it's probably not totally unfair to say that this hobby is making them less intelligent.")

eFECS Technical Architecture Developer Retreat, part 3

2008-01-02T15:10:00.000-08:00

11:00 Previous schedule thrown out window.

15:11 I'm mimicking PP's code, but I don't understand it yet.

eFECS Technical Architecture Developer Retreat, part 2

2008-01-02T09:38:00.000-08:00

09:39 Scott and Pete are creating an eFECS solution/project/VSS/etc. Sweet deal for me.

09:42 Mocking up a database....

Liveblogging the eFECS Technical Architecture Developer Retreat

2008-01-02T08:55:00.001-08:00

08:50: Paul S. will moderate discussion.

08:53: First decision. We'll use whatever Visual Studio 2008's defaults are for things like curly-brace placement.

Agenda:

09:00-10:30 Basics

Tech stack
Coding standards (see above)
Solution structure
Service structure

10:30-10:45 Define backlog
10:45-11:45 Hack
11:45-12:00 Debrief
12:00-13:00 Lunch
13:00-13:15 Define backlog
13:15-14:15 Hack
14:15-14:30 Debrief
14:30-14:45 Break
14:45-15:00 Define backlog
15:00-16:00 Hack and/or future planning
16:00-16:30 Debrief & future planning

Algebra I FTW!

2007-11-16T13:00:00.001-08:00

Never let it be said that Algebra I isn't useful in real life. Mr. Wog would be so proud.

So here's the problem:

I need to construct a complete, detailed payroll history for an employee over a particular 6-month period.

During the period, the employee is paid from 4 different budgets, which we'll call A, B, C and D.

Budget A is active all 6 months, and I have complete payroll detail for it during that time.

Budget B is active all 6 months, but I only have its payroll detail for the first 3 months.

Budget C is active all 6 months, but I have no payroll detail for it at all. I know that it was not paid during the first 3 months, and that a lump sum was transferred from Budget A to Budget C to cover the first 3 months of my arbitrary period and the 3 months prior to the period I'm studying. Unfortunately, it's applied to earn dates by academic quarter rather than calendar month, which means it's offset by 2 weeks in addition to being partial. I don't know for sure, but I assume, that Budget C was paid normally for the last 3 months.

Budget D is active only the last month, and I have its complete payroll detail.

I have monthly averages for each of the 4 budgets as calculated before the transfer and after the transfer. I also have the total monthly average paid to the employee.

I have the total monthly amount paid to the employee (A+B+C+D) for the first 3 months only, during which time it is constant, but I can tell from the monthly average that the employee received a pay increase sometime during the last 3 months. I don't know exactly when or how much.

I need to reconstruct the detail in such a way that the monthly averages for each budget, both before and after the transfer, and the total monthly average, come out the same. I'm allowed to make brute-force assumptions about anything that doesn't affect that outcome, e.g., I actually have to construct it by 2-week pay period, but since the averages are monthly, it's OK for me to arbitrarily divide the monthly total by 2 to come up with a pay period amount.

My tools for this exercise are Excel and a whiteboard. In Excel, I create some PivotTables to group and average the data so I can track the effect of each change to each budget.

The first thing I see is that the monthly total of Budget B for each of the first 3 months is exactly the same as its 6-month average. I decide to fill in that it was paid at the same rate for all 6 months. Budget B is now solved.

I have Budget A data for the last 3 months, and now that Budgets B and D are solved as well, I can get Budget C with simple subtraction... except now I need to figure out the pay increase.

It makes sense to me to assume that the pay increase occurred in month 6 only, because that's when Budget D became active and the pattern of Budget A seems to support this idea.

On the whiteboard, I figure out the amount of the pay increase with this equation:

(5(18208)+x)/6 == 18261.84

x == 18531.04

I decide to assume this, which gives me a grand total for months 4 (18208), 5 (18208) and 6 (18531.04). Now that I know Budgets A, B and D during those months, I can fill in Budget C by subtracting. If this isn't precisely right, I figure I can make up the difference in the first 3 months and make the averages come out as desired.

Now I try to guess how the lump-sum transfer for the first 3 months should be pro-rated. Its effective date is supposed to be only partially overlapping with the period I'm working on, so I try to calculate the per-pay-period amount on that basis, but the adjusted monthly average I come up with doesn't match the adjusted monthly average I've been given. On a hunch that this math was too tortured for the poor soul who made the adjustment in the first place, I decide to see what happens if I pro-rate the lump sum over only the partial period that I'm investigating and not the total transfer effective period. Bingo! Everything falls into line.

To a degree of accuracy that I care about (and no more), I've successfully filled in all the missing payroll detail for my employee, and I have a complete picture of all 4 budgets for the entire 6 month period.

Math is cool.

Windows Technology Frameworks (p&p, day 5)

2007-11-09T14:25:00.000-08:00

The wrap-up.

When our speaker asks, "how many of you think this stuff is so complicated that you'll never be able to learn it all?" and all the hands go up, well, that's encouraging.

He likens the .NET Framework to shopping at Home Depot. We wander around from aisle to aisle, with some kind of broken home widget in our hands, desperately searching for something that resembles the widget, so we can zero in on a replacement for the widget, and if/when we get to the right item, we turn it over and the installation instructions make no sense.

"How many of you have looked up the documentation for the DoSomething() method and found that its sole contents are: 'Does something'?"

"ASP.NET: the most impressive kludge in the history of software development." A pretty reasonable attempt to layer a real programming language over browser-based development.

"If the root problem is complexity, EntLib is not the solution."

Agile, TDD, software factories, etc., touted as panaceas... really an attempt to spackle over the real problem, complexity. And now, we kick around a Peter-P-who-shall-not-be-named, for his pairing and TDD presentations at p&p last year (which, wow, I remember!)...

Pair programming had better produce twice the value of one programmer programming alone. We've talked about how hard it is to find good developers. If you put two bad programmers together, do they become > 2 good ones?

If TDD means you write 2 lines of test for every line of production code, then that prod code had better be three times better. (If not, you're just feeding a substance abuse problem.)

If everybody pairs, and everybody writes 2 lines of test per line of code, and every team has 2 testers per dev, the only possible conclusion is that we suck. (Our ratio of testers to developers causes #DIV/0!, so don't assume the converse.)

Fueled by iPods, "people are waking up to the idea that simplicity has value and complexity has cost."

Simplicity Manifesto v1.0

Stop adding features
Make help helpful
Fix the bugs
CRUD for free
Hide the plumbing
Get better names

"HTML: the COBOL of the internet"... we've pushed it way, way beyond what it was envisioned to do.

"Treat simplicity as a feature" and demand simplicity in tools, too.

Boldly go, y'all.

< 10 of these things are not like the others (p&p, day 5)

2007-11-09T11:38:00.000-08:00

The speaker this morning told a funny story about women.

He didn't say anything offensive about women, particularly.

I'm not going to belabor this. But it made me feel several inches tall, and I didn't hear a damn other word he talked about during his hour.

Update: on the bright side...

5 of the aforementioned < 10 are from UW. That's both a good thing, for me, and an even more disproportionate thing for the rest of the world.

It occurs to me that UW is a spectacularly good place for women in IT to work, as evidenced by the fact that we just don't do that. That's why hearing it here was like being ambushed by a grotesque. This fact could be a powerful recruiting tool if I could figure out how to wield it.

Change the world and/or go home (p&p, day 5)

2007-11-09T08:33:00.000-08:00

First half hour of keynote: more Scott H hilarity, lots of LOLcats, a nice wrap-up, like an Episcopal benediction and dismissal, but for geeks. "Be well, write good code, and stay in touch." Thanks be to [insert your Microsoft joke here]!

Second half hour of keynote: more MVC Framework demos by popular demand.

Yesterday was exceptionally difficult and depressing for me (capped off with a miserable 90-minute commute home), so this is just the right mood enhancer at just the right time. Not just the comedy and the great stock photo usage, but also that Scott H explains complicated things pretty accessibly.

More musings on learning styles... I tend to tune out when I can't "contextualize", i.e., figure out how the demoed tech relates to anything I'm doing now (or have done before). The problem is, if I haven't paid attention, how'm I going to recognize an opportunity to apply new tech in the future? We already know the answer to that.

Push learning is going to work better than pull. If I load up on stuff I don't understand now, I'll have a better chance of wiring it together someday when a context presents itself. This is a lot better than flailing around for a solution when I get stuck later, especially because most of the time I won't be "stuck", I'll be writing code that works, but is crap, because I don't know any better.

The benefits of showing up and paying attention: John Lam has just shipped LOLCODE on the DLR and is coming down to the podium to demo it. Now that's something that might really come in handy someday.

WCSF (p&p, day 4)

2007-11-08T14:33:00.001-08:00

Web development paradigms

Content sites (e.g., news)
Transactional sites (e.g., stores, banks)
Collaboration sites (e.g., wikis, workflows)

Demo, helpfully, to focus on transactional sites

WCSF facilitates...

Separation of UI development & UI design!

Richness, experience, navigation

Security, manageability, testing

Separation of responsibilities very easily, very clearly... deploy without affecting other subteams (ahem).

I guess the thing I find most challenging about "Factories" day is that demos like these, for me, are just teasers. They either get me thinking, "hey, that'd be fun to play around with" and/or "hey, that sample problem resembles a problem I recognize", or they don't. I think to do this, they have to show a variety of things in modest depth, but the depth itself ends up being lost on me, and that makes for long hours of struggling to pay meaningful attention.

I suspect some "homework" on my part would help with this... if I were to keep current on p&p, or at least brush up on the latest initiatives before heading off to the summit, I'd probably have enough of a basis in the technologies to have formed specific interests and questions. To that end, I've subscribed to about 15 different blogs today. Will the momentum carry through to 2008? Tune in!

MVC (p&p, day 4)

2007-11-08T08:33:00.000-08:00

Scott H reaffirms that stand-up comedy skillz are at least as valuable as a liberal arts education, in any industry [see also: Mark Driscoll].

MVC Goodness!!1!

Separation of concerns
Red/green testability
Extensible/pluggable
Clean URLs, clean HTML
Great integration within ASP.NET

Don't Panic (or perhaps the Kool-Aid)

Not Web Forms 4.0; about more choices
As simple or as complex as you wish
Fundamental in System.Web
Plays well with others

"Where does the file live?" It doesn't really exist. The URL/I doesn't point to a physical location.

Everybody wants a friendly, hackable URL/I. It's a user-interface point now.

And now, code.

"IM IN UR NORTHWIND"

Just like yesterday, I think watching and listening to a code presentation that I barely understand, or don't understand at all, is improving my skills by osmosis. Better than a book. Every once in a while, I see a problem I recognize from having solved it (poorly) once before...

