DoubleAmericano

tom

2008-09-22T06:27:00.001-07:00

tom
Originally uploaded by wck

playing at home

Dust

2008-09-16T17:33:00.000-07:00

I have finally- thanks to a 5 year old who was too inquisitive with my point and shoot digital camera and the rising costs of film development- broken down and gotten a DSLR. Yes, I'm the last photo nerd on the planet to get one, I know. I still adore film, but Kate's doing in of the lens on my little digital elph pushed me to just get a DSLR.

My new camera has one of the built in dust sensors, so over lunch today with another former art major (like me now slumming as a software person) we discussed how you used to deal with dust with film developing and printing. If you had a speck of dust on a print that you just couldn't get rid of, you had to manually paint it out. With a real paintbrush and ink. I'm serious! I spent so many hours hunched over my black and white prints before a show, with a teensy paintbrush, making tiny dots with a bit of ink to simulate film grain over dust spots. My eyes ache just thinking about it. And really... talk about an arcane skill! This is one of those spots where I guess digital technology really has a massive advantage over film.

macarons

2008-08-26T07:27:00.000-07:00

Until the trip to Seattle this summer, I had been perfectly content to think of pistachio macaroons as a Paris thing. However, when I was out poking around Pike Place Market, I discovered that Le Panier now carries macarons. Hmmm... and they're delicious.

I just stumbled over a blog post on macaron reviews in NYC: In Search of the French Macaron in NYC�. Now I forsee a side trip to Rockefeller Center at some point.

food and security

2008-08-20T10:09:00.000-07:00

Via emergent chaos, a blog post on foodies and security nerds.

I find it interesting that security people and foodies are strongly correlated. Or at least are strongly correlated among the ones I know.

Too funny. So here's my list. Bold is food that you have eaten.

Venison
Nettle tea
Huevos rancheros
Steak tartare
Crocodile
Black pudding
Cheese fondue
Carp
Borscht
Baba ghanoush

Calamari

Pho

PB&J sandwich

Aloo gobi

Hot dog from a street cart

Epoisses

Black truffle

Fruit wine made from something other than grapes

Steamed pork buns

Pistachio ice cream

Heirloom tomatoes

Fresh wild berries

Foie gras

Rice and beans

Brawn, or head cheese

Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper

Dulce de leche

Oysters

Baklava

Bagna cauda

Wasabi peas

Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl

Salted lassi

Sauerkraut

Root beer float

Cognac with a fat cigar

Clotted cream tea

Vodka jelly

Gumbo

Oxtail

Curried goat

Whole insects

Phaal

Goat's milk

Malt whisky from a bottle worth $120 or more

Fugu

Chicken tikka masala

Eel

Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut

Sea urchin

Prickly pear

Umeboshi

Abalone

Paneer

McDonald's Big Mac Meal

Spaetzle

Dirty gin martini

Beer above 8% ABV

Poutine

Carob chips

S'mores

Sweetbreads

Kaolin

Currywurst

Durian

Frog's Legs

Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake

Haggis

Fried plantain

Chitterlings or andouillette

Gazpacho

Caviar and blini

Louche absinthe

Gjetost or brunost

Roadkill

Baijiu

Hostess Fruit Pie

Snail

Lapsang souchong

Bellini

Tom yum

Eggs Benedict

Pocky

Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant

Kobe beef

Hare

Goulash

Flowers

Horse

Criollo chocolate

Spam

Soft shell crab

Rose harissa

Catfish

Mole poblano

Bagel and lox

Lobster Thermidor

Polenta

Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee

Snake

-the HTML is via a handy form that will generate the html for you. http://reddywhip.org/lj/foods/

Soho to Penn Station

2008-08-12T15:08:00.000-07:00

Viviane suggested that I blog this information, so here goes. She wanted to know how to get from our office at Broadway and Houston to Penn Station, buy a NJT ticket, and get on her train. I've optimized this route to pieces, so here it is.

enter the Broadway Lafayette station at Broadway and Houston
Go all the way down the first set of stairs past the turnstile to the BDFV Uptown platform. wait just behind the stairs
Get on the first train that comes and go 1 stop to West 4th
When you exit at West 4th, the escalator that skips the mezzanine is right there. Get on it and go to the ACE Uptown platform
walk down to the other end of the platform. take a C or E train.
exit at 34th Street/Penn. you will be very close to the turnstiles, go out them and down the half flight of stairs
you're now on the lower level of NYP Station. Walk straight ahead, and take the first corridor that goes off to the right. That corridor starts off with LIRR tracks, and the NJT tracks are at the far end
Near track 6ish or 4ish, there's a set of ticket machines that will rarely have a line. Buy your ticket there.
There are NJT monitors nearby- watch them for your train. You will see the track announced 10 minutes before it will leave NYP

glasses

2008-07-31T13:22:00.001-07:00

ana & me
Originally uploaded by wck

Nerd glasses on me and nerd glasses on my niece! I did always say when she was little that I knew she was going to be a programmer when she grew up.

trains, ferries and buses

2008-07-22T11:09:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-21T14:52:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-06T16:41:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-04T09:03:00.001-07:00

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!

2008-06-25T05:48:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-06-08T03:12:00.001-07:00

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

Manhattanhenge

2008-05-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-23T03:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-23T03:11:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Ana being Silly

2008-05-18T15:46:00.001-07:00

Ana being Silly
Originally uploaded by wck

Annika this morning.

NYT article on women engineers

2008-05-15T08:20:00.000-07:00

�Most people just don�t look at a woman and see an engineer,� Ms. Muller said.

- New York Times article on women engineers in the workforce (yet again, is this article in the Styles section because they assume only women will want to read it?)

Copyright years

2008-05-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

Dear Developers, Don�t Hardcode Copyright Years

Ha. So glad that this annoys someone else. I wish I could remember how many first-Tuesday-back-at-work-in-the-new-year online pushes I've signed off on just to fix a hardcoded year. People, you're presumably using a template language of some kind. Take advantage of it!

NYC, again

2008-05-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

Last year I was mildly obsessed with Greenwich Village. This year, it's been my almost daily walks down Bleecker to Bowery to grab lunch. The last few blocks of Bleecker have a sort of hidden feeling to them... a few small stores, the backs of some large buildings, a really back corner, haphazard feeling... then you reach Bowery, and there's the old CBGBs (now a jeans store), the new Rogan store, the new Think Coffee, and all these little shops popping up in a small area. The sociologist in me is still mad obsessed with these blocks.

The sun finally came out again this afternoon, and I managed to snag a backwards facing window seat on the train, so I had a great ride home. The reason why a backwards facing window seat is so wonderful is that as you come across the meadowlands on your way to Newark you can sit and stare off in the distance at NYC disappearing.