Electric Ladyland

i believe in the power of murphy

here i was just sitting down to write a post called "no love from the cable company" as it looked like, with less than 15 minutes to go, i was going to get stood up for my 2-6pm appointment.  and then the guy showed up!  replaced my ailing cable modem, which has been bonking out and emitting a high-pitched noise.  he'd never heard a cable modem do that either.  well, it did its duty for just about three years.  time to let it rest in peace.  and hello, new cable modem!

hasta la vista

call it a grady move.  the first time i was aware of byung-hyun kim he was the goat not once but twice in the 2001 world series.  i specifically remember seeing him crouched in a near-fetal position on the cover of the new york times and, as i passed, thinking "damn... that's gotta be the worst..."

i never knew we were going to sign him!

i don't know what kind of brain cloud caused that misguided decision.  i was wary of it from day one.  however, i tried.  i gave him the benefit of the doubt.  i really wanted to warm up to him.  and so did the red sox, apparently, but even they had enough.  well, no one would call flipping off the fenway faithful a brilliant p.r. move...  and it seems that the guy who had it in his heart to flip us off also didn't have much of a taste for getting to know his teammates.  over time, that works against you.  people stop trying to meet you halfway and go back to their own corner again.  it's more fun schmoozing with manny and david anyway.

one of my favorite red sox blogs discussed the BK conundrum yesterday, assuming we'd keep him for the coming season and just deal with it somehow.  i wondered how theo would be able to abide by such a situation and apparently the verdict's in:  we traded him!  hallelujah.  i genuinely hope he gets his groove back in colorado.  from what i heard, he used to have some pretty fierce stuff.  now he does have that funky submarine delivery, but the stuff i have yet to see.  come on BK, now's as good a time as any...

spring thaw

today gave me a lot of reasons to have hope.  first and foremost among them:  the weather!  it finally felt like spring.  there was a noticeable moment a few weeks ago when i first heard birds chirping.  today was the first day i saw restaurants put tables outside and people were sitting in them, happy as you please, right on the sidewalk taking in the atmosphere.  how pleasant.  how civilized.

speaking of civilized... since encountering a mind-altering veal porterhouse steak in philadelphia earlier this month i have been wanting to try out a porterhouse cut at home.  tonight was the first attempt.  i got a beef porterhouse from whole foods and did it up with sel de guerande, ground black pepper and a light sprinkling of rosemary to give it fragrance.  threw it in the broiler.  magic happened.  it was a very good thing.

devoured that with a little red kale, which my father has been urging me to try for the last few weeks (he swears it's beautiful in the early morning light).  washed it down with a grenache/syrah blend that one of my favorite wine purveyors billed as the "cotes du rhone destroyer."  them's fightin' words!  sure enough, though, it acquitted itself quite well.

all in all, a thoroughly enjoyable dinner to begin my evening.  now i have homework courtesy of the opera momma:  a close listen to turandot (the sutherland/pavarotti/caballe recording with mehta conducting).  the gypsy papa confirms:  it is guaranteed to stand your hair on end.  after the wine and the steak, i say:  bring it on!

oh yes.  dessert.  i have far too many hamantaschen because my mother offloaded them on to me (she forgets that they crop up at work too... hamantaschen double-whammy!).  in all their apricot splendor they are proving much too irrestistible!!  mrrpphhfffll....

like speaks to like

just when i least expected to, i came in contact with a kindred spirit today and the basis for our connection was our shared ancestry.

while doing interviews for a networking project, i met a frenchman who immediately inquired about my surname and was obviously curious about my heritage, saying that he rarely meets french people in new york.  (that's a common complaint of mine as well.)  his female colleague piped up about the stereotype of french people being obsessed with food and commented that when he was a teenager, his method of rebellion was to eat only fast food for a time.  that really angered his father, who like most french fathers takes food seriously.

i laughed but also immediately understood and said, had i done such a thing, it probably would not have gone over very well in my household either.  i mentioned how when i spent a summer in france, i used to write my father long letters about all the fabulous gastronomic discoveries i was making (brebis, piperade, jurancon, etc...) and how he would reply only to say "tell me more about the food!"  i still have those letters and, honest to god, they put their focus squarely on the food.

so it's a stereotype, i said, but it's true!  and as it turns out, this particular frenchman is quite the gastronome.  he had all the dirt on who alain ducasse goes to for his ingredients and how they're now producing foie gras in new york (i didn't know that!).  we shared some knowing smiles over the glories of d'artagnan and the woman kind of watched our back-and-forth with a "my god, french people really are obsessed with food!" expression on her face.

oh honey, you have no idea.

i tried to rein myself in a bit because i really could have started frothing at the mouth about my most recent passions (armagnac, sancerre, floc de gascogne, the list goes on) but didn't want to leave this poor lady out in the cold.  it's the only occasion i can think of in which i had a very obvious, clear, overt ethnic connection with someone else.  oddly enough, even though western massachusetts is franco central nobody talks about it.  that culture is dying out if not dead.  and francos in the united states, unlike their quebecois cousins, have all but assimilated into the larger mass culture.  what a regret.