He keeps coming back to the clean/intuitive URL/I thing, but that's a problem I can totally relate to!

"The problem with XML is not that it's human-readable, but that it's manager-readable."

Holy cow, it's an MVC gradient graphic generator. My head might explode.

This was awesome! What a great start to a probably otherwise challenging day!

Can I choose 'none of the above'? (p&p, day 3)

2007-11-07T16:41:00.000-08:00

Face-off on the future of patterns, featuring, for reasons which never really became clear, suction-cup-dart guns.

Should patterns be disseminated as a new online share/wiki/repository and in books? I.e., descriptively?

OR

Should patterns be built into tools and libraries and provided? I.e., some other adverb?

In some ways it took on the characteristics of a negative political campaign, with both sides explaining each other's shortcomings, and had the same effect on me as it does on voters, which was to depress turnout. :P

For me to be able to use patterns, I need to learn them as a vocabulary and understand them intuitively. Patterns aren't imposed, anyway, they emerge from good coding practices and become named as a means of communicating about them. (I learned that several trainings ago, along with lots of other things I can't actually implement.)

Back on day 1, one of the speakers captured the answer here already. Patterns aren't magic, they're just a language that allows architects to talk to each other and to coders about what should be built and how.

I don't learn well by reading. I wouldn't use books. I don't have anything to contribute to a wiki. They are right that nobody would want to sit down and document the pattern anyway, we have work to do.

But, tools without understanding are like... FrontPage. Pretty much exactly like FrontPage.

I learn by doing, and I learn by surrounding myself with people smarter than me (about the topic in question, eh!). Any pattern I've ever heard of, I learned by someone near me talking about it whilst I smiled, nodded, and covertly Googled. It works!

Aha! And the reason it works is that I learn the pattern in context. I'm not just figuring out what the pattern is, I'm trying to figure out WTF my friend and/or colleague is talking about, which is probably an application of a pattern, and when I figure it out, I have learnt both. I will remember it, and I'll be better equipped to apply it somewhere else later (in theory).

OK, Google usually points me to Wikipedia, and somebody had to have written that, and I do then assimilate it by reading it. But I'd be very unlikely to go there, or anywhere else, and browse patterns for the sake of patterns, so discussing the future without a context just isn't that helpful to me (see also: years of unapplied trainings).

The mechanism doesn't matter. It's about the understanding. The right community doesn't even have to try, they just have to be smart about patterns in proximity to each other.

Get me my suction-cup-dart gun.

Moar Ted Plz! (p&p, day 3)

2007-11-07T14:27:00.001-08:00

Started this out in the parking lot, but wow! it merits its own post after all.

Workflow workflow workflow workflow. Workflow patterns!

Interestingly enough, Ted uses a hypothetical higher ed approval process as his hypothetical test example.

W(t)F: look for "processes" in application code that users will want to control directly, or that will change over time. Long-running processes that happen in human space/time.

Instead of running around/telephone game for coders to implement and re-implement changing requirements, esp. around changing processes, give the "knowledge workers"/domain experts the tools to DIY. Not just the content, but the process/steps/sequence.

Activities: not branching and flow control, but domain-specific steps

Programmers build domain-specific activities (we focus on what we understand); domain experts string them together into processes (ditto)

We have to build activities so they're potentially useful across multiple workflows... sounds familiar

Decide early who's going to write the workflow; when in doubt, assume non-techs will do it.

Sequence workflow, state-machine workflow, open-ended processes, parallellism

Workflows with non-processing elements may never proceed to the next step (human actor hit by bus); need a timeout/recovery plan, don't leave a bunch of stuff locked & waiting, etc.

Workflows can persist themselves off anywhere and rehydrate anywhere, any time. Activities need to be decoupled accordingly. If done right, super-scalable, because can punt any of them to a new box any time.

Also "temporally decoupled"... take your Amazon.com order, capture it off, store it, apply its workflow to it somewhere else. Avoids lots of remote tripping, slashdotting, etc., because it doesn't matter what happens to the site. The workflow gets done eventually. If something went wrong, you get an email later.

Kudos to ps for catching Ted at the same thing I caught him at: "the IT guy" writes activities to enable the non-technical domain expert, "the secretary", to write processes "herself". Grrr. (This reminds me that in Peter's Agile Tragicomedy yesterday, the cast of characters consisted of a female PM, a female customer, three male developers and a male tester.)

Now with more Provost! (p&p, day 3)

2007-11-07T12:50:00.000-08:00

There is a distant possibility that I might, utterly unlike last year, "get" Dependency Injection Frameworks.

"Don't call us, we'll call you."

The responsibility for making decisions about how to resolve the dependencies lies outside the object itself.

Service Locator: not really DI, just a pattern. It knows how to find its dependencies.

Interface Injection: the framework can find the inject method, then you pass in an interface.

Setter Injection: call "setFoo" and pass it a Foo.

Constructor Injection: this component requires a Foo, or I can't even "new it up". It doesn't have any limbo state while it's being instantiated/set up.

Others

Method Call/Method Injection: calls methods on your behalf at predefined times.

Getter Injection (AOP): all usage of the Foo inside of the object will call the get(), whose implementation is empty, and the get() gets replaced with an implementation via AOP.

So... why?

Makes you think about highly cohesive, loosely coupled design. Testable without fancy mocking frameworks. Don't Repeat Yourself.

Issues

Lots of little objects (pitter-patter of little objects?)
Interface explosion
Runtime wire-up complicated, difficult to visualize (but he blames the tools more than the technique)
When building reusable libraries, consider wrapping facades around systems created this way
Late-time binding affects performance, as do all strategies for maintainability; "we all want responsiveness, most of us don't need performance."

Scott says, less talk, more code.

Factories are a very specific type of DI.

And now, pair bantering, I mean programming.

"And thus you can destroy, or not destroy, planets."

In conclusion, I get it, but only kinda. Contextualization!

Heavy lifting (p&p, day 3)

2007-11-07T09:52:00.001-08:00

The Rocky-Ted-Peter-Brad-Keith banter dynamic is great. It'd be cool to be part of a community at that level.

Does SOA supplant client/server? Forever? Are we in a post-OOD/P world? No, it is about selecting the right tools for the right job.

What we think of as n-tier is often just a layered architecture, multiple DLLs all on the same machine; this is distinct from physical "tier" boundaries (servers, etc.). [So that's why our interviewees draw server diagrams when we ask them this.]

When you don't properly separate layers, and it's way too easy not to, then "C# is VB3 with semicolons." Lack of separation is short-term productive, but awful.

Old-school layers: Presentation, Business, Data
Newer layers: Presentation, UI, Business, Data Access, Data Storage... hey, we came up with that on our own, kinda.

The corollary to the newer layers is that you can't use the DataSet, at least not as designed, because it tends to flow all the way from DA through B to UI and would break the entire app if replaced. You have to isolate the DataSet in the DA layer and convert it to something else in the others.

SOA!

Tiers and service-orientation don't go together. Everywhere you had a tier, you now have a separate application with services to get them to talk to each other. How do you structure these little apps? In a kind of layered way. A service-oriented "system" is made up of lots of little applications that talk to each other, at least one of which talks to the user. Each individual app is internally layered, too, e.g., its "UI" is the part that talks to the other services.

Workflow? Free in .NET 3. The new hotness? (Workflow is not new. It's older than OO.)

Workflows are not apps, they are "orchestrations of activities". But, each activity is kind of a mini-app.

OO is dead! O rly?

It's naïve to think you can arbitrarily make any method a service and put it on another server somewhere, e.g., if you are calling it from inside a loop or it is otherwise chatty, network/performance. This was figured out in OO a long time ago, could do the same thing with OO pre-services, just frequently wasn't a good idea.

"OO: Key Concepts"! (Hi cjm!)

A service is an encapsulation and an abstraction, because it's supposed to be a black box. Same for an activity in a workflow. This is building on top of OO ideas. SOA is all about eliminating coupling, but the drawback is increasing complexity/overhead; that's why OO compromises and accepts some coupling in some places (for simplicity, maintainability, performance).

Is OO hard to use in distributed environments? It requires forethought and planning. I think this means it's hard. :)

"SOA should be spelled $OA"

"Almost everybody does services. Almost nobody is 'service-oriented'." They use them the exact same way as MTS/COM+ for data access (ew!), just looks better on a resume.

SO: Key Concepts

Autonomy of computing entities
Message-based communication
Asynchronous communication (?)
Loose coupling

Behavior negotiation

Explicit boundaries

Contract exchange (metadata)

No tiers

[Services are paranoid little critters. They can't assume anything about the thingies they interact with, except that the thingies will be clueless and constantly changing, so they need to spell everything out and agree on everything up-front. Services need prenups. Services are cynics. As every cynic knows, this means they are realists.]

Strengths

Potentially better way to model real world

Non-deterministic technology for a non-deterministic world

Leverage existing application behaviors
Promote re-use of behaviors, not code
Cross-platform, cross-language

Weaknesses

Immature concepts and tools; glorified MTS
Complicated and expensive to code around non-determinism
Distributed parallelism is hard... easier if you drop the async goal

Workflow: Key Concepts

Define process in terms of inputs, outputs, tasks
Organize tasks into ordered steps... what if order needs to change?
Define resources required for each task
Isolation between workflow and outside world... how?

Clear lines of communication

Dependency properties
Workflow events

The "code activity" is "like FORTRAN in a GUI."

Strengths

Very mature concepts

Data flow and flowchart concepts from decades-past
Maybe it really is new, if all the practitioners have retired or are about to :)

Weaknesses

Major learning curve for OOers

Everything looks like an object, must un-learn a lot about objects & events

Bringing it home!

New stuff doesn't obsolete everything that came before. We come up with new concepts and new metaphors to solve specific problems that weren't solved by the previous thing(s).

It's a hybrid world.

E.g., a layered client app that talks to layered services and/or layered workflows that in turn call other layered services and/or layered workflows.

Or, a layered workflow and a layered client app which share data storage (e.g., a corporate dB).

"Control messages": "I wrote the data over here and I want you to go get it and do this with it" rather than the data being in the message.

Q&A

The problem with the hybrid is every little thingy has a separate business layer. How do you re-use common business stuff like auth, rules, etc.? The problem is that re-use is the flip side of coupling. If you have re-use, you have coupling. Uh-oh. So re-use is, at best, overrated, at worst, harmful.

Aren't you universally coupled to the database schema? Well, yes. Unless you have separate little databases for every little thingy. If you can pull this off, more power to you.

"If you want to achieve decoupling, you can't allow more than one piece of code to talk to any table." Reality intrudes.

Also, Keith intrudes. Time's up! Break! Rocky is cool.

