GirlHacker's Random Log

If all goes according to plan, a coworker of mine, John Lewis, is jumping out of a (we hope) perfectly good airplane onto the South Pole any hour now. Don't worry, he'll be wearing a parachute. And, since he's skydived the North Pole already (he has the photos to prove it), this should be a piece of cake. New Year's Eve usually makes people look back at what they've done and forwards to what they want to do. Don't forget to enjoy the here and now.
12/31/1999 6:56:46 PM - name='30681'

Thursday, December 30, 1999

Catching up on a year's worth of National Geographic magazines is one of my usual holiday activities. Here are some interesting color facts from the July 1999 issue.

• To satisfy German preference, egg producers in that country feed chickens marigold petals and paprika to darken the yolks.
• Men in the U.S. respond most strongly to reds with yellow mixed in. Women prefer blue-based reds. (Remember this next time you're picking a lipstick. Hmm I keep buying blue-based nail polishes. Maybe that's my problem.)
• In 1985 the courts allowed Owens Corning to trademark pink for their Fiberglas insulation. However, Nutrasweet was denied the right to trademark pastel blue for their Equal packets (so, what if they had colored the Equal itself blue?).

12/27/1999 8:42:11 PM - name='29323'

Sunday, December 26, 1999

My parents got new linoleum in the kitchen and the little bit of carpeting at the very top of the stairs is no longer there. Every time I head downstairs, this small change almost causes me to pitch myself headfirst down the stairs, screaming mantras from The Design of Everyday Things. I'm not sure what it is about the missing carpet that is turning me into such a klutz, but my mom says it took her a month to get used to it herself. When I'm at my parents' I realize that my dominant memories of the house are from my childhood (well, duh), because everything looks like it has shrunk. I am reminded of Joan Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank describing her high school reunion: "It was as if everyone had swelled."
12/25/1999 8:30:25 PM - name='28741'

Friday, December 24, 1999

The flow of time here lacks the cadences I'm accustomed to. It's been almost nine years since I came to California, and I still feel incomplete without the usual landmarks of seasons passing by. Sure, in winter it gets colder and it rains, and Christmas decorations appear, but back in New England, when a season comes along, it revs up to hit you at full blast. It could be the relentless patter of the April rain, the deep colors of the autumn leaves, those nights you try sleeping on the floor because it's just too hot and muggy to be in a bed, or those blizzardy mornings when you wake up extra early to listen to the list of school closings on the radio. Maybe it's only because I was younger, but those four disparate seasons made the year seem longer. And I no longer have the regular rhythm of a school year to attach myself to. Software development schedules don't move along in parallel with the seasons. Heck, some don't move along in relationship to anything substantive at all! (This log entry inspired by the luminous snowy photos of the elf-freaked pb)
12/23/1999 1:05:36 AM - name='28034'

Wednesday, December 22, 1999

A friend of mine is auctioning off New Year's Eve babysitting services on eBay. Need a babysitter within 75 miles of Sunnyvale, California for the 31st? I'll vouch for her. There are at least two others auctioning off babysitting on eBay for that night. A guy in Austin has set his price starting at $1000, so my friend is a bargain at $200. When I mentioned this to my officemate he said her approach was too high tech and recommended that she instead post paper fliers around the neighborhood. (Oh but that just wouldn't be as much fun!)
12/22/1999 12:47:30 AM - name='27615'

Happy Winter Solstice. As Seth, who happens to be in Scotland, wrote to me: "If I don't stay up too late, I can wake up at sunrise (8:16) and catch all five hours of daylight." (Correction: Seth subtracted incorrectly; it's actually 7 hours. That's what he gets for not using 24 hour time and also inventing chrons.)
12/22/1999 12:41:08 AM - name='27613'

Tuesday, December 21, 1999

Lots o' folks are crowing about patents, especially with the call to boycott Amazon.com. My feelings about patents have always been the same (patent law absolutely needs to be altered to deal with the nature of software development), but my attitude has shifted a little. When I was at Lotus, I hoped they would lose their user interface suit against Borland. At GRiD, I proudly displayed my LPF "Apple as a snake" button in my cube. At Brio Technology, I declined to be listed as an inventor on a patent, thereby horrifying a lawyer acquaintance of mine who felt I was breaking the law (the rule of thumb is if you've touched the code at all, you're on the patent), stupefying a few friends, and missing out on a resume enhancer. My current philosophy is that if someone wants to use the law to their advantage, I'm not going to penalize them for it (ergo, I'm not boycotting Amazon). But I still don't feel right taking advantage of those laws myself. To each his or her own.
12/20/1999 2:12:50 AM - name='26702'

