I am a spaz. I am not insulting myself.

My hands shake. Almost all the time. Sometimes it is hard to hold objects without pain & tremors and it is getting harder recently to hold a pen or other small, thin objects.

I have essential tremor. My dad has essential tremor, his hands shake. His father had essential tremor and his hands shook. It runs in the family.

I have had a noticeable shake in both of my hands since I was 12 or 13. My biology teacher in high school said after watching me dissect a frog and a shark's brain that I should be a brain surgeon as I made the cleanest cuts he had seen in 30 years of teaching but I would make all the nurses nervous due to my hands and the scalpel shaking all the time.

I had a formal diagnosis of Essential Tremor when I was in my mid-twenties by a Harvard neurosurgeon, who told me that it will get worse over time and when it gets too hard to write or hold a fork that there are medications that I can take. He also told me that I was lucky that I didn't have the 'head bop' version of ET.

Nearly 14 years later, while I am not at the point where I need the ET meds, it is getting harder to do certain tasks. I can't put on mascara without using both of my hands - one hand to hold the mascara wand and one to hold the wrist of the hand holding the wand.

Yesterday, I was out at lunch and went to take a photo of my lunch, when I heard the folks at the next table talking about me in Spanish. While I can't talk back in Spanish, I do understand. The conversation started by talking about my hair, then they moved to the fact I was shaking. The woman doing most of the talking about me kept saying that if I was an alcoholic, I should just order a drink to stop the shaking. Then they all laughed.

First I was appalled, then a bit angry, but I let it go quickly, as I did not even want to get into a conversation with these folks about what Essential Tremor is, why I have it, why it makes my hands, fork, & camera shake, and no I am not an alcoholic, as well as explaining why I can understand Spanish but can't speak back.

I quickly forgot about this, as I will be the first to call myself a spaz. In the common California version of English, a spaz is a person who shakes with excitement, it has nothing to do with mental illness and only vague relation to people with MS or Cerebal Palsy but it is much more informal in its usage. I have been called a spaz all my life by many people due to my hands shaking, my voice, and my general excitement about life.

I am more than OK with being called a spaz as I don't see it as an insult, but merely a concise description of true statements about me - I shake, I have an unusual voice that gets more unusual & fast with excitement, and I am a bouncy and overly cheerful human.

Why am I even writing about this? A web designer, developer, and blogger that I like and respect from the UK, Ann McMeekin, has written a blog post that to use the word 'spaz' is an unacceptable term. I see the argument she makes in her post and in her reply to Christopher Fahey (commenter #13) who tried to explain the American usage of the term, but I do think that it is very hard to keep up on the usage of English words across the world as they are used in lcoal parlance even if the writer or speaker may be speaking to a non-local audience.

The more I meet and get to know folks who are native English speakers from various countries across the world the more I realize that each country or sub-section thereof ascribes different nuances or even full meanings to words that we would all call common to English.

I am always terrified to ask for a napkin when dining in the UK, as I was told that it meant a feminine hygiene product, not a paper or cloth square of which to wipe one's hands with when eating. I have perused whole lists to figure out what the differences are between UK and US English and do my best to keep up on different usages, but that does not take into account states or counties with in each country or even other countries that have English as a native language.

Nor does it take into account all the subtle cultural meanings that may be attached to word or phrase usage right now that weren't the case ten years ago or many not be the case ten years from now.

When I was fresh out of college, I spent three months in Amsterdam and then two months in Budapest living with and in community with a set of folks from all over the world. One of the things I learned fast is how words that may be innocuous to you will be highly insulting to another. My English friend said fuck like it was going out of style, but if I used the word 'bloody' she would be insulted. My friend from Australia damned everything, but if I say I was 'pissed off' she would bawl me out.

The best is when our very innocent friend from Germany had a long conversation with a missionary group from the American South at the youth hostel we were staying at and she kept telling them about her problems with shit. She needed shit massage as she was constipated and went into great detail about how the shit needed to moved out of her bowels. The best part was watching the faces of said missionaries, at first they were very interested in listening to her, then I could see that they were determined to save her from her sinful swearing ways, and finally they got up and left as they were so insulted to be treated to a conversation that went for a half hour about shit.

My German friend was baffled by the missionaries abrupt departure, another American friend and I tried to explain to her that in the US to talk about shit was really taboo that one only talked about one's 'bowel movements' briefly with very close friends and family and even then only used a euphemism. The concept of a euphemism for shit was unknown to her as German does not have gradations of delicate terms for going #2.

If you are American, you many be quite uncomfortable right now that I just said fuck and shit in a blog post. If you are English, it may be seen as unprofessional but not uncomfortable. And if you are from a culture that does not have shades of delicacies for such words, then you may be plain baffled that I have to write this paragraph at all.

All of this to say, that I agree that Ann is right about the global nature of the internet. Yes, we do need to be aware that our readership is not just from our local area who may understand the finer subtleties of our word usage or even of the words we just use without thinking. But on the other hand, it would be a whole study in and of itself to keep up with the thousands of common English words and how they are used both in formal writing and common speech in hundreds, if not thousands, of cultures and sub-cultures around the world.

I understand that it is important to not insult, I would like to call for giving each other a bit of grace and then if one is still bothered then to discuss the terminology with the person in question what was meant by its usage, and then still extend grace for the fact that even though we are global online we are still local in our daily lives.

This morning, my Mom, who had read last night's blog post, asked if I was anxious.

I responded, "No, I was just reflecting on the last ten years and stating where I would like to go from here."

This is a true statement. Right now in my personal life, I am happy and surprisingly content. In my professional life, my dance card is currently full, but I don't want to get lulled in complacency.

Reflective, yes. Anxious, no.

The last two to three years brought a clarity to the fact that I work best in collaboration, my favorite projects of the last 5 years are the ones where I have worked in a team or closely with a creative client who wanted to collaborate. The last year worth of projects has made it even clearer that I do best when I am working with people in the same space and then am able to work on my tasks. I have honestly looked at my productivity patterns and see that they are not at their best when I am working at home all by myself with no client/collaborative contact for weeks at end.

I have several web designer friends who work best when left alone to themselves and they don't want to work on team projects. I have one friend who after the initial client meeting will only deal with clients via email.

The Myers-Briggs personality assessment can say a lot about one's working patterns and what environment they do their best work in. I will bet that my friends who do their best by themselves are Is for Introversion, in that they get their energy from being alone & work best when left alone. Reductive, I know, but I don't want to dedicate paragraphs to parsing this out, when you can go read about it yourself.

I have taken the long form Myers-Briggs several times in the course of my life and I always test out as just a little to the Introversion side but very close to the Extroversion. This means that I get my energy from being by myself at least a few hours a day, but I am still social. I have noticed that I am happiest when I am able to touch base on what the plan is, break up into small groups or alone to get the task done, and then reconvene to assess and then iterate.

I wrote last night's post on my ten years as a freelance web designer as a way to celebrate and reflect on what the last ten years of my professional life has been all the while being honest about the bad as well as the good. If that honesty was conveyed as anxiety, that was not my intention.

I think it is all to easy, particularly given that a web professional is always connected and by the nature of our professional community we are frequently on social networks, to paint one's client situation as rosy and to only announce or put up in one's portfolio the good projects, but it hard to talk about the doubts, the mild to major failures of projects or hopes, and otherwise be honest as it can be seen as unprofessional or it would look bad to do so.

I am interested in being honest. Honest that I don't want to get caught in complacency of my life, but I want to examine where I have been and where I would like to go. And professionally, I would like to work at a company or firm where at least 50% of my time would be working with/for/around the mobile space.

Thus, not anxious, but examining and moving forward.

Ten years ago this week, I gave my two week notice at my well-paid but non-web related corporate job. I gave my notice so that I could go pro as a web designer rather than just doing it as a side job or hobby. I gave my notice so that I could start my own web design freelance consultancy. I gave notice so that I could teach web design and 20th Century art history at a local university. I gave notice so that I could grow into my new life as a full-time web designer.

My timing, I have joked for years, was impeccable. I gave notice to start a web design business right on the precipice of the Dot Com Bust of 2000/2001.

In the last ten years, I have built a web design and development business / freelance consultancy that has focused on small businesses, creatives, non-profits, and education related endeavors. In the last ten years, I have offered my clients not just a new web site, but also how to conduct an online marketing or promotion campaign, how to use the internet to grow a business or project, as well as helping the internet phobic get comfortable in this new space. It has at times been very satisfying and at others deeply frustrating.

Five years ago this month, I wound down my web design business and teaching at the university to go back to school myself. I packed up my whole life, gave up my lovely 1890s back of the house in Orange, and in Sept of 2005 I moved to Dublin, Ireland, to attend graduate school at Trinity College, Dublin. I went to graduate school with the intention of learning more about programming and web development, as well as to focus on a mobile project.

When I first returned from Dublin with my new minted Masters degree, I spent 6 months in a job search of which many leads were pursued, paths investigated and interviews conducted but none lead to a corporate web or mobile design job as I had hoped at the time. In 2007, I spent a great deal of the year trying almost any new professional adventure offered to me - speaking at developer conferences about design, working as a web developer contractor to an East Coast based agency, thinking & planning a mobile hack day, etc. In one way, this was good, as I got to discover what I did not want to do, but on the other side it was bad, as I felt like I was too full of post-masters degree energy and that I was scattered and did not focus.

For the last three years, I have been working more on the web development and programming side of my skill set, both on client projects and a large semi-collaborative web application, as well as mobile development projects. Something funny happened on the way to the web app forum, I discovered that what I knew to be true in early 2007 when I was interviewing, which was that I really did not want to work for myself anymore but instead work on a team doing bigger projects than one person can accomplish alone, is still very true, in fact truer now than it was in 2007.

Furthermore, I have discovered that the longer I am a freelance web designer and developer working with remote clients or on contract, the more demoralized I become. It is not enough to work on a remote team where there are weekly phone or Skype meetings, I deeply desire, be it a larger company or at an agency, to work on an in office/studio team to be a part of a larger whole than what I can accomplish on my own. I want to hear more than just my own thoughts or what little I can glean when I throw out an idea on Twitter. I want to participate in discussion and discourse, I want to be challenged, I want to learn from colleagues, I want to be able to mentor in turn, I want to collaborate, and I want to participate together on projects.

To this end, I have spent much time this summer dusting off my resume and working on how to best presentation of my portfolio. I have been watching the job listings at companies I admire and would want to work at. I have let friends and contacts know that I am starting a job search.

While most of my client work the last ten years has been mostly web based, be it web design, development or marketing, my true passion and where I have spent most of my non-client working time in the last five years is in mobile. If you have read this blog, you know that besides mobile blogging & camera phone photography, I tend to blog about mobile. Thus, I am searching for jobs in mobile and at mobile companies.

If you know of any openings in mobile for a passionate and bright designer / developer hybrid with strong talents in user experience, communication, marketing, and systems design, please let me know.

Follow Up: Anxious? No.

Recently, I blogged about Shabbat and wanting/needing to take a day completely off once a week. While I have not been completely successful at taking a full unplugged day off once a week, I have been moderately successful at not working every day of every week like I have done for the last 11 months.

For the last month on one of the weekend days, I have taken at least 1/2 - 2/3rds of one day completely unplugged and have done something wonderfully analogue like reading a paper book. And on the last two weekends, I have made a point that if I couldn't stay off my computer the whole day, then the other part of the rest day, I would use for a fun personal project rather than working on client work.

Trying to break a year plus long habit of working every single day on something for some client and/or trying to keep up on some work related learning or articles is hard. But the payoff of being relaxed and not always stressed out is worth the time & effort.

So, while a week or two weeks of actual real live vacation (or even 4-6 like some of my Nordic friends) is not in the cards this summer, I can take one day every week. Or try to at any rate.

;o)

Photos taken by Ms. Jen today with her Nokia N86 camera phone.

Tues 07.06.10 - Two sides to a coin, possible paradoxes, and sisters in arms: fragile | tough, hope | courage, brittle | tears, anger | yearning.

To my two friends who are going through much travail this week, I walk with you in mourning, tears, and anger. I give you a big hug across the country. I wish I could be there.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86 this misty morning about 10:30am looking out from Seal Beach to Esther the Oil Platform.

Mon. 07.05.10 - Rarely does the Southern California's June Gloom last into July. Some years the marine layer of clouds will stubbornly persist in the mornings until the Fourth of July, but most years the Fourth of July dawns sunny and hot, not low, gray, looming clouds with a windy chill as yesterday's weather.

In the course of my living memory, there have only been two summers where the clouds stayed past noon and/or the clouds stayed all summer long, depressing many and causing tourists* to snark about "Sunny California".

The summer of 1983 had clouds that lasted well into July and it did not get good and sunny at the beaches until August. The winter of 1982/1983 was one of our biggest El Nino years in history and the following year was a La Nina year. The summer clouds created by the chillier than normal ocean & hot land foretold of the La Nina to come.

The summer of 1991 had clouds as far inland as Buena Park all summer long, while it was odd to be socked in with clouds 20 miles inland from the ocean in August, that was the year that Mt. Pinatubo blew it's top and created the 2nd biggest eruption in the 20th Century. But the early nineties were also a strong La Nina and California drought era.

In a year of drought, it can be a blessing to the parched hillsides to have clouds and a bit of mist over a hot, drying sun, even if it causes S.A.D. and cranky beach goers.

Scientists announced last month that this past year's El Nino had abated and that the Intertropical Convergence Zone in the Pacific has lower than normal temperatures and they declared 2010 to be a La Nina year. Or shall we also account Eyjafjallajökull's ashes to partially account for this year's extended June Gloom season in SoCal?

My bet to account for the longer than usual June Gloom this year is largely with La Nina with a possible sprinkling of volcano ashes. Regardless, this morning and yesterday morning had low lying clouds bordering on fog and the temperatures were in the 60s F / late teens C and not the 80s F.

Yesterday the sun finally burned the clouds off at 12:43pm and they did not return until after 5pm. Today we had a sprinkling rain most of the morning, the clouds didn't burn off until after 2pm and by 4:30pm the clouds had rolled back in.

Clouds most of the day with a fine misty morning? Who imported in a nice western Irish summer to Los Angeles?

;o)

* Dear tourists, please note that SoCal is at her *TRUE* glory from Jan 15 - March 15th. When your town is knee deep in with snow & cold, SoCal gets a storm or two that blows in, blows out, and leaves crystal clear, sunny days with snowy mountains. Our summer does not really start until July most years, and does not really heat up until August & September. Check Weather.com and book your holidays accordingly. kthnxbai.

It is 12:41pm here in Seal Beach, California, socked in with the dreaded 'June Gloom', aka the Marine Inversion Layer, and it is chilly for a mid-summer day at 66F/18C and there is a bit of wind. The Sun has made no effort to come out for a visit. Hopefully, old Sol will burn the clouds soon.

In the meantime, here a few nice links for your Fourth of July reading enjoyement...

How America got its name: The suprising story of an obscure scholar, an adventurer's letter, and a pun

When Ringmann read this news, he was thrilled. As a good classicist, he knew that the poet Virgil had prophesied the existence of a vast southern land across the ocean to the west, destined to be ruled by Rome. And he drew what he felt was the obvious conclusion: Vespucci had reached this legendary place. He had discovered the fourth part of the world. At last, Europe's Christians, the heirs of ancient Rome, could begin their long-prophesied imperial expansion to the west.

Nick Patrick on Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?

Reading David McCullough's 1776, I found myself wondering: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? If so, when did American accents diverge from British accents?
The answer surprised me.
I'd always assumed that Americans used to have British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, while British accents remained more or less the same.
Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn't yet diverged. That's not too surprising.
What is surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today's American accents than to today's British accents. While both have changed over time, it's actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then.

The Tyburn Angling Society:

Nonetheless, in addition to a regular circuit of dinners, drinks, and fishing outings, the Tyburn Angling Society is committed to resurfacing the ancient stream -- still theirs to fish, they argue, by a never-repealed royal decree. "You could have people fishing by the river in the middle of Mayfair," Jim Bowdidge told the Evening Standard, "We would get the Wild Trout Trust to get the habitat right for small wild brown trout. Properly done, we could have salmon."

