Electric Ladyland

signs of summer

i saw my first fireflies of the season tonight.  they were glittering in the air on my block as i was walking home.  a little summer magic and time stood still.

office productivity is necessary, mmmmkaaaay?

spent a good portion of today testing intuit's track-it help desk software for IT departments and so far it is really doing what we would need.  it integrates with active directory, handles e-mail based requests that it automatically converts into work orders, enables remote control of users' desktops, and a bunch more.  we may end up going with this solution to manage the volume of user requests we get here (50 people and counting!).  not bad.  makes me feel good to think we might actually have a system in place to deal with this stuff.  tres bon.

and tonight we're taking out an intern for a farewell fiesta before he goes to a brand new job in D.C.  as mike said, "we're going to make him drink a shot for every month he's interned here."  how many months has he been here?  oh wait, that could be a lot of liquor.  on second thought, let's not!  poor boy needs to make it to D.C. in one piece.

tomorrow night is movie night at the office.  what are we watching in the conference room?  office space.  the choice of film is a sly inside joke from one of my coworkers which i know has been utterly missed by the people for whom that joke was intended.  but oh, we'll have fun watching the movie anyway.  it's a great parody of corporate working life in the u.s., cubicle farms and all.

social disease

i'm trying to fight off a cold.  more than a few of my friends at work had various bugs and last week, after talking to one of them, i went home feeling that familiar dreaded energy drain that precedes a cold.  so i made sure to take vitamin C and some zinc, also get a lot of rest.  last night i had been talking to the same person again (can't help it!  i'm social!  and besides, now that i have time i want to see my friends) and was feeling that same energy drain only stronger, so when i came home i tried the vitamin-C-and-zinc approach again.  it felt like that wasn't doing enough, so i went to plan B -- something a nutritionist i used to work with recommended to me years ago:  raw garlic.  (she said the mitochondrials help.)  yikes!  i rarely do this because it's not so pleasant, but mixed up with a small baguette slice i had a clove before going to bed last night.  it worked, though!  i felt much much better almost instantly.

today it's kind of overcast and i feel like i have to monitor my health to make sure i don't end up getting this cold all the same.  i've slept well the past two nights and should make sure i do again tonight.  it's ironic, you know.  now i actually can get sick because i have help at work, but of course who wants to get sick?  and i certainly don't want to get sick when i've got plans to fly to orlando and party with my buddy christy this weekend.  beaches, bars and theme parks!  i certainly don't want to be sick for that.  it's my first trip to florida.

and here's a little anecdote from my childhood which i've been sharing with friends lately.  my dad is, shall we say, not big into leaving his home base in massachusetts (never mind the fact that he's in italy right now -- that's for his career).  when i was a kid, i naturally wanted to go to disneyland.  badly!  and of course i pestered him about it all the time.  one day dad said "okay, get in the car.  we're going" and we drove out for at least an hour until he parked us in front of a sign that read "welcome to florida, massachusetts."  that was my dad's sense of humor.  i was not amused.  i think i was 24 years old when i finally made my first trip to disneyland -- in japan!  it wasn't the same.  it's better for kids.  even so, i know i'm gonna have some fun this weekend provided i stay healthy.

nostalgia train to coney island

today mom and i took the nostalgia train on the sea beach line to coney island as we had a few years back (2002?) and it was even more fun than the last time we went because it included an hourlong tour of the new stillwell station.  it was the perfect thing to do on a warm summer day.  so here are the photos from the trip!

another view of our special train

a reminder that we're in new york, baby!

above ground in brooklyn.  happy transit buffs!

stillwell station as viewed from the overpass

here we are:  coney island!

our train heading out after it has dropped us off

outside the station:  the restored terracotta BMT facade.  a touch of history.

of course we went to nathan's for some hot dogs!

people were out at the beach today swimming, sunbathing and fishing.

tranquility on the shore

our train returning to pick us up in the afternoon

people gazing out the window

transit buffs snapping photos as we passed the famous cyclone rollercoaster

and when i said transit buff i wasn't kidding!  this guy got the whole experience on video.  i saw him once on a documentary about nyc transit buffs.  it was cool to see people so excited about the subways.