Agile SDL (p&p, day 2)

2007-11-06T15:22:00.000-08:00

"Why they're called a 'buddy', I don't know. It's kind of like calling my IRS auditor my 'buddy'."

(Non securitur: "If you give me the right hardware, I can probably get Excel to bring me more iced tea.")

[The immediate problem I'm seeing with this (presumably canonical) SDL model is that waterfall doesn't work for security, because there are always new threats, so, e.g., the threat model is out of date before it's even been written. "Final security review" especially doesn't seem meaningful. I might be jumping ahead as far as this process really needing to be agile instead.]

"How many of you wait until the end to get performance right? Do you do a 'performance push'?"

Agile! Here we go!

How do we get the same gains with a less-heavy process and less up-front design?

Security is just as much a part of every developer's job as, e.g., reliability

Appoint a Security Owner, preferably one who cares whether the app is secure or not, whose responsibility it will be to ensure that the team meets security goals day-to-day

Need to train every developer to know what a security bug looks like

Agile Threat Modeling

Lightweight, rapid
Sketch DFD on whiteboard
Include threat mitigations in the feature backlog

Does management want to learn how insecure your app is from you... or from a hacker?

Use code-scanning tools daily or weekly
Peer code review; anything that increases quality, increases security
Check for banned APIs at code check-in time?

Crypto: don't try this at home. Hire a pro to review.

Unit-level, object-level security testing; write at same time as functional tests
"Throw some evil inputs at it" when running tests

Security Push is good to get everybody's head in the game, and/or for legacy cleanup, but all the rest of the time security needs to be every day, every sprint, whatever

We could make Agile the more secure development approach... it lends itself, we just don't capitalize (yet)

xUnit, schmUnit (p&p, day 2)

2007-11-06T14:04:00.000-08:00

Unit testing --> "programmer testing"

Not about TDD, though TDD is a good (the best?) way to do unit testing

"I understood too much about how the system is supposed to work to test it effectively. But if I do the test first...," no preconceptions about how system works.

Non-functional requirements: the "-ilities" (some, like usability, I've previously called qualitative; others are more technical, like scalability, maintainability)

Lesson 1: just do it; there are good reasons, pros, cons, whatever, just do it

Lesson 2: write tests using the 3A Pattern

Arrange: set up the test harness (instantiate the objects, fill in pseudovalues, etc.; the other stuff you can't test without)
Act: do the thing (the one whose workingness you want to test)
Assert: verify the results (test one thing per test, regardless of how many Asserts are needed)

Lesson 3: keep tests close to production code; don't make private stuff public just to make it testable to an artificial test architecture (e.g., separate assembly)

Lesson 4: use alternatives to ExpectedException

it violates 3A (NUnit syntax places the test out of order)... use Assert.Throws() with delegate{} (imperfect, but better) or .NET 3.5 lambda thingies
not always enough info about where the exception threw from, or should have thrown from, in processing order
Assert.Throws() returns the exception itself for further inspection

Lesson 5: small fixtures; separate fixtures for all the tests associated with a particular method, setups will be similar

Lesson 6: don't use SetUp and TearDown, even at the expense of some code repetition in tests; although small fixtures should help with this, they won't always

Lesson 7: improve testability with Inversion of Control (a pattern; Dependency Injection Frameworks use this but are themselves overkill for "most" applications)

constructor injection
setter injection (create an interface for the thing that needs to be mocked in the test; swap out the set method for test purposes)
cascading failures are unhelpful; isolate the code such that if change one part of code, one test should fail, and the failure should point you to the actual place where the problem is

Lesson 8: doesn't like mock object frameworks; they violate 3A

Just seeing these examples is one more step toward "contextualizing" this stuff for me. Cool.

Agile 2008 (p&p, day 2)

2007-11-06T12:58:00.000-08:00

Agile 2008 conference seems like something we should get into.

Particularly, we might have interesting things to say about organizational culture...

Post-agilism (p&p, day 2)

2007-11-06T09:49:00.000-08:00

The Agile forest for the Agile trees: too much attention to individual practices than understanding the broad principles; form over substance

Sounds like the difference between "Agile Tragedy" and "Agile Comedy" is communication, practically an encounter session. Telling truths, even when difficult. Bi-directional.

Aha: Agile is about trust, building it, maintaining it, specifically earning it.

Zen agile, neo-agile, postagile... can jettison all 12+ practices and still be little-a agile

Shared understanding of what "done-done" looks like
Empowered, own the problem, it is the team's to suck or shine
Incremental understanding; learn as you go about all aspects of what's going on (including each other, the business area, the customer, etc.)... must accept that you don't know up-front... must seek to learn continuously

Warning signs

Silent team room
Afraid to change existing code
Customer unavailable
Don't ship frequently

When off-track

Talk talk talk (yay!!)
Ask how we'll solve the problem(s) together
Guide, don't bully (oops)
Gotta listen, too (hmm)

Pair programming reduces context-switching costs: much less likely to interrupt and distract two people who are engaged in an activity than one person when you don't know what they're doing. Context cop(s) important, take (kick) side chatter out of the room... then can be a noisy vigorous team room but will be focused and happy

"Let's say you have an agile team, and you have team members who don't want to be agile. You can't fire them, and you can't promote them. Where can you put them to minimize the damage?" (Ted rules!) It's better to bring them into the team, but if you can't, then you've either got to figure out how to be a team without them, or just don't do the hyper-team thing at all, which is a valid option.

Peter Provost rules!

OMG Steve McConnell (p&p, day 2)

2007-11-06T08:33:00.000-08:00

Basic motivations for agile:

Developers: want less overhead, want to focus on "real" work
Customers: want flexibility

Value delivery keeps up with cost

"Especially useful when schedule and resources are fixed, and mission is to provide maximum business value within those constraints"

Agile Manifesto (ca. 2001)

"Reduced emphasis on long-range predictability of features--especially of the combination of cost, schedule and features"

Variation of methodologies is really about the balance of up-front work vs. in-iteration

In-phase defect removal goal is always 100%, at least in theory

Aha: in addition to code defects, can also find requirements defects, architecture/design defects... leaving major testing to end allows build-up of latent defects (all kinds), unexpected fix time

("Evolutionary Delivery" illustrated with arbitrary 25% balance, looks good for us)

Packaged methodologies

XP: developer focused; abandoned more often than retained
Scrum: workflow/management focused; retained more often than abandoned

Few projects use all the practices of a given method; claim of "synergy" among practices is invalid

Useful practices

Short release cycles (1-4 weeks): does not have to be externally to the customer; virtually always valuable
Rolling-wave planning: long-term (2-12 months); detailed (30-60 days)
Timebox development: commit to delivering fixed set of functionality in given timeframe; high morale, visible progress; need a rest period or different activity between sprints
Empowered, small, cross-functional teams: include all stakeholders needed to make binding decisions
Active management (coach, Scrum Master): "Theory Y" style; remove barriers to good work
Coding standards
Frequent integration & test: daily build and smoke test (no point building if don't also test that build is OK); note that you don't have to deliver new functionality every day, nor even check code in every day
Automated regression test (TDD): virtually always a good practice with new development, problematic for existing/legacy systems
Postmortem for each release

Hit or miss

Customer-provided acceptance tests: ongoing participation hard to sustain; customer testers don't always know meaningful comprehensive tests
Daily stand-up meetings: a good idea that can go too far; less often, shorter, can be OK
Simple design: don't oversimplify; must fully satisfy known requirements
Test-first development: culture shift is difficult, high discipline required, worth the effort
40-hour work week: we really mean a sustainable pace of work

Problematic

System metaphor
Onsite customer
Collective code ownership
Pair programming: good if used selectively
Refactoring: prone to abuse

Legacy

Overhyped, buzzwordy, has led to cynicism

Not the best solution for every company, just for many; there are still cases where sequential dev is the best fit

Best outcomes

Importance of short, iterative and/or incremental cycles
Die Waterfall die!
Check-and-balance against overly bureaucratic CMM
Reality check against "omniscience" of requirements, planning, design

In conclusion:

Steve McConnell is a great communicator. I feel like this stuff is really accessible to folks at all tech levels, which makes it helpful for me in taking the Gospel back to our stakeholders.

p&p Parking Lot

2007-11-05T15:07:00.000-08:00

Day 1: Architecture

Enterprise Service Bus: complicated. I couldn't figure out how it'd be useful for us.

Scalability: seemed really geared toward high-availability, high-traffic apps, which mine definitely isn't. The advice about degrading services gracefully is helpful, though.

SecPAL: new standard is an oxymoron, it's all game theory figuring out who's going to adopt it and how many peers would need to in order to make it useful.

Day 2: Agile

Does the fact that day 1 was "architecture" make this a "waterfall" conference?

Empirical research on Agile adoption: zzz... I mean, it is awesome, I'll take the deck to work for show-and-tell, seriously. Why's it called a "deck", anyway?

Longitudinal study shows correlation between introduction/adoption of Scrum (specifically) and less overtime (fewer hours and less often). This makes agility interesting for us because the sustainable pace is less negotiable in our environment, while productivity is what flexes...!

Day 3: Development

Totally unable to overcome skepticism of IronRuby. Also, speaker less than riveting. He's talking about IronRuby while presenting on a MacBook. Bwah?

Rocky: "Sharepoint is the new Access!" LOL.

Models: zzz. I suck for not paying attention to this.

Day 4: Software Factories

Microsoft's ill-fitting latte lids, thoughtfully supporting me in my mission to spill coffee on important technology persons. Starting, today, with myself.

In the half hour before the keynote, Scott H popped up a Notepad window over his lead slide, and hacked out a short story about someone at the conference this week actually playing Quake and CounterStrike during the sessions, headphones and all, and finished with the question: how many of you are planning to play CounterStrike during my keynote? About five minutes before his talk began, he ^A-deleted it. Never said a word about it. It was like an Easter egg for presentations.

The entire rest of day 4, so far: my brain hurts. My laptop's brain hurts. My chair's brain hurts.

Swag update: Code Complete 2, Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET

Architecture for... me (p&p summit, day 1)

2007-11-05T13:50:00.000-08:00

"Pragmatic Architecture"

Demystifying architecture. What is an architect? That person who gets paid more than everybody else and has management fooled? "Architect" == Latin for "cannot code anymore"?

Infrastructure architect, enterprise architect, systems architect.

An architect's areas of concern/decision-making: communication, presentation, state management, processing, resource management, tools.

A higher-level perspective than implementers typically think at.

Addresses the high-level decisions that are really, really difficult to refactor (e.g., changing from WinForms to a web app is not a "refactor").

This stuff seems less frightening this way.

