GirlHacker's Random Log

One of my favorite Christmas-time programs is on Wednesday night, The Kennedy Center Honors. Walter Cronkite hosts and it is always a pleasure to hear his voice. They put a lot of thought into the event, choosing memorable performances and participants who hold great meaning for the honorees. It's not really a show for the general public as much as it is a tribute for the recipient. Someone who worked at the post-production firm used by their television producers told me that they insist on the highest quality work, and I believe it. It's a genuine class act, which you don't see much of on TV these days. Sadly two of last year's honorees just died, Victor Borge and Jason Robards.
12/26/2000 09:01:55 PM - name='1778037'

Friday, December 22, 2000

The makers of the Barbie PC and the Hot Wheels PC have filed for bankruptcy. Mattel is making it clear that they did not make the PCs, they just gave Patriot Computer a license to use the brands. But Mattel is offering $100 gift certificates for customers who paid for and did not receive a PC.
12/22/2000 05:25:16 PM - name='1745493'

RIP Thomas G. Yohe, creator of "Schoolhouse Rock". Edutainment at its best. (via CamWorld)
12/22/2000 05:14:33 PM - name='1745426'

I think I'll be better off not committing myself to posting daily for the next week. I've got travel and holiday things to deal with. But maybe I'll be inconsistently consistent and pop in more than I expect. I hope the end to your year is happy and peaceful, and that 2001 brings you much joy and laughter.
12/22/2000 05:11:33 PM - name='1745399'

The Cross Convergence pen gets a lot closer to what I was hoping for with the CueCat. It is a detached, normal sized pen, unlike that cumbersome cat with the chord. So it fits in much better with typical reading and shopping activities, plus any impulse barcode scans you may want to do. And you can write with it too! It is available on the website for $89.99 and seems to only have Windows software. I am hoping that, like the CueCat, someone will sponsor or subsidize this device so consumers can have it for free or cheaper. But it is probably a hefty loss-leader to justify in the current economic situation. Of course, it has that chicken or egg problem. If no one uses the scanners, the Digital Convergence codes are useless (however, bar codes can be stored too, and those often work just as well). I doubt many people are CueCatting, so they need more mobile devices like this one.
12/21/2000 12:46:31 PM - name='1732997'

If you haven't been in on The Ring movie hype (and this is J.R.R., not Wagner), you can catch up with this Boston Globe article. The first movie is due to open a year from now. "At least 400 fan sites are exclusively devoted to the production." Whew, thatsa lotta HTML. Middle Earth is a world that lives in millions of individual imaginations, with each visualization completely different. A movie phenomenon like Star Wars existed solely in the head of one guy who then brought it to life on screen for us to stick into our imaginations, pretty much intact. But living up to the expectations of what all the readers have built into pictures in their heads from the written word of Tolkien is a monumental challenge.
12/21/2000 12:14:34 PM - name='1732673'

Wednesday, December 20, 2000

Local Harvest is a public directory of small farms and farmer's markets in the U.S. You can search for pick it yourself farms and specific produce. The site had a link to Gifts and Graces of the Land, a photo-essay on America's current farmlife. It's good to remember that the food you eat every day doesn't just magically appear in the restaurant and the supermarket. (via Yahoo's Weekly Picks)
12/20/2000 12:27:48 PM - name='1722668'

My favorite Letterman Top Ten List (or at least it's in my top ten of top tens) is the Top Ten Numbers From One To Ten. I remember my exact reactions while watching it. Dave announced the title. I thought "geez, this is going to be so lame!!" It was their first week on CBS so I was getting skeptical that they were already losing the magic touch. Then he started reading them. "Ten". OK, ha ha, it's the same number. "Nine!" Oh great...this is just going to be a countdown. Lame lame lame! Then "Six!" Hmmm... OK. And as he read the rest of the numbers, in a perhaps well thought out, but probably random, order, I started laughing. It was a sort of meta-funny, Jim's Journal kind of humor. Which is classic Dave, of course.
12/20/2000 12:16:07 PM - name='1722547'

