Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2008

# (4) 02 Jan 2008, 04:03PM: Yay For Our Common Heritage: According to a blog that watches the public domain, as of yesterday lots of works became free for all of us to reprint, remix, and generally be creative with. Depending on the country you're in, the magic year is probably 1937 or 1957 (the date of death of the author). Some of the authors whose works passed into the public domain yesterday:

Russian novelist, playwright, and essayist Yevgeny Zamiatin (a.k.a. Zamyatin), author of the very weird dystopia We, written as Soviet Russia was beginning to show its true colors. I have bought one copy of We, and received one as an anonymous gift mailed to my workplace. And soon you can read it for free! Think Gogol.
American composer George Gershwin, of George and Ira Gershwin.
Bengali scientist and author Jagadish Chandra Bose. This is the kind of guy you thought died with the Englightenment. Wrote sci-fi, did groundbreaking physics and botany, all while Great Britain had India under its boot.
French author Jean de Brunhoff, author of the Babar elephant books.
American fantasy and science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu mythos. Whoooo! Scary!
Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who freaking invented the radio (basically) (and oh yeah was a Fascist).
American statesman and Nobel laureate Elihu Root, arguably one of the 100 most influential people in US history.
Scottish novelist and dramatist J.M. Barrie (except for Peter Pan).
French composer Maurice Ravel, famous for Bolero -- or is that chunk of work waiting till 2015?
Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, a collaborator and rival of Sigmund Freud.
American novelist Edith Wharton, author of about a zillion books including The Age of Innocence and The Buccaneers. No one except my sister and me remembers the Masterpiece Theatre presentation of The Buccaneers, featuring a guy exclaiming with a weird aristocratic accent, "I'm not a monster!"

As a celebration of our love for public domain literature, Leonard and I gave a Christmas gift to a few of his family: the Project Gutenberg best-of DVD. Leonard burned them and I decorated them with the label "Civilization: A DVD Archive."

For a measure of the long tail, check out the top 100 books downloaded from Project Gutenberg over the last 30 days. Half of them I'd never heard of before. Makes me wonder whether Leonard or I will be on that list someday.

It's your past, your cultural heritage, your public domain. Promote it, celebrate it, and use it, or we will lose it.

# 04 Jan 2008, 06:46PM: RIP, Bob Watts: Scott Rosenberg and Joan Walsh remember the kind and talented Bob Watts, who died today.

I worked with Bob at Salon. He was in Editorial, which kind of intimidated me. I was more on the technical side if anything, but the rule was that anybody could come to the morning story meeting, so I often did. I liked sitting next to him and seeing him sketch or manage email workflow as we talked, especially because he helped me feel like I had a place at the table (literally). I can attest to the warm, gentle character he always showed. I think he was the first working artist I ever saw producing work day after day, showing me that the visual side of publications as much as the text side is about making great stuff on a deadline. On the walls in that conference room someone had hung inspired pieces of art from Salon pieces and covers past. I wonder how many of those were his.

When I went on the Salon summer retreat in 2003, I hung out with his wife Lori and daughter Cady. We talked about books, of course. It was obvious what nurturing and creative parents Bob and Lori were.

He got the cancer diagnosis the year I started working at Salon, and everybody knew, but from the fact that he kept coming back to work after treatments I assumed he was fighting it off. I'm so sad I was wrong. I'll miss him and I know everyone who worked with him will too. Scott and Joan speak with more eloquence and greater intimacy -- I wish I'd gotten to know him as closely as they did.

# (3) 05 Jan 2008, 02:10PM: Gems: I post lots of little links in the del.icio.us account that Leonard and I share, and that keeps this blog from just being a mass of commentless links. But every once in a while I wish to celebrate bits of the net with/at you. Here!

If you can't get enough Randall Munroe, his LiveJournal should absorb you for ten to twenty minutes. Munroe's experience of Cryptonomicon and mine concur: "I keep picking it up to glance through and then accidentally reading through to the end." Sadly, Knuth, Stephenson, et al. are probably too busy with their magna opera to enjoy the thrice-weekly distraction of Munroe's work.

The soldiers' truce of 1914 -- I knew about it, but it turns out I didn't know a tenth of the story. Tremendous.

And, in a discovery almost certainly irrelevant to your life and to mine, I think Pseudonymous Kid's mom's dad lives where I used to live.

But the real hot tip of this entry is Yishan Wong's Reddit comments. Wong works at Facebook, his wife just had a baby, and I'd rather read his comments on Reddit than blog posts by jwz or Steve Yegge. Examples:

Abortion clinic bombers are the only terrorists who can accurately be described as "hating us for our freedoms."....
It's not one bad programmer. PHP makes bad programmers worse, but it also forces good programmers to have to be kind of bad just to get things working "okay."
What's remarkable about PHP is that it's the best PHP programmers who are the ones most vocal about how awful it is....
Just for irony's sake, I use [the powerful chip in the Sony PlayStation 3] to crack the encryption on my Blu-Ray discs.....

But the bit I really love, the bit that throws Paul Graham into the water, is Wong's encouragement and HOWTO on learning to work hard.

...One bonus effect is that you learn what smartness really does for you: it's a multiplier. It doesn't give you success for nothing (i.e. 5000 x 0 = 0), but if you apply smarts to a work ethic, your output is multiplied (i.e. 5000 x 10 = 50000). So a smart person who learns to work hard benefits far more than a mediocre person who works hard.
This benefit becomes very addictive: "whoa, by sheer force of will I can essentially call into being wealth for myself!" and that's what keeps you from backsliding....

That's going on my reread-regularly list.

# (1) 06 Jan 2008, 11:31AM: Ramayaddayaddayadda: Last night I conversed with Leonard about the humor project that's been in the back of my mind for years: a comedic retelling of the Mahabharata akin to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Once Leonard drew my attention to the number of essential characters in the story, I realized that the Ramayana is much more manageable as a first attempt, not to mention more plausible in a purely textual form; I can't imagine doing my Mahabharata without sound or pictures. And I actually have ideas for reworking the four major characters, and the whole crazy situation with Rama's moms and dad. (Think Rama as Reginald Perrin, Sita as Cat and Girl's Girl, and Ravana as a cross among the Borg, Dr. Evil, and Indie Rock Pete. And Hanuman as T-Rex played by Michael Cera.) I should probably bang ideas around with Shweta and my sister.

Ashok Banker also did his Ramayana first, with amazingly intricate and extensive worldbuilding and a serious cast of fully realized characters. I bought most of that series, specially ordering the third and fourth books from abroad, because I loved the concept, but I couldn't get past book two and ended up selling even the unread books to the Strand. I ragged on the first few books of his Ramayana retelling in an MC Masala column in 2005, and he found out about it and wrote me an excellent note thanking me for reviewing it! Solid, and exemplary. His purple prose weighed down the story, I'd said, and Rama, Sita, the evil queen, etc. were completely good or bad with no shading. And, now that I think about it, not nearly enough humor.

Now he's working on the Big M. The Mahabharata just naturally has more complex characters and motivations -- Banker chose to stay true to Rama's perfect heroism and sacrificed conflict. But I probably could have dealt with that, if I could stand the voice. The wordy overdescriptive style sadly continues in this excerpt from his upcoming Mahabharata treatment. But at least there's a hint there that the line between good and evil runs down the center of every human heart (to borrow the line from Solzhenitsyn).