My problem is a lack of vocabulary: patterns, libraries, the specifics. I learn the abstract concepts, the "rules", the grammar a lot more easily. (Linguistics vs. language... the same reason I can't speak more than a few words of French, Russian, Spanish or German today but can describe broad commonalities and differences among them...)

Swag update: cozy p&p summit polar fleece vest.

Day 2 update: "Architecture is that stuff that if you don't do it right, it costs too much to fix."

A good target for stories is not that you can't think of any more to add, but that there's nothing you can take away.

"What do you do with troublesome senior devs who won't cooperate with agile methodologies and can't get along and get in the way of the team?" "Make 'em architects!" [audience LOL. pause.] "Hmm, seriously, that might work."

Star struck (still at p&p, still day 1)

2007-11-05T12:42:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty excited about the fact that Steve McConnell is scheduled to deliver tomorrow's keynote address.

I really need to see if I can arrange to spill coffee on him.

p&p, day 1

2007-11-05T10:02:00.000-08:00

It's cool to hear a keynote speech in this field and basically understand what it's about.

This morning, LINQ, which seems like a way of replacing inline SQL with inline SQL. OK, not really. LINQ code in C# seems a lot better for maintenance and code clarity, but our speaker mentioned that it encapsulates the "how" away from the "what" and I'm not sure I see how it does that.

I learned a new verb, "to new up" (to instantiate).

Now we're talking about patterns, and our (next) speaker has pointed out that patterns aren't widely used because they are "difficult to contextualize". I like that; it's a highfalutin' way of saying what I've struggled with all along. His analogy, however, that it's like searching for a recipe and getting only a list of ingredients, is funny considering my friend in culinary school has been trained to handle that exact situation and convert the ingredients into a delicious dish. In other words, she's a better patterns architect than I am.

More to come...

Great Experiments in Sexual Orientation

2007-06-11T19:39:00.001-07:00

I would be gravely negligent, to the point of defeating the purpose of this blog, if I failed to ref Dan Savage's Slog post, Great Experiments in Cunnilingus, on the incredibly new! newsworthy! subject of normal! women experimenting with bisexuality.

Choicest quote:

The trend among college women has prompted some sexual behavior experts to light-heartedly refer to the term "LUG," or "lesbian until graduation...."

Funny, when the articles about this exact same new! newsworthy! subject came out about 20 years ago, and said the exact same thing, they didn't quite call them "LUGs". And no, what they called them then wasn't the original name for them, either.

Pretty much as long as there've been lesbians, there've been hasbians, by whatever name.

(I would normally directly reference the MSNBC article he's citing, but the Slog comment thread is worthwhile, too.)

Me, on the art of the non-working prototype

2007-05-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

The benefit of using a cocktail napkin is that nobody mistakes it for a Boeing 737.

As I was saying...

2007-05-08T10:57:00.000-07:00

... about the "problem" with, e.g., Mormonism or Scientology:

Bibles is bibles is bibles—and any idiot can write a bible. And so long as people think they can win arguments by writing bibles, idiots are going to keep writing bibles. (Dan Savage, New Jesus vs. Old Jesus)

The "threat" of Mormonism or Scientology or any such "religion" has nothing to do with anything they might believe or practice, but with the fact and circumstance of their existence. Anything so blatantly invented by humans more-or-less within living memory just illustrates how simple it is for an entire, widely accepted faith system to have been blatantly invented by humans.

Gee! Mail!

2007-04-12T20:58:00.001-07:00

Gmail works on my phone now. Word!

Women's Big Break/LPGA update

2007-04-07T22:13:00.000-07:00

I'm relatively new to the world of spectating women's professional golf, so I have no idea whether this is how things usually go. It just seems like LPGA rookies shouldn't miss cuts on the FUTURES Tour.

Ashley Prange: T45, T32
Kristina Tucker: MC, T32

Maybe they're just not focusing on FUTURES events in their training/planning?? Jeanne Cho and Becky Lucidi haven't even competed on the FUTURES yet this season.

At least one former BB contestant is doing pretty well for herself:

Rachel Bailey: T20, T6 (#12 on money list)

Other BBers, so far:

Dana Lacey: T33, T9 (#17, not bad)
Ashley Gomes: MC, T43
Briana Vega: T45, MC
Bridget Dwyer: MC, T50

I had an epiphone about the utility of game shows like The Big Break, based on stuff they've mentioned in passing about some of the contestants on the show(s). In my prior post, I said there were perfectly good "legitimate" routes to the LPGA—the developmental tour and Q School—and while that's true, the problem is they're potentially very expensive. At least a couple of BBers have tried their luck at the game show because they couldn't afford to go pro.

And, it may yet turn out that the developmental tour entry fees in the prize package are a better career boost than the one-time exemptions.

A Picture Share!

2007-04-06T20:07:00.001-07:00

Moblogging this picture of Joe in Chapter, because I can.

(Open meeting, and we were in recess.)

A Picture Share!

2007-04-06T14:33:00.001-07:00

So, Google says I can blog and photoblog from my phone. I haven't figured out whether or why I want to, but here goes.

Let's just say I've been here a long time.

2007-03-08T23:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Uptight Seattleite,

My question is, if everyone here seems to be a transplant, are all these transplants just complaining about each other? Everyone always says it is so rare to meet a real live native, so is it really "true Seattleites" that are so bad? Were you born here?

Curious

Dear Curious,

What is that horrible droning from beyond the mountains, getting closer and closer? A plague of angry seagulls? An army of torch-wielding bigots? Oh, wait, never mind, I'm sure you already recognize it. That's right, it's the whining of newcomers. "Seattle is sooo unfriendly! Wah!" I'm just ribbing you, Curious. Really, there's nothing wrong with transplants. Except they all brought their cars with them, and, well, over to you, Harmon Shay, on what that led to. In any case, there certainly isn't some sort of class system based on how long anyone's been here. Even if there were, I wouldn't want to be part of it. I consider myself to be very compassionate toward newcomers. I fully believe in everyone's ability to "get it" eventually. Let's just say I've been here a long time. A really long time. I'd slap my length of time in Seattle up on the table next to anyone else's. Pretty much. Why? Are you from here?

Welcome Archie!

2007-02-23T23:17:00.000-08:00

It's Archangelo! Archie for short.

Cool things about Archie:

He sings in his sleep.
He knows his name and comes running whenever it's spoken.
He kisses.
He purrs a LOT.
I'm still learning the language, but he clearly talks, using different meows for different situations.
He plays.
He loves to have his tummy rubbed.
He doesn't mind sleeping solo.
He's fastidious about his litter box, as far as I can tell.

He's just a happy and happy-go-lucky guy. Welcome to the family!

Bri fought the cut, and the cut won

2007-02-21T22:14:00.000-08:00

The second round of the 2007 SBS Open at Turtle Bay drew to a close on Friday with Big Break VI champion Briana Vega in sole possession of last place with a 17-over-par 161. She'll have another go in October at the Longs Drugs Challenge, plus all those tournaments on the FUTURES Tour, plus whatever she wins on Big Break VII.

Ashley Prange, of course, missed the cut in her lone Big Break V exemption, the 2006 Safeway Classic (+10 154), and Danielle Amiee famously withdrew from her second exemption, the 2005 Corning Classic, after posting a +14 156 at the 2005 Michelob Ultra Open at Kingsmill. (Oh yeah, and the alleged Playboy thing. Those sure looked like her head covers. Ahem!)

ig·no·min·i·ous
Pronunciation: "ig-n&-'mi-nE-&s
Function: adjective
1 : marked with or characterized by disgrace or shame : DISHONORABLE

I've been trying to track down the performances of all the other Big Break winners in their respective exemptions, and that they're so elusive says whatever we need to know. Easy to find the promotional run-up articles, nearly impossible to find the final scores.

OK, granted, I'm a total golf novice, so what do I know, but it seems to me like The Big Break's challenges span every imaginable type of golf shot, a wide range of improbable golf situations, course management, endurance, and psychological pressure. Yes, there's dumb superficial reality show drama, but with very few exceptions one's fate rests with one's ability to make golf shots. I wonder what it is that fails to translate into tournament success?

I guess the main observation is the damning one. Q School and the developmental tours offer pretty straightforward paths to earning status on a major tour, and if these contestants could cut it on those paths, they wouldn't need The Big Break.

Indeed, Kristy McPherson and Sarah Lynn Sargent each earned their 2007 exempt status the old-fashioned way (FUTURES Tour money list and Q School, respectively), and both of them trounced Bri Vega at the SBS even after she "bested" them on BBVI.

Oh well. I'm still gonna watch VII. :)

Who will win the DVD format war

2007-01-23T17:16:00.000-08:00

Now we know for certain who will win the high-definition DVD format war, Blu-ray or HD-DVD.

New York Times: In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real

The article (entertaining in its own right) contains this little gem:

The pornographers’ progress with HD may also be somewhat slowed by Sony, one of the main backers of the Blu-ray high-definition disc format. Sony said last week that, in keeping with a longstanding policy, it would not mass-produce pornographic videos on behalf of the movie makers.

The decision has forced pornographers to use the competing HD-DVD format or, in some cases, to find companies other than Sony that can manufacture copies of Blu-ray movies.

The movie makers assert that it is shortsighted of Sony to snub them, given how pornography helps technologies spread.

This is exactly right on. It's like trying to build a new super-high-speed armor-plated helicopter and then refusing on principle to sell any to the Department of Defense.

Also, Blu-ray has a silly name. I believe the VHS vs. Betamax war proved that acronyms have a decisive advantage over phonemes.

Getting rid of postal mail advertising packets

2007-01-20T11:06:00.000-08:00

Those advertising and coupon packages that fall apart in my mailbox really make me angry, especially because the packages themselves don't contain any information about how to get rid of them. When I first moved in here, I started calling the "advertise with us!" phone numbers until I reached someone with information about how to get off their lists. I had to make my request in writing by postal mail, and both of them advised that they will only honor a removal for two years!

It's been two years. Grrr.

But, good news! The two offenders that recently showed up, falling apart, in my mailbox, now accept removal requests online! Neither one of them says anything on their site about the two-year limit, but my guess is it's still in effect. They keep hoping you'll sell your house to someone who likes their crap.

As a public service, and a personal reminder for myself in two years, I present:

Remove your address from the ShopWise® mailing list

Remove your address from the ValPak mailing list

Remove your address, phone and/or email from Direct Marketing Association lists¹

__________
¹ Don't hold your breath about spammers honoring your DMA preferences, obviously.

Most euphemistic, indeed

2007-01-05T15:45:00.000-08:00

The American Dialect Society votes today on its 2006 Words of the Year, in a variety of categories. This nominee stands out:

MOST EUPHEMISTIC
[...]
waterboarding: an interrogation technique in which the subject is immobilized and doused with water to simulate drowning; reported to be used by U.S. interrogators against terrorism detainees.