Tuesday, December 19, 2000

An interesting look at another dot com failure, Inside the Cult of Kibu is by Lori Gottlieb, former vice president and editor-in-chief of the doomed girls' site, and author of Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self. I had tried Kibu out and it seemed to have the promise of being fresh and different, though the business plan was transparent: collect data from girls for paying companies. The article portrays most of the company's employees as being quite clueless. The part that really struck a chord with me was when she was labeled as "negative" and "not a team player" for raising important issues about the company's goals. I've been there. I've now learned that if I need to put myself in that position, I'm already in the wrong environment. Next time (if there has to be one), I hope to catch myself before the mental burn-out happens. (via CamWorld)
12/19/2000 12:46:51 AM - name='1707734'

MIT now officially allows cats in certain dorms. It's a pilot program allowing 26 cats in four of the dorms. Before this new policy, they had started cracking down on the many clandestine pet owners. Previous to that, the rules were not enforced and many students had pets. I remember meeting a happy little ferret named Biko (ferrets are still officially illegal). I was curious about the regulation that the cat owner must "buy a special collar from MIT". But it's media filtering at work. The official policy specifies that the cat wear an "identifying collar tag", issued by MIT. That makes more sense. The most appropriate policy is this one "Student will not permanently alter room doors, windows, or walls to allow for cat entry or exit." It's MIT. Automatic, electronic cat entries are practically a no-brainer. The trick now is to camouflage them. (article via LTSeek)
12/19/2000 12:12:53 AM - name='1707554'

Monday, December 18, 2000

'Tis the season to dust off Ralph the Elf Gets a Job. This site (lamely designed, with rudimentary HTML skills) was the product of an evening at the mall last year with an elf decoration that was part of the holiday decor of the building I worked in. It is probably time for a sequel, something like "Ralph the Elf gets laid off from a dot com". But we've lost track of Ralph. I assume he's been rotated into another building somewhere. Hopefully they gave him a better view this year. But he probably asked for a higher salary instead of stock options.
12/18/2000 11:00:30 AM - name='1701082'

I liked this CNN headline "Weird, wintry weather in much of U.S." The word "quirky" is also used in the article, wherein a meteorologist says "Normally, we don't start off with the copious amounts of precipitation and the numerous thunderstorms. This is very atypical weather for December." Although I've been in Silicon Valley for almost ten years, I'm still not accustomed to being left out of the winter weather. I feel that wind-whipped chill on my face when I see the photos of people outside in the cold, digging out of drifts, and my once-twisted ankle gives a sympathetic twinge. And I wonder if my four wheel drive Subaru will ever get to dig its tires into any of the white stuff. Of course I am enjoying the mild climate here and my blood has thinned out enough that I actually bought a wool coat for this winter.
12/18/2000 10:52:17 AM - name='1701014'

Sunday, December 17, 2000

I read somewhere (can't find it, of course) that a Singalong Sound of Music will be opening in San Francisco next year. It's been a smash hit in London and New York with people arriving in nun and window curtain costumes to sing along with Julie Andrews and the rest of the gang (hmm maybe some of the nuns aren't in costume!). With a San Francisco venue I'd be disappointed if I didn't see a wide selection of male nuns and "going on seventeen" cross-dressers. This Australian article gives a view of the raucous London audience. Apparently, you can bring alcoholic bevvies into British movie theatres.
12/15/2000 01:44:08 AM - name='1669359'

A new programming term to me from a Technology Review article: aspect-oriented programming. It's a concept that has made it out of Xerox PARC and into an actual Java language extension, AspectJ (yay for research from PARC that makes it in the real world! ;-). If you want to duplicate and enforce a behavior for all instances of a specific situation, you can create an aspect to help propagate and maintain that behavior. These would be behaviors that aren't easy to modularize because they need to occur over many disparate modules; some of their examples are design patterns, error-checking strategies, and resource sharing. If you're like me and need an example to actually figure out what this all means, see the short AspectJ overview. (Apologies to the non-programmers out there. I'm sure this is as fascinating as more election coverage.)
12/15/2000 01:25:07 AM - name='1669280'