... and that's all she wrote!  what a lovely day. 

who's a good american?

after several days of absolutely perfect weather i hear we're in for another heat wave.  i could feel the humidity rising tonight and eventually gave up, turning on my air conditioner.

when i got home from work tonight i was feeling the energy drain you get when you might be coming down with a cold.  figures because three people i'm friendly with at work have been sick recently.  but i fought it back with a robust dinner and then curled up to watch star wars (episode IV).  after having seen episode III i have to say it was very intriguing to note the references i didn't get before.  a few of the blanks got filled in.

feeling a little distracted.  back at wikipedia (my bad habit -- i consume information like some people eat pringles) and i found an interesting little article on hyphenated americans.  it contains this quote from none other than president roosevelt:

"The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. ... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else."

obviously i disagree.  you can maintain a link to your heritage while being every bit as american as mom and apple pie.  this either/or concept of american identity (you're either with us or you're against us?) also doesn't fit with our sentimental ideal of the melting pot.  besides, that's half the fun.  you're friends with so-and-so who's from such-and-such background and while talking to that person you learn about all sorts of things you never would have known before.  if we're all supposed to shut up and assimilate we're going to lose a lot in the process.  the diversity is the interesting stuff, after all.  what did spock say?  infinite diversity in infinite combinations?  so bah on what roosevelt said.  i'll continue to eat my stinky french cheese and still be a good american (notice he didn't say real american), thank you very much.

yeah, wikipedia'll keep you up late.  i found the above article while aimlessly roaming through stuff on the chinese diaspora.  cultural mixing and blending fascinate me.  when two cultures synthesize a third how do you trace the original influences?  and then sometimes you can have several levels, complicating it even further.  the other day a chinese-american friend of mine took me down to chinatown to pick up some lunch for everyone at the office and we went to one regular chinese place but also stopped in at a vietnamese place.  he explained that the vietnamese in chinatown were mostly of chinese descent themselves.  so you've got chinese, american-born chinese, vietnamese-chinese, and so on and so forth.  it does get rather intricate.  but interesting, no? 

and how do you relate to someone with whom you have a common ethnic link but may not have a common tongue?  i still haven't run across this much in my own life because the french are either in hiding or i'm not looking hard enough for them.  it's been a while since i compared notes with someone else of french descent.  that's partly why i read the romeo dallaire book on rwanda a little while back -- it opened my eyes to a few layers of french influence.  so in this case it was a french american reading about a french canadian leading a mission in francophone africa at times involving french-speaking belgians and actual french french.  got all that?  yup, it does get a bit complicated indeed.  but oh so interesting.  the layers are what intrigue me.

a trip to coney island

today i went with my new hire to coney island for a demonstration of citrix.  a bit farther than we would usually journey for a demo, but it was actually well worth the trip.  we learned a lot about how the software functions and what its features are.  both of us came away feeling like we'd gained a solid introductory understanding of what it can do.   now we've got a lot of food for thought as we plan how we want to implement this in our network.

it was also nice to be treated to a view of the newly renovated stillwell station, which is beautiful, and a few of the other well-known pleasures of coney island.

first and foremost is nathan's, the venerable institution of the neighborhood.  you cannot travel to coney island without having a hot dog here.  they actually have other food too, but unless i lived in the neighborhood and ate there often i don't think i could pass up the opportunity to have one of their hot dogs.

and so i got one!  got a "medium" coke which ended up being way too large for me, but oh well.  at one point we could see the beach and we did pass by the cyclones' ballpark on the way to the demo, so i got to thinking that maybe i should plan a trip to coney island on my own sometime this weekend or in the near future.  had i not been going back to work i would have ambled onto the beach for a view of the ocean.

if i had any doubts before, i have none now.  summer's here.  hooray.

new to lambdamoo

i've been spending some time the past few nights searching technorati for blogs related to some of my interests.  tonight it's lambdamoo and i am disturbed to discover that the freshest posts seem to be from college students who are checking out lambdamoo as part of their classwork!  you know they're not too familiar when they call it lambdamoo.com.  there is no lambdamoo.com.  it's telnet lambdamoo.mud.org 8888 folks!

as these young people point out, lambdamoo is not a chat room but a text-based environment with user-created spaces and objects.  starting out in the house itself, you can wander from room to room until you stumble across someone interesting to talk to (less and less likely to happen from a posting i read on one of the lambdamoo bulletin boards today decrying the decline of good conversation on the moo) or find a space whose description was particularly well crafted. 

i don't know.  i've been there a long time and it's hard to shake the snobby feeling that many of us once had towards the AOL crowd back in the early 90s when the mega-ISP and purveyor of CD frisbees first joined the internet.  i guess it's a good thing that some people are discovering lambdamoo for the first time, although i wonder just how they found out about it what with all these GUI-based chat environments out there on the net now.  looks like they were all assigned it in class.  weird.  i was on lambdamoo while avoiding school, not studying for it. 