So, "waterboarding" is a euphemism.

"Interrogation technique"?

"U.S. interrogators"?

"Detainees"?!

Is this intentional irony, Alanis?

And don't even get me started about how NPR plays along with the administration's Newspeak.

Reading list updated

2006-12-30T23:40:00.000-08:00

I keep a list of what I've read, what I'm reading and what I'm fixin' to read over on my personal site. The pace has slowed way down now that I'm no longer riding the bus to work, and I let the list get stale this fall, but tonight I've updated all my recent reads and re-filled the queue with my latest Borders and Amazon acquisitions.

The underlying code for that page is a bit spaghettish, but I'm pretty pleased with how I was able to get it to come out. (Refresh the page a few times to see my cool parlor trick.) The list data is maintained as an XML file and the page is built using JSP and templates. Maybe I'll look into Web 2.0ifying it this year.

Remembering Jiji

2006-12-29T10:53:00.000-08:00

Five Corners Animal Hospital is the 24-hour emergency clinic where we took Jiji on Christmas Eve (and, this summer, had taken Prissy the ancient Maltese when she was hit by a car on a Sunday). As I've recently discussed, I used to volunteer at a similar after-hours emergency clinic. You really have to admire people who are willing to give up their Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day, to make sure that the rest of us have a place to take our pets when they get into the chocolate or the poinsettia, or when we figure out that holding out until Boxing Day was overly optimistic. I euthanized one beloved pet this festive holiday season, but they probably euthanized many more. And, hopefully, saved a few.

VCA Five Corners is a corporate clinic, which I have mixed feelings about. NTEPC is a co-op and I still think their economic model is amazingly cool. But I'm pleased to report that the corporateness doesn't diminish the compassion or professionalism of the staff.

Anyway, on Thursday I got a sympathy card in the mail from Five Corners. That's standard practice and I was pretty much expecting one. What I wasn't expecting was a handmade card inside, decorated all over with hearts and Jiji's name and, in the center, her paw print. Before sending her off to be cremated, they took her paw print. I hardly need to say that I bawled like a baby. I especially loved Jiji's bony little paws, and now I have a life-size memento. I reckon I'll frame the print along with a picture or two of her.

What do you do, I wonder, to say "thanks" to a corporate clinic?

P.S. Thanks, also, to the good friends who gave me a sympathy bouquet today!

Five things meme

2006-12-27T11:55:00.000-08:00

I'm not normally the meme type, but I have great respect for Eszter's blog and thus I don't take her tap lightly! Hi Eszter!

I talk so darned much all the time that it's hard for me to imagine any information about me that everybody hasn't already been subjected to, but I'll give it a try. :)

1. My mom is deaf. She speaks almost flawlessly and can lipread most people, but I still functioned as an "interpreter" and handled all the family's phone calls from an early age (five or six). I think it may be similar to how second-generation immigrant children translate for their parents. I suspect this is why I'm so talkative and have always been fairly confident speaking up around my elders. I got in trouble with some adults for correcting Mom's pronunciation in public, but she would always reassure me privately that she wanted me to help her speak perfectly and she welcomed those corrections. I wonder if that's why I'm so contrary now. ;)

I don't sign worth a darn, except for the alphabet and "Silent Night", but I lipread pretty well and I normally watch people's mouths, rather than their eyes, when they talk.

2. For several years in my late 20s, I wanted to be a veterinarian. I volunteered at the North Texas Emergency Pet Clinic¹ in the evenings (after working my day job as a software developer). Chuck and I traveled to Texas A&M University for an open house at their CVM, and I spoke with counselors there and at UW about what it would take for me to pick up remedial science credits before applying to vet school. When we moved back to Seattle, I initially took a job as a clinic receptionist. I ended up abandoning my veterinary aspirations when I got a closer look at the challenging economics of clinic practice and, at the same time, got an offer for an obscenely high-paying job as a software consultant.

I adopted Jiji in part because I figured I could at least put my experience to good use taking care of older pets with special needs.

3. I'm an active member of the Order of the Eastern Star and the proprietor of the only, as far as I know, OES blog on the web.

4. I'm a language geek, although I'm quite terrible at actually speaking languages. I have taken classes in French, Russian and Spanish. Russian was the biggest disappointment; I loved it, but after nearly four years of study, these days I can barely remember two words and one children's song. I do read Cyrillic pretty well, though. I'm a huge fan of modern-traditional Scottish Gaelic music and I've learned phonetic Gaelic so I can sing along (and I've done exactly one a cappella Gaelic gig). I picked up a respectable amount of travelers' German on my trip in 2005 and would like to learn more. I mastered exactly two words in Czech, although I was able to muddle through a few more to fend off a would-be suitor at the Prague train station. I've dabbled in Welsh, Japanese, Danish, Cherokee and Latin. I like to study alphabets and pronunciation so I can handle native people- and place-names even in languages I don't know, such as Polish and Hawai'ian. For no apparent reason, I recently decided to collect the Nicene and/or Apostle's Creed in as many languages as possible, which necessitated installing about a hundred new fonts. I'm considering a new, more useful project to document "excuse me", "thank you" and "please" in as many languages as possible, and maybe "hurry!" in case I ever get cast on "The Amazing Race".

5. I play guitar in a startup quasi-bluegrass band.

Tapping Jana, Jim, Cameron, Siri and LG.

______
¹ I created their first website and was surprised to find that a lot of the content they're using today was originally written by me!

"He was delicious."

2006-12-26T22:55:00.001-08:00

We knew it'd come in handy eventually.

I always thought this was one of the funniest sketches evar on SNL, and I've quoted it regularly ever since. So when the real news finally broke, I found out by someone quoting it back at ME. Thanks to lafe for tracking down the video... I bow to your superior Google-Video-fu....

James Brown IS Dead

2006-12-25T23:02:00.000-08:00

Seriously old-school techno. I've owned this track since it was released, I thought longer ago than 1991, but whatever. In spite of its title/chorus, the lyrics do conclude that James Brown is not actually dead.

There were counter-tracks released by other bands: "James Brown Is Still Alive" and "Who the Fuck is James Brown?" This one had to win the rhetorical argument eventually, though, and on Christmas Day 2006, it finally has.

RIP Jiji, 1988-2006

2006-12-24T15:51:00.000-08:00

We euthanized Jiji this morning, on Christmas Eve.

I would have to say that the many stresses of the windstorm and five-day power outage took their toll on her, but so did the cold winter weather and the passage of time in general.

After three full days in the cold at my power-less house, we both found refuge at my sister's cozy apartment in West Seattle. Jiji seemed her usual self for two more days; don't know if she was masking symptoms, or if something more acute happened while we were not looking. We suspect a seizure or a stroke, brought on by the progression of the kidney disease. In any case, when I brought her home on Wednesday night, she was terribly agitated and in real distress. I couldn't find any way to settle her. She spent all day Thursday, overnight, and most of the day Friday at her vet, where they tested for many things and treated many more... all best guesses, as is so much of veterinary work. Two different doctors mentioned "senility", which turned out to be the key.

When I brought her home again on Friday night, she went right back to the same agitated behavior, and that's when we realized that she truly didn't know where she was (and hadn't on Wednesday, either). Her other ailments weren't the cause of her distress. She was lost, confused and probably scared. She didn't know any of her old favorite places in the house, and she started getting into rooms and climbing on things she had never shown any interest in before. It was like having a different, new cat, and it was hard to accept that she wasn't ever going to sit with me in the same way or share any of my favorite interactions again.

But, we hoped, maybe we could help her re-adjust to her home and build a new relationship. In a way, that worked. She was able to settle in, and in a strange way she still seemed to know us... at least, to know that she could trust us and that we loved her. I imagined that she might be trying to figure out how the heck I knew all her favorite spots to be petted. "You taught me," I told her. She started looking for me in my regular place on the sofa, and would come to me when I sat there. She calmed down. She slept, just in new places.

But she still wasn't feeling well, and couldn't bring herself to eat. Loss of appetite is one of the major signs that the kidneys have failed beyond recovery. I came up with my list of enticements, all the things we would try over the next few days to get her eating again, and we tried all of them. Nothing worked. It wasn't just that they didn't work; it was that whenever we went to the kitchen, she would follow us and meow and wait to be fed. She was hungry, and she knew she needed to eat, but when the food was placed in front of her she just couldn't do it. On Saturday night, I mixed some food with water and managed to get her to swallow 2.5 cc's from a syringe, but her heart wasn't in it.

On Christmas Eve morning she let us know that she was really done. She hadn't touched any food overnight, could barely drink water, lurched and wobbled when she tried to walk, and couldn't hold her head up. I had just finished reading about end-of-life for cats and the telltale head drop. I catalogued all the medicines, treatments and techniques I had available to try on her, and couldn't bring myself to subject her to any of them. It was just enough.

I've never actually had to euthanize a pet before, and the thing I hadn't really figured out was that if the purpose of euthanasia is to prevent a pet from suffering, what that means is, you have to make the decision to euthanize before the pet is clearly suffering, in other words, when the pet still seems to be stable and could be "OK" for some indefinite longer time. I'll never know whether she might have been "OK" through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but it was very clear she wasn't going to get any better thereafter, and that meant there wasn't anything left to wait for. Our gift to her was peace, and an end to her disease. At the emergency vet, she nuzzled into the crook of my arm and just seemed so, so tired. It was hard to let her go, but she told us it was time.

Jiji lived nearly nineteen years. Her vet's records (dating back before I adopted her) showed she was born in 1988. She was older than my high school diploma. :) No one I know had ever even heard of a nineteen-year-old cat, much less one so companionable in her eighteenth year, much less one who had been indoor-outdoor for the seventeen years before she came to me! Vets were impressed that she made it seventeen full years before showing any signs of CRF, and that she lasted another full year after the disease emerged (the cat's body compensates so well that by the time symptoms become visible, the kidneys are already 75-80% gone). She was a wonderful cat and a perfect companion. I was so lucky to have her for the year that I did.

Rest in peace, Jiji, wherever you are. I love you.

Unisex baby hell

2006-12-11T11:50:00.000-08:00

This is how bad it is. As I was shopping for friends' baby shower this weekend, I mentally applauded them for refusing to know in advance the sex of their baby, especially when I discovered how unbelievably difficult it is to find unisex baby clothes. No matter how many times you tell the relatives you prefer unisex, I thought, they're going to get stereotypically gendered stuff out of desperation because there's nothing else here.

