Posts filed under 'Schtuff'
The past day or so have been laden with good, geeky happenings. First, my family got a Wii for Christmas. The sheer delight of my kids as they tore off its wrapping paper and shouted ‘Wii!’ in unison was wonderful. They (and us) have now spent hours playing tennis and bowling against each other. My younger daughter’s found some way to really scream the tennis ball on her serve: I haven’t been able to figure it out yet. It’s nearly unreturnable, at least for me, anyway.
Next, I got to reference a teen boy from my church who was griping about wanting to do Unix-like things on his Microsoft laptop to Cygwin. Now, what makes that even sweeter is that when the youth group was over at Christmas, when the guys had a tech question, they immediately turned to my husband. No knocks against my husband; he was able to answer their questions, and frankly, does have certain tech areas covered much better than I do. However, given that they don’t know him really at all, I was a bit peeved that the assumption was that he would be the person to answer the question. It was nice to toss a technical morsel to at least one of the guys.
Lastly, my Facebook Scramble score went up by 32 points this weekend. I had held the lead position in my circle of friends for months by some 15 points, but hadn’t been able to beat my personal best. I beat it, and then beat my new top score, to really annoyingly widen the lead.
So, I’m happily geeking out. No coding as yet this weekend, though I’ve seen a few headlines in the tech world I want to poke at. Merb + Ruby? Two technologies I haven’t played much with have now merged: hmmm… time to do some poking.
December 26th, 2008
Our company is organizing one of those grab-a-gift-from-the-table gift exchanges. My client’s office is arranging one, too. I’m not allowed, for ethics reasons, to give anyone a gift at my client’s office. But somehow swapping $20-limit goodies works, since I don’t know who specifically will get it? (Yep, I looked it up in my client’s online ethics manual: if I don’t know who I’m giving it to, it’s completely ethical.)
Seems like then I’m not giving to make someone’s day brighter, since I have no real idea who I’m gifting to or what they’d like. Forgive my Scrooge-i-ness, but it seems like then I’m giving so I can get something from the table. Something which someone else has no idea whether I’d like.
I can’t help but thinking we’d be a little more in the Christmas spirit if we all just put cards on the table that said “I put a coat on someone for you today”, or “I gave someone dinner in your (non-specific, ethically pardonable) name today”.
December 3rd, 2008
If anyone is interested in a wonderful Christmas present for moi, any of the following that refer to running would be nice: (running schwag that well fits me)
October 9th, 2008
As the Washington Post reports that McCain’s chief of vetting only interviewed Sarah Palin the day before she was tapped as vice president, I wonder whether McCain’s maverick nature has bit him too hard. The disadvantage to being a maverick is you forge your own path - the one that others haven’t seen, or if they’ve seen it, have viewed it as too hard, too dangerous, or just unwise. I happen to view this choice as just plain unwise, as spur of the moment, as foolhardy. I’m female, I’m Christian, I’m what some would argue as middle class (hey, we make less than $5 mil a year, anyway), and I was an undecided voter. Until he picked Palin, that is. He had multiple women on his advisory team who would have made better picks (Whitman being my preference over Fiorino). There are multiple women senators, other women governors, current women Cabinet officers: any of which I’d have looked at more seriously than Palin. A relatively rookie governor from Alaska, which could hardly be described as a state wrestling with most of the same issues as others, whose previous experience was as a mayor of a 9000 person town. My university has a bigger population than her town did, and as much as I respected Dr. Hrabowski as a leader, my veep choice he wouldn’t be.
McCain’s choice demonstrates his inability to do several things: listen to his vetting team, select people appropriate to accomplish his vision, and convince the rest of us of his choice. All of those I see as key markers of him, not just of her. I’ve seen various comments that suggest the Dems put their inexperienced candidate at the top of the ticket, and the Republicans at the bottom. But what I’m seeing indicates that the Dems seem to have made a wiser pick for veep, which makes me much comfortable with their TOP of the ticket than does the Republican pick.
And by the way, for those in the Christian right who are applauding their issues coming front and center: when the candidate is only there to front those issues, and not any others that the American people cares about, it just yet again separates Christians from the concerns of the rest of America. I agree that (some of the) Christian right concerns deserve far more discussion and focus; I just don’t think they are the exclusive issues for the American populace, and I’m concerned to see Christians cast yet again as way outside of the fray. We are called to do God’s work in the world. That only works if we’re involved IN the world, as was Paul and the apostles, not trying to stand completely outside of it.
I don’t see McCain recovering from this, in my personal selection process. I had been undecided: both candidates had their plusses and minuses. But now I see myself needing to vote against McCain, against what I see as a pandering selection, trying to please both women and the conservative Christian right with one candidate who covers all the check boxes. Except for the ones that would cause me to see her as viable to fill the role of Vice President, to have some ability to step into the highest office in the land should that become necessary. And that is a horrible mark against the man who would like me to check his name in the ballot in November.
