Years ago now I read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and was enchanted by the idea that some day, somewhere in the future, you could make a living out of knowing what was cool when you saw it. That by drifting through odd places, odd flea markets, odd corners of the web, you could be one step ahead of the pack. (In reality, these people already exist in the fashion and music industries, but, alas, I'm not hip enough to run with those packs. Geeky engineers are never introduced to the "talent".) But now and then I can surprise my husband with briefly brushing up against the cool.

Friday night I accidently discovered that the punk band, Bowling for Soup, was playing for free at the Alameda County Fair. (Nominated for a Grammy in 2003 for their song, "The Girl All The Bad Boys Want" in the "Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal" category. A small stage in the corner of the fairgrounds, very relaxed, no security, cameras welcome. If only we could see all our favorite bands that way. :)






And yes that is an In And Out Burger paper hat that he borrowed from someone in the crowd while singing "Almost".

The list of books I've read in the second quarter of 2009.

1. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
   
2. A Traveller's History of North Africa by Barnaby Rogerson from my Morocco Reading List
   
3. Sunnyside by Glen David Gold
   
4. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith [Review]
   
5. The Meaning of Night: A Confession by Michael Cox
   
6. City of Thieves: A Novel by David Benioff from my Russian Reading List
   
7. Daemon by Daniel Suarez [Review]
   
8. Rodin: A Biography by Frederic V. Grunfeld [Review]
   
9. My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk from my Nobel Prize for Literature List [Review]
   
10. Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War by Robert Roper [Review]
    
11. The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier by Michelle Green from my Morocco Reading List
    

This probably hasn't come up in conversation, but I am fatally attracted to stolen obelisks. I found my first stolen obelisk in Rome behind the Pantheon in the Piazza della Minerva 10 years ago, set on the back of a marble elephant carved by Bernini. Since then, I've deliberately gone out of my way to search for them.

The idea of these enormous monoliths being carried by ship around the world, the engineering feat to reseat them in a new environment, what is this hold that ancient Egypt has on us? That Babylon, Carthage, and Assyria did not?

So, of course, while in New York, I had to go to Central Park and find the obelisk.



It's called "Cleopatra’s Needle", originally carved from pink Aswan granite in 1400 BC-ish as one of a pair of obelisks to celebrate the third jubilee of Thutmosis III, an Egyptian pharaoh, for the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis on the Nile River. "Repurposed" by Caesar Augustus, who brought to Alexandria in 12 BC. for the Caesarium, the temple for Julius Caesar. Donated in exchange for foreign aid and remounted in Central Park, January 22nd, 1881. The other obelisk from the pair is in London.

Oh, the best part is that under each corner of the obelisk is the a bronze sea crab (an 800 pound bronze crab).



When humans are long gone and the cockroaches have evolved into intelligent life forms, what stories will they make up about our scattered spires of stone?

I have never been off the highway into Sand City and yet Dean and I found ourself in an odd industrial area followed by a police car looking for a bar / cafe where Andrew and Morgan were playing.



My niece, Morgan, between songs, Big Tree



Her brother, Andrew, Andrew Heringer Band

They had some weird blue / purple rock and roll lighting, so I fell back to black and white.

It's not politically correct of me to love the African / Oceania carvings and masks, the dance costumes, the strange primitive shapes dragged upward from the cave of dreams. I'm supposed to be all modern and slick, the strong, clean line, Bauhaus and titanium. But the more we deconstruct ourselves, the more complicated we become.



Ah, the simplicity of unreconstructed creation. Something done once and then left alone.

If you write software for Windows, then you probably already know about Windows Error Reporting which is a service that Microsoft provides to give you incredibly valuable information about how your application crashes out in the wild and how many times. This data feed is heartbeat for how you're doing out there. So, I use this service a lot. Unfortunately, a year and a half ago, they were switching things around, going through a bad period and the latency, the period of time between releasing an application and when you started to get the data from it had gone up to 2-3 weeks. And because my application gets in cycles where we are doing multiple releases one after the other in a short period of time, they were missing entire release cycles. I wasn't getting the data from the previous release before the next release had to go out the door.

