So, I've spent the past 3 days at YAPC::NA 2008 and for all my friends who don't work in perl, I rather pity you. It's not that your Java, Ruby and bizarro flash-interpretive languages aren't good to write. They are (some of them -- ahem). But *you* haven't seen Ingy the professional ham do a strip-tease. (Tossing his underwear from behind the curtain, I tell you!) or heard Matt Trout get good laughs out of righteous indignation and the word fuck or heard the "I'm f*cking Steve Ballmer" song. (Which I'm trying to find, but it seems not to be online anywhere. Not shocking since it was just released "into the wild" about 45 minutes ago and it would've been spoiled if anyone had seen it early.
Point being, the perl people? They are fun. And friendly too. There were 350 people here, most of them seasoned programmers even if they were new to perl and the level of investment in the community was very high. My frivolous regret? I didn't bring enough cash with me to the auction to compete for the right to be the auctioneer in charge of selling off lunch with Larry Wall. (Who accepts being sold like an expensive tart every year with real grace). And as much as I like perl what this really reminded me is how much I love code. My code. Your code. Any code someone is really joyfully writing.
Therefore, I hereby declare that (as soon as I clear it with my spouse) there will officially be a monthly SuperHappyDevHouse at my place in Washington once a month. Dates to follow. If too many people want to do this, we will be forced to find alternate space but what the hell. If I don't set dates to hack. I don't hack. So come on over. Coffee's brewing.
]]>And the list grew. And it grew. And it grew. And the RSVP list sat. And it sat. And it sat. Until two days before the shindig when suddenly a flood of "yup, yup. Planning to be there!" Phonecalls came to me while I was trying to work. 1,2, 3...15... 25... ohgodohgod 32 kids. Right. And attendant parents. Whom we will have to feed and entertain.
Now a blow-by-blow account of sitting up until midnight prepping goodie bags, stuffing the pinata (because who could resist letting little kids beat Dora the Explorer with a big ole stick) might not interest you. And a post mortem of things we ought to have done (for example starting the grill at 9am and prepping ALL food the night before) also might be overly nitty gritty. The party happened. Reed, my mom and I worked like crazy. Betsy seemed to have a pretty good, though somewhat overwhelming, time and she and Ginger collapsed in an exhausted puddle when it was all over.
But when the party was all over, we still hadn't opened presents yet. And that's worth a discussion. I thought hard about whether to post this post. Would attending parents who read this blog be offended? Did I care? I dithered. I fiddled. And in short, anyone who is insecure enough to wring their hands and say-woe-is-me-she-hates-us-cause-we-didnt-include-a-gift-receipt has got it all out of proportion. I hate no one. The things Betsy was given were lovely. And other friends could use this entry. Nuf said. People with little children who will attend parties in the future, consider the following rules next time your kids are invited to a birthday. The following are good birthday party ettiqutte for (at least) the preteen set.
1. As a matter of ettiquette, it's polite to call the inviting parents and ask them what their preferences are about gifts for their kids.
2. If you make the aforementioned call, it is negated as a politeness unless you actually USE the information so gleened to buy an appropriate gift.
3. Especially if you did not follow rules 1 and 2, it is polite to include a gift receipt with what you buy so that it can be returned if it's a duplicate or ... ahem... deemed hopelessly inappropriate.
4. If for some reason you really can't do 1, 2, or 3... buy something without monstrous Disney or other marketing push behind it. Books -- especially classics -- are *very* safe purchases.
5. Extra credit for thoughtfulness goes to parents who put presents into gift bags instead of wrapping them in wrapping paper. This is for two reasons: a. It makes parental pre-snooping of gifts to be sure there's nothing you don't want your tot to have much much easier and b. You can reuse the gift bag next time your own child takes a gift to a party.
I may actually have an ammendment to the overall list next September about how you should behave when the parents ask that no presents be brought. I think that's what we're going to try for the next few years.
Peace, yall.
K.
Yah. I feel that. Ok, I don't live it, but I live at all times at essentially two disasters worth of remove from it. One good trainwreck taking the family, one good business tidal wave taking the job. Or maybe a physical disability. Point being, the full cup that runs over for me is shatterable. So's yours, probably, whether you notice it or not. You can't look over your shoulder all the time in fear, it aint healthy, but then there's Molly sitting right there struggling with the ultimately ineffable, the how do you go on, the need for something to get up in the morning for. Hell, Molly's hardly the only one.
My personal answer to the fear of living old, alone and unspeakable is simple, maybe simple minded. Don't look. That sort of future is one that is called into being by thinking about it. Feel it creeping at your spine and breathing in your ear, but you never turn round. You walk like Perseus out of Hades, towards the light. Find things to love, even if they're not what you wanted to love in the beginning. And walk on.