John Scalzi on Status Check, Re: USA:

The 234th birthday of the United States of America is a fine time to check in with one's self about how one feels about being a citizen of this country, so today's question: Am I proud to be an American?
I am. The United States, like so many things, is better as an idealized concept than it is as an actual entity, on account that the nation is made up of people, and while most people mean well, in a day-to-day sense they struggle with their ideals, which are often so inconvenient to their desires. And so, like a married family-values politician with a Craigslist personal ad, or a vegan Febreezing the apartment so no one will catch the smell of bacon, America often finds itself failing its own expectations for itself and others.

Last but not least, the quote of the day from Kevin Lawver:

Happy "Crap, We Lost Some Colonies" Day, Brits!

Update! 12:54pm on 07.04.10 - The Sun is doing his job & is burning through the clouds, Seal Beach now has some sun, some clouds, and is still chilly. Wahoo.

Happy Fourth of July!

My fave quote from Rant #1, US vs Them? American wireless industry, come meet me at Camera 3:

But no, Americans consumers get crippled versions of the cheapest lousiest phones you can find. Why is it that an Apple 'innovation' of a Forward Facing Camera is somehow radical in the USA? We've had these forward facing second cameras as standard features on essentially all 3G phones in Europe and Asia and Australia and Latin America and.. for Heaven's Sake, in Africa! I was the person flown in to place the first 3G video call on the continent of Africa when Vodacom of South Africa opened its 3G network for developers - and I used a forward facing second camera on that 3G phone - and this was in ...2004! Shame on you American carriers! That you haven't bothered even to bring this international standard to Americans and we have to wait for an outsider like Apple to bring it (now obviously, they do it on their Facetime proprietary solution, and can you blame Apple for that? You ruined yet another opportunity). The best phones? Isn't it time you joined us in the 21st Century and let American consumers enjoy what the rest of the world expects as normal.

My fave bit from Rant #2, Serious reply to CTIA Steve Largent - he's cruisin' for a bruisin':

In Japan, on just one carrier, NTT DoCoMo, there are today over a million content partners, application and service providers. When did they pass that 100,000 level? in 2004! You think Steve Largent that this is a sign of innovation in America in 2009? You are literally 5 years behind Japan - a country only a third the size of the USA in population. Shame on you! But I know the app store argument is fun to make today, eh? So you admit that the carriers can't do this level of creativity, it takes the outsider - like Apple - to do it. Thats exactly what I argued. So, one, I defeat your argument that the USA is 'innovative' because of the Apple App Store - but you then admit that the 100,000 in December 2009 and most of the 240,000 today (Apple having 225,000) is because of Apple who could not deploy these on the carrier systems, and had to develop its own app store. You are helping me prove my point that the carriers in the USA are dinosaurs, Steve.

The internet, the blogosphere, and the mobile worlds are all the richer for Mr. Ahonen's rants. Put Tomi on your RSS feed, it is always a good read.

I have begun to hate all the blog posts and articles that are titled for SEO points using numbers plus the general idea.

It is like a bad internet loop of The Nails' "88 Lines About 44 Women" going over and over and over again.

Most of the time the posts in question are fluff pieces and while they lure you into reading them with promises of real information or that you will read a point by point soundly reasoned and argued opinion piece, no, one gets fooled.

Fooled into thinking that the writer/ blogger actually had something to say.

Fooled by the numerals into thinking the piece would be use sound rhetoric and be factual.

But no usually they have one or two good idea-ettes per 10 numbers and the rest are puffed up to reach the other 8 or 9 points to lure more traffic and diggs to their site.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Wed 06.09.10 - Sorry if things have been a little quiet around here at Black Phoebe lately, but I have been quiet. I have been working on finishing up the tiny details and loose ends on several work projects and have been so immersed in the finishing that I have not had a lot of things to say or write about here.

I do have two halfway finished mobile blogs posts for you all, I just need to find some time and mental space to complete my thoughts.

Mostly, thought I have enjoyed the final ends of the projects and taking photos while out and about on walks with Scruffy. The act of observing the little details both in code and image is what the last month has been about for me.

Heartbreaking. I truly hope that the Iranian people prevail and not the regime. One year later and no change of the regime, even more heartbreaking.

The Guardian on the making of the 'For Neda' documentary.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

The question of the day at the Ladies Luncheon yesterday is what would you do for your career, any job, that would be a job that you loved and you are good at?

Our answers ranged from 2 personal shoppers, 1 prostitute, 1 mattress tester (aka professional napper), 1 movie reviewer, and 1 travel photographer.

Given my last blog post about a very passionate 15 year old who is determinedly working towards her dream to dance in the Bolshoi Ballet, regardless of your age, circumstances, and current employment situation, what would you do that you love and be good at?

Me, all jokes aside about being the first professional camera phone travel photographer, I would love to be on a team that is creating camera phones or is creating software for camera phones and I would be good at it.

And you? Do tell.

Today at Tuttle Club LA, David A. said to David G., "Shabbat Shalom. Can I call you tomorrow or do you not pick up your phone on Shabbat?"

"Yep."

"Ok, I will call you on Sunday then."

I waited for Mr. A to go away and I turned to David G., "That's cool! If you don't pick up your phone on Shabbat, then I take it you don't turn on your computer?"

David G, "Yes, that's right. No computer, no phone, no iPhone, no..."

Me, "How wonderful."

Really, how wonderful. I didn't ask what he and his family did about emergency calls or anything of the like, instead I asked him if he had read a lot of books recently and he had.

Right now, after months of working on one big project and several smaller ones, of which I am tying up the loose ends of all of them, I would *LOVE*LOVE*LOVE* to take one day a week where I did not turn on the computer or phone or whatever, but instead took the whole day off and just rested.

I need it. I don't need a 2 week vacation right now, what I need to do is to carve out one whole day every week that I don't even do a smidgen of work at all. A day where I read or sleep or hang out with friends or walk or whatever but not turn on the computer or phone.

At the end of Tuttle, David G. asked, "Are you Jewish?"

Me, "No, but I really respect it."

Right now more than ever.

Shabbat Shalom.

Thurs 04.08.10 - Fare the well to Mr. Malcolm McLaren. Thank you, kind sir, for many years of hijinx, punk rocks, and making London new & sexy after the great 30 plust years of post-Empire & WWII hangover.

I first was exposed to the fruits of Malcolm's mind & labors in 1981 when I was a wee 13 year old going through some tough family times. I spent most of the end of 1981 and all of 1982 lamenting that I was 5 years too young to have experienced the punk revolution in 1976 in London or Los Angeles myself. So, I did the next best thing, I jumped into OC/LA's music scene in 1982 as a fresh, idealistic 14 year old.

As an adult, I can now appreciate the trickster, rebel, and calculated businessman that Mr. McLaren was. And I still have a fondness for red haired men in plaid...

Photo taken on Fri 03.12.10 by Ms. Jen while at SXSW 2010.

In the course of my four decades on this planet, I have only really truly like 3 hairdressers: Julia Johnson, Diana ___, and Beth Martinez.

I have a BIG backseat hairdressing problem. I like to do my own hair and on occasion go into a salon for a bit of teamwork collaboration with a highly competent artist.

This makes sense, as I am artist, I like color and craft and mathematics, so doing my own hair has always been fun. I started practicing on myself, my brother, and my sister as a small child. My first real grounding is when I gave my then 2 year old sister a cannibal bowl hair cut.

While I was in high school, I went to beauty school after the school day was done and when I was in college I made money by upgrading Apple computers and dye/perming/cutting hair.

Ever since my beauty school days, I cut my own hair and color my own hair about half the time and only go into a hairdresser when I need more polish or elegance than I can do for myself.

Over the years since the days at Richard's Beauty College in Costa Mesa, California, I have only really liked and gotten on well with 3 hair stylists/colorists: Julia Johnson who I met through punk rock and Richards and we went on a kickin' tour of Europe the summer of 1988, Diana ____ who I met through the swing dancing crowd in 1998, and then when Diana got married and moved to Georgia, I found Beth Martinez through her husband Ron and Alex Hernandez.

Julia now lives in Houston, Diana in Georgia, and Beth in Austin, TX.

Now my hair looks bad. While I do bleach my front streak and color the bright Special Effects purple myself, as well as cut & shape the top/front of my hair to fit the punky 1940s inspired rolls I do, I do need to have the back cut by someone and the rest of my hair dyed by someone I trust. Really trust. Beth moved about 3 months ago and I need her back.

Beth kindly recommended two stylists for me. I tried one for a trim before SXSW and she was bossy and didn't get that I am a DIY hair girl at all. Due to the bossiness, I won't go back. The problem is that the other recommendation that Beth gave me is the stylist who is just across the salon from the bossy one, so I can't really go to the 2nd recommendation.

Anyone know of where I can pick up a non-allergenic Damson Plum demi-permanent to cover the gray that is homesteading at my temples?

Fri 03.19.10 - Lloyd Davis of the London Tuttle Club joined the Los Angeles / Long Beach Tuttle today as a part of his #Tuttle2Texas trip.

In this video taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N86 I interviewed Geoff Hickman, Jeb Brilliant, Lloyd Davis, Al Pavangkanan, Luke Dorny, Francine Kizner, and AJ Pape.

Geoff also made a video where he asked Lloyd about the start of Tuttle and posted it here.

Tuttle2Texas Posterous: tuttle2texas.posterous.com

Thanks to WOMWorld/Nokia for the loan of the Nokia N86 8MP camera phone so that I could capture great video & stills.

Today is the 2nd Annual Ada Lovelace Day, in where I am to blog about a woman in technology that I admire.

After reading Vikki (aka Victoria) Chowney's Ada Lovelace Day post this morning, I decided that I would like to write about two kick ass twenty-something women that I know personally who are both very influential in persuading others to engage in technology: my cousin Caitlin Kilroy and Ms. Victoria Chowney.

On Sunday morning, I had a lovely breakfast with my cousin Caitlin and her mother Robin. During the course of the breakfast, I found myself explaining to my (now ex-) aunt that Caitlin was very influential in getting more than a few of her friends and relatives to join and engage in Facebook. Robin was at first baffled, but when I asked her, knowing what the answer was, how she joined Facebook and now has it logged in and turned on all day every day, she said that it was to keep track of Caitlin on her big adventures.

Last year, Caitlin a tall willowy then 24 year old blonde, announced that she was going to take a year to travel from California to South America via the Transamerican Highway. The family erupted in calls of No Way! I cried bullshit to most of them. If Caitlin were a 24 year old boy cousin, no one would say a damned thing but would instead brag how cool he was to travel through some interesting terrain, but because Caitlin is female there was a big hew and cry.

Luckily, Caitlin did not pay attention to them and just went. Good on her. The family was at first shocked, then my sister and I noticed that Caitlin was posting updates and photos from her adventures to her Facebook account. Then I noticed over time that family members and various friends of Caitlin joined Facebook and started to get over their own fear of technology and Caitlin's choice of travel route to cheer her on via her Facebook Wall and photo comments.

When my grandma or mom would ask if anyone knew where Caitlin was now, my sister Allison & I could give a report due to Caitlin's intrepid use of Facebook no matter the location. As I explained to Caitlin's mom at breakfast, Caitlin is a technology influencer, as folks who previously did not use Facebook to interact are now using it daily because of Caitlin's big adventures and using Facebook to report on same said and connect back home.

Caitlin is currently in LA to get her certification to teach yoga before returning to Peru to teach yoga there. She just assumes that no one will worry as she is just a click away on Facebook.

My other favorite mid-twenty-something kick ass technology lady is London's Victoria Chowney. Vikki in her own Ada Lovelace post details out her own involvement in the technology world via an early career in tech pr, but a cursory read under estimates her depth and breadth of knowledge of the digital and technology spheres as well as her passion for the intersecting worlds of technology, community, and communication.

In late September 2009, Vikki invited me to the launch party of Reputation Online, web community to further deepen the interstices and encourage connections between new & social media & technology with older media and more traditional public relations. Vikki is the editor of Reputation Online and has put a great deal of effort into making the site into a great resource for best practices in social media and new media public relations, as well as expanding the knowledge community in the fields of communications and technology. Vikki's passion and drive to further push the communications field into the 21st century is truly awe inspiring.

So, to my two favorite young women in technology the future is yours, ladies, thankfully. Go forth and kick ass.

*****
My post from last year's Ada Lovelace Day :: Cousin Lynn

Today the Healthcare reform bill passed the House.

On other notes, my mini-vacation is nearly over and I will return tomorrow with 3-4 blog posts as I have a SXSW wrap up to write, more photos to post, a post about the #NokiaComp to SXSWi, and a one year later follow up on the Nokia N97.

And now for my next trick, I will go to bed.

I unfortunately missed Danah Boyd's Saturday Keynote on Saturday, but above is an excerpted video. Danah has posted the notes/essay of the keynote: "Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity" at her website.

Watch and read it, provocative and thoughtful as always.

Last night, I saw a bunch of purple irises peeking out of a man's shopping bag, and my heart was pierced.

While I wish I was not single, in my day to day life I have become, in defense, somewhat immune - until the small moments, the little things observed. The little unconditional things that a man can do for a woman, then I come undone.

Looking at those irises, I sincerely hoped whoever received them, did so with joy. Later in the evening, I found myself crying. Trying not to, but I was.

More than worth the time to watch as Episode 1 of PBS's Faces of America is excellent.

American Stories explores the dynamic and shifting relationship America had with her new immigrants in the 20th century. World war tore apart families and sundered the fabric of many lives, but America beckoned and millions came. Yet, America was an ambivalent host. At its best, a place of refuge and salvation, as for film director Mike Nichols whose entire family escaped Nazi Germany. At its worst, a country that would imprison two generations of Japanese Americans, like the ancestors of Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi. Along the way, we'll discover the buoyant American optimism that shaped chance - as in a single encounter that changed cellist Yo-Yo Ma's life forever - to pave the road to success.

Every year since March of 1998, with the exception of one (2002), I have gone to SXSW be it Music, Interactive, or both. Every year since 2001, with the exception of one (2006), I have gone to Punk Rock Bowling in Lost Wages.

This year I am taking off, not from SXSW as the rubric should suggest given it is 2010, but from Bowling. I just can't do everything, and this week after months of working hard on a web app and a few other projects, I had to make the decision to trim something. Something that takes lots of social energy, creative energy, and some money. And that something was Bowling.

This year BYO Records and the Sterns are ramping up the event to include a Music Festival, I say - Bravo! I hope it goes well for the Barflies.net team, for BYO, and for all the lovely folks who will be bowling and merry making. I will not be joining the weekend long party.

By the graces of the Grace, in May, I will be in London or the like as it is time to make a transition.

Yes, I am officially job searching. If you have room on your team for a kick ass, intelligent, creative developer & mobile user experience professional, let me know. I am looking to join a great company, make a difference, and relocate.

Wish me well. And to all the Bowlers, have a grand good time!

Between Thursday night and Friday morning of this past week The Atlantic launched a new website redesign and switched the comments on the various blogs from self-hosted to Disqus hosted comments.

My first shock upon my morning review of the website was the new colors: Red - White - & - Blue - UGH! I find red, white and blue to be very divisive and a cheap, cheap, cheap visual shot.

During the 2000s, the red and the blue of Red, White, & Blue were used to separate out Us Vs. Them. At that time, the Us was the Red and the Them was the Blue. Still is. I just hate that American politics has dissolved down into color. UGH.

What was the rotten, pus-y cherry on top of the political sundae was the summer of 2006 when I spent a good deal of time traveling around Northern Ireland, where the colors of Red, White, and Blue are used as a symbol of war and hate. Driving through towns that had painted red, white & blue curbs as well as flags and placards was beyond creepy.

Heaven forfend that the United States of America devolve into a Northern Ireland style division, warfare, and ideological hatred. But the continued use by a variety of media of the colors red-white-&-blue only furthers a cheap visual metaphor about supposed patriotism and political partisanship.

Why did the Atlantic Monthly, formerly one of the most intelligent news sources, decide to join the ranks of creepy and division? Could they not afford a graphic or brand designer who could explain the concept of visual literacy and metaphor to them?

I showed the Atlantic's site redesign to other web designers at Tuttle Club LA on Friday morning and they were as horrified as I was. One thought it looked like a conservative business website and the other went on a discussion about hosted comments and HTTP Request loads.

As my visual acuity was assaulted by the new color scheme, I went to Ta-Nehisi Coates' Altantic blog to read what others in his community of readers thought only to be confronted with the fact that the comment section had been switched over to Disqus hosted comments.

