Goodbye, Blogger.

I used to blog here with Ehren. We shared an office, and we blogged to entertain each other.
Johanna and Shital were co-workers, who posted once or twice each.
Ehren stopped blogging about six months in.
In 2008, I started using Facebook and my blogging slowed dramatically.
In 2011, I left the organization we worked for, and not-entirely-coincidentally started blogging on Wordpress.
In 2012, Ehren moved to California and was Hardly Ever Heard From Again.
So, this blog is dead.
Bits of it are preserved over on my Wordpress blog, "Words | Web | Woad", at www.simoneparrish.com, where I'm still fairly lackadaisical.
The End.

I am not your target audience.

Not Your Target Audience I

Dear Hotel Chains:
Now that I am past the stage of life in which most people I know got married, I typically stay in one hotel a year. (This is whatever hotel the Nonprofit Technology Conference is in.) Sending me email for the rest of time about an $89 sale at your hotel in another city is wasting my time, and yours. Unsubscribe.
Sincerely,
-Me

Not Your Target Audience II

Dear Hulu:
It's nice that you ask me "Does this advertisement apply to you?" Have you noticed yet that I have clicked "No" on every single ad you have shown me that is not for REI or Subaru?

Not Your Target Audience III

You know how many calendars they have at Barnes & Noble? Lots, right? I hate them all.

Is good the enemy of the good?

11NTC was all a-buzz about NPower's Community Corps. As far as I can tell, Community Corps and Civic Actions' Geek for Good (which I caught some buzz about last year) are directly competing for the same eyes. They are both online services matching geeks (who have skills and time) with nonprofits (who have tech needs). Is Community Corps's clarion call the death knell of Geek for Good? I didn't hear any talk about the overlap, and Geek for Good's site doesn't have easy contact info. I just posted a contact form to Civic Actions, so stay tuned. (I guess. Not that any of you are tuned.)

Queen of the Universe, 10 & 11

10. Do you own or rent a property which has sidewalks that other people might have to walk or push a stroller or use a wheelchair on, ever? Has there been wintry precipitation recently? It's your responsibility to make your walk safe. No snow. No ice. Wide enough for wheels. If you can't do it yourself, my benign government will have a postal-code/neighborhood-searchable "Get shoveling help" app, so you can find paid or free assistance. If someone slips and falls on your property because you just didn't bother, there will be severe consequences. (For example, making you Snow Remover For Life. for your whole block.)

11. Highway sign change: Any sign that now says "Do not pass" or "No passing zone" will become "None shall pass!!"

Queen of the Universe Proclamation #9

100-year ban on all commercial fishing and ocean-based fish farming. (Sustainable inland farming is OK, like catfish and tilapia and barramundi. Also OK if you actually catch a fish yourself.)

Queen of the Universe, continued

7. Biting insects and blood-borne pathogens, begone! But with some kind of "don't screw up the entire food web/population balance" rider.
8. There's got to be some kind of population control. I know this is going to be why the peasants rise up and burn me in my palatial roundhouse, but I think there are too many people. Finding new ways to grow more food seems like a losing proposition, eventually, what with our planet being finite and all. Best suggestion so far: Everyone is reversibly sterilized at birth, no exceptions. Then, after you turn 21, if you want kids, you apply for a breeding license. At first I don't think there will even be any more hoops than that. You apply for one, you get one. Like a fishing license.

When I'm Queen of the Universe

I was gonna write these up in a Facebook note but then I got all paranoid about ownership and copyright issues. Weird.
Anyway: My Queen of the Universe Platform / List of Proclamations

