Archive for December, 2008
Earlier this year, I was in shape enough to muscle my way through a half-marathon, albeit more slowly than I would have liked. My dear hubby and I had had been having some success with a weight-lifting routine called 5×5. However, lately, we’ve both slacked off. The holiday season doesn’t help, of course, and neither does our natural state of putting-it-off-it-ness. My pants are getting snug, and I’m nowhere near in shape enough to tackle some of the races I’d like to run this year (another half and a marathon), so it’s time to kick myself in the tail to get back out there and log some miles / lift some weights / otherwise make sure I stay in at least my same clothing size.
A horribly awful motivational approach came to me as I gazed at the magazines in the grocery store checkout aisle today. Looking at the various starlets shown in their swimsuits, some of them not nearly in good swimsuit shape, a beautifully terrifyingly inspiring approach to self-motivation came to mind. There had been a guy in some magazine or NPR recommending that we motivate ourselves by avoidance therapy: if I don’t meet this goal, then I promise I’ll do this thing I would otherwise be horribly averse to. His example was giving money to a politician you radically disagree with, or supporting a cause you’d otherwise avoid like the plague. Combining aversion motivation with swimsuits, this idea popped to mind: a person who really wants to lose weight could vow to lose a certain amount of weight within a given time period, or else post a picture of themselves in a swimsuit up on Facebook. It’d work like this: at the beginning of the weight loss period, you take a pic of yourself in a swimsuit. If you succeed in losing the weight, the pic gets deleted. If you don’t succeed, it goes up online. Bleah.
Not sure yet that I’m THAT motivated to risk that particular form of self-abuse. But if I don’t come up with another form of motivation, this may be the thing that does it. You might want to avert your eyes from my Facebook page come, say, March…
December 27th, 2008
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
Following on my earlier post, ‘EclipseCon submission‘, needed to round out the tale with the ‘EclipseCon rejection’ entry. They did it with what’s obviously an automated email. However, it’s also one of the classiest approaches I’ve ever seen to such a letter. Quoting from it:
‘We received almost three times as many proposals as we have space for, and thus have been forced to decline a large number of quality submissions. Unfortunately, and with our apologies, your proposal is one of those we had to leave out.’
Wow. They balance that just right. They don’t actually come out and say my particular submission is was a quality submission, so if they get submissions that are crap, they aren’t intentionally lying. However, they do leave you with the overall impression that you were in good company in the reject pile.
They then go on to say: ‘There are still plenty of opportunities for you to participate at EclipseCon, including BOFs and posters, both of which tend not to be over-subscribed and will be open for submissions in February. We look forward to seeing you at EclipseCon 2009 and we urge you to register early to take advantage of the lowest price.’
Yep, the BOFs and posters aren’t nearly so over-subscribed, as they don’t have free admission tickets to the conference associated. And I love the direct link to register here: great sales job, honestly. My submission didn’t earn me a free entry to EclipseCon, and they’ve let me down gently about it, but they’ll give me a link to cut me a deal on the early registration deal open to everybody.
I know you could read this posting and ascribe some sarcasm to it. It’s probably in there, too, but I also have to say that I was geniunely impressed by their handling of the submission process. I do intend to go to EclipseCon this year, if I can swing it through my employer, and I REALLY want to go to the sessions covering the topic area on which I was intending to submit. All I can say is, your stuff better be good!
December 21st, 2008
We decided to use our new addition this weekend. It turned out, REALLY use our new addition this weekend. In past years, we’ve hosted a gingerbread party, where the kids decorate gingerbread cookies. The kids get to invite their friends, we have a bunch of fun with them, and we’re happy to have a mess made in our house. We clean up the house beforehand, so it sort of all nets out to where it was before we had a horde of kids.
This year, we upped the ante. We did crafts with a ton of kids. We’re so crazy, we gave the kids glitter. We imported two teenagers to help, we fed ‘em stuff we picked up at BJ’s, and just generally let them play when they got bored of crafts. I’m a big fan of just letting kids play when they’re done with whatever stuff’s at hand. Note that we’d have been in a world of hurt had we had a fire, as I’m not sure exactly how many kids we had. I know it was more than 15, probably less than 25. But we were just having a great time with these kids. And the kids went home with crafts that they had made, and ran around playing with my kids, with other kids. It was a blast!
And then we had the teenagers from church over. Teenagers, it turns out, bring lots of teenagers. And they take up a lot more space than do first graders. We had more than 30 (!!!!) teenagers in our home. We munched on food with them, did a white elephant gift exchange, went caroling around the neighborhood… my kids, my husband, and I had a WONDERFUL time hanging out with these high schoolers. I had talked my husband into letting us host the high school youth group, figuring we were already set up for a party, teenager parties are low key, and heck, what’s a new addition for if not for making it available for gatherings like this. As teenagers kept pouring in, I really started to wonder if I had done the right thing. Folks were stepping over and around each other. All I can say is, I’ll do it again next year if they’ll let me. One daughter picked one teenager to hang out with. The other daughter picked another teenager. All three kids were delighted to get to go caroling with the big kids. And it’s a wonderful juxtoposition to see these kids, some of whom I’ve seen grow up in the church, in the same house as my kids.
So weekend’s over, tomorrow’s a back to work day. But I really enjoyed our tremendously busy weekend, and all of the folks who flowed into and out of our house. If you were one of them, thank you for coming! We really enjoyed having you!
December 14th, 2008
So, I mentioned that I was considering submitting an abstract to EclipseCon. Just following up to mention that I indeed did… I’m waiting to hear if the talk’s accepted – should hear later this week.
This was one of those ‘what do I have to lose’ kinds of things. It’s a topic I need to figure out, it’s a topic for which there isn’t a lot of material already out there for, and it’s also a topic which impacts lots of projects. If we (I talked my tech lead into working on it, too: gives me cover for doing it as a chargeable item for my project) get shot down, hopefully someone will at least point us in a useful direction. I’ll let you know later whether we got accepted…
In the meantime, the submission model they’ve used for the conference really intrigues me. I’ve learned a lot just by looking over the abstracts other folks have proposed. I’d like to consider a similar model for a geek user group in the area: the topic(s) for the month are based on a sort of digg-like voting model. Votes would have to be counted some amount of time before the user group, to give the presenter adequate time to prepare. Frankly, you could use that model for any kind of presentation group: votes determine the presenter. After the presentation, folks could give anonymous feedback, which helps drive the voting process next time. Oh, that guy was an awful presenter. Or, the presenter was great, but the material was a bit over my head. Or… whatever. The group learns from itself what works best for it. As new members join, they’d influence the votes for upcoming meetings, so the group would theoretically not automatically only serve the needs of the original members.
Thoughts? Influence the idea a bit??
December 13th, 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
