elizabeth grigg - the other fourth meal

Actually, I have two. One is an incredibly annoying tax thing. One of those things where I'll be dreaming about colon cancer awareness month and thinking about the good old days.

The other project is repairing a huge pile of laundry. Yes, when you repair clothing it's called "sewing" but I won't tarnish the monniker. My sewing kit is as ill-supplied as my skills in the area, so I borrowed mom's kit. And, it turns out, her mom's too.

There is a thing about women's sewing baskets. Every woman has one. It may or may not close. Certainly nothing has ever been thrown out of it. And every item contains a history of an undocumented project - success or failure - you'll never know. Only the thread remains, or some "bunting" (wha?), or random lace parts, one side only of velcro strips, a cluster of buttons somehow outliving their shirt or sweater for their unusual prettiness, threaded together and preserved for all time. Looking for just the right shade of pink thread, I unburied a big whiff of my grandmother - no, not in a bad way. Just a smell that established the truth that many decades of presumably productive sewing existed before this one, undoubtedly.

For some reason, I ended up looking at this blog on sewing, and dying of laughter. Please click this link it is very much worth it. Anytime you think of blaming yourself for anything, think instead: we were raised by THESE PEOPLE and of course how can we possibly be accountable.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 08:18 PM | Permalink

I can volunteer to be a non-podcasting and non-vlogging person for this event.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 10:50 AM | Permalink

I decided not to download and install RealOne yet. As far as I know it is the only way to listen to all of "This American Life" for free. The tagline at the TAL website says it all:

"Note: don't let RealAudio fool you! You do NOT need the paid version of RealPlayer to listen to our files."

Proof that you can't reboot a company, nor can you reboot public opinion, without something unforseen happening (such as a "magnolia" grade plot twist. Frogs, anyone?)

I did listen to a few tracks from morning coffee notes while doing some repetitive work. The work soon required more than just mouse clicks, so I sorta blew that one, somehow dedicating part of my brain to listening. Some random thoughts from an outsider:
* I am still not bought off on the audio format for one person talking. Given a choice between reading one person's text, and listening to one person talk, I take the text, as it moves at my pace. One person cannot generate the animated quality that we get when talking with others.
* However, with multiple people the format takes off. It's pretty great. Although I still want a transcript option. Should I be taking notes the whole time? I know, it's called rewind, but I want to experience the message first and follow up with research later.
* People bursting into song is very cool.
* Playing back canned MIDI is a very funny joke for the smallest of instants.
* People look nothing like their voices hardly ever.

Still no way of truly integrating intensive listening into my day unless I get a more boring job.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 04:57 PM | Permalink

This post has, on one page, a concise and readable trajectory of everything that is going on in the calendar space right now. It also includes what's outside the trajectory everyone is taking. Those uncharted areas remind me of what I've said a million times.

* Data Entry on the go is a Dealmaker / breaker.
* Task Mapping and Visualization to help with "decision time."

Again, it seems it's such a challenging space to even repair the basics.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 10:54 PM | Permalink

This is just the best entry by Halley Suitt. Controversial as always. I can't remember the last time I caught someone looking at my a**. How would I notice anyway, I mean, do you just spin around and say "boo" or what.

Is it just me, or since Joi Ito's step back regarding blogs as either boring vs. too personal, people (myself included) have rallied to show him otherwise. There's no such thing as too personal. Right now, I have in draft mode an incredibly personal story about InfoPath and namespaces. I swear you'll be crying by the end of it.

But, back to the subject Halley was writing about. I have known parents who have taken their kids out of the "good" schools in the burbs because of the materialism and because of social issues. I agree with that choice. Her kids are doing much better now. This makes sense because thinking back on that time, what was I interested in. Social life and buying things. Certainly didn't need a school to reinforce that. Glad that's all changed now, though. (wink)

On suburban mothers, though, it's a little different in Seattle. Maybe it's the free health club membership to Microsoft widows I mean wives, but everyone seems tanned, trimmed, and toned. Of course it's fake and completely purchased, but where do I sign up. Har.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 03:43 PM | Permalink

Listening to NPR in the car the other day I heard an interview with the writer of the Revenge of the Sith novel that came out just before the movie. The interviewer asked a really good question, one that most people do not have a ready answer to. She asked, what did you learn directly from George Lucas that you did not learn from anyplace else. The author thought for a short time and then relayed a story where George informed him that in fact, Annakin's character is not driven by love as you might initially suspect (love for his mother, love for ob-wan, love for padme), but he is in fact driven by greed. This greed manifests itself in Annakin never letting anything go out of his life. Of course, things must leave your life as regularly as other things enter, so Annakin voices this unfairness through anger. It actually doesn't hold up nearly as well in Star Wars as it does in my own life recently.