I noticed a scary bit about this autonomous vacuum cleaner (via Eatonweb): notice that they have a "patent pending" on their "mood indicator light". The implications of this are making me feel rather moody. How broad is the patent anyway? Did anyone patent the mood ring when it came out? Prior art! Ironically, if the light's blue, the vacuum cleaner is happy. Hmm.
12/20/1999 1:45:22 AM - name='26700'

Sunday, December 19, 1999

I've been continuing to ruminate the marketing paradigm shifts that need to occur as products go completely digital. Will consumers still go to Tower Records to browse for albums when they can be downloaded online? Will music stores disappear faster than bookstores? You don't really experience the physical nature of a CD. It just disappears into the player. If marketing folks want to keep us coming to stores and shelling out cash for physical items, I'm sure they will devise clever ways to continue to use up petroleum and trees. But it will be entirely more convenient to download music off the 'net. I'm just not sure how I would package that up to give to someone else as a present. Will someone invent digital giftwrap? What would that be? And what about album cover art? Perhaps the music player of the future will have a screen to show artwork instead of just text to identify the song and artist. John Perry Barlow's article "Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net" has some relevant thoughts on this topic. If you don't want to slog through the entire article, go to his conclusions at the bottom, the last of which is: "in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns." And, not surprisingly, he has a lot to say about the inadequacy of current intellectual property law. Many thanks to Dru for sending me the Barlow links.
12/19/1999 1:50:57 AM - name='26411'

A couple of funny items in this site of newspaper corrections. My favorite: "A caption in Monday's Chronicle incorrectly stated that a typical hyena consumes more meat than any other carnivore. Taken as an entire species, spotted hyenas are thought to consume more meat than any other species. But other carnivores individually consume more than a hyena." Hmmm...did they add up all the kitty cats in the world?
12/19/1999 1:10:23 AM - name='26401'

Saturday, December 18, 1999

I got this from Robot Wisdom, and I abhor logging "been there done that" links, but I need to wave this under the nose of everyone who thinks I'm delusional when I talk about it. Yes, Virginia, there was a Star Wars TV Christmas special. Even more frightening than that, Bea Arthur was in it.
12/18/1999 1:18:15 PM - name='26256'

My latest (non-programming) hack: Ralph the Elf Finds a Job. This was a lot of fun to do. The HTML is bare bones, the graphics a bit hefty, but we got it "shipped" quickly. I live for hacks like this. If it weren't for insanity, I'd have gone insane a long time ago.
12/18/1999 2:39:37 AM - name='26130'

Friday, December 17, 1999

Can you relate to this passage from Ellen Ullman's book? I'm not there yet, but there are many days that I wonder if I should stop before I reach that point. Then again, maybe I should stick it out so I can say grumpy old geek things like "in my day, we had to worry about things like disk space and Internet bandwidth!" (Thanks for the link, Landon.)
12/17/1999 1:44:05 AM - name='25692'

One day, the awe inspiring special effects from movies like The Matrix are going to look as crappy to people as earlier sci-fi movies do to us now.
12/17/1999 1:37:19 AM - name='25691'

I really want a "developer's edition" of the major browsers. When I'm debugging web applications, I am forever clearing caches, quitting and restarting the browser, reloading frames, etc. I'd like complete control over the caching, especially how fiercely it holds onto Java applets (those take a restart to clear). I'd like to be able to set it to *never cache anything*... not just set my cache spaces to 0 and hope. I want better ways to hook in Java applet debuggers. I want built in JavaScript debugging. I want some kind of safe mode so I'm not as likely to crash the browser. Am I asking too much? Make it easier for us to develop and we'll make more apps for your browser. (I know someone's going to tell me to stop whining and just contribute to the mozilla project.)
12/17/1999 1:32:28 AM - name='25688'

Thursday, December 16, 1999

Speaking of slashdot, I was wondering if anyone owned dotslash.org... thought it would be mildly funny if it was slashdot's content, literally, backwards (well, the "still awake at 3AM" brain thought so anyway). Not too surprisingly, dotslash.org also goes to slashdot. Nice touch. However, backslashdot.org is not registered yet, so if you want to start your own renegade DOS news log, go for it! (Yes, I'm kidding.) (Yes, I know that was a lame joke. Again, I plead the 3AM amendment.)
12/16/1999 3:02:23 AM - name='25189'

I'd like to thank everyone who pointed me to the hilarious Y2K corporate emails in response to yesterday's log. It was posted to /. last month.
12/16/1999 1:41:37 AM - name='25162'

At Safeway (grocery store) today there was a little handwritten sign taped to the ATM. It said "DOWN". I thought "down?" and, of course, looked down the machine. Caught myself just in time. Duh. It meant the machine wasn't working. As in "the computer is down". Is "out of order" going out of style with the new computer vernacular? Or is this just another "only in Silicon Valley" bit?
12/16/1999 1:36:36 AM - name='25160'

Guess who owns splirt.com?
12/15/1999 11:22:20 AM - name='23429'