1. Proselytization is punishable by death. Zero tolerance. You want to set up a storefront or a website or a mail-order business telling people about your god(s), have at it. But you start knocking on people's doors or invading their countries and telling them they have the wrong gods, and you will vanish without a trace.
2. All public trash cans that look like barrels with two legs and round heads shall be painted to look like R2D2.
3. Some kind of kilt subsidy. I used to think I would proclaim Tuesdays as Utilikilt Day, but I don't want to make it too structured. I just want more men to wear kilts, more of the time.
4. Ban advertising. (In part just to see what happens if people only buy things they actually need, or that they happen across and find delightful. Also because I think advertising is a corrosive force, spiritually and psychologically speaking.)
5. No patents for life forms. I feel like genetically modified organisms are a giant Promethean Frankenstein nightmare waiting to happen, but I also think that viral genetic medicine is interesting and potentially beneficial, and I love the Golden Rice concept, so I don't really know how far to take this one.
6. No Christmas music before Thanksgiving. And no "holiday medleys" of any kind. The severest penalties will be reserved for medleys of holiday music composed after 1900, played on "classical" instruments like violins and cellos and piano, and then broadcast by stations that should be playing actual classical music.

Don't watch this space.

I haven't been blogging.
I blame Facebook.
Friend me there: http://www.facebook.com/simone.parrish.
I'll probably still post here sometimes.
Ehren never blogs, ever.
And he isn't even on Facebook.
I'd be happy to hear your opinions on how long a blog can go without a post before it should declare itself to have joined the choir invisible.

Sightseeing

Lunch walk today was Mission: Ducklings.
Lafayette Park: Cordoned off due to a demonstration/protest of some kind. Couldn't get close enough to see what the issue was. No ducks at all.
Constitution Gardens: Many, many ducks and ducklings (including very sweet little peeping noises from the underbrush), and two herons, possibly great blues (which eat ducklings), and several geese but no goslings.
19th & Penn: Hillary Clinton crossing the street. (No ducklings in her modest entourage.)
I Street between 19th & 18th: The Giant Inflatable Rat. (No ducklings there, either.)

I ATE'NT DEAD

I just haven't been blogging much since I started playing with Facebook.
I have limited social media bandwidth.
But from the Mutant Super Power file, I was watching The Riches yesterday (on DVD), and a new character named Eamon Quinn appeared on the screen, and I thought "Huh, he looks really a lot like Richard Harris."
Eamon is played by Jared Harris.

Lantern-bearers and Ada Lovelace

I love the idea of Ada Lovelace day. I've known her name since I was maybe nine because my dad had a crush on her. I've been thinking about the women who are my technology role models, and the person who floats to the top is Jeanne Kramer Smyth.
Jeanne's not famous. She's not a household name. But in her enormous social and professional network (in which she plays a vital node-like role, gathering people and keeping them connected), she is a go-to person for technical advice. She has a voracious appetite for new ways of managing information and connecting people to each other and to the information they need. If anyone has a question about search engine optimization or RSS or piping or blog templates or visualizing information, it's Jeanne we call.
I became an IT professional by accident, and I still feel quite seat-of-the-pants a lot of the time. Jeanne's example of how far noodling around can get you has been very inspiring to me. She has traveled the paths, and her light still clings there, tracing the paths for others. She sees possibilities that would never occur to me, but seem obvious once she lays them out. I feel less lost when I'm exploring something new, because of the way she sets out exploring. She is a dear friend, but I'm not sure I've ever told her how important she is to me from this technical and professional perspective, so this post is a little tribute to her. She's my Ada Lovelace Day pick. She blogs at http://www.spellboundblog.com/.

Kindred spirits

Check it out: A jargon-checker called, beautifully, "Bullfighter".
It just gives me a warm, I'm-not-alone feeling.
I haven't tried it out yet. I'm just happy someone developed it. And it's free.

Got corks?

I was looking for shelf pins (which I've just discovered is the official name for the little pegs that hold bookshelves up), and I found this website, widgetco.com. Manufacturers and purveyors of the small and practical. Which reminded me that for a couple of years I've been meaning to buy lots of tiny bottles. With tiny corks. Whee.

The world is now better.

Noteflight is a free (well, it's free now, 'cause it's in beta; not sure if they'll charge for it later) online musical notation system that lets you share scores with other people.
OMG.

Catching up

Wow, a 6-week blogslack. I blame Facebook.