Greedy people such as myself often mean well. We want the best for ourselves and others, and have a general principle of leaving no stone unturned to get it. If I were born a couple centuries ago, I would be the type of woman who would know how to use an entire pig - every cell of the poor animal - towards caloric intake of some kind. A couple of postings ago, I called this tendency optimization, but after last week's Sith experience I now find the greed metaphor more accurate. If it was simple optimization, I wouldn't get so darned angry when things go awry.

People I have chewed out recently. The metro bus driver supervisor who mistakenly re-routed our bus away from our destination. The little missy running the birthday party who left me stranded in the warehouse parking lot. The mild mannered and absolutely defeated clerk at the car dealership who had no understanding that I was a customer. Chew, chew. Very uncharacteristic. What is bothering me, I thought?

Another dynamic has been my desire to "give back." This I also realize is a euphemism for the underlying greed, of wanting my people "my peeps" around me constantly and to be able to cook for them and integrated with our life. Currently we float around on our family asteroid known as the house, a designated 10 feet on all sides of the property line from other asteroids like ours. I was very frustrated with not being able to structure daily life to perform this giving-back, but in fact I was more interested in the taking.

It has been freeing and useful to think of Annakin in this time, because he is such a cartoon, when I pound my own fist on the table and demand to be and do everything all at once, it reminds me that this is just silly. And no, I can't pick up and go to Norway. Here is the explanation. It would consume my entire life to do so, so no, I can't. How can I live a life so rigid and inflexible? Well, it's not, not really. We have designated some time where we haven't planned anything, and can do what we like. This is 4 and 1/2 hours a week. Also, we have designated some money to also do what we like. This is maybe $750 every 4 months, but we're working on growing it. When I feel like I need to white-knuckle my grip on every last thing, and start lashing out (I add again, uncharacteristically) I remember that we've set up this playtime and playmoney, and if I want more I can set this up to get more.

So, just to give you this update. The whole topic of optimization and giving back has transitioned to overcoming this greed. I just thought you should know. Now, where's my lava pit?

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 07:34 AM | Permalink

Just like Jay I'm sick too. But I'm keeping my meetings and keeping going. It's affecting my attitude though. I have some really ill-advised posts over in the notepad area. We'll see if they make the director's cut.

Turns out my computer can get fixed under an extended warranty just for toshiba 4600s. Just for the low light monitor problem. So I will be back online someday soon.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I am so hooked on newsgator web edition. I don't know how I ever lived without it. The reading experience is great. Fast. Dialog-free. No booting. And as I use this as my primary newsreader, I decide that booting Outlook is just not worth the bother, and I read my mail through the browser interface too.

What do I mean by "worth the bother:"
- It is occasionally a long road between securing TCP/IP and getting Outlook to show messages.
- If I launch the browser I know right away how many messages I have coming to me. Outlook's "so 10 minutes ago" claim of a certain number of messages on the XP logon screen has no credibility.
- Outlook doesn't always decide to send/receive messages when I want it to. It's doing all kinds of fancy multithreaded stuff all the time. It's possible that it's first priority is to perform this retrieval, but the net behavior is severely delayed.
- When I attempt to outwit the multithreaded-ness, and manually send/receive, it is unable to retrieve anything until it is darn well ready. One way Outlook tries to make me feel better about this is to give me a dialog saying it is 50% done with the send/receive action. It can only claim this because there was nothing to send. It's like me saying I'm 50% done with my fitness goals. I have no fitness goals, so this should be a divide by zero error or something.
- I like the idea of Outlook and like the plug-in architecture. So I have a couple plug-ins. This is a huge time penalty on startup.
- Because Outlook only synchs up my inbox and not my sent mail, I have to launch the browser in order to run searches anyway. It just feels faster to use the browser.

So this is funny, how newsgator web is making me not use Outlook at all. I'm still interested in it, but it's a little like having a dual-boot PC. If you have to switch OSs, it's just too much bother.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 09:36 PM | Permalink

Again I have decided to bestow on the blogosphere a new term. "Quaffic" is just like traffic, as in for your web site, except intstead of a measure of quantity it is a measure of quality. Used in a sentence. "Getting slashdotted was nothing. What I'm really hoping for is a huge spike in quaffic."

