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Theft, early mornings, and food

Without going into the details, we've now received information that confirms that someone, most likely one of the people our cleaning service employed to clean our house, did indeed steal several items from our house. I put the service on hold a couple of months ago when I suspected this had happened. Just the idea of someone picking through our stuff, taking items that were small enough that we wouldn't notice right away ... did they go through our paperwork? Did they write down our social security numbers, bank accounts, credit cards? Guess we'd better keep an eagle eye on our credit, which has always been stellar. When I found out that this was real, that we'd been robbed, albeit of small things and probably over a period of time, my heart started racing and, well, it just makes me feel ill.

Also, our house, which is always pretty messy, is now working its way toward dirty, as well. I'm thinking of looking for someone who's self-employed as a cleaner. There's no way to prove that someone won't steal -- my parents had the same cleaner for years, until they realized how much stuff had disappeared -- but at least having one person would make me feel better. This cleaning service had different people in every few weeks. I should have acted on my discomfort and canceled them a long time ago. Then maybe I would still have my most expensive piece of jewelry.

*Deep Breath*

Okay, so other stuff going on -- I've decided to adjust my weekday schedule so that I wake up at 6. Historically I have shot for 7, but more realistically it's been 8 unless I had somewhere to be. My stated reason was to prepare myself for ski mornings -- when we get up at 5am to be through Boulder by 6. Even if we are lucky enough to have stayed in a condo or hotel the night before, it's still painful when you have to get up earlier than usual to get to the lifts as they open.

It actually hasn't been as painful as I expected. The trick was switching to 6am just as daylight savings ended, so that as far as my body was concerned, I was still getting up at 7. And there are all sorts of benefits. On the rare days when I have meetings scheduled for 8 or 8:30, I don't have to get up early, meaning that I'm actually alert and productive while I'm there. On days when I have to be watching our systems at 7am (half an hour before east coast stock markets open), I've already been up for an hour. Sunrise doesn't wake me up before I'm ready, because I'm already awake. And even when I sleep in for several hours on the weekend, I still have the whole day ahead of me.

Going to bed at 10 hasn't been as hard as I expected, either -- the kind of days I've had lately, I can barely keep my eyes open by 10.

Today is an outlier -- apparently I didn't set my alarm last night. I remember looking at the clock at 5:something, then snuggling up with my husband for a while. In my half-sleep I finally thought, huh, shouldn't it be 6 by now? When I finally did look at the clock, it was almost 7. Which brings up the other great thing about getting up earlier. 10am is pretty much the latest I feel comfortable getting to work. When I was getting up at 8, any little thing could jeopardize my start time. Now, though, I can oversleep by an hour -- and still have *plenty* of time to get to work. This is also great for appointments. Used to be, because I didn't want to get to work later than 10, I would schedule my hand therapy appointments at 9, and I would have to get up earlier than normal. Now, I make the appointment at 8, and I'm still in the office by 9. Much better!

Food -- I've made a lot of changes to my diet, starting this February. I keep meaning to post about the details, but first I would have to articulate it all in my head, and there's a lot. A couple of weeks ago, I took a cholesterol test and found that, for every possible stat, my cholesterol is outstandingly good. By happy coincidence, I ran across this article, which in some ways seems to be very similar to how I eat. No wonder my cholesterol is awesome. http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/oct/06/no-headline---07pcov/ (The online version doesn't have the pictures + captions -- one caption in the print article reads "Olive oil and chocolate are a big part ..." My kind of diet =)

when approaching a small dog ....

don't loom over them and reach straight down like an alien collecting species samples.

Look, sure, Barney shouldn't have bitten Decker, but Decker shouldn't have approached Barney the way he did. Heck, if a giant 6 times my height leaned over me suddenly and reached straight down, I'd probably freak out and bite him, too. And that's ignoring the fact that they had so many strangers all over the place, being noisy and generally acting all weird and human.

Kneel down a couple of feet away, so that you are closer to the dog's eye level. Slowly reach your hand toward the dog, not with your fingers extended. No sudden movements. Shouldn't everybody know this stuff?

