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.

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 )

I'm finally at the point in my Ph.D. where I need to start getting serious about deciding exactly what I'm going to research and how I'm going to run my studies. This isn't as easy as it sounds. "I want to know how to make secure systems usable" isn't a research study, it's a goal. I've been spending most of the last year and a half learning how to create actual research studies from that goal. I'm still not sure I've got it down.

The real problem is trying to decide which line of research will provide the most bang for your buck.

I used to get very frustrated with some of the people in Microsoft Research, because some of them were working on things that seemed completely beyond the scope of anything we could reasonably hope to build. That's a very dangerous sentiment from a business standpoint, though. It has destroyed companies.

Exhibit A: Xerox.

Back in the 60s and 70s, Xerox was powerful and influential enough to have a major research lab called Xerox PARC. You owe your computer to Xerox. In 1973, they built what was arguably the first personal computer. 1973. The Alto's user interface looks recognizably like that of a very early Macintosh, designed more than 10 years later.

So here's the question: why didn't Xerox get rich?

Well, mostly because Xerox's managers didn't know what they had.

Xerox already owned a computer division. It sold 1960s-era room-sized computers that cost up to half a million bucks, and the division was tanking. (It closed entirely in 1975.) The idea of pouring more money into making completely untested computers was completely foreign to them. Moreover, nobody thought much of the new interface.

The reason you're sitting in front of your computer desktop today: Steve Jobs of Apple took a walk through Xerox PARC in the late 70s. (When Apple later sued Microsoft over Windows 1.0, Bill Gates pointed out, accurately, that Apple stole the design first.)

Back to the lecture at hand, to quote somebody or other. We're in 2008, not the early 1970s. How do you pick the piece of research that's going to build today's equivalent of the mouse? Or the next-generation computer desktop? Or, in my own humble world, a secure system that you can use?

If I knew the answer to that, I'd not only have my Ph.D. tomorrow, I'd be rich.

If I've been quiet lately, it's mostly because I'm attempting to keep the classic LJ back-of-hand-to-forehead "Oh, whatever shall I do, WOE" posts to a happy minimum. Hopefully my mood will improve over the next couple days.

However, in shameless self-promotion, I did want to point people to today's quick rant on Metroblogging Seattle: #12, midday. Because I love it when I run into people with long, long memories.

It's always fascinated me that when looked at from the right point of view, our country is only three generations old. Like this:

James Madison helped design the Constitution, wrote the Federalist Papers, and was the fourth President. He was born in 1751 in the British crown colony of Virginia and died in 1836, one day before Virginia's fiftieth anniversary as a state. At the time he passed away, Madison was the last of the signers of the Constitution left alive.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was born in 1841, only five years after Madison passed away. Holmes served in several battles in the Civil War, getting wounded three times before retiring out as a Lt. Colonel. He went back to school at Harvard, studied law, and eventually ended up as one of the most respected legal minds in the country. He served as a justice on the Supreme Court for nearly thirty years before retiring. He passed away in 1935.

By the time Holmes passed away, George Bush Sr. was already nine years old. He served in World War II, went to Yale, then entered politics, winning his first seat while the US was firing off Gemini spacecraft and fighting a war in Vietnam. He served in a variety of political and government offices throughout the 70s before being elected Vice President in 1980 and President in 1988. He's still alive, our oldest living president.

See? Three generations. And Seattle has only existed for two of them.

Grandpa was an engineer who served in the Navy during World War II. He spent most of the war building and repairing ships at what was then called San Pedro and later became the Long Beach shipyard, just south of Los Angeles.

He loved, loved to tell World War II stories, but there were a few that he told reluctantly if at all. Only once, in a weak moment, did he tell me about one of the torpedoed destroyers he'd been ordered to help repair. Nobody had bothered to clear the dead bodies out of the twisted wreckage of the bow, and the ship had spent a week being towed to the dry dock. It had happened fifty years ago, he said, but he still couldn't get away from the smell.

I thought of him today when I stumbled across an online cache of photos from Pearl Harbor during the war.

Not a lot of people remember this, but almost all of the twenty or so ships that were sunk or damaged during the Pearl Harbor attack were eventually raised and repaired. That meant somebody, in tropical heat, had to dive into sunken metal boats choked with water, oil, and blood, remove all the corpses, and get out all the ammunition and salvagable materials. Oh, and avoid being drowned, asphyxiated, or blown up in the process.