It turns out it's worse than that. These same friends had a similarly-situated expectant friend or relative. Her family decided on their own that it would be a boy, and bought it blue boys' clothes anyway. Hmm... but I'm not sure what it proves that when the baby turned out to be a girl, they decided that the boys' clothes couldn't be used and now they're packed away, waiting for someone else in the family to have a boy. If you decide that your "unisex" girl baby "can't" wear "boys' blue"...?

I ended up going empty-handed to the shower because I hated the only unisex I could find and I wanted to take the time to shop better. Today it's looking like the entire mission is a fool's errand. Witness:

Amazon.com >
Apparel & Accessories >
    Kids & Baby >
        Infant & Toddler >
            * Girls
            * Boys
            * Shoes

Girls, boys, shoes? Surely....

Search >
Infant & Toddler >
    "Unisex" >
        * "Gerber" Onesie with Matching Cap and Booties (Unisex)
            Choose a color:
                * Pink
                * Blue

I give up. I guess the only way to avoid "gendering" a baby is to let it go naked.

Oh, wait. Hmm. Dammit.

Update: I'm not alone! Rigid lines between boys' things and girls' things removes options

Women's Big Break/LPGA Q School final report

2006-12-04T12:40:00.000-08:00

Final standings of Big Break contestants competing at LPGA Q School 2006:

Top 15, earning exempt status:

T10 Sarah Lynn Johnson  BB6  T16  72-73-72-71-70  358  -2

Next 35 and ties, earning non-exempt (conditional) status:

 1  Jeanne Cho          BBV  T19  71-72-72-74-71  360   E
27  Kristina Tucker     BBV  T50  73-76-71-73-73  366  +6
36  Becky Lucidi        BBV  T50  77-77-67-72-75  368  +8
37  Ashley Prange       BBV  T50  69-76-73-75-75  368  +8

Failed to advance to final round:

Ashley Gomes            BB6  CUT  78-76-76-75     305  +17

Also, Big Breakers who failed to advance at Florida Sectional Q School:

Julie Wells             BBV  CUT  80-74           154  +10
Bridget Dwyer           BB6  CUT  76-79           155  +11
Dana Lacey              BBV  CUT  80-76           156  +12
Annie Mallory           BB6   DQ  86               86  +14

Nota bene: Kristy McPherson, BB6, already qualified for 2006 exempt status as one of the top 5 finishers on the FUTURES Tour money list.

Women's Big Break/LPGA Q School report

2006-12-02T21:44:00.000-08:00

Sort of a "where are they now?" thing.

Big Break contestants competing in LPGA Q School 2006, after 4 rounds:

Sarah Lynn Johnson  BB6  T16  72-73-72-71  288    E
Jeanne Cho          BBV  T19  71-72-72-74  289   +1
Becky Lucidi        BBV  T50  77-77-67-72  293   +5
Kristina Tucker     BBV  T50  73-76-71-73  293   +5
Ashley Prange       BBV  T50  69-76-73-75  293   +5
Ashley Gomes        BB6  CUT  78-76-76-75  305  +17

Final round tomorrow! Exempt cards for the top 15 finishers, non-exempt status for the next 35.

Also, Big Breakers who failed to advance at Florida Sectional Q School:

Julie Wells         BBV  CUT  80-74        154  +10
Bridget Dwyer       BB6  CUT  76-79        155  +11
Dana Lacey          BBV  CUT  80-76        156  +12
Annie Mallory       BB6   DQ  86            86  +14

Nota bene: Kristy McPherson, BB6, already qualified for 2006 exempt status as one of the top 5 finishers on the FUTURES Tour money list.

Several other BB competitors have retired from competition, but I'm not sure what's happened to all of them. So far none have earned status on the LPGA. No one from BBIII is represented on the FUTURES Tour 2006 Money List at all and none played in any of the Q School tournaments this year.

w1b a11y, Day 3 and wrapup

2006-12-01T23:07:00.000-08:00

A smaller crowd today, and a shorter session.

We got a demo from the blind Ph.D. Google guy of his audio desktop, which is a collection of scripts that run the gamut from API-based extensibility of sites to old-school screen-scraping. Basically, he said, out of necessity, he started doing the stuff Greasemonkey does now, about five years before Greasemonkey started doing it. He showed how direct access to content is vastly superior to parsing through a visually-oriented site using a browser rendered by a screenreader, and there's no doubt to me that he's right about that. The problem, for now, is that he has such a poweruser setup that it really isn't useful to blind folks who aren't Ph.D.s at Google.

After the coffee break, we had a free-for-all session. Several of the attendees had websites that we tested, on the big screen, using the Window-Eyes screenreader. This was useful on several levels. First, coming on the heels of the audio desktop demo, it was further proof that direct content beats the clunky screenreader, hands down, and the poor Window-Eyes vendor's protestations didn't help his case any. It's not that his screenreader is such an awful screenreader, as screenreaders go; it's that screenreaders seem like totally the wrong paradigm. I can't help but think of the difference between Signing Exact English and ASL.

The website testing was a bit of déjà vu for me. One after another, websites created by really passionate people, who believed they had really rigorously followed accessibility standards, flunked out when tested with a real live screenreader. Heck, even one of the organizers of the conference, who does these kinds of standards for a living, was surprised by some of the screenreader's behaviors. The same thing happened to me when I, a really passionate person who believed I had really rigorously followed accessibility standards, took my web app to a beta test with a real live blind user and real live JAWS.

I had a lightbulb moment during today's testing session. It isn't just that the accessibility standards are out-of-date, though they are. We are really dealing with two totally different issues, both of which have their analogues in the sighted web. There's standards-based accessibility, the traditional kind, and then there's accessible usability. If you think about the early web, it's clear that these were different things for the sighted world, too, and that one lagged behind the other.

Standards are pretty concrete. Well, OK, less so these days, but still. The problem is, nobody follows them, and the screenreaders know that nobody follows them, so the screenreaders have no choice but to adopt workarounds, which break the standards. (Déjà vu again? Isn't this what some of the early (sighted) browser wars were about?)

But beyond that, standards are not enough. Just like in the sighted web, a perfectly standards-compliant site may be incomprehensible to users; in the case of accessibility, may be incomprehensible to users with screenreaders. Poor organization, badly-designed widgets, counter-intuitive behaviors are not usable. And if a site isn't usable, it isn't accessible, no matter how "compliant" it is.

I doubt very much that I'm the first person to think of accessible usability. It sounds like some of the other (sighted) attendees at this week's conference figured out something along these lines themselves. Screenreader users probably thought of it a long, long time ago.

The problem is, like sighted usability, accessible usability is bound to be much more abstract, less understood, more widely variable among users, and generally debatable for years to come.

And that's even before we attack the paradigm.

This stuff is hard.

w1b a11y, Day 2

2006-11-30T14:16:00.000-08:00

Well, the most important thing I did this morning was spill coffee on the Ph.D. blind research scientist from Google. You may safely assume that this wasn't how I planned our meeting to go.

After lunch I found a moment to grovel for forgiveness and he was most gracious, so I may survive the rest of the conference.

My appearance as a panelist was fine, uneventful, and thankfully occurred before the coffee incident. We were supposed to be speaking about accessibility management, which is supremely ironic considering that I'm not a manager and that I engaged in legendary power struggles with my previous manager, often about accessibility.

Anyway, I was delighted to be able to work in my counter to yesterday's web zealots:

The question of "how to be accessible" is not difficult. We all already know how to be accessible. It's very simple. Design for Lynx, with no presentation. Use plaintext, semantic tags, maybe an

. Done.

No?

The real question is, newer and richer web technologies are always out there, doing that "emerging" thing that they do. We want to learn them, use them, maybe even help create them. Our users want them. Our bosses want us to provide them to our users. "Don't do that" isn't a strategy, for many reasons. And so the reason we're all here is to figure out how to render more interesting things than plaintext, more interestingly, while remaining accessible.

I was delighted that this point went over more or less well with the group.

It was supported by a back-reference to one of yesterday's presenters, the guy from IBM/W3C who talked about how WCAG 2.0 is moving toward technology-independence; rather than banning certain things (like, helpfully, all of Javascript or all tables), the emphasis is on guidelines to providing accessible content with all technologies.

Today's presenters have been wonderfully concrete: a guy from Adobe and a guy from Yahoo!, both describing actual techniques and strategies for actual web development. Exactly what I'm looking for. Plus, the one from Yahoo! used "a11y" in his slides. Rock on!

w1b a11y, Day 1

2006-11-29T14:47:00.000-08:00

This week I'm attending an invite-only conference on web accessibility. It's sponsored by a UW center, but I still had to apply to get in. I was very pleased to be selected and tomorrow I'm going to be a panelist!

This event is formatted like a workshop/working group, rather than a lecture series (I was going to say "than a conference", but conferring is exactly what we're doing). The purpose of the conference, and the topic of the questions when I applied, involved accessibility for emerging web technologies, rich media, etc.

Our group discussions got off to, in my opinion, a rocky start. Over a "working lunch" (our host explained that the NSF won't pay for meals unless they are "working"), I ended up at a table with two good folks who I can only describe as web religious zealots. I think in my past I've been this kind of zealot, and wow, I must have been incredibly annoying. I deserve to be stuck at a table with people like this occasionally. I have one in my working group, and our table picked up one from another group, and they fed off of each other.

Anyway, he and the other zealot very quickly concluded that the solution to accessibility of rich content is that nobody needs rich content anyway, and if we just stick with the old proven web standards then accessibility is no problem.

Fortunately, the majority of us here don't feel that way, that being why we're here. The discussions the rest of the day were much more productive. Our afternoon presentation covered WCAG 2.0, which I like the sound of even if A List Apart doesn't.

Let me also say the food at Hotel Ändra is superb, even better than the food at Microsoft (which was good). This is my second conference this year, but I haven't managed to get out of western Washington yet. Working on it.

Dear Santa....

2006-11-26T19:20:00.000-08:00

Things I don't want this year:

Bearistas. I have more than enough. :)
Stuffed animals. Ditto.
LEGOs.

Relatively inexpensive things I might enjoy:

Amazon Wish List items.

Amazon gift certificate would work well, since I get free shipping.

Junonia gift certificate so I can get PJs.
Wine glasses (6) and water goblets (12) in Javit Rain pattern from Replacements.com.

Thanks, Santa!

Slovanská epopej Alfonse Muchy

2006-11-21T14:31:00.000-08:00

I'm not really a fan of art for art's sake, but I can get pulled into art by a great story. I visited the Mucha Museum in Prague last year kind of just for something to do that day, not because I knew anything about Mucha or felt particularly strongly about art nouveau or anything. So I guess it is not too surprising that among all the advertising posters and the stylized beautiful women, I fell in love with Mucha's "patriotic" period and the Slav Epic.