I love my job

My job is exhausting. It's frustrating, it's demanding, and there's not a single day when I ever get everything done that should get done. Rarely do I have enough information to feel comfortable with the decisions I have to make. Rarely do I complete a task without suspecting, or actually knowing, that there was at least one more step I could have done to be sure that what I did was 100% right. For someone as risk-averse and, well, OCD (no, not clinically) as I am, this should be hell.

Nevertheless, I love it. I love that people come to me for answers and trust me to provide the right ones (even as it scares the bejeezus out of me!). I love that I know so much about the systems I work with, and I love that there's so much still to learn. I love the challenge of trying to write elegant, generalized code to handle data that at its fundament is human-generated and special cased, and maybe some perverse part of me even enjoys trying to do it in T-SQL stored procedures, which are to software engineering what crayons are to architectural diagrams. (Yes, there are good reasons to do it on the database, honest. It's just that it would take hours to explain. And even if there were good reasons to switch, they had better be damned good reasons to justify the cost of changing from one architecture to another.)

Why am I thinking about this? In the last couple of months, two friends of mine have quit my company. Now, they have their reasons, and as much as I love my job, their situations were different, and I think they made the decisions that were right for them. Pretty much everyone has gripes about their job, and when you're hanging out with co-workers, it's easy to fall into airing that dirty laundry. When you spend time with people who are genuinely dissatisfied, though, you (I) start wondering if they don't see things more clearly than you do. You start seeing your company in a different light. You start questioning whether you should be there, too. And since the unhappy people are your friends, you are predisposed to make sympathetic and comforting noises rather than critically examining their statements and evaluating them both for accuracy and for applicability to your own particular situation. The dissatisfaction seeps into you.

Now that I think about it, I have other co-worker friends with whom conversation inevitably drifts into work, too, but it's about how to make our systems better; how to create an interface where none currently exists; conversation about work by people who are just as psyched by their work as I am by mine. People who say, "So, I was thinking about how to put [your subsystem] on ..." when they're belaying me and I've just started a climb (yeah, you know who you are!). I guess that's a good way to tell if people really do love their jobs, or are just faking it (or don't even realize, themselves, how dissatisfied they are). Whenever my husband sits down with one or more of his co-workers, they end up talking about how to improve their systems. Productive, brain-stormy work talk. It's annoying as hell when I'm along, but it supports what I already know: my husband loves his job. Having seen him when he loves his job, and having seen him when he's merely drawing a paycheck, I have to say I prefer the job-loving version, even though it means I see a lot less of him.


I love my friends dearly; I also believe that I will be happier with my job now that they aren't working at my company. And in the future, when a friend and co-worker starts sounding unhappy at their job, I hope I'll have strength to compassionately ask them to change the subject.

favorite gluten-free breakfasts

Avoiding both gluten and egg means I don't have a whole lot of traditional, ready-made breakfasts at my disposal. Here are two yummy options:

Brown cow cream top maple yogurt with thawed frozen raspberries and topped with a crunchy gluten-free cereal (I use Perky's Nutty Flax) for texture.

Cream of rice (I use Bob's Red Mill Creamy Rice, made with brown rice)with agave nectar, slices of ripe bananas, and sliced almonds. Or maple syrup instead of agave and fresh peaches instead of bananas. I usually add a splash of milk, too, especially when I'm reheating a precooked batch.

Some days, like today, I don't really feel like sitting down and eating, so I make a fruit smoothie with vanilla yogurt, some form of fruit juice, and whatever frozen fruit is on hand. Smoothies got a lot easier when I realized there's no magic formula -- almost any combination of fruit will taste good. The key is to add just enough liquid to allow the fruit to be pulped, without adding too much and making the smoothie too sloppy. (Side note -- outside of smoothies, I rarely drink fruit juice anymore. It's not really much better than soda, nutritionally.)

It's funny that in my new life, a fruit smoothie is what I consider my "cheater/less nutritious" breakfast option.

Back from my aunt's wedding ...