All photos from the Naval Historical Center.




Note the guy on the left. He's covered head to foot in oil.












These guys are standing just behind the forward guns of the USS Arizona (which, by the way, looked like this at the time). They were diving through the flooded and oil-soaked wreck, looking for live ammo and personal effects they could bring back up.









Even once they drained some of the water out, life on the cleanup crew wasn't exactly pleasant.












Note the gas masks. Many of the compartments on the partly-raised ships were flooded with poisonous gas.










Perspective is great. If I had a lousy day working at my desk, it's still a better day than these guys had.

I suspect almost everyone has a few nonsensical Rules that they follow, absolute commandments for themselves that they would never consider enforcing on anyone else. This is one of mine:

I never call myself a writer.

I just type a lot.

When someone starts paying me to write stuff, then I'll start calling myself a writer.

Just setting some context for what follows.

---

Remember that old Calvin & Hobbes cartoon where Calvin writes a book report called "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes," and announces, "Academia, here I come"?

Quoted for truth, as the kids say.

There are days when I despair of being able to adopt an "academic" writing style for my papers. Take tonight's homework assignment. Here is a field guide to Hawaiian reef fish. Question: are color photographs an appropriate visual to include with the field guide? Why or why not?

Well, I could quote gestalt theory and Koslyn's theories of preattentive processing and note that the rods and cones in the human eye respond more quickly to 'edges' or differences in luminosity and wavelength, so given the bright coloration of the specimens, the eye is in some ways better adapted to distinguish between two similar species of chaetodontidae using a color photograph.

Or I could explain that differences in bright colors on a neutral or dark background will be immediately apparent to the eye, so a color photo are better than black and white photos or schematics to distinguish between different species of Hawaiian reef fish.

Which made more sense to you?

The writer's commandment is: know your audience. That's not easy for papers and assignments in my department. The professors are an odd mix: some rhetoricians and theorists who live and breathe academic jargon, and some usability and user-centered design experts who tend to prefer prose that's more clear and succinct. Knowing which is which is not always straightforward.

So I write the papers in the best academic prose I can muster. Then I come home to write a blog post, or a short story, or a script. My sentences are too long, my vocabulary too complex, and the text just won't come together. The idea's there, but I can't express it clearly.

Some days I think my brain needs a hard reset switch. Fortunately, that's why God invented bourbon.

I am, at best, what you'd call a casual gamer.

Of course, some of my friends have built their entire careers off of creating the games that I play. All I do is play some board games and goof around with an XBox 360.

So if I notice a trend in games, it's probably at least a year or two out of date. But what the hey.

I like first person shooters, and I've been spending a lot of my XBox time lately playing Call of Duty 2 and Gears of War. I'm fascinated by the fact that they both are based around the idea of 'cover.' Back in the Castle Wolfenstein and Doom and Quake days, and even to some extent in Halo, you didn't really have things you could hide behind. Survival was based on constantly moving. Don't be where they're shooting.

If you try that strategy in either of the games I'm playing right now, you die very very quickly. Survival is based on never being out in the open for more than a second or two. You dive from one spot of cover to another and stay there until you've shot enough of your enemies to be able to move without being instantly cut down.

Good stuff, and much better suited to my playing style. I don't have the reflexes for those how-fast-can-I-twitch games any more.

---

I did end up with the second TA job, which means that my winter quarter has now gone from "well, I'll have some free time" to "God, I may never sleep again." On the one hand, double pay == good. On the other hand, after I introduced myself to the two instructors I'll be assisting, one of them immediately noted that he'd be out of town during week 2 and week 6, so would I like to prep and teach his four hour class?

Oof.

It's a damn good thing they opened a coffee shop in my neighborhood.

I'm halfway tempted to do one of those "Are you reading this?" polls, just to see how many people actually do read LJ in the middle of the holiday weekend.

bubblesutonium and I are alternating between dropping in on friends at holiday parties and staying home to eat and drink too much. This is the first Christmas holiday we've been in our new house, and the first Christmas holiday I've ever had a double oven to play with. Baking cookies suddenly becomes a much faster operation. Plus, I can shove the roast beast in the lower oven and use the upper oven for other delicious goodness. Yay, cooking luxuries.