Disqus. My blood boiled at 212F and my blood pressure went sky high. I hate Disqus comments.

I don't really like hosted comments, but I understand why bloggers use them for ease of AJAXy goodness with ratings, liking, and threading. The big but is that Disqus login fails about 2 out of every 1 time(s) that I try to login and then a good portion of those failures also deletes my carefully crafted comment to the blog in question.

My problems with Disqus occur regardless of computer or browser. Yes, I have my third party cookies set to on. Yes, I have been in dialogue with Disqus' one man support team.

I have come to dread encountering a blog that uses Disqus, as it normally takes me 3 times as long to comment on a Disqus blog as a blog with a complicated self-hosted comment system, if Disqus lets me comment at all.

On one hand, I understand why a large site like The Atlantic would prefer to use Disqus, as it reduces the load on their database, but given the amount of readers on the site, Disqus is a bad idea for two main reasons: usability and privacy. When I went to comment on Ta-Nehisi's blog, it took 3 times of attempting to login before Disqus would post my comment and it took over 5 minutes for the 3rd login to commence and post the comment.

When my comment finally posted, it made the title to be "404 Error". Perfect. Yes, Disqus is one big 404 error waiting to happen on a website with as many users as The Atlantic's website due to the heavy load of HTTP Requests from theatlantic.com to the disqus.com's servers. Good thing Andrew Sullivan does not have comments on his blog or Disqus's servers would melt.

Beyond HTTP Requests and error messages, the more important part of the Disqus Fail is that Disqus publishes one's comments not just to the website that one has decided to comment on and participate in that community, but Disqus also creates an automatic page for ALL of one's comments on the Disqus website of which one cannot make private or switch off.

Go look at my Disqus Profile, of which I can't make private: http://www.disqus.com/msjen/

Yes, every comment I have ever made to a blog that uses Disqus' hosted comments is now available and search-able on the Disqus website out of context and without my permission. I have searched the Disqus site for a way to make my comments not publicly viewable on their site, but there is no way to turn off the comments from my profile page.

I don't mind the information that I placed into my Disqus profile to be viewable publicly, I do very much mind that Disqus makes all of my Disqus blog comments available to anyone to view.

This breaks the community of comments and the context of the comments to the blogs where they were originally posted.

To that end, I am a bit surprised that the web had a collective apoplexy last week about Google Buzz and the original lack of the ability to opt-out of a public display of one's Buzz's but no one has said a thing about how both Disqus and Intense Debate do not give the registered user the ability to make their comments private on the Disqus or Intense Debate websites. This lack of ability to opt-out is just as egregious as the first week of Google Buzz, as in all three cases the display of the comments/threads without permission and context breaks the original posting of the comment within the blog or media community that it was posted in.

Some folks may want all of their comments to be public beyond the blog they originally posted them on and search-able for that matter, but many of us may not. Disqus and Intense Debate, offer your users a profile privacy option.

For a magazine as web savvy and web successful as The Atlantic has been, this redesign is both a tired political branding trope in the color choice and a social media privacy bomb waiting to happen.

********

Update, Sun 02.28.10 10:30pm (PST): I am not the only one who doesn't like The Atlantic's redesign, Mr. Sullivan doesn't either for different reasons.

Wow. I am more than a bit stunned that the Atlantic would go ahead and do such a big visual and content management redesign without consulting the main bloggers/writers who create their content and draw in the readers who form the community of the site.

Now I am just sad. Sad as a faithful reader & subscriber of the Atlantic and sad for my profession of web design. In web design, we talk a lot about User Experience, but UX is just not the experience of the end user, but also of the authors, bloggers, and content creators of the websites in question as they are also our clients who we must design a good experience for.

Be you a-theist or a theist, three great links were found on the Inter-Tubes today, one is on Anne Hutchinson and the other two are on the recent archaeological find of an 11,000 year old Turkish temple complex.

It appears that religion started before the villages, agriculture, and cities did, rather than the other way around. More importantly is how advanced the sculptural art is on the T-shaped temple lintels, the photos are truly gorgeous. For as much as we love to think of ourselves as the only era who makes art and creates systems, humanity has been doing both and more for far longer than our systems of history and archaeology have accounted for:

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder--who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites--says: "Many people think that it changes everything...It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city. - Newsweek.

History in the Remaking: A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.

Smithsonian Photo gallery on Gobekli Tepe

Gobekli Tepe: The World's First Temple?

And then let's move the the new world and to America's first public heretic (not really) and feminist (yes, really, 15 kids & was willing to go out on her own and stand up to the authorities in 1630s Boston!), Killing the Buddha parsed out what it heresy means and Anne Hutchinson's wonderful defense for any person's direct connection / petitioning of the Divine without the need of the clergy. She out-Protestanted the Puritans:

Where had Anne Hutchinson learned such an outrageous idea--that a person can be in direct communion with God? From the Bible; from the promptings of her heart. Minister John Cotton--who would later condemn her so severely--had taught her that the inward dwelling Spirit of Christ was more than a mere metaphor or abstraction. "It is not you that speak (and consequently not you that think or do)," he had written, "But the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you."

Just as Antinomianism wasn't something that Hutchinson had cooked up on her own, but an ineluctable (if morally and philosophically problematic) corollary of the doctrine of Justification by Grace Alone, there was ample biblical precedent for Hutchinson's conviction that she could hear God's voice. When the court demanded that she tell them how she knew that it was God who spoke to her and not the Devil, she answered with a question of her own: "How did Abraham know that it was the voice of God, when he commanded him to sacrifice his son?" - Killing the Buddha

The best part is the the two sets of folks that I know who descend from Anne Hutchinson are also bold, outspoken, creative people of (non-conformist) faith.

No, not a law or architecture firm, but two links that I enjoyed today plus a good debate from the other day.

John Scalzi on Holden Caulfield:

"I never got Holden Caulfield anyway. This partially due to having my own reading tastes bend towards science fiction as a teen rather than the genre of Alienated Teen Literature, of which Catcher is, of course, the classic. If you were going to give me a teenage hero, give me Heinlein's Starman Jones: He traveled the galaxy and memorized entire books of log tables and became Captain of a starship (for procedural reasons, granted). All Holden did was bitch, bitch, bitch. Put Holden at the controls of a starship and he'd implode from stress. Not my hero, thanks."

Mr. Scalzi and I are the same age and as teenagers appear to have had similar tastes in literature. I loved SciFi and Fantasy novels as a teenager and when I was made to read novels like "Catcher in the Rye" in school, I found them to be repugnant. I remember thinking that someone should tell Holden to get a life and get on with it.

I was made to read that novel when I was miserable at my high school, but rather than whine about it, I went out bought thrift store clothes, dyed my hair, hitched every ride to Hollywood I could, and took lots of photos at concerts. Holden was up there with the non-hero of "The Good Earth" for folks I would ignore rather than hang out with at that stage of my life.

Mr. Scalzi has squarely hit the nail on the head with his assessment that Holden was too passive. I didn't have those words in high school, but I knew that if you didn't like your life, like I didn't like mine, you did something about it. To this day, I have always thought of Holden Caulfield as the hero to young men of a melancholy bent and I have yet to meet a woman who really liked him or the book as a teenager. If you are a woman and identified with Holden or Catcher in the Rye, please feel free to comment below in his defense.

On another note, Mr. Sullivan has parsed out an interesting difference between Brits and Americans in terms of debating and refining an arguement:

"So much of American politics is debate conducted at a distance, through ads or soundbites or various talking points that never actually engage one another in debate. Reared in the British debate tradition - I debated through high-school and college, becoming President of the Oxford Union in 1983 - this has always felt to me like the biggest drawback of the American system.

The point of debate is to clarify things, to find where the real points of disagreement are, and to assess them in that context of actual alternatives. "

I find this a wonderful assessment as some of my favorite people to debate with have been raised and/or educated in the British or Irish systems. Just a few days ago, I found myself in a good give & take with James Burland on Twitter about Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu for the Nokia Booklet. After our tweeted mini-debate died down, I realized that I thoroughly enjoyed debating the merits of Windows 7 with a Brit who was also a fellow creative and Mac owner as he was able to help me parse out what I was really thinking about rather than both of us taking a side and sticking to it.

Ashe to ashes, dust to dust. Pixels to electrons, electrons to delete().

As a person who studied art, art history, and graphic design in the first round of my college education, I spent a lot of time reading about and studying artists and designers of the past. We know and study those artists and designers by the physical objects, paintings | journal entries | letters | etc, that were left after their deaths. We know them by their objects.

How will future generations know about our generation when we have spent so much of our time and efforts tossing the physical object to the wind and embracing digital ephemera? For the first 10 plus years of the internet revolution, the giddy joy was in the ephemera, the shifting sands of the bytes blown by the winds of chance and a forgotten domain registration. But the winds have shifted, a few of the early generation of internet pioneers have passed away and now we wonder what will happen to their writings, photos, and their primary sources when the domain expires or the hosting goes past due?

How will future scholars know who were the true pioneers, the giddy bon vi-bloggers from the corporate marketing shills that followed fast on their heels? Do we give the college freshman of 2567 CE/AD an introductory digital studies of Steve Ballmer meets Proctor & Gamble, or do we protect the writings of internet and blog pioneers such as Brad Graham and Lesile Harpold who died too early to write a will or a set up a trust that considered their seminal writings and blogs to be passed on to a university collection?

Now some would say, it is just the internet - here today, gone tomorrow. I would counter that we don't know what others in future eras will want to know and what will be just assumed about our era, and that more the more well preserved primary sources we leave the better for future scholars and pundits to be able to analyze and learn from our time in a way we are too close to see with any clarity.

A discussion started on the "Remembering our friend Brad" Metatalk post between Matthowie, barbelith (Tom Coates), Maximolly (Molly Steenson), myself, holgate, and a few others how to preserve blogs to an archive that can be accessed past the time the domains have expired and the files deleted off the web hosting server.

Tom suggests that:

"We should consider talking to George Oates at the Internet Archive to see if they have any options for this kind of situation. They might be the perfect place to put sites after someone dies like that."

I agree with Tom that the Internet Archive is a great place to start, as I use it to find all of my own 1996-2001 website archives given that I can't find the files on any old disks anymore. But the problem with the Internet archive is that it does not bring any photos or other image files, only the text from the sites that it archives.

After watching in the past few years the work that George Oates did with the Library of Congress while she was still at Flickr, I wondered if we should be considering a long term strategies that would go beyond registering a blog's copyright or even a periodical ISBN with the Library of Congress or other Copyright Libraries (such as Oxford or Trinity) but should we not also be archiving our text, images, and presentation (css) files to the copyright libraries for future study and access?

In the Metatalk thread, I asked:

"Previously if one was a writer or artist or scholar or otherwise historically/culturally significant, one would give one's writings & 'collection' to a university library. What do we do with our websites & blogs past the time we can pay for them?

How can we know now what might be significant for study 100, 200, 500, 1200 years from now? How do we archive bytes?

Some folks are printing out their blogs to custom ordered books, but this is not necessarily the best solution, as what will the children or grandchildren of our friends and families do with those books? Will they end up at flea markets along with 78rpm acetate records? But maybe that is good, the randomness of the find.

By choosing to engage in the frontier online space, we have chosen to some degree to toss the long term to the wind. The suggestion of the Library of Congress, or other institutions that function as a cultural respository, may be a good bet for the long run in terms of keeping an archive of text|image|ephemera, as after 2 recessions, I don't trust the market to keep a reliable archive.

If we can now register our copyright with the Library of Congress or the Copyright Libraries (such as Trinity, Oxford, etc), and we can get an ISBN or periodical number for our blogs, how do we start to archive the actual posts and images to a repository.

Do we lobby our congress|political critters to set aside resources for blogs that are periodicals to be archived OR as Matthowie suggest do we donate to an institution such as the Archive.org foundation and make sure that it can function as a cultural archival NGO?"

Is the Library of Congress or the various other copyright libraries up to the task of the pioneer digital generation donating their archives to the libraries in question or do we donate to the Internet Archive so that they can provide a more robust non-governmental/academic solution to archiving blogs and pioneering digital media?

Ashe to ashes, dust to dust. Pixels to electrons, electrons to save().

Photos taken by Ms. Jen at Dog Beach with a Nokia N97.

Fri 01.01.10 - Happy New Year one and all!

A Metaphor for 2009: Hit in both engines by a bunch of heavy, big flying objects minutes after take off, attempts to restart engines result in an emergency landing, cool headed pilot & co-pilot make safe landing in an unusual runway, ferries come quickly to rescue, all humans on board come out alive including the baby & the elderly, and then plane and luggage get more than a bit soggy or lost.

Here we are, at the end of 2009, shaken to the bone, wet, shivering, and standing on the wing of the plane waiting to get climb up on to the ferry and get to where it is warm.

.

Bruce Schneier asks Is aviation security mostly for show? on Cnn.com.

Yes, yes it is. My experience traveling the last eight years is that airport security measures to go beyond the border of ridiculous and over into the 2000's version of Theatre of the Absurd.

Once I smiled at a TSA agent and asked to anyone who didn't listen, "Doesn't this evoke a sense of the Dada Theatre, circa 1922?"

Lucky for me, the only thing required of me was to put my shoes in the bin and the bin on the conveyor belt. I felt that I should be chanting nonsense syllables as I walked through metal detector.

Now, I don't ask culturally relevant art historical rhetorical questions, I just put my shoes in the bin, the bin on the belt, and smile a nice big smile as I go through the metal detector.

Cathal Kelly writes in The Star about the huge difference between Israeli and US airport security in The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother:

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with Pearson -- the body and hand-luggage check.

"But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America," Sela said.

"First, it's fast -- there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."

That's the process -- six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.

25 minutes from parking lot to airport lounge at Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv! Now that is how to do it.

TSA, pull your head out of your ass. Time for intelligent prevention and not the mindless, droid-like bureaucratic theatre of the absurd of the last eight years.

Several sites I visited today had links to various astronomical theories on the Star of Bethlehem, thus in the spirit of the season, I give you the links:

The Star of Bethlehem by Colin Humphreys, originally printed in Science and Christian Belief , Vol 5, (October 1995): 83-101 - Humphreys advances the theory of a planetary conjunction of Jupiter & Saturn or a comet.

Revealing the Star of Bethlehem by Michael Molnar - Molnar's website has a Q&A about his book on Jupiter as the Star of Bethlehem

What was the Star of Bethlehem? by Nigel Henbest in First Science - Henbest summarizes all the major astronomical possibilities for the Star.

Understanding the Christmas Star by Stephen Milton - Also a summary, but with more Bible exegises in combination with reviewing Molnar.

Happy reading!

Rockstars do it all the time. If they don't, it tarnishes their reputations.

Movie Stars would be deadly dull if they didn't.

Sports dudes also do it, unless they are shooting 'roids, then maybe they can't.

We live in a culture saturated with it, so really people why does the media even care?

At least half the reporters reporting on this case have. So, why does it matter?

Yes, I am talking about Tiger.

So, the esteemed Mr. Woods is a horn dog. Yep, a multi-millionaire got some pussy.

Why do you care? Are you jealous? Did you wish you could score that much?

Or you like me and are baffled about this being news?

Baffled in a culture saturated in sex as to why the media would even cover such a thing when there are wars going on, people being killed, and budgets being strained by eight years of overseas military expenditures.

Is it the golf factor? Yes, golf is deadly dull, so the astounding fact that some chicks would divert attention from the stars of football, baseball, soccer, rock, hip-hop, actors to a golf dude is that what is so titillating? Is that the story, groupies for golf dudes?

Or is is the story as Cecily and Tiffany have pointed out? Is this story really about the Swedish Model Wife done wrong?

Wake me up when Jeff Sessions or Robert Byrd are outed as having life long gay high school sweetheart lovers.

Photo by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Fri 12.11.09 - Diego is only 11 weeks old and he is wearing a size 1 shoe and growing out of 6 month clothes! His hands are HUGE. Basically, Alex & Paige have a baby who will be a very tall/large!

The best part is not that Diego will be taller than me by the time he is four months old, no, the best part is how alert and watchful he is.

I know at this time of year that there are a lot of folk who are encouraging you to donate before the end of the year, but if you haven't already and are looking for a place to donate or give or contribute, how about Kiva.