Came across Letters from a Nut in a bookstore (yes I was in an actual physical independent bookstore, they do still exist, go buy some books at one if you can!). This guy writes insane letters and gets responses from places like The Baseball Hall of Fame (he offered to donate a full set of Mickey Mantle's toenail clippings). It reminded me of a book I gave a friend a while back: Idiot Letters: One Man's Relentless Assault on Corporate America. In my continued mulling over digital vs physical items, I am wondering whether companies would take email queries with the same seriousness as these typewritten/word processed letters. Email is just too easy and cheap to produce, and there's a lot of crackpots sending idiotic email anyway. But could someone achieve the same results using email as these guys did with snail mail? Anyone want to give it a try? Perhaps someone already is!
12/15/1999 12:20:28 AM - name='23430'

Tuesday, December 14, 1999

After perusing my access log, I now I feel compelled to say hi to everyone from GeekNews simply because I'm getting many more referrals from there than anyone else (no, this is not a competition, and please, remember, No Wagering!). Logging is more fun with an audience.
12/14/1999 11:03:36 PM - name='23431'

As a coworker put it, GirlHacker has been "the web log equivalent of slashdotted". Welcome all you Now This and Robot Wisdom readers! And much thanks to the inspirational Dinah for starting the reference ball rolling in the first place. OK, enough with the self references, back to the cool ideas.
12/14/1999 11:48:04 AM - name='23432'

One day, I just may be tempted to hack someone's washing machine.
12/14/1999 12:49:59 AM - name='23433'

One of those questions that often enters my brain as I am sitting in traffic has finally been answered: just how much does it cost to rent a billboard on 101 in Silicon Valley? Apparently ten times more than it did five years ago. Prime spots are going for $100,000 a month, according to an article in the Mercury News. And if you want one, you'd better plan ahead. There's a waiting list. Or perhaps you'd prefer a sign on a barge floating in the bay by the Stick (yes, I know it's actually called 3Com Park; what an expensive billboard that was!). Those open at $35,000 for two weeks. Nice to know that my eyeballs have such expensive taste.
12/14/1999 12:47:25 AM - name='23434'

Monday, December 13, 1999

I was delighted to find the complete texts of the L. Frank Baum Oz books online at Project Gutenberg. Of course the fantastical artwork from the books is not included, but that's what used bookstores are for. (Although maybe someone could do ASCII versions... like the guy who's recreating the Star Wars movie entirely in ASCII (java 1.1 req'd).)
12/13/1999 12:36:03 AM - name='23435'

I often sing the praises of the New York Times, so it was disheartening to read Steve Wozniak's tale of how they asked him to write an op-ed piece about Microsoft, which he did, but they turned it around, trying to get him to spin it into good PR for Microsoft. He refused to let them print a reworked version. Woz states "one of the key Microsoft executives writes a column for the New York Times". Hmmm I know Bill Gates used to write a New York Times column. Does he still? Well, I know unbiased media is next to impossible, but I will continue to appreciate the Times' high caliber writing.
12/13/1999 12:15:00 AM - name='23436'

Saturday, December 11, 1999

Heard on the radio this morning that American Express is having trouble keeping up with the demand for their new Blue card. This new card has a smart chip that works with a reader attached to your computer. I was attracted to it solely because the ads showed it was see-through (very cool), but the radio story also mentioned that because of production problems they're not manufacturing it out of clear plastic. Bummer. Researching this, I found an item at CardTechnology news that says "sensors in automated teller machines could not pick up the see-through cards as originally designed", so they're shipping opaque right now. Redesigned translucent cards "will have a reflective material that can be picked up by ATM sensors."
12/11/1999 5:25:22 PM - name='23437'

Never wear suede shoes in a bar -- or anywhere else where people could spill beer on 'em.
12/11/1999 3:06:33 AM - name='23438'

Amusing: TheGoodNamesWereTaken.com (another Feed find). Check out the Chia Pet Crop Circles.
12/9/1999 11:34:19 AM - name='23441'

As I made my way to the ATM, kvetching all the way about the need for cash since not everyone takes cards, I wondered what panhandlers will do when we become a cashless society? This will depend on how we end up carrying our money. Will we give them our (untraceable cash) cards with spare change on them? On a related note, someone did market research on panhandlers (found via Feed). There's a survey where you can select how much money you'd give in response to different panhandling techniques.
12/9/1999 11:31:05 AM - name='23442'