Thursday, December 14, 2000

Last year, friends who weren't in the computer industry had a common sentiment for me in their Christmas cards: "I assume you're busy dealing with Y2K problems." This year, I'm expecting concern about dot-com failures affecting my livelihood. Neither are true. I hope.
12/14/2000 09:46:57 AM - name='1661380'

True to form, Media News has gathered many links to commentary on the live TV coverage of the Supreme Court decision. Comments include "It was not television's finest hour", whatever happened to "Figure out what happened, then tell people?", nowadays "when it comes to election results and breaking news, any reports should be taken with a grain of salt" and my favorite from Tim Goodman: "much of what passes for news or discussion is little more than gaseous, opinionated air spurt out in sound bites with no introspection or real thought attached." Ahh, but it's those who are intelligent and quick enough to make their opinionated air carry weight and meaning who win my attention.
12/14/2000 09:40:08 AM - name='1661320'

Wednesday, December 13, 2000

From a NY Times article on TV coverage of the Supreme Court decision, Peter Jennings reassured Jackie Judd as she tried to make heads or tails of the document: "Nobody should be embarrassed about working through a Supreme Court decision [before a national audience]." I was amazed to find, as I drove home listening to the radio, and then channel surfed for the few minutes I had, that in the interest of being as fast as they could with the news, all the live news outlets placed their reporters and legal experts on the air immediately, reading and trying to figure out what they were reading. It was a real mess. I suppose they were expecting to find a summary statement they could just pass along. Or, as usual, they were milking as much drama as they could out of the situation. It was reality television, the latest fad. And I bought into it, because it was a lot more gripping and relevant than that thing on the island.
12/13/2000 12:58:06 PM - name='1652107'

Up With People has been losing money, $3.2 million in Fiscal Year 2000, and they are suspending operations. When an acquaintance of mine joined for a year, I was amazed to find that the participants have to pay a fee (currently $14,300) and are responsible for their own health insurance and sundry expenses. But I guess that doesn't cover all the costs of the production (much like how college tuition doesn't even begin to cover a college's expenses). It is a non-profit group, and they do offer scholarships for the fee. So they depend heavily on donations, which have been declining while their expenses have been climbing. The last performance is December 29th at the Holiday Bowl. I'm expecting tears on the faces of the performers. (via Kestrel's Nest who pointed to a CNN article about it)
12/13/2000 12:38:53 PM - name='1651929'

Tuesday, December 12, 2000

Paint Job nail polish colors are actually created to match specific car paints. My pick is Jaguar Jade Green Pearl Metallic, but for a car, not for my nails. 1997 Chrysler Light Gold Pearlcoat or 1993 Isuzu Ultra Violet Pearl Metallic might be OK for my fingertips.
12/12/2000 03:13:25 AM - name='1636619'

Thanks everyone who made sure I didn't miss Brenda Laurel's essay about Purple Moon. I had a difficult time deciding what to write about it, if anything. Because Purple Moon's mission was near and dear to most every employee's heart, the time spent there and the time spent tearing ourselves away was emotional. It is hard, as I am often reminding myself in business life, to not take it personally when your goal feels so noble, so pure, so capital-G Good, but, hard as you try, you are failing to make it. Even our partners, our customers, and our suppliers were rooting for us, treating us so well because they too wanted to believe in and be a part of something Good. It was hard for every little thing not to be emotional and personal, because everyone cared so much. We all felt we had a personal stake in our mission. Wouldn't it make such a difference to believe so strongly in what you were doing every day at work? That's what we had. But I don't think anyone realized that the biggest risk we were taking was that we would all feel so damn horrible when it failed.

