Mostly because I need something to read that has nothing to do with anything I'm studying, I've been reading up on the 60s space program lately.

Yes, yes, Neil Armstrong first man on the moon blahdeblah yay space nerds. Everybody knows the story, been there done that.

What fascinates me, and I'm speaking semi-professionally here, is that a team of engineers, rocketry guys, and test pilots went from nothing to watching Armstrong wander around a lunar plain in less than 10 years. It couldn't happen today. Windows Vista took longer to develop than all of the Mercury and Gemini flights combined, and the results were a whole lot less impressive.

Honestly, I've learned as much about technical project management out of the space program history as anything I've read in the computer science field.

Anyway, for the interested, a couple of the better books on the subject:

Andrew Chaikin's A Man On The Moon was the semi-definitive history of the Apollo program, told mainly but not exclusively from the astronauts' point of view. Most of the HBO mini-series "From The Earth to The Moon" was cribbed from this book. It's not just insightful, it's entertaining as hell. Its downside is that it only touches briefly on anything that happened before Apollo 1.

Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox's Apollo: Race to the Moon has its flaws, but it's a highly readable account of the earthbound engineers who made the space program work, including most of the personalities involved. This is the one that all the current and aspiring program managers ought to read. It's out of print, but the local library might have a copy. EDIT: Scratch that, it's back in print under a different title. The book is now simply called Apollo.

There are enough astronaut biographies and auto-biographies to break a bookshelf in half by sheer weight. The best, by general acclamation, is Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire: graceful, poetic, fascinating, and not ghostwritten. (Collins was the command module pilot on Apollo 11, the guy who got to circle around the moon while the other two had all the fun.)

Food for thought. Also, for the grad students among us, a good way to read something besides articles titled "The Study of Ideologies and the Philosophy of Language."

There's something a bit startling about looking out at what normally is a peaceful, quiet bay and finding a cruise ship the size of a skyscraper moored in the middle of it.

Friday Harbor gets cruise ships, but small ones. This one is a monster, 650 feet long, the kind of cruise ship you see looming on Seattle's waterfront in the summer. It's far too big for the harbor. They've moored it in a nearby bay and are letting people off the boat by using odd lighters-cum-lifeboats that look a bit like oversized greenhouses with outboard motors.

The ship is called The World. It's a residential ship. You don't buy a ticket, you buy or rent a condominium aboard. (They have everything from small studio apartments to six room penthouses available.)

It has no fixed route. The ship goes wherever the managers and residents decide they want to go. You live aboard full time, disembark whenever you think they've arrived somewhere interesting, get back aboard and go somewhere else. They almost never stay anywhere more than a day or two.

They're going to spend the rest of the summer wandering up the inside passage to Alaska. Then they're off to Russia, Japan, Australia and God alone knows where else.

I met a couple of the ship's residents in town today. Well fed, prosperous, decadent. Proud. And very, very tan.

A fellow doctoral candidate and I were sitting in the sun near UW's Drumheller Fountain last Friday, commiserating about the joys of graduate school, when a couple of young punks walked by.

I say that with complete affection. They were maybe 17, 18 years old, dressed in tattoos and ripped leather and Value Village clothes, hair done in Manic Panic colors never before seen in nature. It was like reliving the late 1980s, or a good day at my alma mater.

As may be, they were fascinated with the fountain's murky pond.

"HOW DEEP IS THIS SHIT?" yelled one of them. Not waiting for the answer, they hustled off towards class or possibly a ska show.

Jerrod and I looked at each other.

"How...deep...is this shit?" he repeated.

"Yeah, that's the most succinct summary of academia I think I've ever heard," I said.

Design geeking time:

Here's a design using Comics Sans font. It's easy to read, designed to be more playful than a boring, businesslike font like Times New Roman.

And it's widely, abusively hated.

( Comic Sans was invented by Satan. Who knew? )

The four pages of academic writing I was working on just turned into liquid fertilizer in my hands and were summarily tossed into the compost bin. So, let's see if I can write about something else:

"Start line" is a misnomer. You're standing in ankle deep water, surrounded by guys built like wedges, bricks, and the occasional redwood tree. You're wearing a neoprene suit that gives you the look of an extremely aerodynamic spare tire, topped with a baby-blue swim cap that you're not nearly homosexual enough to look good in.