I lived for seven years with my Jewish step-dad while growing up, so in a nod to longtime tradition we celebrated Hanukkah with the customary candles and a menorah. It was sitting right next to our Christmas tree. Oddly, this was both entirely uneventful and rather beautiful. I can think of some Christians and rabbis who might want to try it sometime.

We're making our way through the usual holiday specials. bubblesutonium watched "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" for the first time in about 10 or 15 years. "Hey, WoS!" she yelled. "Did you know Hermy the Elf is gay?" My reaction: "Doesn't everybody?"

Probably the oddest video in our Christmas collection is a long-out-of-print CBS special called "B.C.: A Special Christmas," based off of the B.C. comic strip. It's not nearly as painful as you'd think. It was written before Johnny Hart dove headfirst into evangelical Christianity, for one thing. Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding (from the longtime radio show "Bob & Ray") voice the two main characters. Goulding plays a cynical schemer who creates a holiday called Xmas to sell rocks, while Elliott looks on in bemusement. I'm sure bubblesutonium will dig out the videotape in the next day or two.

Meanwhile, the cookies are calling to me. I'm trying a new (to me) Alton Brown chocolate chip cookie recipe. Let's see how well it worked.

There's a meme floating around at the moment which recounts several points of interest from your senior year of high school. (Q: What was your favorite outfit? A: Black shirt, black jeans, soft black lace-up boots or combat boots. If the whole 2300 person school thinks you're a little weird, embrace it.)

True story: not long ago, in an idle moment with my mother, my step-dad, and a couple of beers, I looked my parents in the eye and asked them point blank: "Why in the world did you leave me in that half-assed school district anyway?"

My senior year wasn't bad. By then most of the guys who were beating me up had left, and I'd settled in to an entertaining stint as one of the editors on the school paper.

(Pause for egotistical aside: Not to put too fine a point on it, that paper kicked ass. We successfully pissed off the school board, the administration, the principal, about three-quarters of the faculty, and several of the local right-wing school board candidates. We won national awards. The lead editor for the paper went on to a long and successful career as a writer for the Washington Post.)

Almost everything before that, though, was a haze of unpopularity, lousy teachers, crappy homework assignments, and singing badly in small choral groups that deserved better. Middle school and junior high were worse. At least in high school I could take refuge in writing and, sometimes, dating. (Hi, D.)

As it was, I got out at the right time. About a year or two after I left, a coalition of Christian-right activists and anti-tax senior citizens got together and managed to get several members of the same fundamentalist church elected to the school board. It was a fiasco. Arts, sex education, and the journalism programs were all burnt to the ground. The head of the board, a born-again fundamentalist, was accused of anti-Semitic comments, fiercely denied but probably true. (Her last name was Mengel, which probably didn't help her standing in the local Jewish community.) Most of the good teachers and administrators left. There was such an uproar that somebody filmed a documentary about it. It played Sundance and later aired on PBS a few times.

"Enjoy it, kid," said my Grandma in 1990. "These are the best years of your life." Fortunately for me, she was lying through her teeth.

When I was working full time, I tended to schedule my life in half-hour to 1 hour increments. I had to. It was the only way to get everything done.

These days my calendar is nearly clear, except for an appointment here or there. I'm still running around - buying supplies for the house, or shopping for groceries, or just taking a walk - but it's all at my own pace, and essentially unscheduled. Only the daily dog walk gets on the schedule every day.

I'll have to go back to the hyperplanned way of living in a week and a half. Honestly, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

bubblesutonium has been a little cranky with me, justifiably, for being more slack-assed and absentminded than usual. (And that's saying something.) I've come to realize it's a habit of mind more than anything.

When I was working, I wasn't always concentrating on what you wanted me to concentrate on, but I was concentrating on something. Now that I've been unemployed for awhile, it's gotten harder and harder to focus on the topic at hand.

My calendar is looking more and more crowded as I get closer to school. To my amazement, I'm actually happy about that. I don't want to get back to the same stress level I was at six months ago, but having a reason to get up in the morning and a plan is a good thing.