Brenda makes some interesting observations about women in business in her essay. Yes, of course, I have my ideas of which names go with her "recognizable dysfunctions". It makes me feel better that she recognizes the management traits many of us had to contend with. Maybe we have different people in mind, but that's OK. People vary in different circumstances. Most of us can be and have been stellar under better circumstances. As I grow wiser and reanalyze situations from a greater distance, I'll probably learn even more lessons from Purple Moon -- and all the other startups I've participated in.
12/12/2000 03:02:20 AM - name='1636584'

Monday, December 11, 2000

The Library of Congress' archive of Coca-Cola TV commercials includes outtakes from the 1971 commercial featuring "an international group of young people on an Italian hilltop singing 'I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke'". Tame stuff, but it is a real part of history now since it's almost thirty years old. Whew. (via Yahoo's Weekly Picks)
12/11/2000 12:50:26 AM - name='1624524'

I clicked into the tail-end of a documentary about toxic areas in Silicon Valley and they were showing a tower outside of a Netscape building which looked like it might be art, but was really a Superfund cleanup project. The tower is taking contaminated groundwater and spewing the chemicals into the air to clean it out. I'm assuming that's a safe way to deal with it, but it makes me nervous. Netscape's campus is on the former Fairchild Semiconductor Superfund site. Here's the irony of computer manufacturing: because the facilities need to be impeccably clean, they use(d) large amounts of strong solvents and cleaning solutions. The underground storage tanks for these chemicals (and you can be sure there were many in the Silicon Valley) sometimes leaked. At the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition website, I used their maps to find the Superfund sites near where I live. As was disclosed during my condo purchase, I'm not sitting on top of one (though there are plenty of old underground gas tanks nearby). But the area is definitely peppered with them. Be aware.
12/11/2000 12:37:09 AM - name='1624470'

Friday, December 08, 2000

After I was all prepared for them to come crashing down, the Iridium satellites are being saved by the U.S. Dept of Defense (which reminds me, soon it'll be time to worry about tax returns again). There's a Slashdot thread on this too. For $3 million a month, the Pentagon gets unlimited air time for up to 20,000 government users. That's $150/month per person. Not too bad. They also get to avoid public panic over pieces of satellite falling out of the sky. Perhaps that's the real bargain here. Someone's going to do a Mastercard commercial parody, aren't they? "Global satellite system: $25 million. Two years of satellite phone service for 20,000 government workers: $72 million. Keeping a public raised on "Armageddon", "Deep Impact", Y2K hype (and many who still remember Skylab falling in 1979) from panicking: priceless.
12/8/2000 02:30:11 AM - name='1597263'

TNT is co-producing a mini-series based on The Mists of Avalon, the Marion Zimmer Bradley book which tells King Arthur's tale from the perspectives of the women. It will air in 2001. Anjelica Huston and Julianna Margulies (formerly of ER) are starring and the production team is Emmy and Oscar laden, so expectations should be high. I have to admit that although I have tried three times, I have never been able to finish the book. I always get stuck in the middle and don't have the will to continue. I'm not sure what it is. I know quite a few women who count it among their favorites. Maybe next time I'll just start from the middle.
12/8/2000 01:45:59 AM - name='1597058'

Thursday, December 07, 2000

From the Annals of Improbable Research, here are Postal Experiments. Various items (most not packaged) were addressed and sent out via USPS. Apparently teeth are considered human remains, which, I suppose, is accurate in some cases. I noted that the helium balloon is addressed to a town next to my hometown. (thanks for the link, Lisa!)
12/7/2000 12:37:09 PM - name='1590776'

