Wednesday September 30, 2009

Blog about to explode... in a good way... In case you hadn't noticed yet, I'm in beautiful Tucson, AZ staying at the wonderful JW Marriot Starr Pass Resort for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. I'm an official blogger, plus I just like to use my blog as a way to take notes for sessions I'm not even the officially assigned blogger. What this means is that I'm about to have MANY posts over the next few days. The should all be under the GHC09 feed, and I'll try to start all the subjects with "GHC09" as well, in case you aren't interested. I should be back to irregularly scheduled and randomly themed blog posts by next week. :-)
(2009-09-30 16:24:20.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday August 14, 2009

Mirror-Mirror

You haven't entered an alternate universe where evil men that look like your friends except they have goatees.... I've just mirrored by blog. Okay, I just created the account on blogger  and Katy Dickinson’s daughter, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, took my extracted entries and comments from 5 years of blogging and got my mirror on blogger.

Jessica was easy to work with and completed the move in just a couple of hours, fixing it up so it looked oh so nice.

For those of you that read my posts via Facebook as "notes" won't notice anything different. Most of you probably don't even know you're reading my blog right now. Gotta love this Web 2.0 stuff! :-)

Tuesday August 11, 2009

Firkin Friday!

We finally made it to the Tied House's First Friday Firkin last week. In case you don't know, "firkin" refers to the size of the barrel the beer is made in.  These once a month pleasures are made in the style of Real Ale - all the carbonation is a natural by product of the fermentation process with no CO2 added. This month's firkin was a nice, light, brown ale. Low in alcohol (3.8% ABV) and high in flavor. It was smooth, with only a slight hint of hops and served in proper pint sized glasses to boot!

The only downsides, really, were that the pints were not always full (illegal in Britain!) and the firkin was rolled in right before tapping, so each glass ended up with yeast in the bottom. I don't like to drink the yeast, because I'll end up with a headache.

Buyer beware, as expected, the firkin pints were not subject to normal happy hour pricing. No complaints on that, though, as the beer was worth every penny!

Friday August 07, 2009

Monk's Kettle Beer Pairing Dinner

Made it up to San Francisco this week to the Monk's Kettle's once a month beer pairing dinner.  This month featured the brews from the Bruery. The food was delicious, service was great and the company was fantastic, what could possibly make this a better night out? Oh, that's right, the amazing beers!

I was glad my friend Phil had warned me about the size of the meal, so we just had a very light salad for lunch, no afternoon snacks and I avoided the tempting bread basket at the table when we arrived.

The founder of the Bruery, Patrick Rue, was in attendance and introduced us to each beer as it was served. It was cool hearing about their humble roots as a home brewer and how they've developed so many new recipes as well as attempting to bring back old styles.  The Bruery is just over a year old, and I haven't had much luck finding them here in the south bay (quoth the BevMo employee, "I'm sorry, *which* brewery are you looking for?").

The first course was organic bibb lettuce with fresh tarragon, chervil, parsley and fried capers, paired with Hottenroth Berliner Weisse. The salad was delicious, but a bit of work to cut into and a bit too much for the plate it was served on, as we all had trouble with flying lettuce and splashing dressing :)  The beer, at a light 3.1% ABV, was super refreshing with a delightful lemon flavor. It reminded me of what I think Mike's Hard Lemonade should taste like (hint: not like syrup ...). It was delicious and I could easily see myself sipping on that on a lazy summer afternoon. (speaking of fried capers - they tasted almost like bacon! they were so good, and seemingly no semblance of vinegar on them)

For the second course, we had pan seared local halibut, crayfish risotto cake, a Sausalito Springs watercress salad and an organic pesto beurre blanc.  When I looked at the menu in advance, I was not particularly excited by this course, not being a huge halibut fan, but was surprised when the fish came perfectly cooked (neither dry nor gooey) and loved the sauce!  This was paired with the Trade Winds Tripel (8.1% ABV), which is apparently made with Thai Basil. You could catch the basil on the nose, but the taste was much lighter.