I see from other short fics Banker has posted on his site (I enjoyed a fantasy Western with a six-handed Indian woman and an expat pilgrimage story) that he can do vigorous and concise. I guess the grandeur of the epics turns him grandiose, which is a shame. He has a likable voice and he groks Creative Commons, so I am rooting for him personally, but I'll have to turn elsewhere, possibly inward, for mashups of my epics.

Which reminds me. Krishna as a talkative taxi driver who drives around in a chariot/cab/ice cream truck. What do you think?

# 08 Jan 2008, 05:38AM: The Hills Have Slopes: I am back in San Francisco and will be here and around till the 15th.

# (1) 16 Jan 2008, 12:14AM: Back In NYC: I arrived back home today. Much thanks to Michael and Julia, Alexei, Rachel and Jeremy, Zed and Jennifer, Angel, Susan and Daniel, and Claudia and Andrew for putting me up, and thanks to about twenty-one other people for making time to talk with me. I really had a Best-Of compilation experience of the Bay Area this past week, making for my best vacation in a very long time. More travel bits if I think they'll interest you.

# (1) 22 Jan 2008, 11:04AM: Classes Start Today: Due to a peculiar electives situation this semester in the tech management master's program, my cohort has had to look around the university for classes to take. I'm trying to take a cost-benefit analysis class and a public budgeting class, but this will take some form-wrangling since they're in a different school within Columbia. So, for the next few days: running around and hyperventilating and figuring out what readings are really required.

I graduate in May, yay me.

# 23 Jan 2008, 04:02PM: Econ Blogs For The Win: Thanks to posts by Daniel Davies that I read five years ago, I sounded like a big old smartypants in the first session of a government budgeting and finance class last night. Advantage: blogosphere!

# 24 Jan 2008, 04:54AM: Just In Time Idiot?: Great, a new breed of anxiety dream. In this one I basically get told that my lack of coding chops means I have absolutely no right to make judgments in technology matters.

I woke up just before my haranguer told me what "JIT I" meant, and why the insight of that framework was that I sucked. Can't find anything relevant for that on Google.

# (1) 25 Jan 2008, 07:48AM: Punchline That Goes With Two [Admittedly Related] Jokes: I discovered the second joke this morning and Leonard demanded I blog it because of its relevance to one of his thousand obsessions.

What did the duck say to the barman? "Just put it on my bill!"

What did Disco Duck say to the cocaine dealer? "Just put it on my bill!" [because that's where the nostrils are]

Filed under: Comedy

# 27 Jan 2008, 08:15AM: Hoodies Are Enough to Justify ASBOs, Right?: Walking back from dinner, passing the park benches. "Oh good, the ne'er-do-wells are gone."

"There's a couple of guys there."

"Yes, but they're wearing baseball caps, not hoodies."

"You're wearing a hood!"

"I'm wearing a hooded jacket. Ne'er-do-wells wear hooded sweatshirts."

"Look, I don't want to deny your Gift Of Fear, but..."

Filed under: Comedy

# 28 Jan 2008, 12:29AM: Condolences: My condolences to my LDS family and readers on the death of Gordon B. Hinckley.

Filed under: Religion

# 28 Jan 2008, 11:21AM: Clutter-prevention And Decluttering Tips: as I just commented on Rivka's blog (she's going to have another baby and she's moving to a better house, yay!). [Edit three days later: condolences, Rivka.]

If you have a decent digital camera and electronic storage space, or the ability to burn data to a CD or DVD, then taking pictures of things that you kinda-sorta want to keep can enable you to toss them with little regret.

It feels more doable to toss drafts and paper backups when you feel secure in your electronic backups. Set-it-and-forget-it automatic backups help a lot.

BookMooch is helping my husband get rid of books and knowing they'll go to someone who actually wants them.

The best way for me to feel okay about getting rid of semiuseful things, e.g., envelopes losing their gumminess or a folding chair we never use, is to feel rich. I am now confident that we will never feel so poor that we can't afford to buy a new one yet SIMULTANEOUSLY need it immediately or else terrible things would happen.

[I forgot to tell her about Cost-Per-Wear Charts but I think she groks that without me, as does flea from One Good Thing. But family members appreciated it a few years ago so I thought I'd mention it again. And those are fun links.]

The Staples MailMate shredder is a good, durable, stylish-enough cross-cut shredder. And it can swallow junk mail whole, as well as CDs/DVDs and credit cards and paper clips. And it automatically turns off if you pull the shreddings-bin out and expose the sharp bits. Keep it handy.

# (8) 28 Jan 2008, 07:35PM: New Job: I have just accepted a job offer from Behavior Design as a full-time Project Manager. Behavior has done some awesome work, such as the redesign of The Onion, lots of sites for HBO, and interactive kiosks for New York's MoMA. And they're right on my subway line, where Chelsea and the Flatiron District meet Midtown South.

I start this Thursday, January 31st.

# (2) 30 Jan 2008, 09:16AM: Christmas Visit: I've had a great month: Best-of-NorCal visit, negotiating and accepting an offer for a new job, quality time with Leonard and New York and New Haven friends, and beginning to mentor a few students in the first and second semester of the tech management master's program. But the honorary start to Awesome January must be the great Christmas trip we took to Salt Lake City to see Maggie, John, and Susie. I learned a lot.

Leonard's family tends to give gifts to charity for me for Christmas, which is per my wishes. Then I get a bunch of great gifts in addition, especially in the stocking. I'm still figuring all this out. The coolest gifts I gave this Christmas were DVDs of Project Gutenberg best-of collections -- burned by Leonard, decorated by me.

Selected gifts: We got a lot of candy. Susie and John gave to a humanitarian relief fund in my name. Leonard gave me neat slippers and a book about weird book titles and concepts, and a few storytelling games like Nanofictionary. Susie gave me a lovely white button-up shirt with black trim, suitable for work and the like! And they gave us the Apples To Apples party pack, which we will inflict on parties at our place.

But the best gift was meeting my niece Maggie and getting to see baby-raising firsthand. Right now that's rare for me. John and Susanna have spent a lot of time helping raise their younger relatives and so they have a matter-of-fact competence. They assumed rightly that my nervousness about, say, feeding or holding Maggie would go away with a little experience. I liked it and it was calming to remember that humans can in fact raise children. Sometimes I get anxious about what I perceive as prerequisites. I hear that parenthood makes you a better person, but only rarely do I hear more concretely and candidly "I was a screwup and having a child forced me to get it together." Because who wants screwups to have kids? And yet who does not fundamentally think of himself or herself as a screwup?

Susie and John have a giant house. At least, to us rabbit-hutchers it's huge. They've decorated it beautifully, and there's so much quiet and space! Especially since Susie is a decluttering fiend! As you know if you read her articles.

While visiting the exurbs, Leonard and I noted extensively that the lifestyle we like, carless and walkable and close to shops, is rare in the US and requires tradeoffs. Something like 95% of the landmass of the world won't suit us. But constraints free us from the anxiety of choice, so now I think happily about visiting Boston and Portland and Seattle with an eye to livability.