Somebody blows an air horn, and you splash out a few feet until you can fall face-first into the water.

( And more trials of the first-time triathlete )

Her registered name was DK's Amy Bell, but we mostly called her Amy.

When we first adopted her, Amy had recently retired from a short-but-successful racing career. She was a shy girl, and still had a lot to learn about life off the track. How do you climb stairs? How do you walk on leash? This stuffed toy: how does it work? What's this "rain" business, and where's the doorway to summer?

(Amy raced in Arizona, and loved hot, arid weather. In 100+ degree Yakima summer heat, sun blazing down, with all of us under shade and sipping cold drinks, Amy would be lying on the hot concrete, tongue lolling in contentment.)

( World's fastest, most loved couch potato )

I've signed up for the Beat the Bridge 8K run this weekend.

For those not local, the challenge of the Beat the Bridge run is...well, beating a bridge. Specifically, the University bridge, which is a drawbridge about 2 miles into the race. 25 minutes after you start, it opens. If you get caught behind it, minor humiliation is yours.

I have run this race once before, in 2004. Last time I missed the bridge by 45 seconds. I'm not missing it again.

Like a lot of races, this one is a benefit for a charity. Unlike a lot of races, this one benefits a charity I care about: the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, JDRF. The name is a bit of a misnomer: type 1 diabetes can happen to anyone, kids or adults, and the work they do helps type 2 diabetes treatment as well.

My grandfather was diagnosed with diabetes in the early 1980s, and at the time his doctors didn't think he'd ever be able to walk or see properly again. (In fact, thanks to his doctors, insulin, and a strict diet, he lived another twenty years.) Other friends and relatives--he said quietly, naming no names--are living with diabetes right now.

If you're moved to throw a few bucks at a worthwhile cause, you can do so here. Quick, easy, and unlike my contribution, painless and sweat-free.

H wrote a beautiful obituary of our cat Grover, who left us on Monday. I can't add much to it. It even had the last and best photo of Grover ever taken.

I wrote a bit a couple years ago about what Grover meant to us.

Rest easily, little guy.

---

A lot of people have written, or called, or left messages of support for both Grover and Amy, our dog living with bone cancer. I haven't enough words to show our gratitude to each of you. You may have noticed that we're just a little obsessive about our pets. All your good thoughts mean the world to us.

Thank you. Thank you all.

I've had a couple people ask me for an update on the pets. bubblesutonium already covered some of this, but for those interested....

After Amy's diagnosis, we put her on a regimen of painkillers and anti-inflammatories to help manage the discomfort. So far they're working wonders. Amy will never have her old stamina back, and she still can't put weight on her bad leg, but she doesn't seem to be in serious pain.

There will come a point when all the painkillers in the world won't be enough, and that's when we'll have to let her go. We're holding that moment at bay for now. That's all we can ask.

It could be much, much worse. Vamp, one of the other greyhounds in Seattle, broke her leg badly at a greyhound event last Saturday. ("It was just dangling there, loose," said H, who was there at the time.) She made it to the hospital, but died on the operating table while the doctors tried to pin her leg back together. That same day another local greyhound, Jannie, had to be put to sleep after both her back legs suddenly became paralyzed. We've been counting our blessings.

---

Washington state's bar association takes almost three full months to grade their bar exams. That's because the exams are essay-based and all have to be hand-graded, a nightmare of a job. So bubblesutonium, along with many of her law school friends, has been waiting since February to hear how well she did.

By last week, H was so anxious that her vibrating was starting to register on the UW's seismographs.

Last Saturday she got the word: she passed.

So bubblesutonium, esq., is now officially licensed to practice in the state of Washington. She'll get sworn in later this week by one of her favorite judges.

FAQ: Why bother getting admitted to practice when you're going to tax school out of state? Do you have to be a member of the bar to go to tax school? A: bubblesutonium could go to tax school without passing the bar first. But it makes finding a job at the end a lot easier if you're already admitted to practice.

I never had any doubts she'd pass, but it's good to be over that hurdle. Watching her take a deep breath or two has been a revelation.

---

As for me? Not sure. I've been a hermit crab lately.

