Claire’s Alternate Version of Reality

Pursuing childhood dreams.  If you haven’t seen Randy Pausch’s talk about pursuing your childhood dreams, please do.  It’s powerful.  And make sure you have kleenex close at hand—lots.

Back in the mid-90s, I took a creative writing class at Stanford, something I’d never had time to do at Brown.  I loved the class.  But after it ended, I dropped it.  My lame excuse:  no time.  Before I knew it, I was pregnant with my first child, juggling work and motherhood, with no time for writing.  Writing wasn’t just in the back seat, it was locked in the trunk somewhere under the spare tire.

What never took a back seat was reading.  The nightstand next to my bed is overflowing.  It turns out that all the years of reading were a good thing. Reading gives you an ear for writing, helps you hear what works, helps you hear when the words are out of tune.  Of all the books I have read, my favorite genre is the mystery novel.  And when I was young, I decided I would write one someday. 

That someday is now.

So for a little while, that’s what I’m doing.  Pursuing my childhood dream and writing a book.  I take my children to school in the morning, swim laps or walk the dog, then write.  I started the book on weekends and plane flights last fall, and I’ve spent the months since January with the goal of writing 1000-2000 words per day.

I finished the first draft of the book in March (w00t!), then set it aside to let it stew.  Now I’m reading it and redlining it and making plans for the second draft.  Wish me luck!

(And for those of you that are curious, I do plan to go back to my first love of hi-tech later this year—after I finish the book.)

January 11th was my last day with A9.com.  I spent an absolutely rewarding roller coaster 2+ years at A9, where I worked with smart people and learned much about online advertising and sponsored link ad networks.   The learnings I’ll treasure most center on customer experience, and how God is in the details when it comes to pleasing (or displeasing) your customers.  I am happy to carry some wonderful friendships with me, and I wish my colleagues at A9 all the best.

Whether it was Randy Pausch’s tearjerk of a talk about pursuing your childhood dreams, or the news that a friend of a good friend died suddenly in her sleep over the holidays, I’m reminded of Robin Williams’s words in Dead Poets Society:  Carpe Diem.  So I have seized the day, and made some changes.  More to come in a later post on what I am doing next.

I remain a fan of Amazon.  Thanks to Amazon Prime, I did much of our Christmas shopping on Amazon, and the logistics of shipping gifts to my family—a family spread across the country—were taken care of.  A few clicks on the mouse, a few taps on the keyboard, and gifts arrived on the right doorstep just 2 days later: it’s a working Mom’s dream.

I first learned to juggle in the hallways of Building 12 in Mountain View, California.  Which was, incidentally, the same place I first learned what a 6.9 earthquake felt like.  Building 12 was an office building in northern California, near the salt flats at the tip of San Francisco Bay, with views of the barren and golden hills of Milpitas.  For the rock music inclined, it was located near an ampitheatre filled with noisy and ecstatic performances by popular bands.  B12 was also home to my first job out of college, and to some file servers that we depended on to do our work.  These servers, named after peanut butters like skippy and jiffy, would go down every few weeks, and it took skippy and jiffy hours - I mean hours - to come back up.  So, we engineers would take to the hallways to juggle.  The senior engineers taught us newbies the tricks of the trade - juggling 3 balls in one direction, passing a ball mid-air to another engineer who would catch it, alternating directions, and for the skillful:  juggling 4 balls.  I had never juggled before and had never wanted to juggle, but I tried, and I learned the basics. Twas fun.

In homage to those first-job days, I still have three red-white-and-blue juggling balls on my desk at work, a gift from a former boss.  The juggling balls are not alone, rather, they have companions:  two blue chinese baoding balls bought in an alley in Shanghai,  a tangle toy, a magic 8 ball, and a popular magnet toy from a New Orleans usenix conference that invites you to roll the magnet back and forth - and back and forth - along a pair of rails, til the cows come home or the meeting is over.  The juggling balls and other toys are for the fiddlers I work with, people who have realized that they think better with busy hands.  People whose hands need to juggle - or fiddle - in order to make things happen.. 

To juggle well requires constant vigilence for me.  But now I’m not talking about the Building 12 type of juggling. I’m talking about school drop-off and pick-up, finding the elusive babysitters who do not have a water polo game so that I can have a date with my husband, managing my priorities at work, planning birthday parties for my children, making plane reservations for our too-few vacations, coaching my children on piano, thinking about the possiblity of  trying to replace my dying garden hedge, reading my books, making time to write, and the list goes on.