During this period, they were having phone conferences about some service they were working on, new interesting ways of data mining this information. And I lost my temper with them, send them a snarky remark that said, you're doing great things, but it's like putting lipstick on a pig. You're going to have the world's most beautiful pig, but I want the bacon. Where's my bacon?

I've moved on. Their latency has improved significantly. I'd forgotten about this remark. Until yesterday when we're up here in Redmond, going through so many meetings with different people that they put us in one place and the various groups come to us. So, we all kind of trickled into the conference room and as each one of them came in, they looked at me and said, you're LeeAnn? Six engineers, one of them female, I must be LeeAnn.

It turns out that my email had a big effect on their group. They pinned it to the wall and used my snarky remark to rally the engineers to fix the problems with latency. Directors commented on it. T-shirts were made that said something about bacon, tasty bacon on them. (No, I didn't get to see the t-shirts.) Apparently I am well known by their team. Not because I complained, because everyone was complaining about that problem, but because I was snarkiest.

I am quite embarrassed that this will be my legacy.

And of course the children must be forced to sing. (Recorded on my iPhone with the QuickVoice Pro application.)





What do people think? Should I bother to drag the biodiesel instant film camera all the way from Seattle to New York next week?

It was raining, it was cold with the wind blowing in off the bay, there's mass hysteria right now about the swine flu and large public gatherings. An SF giants employee on the loudspeaker ordering you not to touch the baseball players, do not shake their hands. It was not the carefree sunny afternoons of some of the other fan photo days.

So, I give the players great props for going out before the game and giving the fans a wave.



      

Fortunately the stadium (because it's sponsored by the phone company) is a wireless hotspot. Which means that you can go to the team roster web pages with your iPhone and look them up. If you can shout out the name of the player as they walk by, they're more likely to stop and give you a smile.

When last we left our heroine, she was gamely trying to make it through the 1259 song BitTorrent feed from South by Southwest. The results to date are:

1259 total songs
640 played
323 immediately deleted
120 marked to interesting enough to play again
3 marked as potentially interesting but unlistenable production quality, look for song on iTunes store

The 8 songs that I've marked for my personal favorites, the keepers so far, are:

It's been a while since I've done this, posted the music I'm listening to this week. Maybe next time, it'll even be a little happier music... (Not all of these songs unfortunately are available on iTunes. In those cases, I've linked to the band, but, with the exception of Elemento P, I like the song in the SXSW feed better than what the band has up on iTunes.)

Song	Artist	Album
Baby Come On	Elemeno P	Elemeno P
Buildings & Mountains	The Republic Tigers	Keep Color
Little Toy Gun	HoneyHoney	First Rodeo
Ex-sensitive	Ben Jelen	Ex-sensitive
All the Money I had is Gone	The Deep Dark Woods	Winter Hours
Keep on Walking	Mad Juana	Bruja On the Corner
A Roda	Ôxe
The Plank	The Devil Makes Three	The Devil Makes Three

We made a half-hearted attempt to invite people over for Easter dinner, but it's Easter and it's spring and everyone was already committed to something. So Dean and I had dinner alone at the dining room table with the door open so that the smell of the orange tree in bloom filled the house.

The menu:



Homemade curry carrot soup with a dollop of sour cream
Three seed sourdough bread



Oven roasted asparagus with a sour cream ham gravy on the side (served on the homemade cherry blossom platter I hand-carried back from Tokyo)



Rosemary encrusted garlic infused roast of lamb with homemade blueberry chutney on the side



And for dessert, baked lemon pudding served cold with whipped cream and fresh cut strawberries

And a bottle of my favorite 2001 Robert Sinskey Vineyards Pinot Noir, the last bottle of it off my wine rack.

The list of books I've read in the first quarter of 2009. If it's a bit eclectic, I've been trying to clear the older, I-don't-know-where-I-got-it stuff off the shelf.