You give a bit of money via Kiva to someone who is in need of a micro-loan and they use it to start or improve their business. They pay you back via Kiva. Repeat cycle.

Let's give a hand up to Elizabeth and many others at Kiva:

Fri 12.04.09 - I realize that this video is not new as it is from 2003, but I found it via a bizarre internet blackhole of which lead me to Erykah Badu at the Def Jam Poetry. Not only is the poem on the nature of fans, friends, and artists good, pointed, and twisty, but Ms. Badu's delivery drives the twists home with delightful results.

If you know of any other sources of Erykah Badu performing her poetry, please put the link in the comments.

Also highly recommended:
Bassey Ikpi's Apology to My Unborn

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97 of
Royal Crown Revue's Daniel Glass The Mint on Wed 11.25.09

Today I listed the things I am thankful for over on Twitter, of which, I will reproduce here.

First Tweet:

Things I am thankful for: a good year. good friends. a creative year. the web app I just finished. the two marriages of the month (D&L, C&M)

Second Tweet:

Thankful that my grandma requested a cool alterna-thanksgiving meal. I am taking her braised lamb shanks on tuscan beans. Cooking now.

Third Tweet:

I am also very Thankful for the new Little People of the Year: Amelia Hoffman, Amelia Grace Callis, Diego Hernandez, and @baby_flapjack.

A very Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.

Photo by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Thurs 11.18.09 - While walking Scruffy in the late afternoon, early evening, aka around 5pm, I spied this lovely crescent moon through the boughs of a eucalyptus tree while waiting for Scruffy to make a deposit.

When we returned home from the walk it was fully dark and I found myself slightly sad. I love this time of year and am not normally affected by SAD, but tonight a weight of the last few weeks piled up on me - Grandpa Bill Hanen's passing, the resulting family stuff, all the activity of the L&D wedding, work projects, and loneliness.

Most of all, what looms like a big 'ole hawk watching a small industrious rodent's hole waiting, just waiting, is The Holidays. If you come from a many times divorced family and further fractured by the years & infighting like both of my family sides, The Holidays get Stressful Fast™. This year doesn't even have to be bad, but all the years of fracture, pressure, and atomization build up and continue to reverberate.

To me, multi-generational intact families are a like a lovely, rare artifact at a museum, and I just spent 3.5 days at a lovely museum watching Families that Actually Like Each Other, Laugh Together, and Do Stuff Together. It was amazing, but even more poignant given the passing of the 10 Second Grandpa™.

Last Wednesday night, the night before leaving for the wedding and the night before Grandpa Bill Hanen died, my Dad called me as I was driving home from an errand to discuss that what the plans would be when Grandpa died. Since the Hanens have all the family togetherness of 3 billion year old Quarks moving away from the Universe and each other at the speed of light or faster, I made sure that my Dad knew that I wanted to make sure if Grandpa passed before I got home from the wedding that they were to make sure that all the family got invited to a memorial and not tell me about it after it happened.

My Dad assured me that after Grandpa was cremated that he would have the funeral folks put some ashes in a small vial to give to me so that I could have my Grandpa stick around for longer than 10 seconds. How did we go from 'Don't forget to invite me to the memorial service' to 'Cool, I get a my very own vial of ashes'?

Six days later, I am tired and sad. Sad for reasons that can't be listed here. Tired for way too many activities packed into too few days. I am going to log off now and read a book for the rest of the evening.

In the meantime, can someone loan me a rifle or bb gun so I can shoot or shoo that evil Holiday Hawk away from the entrance to my lair?

Blackburnian Warbler, May 2009, Magee Marsh, Ohio. Taken in the wild by g-graphic.

For years I have told friends and family that I really want to visit Central Asia, climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and eat Chinese food in Greenland. I didn't know that this activity was called a 'Life List' or a 'Bucket List', but I had one in my head and most of it revolves around the intersection of my love for nature/mountains, history, culture, and travel.

Given that it is now meme-able to post your life list on your blog, I thought I would write down the list items that have lived in my head for years and will add to this list as I think of more.

Ms. Jen's Life List, in no particular order:

1. Travel to Greenland, eat at the Chinese restaurant.

2. Sit under a wild apple tree in bloom on the foothills of the Tien Shan mountains.

3. Go into space.

4. Travel around the world in less than 4 hours, stopping in London, Mumbai, Sydney, Tokyo, and LA.

5. Hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro before the glacier melts.

6. Travel the Silk Road.

7. Visit Tuvalu

8. Visit Tuva and Mongolia, go see some of the Mongolian carved megaliths.

9. Spot a Blackburnian Warbler in the wild.

10. Learn to fly a plane.

11. Learn to fence properly.

12. Spot a Vermillion Flycatcher in the wild - Fulfilled on March 1, 2009 at Buckskin State Park in Arizona.

13. Live in central London for a couple of years at some point.

14. Live in a loft at some point and actually paint in it.

15. Stay overnight at the Pic du Midi Observatory in th French Pyrénées.

16. Spend a week in a cabin / summer house on a lake in Finland.

Mon 11.16.09 - Today Erika and I met Thomas at the Art Center's Auditorium for Jan Chipchase's new 'Edge. Edgier. Edgiest.' talk for the Designmatters Lecture Series.

I wanted to see Jan Chipcase speak, as I have been reading his blog FuturePerfect ever since various and sundry friends referred to his work and writing in the last four or so years. Much of what he writes about and the photos he posts are fascinating to me as they are about people, culture, technology, and how people interact thereof. As a long time fan of anything Central Asian and former Silk Road territory, I am particularly enthralled by his posts about design research adventures in the 'stans'. I am very jealous that he was in Kabul a few weeks ago.

Though by his own admission, Chipchase is still working on the material he presented today, it was a good fit for a design college crowd as he covered the his approach to design research, the ethics he applies to field work, how one works under a corporate umbrella, and the pure adventure of it all.

Thomas had to leave the presentation a bit early as he had a class to teach upstairs in room 202, but Erika and I stayed through the Q&A before walking up to Thomas' class to see the student work that was being critiqued this afternoon. As we came out of the class, both of us opened our mobiles, Erika to text and me to check my email. As we were both engrossed in tiptapping away, Jan Chipchase passed us in the hallway and with a twinkle in his eye quipped as he passed, "Put down your bloody mobiles."

Two blogs I truly enjoy reading, Wordridden and SoF Observed, wrote posts worth reading about their own memories of Germany in the 1980s and what the 20th Anniversary means to each of them.

Go Read.

Wordridden - Then and now.

SoF Observed - The Fall of the Wall, JFK's Assassination, and Two Birthdays

Happy 20th Anniversary to a whole lot of gumption and hope.

1989 - DDR (East Germany)
1994 - South Africa
2009 - Iran ???? - One can only hope.

The Golden Rule requires that we use empathy -- moral imagination -- to put ourselves in others' shoes. We should act toward them as we would want them to act toward us. We should refuse, under any circumstance, to carry out actions which would cause them harm.

If you missed it today, the American Public Media broadcast of Speaking of Faith was Krista Tippett's interview with Karen Armstrong, that reference's Ms. Armstrong's TED 2008 talk which sparked the Charter of Compassion.

I heard the SoF broadcast today on KPCC while driving home from Glendale and by the time I was home, I was determined to find out a bit more about the Charter for Compassion.

It is time to focus on compassion, no war. It is time to focus on justice, not revenge. It is time to work towards making a world that we can all live in, not die in as we kill it and each other.

And that it is time for faith, hope and love to reign over certainty, fundamentalism, and despair.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Sat 11.07.09 - To all of you who know me in person, know that my car's license plate is BLKPHBE and that my Prius' name is 'Black Phoebe'. Not named after this website, but named after the bird that this website is named after.

For those of you who don't know me in person, or who don't know about my lifelong passion for native song birds, here are some reference pages on my all time favorite SoCal bird, the black phoebe:

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/black_phoebe/id
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Phoebe
http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/framlst/i4580id.html

Why does this come up today? Because recently I had the third comment where someone who doesn't know me or a neighbor who I only know in passing has said, "Black Phobe? What are you racist?"

The first time someone asked this I was so surprised. Each of the three times it has happened I have said, "No, it is black phoebe, it is a local bird." I then go on to describe a black phoebe and its habits, some of which are very unique to flycatchers. The first two inquirers knew exactly what bird it was and were a more than a bit baffled that I would name my car after a bird. The third one, a retired neighbor, asked a couple of days ago and kept asking me to describe the bird, as it was obvious he didn't believe me.

I find this baffling. Why would I have a license plate named 'black phobe'?

A few weeks ago when I was in London, Vikki Chowney invited me to the Adams Street Members club for the launch of a new blog that she was involved with called Reputation Online.

I went along to the party to support Vikki and to see what the new venture was, curiosity frequently titillates this cat, but ended up being more than pleasantly surprised by the idea, conception, and execution of Reputation Online.

On my last Sunday in London, Vikki interviewed me for my opinions on how reputation, promotion, and PR differed between Los Angeles and London. As someone who has deep roots in the Los Angeles music scene and a decade plus of online content publishing, I have opinions on such things.

I think that folks wanting to conduct a good online campaign or who want increase their online reputation should take more than a few hints from the many and varied ways that folks conduct DIY music PR and promotion campaigns as much of ideas and techniques are transferable. Some of best PR and Internet Marketing folk I know are the ones who have come out of Indie and DIY music worlds, not the folks with bachelor's degrees in Communication who have worked in corporate PR.

After spending time on the Reputation Online site, I applaud what Vikki and her team are up to and accomplishing. I love the dual OurViews (on the left) and YourViews (on the right), in which one can read the Reputation Online team's interviews and analyses and then you can click on the "Contribute" menu item and write you own analysis or post on reputation, new media, et al.

The best part is that Reputation Online is not just for public relations professionals but for anyone, be they individual or company, who is interested in managing or growing their online reputation and presence.

Ms. Chowney and the folks at New Age Media, Bravo!

Mirabilis.ca linked to an article at the BBC entitled, The 'youngest headmaster in the world' , in which they feature the heroic efforts of a 16 year old young man to educate the rural poor in his village in West Bengal.

A mainstay of any democratic country is education for all. The idea of a free public education is a recent one, started by reformers in the US and UK in the late 1700s and enacted on a large scale in the mid-1800s to early 1900s. Many would argue that the success of Western industrial democracies in the last 150 years is built on the availability of free public education that a large majority of folks receive up to the 12th grade (6th form in the UK) who are then empowered regardless of class to participate in the economy and growth of their societies.

Tues 10.06.09 - Ta-Nehisi Coates and Andrew Sullivan conducted an interview to talk about Ideas | Life | The World | Etc a week and a half ago, and since both have released video snippets on their blogs that have been very intriguing. I hope that the Atlantic will post the whole of the interview on their website - Look! They have, in pieces.

Today's snippet, above, deals with war, innocence, gay rights, sacrifice/transcendence , Jesus, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Good stuff.

Here are a few of the other video snippets:
Touching The Void
Obama, The Tory
Almost Grateful

On another note, Sullivan does some great Dog Blogging this past week.

I don't know about you, but I voted for change, not more of the same.

Le Sigh.

The Patriot Act is and was a load of absolute bullshit that hinders this country in the name of fake security.

William Neuheisel's Burning Man 2009

The title, it is true. When Mie Yaginuma blogged about how she missed Burning Man this year and included the above photo, I was immediately drawn to William Newheisel's Flickr page to find this photo.

I love it. I love the distance. I love the sky. I love the desert. The photo is evocative of a post-modern American Tibet - high desert with enigmatic decoration and art that suggests ritual and meaning.

As I continued to look at the photo, it made me think of my life right now, as I walk down a path that appears to be going somewhere, but I can't clearly see the end even though there are sign or light or prayer bell posts along the way. Am I on the right road or am I walking down a performance art piece of someone else's device?

What where you listening to in 1995?

Up until 2005, I had never heard of Daft Punk. I knew of the name, I knew that they were a Euro-electro band that was not a punk band in the way I knew of punk. In the last four years, various of my web design / dev friends have blogged & tweeted about listening to Daft Punk, because I trusted their visual & design aesthetic tonight for the first time I checked out Daft Punk on YouTube.

The me of 1995 would have changed the radio channel so fast, even if there had been a station playing Daft Punk in LA or Boston in 1995.

This was my idea of punk in 1995. This is Daft Punk's idea in 1995.

When you watch the videos both bands are musically very far apart, in terms of post-modern rebel aesthetic - not so far apart.

Tidbit #1: I don't have any photos from today because I only took one and it was of Scruffy. I think y'all get enough Scruffy photos.

Tidbit #2: Why no photos? Gasp! Shock! Horror! What ever have you been up to?
Work.

Yep. I am trying to work real hard real fast so that I can free up two weeks at the end of this month to go to London for the Moo Party, London Design Festival, Over the Air, and FOWA. I am registered for FOWA (Future of Web Apps) but I would really like to be able to be in London the week before.

Tidbit #3: Lauren has been Redeemed.

Tidbit #4: I am perversely considering buying a Nokia N86 in London rather than one here. Why in London?
a. I am sick of the US being the place of last mobile delivery and I don't want to reward companies that wait 2-3 or 4-5 or never months to release good mobile devices in the US.
b. The 3G sucks on AT&T due to the large number of iPhones on the network, so if one is going to be stuck (at least in LA) on Edge-like speeds why not buy a device that is Euro 3G - at least it will be fast when I am on holiday.
c. If I buy an Euro Nokia N86 online in the US, I won't have a warranty. My June of 2007 bricking experience of my online bought N80 taught me that no warranty is BAD. If I buy the N86 in London, then I will have a warranty in the UK. It is still a warranty.
d. I want to within the year get a job in Europe, so it would be better to get a Euro 3G phone.

I know...rationalizations. rationalizations. rationalizations for my anger at NokiaUSA for being S-L-O-W or getting their container ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle.

Tidbit #5: Hey, have I mentioned lately that I would love to get a job in mobile in London? Know of any positions for a bright creator|ideator|project manager sort? Let me know.

Hopping back on the hamster wheel.

Since the United States has been so obsessed with free markets, democracy, and business competition, it is time that the health care systems gets a good dose of competition from these United States in the form of a public health care and insurance option for any citizen or legal resident of these said States.

Given all the hysteria from various corners and pressures from lobbyists, the various Congress Critters and Administration folks seem to have lost heart and have caved to a reform bill that is unpalatable by most.

Last week while having dinner with my mostly Republican family, a hue and cry went up about health care reform. I expected various members of the family to bash Obama's health care plan, which they did, but not for the reasons I expected. Several folks at once cried out, "What happened to the public option?"

After discussing all the various perspectives, everyone but my 89 year old Grandma agreed that the US needed a public health care option to be opened for all who wanted one. Two of my aunts agreed with me that the Irish way of public health care for all and extra private supplemental care for those who want to pay for it was an excellent way to go.

When I lived in Ireland, I purchased private supplemental health insurance from VH-1 for €10 a week, which at 2005 exchange rates worked out to be about $54 per month. This supplemental health insurance would give me a semi-private room if I ended up in a hospital plus other options for picking the doctor of my choice. Right now, I pay $297 per month to Kaiser Permanente for health care and I have no idea what my hospital coverage is if I would need it other than I have a $100/day co-pay.

I felt more confident in Ireland with the public health care and my supplemental healthcare than I do now with Kaiser. I am reluctant to go to Kaiser and in the last three years have only been 5 times in total, twice for my migraines, once for an ear ache, and twice for travel shots & booster vaccinations, otherwise I have avoided the Kaiser doctor like the plague. I have paid out of pocket to see an N.D. about my allergies & migraines, as Kaiser in SoCal does not cover ND's although they do in their Pacific Northwest territory.

I am willing to pay out of pocket to see a doctor that is willing to explore the real causes of my migraines as the ND was and the doctor at Kaiser was not. The Kaiser doctor did not want to listen to my ideas of what I thought my migraine triggers were, but instead after 2.5 minutes prescribed a $125 co-pay medication and shuffled me out of the office. This is a minor problem to have compared to the large minority of people who do not have any health coverage or are under insured.

Let's not even speak of all the small businesses that will never be started because folks are too afraid to lose their insurance if they leave their job to start a new business or the current small businesses who can't afford to hire more people because they want to provide insurance but can't afford it.