But now I have a new trick.  Not new to you, I’m sure, but new to me, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that I’ve rediscovered something I knew all along.  I juggle better with one more ball in the air.  Swimming.  For a half hour I swim, several times a week, and I am alone.  No one can get to me there, well, no one but the large black and white wall clock that times my bliss.  My mind wanders from that pool to the edges of everything.  So many blogs I’ve written in my head in that pool.  And even the beginnings of a few stories.  I can think about  w h a t e v e r  I want when I swim.  I like it there.

The morale of the story:  If you need to juggle, and most of us do, at least those with spouses and jobs and children and to-do lists a mile long, and if you’ve gotten out of the habit of exercising because you just don’t have time, well - stop it!  Make the time.  In the words of some brilliant advertising copywriter, just do it. 

Every Thursday evening, on the way back from accordion lessons in Newport, we would stop for flowers.  Roses, carnations, and countless others.  Rain or shine, in the throes of twilight, we would stop at the same florist and climb out of the car to help make the selection.  I was 12.  I don’t know why my father created this routine  - did he do it to make my mother happy?  Because he liked having flowers at home?  Because he liked giving?  Or did he stop for flowers, with his daughters in tow, in order to teach us about thoughtfulness and perhaps set a standard for the kind of behavior we should look for in a husband someday?  Knowing my father, it was a bit of each.

Today is Dad’s 70th birthday.

The summer before 8th grade, we were sitting around our kitchen table, my younger brother, older sister and parents, eating dinner and talking about the new school year.  My brother asked what algebra was - and I answered with a quip I’d heard from another student - that algebra was (add some adolescent attitude to the tone of voice) - “some stupid math class created to make us suffer.”  Anger flashed in my father’s eyes.  In my 39 years, I can only remember seeing my father lose his temper twice - and this was one of those times.  He firmly corrected my answer, explaining that algebra was a tool used to solve everyday problems, and more importantly he scolded me for repeating the uninformed put-down.  Over the next few years, I loved algebra and geometry, trig and functions, calculus and math team.  But more importantly, because my father lost his temper with us so few times, I came to appreciate his ability to stay calm, to be patient.

In high school, my father and I often ran together on weekends.  He was taller and faster but would slow down for me and we’d run Fisk Hill or Little Pond - about 5 miles.  Worst case, short on time, we’d run The Loop, a wimpy 1.5 mile trip around Bishop Brady.  We ran in sun, in rain, in hail, and even with dustings of snow. At the Lake, we’d run with pesky horseflies in tow, buzzing in and out of my long hair.  Dad would challenge me to run faster and I’d get mad and would end up running faster to tell him exactly why he was so infuriating.  Looking back now, I cherish those runs.  And as a parent, I realize what a smart thing he did by inviting me to run with him.  During those hormonal, self-absorbed high school years, the weekend runs gave us alone time - time to talk and time to not talk - in addition to all the benefits of exercise.  With my brother, the tennis player, my father extended a similar invite, logging hundreds of hours on the courts with John.  What pals they became as a result.  They’re still close to this day.

There are so many lessons that I’ve learned from my father.  Lessons of thoughtfulness and patience.  The importance of spending time with your children on their terms - whether it be running or tennis or whatever their passion is.  Discipline.  A love of reading and an appreciation of libraries.  A belief in hard work.  Faith.  Accepting people for who they are.  The importance of an education.

Since my father is 3000 miles away today,  it’s kind of hard to give him a big bear hug.  So instead, I’m giving him his very own blog entry.  I love you, Dad.  Happy 70th Birthday.

Old habits die hard.

Or so they say.  But what about habits that drift, just out of reach, no longer part of your day to day?  Close - and yet far. How do you get them back?  I suppose it’s true that old habits die hard - but isn’t getting habits back - or giving birth to new habits - harder still?