there have been many times when i've witnessed americans of other ethnic backgrounds making the connection over some shared experience that brings fond smiles to their faces, but to this point i've pretty much had to seek out that link on my own.  for that reason it was a real pleasure to, simply by chance, fall into this delightful conversation with another french food fanatic.

know your local history

in the "why didn't i know this before?" department:  although i'd heard that shizuoka prefecture, where i lived from 1998-2001, was formerly known as suruga, i knew even at that time that the boundaries were not historically the same as they are now.  suruga was in my mind closer to the center of the prefecture (near shizuoka city, shimizu, etc) and izu was, well, izu.  but i didn't live in either of those areas;  i lived in western shizuoka.  so why is it that only now i learn western shizuoka used to be known as 遠江国 (totomi no kuni)? 

yeah, what's up with that?  i don't recall ever hearing that during the time i was there, although people do refer to that region as 遠州 (enshu), which i gather matches up with how most of the old provinces of japan are referred to these days (甲州、信州, etc).  but i've got to say, i'm almost annoyed that i never knew that. 

but then again, there's a lot i don't know about my home state too.  i once read that massachusetts means "big hill people" in wampanoag, but who's to say if that's true or not.  i only just learned that there's a massachuset language  (wampanoag) and the first bible translation in north america was from english into massachuset.  i'm embarrassed!  looks like i've got to go back to school and start from the beginning.

in modern terms, we still do have that accent in the eastern part of the state (but not in the west, where i'm from -- we use more standard pronunciation except for in the mountain towns like in the berkshires -- it follows geographic boundaries) and we do have our very own words that are unique to new england as well as some phrases and expressions.  case in point:  if you do a merriam-webster search for "grinder," our meaning only shows up fourth (submarine sandwich).  and if you search for "wicked," well, it's just not there at all.  so i shouldn't be too perturbed about not knowing certain things;  some things you just grow up with, like how to pronounce worcester and amherst. 

one thing i have to get off my chest wicked bad:  boston does not equal massachusetts.  if i had a nickel for every time someone said "so, you going back home to see the family in boston?"  i would have paid off my student loans long ago.  boston's great, but it's not where i'm from.  i may make a mean chowdah and root for the red sox, but out where i grew up there is no ocean and there are no skyscrapers -- just cows, hills, and people who look at you funny if they haven't known you for oh, about ten years or so.  good old western mass.

we can do it

ever wonder why some weeks you can't seem to make any forward progress and then the dam breaks and you roll right on your merry way?  today i cruised right in on the steam of the nten conference and mowed down my to-do list, knocking off sick amounts of work.  feeling positive about having checked a couple of key things off now -- they'd been nagging at me for quite a while.  so, for my theme picture of the day i choose this sticker, which a coworker gave to me, of a woman flexing her bicep with the sleeve rolled up.  let's get to work!  note the ethernet cable laying just above.  elbow grease and cabling is what it's been about today.  and fielding sales calls (oy).

didn't let my own personal to-dos slide either, though.  ordered that new battery since no apple store seems to have it in stock, and it turns out i have found a class to prepare me for the japanese language proficiency test i want to take in december.  よかった！

sing till it hurts

last night was t-san's soubetsukai and some of us took it upon ourselves to take him out for one final night on the town.  the program was korean barbeque followed by two hours of (very) enthusiastic karaoke in k-town.  we were up to the task.  yours truly busted out the nihongo vocalizing for the first time in, oh, say about four years?  sang a couple of songs by spitz and one basically unsingable song (too @#%! fast!) by glay .  had a few very amusing in-joke karaoke moments brought to us by (or was it to?) NWF, who no doubt will carry on the tradition in his own way for the next year.  long live nichibei nomunication. 

new york nostalgia pt II

yesterday while on my way to kinokuniya in manhattan, i turned onto 56th street off 7th avenue and got hit by a lightning bolt from the past -- i saw patelson's from across the street.  i hadn't been there in so long!  i snapped this picture with my cell phone and walked in.  it's exactly as i remember it from my childhood.  mom and i used to come here all the time.  i felt this weird energy, this strong deja vu feeling, and wouldn't you know it, the first piece of sheet music that i put my finger on ended up being the malaguena (rumores de la caleta) by albeniz.  spooky!  i wonder what causes those coincidences.  the music/opera books up front weren't as meaty as i remember them being, but then again, the last time i was in there i was so young that my definition of intellectually engaging was a little different than it is now.  anyway, i'm so glad to see that patelson's is still there after all these years. 

goodbye chi-town

i'll be leaving the windy city (which wasn't really all that windy but did represent with its fair share of wet snow and cold temperatures) in a few hours, so i stepped outside during the lunch break to take a few quick snapshots of the environs near our home base for the conference.  note the cubs fan on the left hand side of this picture.  cubbies, the sox finally made it so all eyes are on you! 