Tonight I decided that I would send emails, via their websites, to the President, my Congress Critter - Dana Rohrabacker (R-CA), and my two Senators' Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer (both D-CA). I tailored each letter to the political type human and here is an example of what was sent:

Dear Senator Feinstein,

I am writing as I am very concerned about the health care legislation that is currently going through Congress, as it does not have a public option. I am concerned that true reform is being squelched by the insurance company lobbyists.

For a variety of reasons - humanitarian, reduce costs, increase competition, and others - we need to provide a public health care option along side of the private health insurance and health care systems currently in place.

Not only do all people within the borders of the US need access to affordable health care, but we need to keep costs down. A public option would increase competition and access.

Thank you,
Jenifer Hanen
Seal Beach, Calif.

Regardless of how your hopes and thoughts in the US health care debate, here below are some good blog posts to get one thinking, after you have done some thinking, please do write your Congress Critter:

Matt Haughey on The entrepreneurial case for national healthcare
BLDGBLOG on City of Fees and Services
William Blim of 3 Quarks Daily on Will Someone Rid Me of Private Health Insurance?
Adam Greenfield on On systems, and what they do

On May 28th of this year, after the Google I/O conference, I got to SFO a wee bit early and picked up a book at the bookstore in the airport that I had put on my wishlist at Amazon a few months earlier. The book was "Incredible Good Fortune, New Poems" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

I love Ursula Le Guin, she is a writer who is up there in the Holy Septinity of Writers in my book of reading love along with Madeline L'Engle, JRR Tolkein, Charles de Lint, Anne Dillard, C.S. Lewis, and Dave Hickey. I even more love it when authors cross genre and write in a form that is not their usual fare.

I particularly love it when a fiction writer or a very thoughtful nature writer takes time to write poems. Almost all of my Holy Septinity of Writers has published a book or two or three of poetry or has embedded poetry & verse in their fiction, with the possible exception of Dave Hickey. Then again, Hickey is not a fiction writer but one of the preminent cultural critics in the the US in the last 30 years and writes hysterically funny and pointed pieces on art & rock'n'roll. As for Hickey, I just wish he would publish more often.

All this being said, I took Le Guin's "Incredible Good Fortune, New Poems" with me today down to the Grandparent's place so that I could read some poems while we waited. About 5 or so pm, everyone left except me, Grandma, and Bill. The Aunts Dana & Anne went back to Anne's house, Mom & Allison went to go get Mom's bag and sleeping bag as Mom has overnight duty tonight. I stayed to hang out with Bill and Grandma, even though Bill wasn't so chatty to say the least.

I know I briefly explained the situation here, but Bill, age 93, went to the hospital last Monday for dehydration and a blood sugar level of 850. While he was there, it was determined that he was at the end of the road and soon to be off to the Great Fishing Lake. Bill did not want to die at the hospital, but in his own tempur-pedic bed at home under Hospice Care. After much to do, he was transported back from the hospital to home yesterday morning.

Ever since, the various family members have been waiting in vigil, both to honor Bill and support Grandma. Bill last spoke on Wednesday, and as of early yesterday afternoon, while appearing to be asleep he could hear folks talking to him, but as of yesterday later afternoon he has been a coma.

Most of what we have been doing is sitting in his room and talking to him. Letting him know that it is ok to go. This is important, as in a family full of folk born between April 20 and May 12th (Taurus people, a pack of stubborn bulls), Bill has been one of our best and most stubborn, faithful, and loyal constituents.

After all the folk left late this afternoon, I went into Bill's room with the book of Le Guin's poetry and started to read poems to him. Bill West grew up in Washington State, and taught Forestry and was the Forestry Department Chair at University of Oregon in Corvalis for his career. Bill has had a deep and abiding love of the forest, lakes, and nature of the Pacific Northwest. Le Guin has lived in Portland for many years and more than a few of the poems in the book are about the Northwest as well as about aging and dying.

So far, my favorite line from the whole book is from the first poem called "The Old Lady", which starts with "I have dreed my dree, I have wooed my wyrd." Or in rough translation of the Scots and older forms of English, " I have endured my hardship, I have wooed my Fate (or The Fates)." I read the poem to my brother yesterday, and he who does not like poetry was intrigued.

I figured that reading Le Guin to Bill would be appropriate, not just for the thematic poems that would be relevant to his life, but also for this one:

Nine Lines, August 9

The gold of evening is closing,
drawing in, tightening.
The light is losing. It is
a little frightening
how fast August goes.
Others have noticed this.
The cat on his concealed switchblade toes
comes by, and what he says
is silent, but enlightening.

The gold of the evening is closing and while Bill may spend his last hours silent in words, he has dreed his dree, and wooed his wyrd.

In case you haven't been following the most uncelebrated, unnoticed holiday in the Western World, this upcoming Saturday will be Llew's Day or Lammas or Loaf-Mass. If you are old school celto-pagan, then you will be celebrating Llew's Day/Lughnasadh. If you are Christian of the old school variety or pagan of the new school, then you will be celebrating Lammas - The Harvest of the First Fruits or the First Wheat Harvest - on August 1st or August 7th or sometime between August 3-10th if you are rigorously following the astronomical calendar.

The first of August is one of the Cross-Quarter Days, the most unnoticed one at that, unless you live in Switzerland, then it is a National Holiday. The other Cross-Quarter Days (i.e. half way between a Solstice and an Equinox or vice versa) are Halloween/All Saints Day, Candlemas/St. Bridget's Day/Groundhog's Day, and May Day/Walpurgis Night. For whatever reason, we don't give the same sort of secular-Hallmark-Holiday-love to old Lugh.

Poor old Lugh, you get associated with the Sun God & the First Fruits and everyone in the modern world forgets you because they are on holiday in the sun and the peaches & grapes come year-around at the supermarket and quite a bit of wheat is now grown in the winter.

Even if you won't be celebrating the first fruits or the high sun or astronomical high summer, we here at Black Phoebe will be. Starting with a Peach Jam-a-thon to preserve the First Fruits of the Helms Ave. Peach tree, to Tammy Callis' 30th Birthday on the 1st, to me committing to daily blog about Tomorrow/Future for NaBloPoMo.com for the whole month of August.

A few months ago, I was talking to Nicole at Salon Pop about the recession and I asked her what she thought we should be doing.

"Frequent local businesses," was Nicole's reply. And she is right. So, in the spirit of supporting local small businesses, I am going to start an occasional series here called "Local Places I Like". This will be my opinion about places I frequent. This series will not be supported nor will I receive free goods and services to write about local places, but merely me talking about local businesses I like.

As I have written about before, I have a migraine problem. They are usually triggered by mistaken ingestion of food I am allergic to, or sleeping on my neck wrong, or by fluorescent lights, or a combo thereof. Usually when I migraine arrives, I write a tweet to the effect of "Le Sigh," take some of migraine meds, put myself to bed with my eye mask on and pray that I am not still there two days later.

A few times, after the migraine is over and when my neck/back has seized up, I go and get a massage at Wellsprings to help release the tension and not have a repeat migraine. This usually is a great help.

Last Friday, while at Dog Beach watching the Big Waves, I noticed that my neck was stiff and not really turning well. When I turned it too fast, I would get a shooting headache pain. Oh oh.

I woke up on Saturday morning with the "Oh, shit, not again" feeling as my neck was in a lot of pain, I had a burning sensation on the right side of my throat, and the right side of my face was in pain. I made it to about noon and it became obvious that I really needed to put my self to bed with my eye mask and meds, when my Mom suggested that I go get a massage at my massage place. I didn't think I could get in so fast on a Saturday, but called at my Mom's urging.

Wellsprings was able to fit me in at 2:30pm that day with massage therapist, Sheila Laughlin. What a blessing. Sheila asked some really good questions before she started and I honestly told her that I was trying to fend off the onset of a full migraine due to neck and back stiffness. She did a miracle modified Swedish massage on my face, head, neck and back that loosed up my muscles. By the time I left an hour later, I felt about half way better with much looser muscles, within another hour all the migraine onset pain was gone and I felt almost all the way better.

Big thanks to Sheila and Wellsprings!

Wellsprings
550 Pacific Coast Hwy # 207,
Seal Beach, CA‎90740
562-594-1158‎

Poor, defenseless marriage, it has been so abused in recent years. Such shocking immoral agendas have been advanced with folks getting married up to 4 and 5 times or more to different spouses, and the attendant equal amounts of divorce to marry the next spouse.

Shocking, yes, shocking.

Here in these United States of America, if you get a more than three DUIs (driving under the influence) your right to have a driver's license is revoked. Folks, if you want to really defend marriage, we need to act now against profligate spending of the marriage vows by poor deluded serial monogamists.

Yes, Americans, we need to protect marriage and revoke the right to a marriage license if even one of the two proposed spouses has been married and divorced three times. Just like a serial drunk or drug addict should not be piloting a car, a serial divorcer should not pilot a marriage.

While we are at it, serial divorce comes from youth being led down the path of sin and perdition by thinking they can marry young and often. To that end, we need to support the youth of America into waiting and abstaining from serial divorce or post-martial sin by making it illegal to marry before the age of 30 without full parental and community consent and completely forbidden to marry before the age of 25, as really, how many pre-25 year olds know their minds?

Now under Ms. Jen's Defense of Marriage if you are a homo sapiens sapiens (a hominid of the modern human variety) and you are over 30 and have been divorced less than 3 times and you want to get married? Get thee to a courthouse or a religious institution of your choice and make it legal, brothers & sisters (or any combo of genders thereof).

America, let's please save marriage. Let's make marriage for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, to death do us part. Once and for all.

*****

Cecily has been "Drinking the iPhone Kool-Aid" this weekend. Wonder if she would sell me her N82?

I don't want to carry a phone, no matter how fabulous the UI is, and a separate camera. I want to carry one device - a great small camera that goes on the internet. Yes, I am a contrarian and I try to limit my Apple kool-aid drinking to the MacBook Pro flavor.

On the other side of the fence from Cecily, Engagdet's editor, Joshua Topolosky, recently tried to use the iPhone to actually get some work done, new media / blogging type of work, while sitting at the doctor's office and found that the iPhone was great for entertainment & web surfing, but stymied his ability to be productive. He writes up his experiment in iPhone productivity in "Editorial: Taking the iPhone 3GS off the job market".

Best of all, Jan Chipchase, recently got to have a real L.A. experience:

There's now a flock of 4 MJ newscopters hovering over UCLA. Could almost be in Baghdad, 'cept no-one has fired back. Yet.

He writes up his thoughts about the percentage of media to actual fans outside of the UCLA medical center on the day Michael Jackson died in "MJ (The Media Experience) Remembered".

Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish has been writing on the torture that the Bush administration/regime purposely approved over the last five plus years, today he asks/states given the results of a poll on how do American Christians view torture:

So Christian devotion correlates with approval for absolute evil in America. And people wonder why atheism is gaining in this country. Notice the poll does not even use a euphemism like "coercive interrogation"...But it remains a fact that white evangelicals are the most pro-torture of any grouping. Mainline Protestant groups were the most opposed. A mere 20 percent of non-Hispanic Catholics believe that torture is never justified.

If one is a Christian, one follows Jesus Christ - right? Didn't Jesus espouse turning the other cheek? The way I read Matthew 5:38-48, is that we are to love our enemies, not torture them.

As a Chrisitan, I ask my fellows and fellowess American Christians - How did you all get so enchanted by Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield that their words mean more to your life & beliefs than Jesus Christ, the God-man you call Messiah? Please do tell...

Sources:
Pew - The Religious Dimensions of the Torture Debate
Poll shows support for torture among Southern evangelicals

If you are the sort of human who likes to have a really good panic every now and then and / or enjoys conspiracy theories, I would like to give you a good humorous cross section on the Aporkalypse to help trot you out of too much routing around in the slops of the swine flu hysteria [1]:

Apokalypse 2007 - A Flickr Photoset that involves a piglet and a BBQ spit. It does not end well... for the piglet.

Making Light commenter, albatross, makes reference to the Four Hogs of the Aporkalypse.

How to survive the Aporkalypse by Aaron at Tygerland.net:

Carry a pack of bacon at all times. If someone annoys you simply rub it in their face and watch them freak out.

Start ill-informed superstitions. For example: I heard that, if you wash your genitals in rose-oil after having full-sex with a pig, you won't catch the flu.

Further Signs of the Aporkalypse (from BoingBoing in 2001! How prescient!)

Last, but not least, The Ham of Darkness, which features a photo of a small blonde child french kissing a pig...

Notes:
[1] If you think I am not taking swine flu or *gasp* Avian Flu or **GASP**ZOMG**GASP**GASP** SARS seriously enough, I would like to trot out that you are much more likely to expire from an automobile accident, heart attack, stroke, or domestic abuse this year than you are of a fairly rare "epidemic" episode that happens once every few years to less that a couple of tens/hundreds/thousand folks world wide. I would really worry about how your local bus driver drives. The Flu is not even on the list of Causes of Death, but TB is. Have you been tested for TB recently?

I wish I had a great photo for you all tonight. Or a big written post chock full of juicy tidbits or meaty ideas. But I don't have either for you all this evening because today was Tax Day.

Actually, my activity towards the eventual goal of the 11:59pm tax filing deadline this evening started yesterday. Back when I expected a refund every year, I couldn't get my taxes done fast enough in late January or early February. Now that I am not teaching, nor do I have a day job, but instead all my working efforts are those of the self-employed, it is all I can do to drag myself to Turbo Tax to get my taxes done in time.

The last two years, I knew before it all started that I had a loss or close to a draw, thus my incentive to do my taxes early was slim to none. This week I cut it very close, close in time and close in dollars.

I do not begrudge paying my taxes - as I do like paved roads and the like, nor do I begrudge giving a full accounting of my fiscal activities - it is a good discipline. But to sit down and do it, that is the hard part.

Luckily for me, TurboTax has really stepped up their game and rather than struggling a bit with the software or explanations or the user interface and then panicking that I would be audited by the IRS due to the bizarre TurboTax interface & lack of clarity, this year was easy with TurboTax 2008, unlike the evil 2005 TurboTax adventure.

TurboTax just worked this year. I had a choice of doing it online at the turbotax.com website or downloading the software on to my computer - or in my case, as a repeat customer, using the cd that came in the mail months ago. Rather than TurboTax walking me through tons of evil details that not even tax accountants understand at first glance, this year the program got smart enough to let me know when I should pay attention and when the details did not pertain to my situation. I love it when I am not drowned in details that make me panic.

Best of all the user interface allowed me to hop back and forth in between sections, finish bits, save and then hop somewhere else without complaint. And it was worth it to get the Home and Small Business edition, as it really was able to breakdown all the categories that as a small business owner / freelance / self-employed person would need to know and had expanded pop-ups to help explain each category of expenses that one is allowed to take for a business expense. There was only one time where I had to guess where to list an expense (domain name registry fees).

Big thanks to the design and development teams at Intuit for a good tax experience, rather than a panicked, evil one.

Intuit, I do have one big request: Please make a Quickbooks Simple Start for Mac OS X. Just sayin'... not all of us small business owners out there are MicroSquash junkies. I know I need to keep track of business expenses during the year, but I am not going to shell out $199 for the Mac edition of Quickbooks before I know if I like it & it will work for me. How about making Quickbooks Simple Start as an online service that is device agnostic?

Even though my exposure to Kalpen Modi's (aka Kal Penn) acting career was in the excellent but more literary movie, "The Namesake", and not any of the Harold and Kumar movies, I am still excited to see that he is leaving Hollywood behind for an even weirder town: Washington D.C.

Good luck, Mr. Modi.

Sepia Mutiny on Oh my God they killed Kutner. Bastards!
8Asians on Kumar Goes to Washington

Yesterday, walking into a bathroom at a Starbucks triggered the most bizarre 24+ hours of migraine I have ever experienced. Mind you, I have been getting migraines since I was 9 or so years old and I am no stranger to the experience. The usual migraine for me starts with a fluorescent light trigger (evil evil evil energy savers) and/or consumption of an allergic food substance (usually egg plus dairy) that causes a sense of unwellness that descends into light phobia, nausea, and twenty thousand evil hammer elves pounding at my skull and eye sockets for a day or so.