Couple of things:

Macromediocrity: This bit of sophomory goes straight to the heart of why we started this blog in the first place (remember, it was about American culture rewarding the lowest common denominator). The article I link to above is all happy about the possibilities for independent developers making a living from creating applications for the iPhone. I'm happy about that too. I'm just kind of crestfallen that, given a tool with the tremendous capacity for communication and learning that the iPhone has, people want more than anything for it to make rude noises[1].

More things in heaven and earth [2]:
- Frogs eat bugs. It's the way of the world. But did you know that there are wasps that eat tadpoles?! (Dragonflies eat tadpoles, too. But somehow I found that less surprising.)
- World's smallest chameleon! (For some reason this one is in Tokyo, even though they come from Madagascar.)
- Check out the snoutiness! It's a shrew the size of a rabbit which got discovered last year.

[1] Thanks to Will for the link.
[2] I've been watching Life in Cold Blood.

Mmmm, brains.

It's not what you think.

We had our office holiday lunch today at Bistro d'Oc.[1]
Brains were on special.
I got to say to Johanna, "Do you want to split some brains?" to which she replied, "Yeah, that would be great"--not one of your more usual conversations, I think you'll agree. (Well, outside the context of a zombie invasion, obviously.)
They were lamb brains with lemon and capers and noisette butter, and they were a fine thing indeed.
Johanna cheerfully admits to suggesting Bistro d'Oc for the holiday lunch "because they serve offal." I was most impressed that several of our less-culinarily-adventurous coworkers tried a little bit of brains ("Can I taste your brains?"). I don't think they'll ever order them on purpose, but they didn't spit them out or anything. (Hilariously, later in the meal, I did have to spit out a little bit of fig spread. I'm twitchy about figs at the best of times, and I was expecting it to be tapenade. Blick.)

[1] I'm kind of mystified by the online reviews of Bistro d'Oc, many of which are savage. We had a 12-person holiday lunch (reservations for 14, but two couldn't make it). When we arrived, the room was set up with two tables--one of 6 and one of 8. Our executive director asked the waiter if he could rearrange the tables so we could all sit together. He did so. He recommended gorgeous and inexpensive wines and described them accurately. He knew what went into everything on the menu. It's a bistro, and it does it well. It's not a high-end haute cuisine celebrity chef experience, but if you know your charcuterie and succulent cheeses and duck confit, it's good for what ails you . I feel as though a lot of the reviewers don't understand what a French bistro is; either they don't like French food, or they were actually looking for a bar.

New respect for flying rats

Yesterday on my walk I noticed an explosion of pigeon feathers on the lawn of the Ellipse. It wasn't gory, but it was impressive. Definitely a whole pigeon's worth. "Huh," thought I, "I wonder what's hunting the pigeons?" Red-tail hawk was my first thought. Then mere minutes later as I was crossing the Washington Monument grounds, I had my answer: Two birds came haring into my field of vision, right on top of each other, flying all rickety in what looked like close formation, until one veered off suddenly to safety among a little copse of (I think) old cherry trees, and the other swooped up to take a scanning perch on a much taller tree at the edge of the lawn. Not a red-tail; a peregrine falcon. Very pointy. Wings almost like a seagull at first glance. Knowing that a pigeon can outmaneuver a peregrine in (pretty much) level flight gives me new respect for pigeons.

Macrobeauty

High-speed photography of colorful water droplets. I'm not sure where the color comes from (lights? paint?) but they sure are cool. Thanks to Will for the heads up. (Oh, upon further investigation: it is paint.)

Eerie.

While taking my pulses this morning, my Chinese doctor (hereinafter referred to as JPG, which are his initials, not a file extension) asked me if I had a cold. "Mmmaybe," said I. "Not a cold, I don't think. Just the sniffles."
During my lunchtime walk I was meditating cheerfully on the pleasingness of the expression "the sniffles". All onomatopoeiac and quaint, like "the ague." Plus it's fun to say. Sniffles.
Now I'm pretty sure I do have a cold. All kinds of sneezing and nose-blowing and itchy throat. Booooo. But good on JPG for being able to tell me I had a cold eight hours in advance of me becoming aware of it.

Humor!

I'm not generally a big humor-forwarder on the tubes, but Darth Vixen sent me this "Font Conference" and I thought I'd pass it on.