Of course, I've acreted quite a pile of people and things to love. Easy for me to say that. And Perseus failed, so who the hell do you have to be to never look round? You'll note, if you followed the link to Molly's post I haven't said a damn thing about her professional sense of despond. She's multipublished, brilliant and broke. I'm middle of the road competent, no luminary and not broke. My recipe is somehow the same. Don't look round. Take new contracts, write new books. Earn, earn, earn. Do everything new today so the might have beens don't eat you.
Good luck, Molly, be strong. We're rooting for you.
]]>She proceeded to spend the next 3.5 days kvetching with a steady temp of 101 and no other symptoms. The doctor says her ears are clear and she's not in any danger. This didn't stop her from sleeping like hell, tossing up any medicine we tried to give her within 5 minutes of us trying to get it down her and being in general, a complete, utter nightmare to be around.
Did I mention that I had her at home through an entire 4 hour conference call I was on Wednesday during which she never once slept or that she managed to vomit in my bed not once, not twice, but THREE times Wednesday night? This in spite of a real effort on my part to prevent it after the first time.
She's turned the corner. She's sleeping peacefully and eating like a little truffle pig. Now *I* feel queasy. And of course there's mission critical work to be done and I've had a sick baby-sized block preventing me from getting to it. Today, Friday, all of the barriers finally got pulled out so now I get to figure out how to work on the weekend with children in the house.
Which would be fine if I could get some SLEEP first. Bleah. Tired. Very. Very. Tired.
]]>Some friends have suggested DreamHost as a possible new home for this blog and others have suggested TextDrive and while I don't see anything actively wrong with either of them, I tried to hit DreamHost's homepage off and on for several hours yesterday and they seemed to be slashdotted. Needless to say, this doesn't impress me in a place I'd be putting my own piddly website no matter how much of a self care user interface they've got built.
TextDrive, by contrast has an "all the cool kids are playing here" sort of allure since the founders are all open source geeks and they're begging for mini-angel investors promising lifetime hosting. I can't decide whether trading potential lack of service for lifetime hosting is ok. Is this a save-by-spending idea that will pay off or is this stupid? If this weren't a potentially buy-once-never-worry-about-it-again sort of deal, I would just make a choice and be done, but 500 bucks is 3- 4 years worth of hosting money. I have to be there a good long time to make it a worthy expendature.
The third possibility to complicate this matter further is that I can get my old free colo space back, I just can't do it for another couple of months. Of course, then I have to admin the box and I have exactly no time for patches or upgrades and this domain's availability is no longer just a nice-to-have for me. Oh... and I'd have to buy a box which would probably cost at least as much as lifetime TextDrive.
Thoughts? If you read this via lj feed, I'll look for comments there, otherwise anything sent to my firstname at this site .org gets to me. No, I don't turn on comments. It's just another place for spam to pile up. Will let people know how this decision plays out since some of you are also about to become refugees from the great dissonant.org shutdown.
]]>2006 will be a challenging year. But the challenges have changed. Learn to work from a place of proactive creation rather than reactive fear. (The new job supports this.) Take active steps towards all the things I want for my family over the coming years. Remember to enjoy the full array of gifts we seem stunningly to just keep having. Keep hands outstretched to the life full of people we drift and almost don't see. Live. Just live.
And if I HAVE to have a concrete goal -- the Quilt That Will Not Die will be finished this year. Which is of course, why I am compulsively working on the Christmas Stocking That Will Not Die (and which I expect to take another year) instead.
]]>I am exhausted. Everyone's Christmas cards and gifts will go out next week. Oh, and Merry Christmas/Happy Birthday To Me!
]]>Today I've got another one. Several months ago, I saw The Fog of War, a movie length set of interviews with Robert McNamara. Just today I finished Talk of the Devil, which is a set of 7 interviews with fallen dictators: Idi Amin, Mira Milosevik (Slobidon's wife) and Baby Doc among others. Last week I ran across a fantastic article about places to intervene in complex systems and their efficacy/difficulty This led me to go finda set of patterns for expressing feedback loops in complex systems. And somewhere else -- I forget where -- I read something about how Intuit is a revolutionary and how they could begin to reparadigim the healthcare system with their new product, Medical Bill Manager.
So I've been reading/listening to people who have lived through and been responsible for apalling history self-justify or deny responsibility. Either they did what was absolutely right or they were somehow powerless to do other than they did. They were in the moment and usually saw themselves in spite of their sins as saving their people from even worse abuses by someone else. Most of them were irresponsible assholes. A few were genuinely nuts. The road to hell is definitly mostly paved with good intentions.