A couple of times in my life, I have had sound trigger a migraine. I learned early on, aka 1991, that I cannot go into a club that plays house or bass 'n' drum electronic music with a light show unless I want to exit with a migraine. Sound, repetitive loud bass sound that I can feel on my skin plus lights equals a migraine trigger, thus my love for the good old fashioned high trebled rock'n'roll.

Bizarrely enough, smoke of the mary jane is also a migraine trigger for me. I can't smoke the stuff or be around anyone smoking hash or pot at all. Neither can my brother. It triggers migraine and nausea for me, and just nausea for my brother. I am all for legalizing the weed, just do not smoke that sh*t within 50 feet of me.

Back to the sound trigger, I have read about folks who have aural / audio / optical migraines that are triggered by sound or flashing lights. When I was in my late 20s, I worked in Boston and was in an office with fluorescent lights and a CRT computer monitor. My doctor helped me work out that the flicker cycle of the fluorescent overhead lights was competing with the 60 cycle/minute flicker of the CRT monitor which was causing my brain to GACK into migraine land. She told me to turn off the fluorescent overhead lights, get a desktop incandescent light, and spend at least 1 hour outdoors every workday. This prescription worked.

I walked at lunch and home from work. I turned off the fluorescent lights and got an incandescent desktop lamp. No more migraines at that job. I now make sure that my house & work environments have lots of natural light and no fluorescent bulbs of any kind. I avoid electronic music. I avoid any combos of egg and dairy in food (thus my joke about being a gluten-free vegan carnivore). I spend most of my time now, gratefully, migraine free. Except the one off odd migraine here and there.

Yesterday was that day. I walked into the Starbucks bathroom, which had bare walls and a concrete floor with a very very noisy overhead fan. The fan was very loud and I could feel the sound and air pulse out of the fan, echo around the concrete and hit my skin. My first thought was, "Oh no! I need to get out of this bathroom now. Yikes, I have to pee!" I tried to get in and out quickly, but I didn't do it soon enough.

Within 30 minutes I found my eyes struggling to focus and the road in front of me pulsing. My hearing was starting to pulse as well. By the time, we made it to Erika & Thomas' house, I had a hard time remaining steady enough on my feet to walk up the stairs. I was having a hard time thinking and I was giggling for no reason.

Normally, by this time, the crushing headache pain and attendant nausea would have descended, but this migraine was different. My head felt off, but not achy. Erika gave me a cold pack and a black shirt to put over my eyes as I laid on the floor to try to get the world to stop pulsing. Within 20 minutes of no light and the ice pack on my eyes & forehead while lying on their living room floor, I started to feel more normal, though all the sounds I heard were still lightly pulsing.

I waited until I felt calmed enough to go home. Once home, I put myself to bed as my limbs felt weak and disoriented. I kept waking up feeling more than a bit off. Due to the fact that the headache and nausea did not arrive, I didn't take my migraine meds, but instead took a benadryl thinking that maybe the dim sum lunch that Erika and I went to contributed to the completely off kilter day.

I woke up this morning feeling like I needed to stay in bed with my eye mask on. My day was very touch and go. I walked the dogs but half way through the walk I started to feel a bit weak and the world got a bit visually wavy again. We went home and I went to sleep for the late morning and early afternoon. Since then, I have alternated between about 60% on and about 85% normal, with bouts of weakness, visual fuzziness, and feeling like my body took a half step over and left me here.

I went and read various folks' stories about optical and aural migraines online and my experience is in line with theirs. What has been so odd about the last 24+ hours is that the pre-migraine or first hour of migraine disorientation that I usually experience has now lasted for over a day.

I really hope that I wake up normal tomorrow. Well, as normal as I ever am.

Take a stance. Even for a minute or two or a month or longer. Do it publicly.

One of the conversations, however briefly, I got into today on Twitter with Jonathan Greene was about John Gruber's iPhone post, "Complex".

While I agree with Gruber's initially stated premise that starting with a simple problem or solving a problem (just one) is a great way to begin any project. Once the simple has been defined, then build on it. Gruber goes from strength to strength to Apple fanboi kool-aid drinking by the end of the post.

In one of my Tweets, I pose the question:

"Gruber is very much in the Apple fold. That is why I ask if he is making a theoretical stance rather than an accurate assessment"

I think it makes great articles to take a stance and argue from it. I think it makes great art when one decides to take a stance, even if briefly, know where one resides in that theoretical space as one creates and practices one's art. But it is also important, whether one is writing articles or creating art to clearly acknowledge the stance and space that one is standing in, so that the reader or viewer can also know where to stand.

What do I mean by this? In Gruber's piece, his lack of a disclaimer or acknowledgment to the audience or even to himself of his US-centric and Apple-centric position makes the ending arguments of his piece fall flat if the reader falls outside of the concentric circles that Gruber is assuming that everyone is agreeing on. Many of the ideas in his article are intriguing, such as basing a series of devices on a software/firmware platform first rather than the function of the device, but this assumes that all the readers have drunken deeply of the iPhone kool-aid and are devotees at the shrine of Jobs. But what happens to the cult when Jobs retires and the powers that be don't carry on the same way? What happens if Gruber is looking at Apple's strategy from a theoretical stance or from a critical (in the academic sense) 20/20 hindsight review of the last eight years of strategy rather than what may or may not have happened?

This year at SXSW, Andy Budd and I had two very fun rounds of debate about Apple, the iPhone and anything that Nokia is doing. We were to have round three but never got to it. Andy is a User Experience professional, not only does he blog about it, run a whole web firm predicated on UX (clearleft), writes books on it, and speaks on UX, but he also firmly lives it. I thoroughly enjoy engaging Andy on topics of UX as it intersects mobile, as it is a great place for my great passion of mobile to cross his of UX. Andy and I disagree on the iPhone. While I agree with him that it is the "game changer" of 2007/2008, I don't think we can assume that it will be going forward.

I argue that Nokia and other firms cannot be discounted in the wake of the iPhone, as not every user/customer/person will be satisfied by the iPhone's features, functions, and OS. I have a number of non-web-design LA area creative friends who tried the iPhone and returned it before the 30 days were up for an Android G-1, a Sidekick 3, or for a Crackberry. I also have a number of friends and colleagues in LA and other places, who prefer Nokia Nseries phones to the iPhone, of which I am one of them. Most of us in this category want camera phones that take great photos.

On Twitter, I summed up my statements with on Gruber's article:

"It can be easy to forget culture & sub-cultural usage patterns as well as differing personal usage. The US is not all."

To this end, both in Gruber's article and in my own conversations with web colleagues who are passionate about A or B or C or X or Z device, I think we all have to remember that different mobile devices are not just fulfilling a cultural zeitgeist of the moment (like the iPhone in the US right now), or a sub-cultural niche (like the Sidekick 2 in the North American punk scene from 2005-2007), but also individual's differing usage patterns.

I do think it is important to state, even if briefly where one stands in that moment within the frame of the discussion so that the reader/viewer knows what one's theoretical stance is.

This is why I always encourage my friends who are excited about digital photography to write about and publicly dialogue about whether they are most interested in the act of shooting the photo or in the act of processing it later on their computer. Do you post your photos as is or do you process them? It is not an inconsequential factoid, but a record of your artistic / photographic journey that helps your viewers to know where you stand right now.

This is why I try to be clear that, for now, I like to shoot photos with camera phones, as I like the immediacy, I like the constraints, and I like to send my photos to this blog or to Flickr unprocessed, as is. And on the other side, for my friends who the great pleasure comes in the hour or two spent at their computer later processing their DSLR photos, good - many beauties upon you. Let us know about your process.

Why do I talk about theoretical stances or spaces in conjunction with John Gruber, the iPhone, Andy Budd, Twitter, Flickr, and camera phones this late in the evening after a long day? Well, in my recent post on the Nokia N95 vs. the Nokia N97, I was outright that my interest is in the camera capacity of the device and in response to some comments, I made a few comments that went deeper into the the territory of the quality of the camera being preeminent. I didn't make these comments to inflame but to iterate that my theoretical space and concern as an individual user of mobile devices is that of a photographer first and foremost.

From what position or space are you standing in right now?

This week when the press was nattering on in headlines about Michael Phelps getting caught smoking a bong at a party, I thought, "Michael who?"

This shows you how much I pay attention to sports. It took me about 2 hours to remember that Mr. Phelps was an Olympic athlete. My next thought was, "Why does anyone care if he smokes pot? Isn't he like 22?"

I would be more concerned if he was shooting steroids to improve his athletic performance than smoking a drug that is known to make folks couch potatoes. Really, people, think of the headlines, "Famed Olympic Swimmer Caught on a 3am Run to Dunkin Donuts for a 24 Pack of Donut Holes." vs. a headline like "Famed American Male Swimmer Looking Oddly Like 1970s East German Women's Swimming Team."

While I do not like marijuana and I really don't care to be around anyone smoking it, as the smoke is a migraine headache trigger for me; and as the daughter of a parent who has smoked it for years, I don't tend not respect regular users, but... but... but...

Really, America, it is time to legalize and tax this stupid-making herb. If we allow Colt 45 to be sold at liquor stores and the state of California makes a tax off of it, then a dime bag of pot should also be sold and taxed.

Why do I think this? As long as this drug is illegal our prisons are full, our national parks are being raped by greedy drug farming capitalists, and we are losing tons of tax dollars to drug lords and cartels who are holding many cities north & south of the border hostage.

We have not set up Sequoia National Park to be a place for the Mexican Cartels to grow marijuana and trash the land, we set up Sequoia to preserve a unique biosphere on the western Sierras. When I first read in 2005 in the LA Times of the cartels slashing & burning oak forest to grow marijuana for the illegal drug trade, I was FURIOUS.

I was even more furious that the US government has known about this since at least 2003 (from the LA Times article), even though they chose to ignore it:

Sequoia Kings Canyon spokesperson Alexandra Picavet thinks the drug debate has kept the problem from getting traction. "People get blinded by the marijuana issue.... We don't want people planting asparagus on the land, either. This is agricultural assault on a national park, no matter what they're growing."

Lawmakers say the issue is crowded out by more pressing matters. This year's federal drug-control strategy did not address pot cultivation on public land. And the Sierra Club acknowledges other priorities than drug bandits.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare), whose district includes Sequoia National Park, called hearings on the marijuana incursion in 2003. He says the issue is under the radar for most lawmakers in Washington.

"They don't even know that it exists.... People don't think about it," Nunes says.

The pot growers are no longer the stereotype of hapless hippies. They are part of sophisticated criminal organizations schooled on the Colombian cartels' economy of scale, says Ruzzamenti. "They do things big. Even if you lose a little here, you'll make it up in the long run. They've taken this lesson to another level," he says.

Most of the ringleaders, say investigators, are U.S. nationals based in Southern California with connections to cartel families in Michoacán, Mexico; field workers are well-armed Mexican laborers.

"We've found AR-15s, shotguns, rifles, knives strapped to poles, crude crossbows," says J.D. Swed, chief ranger at Sequoia.

It is high time that we allow American farmers to legally grown the herb - let's help set them free from Monsanto & Number 2 corn - and for the US & various states to make a little tax money. Let's make it cheap enough that there is no incentive for drug cartels to rape our national parks and to be involved at all.

If folks want to get high, let them. Tax the shit and then change the DUI laws to include both alcohol and marijuana influenced equally. Take the tax monies and place it into education and health care. We tax alcohol and cigarettes, let's tax the herb.

We need the money more than the drug cartels do. As for Mr. Phelps, we put him up on the hero pedestal, let's not knock him down off of it for anything less than steroid drug abuse that will effect why we put him on the pedestal in the first place.

Sun. Feb. 1, 2009 - It has become quite the thing to tilt-shift one's photos and make them look like architectural miniatures. Recently, I came across a tilt-shift maker and decided to try a photo or two.

Due to my style of photography, most of my photos were not successful, at least to my eye, when rendered in the tilt-shift mode. Except the above photo of a red white & blue curb in Kilkeel (or possibly Ballymartin - sorry I didn't geotag this photo at the time due to driving when I took it).

This photo was taken during the Around Ireland mobile / geo-photo project in the summer of 2006. I made many trips to Northern Ireland that summer, as I was attempted to suss out as much of the real NorIE from all the tales as possible.

Frankly, the Unionist towns CREEPED me out. They mean to. All that red, white and blue is meant to give the viewer a big case of the creeps. It is meant to keep you in line. It is meant to let you know who is boss.

The painted curbs and buildings, the Union Jack flags, the flags posted on light poles and painted on bridges in certain towns. It is all meant to send a sign. To the let the viewer and visitor know who rules this town.

Thus, the tilt-shift is perfect for this photo as the whole perspective becomes even more tilted than the drive by tilt already in the photo (taken at driving speed) and the tilt-shift technique blurs/focuses, and miniaturizes the objects in the photo. Just like sectarianism does for people's perspectives and lives.

Most of Northern Ireland is delightful. I have been back since 2006 to take my mom to NorIE, as her grandfather was from Ulster and much of my father's people were from Newry and surrounds. This is the land many of my people came from. I felt at home in much of the north. Except the towns with the red, white, and blue.

Fast forward to the recent U.S. election season. All the red, white and blue this election seemed darker and slightly creepy this past year, as if America was blurred and focused on a small dot, tilted in all the wrong places, and miniaturized in all the wrong ways. The emphasis on patriotism with out reflection, lock step to the party.

America, we have fought long and hard for our freedom, let's not fall down the dark, myopic hole of sectarian, partisanship. The flag is only a sign, a symbol, not an idol to worship. Let's take the opportunity of a new beginning to work together.

Original photo taken by Ms. Jen on 07.15.06 with her Nokia N80 while driving north in County Down on the Newry Rd to Belfast.

As a small note: I am neither Republican of the Irish or American variety, nor am I an Unionist of the Irish or American variety.

Tonight at dinner, Erika and I had a long talk about my Facebook post from last night: how each of us use it, why I hate it, and why it is the first social network site that she has really gotten into. We talked at length about synchronous vs. asynchronous communication, public vs. private, the open web vs. the closed web (like MySpace or Facebook), preferred modes of communication, and which worked better when. It was a great conversation over excellent food at Fu Rai Bo in West LA.

All the while we were discussing Facebook and styles of communication an early 20s-something couple next to us was on a date and the whole time the girl kept taking phone calls and texting, all the while she was leaning across the table to smooch the fellow. When they left, I pointed out the extreme difference to Erika.

Not once during dinner did either Erika or I touch our mobile phones, I did not take photos or check my email, she did not take any phone calls. We talked. Then again, we weren't on a date, just having a fun debate over issues. Yet, the youngsters were completely ok with continuous partial attention and smooching in between communicative interruptions.

One of the things that Erika pointed out to me during our discussion, of which she should know as we have been friends for over 18 years now, is that if I strongly don't like something then it is a guarantee that 80% of the rest of the planet will strongly like it. I have a problem with intuitively not being mainstream. Thus, if I don't like Facebook, you should probably go buy stock in it. Well, if they were public that is.

I got home tonight and found this post over at The Spittoon and have concluded that I must not be "Miss Con-GENE-iality":

If Facebook is starting to take over your life, maybe your genes are partly to blame.

While I am good at keeping up with a wide circle of networks, I don't enjoy nor have I gotten sucked into Facebook. As I stated to Erika tonight, it really comes down to the open web vs. the closed web and how services like Facebook & MySpace encourage folks to remain in the closed web and get dumbed down by the confined space. Erika argued that folks like the convenience of the closed web spaces like Facebook & MySpace that allows folks to do everything in one place.

I don't want the internet to become an slightly more interactive version of the brain dead Boob Tube (TV), but a place where folks can grow and become more creative and alive.

I have social networking fatigue and I have had it for years.

I jumped on my first alt.music board/list in 1994 and have been full bore ahead on mailing lists, alt.music, bulletin boards, message boards, groups, friendster, myspace, flickr, twitter, facebook, jaiku, ad finitum, ad nauseum ever since. Fifteen years later, I alternately love the online spaces that allow me to really connect and be fed by others, and I am overwhelmed by the ones that sap my attention and energy.

I hate chat/IM/AIM and text/sms is not far behind in my book, as they both demand that one reply immediately and in a shallow fashion. I really do prefer asynchronous communication in which I can take the time to reply in depth if necessary to instant now chat. I prefer to be able to check in on [insert name of service] when I have the time and post / reply at my leisure. It is for this same reason that I only pick up about half of the phone calls I receive. As a bouncy adult who is easily distracted, I have learned that I need to think before I respond.