The third course was Blue de Sassenage, fresh slices of pear, spiced almonds, organic honey and toasted bread.  I'm always a fan of a cheese course, so no complaints here! We all wished the "spices" used on the almonds were listed, as they were quite tasty. We were guessing paprika and brown sugar. This was paired with Humulus Lager (India Pale Lager, 7.2% ABV). This was much lighter than a pale ale, and apparently made with rice to make it an American style lager. Patrick assured us, though, that rice is not a cheep beer making ingredient, as it is often referred to, as it costs him more than his hops.  I'm not a big fan of hoppy beers, but Mark was more than happy to finish the last half of my beer.

The fourth course was what we'd all been waiting for: 'Black Orchard' marinated short ribs, roasted garlic potato puree, haricot vert, and a 'Black Orchard' demi glace. This was all paired with the Black Orchard beer from the Bruery (5.7% ABV).  These ribs had been marinated in the Black Orchard beer with bay leaves and garlic for 24 hours, before being braised for 5 hours (with a mixture made of Black Orchard beer, chicken stock and brown sugar). These spare ribs were phenomenal!  The Black Orchard beer (yes, that Orchard, as in Apple Orchard, not Orchid) was my favorite one of the evening. A nice brown ale, soft and smooth, slightly sweet, and a crisp after taste.

Dessert was house made ice cream sandwiches with a 'Papier' chocolate sauce. This was served with two beers: Papier (first anniversary old style ale, 17.5% ABV) and Black Tuesday (bourbon aged imperial stout - 19.5%). Both beers were really good, though I would have to say that I loved the chocolaty flavor of the Black Tuesday the best. And who wouldn't like a beer named after the start of the Great Depression that sells for $30/bottle? ;-)

Anyone else make it up here for the event? I can't wait for the next one! This is a great way to discover how beer can make food better and to discover small craft breweries.

Wednesday July 08, 2009

The Triumph of Women's Suffrage

Mr. Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr. came to Sun Microsystems today to talk to the Women@Sun group about the triumphant women's suffrage movement in the United States that took more than 60 years to gain success. Sixty years! Just for women to get the right to vote!  [1] Mr. Cooney became interested in this movement in the 1970s when attending school to become a graphic artist, when he realized the large prejudice that women needed to overcome and that they were able to do this in a nonviolent way.

This was such a difficult task, as the women had to convince men that not only were women prepared to vote, but that women were educated and informed. Only men could decide whether or not to grant women the right to vote, and many of these men were ignorant, uneducated and even illiterate.  A difficult task at hand, indeed!

Suffragists started with parades in different states to raise awareness of their concerns, along with organizing peaceful rallies. Getting women to join in these events was difficult, as many were afraid that their participation would be seen as too forward by the men and scare the men off of giving them the vote even more, but the suffragists knew they could not be silent. They need to be seen to be heard.

The US Supreme Court had ruled that it was an issue that should be decided by the states, so the women had to levy campaigns in each and every state, a very arduous process indeed! These campaigns were most successful in the progressive west. East of the Mississippi, the only suffrage many women could get was the ability to vote only for school boards and other small, local positions.

Susan B. Anthony strongly believed it was really a federal issue, and began the push for a federal amendment to the US Constitution. Unfortunately, she died before seeing this come to pass, after 45 years of tireless effort on her part.  Fortunately, there were other women ready to take up the task at hand and push the movement forward, even in times of war.

The women found they were ignored by both major political parties, so their took their parades to the democratic and republican conventions. At one of them, the women actually had a silent, still "parade" - where they all wore white with golden jewelry and parasols and lined the street and stood silently while the delegates were participating in their own march down that same street. The eerie silence had great impact on those delegates, bringing the rights of women to the forefront of their minds.

When the suffragists were not getting momentum they wanted at the national level, they began to leverage their vote in the western states to oust seated national politicians, targeting, in particular, the democratic party. I find this an interesting historic note, as the democrat party is now associated with women's rights, but apparently the turn of the 19th century told a different story.

Mr. Cooney has documented this in his book, Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement, which is filled with outstanding images of the buttons and posters the suffragists made, as well as pictures of the rallies and events and documentation of the cruel treatment several women received for protesting peacefully outside of the White House during World War I.