I met members of a big huge extended family on the Chadwicks' side. I'm as related to them as Balki Bartokomous was to Larry Applegate, but I could make conversation fine and enjoyed their company. I used to be terrible at parties; I'd flee to read a book. Reading Dale Carnegie helped me learn small-talk tactics and going to college, where people thought I was interesting, helped me relax. It's like remembering names: I've overcompensated for an early deficiency and now I'm better at it than my median acquaintance. Growing up can be nice.

We sang Christmas carols, Susie accompanying on the piano, and I was surprised at how much theology lives in the later verses of the ones I thought I knew. It's like the Brit-bashing five minutes into "The Star-Spangled Banner." Sometimes the version Leonard pulled up online and the version in Susie's hymnal had schism-driven differences, but only in the lyrics, not the melodies!

We played Apples to Apples, and a "finish this unfamiliar aphorism" game called Wise & Otherwise. "A man is like a tree. A woman is like..." I submitted "a cave" and fooled people into thinking it was the original Japanese ending, since the actual ending, "a wisteria vine," sounded completely bogus botanically and psychologically. Nope! Remember, the more inexplicable it is, the more SYMBOLIC it is. Right? A great game.

Thanks for hosting us, Chadwicks!

# (1) 30 Jan 2008, 10:20AM: Idiosyncratic Feminist Book Recommendations: Leigh Anne Wilson of the fabulous One Good Thing blog asked for recommendations of feminist books, especially history and fiction, for a college women's resource group's library. I love recommending books! So I made a little list.

Wilson had already recommended Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear so Leonard and I can just make oblique references instead. I think I lent my copy to Zack Weinberg five years ago and I don't know where it's gone. And others had already covered Atwood, Butler, Kingston, Tan, Ensler, bell hooks, and other well-known authors. I recommend:

A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which I think Rachel gave me. Ulrich shows you and explains to you the cryptic diary of a New England farmhouse wife and midwife. Combines the most gripping bits of "Little House" with historical analysis.

Our Bodies, Ourselves. Just essential. The handbook to my body. Every girl should get a copy at puberty. The bits online are not enough -- she's gotta be able to flip through it and browse.

Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives by Dr. Anna Fels. Points out that the childhood or adolescent desire for fame is often a precursor to a more nuanced ambition, combining the urge to master some domain or skill with the desire for the recognition of one's peers or community. She also notes that women, especially, feel the need to hide that wish for fame instead of developing it into a healthy passion to guide our careers. Just blew my mind in the best way, and massively helped me guide my career development.

Children of the River by Linda Crew. A moving young adults' novel about an Asian immigrant teenage girl and her conflicts with family and a suitor. Helped me a lot when I was a young teen.

Anjana Appachana's Incantations and Other Stories are short stories about Indians in India and abroad, stifled by or breaking through class and gender mores. When I was eleven, it gave me a new way to see Indian womanhood. Looking back I think the writing isn't as subtle as I'd like, but it was great for teen me.

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. The classic lesbian coming-of-age story, messy and sexy and all mixed up with class and race.

The She's Such A Geek anthology. Great mini-memoirs about the intersection of gender politics and a particular field's attractions and annoyances.

Ellen Ullman's work, such as her memoir Close To The Machine and her novel The Bug. Same attraction as above, with reliably deft writing. With "The Bug" it looks like Ullman has the Great American Girl Geek Novel title locked. Excellent, suspenseful, evocative, emotionally accurate.

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild. A really inspiring tale of the British abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Reminds us that social justice battles are winnable. And reminds us of the historical connection between civil rights and women's rights.

Everything by Diana Abu-Jaber. Frances loved Crescent and I think my sister rereads it every year. One of my better recommendations while working at Cody's.

Asra Nomani's Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle For The Heart of Islam, with reservations.

In Code: A Mathematical Journey by Sarah Flannery. An Irish girl discovers math with the help of her dad, and makes international headlines with a discovery about cryptography. A nice memoir partly because there's nearly nothing depressing in it. I wrote when I first read it:

She's the type who can confidently approach a hard task and try at it and try at it and count her failures as learning experiences and live with the humility and keep going until she succeeds, self-esteem intact. I'm the other type. I've met quite a lot of that Sarah Flannery type over the years, and I always envy them, and now, maybe if I can just accept that I'm not like that, my envy won't have to get in the way of being friends with these people.

Now I know that's bollocks and I can indeed attempt and achieve hard tasks. It just took a while to find out what working style works for me, and to recognize my own self-deprecating patterns and stop assuming anything I've done wasn't hard.

Alison Bechdel's Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip collections and Fun Home memoir. DTWOF is a deep and broad look at the left and LGBT culture in America from the last two decades, and a great story. Fun Home is Bechdel's personal history, artful and edifying about queerness. They're clear, funny, and poignant, and they address lots of LGBT/feminist/left ideas in easy-to-read cartoons.

An old Secrets of Loveliness by Kay Thomas or similar girl's manual from the fifties or sixties. The reader gapes at what we used to tell girls, and what we still do. I bring it out to shock guests sometimes.

Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher, Ph.D. Puts a name to the pressures American girls face, and does some old-fashioned feminist consciousness-raising. These stories made young women, like me, say "that's me." I read it in high school journalism class. Probably heavy-handed for a lot of women, though, and looking back I wonder about the research.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness. I taught the latter. Classic feminist/political what-if sci-fi about understanding the other and power structures.

"The Phantom of Kansas" by John Varley. I read this gender-fluid murder mystery set on a lunar colony when I was twelve and it still stays with me as a musing on sex and identity.

Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan. When you've read all of DTWOF, here's the serialized graphic novel to try out. You can read the first issue for free. The last man on earth tries to figure out why all the men died, and why he's still alive. A Sorkin-esque dystopia. The last issue comes out soon.

The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson. What sort of education could transform any girl into a strong, independent woman? That what-if, among others, underlies this scary, funny, infuriating, and I think overlooked Stephenson.

Find some anthology that includes Connie Willis's short story "Even the Queen." Menstruation sci-fi. Hilarious. I taught that too.

Nancy Kress is a sci-fi author who thinks about genetic engineering and human relationships. Her main characters are often women.

Joanna Russ's sci-fi usually explores gender and power.

Others, such as my husband, tell me to tell you about Shari Tepper's science fiction, especially The Gate to Women's Country, and Lois McMaster Bujold, A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, and Elizabeth Bear's Carnival. I haven't read them yet. Nor have I read nearly enough Alice Sheldon nor her celebrated biography, James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips. But people recommend it highly. A bunch of Sheldon's work is available online for free and "The Screwfly Solution" is just indispensable.

Comments are open for you to tell me things, but comment over at One Good Thing too.

# 30 Jan 2008, 01:06PM: Sending Creates The Recipient?: Once I start my job at Behavior tomorrow, I'll have a mailing address for packages, one that doesn't depend on Leonard being home during the day and doesn't reveal where I live. Thus, this week I've given out my not-yet-existent address (Sumana Harihareswara c/o Behavior) twice. These packages shipped before the person/address combo existed, but by the time they arrive I'll be there. This says something to me about networking architecture, ephemerality, lazy evaluation, worse is better, and Le Guin's lines from The Dispossessed:

"To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, and if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."