As a creative who has had her own consultancy / freelance web design & development business since August of 2000, I have learned that if I want to be a good little citizen and pay my bills on time I really need to focus on the task(s) at hand when I am working.

While continuous partial attention may be a great catch phrase for the current cultural zeitgeist, if I practice it at any length it will toss me out of my house and I will be living in my car. My car, while wonderful, does not have a comfy bed & a hot shower. Thus, I need to focus and concentrate on work and the online leisure activities that feed my life and soul - like blogging, researching, creating, and communicating in a constructive manner.

Ok, so that is my explanation for preferring email & phone calls and avoiding chat & texting. Now let's talk about social networks....

Mon 01.26.09 - Happy New Year, the Year of the Ox - Ji Chou, the year 4706 or 4707 depending on the source.

Happy New Year!

Ever since this past weekend's Punk Rock Bowling adventure, I have had a hard time going to sleep before 2am. Given that I am at my Mom's and am supposed to be up nice and early in the morning to go skiing, my idea for a big blog post has been thwarted by the late hour and Rio the large black lab with a cuddle affliction.

In the meantime, while I continue to ruminate on Tuesday's inauguration, here are a few links:

From 3quarksdaily, From Books, New President Found Voice:

Finally, after eight years, you do not have to apologize for being well read. Smart, in fact, is the new cool. Congratulations to all 3qd readers on this special day.

I say Amen, Amen, Amen! I am so glad to have a President who is not just well read, but is an open intellectual. Relief.

From the BBC, Obama 'set to close Guantanamo'. Further Amens.

I have previously written about how it is completely unethical for us to detain folks without due process in a military base that is on the land of a stated enemy. Given that we have made peace and/or diplomatic connections in recent years with other stated enemies (Libya, Vietnam, China, Russia, etc etc etc), maybe it is time to completely close Guantanamo and give the land back to Cuba. And while we are at it, reinstate relations with Cuba. We have brought more change to the communist countries we trade with then the ones we embargo.

From Politics and Culture, David Schmid nominates Slavoj Žižek! a recommendation for a bit of cultural whimsy.

Mon 01.19.09 - The last few weeks have been odd: sad at times, waiting, and mostly a feeling that I have outgrown my skin, making me think of Eustace desiring his dragon skin removed in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

The last eight years have been a steady downward spiral at the hands of a power hungry administration and I am ready for change. On Friday night, I was awoken half way through the night with the most beautiful dream of change, a new day for America where beauty, aesthetics, and compassion triumphs over power, war, and depression. This was an odd dream to have at a punk rock bowling tournament in Las Vegas.

Then last night, Vicki Pepper was so overcome by her excitement for tomorrow's Inauguration and shouted about it in happiness at the bar at the hotel. Today as we drove home from Vegas, I found myself voiceless due to a smoke-full Vegas, unable to really talk to my car mates and fretting. Fretting about tomorrow. Worrying about the safety of the Obama family. Worrying that America won't be able to pull out of the spiritual and cultural pall we have been under for the last eight years. But fretting amounts to a hill of beans and lost miles on the road.

So starting tomorrow, I will be letting the fretting go, looking forward to change, looking forward once again, looking around in my world to see what I can change, and not just hoping for Aslan to come cut us, America, out of our dragon skin. It is not one person or one new Administration but ourselves as a culture who will make the changes and shuck off the old skin for the new one.

Wed 01.14.09 - Actually, Steve Lawson speaking on social media for musicians at The Olde Ship in Santa Ana.

During and after college at least once a month, I would work at having a Big Sleep. Basically, I would sleep for as long as possible, at least 10+ hours, and then stay in my nightgown/sleepclothes until at least 5pm on the day of the Big Sleep In. The post-Big Sleep always included reading a good novel whilst hanging out and about with no plan until 5pm.

Over the years as time and stress of adult life has creeped on, the Big Sleep has reduced to sleeping in once a month or once every two months and not getting dressed until noon. In the last few years, I have not really had a good Big Sleep and have gotten much more involved in working at my computer at all hours and all days.

This weekend, after many weeks of sadness, stress, back pain, and holiday family fun, I decided to stay off my computer and enjoy hanging out with friends. I returned home last night from Ryan's exhibition and dinner with Lauren and determined that I would settle in for a Big Sleep.

I took a shower, finished reading a book, and then went to bed around 11pm. I woke up at 7:04am and determined that I needed to turn over and sleep more. I took a drink of water, went to the rest room, put on my sleep eye mask to take away the sunlight streaming in my windows, and turned over to attempt to sleep another hour or so.

The best part is that I woke up again at 11:56am this morning! Yay! I stayed in bed enjoying the relaxed happiness of waking up after a Big Sleep. While I did not stay in bed until 5pm, I did make it until 1pm - and then I went to lunch and took the dogs to Dog Beach.

Now I feel reset. This is very good.

I need to get back in the habit of turning off the computer for the weekend, settling in with a good novel, and have a good Big Sleep at least once a month.

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

Tues. 12.30.08 - The International Year of Astronomy 2009 - go out and truly watch the night sky. (Video via APOD.)

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Much like the famed Humpty Dumpty, the larger extended family appears to have shattered into too many shards to be put back together again. Our family's egg did not fall off of one wall to only to shatter, but many, of which some of the walls and some of the falls were spectacular, like all of 1990, Thanksgiving 1992 or 93, again on Thanksgiving 1994, and then the first weekend of May 2002 was the dilly.

With each fall off of a wall, has come more divisions and separations. More of the family troops have sub-divided into camps. The camps have further sub-divided. A once large, boisterous, albeit dysfunctional Irish-American family is now in silent, walled off pieces.

It is only now that it has become obvious how the events at the birthday dinner on that Saturday in early May 2002 were the final nail in the family togetherness coffin. Even though 97% of us were not involved in the row that bloomed that night, much like a dot of mold on the cheese, it has now spread to almost all of us, even the one's of us who are not at war.

I am tired and sad by all of this. I came home last night and both Tweeted/Jaiku'd that I want to move to another continent. Preferably the London or Helsinki continent.

Yesterday's Christmas dinner was the echos of the evidence of how bad it has gotten. Two of my mom's sister's and their families were in town, but they had Christmas' completely separate from our immediate family and the grandparents who are not involved in the May 2002 event at all. My mom was agitated and our dinner was subdued. I cried as I drove home. Christmas felt like a struggle not a celebration.

I am sad that family members who live on the east coast and I have not seen in years were within 15 miles yesterday yet we did not get together. Sad that one family member who called while we were over at my grandmother's didn't even recognize my mom when she answered the phone, yet invited me to come visit in January.

I know that it is considered natural in modern America that big families don't stay in touch after the grandparents pass on, but all of the grandparents in this case are still alive and so are the step-grandparents. And I know of families in the US and in Ireland that are even bigger than mine and they still get together for Christmas.

Part of me wants to pick a neutral park, sometime next summer, and invite them all over for a family reunion BBQ and include all the Kilroys I can find on the West Coast to diffuse the tensions (really how bad can one behave if Walt's side of the clan comes?). Another part of me wants to write a big letter naming names and calling out bullshit, but that will just inflame the ashes. Another part of me wants to write it all off and be done with it, Hanen family style (Hanen's never ever get together for anything. Well, maybe once a decade in groups of 3s & 4s).

The best black humor part of all of this, is that most of the prime pushers of the egg off the wall of our family and stompers of the egg shells into more shards are nice good family values Republicans. God bless America!

Wed 12.24.08 - Just after a delightfully real Christmas Eve service at St. Mary in Palms church in Culver City.

Katrina and Sam invited Erika and Thomas who invited me. I am glad I went.

Dear Yahoo Executives,

If you are wondering why your company is failing, it is because you don't get the internet.

What were you all thinking last week when you decided to layoff one of the founding employees who is now one of the two most public facing and world popular employees of your most important property?

After this bonehead move of exceedingly bad strategy and timing, everyone involved in the decision to layoff George Oates should be fired asap.

Sincerely, Jenifer Hanen

*******
Update from Tues 12.16.08:

Jeremy and Jeffrey both weigh in on George getting laid off.

It seems to me that the media (TV, newspapers, radio, the internet, etc.) and several people I know are thoroughly enjoying the current fearmongering fun of "hard times!", "Recession", "Depression".

Everyday I hear radio ads for how to beat the current hard times, all the NPR news presenters are starting their segments by mentioning how rough things are, and in the last month the LA Times has more ads and advertising supplements folded into the paper on a daily basis than there has been in the last five years.

I have friends and family members who can only talk about how "bad" it is. Only problem is that none of these folks have lost their jobs, nor their homes, nor any real lifestyle differences. I called two of them out on it recently, as they were talking about how "hard" it is.

I said, "You are saying that with glee. Are you enjoying this?"

Both were shocked into silence and then kept talking about the doom and gloom.

Yes, people, America is enjoying this. We love our horror. We love our shock. We love our End Times. We love our big budget Hollywood Thrillers and Action flicks. We love our apocalypses. We love prophesying THE END.

Funny thing is that the end never seems to come. Well, except individual death. And the credit card bills keep showing up every month. And once a year, in April, the taxes are due.

As Americans we love fear. FDR told us that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. No, in 2008, there is nothing quite as enjoyable and gleeful as fear itself. Why do we enjoy the fear? Is it a nice break from our optimism?

But hey, the LA Times food section just did a whole Wednesday section on Depression era cooking, shopping, and articles on how to make the food budget stretch.

Back in 1991 - 1993, everyone was really gleeful about the mini-Depression we were going through, esp. here in SoCal where the AeroSpace Industry was collapsing due to the end of the Cold War. In '91-93, the big gleeful fad was Depression era Prairie style dresses, long flowing print dresses with clasps to cinch in the waist. Dang it all if we didn't wait out that recession in Doc Martens, dreadlocks, and flowing flowered dresses.

Be as gleeful or fearful/gleeful as you want about this Recession, but what I want to know is where are all the fun dresses?

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent.

If you are like me, Advent has little meaning other than a fun little calendar in your childhood of the days in December that you opened a colorful little paper door and there was chocolate or surprise in side. I grew up vaguely Presbyterian. Vaguely.

As a young adult, I found myself at charismatic churches were ritual is of little to no import. Since the 2004 election, I have been allergic to going to church, unless it is an ancient church in the UK or Europe with ritual. Oh, St. Bartholomew's, how I love you.

I still know very little of Advent, about as little as I know of Lent. The seasons of the liturgical calendar are a mystery to me, a mystery that I am somewhat intrigued by until my interior protestant gets in a big fight with my interior anti-authoritarian rebel. Not pretty, I assure you.

If you, like me, are Advent-curious but a little afraid to step out and experience it in an out way, then Ken Collins' Advent Wreath tutorial may be for you.

I have looked at pine wreaths for days at the market trying to determine if I will make the leap away from Calvin and the like and try out a Sunday advent practice starting tomorrow, but I have been unable to commit. I have 2 purple candles and a bunch of beeswax candles, but it seems a bit too heathen for me.

Silly me.

How do you celebrate Advent?

Compliments of the nice folk over at 3 Quarks Daily, late last week I read this article on The Imprinted Brain Theory by Christopher Badcock who writes on the genetic, gender, and environmental causes of mental disorders / diseases such as autism and schizophrenia, or how it may not be nature vs. nuture but nature + nuture.

Badcock breaks down not only genetics and brain development, but also how environmental factors such as good maternal nutrition can contribute to more cases of autism and famine can contribute to more cases of schizophrenia. Also, there is implications in less extreme cases of non-mental disorders such as tendencies to a scientific / rational persuasion versus folks who tend towards intuition, the arts, and faith.

I have been interested in the recent research of the last few years that is showing that one's belief in religion or lack thereof may be influenced by the processing of one's brain. If Badcock's research and theory are found to be correct, then may the decline of religion in developed countries may be a result of increased maternal nutrition and pre-natal care? Before you get all up in your biscuits defending rational secularism or religion, read the article and think about the implications.

Photo of the Taj Hotel and the Gateway to India taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N82 on 02.19.08 from the Mumbai Harbor.

Thurs 11.27.08 - For 2.5 days in February 2008, I stayed in the Colaba district of Mumbai at the end of the Urbanista Diaries adventure in India. I stayed a little less that 2 blocks from the famed Taj Hotel. I ate a small supper the second night at the upstairs bar at Cafe Leopold. I enjoyed wandering around on foot the southern part of Mumbai.

Most of all, what I did experience of Mumbai made me love it the way I love Los Angeles and London. A big sprawling vibrant world class city. The kind of city, like LA or London, that you either love or hate. After being in Mumbai for 15 minutes, I was deep down happy. It was love on first sight.

Yesterday, my heart went out to Mumbai as the news of the terrorist attacks on the Taj Hotel, the Oberoi, Cafe Leopold, the Jewish Center, and the CS Railway Terminus.

I first heard of the attacks on Twitter when an Indian friend wrote a cryptic anguished tweet, I went to the BBC and saw no news, 10 minutes later there was. The news and crisis has continued to unfold over the course of the last 36 hours, getting worse. And made worse by having been at 3 of the 5 places that have been attacked. And worse for loving the city.

Oh, Mumbai, I am dreadfully sorry. Words are failing me to express the upset.

So most of today, I have been singing the chorus to the worship song, "Give Thanks" in my head, "Give thanks to a grateful heart, give thanks to the Holy One, give thanks..."

And then I forget the rest of the lyrics.

Today was a seesaw day. I had the opportunity to have an early supper with some old and dear friends - Mike and Kim from Channel Three (CH3) plus Kimm's wife Kelli. I have known and been friends with these folks for over 24 years. It was a blessing to hang out, have a few glasses of wine/beer and some food over good conversation.

But this was deeply weighted by some very bad news I received beforehand.

Therein lies the crux or the paradox of life, the good and the bad many times are entwined. Entwined some times in the same hour. The big challenge for me is how to digest it, what to make of it, and how I will choose to respond to the circumstances of life.

One of the things that I have learned in the last 15 years is how to count my blessings or count the things that I am grateful for, even if very small, each day. Write them down if necessary to make the things that I am thankful for more concrete.

Today, I am thankful for dear friends with whom I have walked the miles with, in good times and in bad and in mundane times. I am also thankful for all the folks who did not get shot today in Mumbai. I am praying that peace will reign today in Mumbai. I am thankful for Scruffy and Belle, even when Scruffy had diarrhea inside in front of folks (oops) this afternoon. I am also thankful for the rain that SoCal received last night.

Rather than go on, I would like to link to Mary Beth Crain's essay in the SOMA journal on "Reasons to Be Grateful":

My great-aunt Lillian was a real pill--a stern spinster-type who made a loud practice of going around doing good and letting everybody know about it. And she was always lecturing you. One of her favorite admonitions was to "Beee grateful!" Whenever she caught you complaining, she'd deliver an unsolicited sermon on everything you had to be thankful for. Unfortunately, she was so sanctimonious about it that all you wanted to do was kill her.

As a result, Aunt Lil and her "Beee grateful!" became a standing family joke. We kids were always going around imitating her. If my brother stubbed his toe and let out an expletive, I'd respond with "Beee grateful! At least you have your toe! There are some people who don't have any feet!" Then we'd all crack up.

Well, it took me about 40 years to realize that Aunt Lil was actually right.

Ms. Crain does not only recommend taking stock of what one is thankful for but also what one is angry at or un-thankful for. She hopes that the thankful list will be longer than the other list.

I think it becomes a spiritual discipline to choose to find more things each day to be thankful for than not. Let's start today and tomorrow to enumerate out our blessings and what we are thankful for and keep doing it each day from here on out.

Ok, so I have failed the last 3 days to write something substantial in the morning for my NaBloPoMo challenge to myself. I am writing but...

Due to the headache and the nearness to the midnight hour, you all will be getting a few tidbits out of me.

1) The new Nokia viNe update for alpha/beta testers, Nokia viNe 1.02 (11/20/08 release) is FAST! Yay! Instead of the upload time taking forever, my 5 photos of this evening's sunset went so fast that I thought viNe was lying to me when it announced the upload was done. But it wasn't, all my photos were up on my Sports Tracker account and up at the nseries.com Nokia viNe flash viewing thingy. Yay!

