Laughing

Kate laughing at something I said. That's from last weekend, in NJ.

Ugly shoes

My cast is off (yay!) but my foot and leg are still recovering, and pretty sore. I used to walk a lot, and it's hard to keep myself from overdoing it. So I went to a store in Seattle today and asked for a pair of sneakers with tons of padding in the heel. I ended up with a pair of Teva vegan (!!!) sneakers. Here's a link to a pair on zappos:
Teva Romero MT - Technical Terrain Women's Terrain (Heron). Note that this description is dead wrong: "for those that want to look fast even when standing still." However, they do have this: "Encapsulated Shoc Pad™ unit in the heel cup that evenly transfers energy of impact throughout the footbed and away from the heel." They at least work better than my pumas, which have almost no padding at all. I still can't believe I'm wearing shoes this ugly, though.

The NY Times had a reminder today that CS isn't the only field with few women at the top. Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?
We tend to focus a lot on the lack of women in CS, Physics, and other sciences, where women are usually scarce from intro classes all the way through college, grad school, and jobs. Law apparently has a lot of women who enter the field in law school, but only a teensy percentage make it to partner many years later. It's a really interesting look at a familiar problem in an entirely different field. For instance, they call out this:
One of the main bugaboos in this debate — and one that analysts says is increasingly cropping up as an issue for male lawyers as well — is the billable hours regime. Billing by the hour requires lawyers to work on a stopwatch so their productivity can be tracked minute by minute — and so clients can be charged accordingly. Over the last two decades, as law firms have devoted themselves more keenly to the bottom line, depression and dissatisfaction rates among both female and male lawyers has grown, analysts say; many lawyers of both genders have found their schedules and the nature of their work to be dispiriting.
What a different way of working from the dotcom world. We care more about what you produce at the end of day than how much time it took. And keeping track of 7 minute increments would destroy my concentration. Most days I don't even notice the time when I'm writing something until my dog starts poking my knee with his nose to let me know that he really needs a walk.
I have no great ideas on how to increase the number of women in either CS or law, but I did enjoy reading about how another industry grapples with the same problem.

nerf chaos!

My office window this morning. (I didn't shoot all those darts at the window, but I did wield the digital camera.)

fuzzy dog

There hasn't been a fuzzy doggy photo in a few days. So here's a fix for that.

Hamentashen

It's Purim today (or tomorrow? I'm not sure), so I should be making some hamentashen this evening. Esther & I made them for 4 Purims at Wellesley because it was, after all, her holiday. I also remember making them in Redmond with her once, but I somehow think that was in September, not March.

So in a related note, I saw a poster of Matisyahu on the wall in a coworker's office, but I wasn't able to ask him if the album was any good because he's OOTO. (For non dotcommers, that's out of the office, aka being on vacation or just telecommuting from a coffeeshop or something.) I mostly noticed it because I'd listened to a sample of King without a Crown on iTunes this morning. I still have the music store "page" up for the album in iTunes, actually. And I tried highlighting his name to paste into an amazon search box, but iTunes doesn't make the name in the top part of the store window highlightable. I can click it, but not copy/paste. I'm more suprised it took me until now to notice that.

Toppled Crane in Myrtle Edwards park

Wow, not every day something like this happens around the corner from my home.

A 100-ton crane toppled onto railroad tracks near Myrtle Edwards Park this afternoon, delaying freight and passenger routes through the Seattle waterfront area.

--seattle pi article
I left work late, but apparently Belltown was super jammed up because of the closed roads, which rarely ever happens. Traffic in this area is usually 3 cars waiting at a light.