# 02 Feb 2008, 06:45PM: Here We Go: By day two at Behavior I got assigned to a project. Every company advertising a job says that you must be comfortable in a fast-paced environment and this is the first time since Salon I've really felt the truth of that. And Leonard is back! Oh, how I've missed him. Now till May: hectic and full of accomplishment, I predict.

# (3) 03 Feb 2008, 12:11PM: Rituals & Security: In May I'll be graduating with a master's. Commencement ceremonies will occur in the evening of Tuesday, May 20th for my program and in the late morning of Wednesday, May 21st for the university-wide hoopla. I haven't yet decided whether to attend just the School of Continuing Education one or both.

This will be about ten years after my high school diploma, and indeed I have been thinking about going back to Lodi and doing the ten-year Tokay reunion. I've even sent off a letter with my new address to the school so the reunion committee can track me down and tell me when it is.

My friend Ron characterized the ten-year reunion as the scoring line on a race: how far can you get in ten years? By the standard measures I've done very well. I've married an awesome guy, graduated (soon) from two prestigious universities, and started earning a very good salary. And that, as much as my emotional growth over the past ten years, is a reason I could go there without a bunch of anxiety.

It's curious. I think of incidents from high school that make my face hot, and then I think, "I'm probably making more than you." And if envy is green, then superiority is cool, blue water. I could drown in it.

# (1) 03 Feb 2008, 09:53PM: Legal & Investment Advice: For the past few months, when I've had a legal document that I wanted a lawyer to review, I've consulted Danielle Sucher. Riana Pfefferkorn referred me; it's nice to have friends in law school! Ms. Sucher and I have never met. We've done everything over email and the phone, so you can tell she's responsive. She's smart and candid and her prices are reasonable. Recommended. Item 7 here talks about some of her more high-profile and interesting law work.

I guess this means I have a lawyer. I feel adult and responsible. I'd feel more responsible if someone referred Leonard & me to a good financial planner in New York City. Do comment or email to let me know if you can recommend someone.

"Purpose-driven voluntary sector"* small-world note: her sweetie works at the Open Planning Project, like Leonard's friend Ian Bicking and (I presume) Mel Chua!

Other legal bit: In RightsAgent I see a hint of the supplier-side equivalent to the IP clearinghouse I wanted, or wanted to start.

*Thanks to Luis for publicizing the phrase. Did I mention yay law school friends?

# 04 Feb 2008, 07:59AM: Technologists Needed, Tech Priorities, And Tech Triumphs: My company is hiring web developers and information architects, especially ActionScript, Flash and JavaScript coders. Let me know if you want me to get a resume to the parters.

My sweetie just wrote an amazing essay on what the government space program should be doing.

A talk about priorities is usually a talk about money, so here's a baseline number. NASA's 2008 budget is $17.3 billion. This is not a trivial sum, but since the government always seems able to allocate much larger sums for pointless wars, weapons systems that don't work and/or are strategically useless, etc., I've never bought into the argument that this $17.3 billion is taking off the table money that could be used to solve pressing social problems. (In fact there's a pressing social problem that NASA is in a good position to help with, except that part got taken out of NASA's mission statement.) I prefer to think of NASA's budget as a Strategic Awesomeness Reserve. And over time I've come to the conclusion that manned space exploration is not awesome-effective.

Leonard also has been keeping up the insight and research at The Future: A Retrospective. When I saw his post about the female condom I felt a need to bring up the relevant section of Our Bodies, Ourselves so people could learn about the plethora of birth control methods we currently enjoy. A new IUD, a vaginal ring, spermicidal foams, a patch, low-dose and combination-hormone pills, the implant one-sixth the size of Norplant... and now a contraceptive pill that also stops menstruation. Let's see how many of these Future Stuff predicted!

I got into an argument last week with a sullen, America-bashing Scottish kid at SIPA. Among other things easily refuted by about five minutes of blog-reading research, he charged that Big Pharma Doesn't Make Medicines That Really Help People. Oh really? I can think of about three uncomplimentary reasons why he hasn't been keeping up with the latest in contraceptive tech.

# 07 Feb 2008, 10:15AM: Question: What is the half-life of leaked data?

# 08 Feb 2008, 01:50PM: Kale, You Have Betrayed Me!: I am eating a lunch of kale, seaweed, tofu, and brown rice. Somehow it is both huge and not very filling.

# 08 Feb 2008, 05:50PM: From Work Today: After a very long conference call: "I've lost some acuity. I'm not the same person you hired....That experience was like the opposite of meditation."

"Crazy Bread. So 'crazy' means 'has cheese in it'?..." "Emotionally Disturbed Bread!" "Why does my bread come in a jacket?"

Filed under: Comedy

# 08 Feb 2008, 06:16PM: But Wait, There's More: It turns out we're hiring for two levels of project manager, information architect, visual design lead and visual designer, design technologist, tech lead, software engineer, and visual design intern to round it out.

# 10 Feb 2008, 03:39PM: After: Last night was the last weekly Slightly Known People show at Rififi in the Village. They performed some of their best skits, other sketch comedians and groups did bits, and we all sang together at the end. In April they start a regular gig at an Off-Broadway venue, which is great for them, like a graduation, but I'm going to miss the old ritual.

I am getting kind of tired of going to comedy shows alone.

Filed under: Comedy

# 13 Feb 2008, 09:58PM: Why Skimming Is Lossy: You might have missed the unexpected heat in the next-to-last paragraph. I know I did.

# 16 Feb 2008, 12:00PM: Tax History Saved For A Future Post: In the last few months, I've seen and read a few things and had opinions on them. Here we go.

I Chose a Parson is a 1956 memoir by Phyllis Stark, an American woman who went to Gustavus Adolphus College, married a seminary student, had two kids, and helped her husband as he rose to a bishopric in the Episcopal Church. I got it for a few bucks at Sam Weller's in Salt Lake City, in the cheapo-books room crowded with out-of-print manuals and histories and children's primers, where the pipe on the ceiling's dripping into a bucket on the floor. Never was there a greater diamond in the muck. Stark writes with the dry eloquence of the Brits and the earthy humor of the Midwest, and every page has a great anecdote. I kept reading stuff to Leonard:

In the original list of repairs new pews had been included, but later that item had been deleted because, as usual, expenses were exceeding the original estimates. I felt very strongly, however, that the new beauty we were seeking to achieve would be completely lost if the crude and wretchedly uncomfortable pews were to remain. With the hope of persuading Leland to press the point, I presented the case to him a good many times, but without success. Then one day I decided to drop my reasoned approach and try instead a more feminine technique.
'Darling,' I said sweetly, 'I've got my heart set on new pews.'
He pulled me up short with the trenchant reply, 'That, my dear, is the only part of your anatomy that will ever set on new pews.'
I'm glad to say, however, that the other members of the committee were more amenable to my importuning, and before the repair work was finished, not only did we have new pews, but also new kneelers upholstered with the best quality surgical foam rubber!

I think Rivka and Rachel would especially like this book. And I have more to quote from it in another entry.

Ratatouille is good. The animation of water is amazing. I got creeped out by all the rats. The critic's flashback is moving.