Mt. Cooney is an eloquent speaker and I really look forward to reading his book in the up coming weeks, but all of this reminds me that all over the world today, women still do not have the right to vote and have themselves represented. It's so disturbing to me, because it seems like such an inalienable right. How can we be citizens and pay taxes and not vote? But, if it took more than 60 years to make such thing a documented right in a progressive country like our own, it may be many more lifetimes before women the world over have these same freedoms and the same voice. Let's hope it comes sooner than later, for all of our sakes.

[1] As pointed out during the Q&A session, not all women gained the right to vote in all states in 1920.  For many women of color, particularly those that lived in the south, that quest took another 40 years, where they had to fight along side their brothers and fathers to get the same equal representation.

Wednesday June 03, 2009

Like a lemming, I'm on twitter now

Taking the lead from my friend Valerie and prodding from Richard, I now exist on twitter!  You can follow me using bubbva

I feel like such a dork blogging about my twitter feed. Perhaps I should've facebooked about it instead. ha!

and, yes, I know that lemmings really don't follow each other off of cliffs and that it was a myth created and propogated by Disney.

Thursday May 28, 2009

Discussion on Women in Technology at 49ers Academy in East Palo Alto

Katy Dickinson and I presented on our journeys that led us to careers in technology at the San Francisco 49ers Academy in East Palo Alto on Tuesday. The students had such diverse backgrounds and career goals themselves, which made for quite a fun visit!  This particular group is focusing on women in science and technology roles and even keep their own blog, Girls' Tyme! 

I talked about my early career aspirations to be a waitress or a record store manager, and why I was so glad I got my degree and moved into the technical arena! There are so many more opportunities - and really, how many record stores are there left? Not a good career path (and while I started my restaurant career, I never got moved up out of the kitchen where I was a car-hop....).

Thursday May 07, 2009

Garden is planted, PBWC was attended!

With the amazing help of my mother-in-law, the tomatoes (cherry, Better Boy, Roma and Early Girl), basil, parsley, oregano, marjoram, basil, parsely, sage, jalapeños, yolo wonder bell peppers, serano chilis, and marigolds are in the ground or in the Earth Boxes! (and for you Simon & Garfunkel fans, the rosemary & thyme from last year are still prospering) Most of those were started from seed in little peet pots, except the oregano, marjoram, Roma and Early Girl tomatoes.

I went to the Professional BusinessWomen of California Conference yesterday in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. It was intense! What a wonderful program! I will have several blog entries from that event over the next week (based on my 13 pages of notes - double sided!)

Monday April 27, 2009

Happy Birthday, Blogs.sun.com!

Can you believe it? Blogs.sun.com is 5 years old!  I felt that I was "late to the game", but now 4.5 years after my first post, I guess that's just noise. I've enjoyed having this outlet to share my theater experiences, work experiences, pitfalls and successes with all of you over the years and really appreciate the support, feedback and sympathy I've gotten from so many people!

I see I haven't been great at keeping up with my "frequent" updates... I guess we all always have ways to improve! (and I know for sure that I have more things to improve than just my blogging frequency!)

Wednesday April 08, 2009

Interesting George Takei interview

I listened to a great interview on the Adam Carolla Podcast yesterday of George Takei, who you all know as helmsman Sulu on the original Star Trek television series, but he is really a very interesting man once you get past the cheese factor of that classic science fiction show.  George has been interviewed in the past by Adam Carolla, so he did not go into great detail of his time living in a Japanese internment camp in California during World War II, but his recollections of soldiers removing his family from their home at gun point, of losing his home, of his father losing his business - are all heart rending.  Back in the midwest, I had never really heard much about this shameful part of US history, and I was surprised to get such a lesson from an Adam Carolla podcast, but it was compelling and I do recommend you give this edition a listen.

On a completely unrelated note, when I got home last night from watching Grease in San Francisco, I was dismayed to find a snail pigging out at my little seedlings that I had put out yesterday morning for "hardening".  I lost a couple of pepper plants and all of one kind of basil. I had started those from seeds weeks ago and they were the ones that were actually doing well. Stupid snail.

