What Memorial Day means to me:
* a 3 day weekend
* lots of sales in the malls driving enough traffic to them that make me want to stay away
* barbeques (though we managed to miss firing up the grill)
* a heavy sense of gratefulness for those who have served or are still serving in areas that caused them to risk their lives. I’m not naive enough to think that all of them were serving for noble reasons: some were paying the bills, some saw it as a ticket to a better life, some saw it as a path to glory and girls. But all put a heck of a lot more into their job than I do mine, and had a greater impact and sacrifice than most of us will ever be asked to give, whether or not they ended up giving up their lives in the line of duty. So, thank you, Brad, Uncle Doug, Pappap Croft, Robert, Uncle Ted, Uncle Ron, Chuck, Matt, and the millions of other service men and women who put their life on the line (either literally or in the sense that they could have been asked to at any moment) to meet our country’s call.
Month: May 2005
Tattoo dreaming
I’m daydreaming of tattooes again. My husband had at one point drafted a design for me that mingled 26.2 (distance for a marathon) and 9.8 (meters per second squared: acceleration constant for things like falling out of an airplane with a parachute strapped to your back). I shouldn’t be for at least a couple of reasons: one is that someone pointed out to me a Bible verse that specifically compares tattoo marks with cutting your bodies for the dead (see Leviticus 19 specifically verse 28). Now, that verse also comes directly after a verse that talks about not cutting the hair at the sides of your head (??) or clipping the edges of your beard, which suggests to me that I may be missing a cultural context. I’m not one to fall back on cultural context, though, so until I know what that context is, that verse still weighs somewhat heavy.
The second reason is that if you get a tattoo, you can’t give blood for a year. I’ve been giving plasma lately, through a process called apheresis, in which the Red Cross hooks you up to a machine taht takes blood out of one arm, spins it to get the plasma from it and then reinserts it into the other arm. Apparently, the plasma is useful for controlling bleeding. Downside is it takes longer and both arms get to get poked rather than just one. I figure, though, if the worst that happens to me is I get poked twice, and it helps save someone else’s life, I’m definitely getting the better end of the deal. Given that plasma stockpiles don’t keep for very long, and that they’re always low at the various blood banks there’s a reasoning that says I may indirectly cause the loss of someone’s life over a silly tattoo. Everyone’s got a purpose in this world: if mine’s just to produce plasma for someone else, well, that’s a pretty humbling reason to be alive (ooh: I can produce cells) but remarkably dumb to goof up by putting ink in my bloodstream. (The reason you can’t give blood for a year after a tattoo is because the ink gets in your bloodstream and can cause an allergic reaction in someone else. Not something I realized when I got my first ink at 19, that the ink would circulate in your blood and could cause allergic reactions.)
I’m still daydreaming of that tattoo though. Not sure where I’d put it. If we decide to have that third kid (and so I can’t donate blood while pregnant) then maybe at least reason #2 won’t be in play. But I need to have done that plane jump and earned that marathon to get that particular one, anyway. Marathon planned for October. Plane jump when?
De-ACTiVATEd
Earlier this year I was given the wonderful opportunity to participate in a program called ‘ACTiVATE’. It’s a program out of UMBC (my alma mater) which pairs women with technologies out of local universities and research centers. The idea is that women would form businesses using these technologies and that the university that held the patent would get the licensing fees associated with use of the invention. This would also help the universities show compliance with federal regulations relating to use of federal funds: the government is very interested in seeing those technologies “transferred” to commercial companies.
The program paired a woman with a technical background with a woman with a business background for each project. There was a classroom component, with instruction in basic entrepreneurialism, and heavy mentoring. The women screened for the first year of the program were screened using resumes, essays, and interviews. The women came from diverse backgrounds, but many had many years of experience in their field and most had advanced degrees. I was inspired to be included in the program.
Sadly, my partner and I realized that our technology wasn’t feasible, due to lack of interest of the inventor coupled with the lack of the specific technical background of our team. That combo is a killer: if you don’t have the inventor’s ear and the team can’t compensate through its own technical background, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to determine what the reasonable bounds of the technology are. It also gives potential investors absolutely no confidence in the founding team. Our technology had already had 1 million plus invested in it by NASA (it’s actually going up in a satellite launch at the end of this year) and was only in the earliest stages of being able to be produced commercially. Neither my nor my partner’s piggybank was going to get us onto that playing field.
ACTiVATE would have been happy to have me continue. I personally wasn’t interested in continuing with another team’s technology: who wants to come in late to the game?
I learned a valuable set of lessons from the program, in terms of the real level of dedication needed to build a tech transfer business. Balancing that with work and family just isn’t possible right now for me. My FT job is already more than a FT job. I can’t handle another one.
I’ll be interested to see where my classmates end up: I’d love to see a couple of them heading companies that are recognized regionally as hot-shot startups. These women are interesting, are dedicated, and are really coming up with some great ideas. I’ll be happy to go to work for some of them someday.
Thinking maybe this guy crammed?
Had an interview yesterday, where I was on the interviewing side, and this fellow was on the interviewee side. Key qualification on his resume was that he was an MCAD, which involves passing a series of exams. One of those exams is entitled “XML Web Services and Server Components Development”. Question in the interview: what is a web service and what might you use it for? Answer: ummmm……
I really need to get on the horn to take those exams.
‘Speaking of Big Bums’
What’s Barney teaching our kids these days? Cora (3!) tapped me on my rear this morning, unprompted, and said ‘Speaking of big bums…’… (Ego-deflator, if not a bum deflator, given that I had just come back from a run.) Inquiring further, we learned from her that one of Barney’s friends had given her the line. I’ll have to pay more attention to Barney from now on out. Not that he doesn’t have his own supersize caboose – in purple even!
Just to even the score a bit, I asked Cora if she had a big bum, and she said that no, she had a little bum. Daddy? He had a big bum. Grandma? Big bum. Inquiries stopped there… dangerous to inquire too much and reinforce the idea in her brain, else we’ll be out somewhere and I’ll feel a tap on my rear and hear one of those little voices that carries way too far.
No longer so sure
Been a long time since posting, as you may have noticed by the rollover to the empty page. Lots of things, mostly work, intervening to keep me away from the keyboard.
Been contemplating this weblog’s name (Convinced She’s Write) and while I like the wordplay, deciding that the wordplay is misguided. Cogitating on other grand titles…
In the meantime, here’re some links to things I’ve been working on:
* ACTiVATE program: pairs women with technologies developed in universities and labs, and prepares us to set up businesses. Even if my technology doesn’t net me a business, I know a lot more now about heat and light and satellites than I did a few months ago.
* Work for the Department of Veterans Affairs on a requisitioning system – the company’s writeup is here… Not that that tells you much technology-wise. Cool technologies (ASP.NET, web services, windows services), lots of interesting errors to track down.
* Raising BEAUTIFUL daughters.
A few other things, too. Life’s never dull.