Juno is not the most comfortable movie to watch with my Mormon in-laws. The banter is great and all the actors were spot-on. I could have done with a less monotonous soundtrack. For the first half of the movie Jason Bateman is basically Michael Bluth, but he and Michael Cera really break out. Ellen Page makes me want to see the upcoming Smart People which is evidently this year's Little Miss Sunshine. Some people find Juno's choice to bear the child unbelievable, but I can see a bunch of reasons, implied strongly or subtly, why she'd do that. However, I do want to find a comedy-drama that is specifically about abortion, just to see if it can be done.

An Affair To Remember: Leonard and I saw the Cary Grant/Deborah Kerr version. All the annoying plot devices of screwball comedy without actual chemistry. That Italy scene takes forever! And the second half is a huge Idiot Plot. From my recollection Sleepless in Seattle is a much better film.

An American In Paris: I had an argument with Will Franken about this movie. I couldn't stand it because the lead, Jerry Mulligan, is a sleazeball stalker. Evidently Will wishes men could be more "romantic" in that manner today and feels castrated by feminism and the need to take a single rejection as a final rejection. I pointed out that I've been the aggressor in every romantic relationship I've ever had, and have been rejected many, many times. And yet somehow I got a husband without stalking him! And lots of men and women find each other without sexually harrassing each other!

Will asked, basically, what if it's love? What if you're in love with someone and they don't love you back? Isn't it just and true to persist in professing your love? The answer is no and it's a contradictory question anyhow. One-way romantic "love" is obsession, infatuation, lust; love is a conversation, two minds meeting as one. And how can you love someone if you don't respect their wishes (namely, "stop asking me out")?

The average Futurama is better sci-fi than the average Star Trek: Voyager.

Scott Westerfeld's Uglies is great, easy-to-read teen-focused sci-fi. The characters make sense while growing and displaying new depths, the worldbuilding is exciting, the action scenes and dialogue are all page-turners, and now I have another trilogy to finish, which I can't afford right now. See you again in May, Westerfeld.

If you can believe it, The Matrix was on American Movie Classics the other day. This is kind of embarrassing for me. I taught The Matrix enthusiastically in my Politics in Modern Sci-Fi class and in my prior Politics of the Midlife Crisis class. I still think the plot and visuals are fun and interesting, but most of the dialogue and acting hasn't held up well for me. I do still like Keanu Reeves's part, though.

The September 11th film anthology was on Sundance and I TiVo'd it mainly to watch Inarritu's segment. It was unbearably evocative and I couldn't watch the whole thing. The whole collection is worthwhile: see it with Brendan and followed by the original Shall We Dance?

Filed under: Religion

# 16 Feb 2008, 12:55PM: Superiority Dance: A couple of years ago, I tried to explain to Eric that he had a bad conversational habit. When Person A brings what she thinks is a new item into the conversation, and Person B says "Oh yeah, I already know all about that," Person A feels as though her conversational effort has been rebuffed or she's being called stupid for thinking the item is new or interesting. I used the Gricean maxims, specifically quantity, to explain to Eric why his habit bothered me: he was acting as though I had broken the "be informative" rule.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a little more forthright and antagonistic when he sees this habit:

I personally think conversations about the current emergency would be vastly improved by a general moratorium on the "What, You Just Figured That Out, Where Have You Been?" rhetorical gambit. Indeed, what that particular routine indicates most clearly is that the speaker is more interested in striking a pose than in actually forming a useful alliance.
...
"Charles Dodgson": "I must be a more cynical SOB than Patrick --- I'm not remotely surprised. It's just a fact of human nature that [etc]"
I like your writing and I like you, but this is an online rhetorical gambit on which I call BS.
First, point to where I said I was surprised.
Second, the game of "You're surprised by $ODIOUSBEHAVIOR???" is itself odious. Hello, person who has, by dint of great effort, worked themselves around to agreeing with me! Allow me to point out in the most withering possible terms that I'm more worldly than you, more knowledgeable than you, more sophisticated than you, and boy howdy, are you ever a chump.
I've indulged in this variety of superiority dance myself. Astonishingly, it turns out to not be the most effective imaginable way of acquiring and retaining allies. Human nature is so unpredictable; who could have known?

Last night I saw Eric and a bunch of other folks in my master's cohort at Jen's party. The Swiss guy played the piano and I joked that the hydrazine in that satellite the government's shooting down is just a Xeroxed zine for people who love water -- perfectly harmless! I mentioned how much I love my new job, especially because the people are friendly: more specifically, the founders at the top don't shun human interaction the way Joel and Michael do, and the company culture suits me far better. Sure I'll have moments of conflict with my coworkers, but they'll be about "who's in charge of this task" or "you should have done that more quickly," not a fundamental misapprehension of human nature.

# 16 Feb 2008, 09:05PM: Lessons Of The Past Few Weeks: I work better when I keep my inbox to fewer than ten messages on a daily basis. Everything that's not a to-do task goes into one big archive folder that I can search or sort if I need something. Thanks, Gmail, for giving the world the insight that, in a virtual environment without haptic reminders of size and relevance, search engines beat a zillion hierarchical folders hands-down. And IMAP rocks.

I still need to work on keeping my volume down when I'm excited in a conversation.

The art of the cc:, especially when sending out an email documenting what everyone just agreed to in a conference call.

If you provide a critical service that other people depend on, and you can't quickly get them an explanation describing the service with sample inputs and outputs, I throw up my hands in disgust. Bonus points if you change the service without telling anyone and respond to questions with "nothing's changed!" for a day or more.

I need more office pants. Black pantage is de rigeur for business-y women, it seems.

A bug tracker is orders of magnitude better than Basecamp To-Do lists for organizing software development tasks. A bug tracker is a collective memory, a place to prioritize, a wiki for specs and repro cases and screenshots, and an easy collection of nifty, gameable stats on How Many Bugs We Closed Today to wow the client and your manager. Even if the project manager has to spend time each day translating between the bugtracker and emails with clients and colleagues, it's worth it. I knew this before but I'm newly re-grokking it.

I am good at this job. This job is good for me. I am so grateful and proud.

# (2) 18 Feb 2008, 10:17AM: Soycake: Leonard read a 1986 edition of Programmers at Work from Microsoft Press. The back cover includes ads for other contemporary books, including Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC with Peter Norton on the cover.

Like one S. Jobs, Norton went to Reed College. And he spent at least a few months, possibly five years (it's hard for me to tell by Googling) in a Buddhist monastery. He started the company when he was nearly twice the age of today's stereotypical startup founder. I like how roundabout his story is.

You've seen pictures of Norton from his books and from the Norton Utilities box (software that's been in development and use for over twenty years, by the way), where he's wearing glasses and his hair has gone lighter. But check out 42-year-old Norton in 1985, who reminds me of Jim Fisher and Leonard of George Frankly from Mathnet, the serial within Square One TV.

His pose is as unreadable as the Mona Lisa's. The nerd look is deliberate and iconic; maybe I'll have to stop using Dilbert as a shorthand for my type of man and start referring to "Peter Norton in the pink shirt photo." He's used to these sorts of helpless predilections.

# 21 Feb 2008, 02:58PM: Easy Listening: Today's work soundtrack so far: Michael Masley (whom I suspect my local spa uses for "relax while you wax" music), Weird Al Yankovic, and a conference call I got to leave an hour early because we'd covered the few bugs I was responsible for.