What's the link all about? It's another one of those things in this big wide world I don't understand. Why, in this age of specialized information, do people still care about traffic. This isn't the miss america contest or anything. (Oh, I hear people coming to take my mail-order MBA away...)

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 09:23 PM | Permalink

I canceled my appointment to take the C# Web Services exam on Monday. Not only am I too busy, but I completely flunked the pre-test. I am so disappointed as I truly rely on this technology to "do stuff." I would rather write a C# app than make InfoPath try to do my bidding. But hey, that won't change just because I don't have certification, right?

One thing that has been a hindrance with this particular test is the fact that I am not a system administrator. Ask me to turn on ASP permissions, and I take a week to do this, coursing through newsgroups and nested dialogs, building little skyscrapers of open windows. Most of the assessment test questions are ways to hack into machine.config. I am the kind of girl who thinks if we were supposed to touch machine.config, they would have built a dialog for it. Apparently, from their perspective, it's not hacking at all, it's base knowledge: you're supposed to go into all those files and mess around. Go figure. Anyway, that's what the test is about, that's why I flunked. 30% correct, I think I would do better answering the questions randomly.

I'm not sure if I posted this story. An old friend of mine came by and we talked about playing the board game "clue" when we were little. The game is basically process of elimination. Once you get that down, it's actually pretty boring. However, I did not have that down. Not at all. My clever friend would win every time, because she was using her list as process of elimination, whereas I was using it as a menu to guess from randomly. I was not upset by this at the time. I was, as they say, "clueless." Seeing her last week I apologized for being such a poor opponent when we were little. I told her I had, for some reason, been thinking about those times we played together. She remembered other things. She said, yeah you were bad at the game, always off drawing pictures and making up stories about Colonel Mustard. She said, she would just nod her head and go "that's nice, but you STILL LOSE" which of course was very true.

And that information, given to me recently, sent me into a tailspin about why I'm in computers at all. It's obviously not one of my innate gifts. I struggle to overcome this on a daily basis and can only now claim some kind of learned innate-ness. I still speak computers with an unplace-able foreign accent.

Another memory is of a financial consultant we hired briefly in 2000 (when we were "on our way to becoming truly wealthy" har har) who said "well, Nate, you're into music, and you, Beth, you're into computers." I love being summed up by overgroomed jerks. Especially incorrectly. The statement made me feel panic, the kind you can only feel if you get on the wrong plane.

The fact is, I'm not really into computers. I'm into optimization. And computers are just so darn practical and efficient, and it's gratifying to bring something of a solution to people that makes things, what, cleaner, faster, more connected. It's a big rush. You get feedback right away. You get to work with people, unlike writing where you start hearing voices and seeing things that should be imaginary. Plus, as I have said, in my current field I get to use the word "gestalt" alot.

Designing a product is a little like telling a story about a feature, isn't it? If so, the ASP authentication story reads like an unalphabetized edition of the white pages. (It was Professor Plum, in machine.config, with the ASP permission set! Mystery solved!)

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 12:44 AM | Permalink

An update on living differently.

Inquiries: I'm doing better on the neediness and impatience. I haven't died yet from not getting everything I want all the time right away. Mostly I have forgotten to want things in the first place. I have been presenting more of a "how can I help" type of attitude. This is in little ways around the house, like breathing and filling the laundry slowly rather than panting and cursing and wondering why it's there at all.

More Options: There has been more closure this week on my projects. Part of this success has been technical, which means the closure was only a coincidence albeit a welcome one. It's amazing what closure can do, you suddenly have room on the shelf for something else. Hopefully that something else will come in the form of a piano. We'll see.

More Relaxed: The best example of this was going on a wine-buying spree. I'm the only one who drinks it. It's pure indulgence, like diamonds. I bought two bottles with confidence, because we still had lots of money in the food envelope, and I deserved to have some little luxury hanging around at home. Perhaps I'll drink some tonight, along with that nice steak i bought too.

More Giving: Not very good examples of this yet. I had a very vivid moment this week of a presence - really an absence of a presence - of a person who would be the key to keeping it together around the house. This person would be available at a moment's notice with no strings attached to take care of all of us if we're all sick at once, or stuck in traffic, or just want to watch one simple tape. I do not know anyone whose time is disposable, this is why this person doesn't exist. Perhaps I wouldn't even get along with someone whose time is disposable, living from meal to meal and library book to library book like you would on a cruise ship. I would probably be too high strung for this person. However, I felt his/her presence/absence vividly. The fact is, the cavalry isn't coming.