That gets me contemplating what one person can truly change and where they have to be in the system to change it. And THAT gets me excited when I look at patterns of behavior in complex systems and looking at leverage points. The most effective system changes are not necessarily coming from a command and control structure.
This all brings me to a concrete example of power shifting. For years we've been hearing everyone whine about how the health care system is screwed up, who owns our personal medical records and how the government should or the insurance companies should change everything. But the government and the insurance companies don't actually have that much incentive to change things. People who buy healthcare do. So what would happen if you helped people to balance the knowledge and record keeping advantages that business has over them? If people who buy health insurance could actually see how often their claims were misprocessed and what the total cost of ownership of a healthcare policy is, would they start buying differently? Maybe.
Intuit is offering a new product that gives the patient or policy holder tools to manage insurance processes outside of a single insurer's system of self care. It is trying to do to insurance filings what it did to tax returns and give people a single place to store everything about your doctors and your coverage that belongs to you -- not putting it in the hands of some third party (although you can bet they'll have a web portion of their product just like they do for Quicken).
Anyhow, I don't expect Intuit to save the world or even "fix" healthcare. I don't expect dictators to become self actualized. I don't expect a hurricane triggered by butterfly wings in a way I can directly trace and follow. The world is the same place it was before I started making some of these connections. I just have this sensation as though the true control structures of the universe have been exposed for me -- which all in all is a pretty cool thing.
]]>The rest of you, my undeniably brilliant female friends ... if you ever wondered why you weren't special when everyone said you tested so bright, if you ever felt like someone was going to discover your dirty little secret that you're just not that smart, if you ever wanted to know what happened to you that made you get straight As and feel incapable anyway the answers are in here. Every single reader of this blog who is my actual personal acquaintance needs their nose rubbed in this because I don't have any friends who are not, in their own ways stunningly brilliant. And I would go to some great lengths to beat you all over the head with it.
Some of you are Ivy educated. Some of you are multi-degreed. Some of you are neither. Almost all of you are multi-potentialled and could have done more than one thing well if you'd chosen to. Several of you have already done more than one thing well and are looking at third careers not first or second. I see lots of us stepping back and standing down our own intellectual lives in the name of family or in the name of "quality of life" and calling it balance. I call bullshit on us all. There is a big difference between wanting to work less hours and parking our intellectual aspirations at the door. There is a HUGE difference between supporting our mates' careers and destroying our own.
I've been contemplating what my daughters need and grappling with my own intellectual hopes for the next decade or two. I remind myself again and again of the lessons other brilliant women friends have taught me -- being strong and feeling strong are not the same thing. With an idiotic sense of feebleness and self doubt and over-caution all folded in on the inside, I am still a giant. Watch me walk around the world 10 miles at a step and make it look effortless.
]]>Betsy has recently kicked fully over into imaginative play and gender role definition. She is fascinated by everyone's role in life. The idea that she is a sister, a daughter and a cousin and that mom and dad both each have moms and dads makes her bounce up and down in her seat. "We are three daughters!" she announces referring to herself, Ginger and me. "And daddy is a son!" This seems to have largely dispaced pronouncements on the subject of who has a penis and who has a vagina. Relationships trump biology. Go, little girl, go.
In terms of one liners that make a momma's heart go pitter pat, she turned to me on the steps one night before bed and whispered like she was telling me a big secret "Mommy, my heart is full of mettle!" Which is pretty well true and a demonstration that if you read kids books with fine vocabulary and engaging characters, they will pluck the most magnificent things from the jumble of ideas you hand them.
At daycare, the dressup box contains among many other things a pair of white cowboy boots. Betsy puts them on as soon as playtime begins and takes them off only when we come to pick her up. Guess who's getting her own cowboy boots for Christmas this year?
Ginger's antics are a little less diverse, being small and drooly and barely able to support her own weight sitting up yet. She finds her fingers, eats cereal and blows endearing not-too-wet spit bubbles. She purrs and buzzes all day, sleeps like a dancer stretched out in mid leap and smiles for everyone -- especially Betsy. She is long and lean by baby standards which doesn't keep her from having chubby baby thighs and plump insteps.
In short, I've not posted about the kids lately, but they're glorious and glowing and I'm full of them. I've bought a pair of notebooks and have been writing letters to their adult selves lately telling them about the marvelous things they are and do and I think that's why I've not been posting much about them lately. Most of my best joy in them is going into letters to them.
Anyway, happy holidays, all. Life is very very fine.