"The Saga Begins," the "American Pie" filk on Running With Scissors, reminds me of good times with my ex. Yes, Weird Al is making me melancholy.

Update: And "Jerry Springer" is a filk of Barenaked Ladies' "One Week," which makes me nostalgic for a different ex. What's next? I don't even know anyone in Albuquerque.

# 24 Feb 2008, 03:32PM: Bloggers Who Give Me A Glimpse of Another World: include John Rogers on screenwriting and TV/movie production, Derek Lowe on research chemistry, Dara Weinberg on theater direction, Camille Acey on Slovenia, Beatrice Murch on Argentina, and Martin Marks on some kind of weird architectural concrete molding job. You know the hype saying the Net lets you read the gossip and shorthand stories of people in different countries and jobs and situations? It's true!

# 24 Feb 2008, 04:17PM: Did You Ever Doubt I Was That Demographic?: I got my first real paycheck from Behavior this past week. Also last week, I stood in line for about 90 minutes at Nintendo World (Rockefeller Center, midtown Manhattan) to buy a Wii. It's my first console ever. I also bought Super Mario Galaxy so I could be Leonard's star bits helper. It's even more fun than Wii Tennis!

Maybe now more friends of mine will come all the way to Astoria to visit. That's the real reason Nintendo's still shipping inadequate supplies of the Wii, fourteen months after launch. I have the cool console, so I'll be popular and people will come to my house after school. I mean work.

# (2) 28 Feb 2008, 01:36PM: Ribbit: What a difference between "Mike can probably do this today" and "Mike can probably do this toady."

Filed under: Comedy

# (4) 03 Mar 2008, 03:35AM: Rhythm: My employer's name, "Behavior," has the same syllabic stress pattern as "America." Thus: anthems?

Behavior The Beautiful
God Bless Behavior
(I Want To Work At) Behavior [WebSideStory]
Comin' To Behavior

# 06 Mar 2008, 01:08PM: The Things You Find: I realize now that Weird Al Yankovic triggered my interest in klezmer, and that he and Dave Barry primed me to appreciate the humor of the over-specific. Also, Yankovic appeared on Square One TV, the show that got me into math and sketch comedy, but that's for another post.

Anyway, a Google search for ["Weird Al" klezmer] led me to this gem:

When you're an accordion player you make mistakes and people who don't really know what they're doing will stop or apologize or make a wincing face. But you should really just keep going and act like you meant to do it. And Stalin is an example of a guy who made a lot of mistakes but he never let them get him down.

# 06 Mar 2008, 04:56PM: Crime Reporting: According to the Every Block folks, the New York Police Department won't release its incident-level, block-level crime data. That would be a mighty fine dataset to mashup! And the city must already have it, thanks to CompStat. I bet it wouldn't be too hard to release a .csv of 311 calls as well. Sounds like I should write a letter to the city.

# (6) 07 Mar 2008, 08:05AM: San Antonio?: I've never been to San Antonio, even though much of the Walch clan lives there. I guess the time was never right with school and all. Then today I saw Gordon Atkinson invite me to a Franciscan retreat at his church in San Antonio. Given that I look on with yearning at Rivka's SUUSI reports, this retreat could be a good way to ease myself into the spiritual retreat scene. And it would be an excuse to visit Kristen, Aaron, Lily, Gunnar, Anne, and who knows who else?!

Now I just need for my company to send me to conferences in Salt Lake City, Tallahassee, Seattle, Portland, Portland, Chicago, Bryn Mawr, Boston, Atlanta, London, Cambridge, Charlottesville, Mysore, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, Radovljica, Baltimore, and I suppose Los Angeles, so I can piggyback all my friends-and-family visits. (Tell me if I missed you.)

Filed under: Religion

# (3) 09 Mar 2008, 03:14PM: Wahoo!: Today Leonard and I beat Super Mario Galaxy. And I beat him at a game of Wii Tennis. And I'm chomping some great yummy dark chocolate. I approve.

# (2) 11 Mar 2008, 10:28AM: Olfactory Equity: Today I splashed a little of Leonard's aftershave on my wrist so I can sniff it and think of him. He warned me that I might seem mannish! I replied, "So what? I'll get a raise?"

Filed under: Comedy

# 15 Mar 2008, 06:56AM: Marching Down To Washingtown: I'm off for a short weekend in Washington, D.C. to see my sister. She has an MBA so she can help me understand the microeconomics in my cost-benefit analysis class. (Formal economics has the flavor to me of a religion, one of the Pythagorean sects.) And we'll make a jaunt to Silver Spring to see John Stange in The Cripple of Inishmaan.

My sister convinced me to treat myself to Amtrak rather than succumb to the cheap temptations of the bus. By the time I bought the train ticket, the Acela wasn't that much costlier than a regular "coach" seat. Power outlets at every seat! Entry to the special Acela waiting area at Penn Station! Costumed dancers to fan me and bring me drinks! I can't wait.

# 17 Mar 2008, 12:26AM: Should I Be On Twitter For This?: My cab ride home from Penn Station included an intelligent discussion with the cabbie as to whether Microsoft's bids for dominance in online apps and advertising would truly challenge Google, and Microsoft's often overlooked (by me) Outlook base.

Why should I move back to San Francisco if I can get this here? Oh yeah: friends, fresh local produce year-round, and bookstore/cafe culture. And (way more) people actually doing innovative tech, not just talking about it.

# 19 Mar 2008, 09:35AM: Getting Rid of Gimmicks and Hand Markers in Dance Dance Revolution: Here's a tip on making DDR for the Wii much more fun.

By default, the game adds all these "gimmicks" (exploding arrows, bouncing and swiveling arrows, etc.) and makes you shake the nunchuck or Wii remote (Wiimote?) to hit certain markers. But the gimmicks just clutter up the dancing, and the Wii doesn't register those nunchuk and Wiimote shakes or button hits consistently. I got really frustrated.

So: at the song selection step, go to Options and turn off Gimmicks and Hand Markers. You'd think this would be in the general Options in the main menu, but it's not. And you have to do it anew for each DDR-playing session (every time you turn on the game, basically). But it makes the game feel much more like the arcade experience.

# (1) 19 Mar 2008, 12:51PM: Said At Work: "So it turns out I coulda bought Bear Stearns."

Filed under: Comedy

# 23 Mar 2008, 08:30PM: Who's Afraid of Castle Wolfenstein?: Zack and Pam stayed with us for a few days just now. I was mentioning something that Leonard's not great at -- boring repetitive tasks, or something.

Leonard (entering): Wait, what's my alleged flaw?
Sumana: You're incapable of love!
Leonard: Don't talk about our son, Martha!

Filed under: Comedy

# (4) 27 Mar 2008, 11:11PM: A Random Walk: My sister is visiting me this weekend and we're going to try to walk the length of Manhattan this Saturday.

We are tantalizingly close to the end of our trek and elated to find ourselves in front of 2 Broadway. We rush toward the dimly glowing storefront that we think must be One. What could be at One Broadway? What treasures could it hold? Apparently: tortilla chips and guacamole. It's a Chipotle. One Broadway is a Chipotle.