I'm still playing graduate student: traveling a bit, talking to professors a lot, not writing as much as I should. With luck, I'll have a conference paper submission and a conference poster done by the end of the month, and a dissertation proposal done not long after that.

Assuming I can get the funds together, I'm planning to sign up for the Issaquah Triathlon. My first triathlon. My goals are modest. Finish, don't be last, and don't drown in Lake Sammamish.

I'm also running an 8K in a couple weeks, the Beat the Bridge run. I'll talk about that in a separate post once I've got the logistics sorted out.

Otherwise, I'm keeping a low profile. There's some interesting stuff on the horizon, though. This summer and fall promise to be entertaining.

A couple of weeks ago, our dog Amy started limping.

Amy is ten years old, a respectable age for a greyhound, and she's an ex-racer with the ills of an older athlete: arthritis, stiffness, even a missing toe on one paw. So at first we didn't take this too seriously. Sometimes a morning limp disappears in the afternoon.

As the days went on, though, the limp got worse. She was keeping her weight off of the leg as much as she could. Climbing stairs and getting on and off the couch began to present real difficulties.

Yesterday I bit the bullet and took Amy in for some X-rays.

Just above her knee, it turns out, there's a shadow on the bone. That's a cancerous tumor. Her femur is turning from regular bone to a brittle, calcified mess that won't support her weight and is extraordinarily painful. The odds are very strong that the cancer has spread elsewhere in her body as well.

It's called an osteosarcoma, bone cancer to you and me. Unfortunately, it's one of the most common ways of losing a greyhound. It's much more common in the breed than it is in humans, or even in other large dogs.

There are treatment options, but they're all lousy. The best option would be to amputate the leg and start her on chemotherapy. It would keep her alive for a few more months, probably, but the odds that she'd survive another year even with the amputation are less than 50%. Thanks, but no thanks. She's had enough parts cut off.

So, we're trying to keep her comfortable. It's about all we can do. It won't be long.

I wasn't going to say anything about this for awhile, but a well-meaning tweet from H has been bringing in lots of sympathy and offers of help, for which we're very grateful.

Meanwhile, we're treasuring the moments we have with her. Her time is short, but she's still loving life--eating all her food, enjoying a lie-around in a meadow, and rooing happily at the door when she's ready for a walk. I think this morning she was quoting the character in the Monty Python sketch: "I'm not dead yet! I'm feeling better! I don't want to go on the cart!"

Thanks to a couple long plane flights last week, I had a chance to (gasp) watch a movie: The Merchant of Venice. Al Pacino as Shylock, Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio, Jeremy Irons as Antonio, and Not Cate Blanchett, Sorry as Portia.

Don't know the story? ( Here's the Cliff Notes version. )

Shylock is the character everybody remembers, an anti-Semitic Christian's archetype of the miserly, angry Jew, but with a deeper layer: "Hath not a Jew eyes?" He was played as a comic wretch at first, but in the last couple hundred years he's been played more sympathetically. Shakespeare's genius is that the text allows for both, especially with some judicious cutting.

Al Pacino said in an interview that he's been offered the role of Shylock "many times," but had always passed due to the play's anti-Semitism. I can see why he took this version on. In the film, Shylock's anger is more understandable and his pain deeper. You see, more than once, Christians spitting on Jews and harassing them in the streets. The effect of Portia's maneuvering is more clear: Shylock stands in the rain, cast out from the Jewish community of Venice, not accepted by the Christians, abandoned by his only daughter, truly alone.

The play, and the film, almost feel like two different stories: a comedy featuring Shakespearean standard cross-dressing, mistaken identities, and love at the end, and a tragedy featuring one of Shakespeare's more tormented characters. Roger Ebert noted that Jessica jumps from one play to the other one mid-stream.

It's a beautiful film, well acted and well staged. Worth watching if you like Shakespeare or costume dramas. I'm still thinking about it days later.

Everybody has their morning rituals. Drinking a cup of coffee, maybe. Watching 10 minutes of the Today show. Listening to NPR. Reading the sports scores.

Mine is reading the paper. And not online, either: a genuine, often-wet, cheaply printed piece of fishwrap. Ink on a page.

I'm probably one of the last people my age who bothers reading a print newspaper. bubblesutonium reads everything online. So do most of my friends, online and off. I'm certainly not immune; for national and international news, I almost always read everything online. For local news, though, I want a paper to flip through while I'm eating breakfast.