Man, what a blast. It wasn't just a huge wedding bash; it was also an opportunity to reconnect with so many of my extended family members. I especially enjoyed spending so much time with the other two nieces (my cousins) and their husbands.

We drove, at my request, rather than flying. Driving allowed me to bring a lot of safe snack foods and as much clothing and other random crap as I wanted. The drive was about 8 hours each way -- and we didn't have to rent a car.

At the suggestion of a co-worker, we left I-80 early to cut through Logan Canyon on the way to the town of Logan. Swoopy canyon roads, beautiful fall colors, and I welcome any opportunity to cut the drive on I-80 short. Oh, and we discovered a huge lake! Who knew! It's called Bear Lake, and the town surrounding it has a distinctly beach-y feeling.

We had to squish the 180-person wedding into the groom's house, as an outdoor wedding wasn't going to fly in 35 degrees and snow flurries. That worked well, though (standing room only unless you were old enough to really need a seat), and we had a rockin' time at the reception afterwards. I danced with all sorts of family members. Dad and I danced together, and that meant a lot to both of us. Eric and I also danced together quite a bit, and we had a great time, even (especially?) when Eric started this crazy pogo thing going where we just jumped up and down as high as we could. (Fellow niece to me: "You're not wearing your heels anymore, are you!")

On Sunday, we drove back to Park City for a family-only dinner at the bride's house, where my uncle and I engaged in a spirited discussion of women in the workplace, and the rest of the family ducked for cover and/or egged us on with peanut gallery comments from the sidelines. Eric and I slept overnight in Salt Lake City, and then we were on the road back home, with a brief (okay, hour or so) stop in Park City to say goodbye to my parents, a few other family members, and the newlyweds. We happened to arrive at their house just in time for me to go on a walk with the dogs, which was perfect, as I'd done little but sit and eat all weekend. A "walk" in that neighborhood might well be considered a hike anywhere else; it's paved, but the road is seriously steep. Definitely a nice way to get a little movement before an eight hour car ride.

And here we are, back at home. I would have liked a few more days with the family, but that wasn't really going to work right now. I may get to see the newlyweds in a couple of weeks, anyway, as they may be visiting Colorado to help out with the Obama campaign.

upcoming changes to my blog, esp. RSS feed

You may have noticed that this blog software is getting pretty crusty. The developers of bBlog closed shop a few years ago, but I have been lazy and didn't want to go through the trouble of moving. Recently, I've finally gotten annoyed at the limitations of this software, especially once I noticed that while all my posts exist in the database, you can only see the last several months' worth on the site. Also, the commenting interface is lame.

In the next few weeks, I'll be migrating this blog to WordPress instead of bBlog. It has a lot of neat features -- I'll be using reCaptcha for comments, meaning that hopefully I won't have to turn off user comments all the time to block spam, meaning hopefully my blog can better facilitate conversation, assuming that's what readers want.

For visitors to the site, the UI will change, but the content should be the same. Unfortunately, a new interface is unlikely to cause me to suddenly be a regular blogger.

For RSS subscribers (I know I have a few, well, at least one, I think), there will be a new feed to use instead of the current one. I'll be sure to post something just before the transition, so that you know to switch.

The timing of the migration mostly depends on getting my posts transferred from the bBlog tables to the WordPress tables. I found a script online that does a conversion, but it's for a previous version of WordPress. So in my "copious spare time," I am working on updating the script to work with the current data architecture. After that, there is no reason the switch shouldn't be fast and painless, but it involves software, so I'm fairly sure something will go wrong.

So. I think you'll like the new interface. I'll keep you posted (har, har).

my, how times change

So I'm looking over a friend's resume and a memory pops into my head of my Comp Sci advisor telling a classroom full of students to only ever bother with plain text resumes -- any company that insists on a fancier format wasn't worth the trouble.

And I remember agonizing over the formatting of said plain text resume -- how to do bulleted lists, how to do headings, etc. Yes, everyone could read it, but it sure wasn't pretty.