If there's one thing I've gained over the last few weeks, it's been the leisure to listen more carefully to people, and occasionally help out around the edges. That, I don't want to lose, even as my free time dwindles away.

ETA: Oh, and:

This is *such* a PM thing to be happy about, but I've finally figured out how to synch up my electronic calendar with my cell phone. You cannot imagine how happy this makes me. For a guy who spent years keeping track of 80 things at once, I'm horrible about remembering where I'm supposed to be 15 minutes from now. I was afraid I was going to have to pull out my laptop once every 30 minutes or so to see what in hell I was supposed to do next, and where. Now, my cell phone buzzes at the appropriate time and tells me where to go and when.

All hail the Motorola Razr. Bow down before its mighty.

The map of the Middle East, notoriously, was created by and for European interests. The diplomats who carved up the land paid little or no attention to the cultural or ethnic boundaries of the people who lived there. The world has been paying the price for that short-sighted greed ever since.

There's a peculiar irony in a Western scholar redrawing that map - and in the Armed Forces Journal, no less. I'm still fascinated.

Here's the map today.

Here's what the revised map might look like, with a full discussion.

(via The Map Room)

This one's for you, Grandpa.

It's called an Atmos clock. It doesn't run on electricity and never needs winding. Instead, it uses a spring that expands and contracts with temperature changes. The motion in the spring keeps the clock running.

In the middle of the last century, a lot of companies gave these out as service awards to high level employees. Think of it as the larger version of the proverbial gold watch you got when you retired. This one was originally given to my grandfather when he left a manufacturing firm in Wisconsin. "In deep appreciation from your sales force of 1975," it says.

When my mother and step-dad inherited the clock, it didn't work. They couldn't find anyone who knew enough about the mechanism to fix it. So it sat around the house in Pennsylvania, and eventually got sent to me.

I found a guy in Ballard who turns out to be an expert on repairing and restoring these clocks.

So now the clock is sitting on my desk, cheerfully keeping time.

It's not new, and it's not an antique. It's not worth a ton of money. It was, basically, a higher-end version of the t-shirts and random knickknacks Microsoft gave me over the years.

But it's here, and on my desk, and working. And it's making me stupid happy. Somewhere, somehow, my Grandpa is smiling.

"So what's it like now that you're done with Microsoft?" people keep asking me.

More frustrating than I'd expected. We'd known that money was going to be an issue, of course, but I didn't expect to feel so annoyed with all of this free time and no money to spend. ETA: On the other hand, eating at home is a vast improvement over the cafeteria food I was living on.

Since I don't have to get up in the mornings right now, I've reverted to my natural nocturnal habits. I'm going to bed about 2 AM and waking up about 9 or 10.

Some mornings, like today, are worse than others. I want to travel, to go, to do something. Instead I'm reduced to plodding around the house and shaking my head over the baseball scores.

(Boston slipped behind the Yankees again, because former M's outfielder Shin-Soo Choo hit his first career grand slam barely a week after we traded him to Cleveland. The gods of baseball are Fickle, Capricious, and Bitchy. All hail.)

The cure for this flavor of blues is Work. So I finish straightening the main floor of the house, take out the trash and recycling, clean up the kitchen. I go up to my office and unpack boxes. I write a bit. I make a few phone calls. I rip a CD or two for my iPod.

Later in the afternoon, once the weather cools and my ambition sets in, I may go work in my yard, or take a long walk somewhere. Maybe to the Central Library, get a few new books to read. I've already been through a baker's dozen books since I left work, including David McCullough's thousand-plus page opus on Harry Truman.

That's my life right now. It would drive me crazy, eventually. But for now, a little enforced laziness might not be the worst thing in the world.

In a fine example of the overzealous clerk, I got carded at the grocery store the other day. I'm 32, and most people tell me I look even older than that.

This will teach me to buy a couple six packs of beer. I'm never carded when I buy wine.

Honestly, I find the whole carding thing kinda ridiculous. When I was in high school, there were a couple simple rules about how to avoid getting carded:

• Spend over $300. If you piled enough cases of beer onto your shopping cart, the guys at the beer & soda place stopped asking. Or,


• Buy wine, especially good wine. No boxes. Or,


• Overpay by a couple of twenty dollar bills, and don't ask for change.