When I was a teenager in Philadelphia, I read a bit of the paper every morning before I went to school. The Philadelphia Inquirer was in its glory days. Granted, they had lots of material. The mob was still active. Mayor Goode was an incompetent buffoon who approved the firebombing of a neighborhood in his own city. Police and judicial corruption was rampant.

More important, though, they had good writers. The one you may have heard of is Mark Bowden, an investigative reporter who wrote a couple series that later became Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, but there were countless others, and their stories won every award from the Pulitzer on down.

These days the Inquirer is a pale shadow of the paper that it was, a victim of tightened budgets, failing subscriptions, and a lot of flailing about how to make use of the Internet. Even if I still lived there--I haven't for almost twenty years--I'd still be thinking twice about subscribing.

Not long after I moved to Seattle, Steve Lopez, a longtime Inquirer columnist, came to town to do a reading of his then-new novel. Most of the people who showed for the reading were Philly transplants who knew him from his Inquirer days, and he asked with interest, "So which is the good paper out here?" There were, after all, two of them: the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Everybody looked at each other. "The New York Times," somebody said.

It was true: neither Seattle paper seemed to have the investigative drive or the willingness to cover national and international news that the Inquirer had had in its heyday. Then again, at that point the Inquirer didn't either.

I subscribed to the Seattle Times for awhile, but grew weary of their writing: the quality of the reporting just wasn't up to the P-I, so I switched. I still missed the old days, especially as the newspaper shrank and shrank in a "cost-cutting" measure, but at least it was a local paper that had good writers and photographers working there. And it gave me something to read in the morning.

Today, in a long anticipated move, the P-I announced that they're going online-only. Tomorrow is the last daily paper I'll get from them.

American journalism in general for the last decade has been struggling, and not just financially. For years after 9/11 I was relying almost exclusively on non-US sites like BBC News, because nearly all the US news sources--print and otherwise--had turned into gossip sites or blatant propaganda tools, mouthpieces for people in power. (BBC News, among others, was warning about the screw-ups in post-invasion Iraq in mid-to-late 2003, years before any American media started paying attention.)

But for all of that, I'd still been reading the newspaper every morning. And now Seattle's best newspaper is cutting most of their staff and shutting their doors. It's not unexpected, but it hurts, and I feel terrible for the staffers there who are losing their jobs.

Awful.

My friend Dylan is one of the minds behind No News Is Bad News, a local mixed group of reporters, bloggers, etc. thinking about how reporting should live on in a post-print world. They've been quiet lately, but I'm hoping the news of the P-I closure will get things moving again.

Those random context-free "Please choose" polls I run once in awhile aren't quite as random as they look. There's actually a method to my madness. I don't normally explain anything about those polls, because the explanation would screw up the results, but I'll make an exception for the latest one.

That's the poll I posted on Thursday, the one whose exclusive choices were "love," "solitude," "sex," "friendship," and "intimacy."

It's an exact duplicate, down to the word choice and order, of a poll I posted last April. The only difference was that in the new one, I said that the responses were "semi-anonymous," or as anonymous as I could make them.

After the first poll, a few people commented on the fact that no one picked "sex" as their word of choice. At the time, H wondered out loud if people were too embarrassed to pick "sex" because they knew their names would appear with the response, and didn't want to appear shallow. Maybe if the poll was anonymous, the response would change.

So I waited nearly a year, and re-ran the poll with an extra layer of anonymity. The answer: nope, the extra level of anonymity doesn't matter a damn. The responses were nearly identical both times. There's no statistically valid difference between them.

Just in case you were wondering. Thanks for answering the polls, by the way. I'm always fascinated by the responses. (And they made wonderful sample data when I needed something to use for my stats homework.)

This one's semi-anonymous. The only person who sees who put in what answer is me.

Poll #1364425 Choices
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

Be specific

With apologies to those who've already heard this on Twitter or Facebook:

Every lawyer going through law school has to decide what type of law that they eventually want to end up practicing. That Law and Order stuff you see is for the litigators, the guys who stand up and argue in front of judges and juries. More power to them, but there are many other disciplines: corporate, intellectual property, securities and transactions, and more.

Midway through her law school, bubblesutonium decided that she wanted to study tax law.