Personally, if I were to distribute a cover letter or resume these days, I would use PDF. It ensures that the recipient actually sees what you meant them to see -- the same fonts, same spacing, same formatting. I've seen documents created in Word be mangled -- not just formatting, but unreadable portions -- by other versions of Word. And if you put the cover letter and resume all in one doc, HR probably won't chop off the cover letter when they distribute the resume.

OpenOffice will export to PDF right out of the box. If you use some other application in Windows, you can download free "print to PDF" tools that install as a printer on your computer. I'm sure there are myriad ways for all platforms.

I would not recommend sending a plain text resume these days, unless of course it's one of those obnoxious resume builder corporate sites where they force you to input your resume in well-defined chunks to even apply to the company. I've been told there are all sorts of reasons for slicing and dicing your achievements that way, but I suspect I wouldn't be happy at any company that does its hiring this way. Yes, I've worked mostly in SQL the last several years, and yes, my most recent work before that was in embedded C++, and before and in between all of that I did Java applications, but what does all of that have to do with me as a software engineer? Those are just details of implementation.

Here I am of two minds. One one hand, I bristle at the idea that I could be defined by the languages I've used. I design and implement systems, and I use whatever tools seem to be best for the job. There's no language I can't use, although I'd prefer not to write in assembly if I can avoid it, kthx, apologies to the assembly coders of the world. On the other hand, having been deeply knowledgeable about Java at certain points in my life (not right now, although I'm sure I would pick it up again quickly if/when the need arose), I do recognize that there is a benefit to having that deep knowledge. Not just to have worked in the language, but to have absorbed its idioms, learned its libraries, to know exactly how memory allocation is handled without having to look it up in a book. Same thing with SQL, although I hesitate to call it a language -- yes, I use T-SQL, but still -- you gain an understanding of indexes, of how to write code, of how to pick the one of several logically identical chunks of code that performs hundreds of times better.

Although I doubt that every person who's spent several years writing SQL or Java would necessarily have absorbed it the same way I have. Some more than me, some less. My inner egotist says mostly less =)

So I guess what it comes down to maybe is that I am not suited to a job as a "{language} developer." Maybe that type of job application is right for a certain type of person who writes software, but it just isn't right for me. Maybe it's harder to find jobs when your skillset is best described as "big and little picture problem solver", not "alphabet soup."

Maybe it's part of that whole transition from software engineer to software architect. I mean, that's been my goal. I wonder if I've reached it. Hrmmm.

But anyway, it really doesn't matter to me right now, because by and large, I like my job, and I like the problems I get to solve at work, and when I'm frustrated it's mostly because I have too many interesting problems to solve (okay, or a bunch of interesting problems and a few boring but important problems that I have to work on first). So while I suspect I should keep my resume polished every few months "im Falle eines Falls" (just in case the unexpected should come to pass), it really hasn't been something I have the time or inclination to do. I'm too busy working on interesting stuff at work =)

pit bulls as the new social meme?

Is it just me, or are TV shows lately picking up the "pit bulls are just dogs; it's the owners that make them awful" cause? I'm all for the advancement of the realization that vicious dogs have one prominent common factor -- their shitty owners. I'm just wondering if it really is becoming a more common TV theme, and if it has anything to do with that asshole football player. Maybe there really is a silver lining to every dark cloud ...

I remember back when people thought German Shepherds were scary; pretty regularly there'd be a newspaper article about some little kid's face being torn off by a German Shepherd. Now it's always a pit bull or a rottie. Not that most people can tell a pit bull from the vast number of similar breeds -- can you? http://www.pitbullsontheweb.com/petbull/findpit.html

I don't have much personal experience with pit bulls, but I practically grew up alongside a wonderful German Shepherd named Romeo. As a little kid, I would run around our friends' house with Romeo and a kitten. Romeo and the kitten would play together nicely; he would even carry her around from place to place.

There was a great article I read somewhere -- I think it was the New Yorker, actually -- about the lack of correlation between breed and attacks. Oh! It was about racial profiling, using dog profiling as a comparison. Here we go:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/06/060206fa_fact

"The strongest connection of all, though, is between the trait of dog viciousness and certain kinds of dog owners. In about a quarter of fatal dog-bite cases, the dog owners were previously involved in illegal fighting. The dogs that bite people are, in many cases, socially isolated because their owners are socially isolated, and they are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog. The junk-yard German shepherd—which looks as if it would rip your throat out—and the German-shepherd guide dog are the same breed. But they are not the same dog, because they have owners with different intentions."