This was in Pennsylvania around 1990. No idea if any of that works out here.

---

Somebody altered a poster I saw on the bus yesterday:

Rosa Parks
A quest for human dignity.
A quiet act of couRAGE.

---

Happy solstice, everyone.

We're having a windstorm in the Seattle area at the moment. My friends list is full of 'MY POWER WENT OUT" and "OMG 520 CLOSED DUE TO WINDS" and the weather service quote about "BE PREPARED FOR DAMAGING WINDS" and so forth.

I live in one of the most sheltered neighborhoods in Seattle - east-facing, tucked into the corner of a hill - so I'm finding this all a bit surreal. We've had an occasional strong gust, and a strong shower or two, and that's about it. And people wonder why I don't get that excited by weather forecasts.

I've been remarkably and happily social the last couple of nights. Thursday we went to the Symphony for ferneyes's birthday, and a lovely show it was. Last night my uncle and aunt invited us to join them for dinner in the club at the top of the Columbia Tower, where we ate, drank, and got caught up on the family news. After we dropped them off at their hotel we headed over to game night at the home of Magus and jnjnboo. Much social and silly occurred, especially after somebody got the bright idea of putting Airplane! on the DVD player. Tonight, assuming stuff gets done, we're heading over to another ferneyes party. IT's all good.

Right now I need to quit stalling and work on getting the house cleaned up. It's going back on the market next week. But before I do, I feel compelled to present to you a thing I had never even conceived of:

Flying Spaghetti Monster erotica.

(The first link is safe for work, the second...well...isn't.)

By long family tradition, New Year's Day is the day you take down all the holiday decorations. So, we're having a mostly lazy day punctuated by occasional fits of industry. bubblesutonium has been more busy than I have since she's also trying to do some laundry and get started on her schoolwork.

We have a short week ahead of us, but Bubbles and I are slowly getting back into our normal lives. Both of us are heading back to work, though Bubbles gets one more week before she must plunge back into the classroom grind.

My six-week vacation is coming to a close, so I'm taking stock a bit. On the minus side, I'm even more out of shape than I was when I started, and I didn't get as much done on my book project as I'd hoped. On the plus side, I'm caught up on sleep for the first time in about five years, I'm much more relaxed, and I've figured out my career path for the next few years. I have to call it a success.

Meanwhile, courtesy of docbrite, have a meme:

( The Last Things of 2005 )

Back in the dark ages, I used to go to concerts. A LOT of concerts. I had a solid wall of ticket stubs that had completely filled my bulletin board after about two years or so.

These days, on average, I get to about one show every two to three years or so.

What happened?

Well, for one thing, Ticketmaster's "convenience charges" and "service charges" and "internet service charges" finally pissed me off. The only way to deal with a monopoly you don't like is to avoid buying the monopoly's products, and so I do.

But, you say, you could still go to small club shows. Or buy tickets at the venue.

Well, yeah I could. Except that most of the club shows I'd be interested in are industrial or metal, and they've sunk deeply into self parody. On jwz's journal, gnat23 posted the following Industrial Bingo card to help explain:



O, do I ever miss the Iron Horse.

The only thing wrong with getting into your 30s is that you start to realize all the things that you're never going to get around to doing.

When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a pilot. I loved flying. As I got older I got the idea that the only way to be a *really* good pilot was to join the Navy, or the Air Force, and get some hours of flight time. By the time I was old enough to follow through, I'd developed a major allergy to military discipline, so I went to a liberal arts college instead. Now I wear glasses full time, and I doubt I could even get into civilian flight school. Another perfectly good dream shot to hell.

I'd love to be a TV writer. I think I'd be good at it. But to be a TV writer, you have to live in LA and give up several years of your life to work in menial tasks at slave wages. One of the people on my Friends list has recently done just that, switching careers and lives midstream, and I'm incredibly jealous. Changing your life around somehow isn't as easy when you have a mortgage, several pets, a spouse in school, and a career of sorts.

I bang around on the piano as I have for years, but I'll never be good enough to play in public.

I still haven't climbed Mount Rainier, and unless I somehow get into much better shape, I doubt I ever will.

My ear for languages is terrible, and I still don't speak anything but English.

It's entirely possible I'll never have children.