1. Seven Viking Romances (Penguin Classics) translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards
   
2. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
   
3. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann [Review]
   
4. The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
   
5. The Life and Times of Chaucer by John Gardner
   
6. Captain Freedom: A Superhero's Quest for Truth, Justice, and the Celebrity He So Richly Deserves by G. Xavier Robillard [Review]
   
7. Passing Strange by Martha A. Sandweiss [Review]
   
8. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño [Review]
   
9. The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca by Tahir Shah, from my Morocco Travel List
   
10. My Century by Günter Grass, from my Nobel Prize for Literature List
    
11. The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence by Martin Meredith, from my African Reading List
    
12. Annie Leibovitz at Work by Annie Leibovitz
    
13. Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel L. Everett
    
14. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
    

The music from SXSW 2009 is available as a BitTorrent feed. 1259 free songs, which if I'm correct is not even 1 per band playing at SXSW.

It's an enormous, artery clogging, funnel cake of music. Because once you download it, you have to listen to 1259 songs, many of them which sound as if they were recorded by sticking a tape recorder at the foot of the band in a small bar with a low ceiling. We make a game out of it — oh, that one wants to be Echo and the Bunnymen, that one wants to be Grace Slick fronting the Sex Pistols, that one wants to be Bob Dylan, etc. I organize them into a playlist, then a smart playlist of music from that playlist that haven't been played and quickly skip through, rating the songs I might want to listen to again, the ones skipped without playing to the end are immediately deleted.

So, then I'll end up with a list of a couple hundred and listen to them again to find the ones I think will regularly make it into rotation. Last time I did this, I ended up with a "Best of ..." playlist of 30 songs or so that I've listened to frequently enough. I'll let you know what I come up with this time. Here's the list of some of my best of SXSW songs from 2006 (at least the songs in the store).

I asked Augustine once why he needed so many French PhDs. Is France really the only place to find anyone with this particular expertise? And the answer I got back (and I'm sure I'm paraphrasing) was that if you were looking for someone to mine coal, you would go to Wales. If you were looking for someone to man an oil rig, you'd go to Texas. If you wanted someone to shoot you with a blow dart, you would go to the Amazon basin. If you were looking for someone to roll in huge piles of money and then set it on fire, ruining your economy, you would go to Wall Street.

Apparently the only place to find these experts are somewhere in the vicinity of Paris.

March 22nd, Bridal Veil Falls across Yosemite Valley in a snowstorm



We woke up on Sunday to a foot of fresh snow. And Yosemite is fabulous in fresh snow, the quality of light and cold stone. If I'd been alone I would called in sick for Monday and spend the day up at Tunnel View (which is the classic Ansel Adams vista) waiting for breaks in the clouds. But we had to head home. I took a couple shots.



March is when the Western Redbud Tree blooms and I took us out the El Portal / Merced River Canyon route hoping to get those beautiful scarlet flowers against the snow, but it's been cold and wet for the last 2 months and the trees are still about a couple weeks from blooming.



This one was much further down toward the valley.

We went hiking across Yosemite Valley and up to Vernal Falls on Saturday. It was pouring rain with sudden bursts of hail the size of cherry pits. So of course the conversation turned to whether this would fall in the top 10 or even 20 of forced marches I've forced my husband on.

The top forced march would be the Chilkoot Pass in Alaska, the route the miners took for the Yukon gold rush. We made the hard hands and knees scramble up to the pass with full packs on and then at the top we were still 4 miles and 3 frozen lakes from the campground (and because it's a historical route you can't just camp anywhere) and it started in with the freezing rain. My husband refers to it as "that time you gave hypothermia".