Yes, I just watched this week's Bones. I really liked the way the whole story was handled, even though it had me bawling.

I have great admiration for Cesar Millan, but I'm not buying the idea that he can get an entire barn full of unknown fight dogs to settle down in ten seconds. I'm just saying. Also, the dogs portrayed in this Bones episode were much better behaved than I would have expected. Are fight dogs typically, or sometimes, very good people dogs who are only aggressive to other dogs? In the shows on Animal Planet, they always come across as completely unsocialized, completely alien to human interaction. But maybe there are multiple categories of freakishly awful humans who think dog fighting is fun ...

mmmm

Dinner tonight:

Tilapia, coated in corn starch with some salt and lemon pepper, pan-fried in canola oil and butter. I think maybe there was some garlic salt in there somewhere, too.

Mashed potatoes, made with Russet potatoes, 1% milk, butter, and sour cream, plus some garlic and onion powder.

Steamed green beans with a bit of parm.

It all turned out incredibly well. Especially the mashed potatoes. Yay mom for the sour cream idea (although I think she uses low-fat sour cream *instead of* butter, not full fat *in addition to* butter).

Plenty of leftovers for lunch tomorrow, too. I'll admit I probably could have eaten a little less ... especially the potatoes ... oof!

Sourdough Satisfaction (the trail, not the bread)

Sourdough trail is a great mountain bike trail starting between Ned an d Ward. The most popular ride is the six mile section from the CU research station to Brainard lake. Now, I've finally completed that section, out and back.

The first time I rode it, I was just starting to learn to mountain bike, and I wasn't very fit, and I had to turn around before I got to the end. The second time, the following year I think, was much the same, although I remember bombing the downhill sections. That was before the "Kenosha Pass incident," where I sprained my wrist and psyched myself outbl of those fast, gutsy descents.

Earlier this year, I rode it starting from the Brainard side; my ride partner had some serious mechanical problems with his bike, and we had to turn around. I'm not sure I would want to do the whole ride from that end, anyway, since it would mean doing all the fun downhill first, then turning around and slogging all the way back up.

So anyway, this past weekend, a friend and I rode Sourdough. My technical skills, my legs, and my lungs are all much stronger than they were several years ago. I didn't have to walk my bike over the water bars at the start; I could ride over a lot of what the trail had to offer. I certainly did my share of walking, but not enough to be daunting.

The trail has two major climbs in the first two miles, and then a few miles of fun ups and downs. The really crazy part was when we got to the top. It was kind of a surprise; we came around a corner, and there was the street. It seemed anticlimactic, so we decided to pony up the cash (one dollar each for bicycles and pedestrians) and ride to the lake. If I'd realized it would be another two miles, much of it uphill, I'm not so sure I would have done it.

By the time we got to the first "scenic view" parking spot overlooking the lake, I didn't think I could pedal another stroke. I had put off eating when I got hungry so that I could eat at the lake; bad idea. I collapsed on a rock and started tearing into my food. Maybe it's not such a good idea to go from constant motion to complete stillness. My glutes felt sore. I didn't think anything of it till I got on my bike again. Ow. Ow ow ow. It felt like there were bees stinging my muscles. I couldn't pedal; it was too painful. So I found mysel f doing some crazy stretches, lying on my back on a rock, my legs in the air, trying to unlock muscles that had seemingly turned to rock.

Finally, I was able to pedal with an acceptable level of pain. As I kept pedaling, the pain eventually subsided.

The ride back down was more up than I'd thought it would be. Somehow, my brain always simplifies rides, remembering the general pattern rather than the specifics. Regardless, there were miles of mostly-downhill rocks and roots to enjoy on the way back to the research station trailhead.


Finally, I've ridden the whole thing. It was everything I thought it would be =)