When we explain this to most of our friends in the legal profession, the usual reaction is about what you'd expect if a medical student explained that they want to become an expert on colon cancer. It's a valued and important specialty; you're glad somebody's working on it, and you're glad it's not you.

The hell of it is that this isn't a pose: bubblesutonium is genuinely interested in this stuff. It's esoteric, obscure even to other lawyers, tends to make experienced litigators glaze over in party conversations, but warms the cockles of her economics-educated heart.

As a bonus, tax law is mostly recession-proof: highly specialized with a constant demand. There are only two certainties in life, and bubblesutonium has no interest in becoming a mortician.

The problem, which we knew going in, is that tax law, because of its complexity, requires--you see it coming--more schooling. It's one of the only legal disciplines that needs an extra graduate degree. The degree is called an LLM, a master of laws. For two semesters, nine months, you study nothing but tax law. Sound like fun?

bubblesutonium still wanted to do it.

UW has a tax LLM program, but it's not very well regarded. In fact, it was explained to both of us that in the world of tax LLM programs, there really were only two choices. There was NYU's law school in New York, and then there was everything else. Boston University, Georgetown, and Northwestern have good, well regarded programs, but for tax lawyers, NYU was Harvard and a Fulbright scholarship rolled into one.

So she sent them an application.

Which they've accepted.

Unless a job falls in her lap sometime between now and then, bubblesutonium will be in New York this fall. God willing, we'll probably end up graduating at the same time in 2010. Hopefully the economy will have settled down by then.

(SInce I'm sure somebody's going to ask: No, we're not moving. Bar the occasional visit, I'm staying right here for the duration.)

It's more work and yet more schooling, but it's a chance for my wife to have something she's always wanted: a highly specialized, lucrative, professional career in a field that she loves. And she earned that chance the hard way. This is the same woman who, five years ago, was wait-listed and then rejected from Seattle University's law school. Now she's a magna cum laude law school grad who's been admitted to one of the top law programs in the country.

Faith manages. Hard work gets you some interesting places too.

I couldn't be more happy for her.

Often, when I'm waiting quietly in a crowd, I end up playing the "guess the stranger's background" game. The rules:

1. No direct questions. If you strike up a conversation, that's a different game.
2. Never be rude. Never stare. Never interrupt.

Take the woman standing in front of me on the rental car shuttle, for instance. Late 40s, standing alone, carrying just a small overnight bag. Silent, with sharp eyes that missed little. Very casually dressed, wearing a Nike jogging outfit under a loose and not-terribly-flattering shirt. Minimal makeup. Aging, good looking but not intensely so. Over her shoulder, in place of a purse, she carried a free convention bag advertising the American Association of Neurologic Surgeons.

Hm, I thought. Neurosurgeon on vacation?

Then I glanced at her hands, at her long, slender fingers and her half-inch-long, manicured fingernails.

Nope. No surgeon has nails like that. Neurosurgeon's wife. Might've even been his first. In the Phoenix area, the trophy wives tend to dress the part.

---

For those who've asked: I'm feeling a lot better. Thanks.

Earlier tonight I dropped off bubblesutonium at a Bellevue hotel, where she'll be staying for the next three nights. It's time for her to take the Washington state bar exam.

( Rites of passage )

My dentist is a bit of an artsy sort, and likes to send out custom cards to his clients once in awhile. I knew that, but was a bit taken aback by his holiday card design this year:



Not that it's a bad design. It's fun in a pulp-cover sort of way. The art was done by a San Francisco-based artist named Rene Garcia Jr., who does a lot of interesting pop-art and portraits. But it's not exactly what I expected as a greeting card from a dentist.

That was nothing, however, to my surprise this morning, when I leaned back in the dental chair and discovered that the design was on the ceiling. In glitter.

The original is a 60x60 or so art piece done with glitter glued to wood. It sparkles at you in the light. The woman and tiger cub are nearly life-sized. And it's hung on the ceiling in the main dental area, visible to all the patients leaning back in their chairs with their mouths open, including the ones who arrived at 8 AM and haven't had any coffee yet.

"Yeah," said the hygienist, "he thought he'd better send that out as his holiday card this year, so everyone would be familiar with the design before they got here."

I like the guy more and more every time I go in there.