Of course, these are the works that are hardest to find prints of, books with, or even very much information about. I couldn't get to the museum where the Slav Epic is housed (several hours outside of Prague, v Moravském Krumlově), so I had hoped to see all of the paintings online when I got home, but couldn't find any web galleries of them anywhere!

Today I find that there's a fantastic little site with information about the Slav Epic, and a gallery. I'm also excited, I think, to learn that the Slav Epic is moving back to Prague where it can be seen and appreciated. There's some controversy about the architecture and about whether the new exhibit will be a cheesy tourist trap, but I have trouble imagining the cheesy tourists really flocking to learn about the heart of the Slavic past, especially if they can have their fill of advertising posters at the gift shop right off Na Příkopě.

Still can't find much online about Mucha's Masonic art, pointers welcome. :)

Smith College Fall Social

2006-11-20T14:01:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of things about Smith College that make me feel like I'm in over my head. My super-studious first year roommate was one. Social events with Seattle-area alumnae are another.

So I got this invitation to something called a Smith College Fall Social Event. This is anxiety-inducing on so many levels that it practically requires a war plan.

Part 1: the look

What to wear to a Smith College Fall Social Event? In Eastern Star I make it a point to wear a skirt or dress to almost everything. (What I'm trying to convey by doing this is a topic for another post, possibly on another blog.) In any case, Smith feels like exactly the opposite. I want to look successful (trousers and shaped jacket), dressy (no jeans), yet fun (loud orange print top).

I have a bit of time between work and the event, and Madison Park is nearby, so I decide to stop in the Aveda store at U Village to redeem a free sample card (for unrelated hand cream). In the throes of Smith College inadequacy, I decide to check out tinted moisturizer, which is—gasp—makeup, though only just barely. It looks pretty good, though flat, so I try a cream blush. No escaping it now, I'm wearing makeup. It looks great. I feel great. I blame Carmindy.

(It occurs to me later that trying brand-new cosmetics half an hour before a big event is probably not the best idea; fortunately, I don't suffer any surprise allergic reactions this time.)

Part 2: the location

I've been doing a fair amount of work as an admissions representative this year, so my co-workers ask whether this social is being held at my house. Horrors! No way! This is at the home of a 1953 alumna who is also a member of the Board of Trustees. It's in Madison Park, near Broadmoor. Probably some mansion, I say, chuckling. No, I'm kidding, but I'm sure it's a nice place.

OK, it's totally at a mansion.

Not just a mansion, either, but a vaulted concrete creation more like a modern art museum (dropped in the middle of a neighborhood full of mansions). I feel like Fraulein Maria arriving at the Von Trapp house with her battered straw hat and guitar, singing "I Have Confidence" as I drive up but finishing on "oh, help," as I reach the front gate.

Our hostess is petite, dressed in a black ruffled tuxedo shirt and vibrant purple print velvet pants. She looks like one of her own art acquisitions. We hear that she frequently leads her guests on guided art tours, but the crowd's too big this time so we have to explore the pieces on our own.

The entire roof of the house seems to be vaulted glass, and there's at least one elevator. The upstairs bedrooms have views of both the Evergreen Point (520) Floating Bridge and the Lacey V. Murrow (I-90) Floating Bridgeplex (making "panoramic" redundant).

Part 3: the program

Is this one of those parties where you arrive on time, or fashionably late? My Eastern Star training has me suspecting "a program," i.e., at least perhaps a formal greeting by the hostess or a short talk, if not a full agenda. I decide to get there on time. This works excellently for scoring a parking space in the neighborhood, but there does not turn out to be a program. It really is a Fall Social Event and the only item on the agenda is mingling.

Part 4: the generations

One of the reasons I stress out about Smith College social events is that I'm so awkward around my Smith peers. Two problems: one, hardly anybody from the late 1980s/early 1990s era ever attends these things, and two, I find 1990s alumnae difficult to talk to. I'm not sure why, but we wade through the obligatory small talk about our career/family choices, we commiserate about the dining room consolidations, and then things dead-end in the vicinity of the new Campus Center. I wonder if it's because you never know what's going to offend a 1990s Smithie (but you know something will)? Plus, the existence of alumnae after about 1995 makes me feel really, really old (hi Eszter!).

Once it becomes clear that this really is a purely social event, at which mingling is expected, I decide to take some advice from noted anthropologist Rick Steves: choose to be an extrovert; it's the only way you'll have any fun. I dive in. I start barging into small circles of alumnae I don't know.

I get great news from the official Alumnae Admissions Coordinators (who are a lot of fun in spite of being 1990s like me): they've interviewed at least two, possibly three, of my recruits from the south end. Holy cow, my outreach program is working! I express my desire to singlehandedly drain the financial aid pool dry and they agree.

I'm talking to another relatively younger alumna (1980s, I think, who is decidedly introverted and inching her way to the door), when a stately lady from the class of 1943 (clearly also operating on the Rick Steves plan) barges into our small circle and starts up a conversation. My Eastern Star background kicks in and I adore her immediately. We all have a million questions for each other about what Smith was like, and life was like, in our respective eras. It occurs to me that perhaps we 1990s don't find each other as interesting because we aren't different enough and we don't have enough questions to ask.

Later I barge in on some other alumnae, cousins from the late 1940s and early 1950s who actually attended Smith from Seattle, not a very common occurrence. One majored in chemistry! This is why Smith women are so inspiring. Plus, they think I'm "young".

Part 5: the cuisine

Wine and hors d'oeuvres are being passed around on trays by catering staff. Somehow, in my circle-hopping, I manage to be standing with people who all already have wine every time the wine comes around, so I never get offered any. Note for next time: get wine early. (This facilitates the Rick Steves plan, too.)

Tasty treats include tuna tartare (remarkably like Hawaiʻian poke and equally delicious), fingerling potatoes with truffle salt, minced pork on a crisp bruschetta-ish bread, and quince pastries with whipped cream.

After more than an hour of mingling, the formal living/dining room has cleared out and we who remain hypothesize that the party is dying down. I wander toward the door and discover a packed corridor leading to what turns out to be a palatial kitchen overlooking a "casual" dining area for six and a reading/conversation area with (yet another) fireplace. The caterers are working madly at the center island, the footprint of which is larger than many rooms in my house.

Here's where I discover les petites madeleines chocolates, fresh-baked and devoured by alumnae pretty much as soon as a batch emerges from the ovens.

Part 6: the reunions

Around the kitchen, I discover a couple of people I actually know: an early 1990s former neighbor, who looks exactly the same (i.e., gorgeous) as our Smith days; and a real live 1993, whom I sang with in choir and who, it turns out, also goes to St. Mark's (as do all good upper-crust Seattleites, I suspect). The former neighbor used to work for Real.com. Did you know Maria? we ask, jokingly, referring to the newly-reelected Senator Cantwell, a Reallionaire. "Actually, yeah." I have got to be more careful what I joke about. The choirmate and I exchange email addresses and I get to relate my gossip about the Amherst Regional High School West Side Story debacle.

My boss, a Barnard alumna, asked me to look for a Smithie grad-school friend of hers and I find my target at the "casual" dining table. She works for the city, and we end up deep in conversation about North Highline annexation.

This is one of the best things about being a Smithie: at some random Fall Social Event, one can find someone else who knows the Growth Management Act in detail and is passionate about it (who accurately guesses my lot size from its location) and can meaningfully work through issues of governance, zoning and Detached Accessory Dwelling Units while sipping wine and nibbling tuna tartare in an art gallery mansion.

Can't wait for the next one.

"Healthy" processed foods: not so much

2006-11-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

New York Times: The Package May Say Healthy, but This Grocer Begs to Differ

Hannafords' ratings expose that most processed foods labelled as "healthy" are misleading at best. I'm surprised the grocers haven't been sued or blacklisted.

I don't think we collectively care, unfortunately.

[S]everal customers said they had heard about Guiding Stars in radio advertisements or seen it in the store, but that it had not influenced their purchasing. Several shoppers said they did not see the point.

"I buy whatever it is on my list," said Karen Wilson, 43. "If my kids want Cheerios, I buy them Cheerios and don't look at the stars."

Wow, quality nutrition and quality parenting there.

LiseAnne Deoul, 34, said she liked the idea of Guiding Stars even though the system had not helped her narrow her choices during a quick stop last week to buy pasta.

"All of it was the same," she said. "They all had two stars."

It does not occur to people that this tells you something useful about pasta?

This is why dishonest food labeling works, and why it'll continue to work regardless of what the stores may do.

Tales from the road

2006-11-01T11:17:00.000-08:00

I keep a travel blog, lately updated with tales from my family vacation to Waimānalo Beach on O'ahu.

I also uploaded zillions of photos to Flickr.

Just before we left, I picked up a fabulous little gadget, the Sony GPS-CS1 to geotag photos. It worked really well and Flickr made a cool map out of the results.

We stayed at the Sea Breeze Beach House, which I highly recommend to all!!

Dear Santa....

2006-10-09T14:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Santa,

I would really like an old fashioned silver coffee and tea service to match my family heirloom silver, and I happened to notice that the sets at Replacements, Ltd. cost less than half of what they used to.

PTSWKT 7-Piece Plated Tea Set (w/ Waste, Ktt

would be wonderfully extravagant. Even though it says it is not available, the nice folks at replacements.com say they would gladly combine their PTSWK + PWTL items to create this set, you just have to let them know.

Otherwise,

PTSWT 6-Piece Plated Tea Set (Waste & Tray)

would really be quite sufficient.

If you and your elves could bring them to me someday, I promise to cherish them always and polish them occasionally.

Hope you are enjoying your vacation.

love, me

patterns & practices summit pays off right away

2006-10-09T11:01:00.000-07:00

p&p seemed pretty advanced, and I was worried that it would be too far over my head. I even tried to back out at the last minute.

I must say it was well worth it, in terms of entertainment value, to step out of the conference room at our midmorning break, breeze by a long line for the men's room, and stroll right into a vast and completely empty women's room.

Guess I'm not the only devgrrrl who wasn't sure she belonged here.

Politics vs. Lodge: a losing battle?

2006-09-07T16:15:00.000-07:00

Those of us who find conservative politics to be repugnant take comfort in the notion that our Chapters and Lodges are meant to be neutral territory, where we can choose to experience what's good in people whether we agree with them on such issues or not.

This could be self-delusion, in many ways.

Perhaps our Orders aren't neutral ground at all, but rather have been overtaken and are dominated by backward thinking, which in turn shapes and governs our institutions and their priorities and directions. (That would explain quite a few things.)

Perhaps it is folly to try to compartmentalize away aspects of ourselves that are part of our passion or our intellect (well, some of us choose to involve our intellects) or our daily lives outside of our Orders, and thus it is no surprise that we do such a poor job at it.