We talk about support systems for our families. It's the distinct possibility that we don't have one for ourselves. No plan for if the system crashes. Nobody to call who doesn't have tickets to something/someplace already. I'm here to question how needful we really are of such things, or have we listened too much to the "take back your life" type of advice dished out to June Cleaver types, in hopes of turning them into Jane Fonda types.

This state of mourning is a terrible attitude. I want to get out of it and get into more of a giving place. But right now it's just talk. My time is not yet disposable.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When immersed in daily life, it's not always obvious that your daily life could in fact be completely different than you have shaped it right now. Big changes bring that fact into light, with a move or a new job giving a completely new texture to the routine. Today, I pondered how to live differently without throwing the baby out with the bathwater: how to live differently but somehow not change the external trappings of daily life. That pretty much leaves the inside as the blank slate to work from.

Your list for "how to live differently despite not changing anything particularly visible, and in fact only changing the subtle mental interpretations we all constantly make" will be different from mine. Here is mine.

LIVING DIFFERENTLY
* Be more giving
- Have the capacity to be a support system for others
- Not be so impatient with the world, or be so needful of the things it could hypothetically deliver
* Be more relaxed
- Not feeling guilty for my own actions not living up to my own expectations (see the feedback loop there?)
- Have time for hobbies and activities that fill me back up (not draining). (This is "have" and not "make" because this is not about optimization, it is about the mental shift to recognize existing availability.)
* Have more options
- Any activity off the beaten path should not get a categorical "no" due to some abstract limit-setting due to all of the above. Seriously. If all my friends are going to Norway, and I want to go to Norway, then why can't I go. Explain this to me.
- Live with the question of what factors within my control actually contribute to this type of flexibility. I don't have the answers, but I can live with the question for a while and look for the right opportunity.

These are nice goals, but I need some groundwork to be ready for these changes. For example, I do not have an inventory of my projects, including an exit strategy and list of Next Actions. My current projects should not feel like lifetime commitments. As long as they do - as long as I do not see an exit strategy - they will continue to make me feel more limited than I actually am. Another thing I need is have some kind of menu ability for crazy dreams, the things that make you feel alive but yet if followed all at once will of course leave you with limited basics. (You can't have 10 hobbies at full throttle and expect to have a day job and a marriage.) The rotation mechanism is key here, and I can get to the fun of itemization once I know there is room for them, allowing me to get to each in turn.

The most important groundwork for these changes will be mental. Short of snapping a rubberband on my wrist as some sort of pavlovian correction mechanism, I would like a way to bring these inquiries to the surface:

1) "Will I really die if I don't get it?" The answer, of course, is no, and hopefully asking this question would be a way to transcend neediness. It's so hard to need so much from the world, and to need something so specific. It's blinding to other things I get for free. Reducing the urgency level just might help.
2) "Does it need to happen now?" The answer, of course, is no, and hopefully asking this question would be a way to transcend impatience. It's bad enough to need so darn much all the time, but to need it all NOW is a recipe for disappointment.
3) "Will it really leave me with nothing, if I gave it?" The answer again is likely no. Asking this question would be a way to become more giving. I know the old story of you have to give to receive. Oftentimes this seems to be something to placate people in caregiver situations who have postponed their lives in order to be needed background for others. But truly, if take take take isn't working for me anymore, why not give "give" a try. Surely, it couldn't mean a complete loss of identity.

More on this to come as the attitude hits the fan.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 09:49 AM | Permalink

This was a nice 2 hour saturday project. Inspired by Janet Tokerod (and why wouldn't I be, we subscribe to the same people), I added a nice flickr photo thingy to my main page. It was so easy and just worked. Too bad all my good pictures and friend/family relationships are on ofoto. But this is OK for throwaway cellphone pictures. What would it take for me to buy in to flickr? Film processing. And it might be too late, given my reluctance to switch.

Another much needed update was to the blogroll on the left. I previously did this by hand, and even though I wrote a nice OPML to HTML converter via XSLT, it still didn't jump out at me as a critical task. Plus I would have to update here, and then locally with Newsgator. Now with Newsgator Online I have the blogroll automatically synch up. Yes, six months behind the times I finally have this together.