It should take ten to twelve hours. It should also be pretty awesome, and about the length of a half-marathon, and thus good practice for any future charity walks we do.

# (1) 29 Mar 2008, 10:02PM: Done: Manhattan has been walked. I kind of can't believe we did it. More later.

# 01 Apr 2008, 09:08AM: Mallory: "Mallory," a near-future sci-fi tale by my husband Leonard, is published at Futurismic. I absolutely love it and hope you do too.

# 02 Apr 2008, 10:42AM: Huh: I just saw stick-figure whiteboard diagrams and thought for a moment that they were an xkcd.

# (6) 06 Apr 2008, 10:29PM: 19th Century Slang Help Request: I'm reading Trollope's autobiography and need help understanding this passage:

The [clerical] critic, however, had been driven to wrath by my saying that Deans of the Church of England loved to revisit the glimpses of the metropolitan moon.

What's a "metropolitan moon"? Ever since I heard that you can anagram "subtext" to "butt sex" I feel slightly more foolish for assuming things I don't understand are about sex, but -- is this about sex?

# (2) 08 Apr 2008, 11:36AM: Words Flagged As Misspelled: in an email I just sent:

DTs, SEs, Meetup, WebGrrrls [actually WebGrrls], LinkedIn, WTF, hackathon, Twitteriffic [actually Twitterrific], miniconference, nametags, MoMA, PMing.

I wonder if you can deduce what the email was about.

# (2) 10 Apr 2008, 08:25AM: Trivia, Drugs, And Profit: Yesterday, in the back of the M60 bus coming back home from Columbia, I overheard a group of people discussing hair, phones, cable companies, the wireless auction, etc. I offered a factlet about rotary dial phones and how area codes got assigned initially, and before I knew it they were asking me whether I freelance. This reminds me of two other stories.

First:

An acquaintance of mine was at a party. She met someone and started talking. "Do you freelance?" he asked. "Sometimes," she replied. He pulled out some cocaine and offered to share it with her.

So now "freelance" is a back-formed analog of "freebase"?

She said, "no, I meant websites," and basically begged off with "thank you, you're too kind, I couldn't possibly."

Second:

One spring day at UC Berkeley, I went to an engineering career/internship fair in Pauley Ballroom, in the MLK student union, just upstairs from the Open Computing Facility. I got professionally branded swag from the professionally staffed booths with the professionally made banners -- Intel, Microsoft, and companies that are huge or defunct now, all blurred together in my memory. Then I saw a space that looked empty, except for the fact that two people were sitting there, and index cards were taped to the front edge of their table.

The cards had tech acronyms and abbreviations on them: VoIP, DNS, HTTP, and so on... and RTFM.

I looked up from decoding them all and said, "RTFM?!"

One of them said, "You're the first one who's noticed."

And that's how I got a tech writing internship that summer.

# (1) 14 Apr 2008, 12:35AM: Escapism: I can't wait to be done with school so I can travel, see friends, get back into How To Design Programs, and generally relax and catch up. Near-future plans of this type include:

Yay visitors!
Dara lives here now! Sorta.
Sam and Adan are getting married! Here and not in Singapore, for which I thank them.
Mom and Nandini are coming to see me graduate in May!
I've bought my ticket for the Franciscan retreat at Covenant Baptist June 6-7. That weekend I'll also get to see some of the Walches represented in the crummy.com blog community, two of whom will visit us in NYC later that month.
Visitors? I hear? Yay?
And the ten-year high school reunion will take me back to Stockton in mid-June.

I would rather plan funtimes than think about cost-benefit analysis. Evidently I would also rather take constitutionals with my husband in the lovely weather, watch Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and Arrested Development, start putting together a slideshow from the Broadway walk, and read Trollope and Lem. Maybe I can use my revealed preferences as an example in the term paper.

# 15 Apr 2008, 09:41AM: Quarter-Baked Ideas: Leonard's daily conference call just now sounded like You Look Nice Today. Thus, I thought of an idea for another comedy podcast: a parody of a daily or weekly conference call. Think The Office.

Also last night I thought the five Pandava brothers would make a good boy band.

Filed under: Comedy

# 16 Apr 2008, 09:20AM: Transfoooooorm!: I now grok feedback I've been getting from my superiors for weeks. I need to improve my listening skills and help other people feel comfortable in difficult discussions. Time to reread Carnegie!

# (1) 16 Apr 2008, 10:59PM: Last One: Fictional Celebrity Jeopardy?: If you miss Spamusement, then spamuse yourself by guessing the subject lines that led to these comics.

Speaking of trivia quizzes, Leonard and I played this periodic table quiz and some other quizzes from that site last night. We missed embarrassingly many elements, no planets, no states, several countries in Europe, and just a few early Presidents. How could we forget Monroe!? He had a Doctrine and a great campaign song!

# 20 Apr 2008, 02:53PM: Stretching: During yesterday's class, as part of a puzzle-solving team, I wrote a Python program and a comic skit. That was really nice.

# 23 Apr 2008, 09:15AM: Anti-Grumpiness Tips: Peppy music (e.g., Barcelona, certain campaign/labor/war songs), handball in the morning breeze, getting documents written and sent, working outdoors on a beautiful spring day.

# 23 Apr 2008, 03:27PM: Questionnaire For Vendors: We got a demo of a fancy new web-based software tool -- project management, task tracking, bug tracking, collaboration, Agile, Extreme Programming, a singing, dancing, iterating revue. I know a little something about the tradeoffs that creators of collaboration tools have to make. So I could ask pesky questions like:

Do you host it, or do we have to? If the latter, what sort of server, database, etc. do you recommend we set up? On average, how long does it take a customer of yours to set that up?
What's customizable and what's one-size-fits-all? For example, does using your application require that the user fill out certain fields for every task, and does the administrator configure that? On average, how long does it take a customer of yours to choose and configure the customizable parts? (You can't have both off-the-shelf and customized.)
What's performance like? (Unfortunately, to check their reply, you have to play around with an instance or installation that has a lot of data in it. See if the vendor has a trial version that comes with sample projects.)
What browsers do you support? (If you have people in your organization dedicated to Opera or Konqueror or iCab, see if the creators of this app have even heard of them.) What versions? (Watch out for IE7 and Vista issues!)
If someone assigns a task to me, how do I find out? Email? RSS notification? Or do I have to keep this web application open all the time to find out whether I'm the bottleneck keeping us from meeting our commitments?!
What's not so great about your application? Related: When do you recommend we not use your application? (I answered this honestly when I worked sales, so I want a straight answer when I ask it. Salon.com wasn't for those who can't stand reading on a screen, or have no free time. FogBugz wasn't for secretive organizations with six levels of security, or time-rich, money-poor hackers. You'll gain credibility and customer satisfaction if you're upfront about who's not your target market and why. If you think you've made the One True collaboration tool, perfect for all niches, then you need to get honest with yourself about the architectural choices embedded in the product you're selling.)
What do I lose in switching to your tool? (Example: you'll lose the tactile intuition of the index cards you use for Agile planning. You'll lose the ability to destroy code or documentation without leaving a trace. But that's worth it because...)
What decisions does your tool make easier?
Does your product integrate with...? Twitter, SharePoint, Subversion, FogBugz, AIM, Outlook, Microsoft Word's Track Changes, iPhones, BlackBerries, Asterisk, Basecamp, TickSpot, Crystal Reports, Time Machine? And if the vendor says yes: How does the integration work? (Example: If half your staff have iPhones, then check whether "integration" means "the site works on iPhones" or "iPhone users can use a special iPhone-optimized version of the site." If you use FogBugz, there's a difference between "we'll email new issues into your FogBugz installation" and "the site makes extensive use of the FogBugz API.")
How do I get ALL my data OUT? (Best answer: "You always have access to all your data in [common, open-protocol format] and can export and archive it at any time by clicking this link." If you don't want to act like you're already thinking about lock-in and the endgame, just say you need regular archives as part of your backup system.)
What's your upgrade history? When was the last upgrade, and when is the next one? (Check this, the release notes, and whether an ecology of plugins exists around the tool.)