Monday April 06, 2009

Dropped the satellite Looks like we're in a growing number of consumers who find the price for cable/satellite not up to what it was actually providing.  For us, we get most of the shows we watch for free, over the air with an antenna, in HD.  And the $65/month fee for satellite to watch a couple of cable programs, most of which are aired for free in their entirety on their cable network's website, just not worth it.  Of course, we still have our TiVo - can't possibly live without that! ;-) (2009-04-06 15:09:55.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Thursday March 26, 2009

Ada Lovelace Day: Women in Technology

Okay, Ada Lovelace Day was actually March 24, so I am a couple of days late, but I believe the bad cold I am finally getting over is a good excused to be a little bit late and doesn't really diminish one of my great sources of inspiration in technology.

Two inspirations, really.  Ada Lovelace herself was one of my first inspirations to pursue computing, when I found my self taking a programming class in Ada88 at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne (IPFW, for short).  I was a completely undecided major - literally taking calculas and Ada programming for fun, while otherwise focusing on core electives - English, Philosophy, etc.  The text book came with an excerpt explaining who Ada was and why the language was named after her, and I found myself inspired. Surely if she could accomplish technical work more

I transfered to the Purdue main campus the following year, fairly sure I wanted to pursue computer science, but dismayed to find that my two Ada courses would count for nothing and I would need to start over again with Introduction to C++ (CS180).  Was it going to be worth it? That's around when I met a wonderful woman, Barbara Clark, who was an advisor for the school of science undergraduate students.  Barbara, a former mathemitician turned punch card programmer, was positively beaming with energy around the Purdue Computer Science department and was actively engaging women in computer science and the science department in general.  She taught me first hand the importance of diversity in any program, all the while seeking out funding from the School of Science head and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to move these initiatives forward.  Barb didn't do all of this alone, but she did draw people into her cause (including me) and inspire us all to stay in technology, network and strive to aim even higher. Under Barb's watchful gaze, the Women in Science program has flourished at Purdue, there are dedicated floors in dorms to women in science majors, and retention rates of women in these areas are up.

Friday March 06, 2009

OpenSolaris Governing Board Candidate Positions and Bio

I am so honored to have received a nomination for the OpenSolaris Governing Board election for 2009-2010. I am currently a staff level development engineer in the Solaris Security Technologies group at Sun Microsystems, where I am a core member of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework team.  I am running with the approval and support of my  management.

Background

I have a bachelors degree in Computer Science from Purdue University, where I was first exposed to Sun hardware and the Solaris operating system. One semester the engineering department took back the SPARCStation5's they had lent us and we found out they were going to be replaced with Intel boxes running Windows.  I joined the group of rabblerousers that wanted to continue to do our work with Solaris, and we soon found ourselves with a lab full of Intel machines running Solaris 2.5.1. :-)

That summer, I did an internship with Amoco Oil (now BP) and got a job as a systems administrator for Solaris & SunOS machines. I fell in love with the big iron, the desktop systems and the operating system and decided then and there I wanted to work at Sun.

I joined Sun early in 1997 in the Solaris test group, starting out as the gatekeeper for the Solaris Test Collection. I was the first gatekeeper to actually version the test suites by the OS they were developed for, which was a great relief going forward for the sustaining organizations - who now found that they could run the Solaris 2.6 tests successfully on 2.6 patched systems, without worrying about test changes introduced to support new features.

It's been a long time since then, and I have found myself working in sustaining on the SunScreen bridging firewall appliances (back before appliances were cool), as an architect for the network address translation component of the layered releases of SunScreen, IPsec, as a developer for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework, and actively working on simplifying access to cryptography in Solaris and in OpenSolaris.

While here, I have worn many hats, in addition to my "day job". I have been representing Solaris for defect tracking concerns for ten years, was the technical lead for the Operating Systems and Networking (ON) consolidation for Solaris 10 Update 1, worked closely with the webRTI team on their initial deployment and successive updates, worked with the OpenSolaris sponsor program, and am the Chair for the ON Change Request Team.

Additionally, I spent 3 years on Sun's Security Ambassadors Board of Directors, where I evangelized Solaris security features, assisted customer facing engineers find the tools and the contacts they needed to get their jobs done, and helped organize our annual conferences.

I am a Core Contributor in the OS/Net (ON), Security and Tools communities.