Perhaps a Sister or Brother's conservative views are so repugnant that we shouldn't fraternize with them.

Perhaps in our silence, we are not only naïve, but complicit.

Perhaps our Orders don't do anything worthwhile enough to justify the effort.

In our Lodge-as-neutral-territory worldview, the true and proper fraternal response to a conservative email-bomb is generous use of the Delete key. The problem is, by doing so we never uncover the issues and can never learn the answers to any of the above questions.

Feline Chronic Renal Failure

2006-07-14T14:12:00.000-07:00

Back in January, I went looking for an older kitty to adopt and found this sweet 15-year-old feline offered by loving owners who felt she would appreciate a quieter retirement home than they could offer.

The whole quiet retirement home thing went a bit awry when I got hit by a car three days later. My bewildered girl adjusted as well as could be expected to the parade of caregivers and piles of orthopedic supplies in her new home. She even warmed up to me once I got rid of the scary crutches three months later.

Nowadays my stately old girl, rechristened Jiji, follows me around and wants to cuddle more than I expected, but still tolerates my busy work and activity schedules fairly well.

We visited her longtime veterinary clinic this week and confirmed that she has chronic renal failure (CRF), which is very common in cats her age. Her previous owners had described the classic symptoms—drinking lots of water and urinating frequently—but I'm not sure how much they knew about her disease. It is progressive and will eventually be terminal.

The good news is, her bloodwork this week isn't any worse than it was last November. Kidney function is diminished, but the damage isn't progressing. We have no way of knowing how long she's already been on this "plateau", but her life expectancy might still reasonably be measured in years, and that's encouraging. I've found websites dedicated to cats who have survived six to eight years on extremely aggressive treatments that I already know we won't try.

I've switched her to k/d (low protein, low phosphorus), which she seems to love, and I'll start her on Pepcid (for stomach upset) and probably subcutaneous fluids (for dehydration). Howevermany years of retirement she may have left in front of her, I'll make sure they are peaceful, cozy and pampered.

Stealth evangelism on the History Channel International

2006-07-08T23:32:00.000-07:00

I sent a "shame on you" to History Channel International, owned by A&E, for the misleading marketing blitz surrounding their debut of "Drive Thru History". Apparently I'm not the only one who got taken in by the ads, which seemed to suggest that they would be using CGI overlays to show what historical sites and buildings would have looked like in their day. It's not that that didn't happen, though it didn't. It turns out the bait and switch was of a much different sort.

I have to say, I didn't hate the 2.5 episodes I watched on DVR. The host was a little much, but I didn't hate him either, just wanted him to dial it back a bit. I guess I'm not sharp enough on my ancient history to catch all the small inaccuracies that the folks on the reader boards are cranky about.

At first, I thought it was pretty cool that the show took a side trip to a (they said) lesser-known monument in Rome, the Arch of Titus, which commemorates the sack of Jerusalem. Then the show got awfully rhapsodic about the history of the Jews and the glories of their temple. OK, I kind of enjoyed getting such a colorful picture of the importance of the temple and how emotionally devastating its loss must have been for the Jews. But it seemed like we were pretty far afield from Rome at that point. And, hmm. Here's what the show had to say about the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites in Islam:

Today, a Muslim mosque, along with another Muslim holy site called the Dome of the Rock, sits on top of the old temple ruins, resulting in Jerusalem becoming a constant hotbed of religious turmoil, warring factions and struggle.

Bwah? Resulting in? Did they just say that all Middle East violence is a building's fault? A Muslim building's fault? But wait, there's more.

In this highly charged climate, some Palestinians and other Muslims have suggested that the Jewish temple was a myth, a political fabrication to give Jews a legitimate claim to the Holy Land. It would appear, however, that the temple and its treasures were as real as the carvings on the Arch of Titus back in Rome. And while there are no easy answers to the seemingly endless conflict, one thing is certain: there can be no just outcome by rewriting history.

Huh? Isn't this a show about Rome? Did we just do a 20-minute segment on an obscure Roman arch just to prove that the Jewish temple really existed and to put the Palestinians on notice?

Well, I figured maybe I was overreacting. And the rest of the show was quite entertaining and not particularly weird. So I watched the next one, which was mostly about Nero and particularly the great fire, which the show pretty strongly indicates (complete with a stay-tuned cliffhanger) was set intentionally by Nero so that he could blame it on Christians. Then, after a rather detailed digression about the persecution of Christians, including Saints Peter and Paul, we get this:

Christian tradition holds that, except for John, all of Jesus' apostles were executed for their faith. For many Christians, this is a strong argument for the truth of their claims. The apostles, because they were eyewitnesses, knew for certain whether Jesus' resurrection was true or false. This set them apart. History is full of people willing to die for what they believed, but it's difficult to find any sane person who will give their life for a cause they know to be fraudulent. Those who defend the Christian faith ask this question: how likely was it that a man would choose torture and death if all he had to do was simply deny a myth?

Um.

The second half of the show visits the Pantheon, and gives lots of illustration and detail about its architecture and engineering, which is way cool, and also a perfectly reasonable overview of the Roman and Greek, well, pantheon. In comparing the Pantheon's dome to other domed structures, we get another mention of the Dome of the Rock, with a conspicuous reminder that it "sits over the site of the former Jewish temple in Jerusalem". They digress again about the persecution of Christians for refusing to worship Cæsar. And then, the big finish: a celebration of how the Pantheon was later consecrated as a Christian church.

And, in the course of a few centuries, Christianity had overtaken the Roman Empire, establishing itself as a fundamental foundation of Western civilization. This upheaval has done nothing less than shape our world as we know it today. The architectural marvel that once stood for the glory of the Roman gods now stands as a monument to their insignificance, and the triumph of a Galilean carpenter who professed himself to be God.

Dude.

I guess I'm a slow learner, though, because I coasted through the digression into the Acts of the Apostles from the Oracle at Delphi in the third episode. It wasn't until halfway through, after they used the Olympic Games as a hook to show a lengthy quotation (with dramatic reading and graphics) from I Corinthians about the Christian "crown that will last forever" that it occurred to me to Google this show and try to figure out WTF was going on.

Well, well, well.

Turns out Drive Thru History was produced by ColdWater Media, an evangelical studio. DTH's editor and host, Dave Stotts, is described as a seminary student with twelve years' experience in "Christian media production". Christian bookstores stock the DVD sets, and it originally ran on the Trinity Broadcasting Network in June before being picked up and run as-is on History International.

Wow. Let me emphasize again that this show was marketed as if it were neutral, secular, scientific and fact-based programming. Some critics on the HCI message boards are also pretty upset about what they say are historical inaccuracies. The small debatable stuff doesn't bother me nearly as much as the Trojan Horse (pun intended): a deliberate framing and interpretation of history to emphasize Christian supremacy, Christianity as Truth, the inevitability of the rise of Christian dominance. Dismissing and denigrating Muslims bothered me, and they haven't even gotten to Turkey yet. And then, identifying Christianity as "a fundamental foundation of Western civilization" (I'm not sure why they bothered to say "a", but they did, I checked) can really only have one purpose: the fundamentalists' favorite, the claim that America is a "Christian nation" founded on "Christian principles". That's provably false, but provable falsehoods never stopped these people before.

Oh, look. Here's what Focus on the Family has to say about an upcoming episode: "Then it's on to Washington, D.C. to see how Greek, Roman and Christian influences shaped the foundation of America."

I don't dispute the History Channel's "right" to evangelize if that's what they really want to do, but stealth evangelism is creepy and uncool.

If you should happen to also be disturbed by this, you could send feedback to HCI/A&E via their contact page and let them know that you'd like their TBN evangelism content to be properly identified as such in their ad campaigns. Alternately, if you love this show and want to see lots more like it, it'd be swell if you'd contact them and ask them to identify it prominently in their ads so you'll know when to watch it....

In the meantime, History Channel International, which I added to my satellite "favorites" just because I thought this show looked cool, is back off of the list. I'll be viewing the other A&E networks warily as well. Back to Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs" and "Mythbusters", which haven't let me down yet.

Fat in Paradise

2006-06-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago now, I saw a special on TLC set at the Freedom Paradise "size-friendly" resort. It seemed to be some sort of "fat acceptance" workshop or retreat, not just vacations. Interesting, because I thought the FA movement was kinda over in the 1990s, but there it was on everybody's favorite cable lifestyle channel.

The insight that I had while watching the show was that there are (potentially) two totally different levels of FA.

One is more like a fat-pride movement. Fat is fabulous. Fat people shouldn't ever change. This leads to some predictable stuff that I think is lame (fat isn't my fault, weight loss is impossible), delusional (lots of fat people eat right and exercise vigorously and are still fat), and/or dangerous (fat is a safe and healthy lifestyle choice). It can get downright weird (everyone should find fat attractive and sexy). Emphasis on discrimination. Everything would be OK if only the MSM would show fat in a positive light. Fat celebrities who lose weight viewed as turncoats. Not much left of this one these days. I think it pretty much lost the war with science.

Someone on the TLC show said something about how nice it was, as a fat person at a fat resort, to be able to go back to the buffet again and again without anyone being judgmental. That's old-school FA for me in a nutshell. Delusions and coverups notwithstanding, it's pretty much Gluttony Acceptance, and that's just sad.

On the other hand, I don't think it's helpful to vilify fat people, to moo at them out of passing cars, or for department stores to cram the fat women's clothing section in a dark corner of the basement and fill it with polyester and muumuus. Fat is so locked up with self-esteem and self-worth that ironically, it's necessary to think well of yourself in order to sustain the motivation and discipline needed to lose the weight!

It's a dilemma and I don't really know whether it's possible to balance meeting fat people's basic needs against trying not to enable fat and make it so comfortable that it really does become yet another alternative lifestyle. I like the idea that fat people can have a normal and relaxed vacation on a beautiful beach with respectful staff and sturdy beds and chairs. On the other hand, being pinched in an airline seat serves as a helpful reminder that my size is not normal and what I'm doing is not OK in the long term. It encourages me to straighten up and fly right, as it were.

I figure regardless of what should or should not be, the marketing niche will win out and fat will be accommodated because fat money is worth just as much as the skinny kind (and there's increasingly more of it). And yet, since the TLC show was filmed, Freedom Paradise has abandoned their size-friendly theme and don't market themselves as such any more. I don't know if that means there isn't support for the niche, or they need to partner with a size-friendly airline to make it work. Maybe it means that all resorts catering to Americans are becoming size-friendly anyway and it isn't a niche any more!

Testing Blogger tags

2006-06-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

Here we are testing whether I can really get categories working in Blogger.

Tags: