trains, ferries and buses

Riding on the amtrak cascades train to PDX. It occurs to me that this trip isn't even half over, and I've racked up a pretty good set of transportation methods.



* Commuter rail: to NYC last Wednesday, to EWR
* subway: within NYC
* monorail: EWR airport train station to terminal
* airplane: to Seattle
* taxi: to downtown
* bus rapid transit: downtown Seattle transportation
* bus: out to Greenlake
* car: driving out to anacortes ferry
* ferry: to and from the islands
* train: to and from PDX
* streetcar: MAX service in PDX

Not bad, 11 modes of transportation, but I'm missing bikes. Last night I could have borrowed my friend's bike, but I chose to walk around the neighborhood with Bandon instead.

summer weddings

When I graduated college and started working at amazon, my very first office was a big room I shared with the rest of the production QA team. There were 5 of us there. Geoffrey, who was already married. And David, Jason, Russell, and me. 9 years later, and I've been to each of their weddings. (Well, except Geoffrey, who had beaten everyone to the punch!) It kind of made me pause and think about how blessed I've been to have such great friends.

David - Aix-en-Provence, June 2002



Jason - Seattle, August 2005



Russell - Orcas Island, July 2008

san juans

view from mt constitution
Originally uploaded by wck

This is the view from the highest point on orcas island, looking eastward at the rest of Washington State. Insanely beautiful. I love the PNW.

Happy 4th

sunset
Originally uploaded by wck

So it's the 6th already... Happy 4th a few days late! I went to Norfolk to see my sailor. This picture is the Elizabeth River at sunset, taken from the ferry just after dinner. The river is so beautiful in the evening, I'm always tempted to stay on the ferry to do a few more round trips.

peonies

peonies2
Originally uploaded by wck

Gorgeous, no? I actually sold two prints on etsy! Amazing. One of them is this print. I had them printed up at Duggal on W23rd, which was kind of fun. They take a lot of care with your prints, so it was fun to go get the print color corrected and printed up nicely on some matte paper. Ooooh... I need to get a photo of the print, as it's just too nice.

Dipping my toes into ecommerce!

Well. 9 years after getting a photography degree, I'm giving the "selling my art" thing a twirl on Etsy. I've loved Etsy since I first heard about, so it seemed like a good place to list a few prints.

Etsy's "Pounce" is endlessly addictive, I can spend hours poking around in the Storque, and it's an all around fantastic website full of amazing things. So, we'll see how this goes. It's really cheap to just list a few things so I'm putting up a couple of my photographs that have been popular on flickr, and we'll see.

Here's my spiffy etsy badge!

Tripit

this is tripit: www.tripit.com.

I love it to pieces. I travel way too much (how this happens even with Sailor and the nieces and nephews on the same coast as me is beyond me) and I'm a secret information organization nerd. AND, they have very sweet customer service. I sent them a feature request and got a nice little note back from them. Awwwww. Anyway, if you fly too much too, try it out. Quite handy.

I still keep all my travel itinerary stuff in my little blue notebook, but now I just print off the agenda the night before and slap it on in, rather than writing out everything by hand.

Why women quit technology careers

Boing Boing Gadgets blog on a non-gadget topic, Why women quit technology careers.

There are two things I can think of in response to this specific article. The first is just "Duh." Really, we need studies to tell us this? Why? (I am old and cynical now I suppose. Different from young and cynical.)

And second, remember how USCG culture is different from dotcom culture? I flat out don't want to say that women in the military never face this stuff, because I know that they do. However, it always appears to me that the institutional culture of the military allows technical women so much more growth, more role models, more respect. I would never, in a million years, swap the dotcom culture I've always worked in, but I will admit to some wistful wishing that we would up and learn a few things sometimes.

But still, my final reaction to that article remains the same as that first response.

success!

My very first rose bush ever has BUDS on it. With pink peeking out! Wow.

Manhattanhenge

Occurs tomorrow and Friday.

The solar event causes the sun to set in alignment with Manhattan’s street grid.

Friday may be the most interesting day, with the sun in perfect alignment just before it begins to disappear below the horizon. On Thursday, perfect alignment begins just after sunset has begun.

-Savor the sunset: Manhattanhenge is this week

geek tshirts

In a few months I'm going to the Open Source convention out in Portland (I'm pretty excited, it's a good nerd conference), and when registering I had to pick out my tshirt size. Suprise, they now offer women's sizes!!! It's the little things when you're a girl geek- all my previous Oscon tshirts are Men's Medium because they didn't even offer women's sizes the other times I went.

In my closet is an entire collection of unworn geek tshirts I've collected over the years, all in men's sizes. So I tend to see "do they offer women's sized tshirts?" as a bit of a equality-in-engineering metric.

Large Scale Data Munging

I don't believe I've ever posted a link to one of my favorite blogs, Datawocky. Great article today on super large scale data munging:

Yet the Map Reduce paradigm has its limitations. The biggest problem is that it involves writing code for each analysis. This limits the number of companies and people that can use this paradigm. The second problem is that joins of different data sets is hard. The third problem is that Map Reduce works on files and produces files; after a while the number of files multiplies and it becomes difficult to keep track of things. What's lacking is a metadata layer, such as the catalog in database systems. Don't get me wrong; I love Map Reduce, and there are applications that don't need these things, but increasingly there are applications that do.

-Why the World Needs a New Database System

Food stores of Bleecker

I took the PATH train to Christopher and Hudson this morning, as I do pretty often when the weather is nice, and walked on down Bleecker to my office. You could gain 50 pounds just looking in the windows of all the wonderful food stores along this walk- The Kitchen blog has a nice writeup of some of the most famous ones.

Foodie Walking Tour of Bleecker

They missed a few other nice ones like Grom Gelato.

Alarm Clock Law

This might even reveal itself in the Alarm Clock Law: if another device can handle the task of a dumber gadget, it will replace it

- The Alarm Clock is Dead, Long Live the Cellphone

Been doing it when traveling for years, but I used to use a CD player alarm clock at home. I've recently switched to my ipod, plugged into computer speakers. So for years I'd kind of wanted one of those 'zen alarm clocks' that have nice chimes for the wakeup sound, but I could never really bring myself to spend that much for a simple alarm clock. Last year I had a brain wave, bought a MP3 album of chimes from the amazon MP3 store, and dropped them into a playlist on my ipod. Bingo- $8 zen alarm clock. I love it. Especially when it goes off at 5 AM every morning, prompting Declan to wake up and start demanding his breakfast.

NYT on email recommendations

Guessing the Online Customer’s Next Want

Very high level overview of a company that provides an email marketing solution based on customer's past buying habits. From the end:

“I still get e-mails from Amazon recommending books based on the Jared Diamond titles I bought three years ago,” he said. “But I get nothing about my interest in gardening.

Same Author recommendtions are much easier, an stronger, than same subject. And it's hard to notice shifts in customer interests- you might think that you're really interested in gardening, but you only buy 2 books on it, compared with dozens of another subject. I find myself frustrated with the same thing, even though I know I can look at the list of my purchases and searches and see a different pattern appearing there than I think there should be.

On the similar interests filtering topic, I first heard about this stuff via Firefly at the Media Lab. Wired has an article from long ago about its demise, Firefly's Dim Light Snuffed Out.

After all, Firefly is more than just another failed Microsoft Web venture. As far back as 1996, the technology, and the community that piggybacked on top of it, stood out as one of the most potent properties anywhere.
In essence, Firefly was a collaborative filter -- a technology that asked users what they liked, learned their tastes in music, then got them in touch with people having similar tastes.
Five years and several new paradigms later -- and following the company's 1998 buyout by Microsoft -- the light is going out for good on the forums. The underlying technology will live on, however, powering Redmond's e-commerce efforts.
Some of the service's users clearly long for the good old days.
"What the hell happened to the fly?" wrote one displaced Firefly user in an MSN forum. "It went down for a few days and then BLAM!!!!!! ... They decided to shut it down ... Does anybody remember when there was over 400 people on at one time in the fly?"
MIT professor Patti Maes does. She headed up the software agents group at MIT's Media Lab and led the development of the technology that would eventually spin off to become Firefly.

So that would make it 10 years ago when I was a junior or senior in college. This kind of recommendations filtering has changed a ton in that time, but it also has remained pretty static. Sure, now you can use MapReduce and we have several orders of magnitude more data, but at the root it's still the same basic algorithm.