My high school sports were cross country in the fall and track in the spring, followed by 5k road races in the summer.  Organized to a fault, I kept a running journal, complete with the number of miles run per day and the adolescent musings of a teenage girl.  When I found one of these journals in my parents’ basement last summer, I smiled at the entry that read, “Invited to go to Canobie Lake Park.  Said no - still needed to go running today.”  I was addicted to running - to the endorphins and the meditation and the routine of it.  Until the fall of my junior year, that is, when I damaged my right lateral collateral and was under strict doctor’s orders not to run for a while.  Months later, when it was time to get back into shape, boy oh boy did I struggle to get back to the point where I would turn down a social invitation because “I still needed to go running that day.”  Recapturing that habit of running was hard, hard - did I say hard? - work.

I’ve been taking a creative non-fiction writing class at Stanford since the beginning of April.  Lots of reading in this class - reading books, articles, and perhaps most satisfying of all, reading the evolving writing of the other students in the class.  We tried our hand at writing exercises in class, too - things like “write about your earliest memory” or “write a bio, along the lines of Contributor’s Notes by Michael Martone.”  The writing has been fun - but the workshop has yielded the most mileage for me - deconstructing some great writing to figure out what makes it tick and tock. 

But the class has not been without cost.  I’ve lost a habit.  The spam comments that land in my mailbox remind me - daily, sigh - that there is an Alternate Version of Reality waiting for a post from me.  How to get a habit back?  And why did I let it go?  And is the class just an excuse?  So what if old habits die hard?  I’m more interested in the birth of habits.  Time to get some back.

It was lovely to be at ETech in San Diego last week.  I only had 1-1/2 days to participate but was glad for the chance.  My first ETech was the year before.  In that first year, it turns out that I sat directly behind two A9′ers during a keynote in which Jeff Bezos introduced A9.com’s OpenSearch. Esther Dyson inadvertently caught the seating arrangement on camera.  At the time, I had not yet met the folks at A9 and had no idea that one year later I’d be working there.  Destiny at work, perhaps?  Nah…

I did miss the intimacy of ETech 2005.  That year, we were all crammed into a much spaller space and you couldn’t help but to run into people.  The new location, the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, was elegant but cavernous.  Presumably this year’s conference was able to hold more people, and it sold out, which is good news for the team at O’Reilly I’m sure, but… I did miss the small space.

Highlights of a few of the sessions I attended:

Amy Jo Kim’s “Putting the Fun in Functional” was standing room only and stimulating.  (Slides here.) I’m no gamer, so I found the examples of good game design interesting.  And the suggestion that design principles used in the gaming world could and should apply to the design of the kind of services I work on resonated with me.  The question Amy Jo explored:  How do game mechanics make an interactive experience more fun, compelling and addictive?  I arrived in time to hear example after example of how important Ajax’y-style immediate feedback is to good web design.  Whether you’re talking about Google Maps or Nintendo DS math problem games or BIMactive’s feedback on your morning run.  Amy Jo’s point:  feedback makes even the most mundane tasks more fun.  Amy Jo also looked at the primal nature of using exchange- structured social interactions, whether implicit or explicit - in applications.  Off the internet, examples abound of how exchanges motivate behavior, whether trading, taking turns in a game or giving and receiving gifts.  She also talked about using customization to create barriers to exit and to increase one’s investment in a site.  Amy Jo cited the Amazon.com home page as the first really good example of automatic customization - the home page changes automatically based on your past buying behavior.  Those of us who know and love Flickr appreciate that the Flickr landing page shows us our recent pictures, our contacts’ recent pictures, comments on our photos - it’s customized just for us.  A game called Brain Training keeps track of when you last logged in and if it’s been 3 days, it tells you so - something like “It’s been 3 days since you last logged in!  You really should log in more often.  Here’s what you can do to make up for it.”  Finally, she explored MySpace, and while Amy Jo likened the MySpace customized profile pages to walking into a teenager’s bedroom, she said that’s the point.  The profiles are supposed to reflect the teenager. I missed the first part of the session, which included discussion of collecting and points as tools to motivate gamers - too bad…

I enjoyed Tim Bray’s talk on Atom as a Case Study.  I know Tim from my days at Sun (and probably would not be hooked on blogging were it not for Tim and the other folks who kickstarted blogs.sun.com) and had never had the chance to see him give a talk, so of course I had to go.  And I learned a bunch about Atom - the publishing protocol - in the process.   Tim adeptly explained the case for Atom (which started on the Pie Wiki, because, yes, it was going to be “easy as pie” to draft Atom.)   I love numbers and stats, so I got a kick out of the numbers that describe the Atom standardization process:  17,944 messages taking up 62.4 meg.  And for those of you with nothing to do, Tim asked for a show of hands at the end - of all the bloggers in the room, how many of them are happy, really happy, with their blog authoring software?  I think at most 2 people raised their hands, and yet most of us were bloggers.    Definitely an area of opportunity.

Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software and Betsy Weber of TechSmith gave a joint presentation on “Usability Testing”.  Joel’s opening line made the case:  If you’ve developed a new product or even a version 2.0 of a product, the development process probably took you 6 to 18 months.  You’ve had an enormous amount of time to figure out how the product works   Your users will have about 6 minutes to figure it out.  So invite users in advance to try it out and see how it works.  The goal is not to get stats or do science or to calculate percentages - but to find places where you have usability problems.  One key message: It’s not true that usability testing will take 6-7 weeks and will cost a ton of money. All you need are about 12 people (and usually you’ve found everything by the 5th or 6th person).  You can do the testing in one day.  Another key message from Joel (and hopefully none of his developers were in the room when he said it!):  “The best reason in the world to conduct a Usability test is to drum some sense into your programmer’s heads about what actual human beings are like.”  Finally, one precious quote, “It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong.  Either the customers like your service or they leave.”

The next day Joel gave a keynote titled “Blue Chip Products:  2006 Report Card”.  Joel graded 3 products on their potential to  become a product people love, using the metrics of whether the products:  1) Make People Happy, 2) Think About Emotions, and 3) Obsess About Aesthetics. Those receiving grades from Joel:  reddit.com, Motorola Razr and Pebble phones, and AirSet - a web-based calendar.  Notable quote: Joel’s suggestion that “O’Reilly speak” for the reddit service would be, “The ultimate community-powered folksonomy-driven, longtail-harnessing ajaxified social news and content aggregator leveraging the power of tagging.”  Gotta love it.

The George Dyson talk on Turing’s Cathedral was wonderful.  More on that talk later - George covered so much ground it’ll take its own blog.  In the meantime, as I’ve said before, if you ever get the chance to hear George Dyson speak, take it!< br>

I had one lustful moment in which I found myself coveting NetNewsWire and Macs in general.  I was at a talk by Brent Simmons  (of NetNewsWire fame, recently purchased by NewsGatorOnline.)  While listening to Brent, Tim was simultaneously showing off what he likes about NetNewsWire, which was running on his Mac.  Since I desperately want to be able to catch up on blog reading while on planes, I fell in love with the NetNewsWire syncing capabilities.  But alas I’m not on a Mac.  If any of you have advice, I’m definitely in the market for a more flexible online/offline blog reader.

All in all, one and a half days well spent.  Thanks to the folks at O’Reilly for organizing.

Technorati Tag: etech06

New Sign in Palo Alto
Originally uploaded by clairegio.

Signs are everywhere.  In my day to day I pass street signs, signs for ski lifts, freeway exit signs… The sign for my dry cleaner and my grocery store and my children’s school.  The sign for the North Face store (where I really need to go to buy some new ski gear).  Logos on products and websites. Book covers and New Yorker magazine covers are small signs as well.  Some signs catch my fancy.  At the mountain cabin there’s a sign that says Locanda Giordano (translation of locanda from italian:  rustic mountain inn) which has been there since the cabin was first built and brings to mind the warmth of family and a cozy fire and an escape from the winter cold. 

When I was growing up in New Hampshire my grandparents had a cabin on a small lake.  To get there, we had to drive a half-hour on a 2-lane country “route” and then 5 miles on a twisty bumpy country road and then 1/4 mile down a long dirt driveway.  The long driveways all had wooden signs nailed to the streetside trees with the names of the families who owned the cabins.  Our sign had my grandparents’ first names on it and said “Red and Claire”.  That sign definitely warmed my heart - it symbolized the beginning of a peaceful and magical weekend at the lake.

When I drive by Donner Lake on my way to the mountain where we ski, I see signs posted on trees that mark the location of mountain cabins.  Those signs have unfamiliar names of unfamiliar families on them - but the style is exactly the same as in NH and reminds me of days gone by.