I believe in the open community. I have worked on getting many defect tracking enhancements done to improve community access, like pushing for external bug update notification emails, coming up with the concept for and assisting in how to implement the Public Comments field in bugster, working with people to open their bug tracking components to the world, and am currently involved in attempting to move us to a solution where external developers can participate on equal footing.

I am also a huge proponent of women in technology, starting with involvement with the pilot Women in Science program at Purdue and restarting the Women in Computer Science program there as well, and most recently as an official blogger for the Grace Hopper Women in Computing conferences.

If there is anything that being a woman in technology has taught me is how important community is - without it, women in technology abandon the field.  I know we have problems with the OpenSolaris community and I want to help make this better.  Communication is so key to a community (in fact, they share the same root :-), and we all need to work on this area. I don't want the community to disappear.

If I am elected to the 2009-2010 OGB, I hope to use my position on the board to help accelerate the seemingly stalled true opening of defect management for OpenSolaris, engender open communication with Sun, and build this community up to what I know it can be.

Hobbies & Personal Information

I was raised in Fort Wayne, IN and was formerly a Bubb (hence the handle, bubbva on IRC and here).

In addition to writing code and reviewing RTIs,  I love to ride my bicycle, perform in various community theater groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, read, listen to music, sing, ski, bake, take pictures, neglect my personal website due to all of these activities and spend time with my husband and my very demanding Ragdoll cat. And I can't get enough of American Idol Season 8... :-)

If you got this far, I'm impressed and I really do appreciate your vote.

Thursday February 26, 2009

Coraline in 3D

I went to see the latest movie based on a Neil Gaiman book, Coraline, this past weekend. It was in 3D! And not at all like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets throwing popcorn at you, either, it was really 3D! This was a really cool use stop-animation and old camera techniques to really bring the audience into the movie, without any of the silly gimmicks like throwing ... well, popcorn at you.  I did find I had to sit very still when the movie first started, to avoid getting queasy at the perceived motion.  After the intro, though, the motion seemed to slow down - avoiding the problem that the latest Bond film had for me, so I could actually focus and look at what was going on. The protaganist was a smart young woman, played by Dakota Fanning, that was so reminiscient of my niece. :-)

The fact that this was done with real object, vs computer animation, brought a certain quaint realism to the characters, endearing them to all of us.  I can't imagine all the knitting work that must've gone on!

I am a huge Gaiman fan, and while I haven't read this particular book, the story definitely had his traditional mark of slightly creepy, intriguing and delightful on it.

To truly appreciate this film, you do need to go see it in the theaters in 3D. I'm sure that's why they filmed it this way (and why we saw so many previews for more movies coming in 3D). It's a good way to get butts in the seats instead of people waiting to see the film on DVD.

Friday January 23, 2009

What happened to book stores? And why the smell?

My family and I are celebrating a belated Christmas, so I went to the Westfield Valley Fair Shopping Center - a giant mall in Santa Clara/San Jose - to hit the sales.  Some of the kids I'm buying for are really into Abercrombie & Fitch (to quote my college roomates, "MUST BE TRENDY!!!!"), so my husband and I took a stroll through there. We were nearly overcome with the blaring loud music and the overwhelming scent of cologne.  Now don't get me wrong, I like loud music - I worked in two different music stores for a total of about 6 years in the industry. I just don't like it so loud that I literally can't hear my husband shopping next to me, nor the cashier behind the register.  And the smell - it was so over powering! Who would wear so much cologne?!?

Well, off for the next person on our list, we started looking for the book store. Was it Borders? Hrm... where was it again? Unable to find the book store where it used to be, we checked the store directory. No book store. None.  Giant mall and no readers. That's depressing.  Well, more reason to spend money in downtown Mountain View, where we have at least three book stores.

Arriving home, I discovered another disturbing thing about Abercrombie.  All of the items purchased from the store reeked of their cologne. They obvsiously spray the garments in the store in order to encourage people to buy their cologne, too. Now my house smells like Abercrombie. Note to self: don't ever shop their for anyone who has allergies!

On a completely unrelated note, why do the producers of American Idol insist on showing people suffer through miserable auditions, and hardly show any of the people going through to Hollywood?  As someone who has auditioned a lot, and knows when I've had a bad audition, I certainly wouldn't want it televised!