Last night I watched three consecutive episodes of Junkyard Wars on The Learning Channel. It's a British show, kind of a cousin to the robot building competitions. Two teams have to build a contraption that performs a certain goal (last night: demolition, bomb dropping, and underwater maneuvers) using what they find in the scrapheap around them. This typically involves lots of welding. The teams of 4 include one expert (a ringer, really). At first, I feared that the hosts would be annoying window dressing, but they were great. The female host, Cathy Rogers, co-created and produces the show, so she's far from vapid. Robert Llewellyn, "Kryten" from Red Dwarf, adds a lot of humor. There are clear, educational explanations of the physics of the tasks and the mechanics of the machines. The original British name for the show is Scrapheap Challenge, and it's filmed by RDF Media. There are FAQ's on both sites (and be wary if you run across the schedule Wallchart page, because it reveals who wins each event by listing the teams in the next set of finals). The American team on the series, The NERDS, have their own site describing their experience on the show. It too reveals how they fared, so be warned.
12/7/2000 12:27:10 PM - name='1590685'

Wednesday, December 06, 2000

Via LTSeek, Duke OKs its chapel for same-sex unions. Here's Duke's news release about it. Duke's current president is Nan Keohane, the highly respected president of Wellesley when I was a student there. Definitely no stranger to controversy, I'm sure she'll navigate the negative backlash with flying colors. She won my admiration during a small gathering in my dorm. We were discussing the Barbara Bush debacle (students were protesting Barbara's choice as commencement speaker) and Nan admitted that she previously had difficulty respecting women who, like Barbara Bush, dropped out of college to get married and start families. She wasn't criticizing us, telling us to grow up, or to get over it. She was telling us that she could relate and that it was OK to feel that way. And, I think, also, very very lightly, reminding us that we all had the capacity for growth and tolerance.
12/6/2000 12:44:02 PM - name='1579322'

I read about the FCC considering 10-digit dialing and immediately thought of my college roommate's rather rural hometown where, in the 1990 timeframe, amid much griping, everyone had to start dialing seven numbers instead of four for local calls.
12/6/2000 12:15:39 PM - name='1579068'

I was poking around (virtually) at my favorite Cambridge bookstore, Wordsworth, and noticed they were featuring Boundaries, a book by Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and other notable structures (see my 5/29/00 posting). She has always impressed me with the purity of her vision and her dedication to the truthful rendering of it. Her work always contains more thought behind the inspiration than just the visual experience of it can relate, so it will be wonderful to read about her experiences and motivations. They provide an excerpt about the Vietnam Memorial.
12/6/2000 12:03:51 PM - name='1578938'

Tuesday, December 05, 2000

In the mid 1990s it seemed that everyone at my company was running the Johnny Castaway screensaver. Johnny was a little cartoon guy stranded on a little cartoon island. He'd fish, have run-ins with an octopus, put on a jogging outfit to go for a run, cavort with a mermaid, and -- if you were lucky, actually get rescued. He'd work on building a raft that got bigger over time. There were special happenings for certain holidays (usually appropriate decorations would appear), and a few rare events that would have people calling over the cube walls for witnesses. Apparently the "real" ending has him returning to civilization, only to realize he misses the island life. He parachutes back and "The End" appears. Then, it starts all over again.
12/5/2000 02:03:09 AM - name='1562393'

In 1987 I stumbled upon a Wiener Werkstatte exhibit at the MOMA. It was a defining moment in the formation of my appreciation for style. I had no expectations for what I was about to see; we were just going to the museum for the day. It seems that a lot of life's best experiences happen when you have no expectations. This exhibit of the objects and artwork from the Vienna workshops of the Art Nouveau, and then Art Deco periods clanged into my head as a revelation. There were beautiful organic forms (think Lalique) and crisply balanced strict lines (think Frank Lloyd Wright). There was even form with function. I drank it all in. It revealed to me the labels, time periods, and pioneering artists for the designs I had been subconsciously craving. Now I knew what to look for. And I do look for it. Unfortunately it isn't usually nearby. When I was in Vienna, I headed to the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts) which has acquired the complete archive of the Wiener Werkstatte. I caught a Charles Rennie Mackintosh exhibit at the Met a couple years ago. The National Gallery of Art is currently hosting a major Art Nouveau exhibit that has been in the Victoria and Albert museum in London. It has a wide selection of items, including that famous Paris subway entrance. They created a web site describing the creation of the exhibit (via Yahoo Weekly Picks).
12/5/2000 01:57:27 AM - name='1562379'