meh.  however they're getting to lambdamoo, it doesn't really matter.  hopefully they'll find it interesting for longer than it takes to do their coursework.  in the meantime, ladies & gents, welcome aboard and watch out for the pervs.

coming back out to play

maybe it's too early for predictions but i think i may have finally entered the promised land of having a reasonable workload and i can almost feel myself relaxing from the inside out.  so, feeling like i have more time, i've been catching up with some friends.  last night i went to dinner at sobaya with a fellow geekgirl who i hadn't seen in about two years.  i'd forgotten how much i like sobaya too -- you come out feeling so healthy after eating there.  on the way out, as she and i were strolling about the east village, i saw these blue hydrangea in bloom.  it's so nice to see all the different flowers showing their summer glory.  they keep me feeling positive.  my nasturtiums and zinnias at home are continuing to grow so quickly now that they have a sunny spot in which to bask.  all of nature seems to be conspiring to tell me:  "you can relax now!  have a little fun!"

or at least i hope this is the case.  i think this is more internal than anything.  i don't even know when it started, but at some point the job was so intense that if something fun came along i thought "i don't have time for that."  i could feel the pressure from my job shutting down my social life bit by bit -- no more book club, no more JETAA activities or being vice president for the group, etc.  the only thing i held on to was calligraphy.  a few months ago when i was reunited with a friend i hadn't seen for far too long she said "well, if things were so hard as they obviously were, why didn't you just call me?"  hard to explain, and i'm not even sure i know anyway.  i think i just felt like i had to hunker down until things cleared up, and that didn't happen for a long time. 

i am a social person but when i'm under stress i don't tend to reach out.  what with our office crammed full of people as it was, i think i was also suffering from people overload -- too many people coming at me all the time.  at the end of the day all i wanted was to go home to one voice and regenerate in the silence.  i usually felt better when i did that.  but that usually meant that i was either in "work time" or "recovering from work time" and over a long period, that's not a lot of fun.  but now, if things continue like they have been, that's going to change.  i couldn't be happier about that.

sleepy sunday

went to sands point on long island today with mom and her husband.  we picnicked out by the sands point preserve and talked politics and religion.  i learned that syrian jews are considered sephardic, as i had guessed.  mom found out how little i learned about the holy land in sunday school.  after we solved all the world's problems over lunch (don't we wish) we got a guided tour of the old guggenheim house, falaise.  that was interesting from a historical standpoint and the views of long island sound were beautiful.  being out there reminded me that it's about time to start hitting the beaches again.  i've got my beach bag and my bathing suit.  next weekend, maybe. 

was just a quiet day.  got home around dinnertime, so i went out to pick up some groceries and then returned home to saute myself a very small steak with some herbed tomatoes.  i've been cooking a lot with white wine lately and thought i might use it to doctor up some onions, but i ran out of the wine making oeufs en cocotte with leeks and shallots this morning.  tonight i just had to go with butter and spices instead, but it turned out well.  i'm continuing to explore more things in the kitchen and filing the worthwhile discoveries away in my mind for future reference. 

guess that's it.  it was a slow day.  i could really feel it early in the evening as i was walking back from the grocery store before dinner looking at the cumulus clouds against a blue sky and feeling stillness in the air.  nowhere particular to go, nothing particular to do.  it was actually really nice.

tokyo calling

just got off the phone with my friend who i call my oniichan in tokyo.  i got to catch up on his news and share a bit of mine, and it was a breath of fresh air just talking to him.  with some friends it's like that -- you talk and it's like you pick up right where you left off.  turns out he's coming home for a visit in october to see the fall foliage.  as a fellow new englander, he knows the compelling urge that draws us home every year come october to see the mountains on fire.  i too have plans to go back home to get my fill of foliage, but then i'm off to japan in november for my first visit in four years and i'll get to see him again in tokyo.  luckily for me oniichan, also a foodie, has promised to take me to tsukiji.  yay!  with all this talk of the sushi we're going to eat i'm getting hungry.  but i'll hold on until the fall. 

he called from the office, working on a weekend.  i was working too earlier today and my work went so well (surprisingly so) that the rest of the day felt like a breeze.  could it really be that things are calming down now?  for the first time in a long time i have reason to hope.  i won't rush to any conclusions but so far things are looking good.  it would be nice to stop and smell the roses once in a while.