I've got a lot of life ahead of me, and I want to enjoy every second of it. It's a little hard when you feel your dreams slowly start to slip like water through your hands.

EDIT: I wrote this last night, and left it public. Then I got up this morning, re-read it, decided it was whiny and annoying, and locked it.

I have mixed feelings about this, but I've made it public again. After all, if you can't whine to friends and total strangers on LJ, where *can* you whine to friends and total strangers?

I slacked a bit at the beginning of the week, and took a night off to go watch a presentation given by The Activist at the home of jnjnboo and Magus. So now I get to spend the rest of the week getting home sometime after 10 PM, sometimes after midnight.

I'm now sufficiently tired and punchy that sentences like "RIP is based on UDP, while OSPF is based directly on IP; RIP uses unicast and broadcast, while OSPF uses unicast and multicast" are starting to sound like Deep Thoughts. Bonus geek points to anyone who thought that quote made perfect sense.

The Activist's speech got me to thinking a bit about women in the workplace, specifically mine. The glass ceiling is real. There are five people between me and the CEO on the company org chart, and all of them are men. (And three of them are vice presidents. That thought frightens me by itself.) There's only one woman on our board of directors, and only one out of sixteen of our executive officers is a woman.

There are two women in senior management positions in my own group. Two out of six of my VP's direct reports, actually, which isn't a bad ratio for this outfit. Call them Kathy and Rona. How do they get stuff done in a mostly rich, mostly male group with incredibly outsized egos?

Kathy's method: subtle sex appeal. Nothing overt, nothing that breaks any rules or is inappropriate in any way. But she wears flattering clothes and low-cut outfits, frequently stays about a half a step inside the personal space of whoever she's talking to, and speaks in a slightly breathy voice that sometimes seems to whisper untold secrets at a level just below what you can hear. (Male) developers tend to get a bit flustered around her, and no wonder.

Rona's method: be a badass. She doesn't have Kathy's looks or charm, but she's got attitude to spare. She likes keeping people off-balance. You can't finish a sentence in a discussion with her; she always interrupts before you're done. She loves to bark tangentially-related questions to keep you on your toes. When she speaks, it's in a sardonic, dismissive tone, as if only the congenitally stupid could possibly disagree with anything she says.

(Mind you, Rona's attitude isn't just towards me, although she doesn't like me very much. She cops the same attitude with almost everyone who isn't in her trusted inner circle, including several of her own employees. Not by coincidence, her team has one of the highest turnover rates in my group.)

Needless to say, both of them are incredibly competent, technically savvy, and well-connected. They've survived in one of the most Darwinian environments I've ever seen for a long, long time. I've a lot of respect for both of them. But it's clear they've had to change who they are to get where they are.

I wonder: do women have to do that to be successful in every industry? Or is it just high-tech?

My brain is turning into pigskinned mush, my legs are cramping up from too little exercise, and my wife won't kiss me any more because I smell like potato chips and onion dip. I love the football playoffs.

I've been encouraged in my sloth by the weather, which is typical January: a cold grey rain punctuated by occasional periods of cold grey damp. I love my hometown, but this is not the place for people with SAD.

---

On Friday, I picked up a new cardkey for myself at work.

Until fairly recently, when you got a new cardkey, security used the picture that they had on file. That meant the picture on my cardkey dated from 1996, when I first started contract work at my employer. These days, the Powers That Be have sensibly decided that they'd like to have more up-to-date pictures on the ID badges. So, when you acquire a new cardkey, you get a new picture taken too.

So here's the difference nine years makes. The 1996 picture showed a dorky white guy who:

- was 21 years old
- wore his long brown hair in a pony tail
- wore black
- had hollow cheeks and a painfully thin face
- was clean shaven
- wore nothing on his face
- had a large, visible zit on his forehead
- was smiling

The 2005 picture shows a dorky white guy who:

- is 30 years old
- wears short, spiky hair tinged with a bit of grey
- isn't wearing black
- has a face filled out by too much good food
- has a beard
- wears glasses
- lacks acne
- has a neutral, slightly bemused expression

Oddly enough, the ears stick out about the same distance in both pictures.

There is no moral to this story, except that the milestones of aging sometimes aren't the ones you expect.