All this musing on the language of signs came to mind when I realized how much I like the new signs that were installed on my office building last month.  It’s a delight to see the A9.com sign, glowing and bright, telling me that I’ve arrived at work in the morning.  And more than a few of my friends have commented that “now we know where you work - we drove by your office the other day and saw the sign”.  So, in the interest of sharing, here is a photo of the new A9.com sign, courtesy of Lionel Bitoun, another talented colleague/photographer at A9.  Enjoy.

Technorati Tag: A9

the bridesmaids and the dog
Originally uploaded by betina.

I just found out that this oh so cool photo taken by Betina Chan, one of my colleagues at A9.com, showed up on the Flickr blog a while back (a great blog, worth checking out if you don’t already subscribe) and now the photo is being picked up by a european print mag as well.  I like it.  Do you?  The juxtaposition is the first draw for me.  The second draw is serendipity - it wasn’t staged, Betina just happened to be in the right place at the right time with camera in hand.  The third draw is the “Do Not Enter” sign.  And last but not least there is the dog, oblivious to the pomp and circumstance of the wedding party.

I’m enjoying getting to know the team at A9 and finding out about their outside-of-work talents.  It turns out there are more than a few photographers in the bunch, Betina included. It’s a good crowd, smart and intelligent.  The true measure, for me, is that it’s the kind of group you want to have lunch with. They make me laugh.  And that’s a good thing.

Technorati Tag: A9

It’s like a bad dream that is always the same.  Here’s how it plays out:  I don’t do something that I know I should do.  Even if I want to do it, I don’t.  Then I feel badly about not doing it.  So I try not to think about it.  Time goes by.  I still don’t do it. It becomes harder to explain why to whoever is on the other end of this delinquence on my part.  So I don’t call.  I don’t write.  I go quiet.  More time goes by.  My at-first innocent lack of action is now an overt act of selfishness. There really is no excuse for my lack of follow-up. What do I say?  So I still don’t do it.  And I say nothing because it feels impossible to apologize.  I’ve dug myself into a hole.

I dug myself into a hole twice last year. 

The first time, a neighbour died and I didn’t write a note to the family.  His death hit me harder than it should have, and I spent weeks and then months thinking about it.  But I couldn’t figure out what to say, so I didn’t write a note.  I know that I have one year to give wedding gifts to newlyweds.  Is there a statute of limitations on letters of condolence?  It’s been 14 months since he died. 

The second time, a good friend had a baby on the East Coast and I didn’t call.  I was away on a business trip, and then on a vacation dealing with all sorts of unforeseen complications, and then I felt so badly for not calling in the first two weeks (after all, she was in the hospital visiting me within hours of my children’s births) that I didn’t call.  Pathetic.  Three and a half months went by before I finally picked up the phone to say I’m sorry and to see how they’re doing and find out more about the little angel.  I think K has truly accepted my apology, but it’ll probably take years to undo the damage.

Why am I writing this?

Today is Sunday, March 5th.  It’s been 2 weeks and 3 days since my last blog entry.  Not quite long enough to constitute the kind of faux-pas I describe above.  No feelings have been hurt.  So it’s not a hole.  But I have felt that good old feeling of Guilt for not blogging.  Of course it’s ski season so we’ve been up in the mountains on many weekends and during the requisite February ski week (the snow has been awesome!).  And my children accused me of being on the computer a tad too much (my words, not theirs), so I have been trying to cut back on the weekends - at least when they’re awake.  And I’m still giving myself time to understand what my boundaries should be at A9.com - between what I can blog and what I should keep to myself.  The “use common sense” mantra is of course the best advice but it helps to understand the culture before applying common sense.  Add it all up and, well, I haven’t been blogging as much.  I intend to get back in the groove, though.  Thanks for being patient.

I love the Winter Olympics. I’m a cold weather person, with New Hampshire in my blood, and a crush on skiing, so, well, it’s no surprise I suppose.  My winter olympic mania made this find all the more sweet to me.  I was browsing Alexa.com this evening and peeked at the traffic ranking page for Sun.com on Alexa.  From Alexa I linked over to my alma mater’s website to see what edgy photography Ingrid’s team was showing on the site today.  Needless to say the photo below caught my eye, and I was pleased to find the this feature about how Sun is powering the NBCOlympics.com coverage of the Torino games.  In particular because the folks at NBC are using the much-loved Solaris 10 Operating System in addition to using Sun gear.  Cool. 

Technorati Tag: Alexa
Technorati Tag: Solaris
Technorati Tag: winterolympics