I don't think the vendor liked that I was asking these questions. I got the nervous-laughter/"That's a very good question" combo twice. Good sign.

I can come up with more such questions for vendors in case anyone feels like lengthening their checklists. Share yours in the comments.

# 24 Apr 2008, 04:08PM: Cleaning the Lint Screen: Twelve inches does not seem very long, and yet a twelve-inch sandwich is pretty big.

My marching band CD is helping me work and keep my mood up. I wonder why I find marches less annoying than techno.

Today's Starslip Crisis was hot enough to warm my cheeks, which surprised me! So if the lack of eros is all that's stopped you from reading it, you should start. If you liked Firefly then you'll like Starslip.

My classmate's wife just had a baby girl. He came to class and showed off a picture, and people congratulated him. No one said, "too bad, maybe it'll be a boy next time," or anything like that. I wish every new daughter in the world got that treatment.

# 26 Apr 2008, 10:08PM: Acting As If: As a matter of course I wish to direct you to http://del.icio.us/leonardr/sumana for random links I run across while dallying on the Web. Example: the hilarious "I consume, but then analyze!" which is by the alternate universe Sumana who got into makeup as a teen. A few additional notes:

Leonard and I and everyone else I know who's gone have superlatively enjoyed MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibit, which closes in two weeks. Go if you can! I especially liked the phone handset, the oxygen generators and air purifiers, and the paper alarm clock, and the instant furniture video and artifact blew me away.

Yesterday I put on the new suit and visited the client for the first time as their project manager. The cubicles, corridors, and cafeteria sent me back to Silicon Valley during the first boom, specifically my tech writing internships at Exodus. After I got home, when I was changing into sleep attire and folding my business pants over a chair, I remembered folding my dad's gray and navy pants over hangers in Mom & Dad's tiny walk-in closet in Stockton, all those years that he worked at Caltrans on PERT analyses. For once bumping into the past was comforting. This isn't new. My dad did it and I can too.

I'm thinking of adding myself to this list of women who welcome invitations to speak at conferences. I'm ruminating on an eminently conference-y IT analogy right now: software development is more like agriculture than it is like manufacturing.

Now, to work on cost-benefit analysis, then watch the original Bedazzled for free on Hulu.

# (2) 29 Apr 2008, 08:14AM: This is Ridiculous: MyDomain, a.k.a. 000Domains, treats my domain, brainwane.net, differently because I registered it more than five years ago. So now I have to call them up or suchlike to renew the thing. Blah. What registrar are reasonable people using these days?

# (1) 01 May 2008, 07:55AM: Designed For Me: The Crooked Timber folks talking about the skill of management.

One point in that discussion: communication of academic concepts to non-academics requires serious empathy. Gotta work on that. In fact, gotta work on my presentation in defense of my master's thesis, which is this Saturday around 11 am.

# 01 May 2008, 05:02PM: Musings: On a colleague sitting alone in a conference room with low lighting, sternly focused on his laptop screen: "He looks so hard-core in there. Like he's checking checkboxes in a web app to decide who to kill."

Filed under: Comedy

# (1) 01 May 2008, 09:41PM: Sportswomanship: Just the facts, mostly; more facts and story. There's a parable here, along the lines of the story of walking with Jesus and leaving footsteps on the sand.

# 02 May 2008, 09:00PM: Litmus Quest: "But is it art?"

"Well, it must be art, because it has an obnoxious Flash interface."

Filed under: Comedy

# (2) 03 May 2008, 07:04AM: Elegance: I figured it out. I woke up and thought about it and invented an opening and closing for my presentation today that's aesthetically satisfying and that uses meaningful, non-cliched analogy to get the crux of my idea across to the judges. Now to practice to ensure I can deploy it well at 10:55.

This is great. This is the heart of yes. I've been reading a lot by my role models recently, especially Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Rachel 'goop' (techwriter) Chalmers, and Dr. Rivka. And even though I know they have their moments of despair and weakness, I couldn't help thinking, "This is how they feel all the time!"

# (2) 03 May 2008, 04:43PM: Done(ish): Thesis: defended! Poker faces of judges: studied.

Now, two more finals, then DONE.

# (4) 04 May 2008, 09:42AM: Tips, Modesty, and The Magic Word (Julie Andrews): My sisters-in-law have started putting longer essays and tipsheets on Associated Content (Susie, Rachel) . Susie writes mostly tips for domestic productivity and happiness. I especially like Susie's tips on beginner sewing projects using scrap fabric and reusing old, worn-out clothes, and her lists of tips on useful things to keep in the car, starting a meal swap group (a.k.a. once-a-month megapotluck), housewarming gift ideas, and setting up and maintaining a cleaning schedule. Now I just have to follow through!

Rachel's living in London, which led Susie to write up tips for reducing an expatriate's loneliness. Rachel mostly writes expat- and traveler-themed articles, like tips on planning a backpacking trip, a pros-and-cons piece on using guidebooks, and gift guides for expats and itinerants. This November, I'd like to use Rachel's tips for succeeding at NaNoWriMo. And it was neat and exciting to read her citizen reporting from the Democrats Abroad presidential primary.

Sadly, not all the stuff on Associated Content is as useful and cool as my family's work. Women have posted creepy Bible-related comments on an article on the history of pants in women's fashion. I never understood why skirts were more "modest" than pants until I read these comments. I'd figured: it's easier to have sex while wearing a skirt! Wouldn't pants, which would need to be removed, be more modest? But no, these women inform me: the lines of the leg-tubes draw the male gaze right to the forbidden area! They know where it is! They can't help but think about it! But wait, isn't mystery sexier? Wouldn't men actually obsess more over the invisible, unknowable skirt-covered crotch? Ridiculous.

If these women want me to wear skirts, they should turn their energies towards convincing mainstream America that God gave all his children leg hair and never meant for half of them to constantly battle it.

As long as I'm talking about my sisters-in-law, I should mention that Rachel recently recommended Lying About Hitler by Richard Evans and saw a stage production of The Sound of Music. Rachel, I saw a home-taped video of the film a zillion times when I was a kid, and I must have always fallen asleep around the wedding. When I was a teen, I then actually saw the ending with the escape and was like, "Oh! So it was all about Nazis!"

Also, when I was five, my mom took me to try out for a local stage production of The Sound of Music as Gretl, the tiny daughter. I said the lines Gretl had said in the movie instead of the lines they were giving me for the play. I didn't get the part.