Wednesday, December 8, 1999

Got a nickname? My alumnae magazine (yes, that's the proper Latin; I went to a women's college) printed an interesting article on nicknames (which I will now shamelessly quote from since I can't link to it). "In a community with a commonality of aspirations, languages, social behavior, rules, etc, nicknames are used to foster a sense of belonging and solidarity. A group facing an external threat will especially prize solidarity and use nicknames extensively." (I also learned a new word: an onomastician studies the origins and forms of names.) This got me thinking about the proliferation of Internet related nicknames. We've got domain names, email addresses, hacker aliases, and chatroom handles. Sometimes popular systems like Instant Messenger force us to choose new aliases since our preferred ones are already taken. And some people create independent indentities for themselves online, with accompanying aliases. How many names do you have? And how many identities?
12/8/1999 12:42:42 AM - name='23443'

Tuesday, December 7, 1999

One day there will be computer software archeologists who will prospect their way through ancient CD-ROMs, hard drives, and, uh, punch cards(??) reconstructing the lost software of our society. And as more and more stuff goes digital (art, movies, etc), the storage (and potential recovery) of our culture will be completely dependent on those ones and zeros sitting on something that can withstand the ravages of time. And even then, we may have lost the software to recreate, run and view the files. Will the restoration of a web browser be the Rosetta Stone of our future?
12/6/1999 12:12:34 PM - name='23445'

Sunday, December 5, 1999

Wedding Economy Tidbits:

• In ancient Rome, the ceremonial kiss was not romantic but legal. It marked the mutual acceptance of the contract of marriage. (from Martha Stewart Weddings Fall '99)
• Because wedding gown advertisers threatened to boycott, bridal magazines refuse to take ads from, or even mention the existence of, companies selling used bridal gowns. (from the book Adcult USA)
• Diamonds are not really rare, but DeBeers has made absolutely sure that you don't know that. And Microsoft's business practices pale in comparison to theirs.

12/4/1999 4:29:25 PM - name='23447'

Friday, December 3, 1999

Some newspapers are charging more for classified ads that mention a web site. If you just list a URL (in a cheap one-line ad), they're losing money since you aren't describing your services with more text. This is an interesting example of the valuable nature of domain names and descriptive urls. As the Wired article points out, the same thing happened when 1-800 numbers became popular. My question is: for classifieds that are online, will the newspaper charge you more to have a live link to your URL or is that included in the cost? (and does that really matter since browsers could be programmed to pick up the URL as a link anyway?) As newspapers continue their evolution into online "print", ad revenue models must evolve along with them.
12/3/1999 1:44:56 PM - name='23448'

Have you seen the new Palm ads on television? A Palm-toting woman and man sitting in different trains on adjacent tracks spot each other through the train windows. They sense potential chemistry, but oh no, her train is pulling away. She lifts her Palm V, he does the same, and she beams her phone number over. Happily satisfied with their clever use of technology, they settle back in their chairs. My cynical mind flashed this thought "Did they practice safe beaming? What if she sent him a virus?" Will we have to use PDA condoms one day? And can I resist making a pun about how PDA is also short for "public display of affection"?
12/3/1999 1:29:30 AM - name='23449'

Top this: according to my inside source, Brio is paying $15,000 for internal referrals to fill certain key positions. No, that is not a typo. Fifteen thousand dollars. Anyone else got recruiting megabuck stories to share?
12/3/1999 1:11:16 AM - name='23450'

Thursday, December 2, 1999

Do you miss Bliss? Bliss is an endearing comic about a young married couple. The San Jose Mercury News stopped running it this week, stating that it had gone out of syndication. Not one to take what I read in the paper at face value, I did some investigation (online of course!) and found that Bliss is still in print elsewhere. I don't know if it is being taken out of syndication, but until it goes away, I'm looking at it here. (I can't link to the exact page because of how they're serving it up, so click on the Bliss logo to get to it.)
12/2/1999 12:04:07 PM - name='23451'

Woke up (way too early) this morning and heard on the radio that eLance has relocated their entire company ("lock, stock and web site") from New Jersey to Sunnyvale, CA . They spent a hefty chunk of change on moving their employees to the silly valley. My still asleep brain hoarded away one fact from the broadcast: they hope to overcome the shortage of high tech workers in NJ. Didn't anyone warn them that everyone here can't find good people either? And I sure hope they checked the real estate prices before they left. Whew. Oh wait, I forgot, it's cold back there; good idea to move 'em before winter hits! And, hey, if it doesn't work out, they can all find new jobs in a jiffy!
12/2/1999 11:05:03 AM - name='23452'

Wednesday, December 1, 1999

Well, I guess Amazon would have something to say about my 11/29 post regarding luxury ecommerce. They're buying into Ashford.com. Maybe they can convince Vendome that you can still have that certain cachet when selling online. I know, how about online shops that you can only access if you're using a luxury branded ISP? Get a $100/month account from "ihaveblueblood.net" and you can shop for those cushy goods online. Someone get on the line to AOL. AOL-Platinum... for those who appreciate Quality Internet Access. (note: Ashford still lists Montblanc pens on their site. Wonder if they'll get a reprieve.)
12/1/1999 11:53:35 AM - name='23454'