The Nokia viNe 1.0 was supposed to be released to the wild last week, but they have delayed it and I will let you know when it is out.

2) As for MOCA's economic failure and near collapse of the institution, I have a few things to say. I bent Tammy's ear about tonight, but it can be all summed up in the fact that I think they have been way to rock star-y high brow about the contemporary art they were showing and did not really interact with the community over the last decade.

The Hammer museum has done a *great* job of involving the community by putting on annual group best of shows (best LA MFA graduates, best of LA young artists, etc), as well as having lectures and other community events that draw folks in. I would love it if MOCA were to have a best of LA young artists or best of Downtown artists or best of east side taggers or best LA mid-career artists that haven't had a one person show yet. Etc. etc. etc.

MOCA, I would rather drive downtown to see great local events at either your Main MOCA space or at the Geffen then drive to Westwood. Give me a reason to care about you. Give me a reason to want to participate. The Hammer does. The Getty does. So, why don't you?

The LA Times' art critic, Christopher Knight, has an Open Letter to MOCA.

Anyone who has known me for any length of time, knows that I am not a big movie person and that I eschew TV completely. Due to the lack of TV, unless I rent a DVD and watch it on my computer, I don't see movies.

But this last year, in an effort to join the rest of the human race, well - at least be up on some movies, I got a Netflix subscription to be able to watch some of the films that I have missed out in the last 25 years of luddite behavior. I have mostly received a movie or two a month from Netflix of which are either art house movies of the last two decades or movies of Jane Austin books or adaptions thereof.

Tonight, after the movie sat on a shelf since August unopened, I watched Mira Nair's "Mississippi Masala". I love Mira Nair films, esp. "The Namesake" and "Mississippi Masala", as well as lighter fair such as "Monsoon Wedding". Mira Nair hits the mixture of family, displacement, life changes, tradition vs. modernity, and identity on the head in her movies.

I have spent most of my life in Southern California, born here to folks who have been in SoCal for 3-5 generations. For all of my living in SoCal for most of my life, I come from a long line, on both sides, of folks with itchy feet. Folks who move frequently, both in&out of California and within California. Folks who travel. Folks for whom settling is really something that other people do. Even though we keep leaving, we always come back to California in one way or another. I love this big, crazy sprawled out cities within the city / metro area with all the people in the world who have also made this city their home.

While I love Los Angeles, I have always felt not of this place. I love the land fiercely, but am also fiercely frustrated by the transient nature of this space which causes folks to abuse it so badly or attempt to mold it into what they had before they moved here. I have spent most of my life not feeling like I match any of the majority cultures or sub-cultures.

As a short, brown haired, brown eyed woman in a region that celebrates the blond beach bunny or blonde starlet du jour, I have felt culturally displaced most of my life. Did I mention that by and large, I dislike Hollywood? Maybe it is my dislike of the stereotypes that Hollywood pushes out to the rest of the world that makes me so fiercely reject watching or consuming their products. More than just maybe.

Most of my Netflix watching this last year has been British, Italian, or Indian films or films made by British, Italian or Indian folk who live in other places. Not so odd that.

What I like about Mira Nair films, is while they celebrate the Indian expatriate or migrant experience, she also keenly shows us characters that are trying to navigate cultural spaces that are not always home. Ms. Nair's films focus on the experience of characters who are navigating the waters of cultural otherness all the while they are fighting for their own space in that place and discovering their identity between two worlds.

When I watch a Mira Nair film brings into sharp focus a question that I ask myself almost every day, really where is home?

I haven't found it, yet, I yearn for home with all my heart.

When I was very young I was a serious early bird, popping up each day around 5:30am and going to bed by 8pm. My best hours of energy and alertful-ness was between 5:30am and 10am. As I aged into teen-twenties-hood, my body clock flipped where my best hours were in the evening and I struggled to wake up any time before 8am, even for school.

Now as an adult, I find that I like to go to bed around midnight and I wake up, depending on the light & the situation, between 6:30am and 9am. When I wake up, I am usually up and peppy. Sometimes I wake up wanting to sing, and I do.

Over the years, my energy levels have somehow melded between my childhood early bird and my teen-twenties late bird. In the last few years, I have lots of energy and concentration from 7am to noon and then again 5pm to 9/10pm. Even more interesting, to me, is that I do my best writing in the mornings and my best designing/coding in the evenings. Afternoons are a bit of a loss for any task of concentration other than talking and reading.

When I was writing my masters thesis, I did my draft writing in the mornings, my further research/reading in the afternoon, and my rewriting in the evening, with insertions of 15-30 minute procrastination/fun breaks at odd times.

I have a list of things that I want to write "longish", thoughtful blog posts about, but I keep telling myself that I can't blog until I have finished my allotted work for the day/evening. If I let myself blog when I am most "on" for writing, I feel guilty, as if I am cheating a client or myself or some schoolmarm in the sky. If I do like I have done for the last week and wait until after 10pm to blog, I know I have a whole *real* post in me, but I can't concentrate long enough to do anything other than vaguely think of the title of the topic and certainly I have not been able to write about it.

I can write about writing late at night. I can write about funny stuff or what happened that day. But if I want to write about, flesh out, and make a good argument for an idea or larger essay, well that is morning work.

I need to get over my blogging vs. real work guilt complex and start allowing myself two hours every morning or at least four mornings a week to write out all the big ideas in my head. Starting tomorrow. Maybe Sunday...

A few weeks ago my brother went to a funereal of a fellow* we both knew in high school. At said event, another fellow that we had gone to junior and senior high school asked after me. When my brother reported that so&so asked after me, I was very surprised.

Me: "Really, he asked after me?"
Joe: "Yes, he did."
Me: "But he was SO mean to me in school and even at our 10 year reunion."
Joe: "Well, I guess he got over himself."
Me: ((disbelief))

Fast forward to this evening's family pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner** with the family. Me, wearing my favorite pink sweater and a pair of comfy (read roomy) black jeans.

My Aunt: "I love your sweater... Have you lost weight?"
Me: Looks down at said comfy/room pants and pulls out waistband to show lots of room. "No"
Aunt: "But you look like you have lost weight!"
Me: nonplussed, "No, I just like these jeans because they are roomy."
Aunt: "Oh, with your figure you must always have room at the waist." (Aunt is not being a witchy here, she is just referring to the fact that my figure is hour-glass and modern fitting jeans never fit).
Me: "I am used to pants not fitting, it has been this way for years, nearly 30 years now."
Aunt: "You are over yourself now."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, 40 years old must be the official demarcation line, not between youth and middle age, but between being full of oneself and being over oneself.

Notes:
* Somehow a fairly simple procedure descended into MRSA-flesh-eating-bacteria-dead-at-39.
** At my mother's mother's house and conducted because we are all going to separate places on Thanksgiving.

While the news has been doom and gloom about the economy in recent months, and specifically this last 6 weeks, I have not noticed much change in my immediate world other than a few small signs. Bizarrely enough, clients still need web work done and are paying on time. Only one of my friend's has lost a job and it was in a vulnerable industry (construction). So far, knock on wood, the financial crisis has been an abstract explosion many thousands of miles away that has made my stock portfolio crash significantly.

The only major change I have had to make is that I *was* planning, for months if not for over a year, to depart in two days to London for the Future of Mobile 2008 conference and my yearly trip to a northern place to experience a real autumn. Unfortunately, due to said financial crisis, the place I had stored my funds for this trip is now only worth 1/3 the amount I saved for the trip. So rather than cashing in on my air miles and hying off to London on the 13th, I am staying home. I am jealous that many of my friends will be in London next week and I will be at home in Seal Beach. Grumpily staying home.

The one thing that has effected my world in the last six months is that the Credit Union I have belonged to for over eight years is starting to behave a bit erratically after years of stellar service. First odd to do was that they redesigned their website for the much uglier in the spring. I called up a friend who also has an account with them and said, "Yikes! What do you think of _________'s new website?" "Yuck. I hate the yellow, red, and blue." She thought it was ugly, too.

Then in late spring, early summer they changed their name for the worse.

In June, a bizarre event occurred where for no reason whatsoever the credit union decided to but a "security hold" on a largish client check that I had deposited about a week before all my automatic payments were to hit my account. They held the deposit for over 2 weeks causing all my payments to bounce. Then to make matters worse, they decided that I had attempted to fraud them with a bad check. Except the check wasn't bad. It cleared with no problem, though it took another two weeks before I could convince the credit union that it had cleared. They had no explanation and decided to blame me. Very very very odd and very frustrating.

Mid-summer I received a letter informing me that the Credit Union was closing all business accounts to focus on personal accounts and that we had until Sept. 15th to move to a commercial bank for business accounts. Hello?!??!???

Up until the name change and the mortage crisis, my Credit Union has been a dream for me. They believed in my fledgling web design business back during the last crunch and helped me get started in 2001 & 2002. They were great when I was in Ireland for graduate school and made it very easy to do all my banking online from Dublin. When I returned from graduate school and had barely got my business back online, the Credit Union gave me an auto loan for my Prius with no questions asked. I have been faithful back to them by paying my debts on time and putting my savings at the Credit Union.

Thus, the increasingly small erratic behaviors since the summer have been more keenly felt.

After the closure of the business accounts, I moved my business account to a large commercial bank of which at the beginning of every month, I have to transfer money from the commercial bank to my Credit Union to make sure I cover my automatic payments. As the credit crisis has progressed this fall, I have noticed that the large commercial bank has honored all of my client's checks within a day or two but when I transfer monies to the credit union it will take 3-5 days to be actionable on my account. Not just a few times but every time since September.

This is a problem. Items are bouncing or not clearing, even though I put monies in up to a week beforehand. I am getting phone calls from unhappy creditors. I am unhappy. And I am surprised that my highly rated, 1937-founded, locally large Credit Union is being stingy, holding funds beyond what is necessary, and treating all comers as if they are out to do the Credit Union wrong. This is not why I signed up with them in the first place.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that I will need to have three accounts: a business account, a personal checking, and a personal savings at the large commercial bank just to get my monthly personal financial business done until the credit crunch eases and the Credit Union decides that they are going to go back to behaving like a real credit union and not like a scared grinch.

Come on Wall Street and the Banking System, let's get the system moving and stopping panicking. That goes for you, too. People, stop panicking. Let's get moving. Forward.

Sun 11.09.08 - For various reasons, my local Whole Foods market is the worst store in the chain in SoCal, I won't go into all of it, but let's just say 2 things on the matter : stock & employee morale. It is not fun to shop at a market where one gets guff from the checkers & baggers about one's purchase choice and general bad attitude. On the stock issue, even before it switched from Wild Oats to Whole Foods, it has been hard to convince this local (was Wild Oats, now) Whole Foods to carry items that would be of interest to folks with multiple food allergies. Thanks for the gluten-free bread you carry, but Glutino is corn & yeast full, how about carrying a lot more of the gluten-free, yeast-free rice bread that sells out very quickly, obviously I am NOT the only customer who buys it*.

Thus due to the idiocy of the local Whole Foods employees and purchasing/stock management, I find myself driving at least 2 times a month to south Huntington Beach to the Mother's Market to purchase a much wider and deeper range of gluten-free, yeast-free, dairy-free, egg-free, canola-evil-oil-free, and corn-free items. My local Whole Foods is less than a mile away, the closest Mother's Market has been over 30 minutes away.

No longer, the genius' at Mother's have decided to do battle against the corporate bloat that Whole Foods has become and they have opened a branch in Santa Ana, that is technically farther away from me but is actually much easier to get to due to easy freeway access. All hail the nice Mother's Market folk.

Now, our family of food allergy sufferers has been frequenting the original Mother's Market health food store mothership in Costa Mesa since the early 1980s when we were first diagnosed. I am over the top excited that Mother's is expanding and is now in a lovely big store in Santa Ana, just across the street from the Westfield Main Place Mall on Main St, just north of the 5 fwy and just south of the 22. Great location, big wide aisles (all the other MM stores have very crunched aisles due to trying to fit as much stock as possible into a small store), and a great selection that far outstrips the average Whole Foods in the variety department.

Whole Foods only real distinctives over Mother's has been their butcher & fresh meat, wine department, and multiple locations. This new Mother's is the first store that has a good selection of packaged meats and not just frozen meats. Yes, there is no wine, but I can go to BevMo. What Mother's lacks in meat & wine, they more than make up for in vegan, raw, allergy-free, and just plain selection of multiple brands of local or health food over the ever increasing corporate organic banality that is Whole Foods.

Here is an example of what I am talking about, beyond gluten-free bread choice: My local Whole Foods only carries one brand of Japanese styled nori and seaweed products, only one brand. The BIG problem with that one brand is that it is grown & produced/made in China. HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! Wake up Whole Foods! I don't care what you say, you need, if you want to retain your indy/organic/wholefood reputation to provide a non-Chinese grown/made brand. I don't care if you have had an organic certification on the brand, HELLO! China is poisoning its own children in the name of profit.

Whole Foods did you test the nori and the water that it is grown in to make sure it is pollution free? HELLO! Now Mother's Market, even in their tiny-ish, cramped Huntington Beach store, has a selection of 4 Nori brands of which 1 is made in Japan and 1 in Canada. Whole Foods in a huge store only offers one brand made in a country which is terribly polluted and has crooked producers that add plastic additives to extend food. Nice, how marvelously whole food of them.

I want more than a label that says "Organic", I want to see that the company and the individual stores are putting thought into their purchasing decisions. It has become more and more obvious that Whole Foods is buying in bulk at the corporate level and not thinking about why they started the Whole Foods stores for in the late 1960s/early 1970s in Austin for in the first place. Additionally, I would like to go to my local Whole Foods and think that the employee type folks I interact with care enough to remember what customers want and do more than mock me, yes I have been mocked for my purchases more than once, when I get to the check out counter.

Dear Whole Foods, get your act together. Remember your roots. Do something about employee morale and attitude, while you are at it, please train your lovely college-aged employees on why insulting customers is bad and why folks would want to shop at your store.

Dear Mother's Market, thanks for staying independent and expanding into Santa Ana. Thanks for still hiring dreadlocked, tattoo'd vegan kids** rather than well-scrubbed college kids, cause vegan kids understand odd diets and don't mock. You rock.

Notes:
* The obnoxious, bad attitude employees always say to me when I inquire, "It just sells so fast." Me, "Why not carry more of it then if it is so popular?" WF employee, (brain explodes), "ahhhh.... Well, you should check back next week." Idiot. How to sell groceries in an upscale, speciality store & keep your job => keep popular items in stock. And furthermore, be nice to the customer who is merely making a request.
** Much like you can tell a good restaurant by who works there, a good health food store should always have an employee ratio of 60% vegan/hippy/punk/crusties/tattoo'd folk over straight/clean/oblivious folk. The local Whole Foods when it was Wild Oats had a good ratio, but with the advent of the Whole Foods takeover, the vegan/raw/hippy/crusties have fled leaving cranky CSULB students as employees. Damn folks, its Long Beach, y'all should be able to find a vegan, LGBT, crusty somewhere in town... And the fact that you can't only puts the final nail into your corporate coffin. Or at least demonstrates the incompetence of the store manager***.
*** Who by the way has the worst attitude of all the employees at the Long Beach Whole Foods.
</rant>

Either I have a box or two of books that are lost up in the further, black widow guarded, reaches of the loft in my brother's garage or the box(es) are propping up furniture in my storage room, but I am missing books.

A box or two of books that I did not find the last 3 times I have scoured the loft, side sheds, and back shed at my brother's for my books. A box or two of books that I have not found the last two times I took everything out of my storage room, except some of the big furniture in the back.

I have been having an itch to start at the beginning of the Charles de Lint Newford Series and work my way all the way through, as I have all the books and have read most of them at least 3 times before. I keep thinking of the the stories and having bits reverberate in my head, so it is time to re-read all the way through the Newford (loosely termed) series.

I know that "Spirits in the Wires" is currently visiting on Thomas Bertling's bookshelf and another 4 are here at my house, but where are the rest?

There are a minimum of 12 novels & story collections, not including the young adult books, in the Newford series that should be living in one of six bookcases in my apartment but aren't.

I can't have loaned that many out. So a box of books must be hiding from me. It must. I hope they are findable, somewhere. Must drag out the big ladder and go through the loft again in mid-winter when the spiders are in semi-hibernation.