Monday, December 04, 2000

According to Reuters (here on NY Times), Digiscents will announce today that fragrance suppliers Givaudan and Quest are backing their company. If my memory is correct, Quest developers are behind many of the luxury fragrances that peppy people try to spritz at you when you enter department stores. Givaudan appears to be in the same line of work. You remember Digiscents; they have a device that can make your computer exude smells. And you thought you only had to worry about that with perfume inserts in magazines.
12/4/2000 01:46:38 AM - name='1551669'

Many professional "to the trade" journals protect their web archives from the innocent eyes of consumers. Not so the Professional Jeweler Magazine. There you can find info on the gem and precious metal trade, designed to keep jewelers informed about the many supplies and variables their livelihood depends on. The site has various organized lists of the magazine's archives, for example, the gemstones archive page where I learned that NBC's Dateline had done an expose on the use of fillers in emeralds (which are notoriously flawed; in fact, if anyone ever tries to sell you a flawless "genuine" emerald, run the other way). For lots of fun with DeBeers (and their now-postponed plan to bypass diamond sellers and brand their own cut diamonds), check out the diamond archive. There is also an archive just for the conflict diamonds crisis (the U.N. is now considering a certification process to ensure that diamonds aren't coming from shady circumstances in Africa).
12/4/2000 01:27:17 AM - name='1551596'

Sunday, December 03, 2000

I was on a foreign website and spotted an ad for Bohemian Bagels in Prague. If not for the URL, Czech language link, and prices, you'd swear this shop was in any big city USA. It also made me wonder where these little round breads come from. Are they an American immigrant invention? An evolution of a Jewish bread? I found two Ivy League links with historical explanations of the genesis of the bagel. Here are "The Round Role with a Hole" and an excerpt from "We Are What We Eat". There apparently is no consensus, as various "old country" baked goods resemble early bagels, and could claim ancestry. It is easier to trace the bagel's history after it hit America, as it became firmly associated with the New York deli and also had a following in Chicago. And once Lender's started mass production, bagels rolled out to the rest of the U.S. And now many areas on the West Coast have Noah's Bagels, and I assume other bagel chains are dotting the rest of the country, or at least the urban areas. Plus many supermarket bakeries sell bagels. I'm not content with Lender's inferior bagels, and I was surprised to find out that after the Lender brothers sold out to Kraft, they went back to the restaurant business and produced "real" hand rolled bagels once again. Kellogg bought Lender's from Kraft and then sold it to Aurora Foods.
12/3/2000 12:44:35 PM - name='1545496'

Friday, December 01, 2000

Today is World AIDS Day. The U.N. reports that 36.1 million people have HIV/AIDS worldwide. We've gotten used to the idea of AIDS, kind of like how we got used to space shuttles going up into orbit. Then Challenger exploded. Complacency can kill. Educate. Don't hate. Reach out. Fight ignorance. There is still denial and fear surrounding AIDS. It's OK to be scared of AIDS, as it is OK to be scared of death. But you should not be afraid of discussing AIDS, learning more about it, helping people who live with it. The fear is actually helping the virus to spread, because many people refuse to face the facts. The virus picked its primary transmission methods well: sex and drugs, not very high moral ground for starting an educational campaign with. AEGIS is the largest HIV knowledgebase in the world. It began with Jamie Jemison and Sister Mary Elizabeth, who each recognized the usefulness of a BBS for connecting those affected by HIV. Let's hope that one day soon it becomes an important historical archive instead of remaining an active community.
12/1/2000 01:28:51 AM - name='1523362'