ok ok ok, i also went to the apple store and tried to see if they could find a replacement for my crap battery.  out of stock.  soho apple store, expect a visit from yours truly soon (but jeez are they always mobbed... and being soho, they're mobbed with the beautiful people.  i saw seal there once.)  but i did see wifi finders  going for around $30.  saves the trouble of opening up the laptop, booting it up and then scanning for wireless access points.  could be useful. 

so nten.  it's been an all right conference overall so far, but somehow i feel like last year's conference in philadelphia was more fruitful for me.  maybe it's because it was my first time connecting with other nonprofit techies on such a large scale.  a couple of very valuable links were made with people who we definitely need to talk to about key issues on our minds these days, so it's not like it was a waste of time.  i got a lot out of one of the security seminars and have a bunch of ideas about what to get started on when i get back to the big apple.  and -- lovely -- people were sniffing the open wireless network for passwords and other precious data being unwittingly passed to and fro.  some people were surprised to hear that.  i was surprised it was news to them.

i've been reading some of the conference blogs and one of them raised an issue that has come up a lot at mealtime discussions over the past couple of days.  it seems like in some cases these heretofore informative workshops have devolved into vendor presentations.  "introduction to blah-blah-blah" gives them a fig leaf to get you in the door and then before you know it you're half an hour into a presentation on X company's Really Amazing Widget when you could have been at that other intriguing group session down the hall. 

that happened to me once yesterday.  i have nothing against the product they were demonstrating but the moderator simply didn't moderate and it went on for much longer than it needed to.  that product certainly wouldn't have even begun to address our needs as an organization.  did they have a sense of who was even in the room?  anyway, they all seemed like genial people but i got annoyed after a while.  someone i know had come and sat next to me at the beginning and before long he caught wind of it and was out the door, muttering "i'll see you later."  didn't hurt that the wifi connection in that room was broken too.  but i was out the door in about 10 minutes after that myself.  i don't see how my organization would have benefited from my staying in that session.  i just felt bad about crashing another session because the one i was in wasn't what i thought it would be.

oh well.  but even so, i'm glad i came here.  very glad i got to introduce my colleague to the wonders of nonprofit geekdom en masse.  now she has recognized her inner geek and is wearing the moniker with pride.  i fully support that.  the world needs more confident geekgirls.  i bet there's many a hetero geekboy who would be shouting "YES, YES ALREADY!" right about here -- they tend to bemoan the lack of estrogen-rich representation in tech fora in general and last night someone told me that if i went to defcon i would be a lone woman in a sea of men.  given how the geekboys feel about the supposedly unicorn-like geekgirls in general, i suspect i would have to bring my own personal force field along with me were i to go.  don't get me wrong, though -- i loves the geekboys.  and geeks of all stripes.

one quick anecdote to illustrate this:  leaving the banquet hall after breakfast on my way to the first breakout session this morning, i accidentally stumbled into someone's power cable sticking out of the floor.  he tried to apologize to me saying the waitstaff had already warned him he might end up tripping someone, but i was like "no!  i'm glad i finally found out where the plugs were!"  same thing happened here just now as a guy was passing me by.  like me, he was glad to find a power source.  i told him the above anecdote and he just smiled, saying "proof we're all geeks!"  yup.

in the board room

here we are, day 2.  needed lots of morning coffee.  was out late in the rain in downtown chicago first having sushi with a techno backbeat, then riding in a taxi which our somali cabbie rammed into some barrels on the highway, then talking to a famous chicago homeless guy about "getting to the heart" of the matter and eradicating homelessness while my feet froze.  it was actually pretty fun but i was not jazzed about waking up this morning.  now i'm awake thanks to the grace of two cups of coffee.

wireless internet access.  breakout sessions.  the morning plenary was stone-cold boring except for an unexpected moment when someone from the audience got up and basically told the speakers they were full of it and didn't know what they were talking about.  zing.  but the breakout sessions are where ideas can get tossed around more interactively, so here we go.  i've got a lot of questions about network security so here i am about to talk digital cloak and dagger with my peers.  excellent. 

i also notice that many people here are using macs (yay!  the mac cabal!) and, moreover, many of them are using the 15" powerbook g4, as am i.  i still love it dearly.  while walking through downtown chicago last night i passed the apple store, indicated by the white plastic glowing apple placed prominently up front.  i hope to make a quick trip there today.  my battery is next to useless and it's time to get a replacement so my laptop can actually be mobile (fancy that).

have been checking out conference blogs off and on during the past two days.  a lot of people are ripping on the  microsoft guy who they made give a presentation on security (i'll sum it up:  "trust us, we're microsoft") over the din of people trying to eat their lunch.  a lot of people ripping on sessions in general.  given that, i'm going to make my next post focus on the worthwhile aspects of being here (there were many).  i guess it's easier just to carp sometimes, but that's a lazy approach to things.