]]>The environment part, for openers. You might think "it's your house, moron, of COURSE it works for you." But the fact that I happen to live here is not what's interesting. It's what had to be present for things to work. I was issued the and required the following:
But how about access to coworkers? Well, my group all stay logged into a private IRC server all day and daily update a wiki with our progress. This allows everyone to ping the group with their needs/questions, be less intrusive than aim and get answers in better real-time than email when it's needed. So far, this has my needs covered and means I actually bother to attempt to answer my own questions before I ask the group. There's very little temptation to have 4 people clustered around a monitor since it's er... well, pretty near impossible.
I have been warned against several behaviors. People say don't work in your pajamas. I sometimes do. People say don't work on a machine you use for personal things -- I do that too. And with that machine a Ctl Ctl A Enter away, it would be hard to keep out of it if it were a problem anyway. My worst distraction is that the ground floor has to be clutter-free. I can't work amid seas of little-girl detritus and I can't make a cup of tea, walk away and leave a sink full of scummy dishes. It's not that cleaning is a secret vice or anything. I can ignore DIRT. It's just clutter that makes me nuts. So the first 15 minutes after my tribe leaves the house for work and daycare, I straighten up. As long as the place wasn't too much of a disaster, then I'm good to go.
The only really difficult problem I'm currently having with the new job is the level of physical inactivity. Unless I schedule exercise or deliberately leave the house, I scarcely MOVE all day. I've worn a pedometer and it's amazing how sedentary working at home makes me. I climb 5 times as many stairs as I did in an office (our only bathroom is upstairs), but I probably walk half the distance since I don't even go from house to car to office and back. It's freezing outside and it will be spring before my bike comes out of the shed, so I'm looking for lunchtime yoga or something to fight this since overall it's actually rather damaging.
Anyhow, so far, working from home is just lovely, thanks.
]]>First, I saw, in a Project Management blog I read of all places, Sarah McLaughlin's World On Fire site which will shame you as you realize what 200 dollars here and 500 there adds up to and how much money we waste in really trivial crap here in our first world nation.
Then later as I was skimming Mr Posty McPostness, Seth Godin, I discovered his link to Kiva. Kiva is a microenterprise lending organization where you do NOT have to "donate". You just put your money to work and see it cycle over and over again through tiny projects you personally choose to sponsor. You loan it out. You see the money come back. When it's back, you can loan it to someone else or cash out or donate it to the operating costs of the organization, but you keep connection to your money and what it's bought and you SEE it not wasted and coming back to you.
Anyhow, these two things had me thinking -- I hate like hell giving my money to beg-a-thons. I know as soon as I give 25-100 bucks to an organization I think is worthy, what I've really done is to tell them I can be shaken down for more greenbacks if they only come up with the right load of emotionalistic crap. I want to help, but I also want to know how my money got used. I want a relationship, not a direct mail campaign. Did I buy your organization pencils? Did I buy someone somewhere a hot meal? I better NOT have bought much direct marketing or I'm gonna be one unhappy camper.
I do not want to give money out of guilty conscience. I want to help people. I want a connection -- a sense of seeing the help I gave take roots and grow. The Guatemalan guys who work for Reed's construction company and send money home know exactly who they're helping and why. They know if they helped their family eat or their town dig a well or a road get paved. That's not charity. That's community building in the place they live and it happens without some 3rd party taking a cut. The trouble is, it's hard to know what people need who are not right under your nose unless you happen to be an immigrant.
It troubles me that community building here in the US runs more along the lines of selling candy for the schools or handing money to large faceless charitable organizations and less along the lines of just opening our wallets and giving money to the school or the person for the things they need and knowing that the donations bought our kids textbooks or a new swingset or a load of mulch or our neighbors a moving van or a month of rent.
Anyhow, Kiva is worthy. And I want very much to know why their idea hasn't taken the world by storm. If we're very lucky maybe it will.
]]>None of which is that interesting, except that as I read what they say about people like me the potential careers and several of the personality expressions identified for me were completely baffling. Last time I checked I was capable of both teamwork and fact-based decision making. (I suppose that's the lack of extreme introversion and the middle of the road stance on thinking versus feeling.) Further more, the professions listed sound actively abhorrent to me. Not to put too fine a point on it, ANY of those would make me a gibbering nutjob in short order. I respect people who are suited to them, but I personally am not. Clergy? Egad!
Thing is, I've read (in a private venue, hence no link) some fascinating and useful discussions of management and communications problems hung on the framework of MB Type expressions by the various people involved. I know MB is a useful tool for trying to sniff out possible resolutions to conflicts and for helping people to understand each others' wildly differing values.
I guess my point is, frameworks are often great at expressing past behaviors and modeling known problems, but when they're used for predictive work, their limitations need to be well understood. Bending facts (my not-quite-temperament in this case) to fit the framework is damn foolish.
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