The number 2 forced march was the Sawtooth Mountains on the border of Idaho and Montana where we went for a week long backpacking trip in early June. And the rivers were enormously, unexpectedly high with snow melt and butt ass cold. So, we were using downed trees across the water as bridges. I apparently was going too slow, what with the large backpack and all, so my husband decided that the way to speed things up was to stand at the far shore and yell at me. On the second day, I managed to slip on the log and twist my knee. I limped on to the spot where we camped for the night, but the next morning one knee was twice as large as the other. So, Dean decided that if we stayed it would just get worse and I would be stuck. He took most of the weight from my pack and forced marched me back in one day the route that had taken up 2 days. (And, of course, back across all those logs.) In his version of the story, this is much tougher for him than it is for me.

The third more popular forced march was last winter at Año Nuevo where the elephant seals come to mate and give birth. And you have to make reservations months in advanced for the ranger walks to see the elephant seals. Of course, the January weekend I chose in October, was this enormous 100 year storm. Heavy, heavy rain, high winds uprooting trees and downing power lines, lightening, high surf. And I drug Dean out into this, down to the ocean to see the elephant seals. It was only a 1 mile walk each way and we were rain-geared, water-proofed, siliconed up, but we were still soaked to our underwear. We both had dry clothes and dry shoes in the car, but the only way to keep from getting wet again was to strip naked in the car in the rather public parking lot, towel off and redress. Oh, Dean was mad at me....

So, you see this Saturday wasn't even top twenty — particularly since I found him a nice warm shuttle bus so that we didn't have to hike the last 3 miles back.

This is a screenshot of my iPhone (lower round button, top button, round button in quick sequence will take a screenshot) running the new feature from the last release of iTunes — DJ. So, if you have a party with iTunes on a computer serving up the music, you can set it up so that anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch (with the free Remote app) can suggest songs and vote on them so that the songs everyone wants to hear get pushed to the top.

Well, we did this at the company beer bash on Friday to see if a couple thousand people with their iPhones could make this thing fall over and crash. Now they didn't make a general announcement, but enough people figured it out. You could see small pod of people hunched over their iPhones all laughing. The good news is that the iTunes serving this up didn't crash. The bad news is that instead of a couple hours of obscure, witty new songs preselected by some hipster, we got the Beatles, Prince, AC/DC, Journey, the Pet Shop Boys. Every bad 80's song you could imagine.

Mob rule is very ugly.

Like all large companies, we wear badges. They let you through series of locked doors, you can use them to pay for food and espresso in the cafe. I also attach my office key and my locker key for the gym so that with this item attached to me I have everything I need for the day. And because I hate to hang things around my neck, I clip them to my belt or waist band on my hip. Which means that I've got a distinct clang when I walk that everyone teases me about. I can be walking down the hall 3 doors away and someone will call out "oh, LeeAnn..."

What's the old fairy tale about the mice putting the bell on the cat?

Well, GP was the first hire into "Little France". Though he's an American citizen, raised in New Jersey, he speaks flawless French and Italian. By virtue of being the first hire into the group, he takes on most of the interaction with my group and triaging whatever problems happen in the murky gray water between their code and our code, which means that I probably know him the best of all the group. And that means he knows the sound of my badge clanging against my keys as I run down the hallway toward his office. GP, I'm sure, is too charming to have ever told me directly that this clang is the sound of trouble coming his way....

I have to confess that I had to look twice the first time I encountered Ginger in the ladies room because she's very slim and tom-boyish and my company is the kind of place that has people in transition who use the little stick figure signs on the bathrooms as more of a goal than a statement. But Ginger is just Ginger.

We refer to this other group (who's software is shipped as part of our software) as "Little France". The director is a French expatriate, the majority of the engineers he hired are French or speak French. The first non-French speaking engineer they hired when the group was very small was from Texas and he fit in about as well as a pig on roller blades. He's gone now — moved on to doing a similar job at Adobe. Since then, they've managed a bit more diversity.

This is Jill. She's the Project Manager and works for Jennifer, our Project Manager. And somehow she manages it without hockey sticks. So, they must be a less surly, snarky group. Or maybe French PhDs respond to more subtle forms of punishment.