Another interesting side effect of reading blog posts online, is I don't have to put up with Outlook's arcane permission set. Some feeds I was able to convince it to download photos for, others it wouldn't download except once and then bring up a red X for the next viewing. If Outlook is for offline use, this really bit.

Anyway, enjoy, it may be another 25 years before I make additional modifications.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 04:15 PM | Permalink

The gods of work-life balance were not smiling on me this week. It's going OK in terms of tasks, and yesterday I actually got a thank-you from one of our developers, but in terms of expected hours distributed it's been kindof a bust. I was lucky to have my work laptop at home on a sleepless night, I could catch up for that day (but not necessarily the week) by working until 2am.

I tend to work in bed. Years of training and knowing it's ruining my marriage has not broken me of this habit I got as a child, with only one of those "hutch" type of desks to work on. Word to the wise. If you have a knob-and-tube era home (1930 or earlier), all of which have small kid's bedrooms and inadequate heating, do NOT buy your kid one of those "hutch" type desks and expect them to do their homework. A well heated room with plenty of desk space is perhaps the one thing you can do to change their success trajectory right now. More than private school or sylvan. My only consolation for keeping this habit of retreating to the bed, is that I am working in the guest room, which is cheerful and has a down comforter and is perfect for late night typing.

Something we forget about childhood is the way things feel physically, the way the light works, the reactions we have to observing these things for the first time. It's easy to forget these things because they're not "like" anything. You can't say, remember when we took that family vacation, it was just like joining the marines! You can't say that about these other, more observational things about childhood.

Yesterday on 4 hours of sleep, I put myself to bed at 7pm. The light was blaring through the bathroom windows, but muted by the time it got to the bedroom. Something tunnel-vision was happening with the way these visual shapes translated into my head. The sheets felt strange, as if I was in someone else's guest bed. Noises from downstairs had nothing to do with me. I tossed and turned. Then I realized I was flashing back to something in my own childhood, some recurrence of summer bedtime oddities that can only be remembered as a collection.

How much time have you, personally, spent looking at this: those swirling specs of dust that seem to appear out of nowhere when a beam of summertime light comes unexpectedly through a usually-dark window.

I suppose it's like that.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 08:12 AM | Permalink

Back in 1996, Linda invited a group of us from Microsoft who graduated from my "flaky college" as I refer to it. It turns out she is one of the graduates. I'm sorry Linda if you are reading this but you have to admit there is a lot of evidence for calling it that. Oh, and hi.

At the time, I had no idea the gift I was being handed of introductions to this person (Linda), or what to do about it even if I did. But boy did I go on and on, talking my head off in the seminar she invited us to about how we all had been "mollycoddled." The word made it into a summary Linda sent out afterwards, or perhaps it was a micronews article, memory fails. Remember when the micronews was on paper? Only?

For some reason, no one would let me shut up about how we weren't given a rigorous enough education. And somehow during the seminar the conversation turned yet again to the "fiber arts," a phrase which still makes me giggle. Linda, if you're reading this, I think this was a pastime of yours at one point (?) so I apologize for my 4yr old sense of humor.

At any rate, today I remembered that seminar, wishing I had the presence of mind to keep track of her afterwards. Today's announcement about Microsoft beefing up the Longhorn UI team with some post Virtual Worlds folks (and women, to boot!) got me thinking: perhaps Linda knows this Lili Cheng, perhaps she remembers me, maybe she can score me an informational. However, after some cursory searching for Linda's weblog (doesn't seem to be one), it seems I am way outta my league. These search result web sites look like a list of "recommended by" reviews on the back of the new William Gibson novel. Which is funny, I think of Matt Groening as the most famous person to leave Evergreen, and now I see that is probably false. After all, I doubt he has been invited to many billionaire dinners. It's hard when you know everyone. Sheesh, I think I will host a billionaire dinner myself. Everyone playing host to one billion or more skin bacteria is invited! Swimsuit optional!

So, Linda, if you are reading this please drop me your contact info at egrigg9000 at yahoo dot com for some fabulous prizes and a walk down memory lane.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 12:30 PM | Permalink

I know you're not supposed to blog when you're feeling bad, especially in a blog about happiness. But heck, sometimes you have to break the rules. I need to find a way to keep reading weblogs and posting articles in my life. The once in a blue moon blogging thing is awful, I don't know how Joel does it. It is spectacularly lonely, and feels like people never read your real work, only the trivial posts. I know that's not true, but it feels that way.

Gotta figure out the schedule to make this happen right.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 08:21 AM | Permalink