September 2nd, 2008
Seen, and enjoyed - happily linking to here with the hopes of my tattoo-party-wishing readers checking it out and maybe purchasing: 
July 27th, 2008
Sitting here, waiting for laundry, packing for camping. Discovered an amazing food/beer pairing this evening: Fordham’s Summer Forecast seasonal beer (”sunny, hazy, with a chance of raspberry”) and a pink snowball cupcake (discussion of the delights of pink snowball cupcakes here, though mine were Walmart knock-offs). Grownup bed-time snack delight.
Confession: I had another pink snowball after the first one, so delicious when paired with the beer. It didn’t taste as good on its own tonight, though I think that’s just a statement of how good that pairing was, as I’ve enjoyed the beer on its own before.
Second confession: I would love to go to the Great Grapes Festival in Annapolis next weekend. Taste a little wine, check out a few food demonstrations, listen to some music. I haven’t disclosed that confession to my husband, which means this is something of an unfair check to see whether he reads my blog.
July 17th, 2008
Yesterday was our ten year anniversary. My mother-in-law graciously offered to watch the kids so that we could go out for dinner, which was both a wonderful meal and a wonderful date. (Knew there were a lot of reasons I married him: marrying into his family was actually one of the things I thought was pretty cool at the time, and have only been convinced more and more of over the years.) I know some folks make a HUGE deal about ten years, but I was pretty torn about how to handle it.
See, the thing is, we love each other each and every day. I love the life we’ve built. I got to see Jason really enjoying bouncing around the church on Thursday night, leading the kids in the VBS parents’ night. I get to wake up next to him, or see him rock our little guy, or dance around with our girls, or enjoy him geek out about which Linux flavor to install on our home systems. (MY answer: whichever one has a UI which lets me find the ‘Switch User’ button quickly, and whichever one doesn’t barf on Samba or connecting to our home printer.) We’ve been through thinking we couldn’t have kids, to having 3 kids (!), through two bouts with cancer, each with two associated surgeries. We’ve gone places, and done things, and still have lots of places to go and things to do.
So, the upshot is, I look at ten as, interesting. Not wow. Not amazing. Just, interesting - hey, we’re ten years older than when this all got started. But it’s not monumental, in the same way that getting to something you didn’t think could happen is monumental, or working through something hard and then getting there is monumental. This, this is just - hey, it’s been ten years already! Boy, hope we’ve got lots more than that left, because it’s sure been good so far.
July 12th, 2008
We’re in the midst of a home renovation project. Essentially, we decided that it made more sense to add a little bit more elbow room to our current house than to increase and reset our mortgage payment. We’re pretty happy with the crew that we chose to do the work - they’re folks we knew already through church who happen to have a home renovation company. But we’re now slightly over our original schedule’s end-date, with likely another couple of weeks of work left to go. We’ve been without a kitchen for weeks now and have subsisted on whatever we can cook in the microwave or on a hot plate or on the grill. Consider your life without an oven, a stove, or a dishwasher. I’m dreaming of baked goods, and Jason swears that the first week where the oven’s in play, we’re going to roast a different cut of meat every night. Ham, chicken, duck, … heck, if there’s a way to roast tofu, I think it’ll be in our oven that week.
July 12th, 2008
Kudos to Monica Hesse for structuring her article on using Google Trends (about link here) to investigate community values such that she got to end with the closer:
“Using Google Trends to ascertain community standards? Well, that’s just comparing apples and orgies.”
Delicious.
July 3rd, 2008
My sister’s getting married in a few months, so in typical sibling fashion, I want to show up in a stunning dress that’s, oh, a size or two smaller than I am now, with abs of steel to show off in the hotel pool. That’s probably a bit too lofty a goal, but hey, I’ve been professionally trained on “being the best by any measure” and “bold and audacious goals”. These are definitely bold and audacious.
In pursuit of those goals, I grabbed a copy of the South Beach Diet and spent two weeks in the first Phase of the diet. No bread, cereal, rice, etc. No fruits. Eat reasonable portions, and multiple snacks. Outcome listed in the book: up to 8-12 pounds in that first two weeks. Outcome of mine: 1-2 pounds. Not very inspiring. One of my snack breaks, I ate pistachios (up to 30 is a snack serving) and roasted pumpkin seeds. Closest to eating like a bird I’ve ever done, and end result was 1-2 pounds??!
Beyond South Beach, I’ve also started taking a class at the gym called Group Power twice a week. It’s an hour of continual weight training to your basic cardio-pumping music. The class is probably broken up into 6 or so segments, with maybe a minute or so break between them. You take a bar and then add weight, depending on the basic body area you’re working on (biceps, triceps, back/shoulders, legs, abs, warmup, cooldown). I always know that I’ve done the class afterwards, and the first time or two I did it, I knew it for up to 3 days afterwards. I’m also adding some running back into my routine, with hopes of doing the Baltimore half-marathon in October, and then a trail marathon in November.
Becky’s wedding is in September: I’m hoping a few months of watching my diet (more gently than formally), lifting weights in class, and running regularly will give me some noticeable results. Nothing like a little motivation to kick me up a gear.
June 15th, 2008
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