The High Tech Way

What I accomplished in 2009

2009-12-31T15:31:40-05:00

I typed the title to this and now here I am sitting and staring at a blank screen.

Which is appropriate because that's how this year has felt.

I've felt unmotivated and worn down. Every time I felt like I got a little edge and was getting somewhere, it evaporated. Case in point: David's pay cut. Case in point: my unpaid job furlough. Those are the ones I'm comfortable talking about here, but rest assured, there are more.

But there has actually been a little progress. For example,

I lost weight on a low-carb diet (still a ways to go, but nearly halfway there. Took a break and gained a little back over these holidays.)
Started going back to yoga classes again.
Found that I had time for reading for pleasure again, and am doing so. (i.e. I don't pass out 30 seconds after I climb into bed.)
Moved into the new living room. Yesterday. David did all of the work and I tried to keep the preschoolers out of his hair as he worked on it.

I have a tendency to feel unorganized, declare that will get organized and then make a list longer than Santa's of things that I need to do, goals I should have, intermediate steps to get there, etc. Not surprisingly, I find this overwhelming and soon abandon it all. I can MAKE myself unmotivated and worn down in this way. But no more.

Resolution for 2010: Simplify.

Enough already with organizing. Now I'm eliminating instead.

Christmastime religious/philosophical question influenced by IVF

2009-12-27T10:56:47-05:00

Back at the time the New Testament was written there wasn't all this scientific knowledge about the human reproductive system.

But now that there is, it raises a question for me regarding the immaculate conception.

Was Christ half human and half God -- i.e. half the genetic information provided by the Holy Spirit and half by the human mother Mary?

Or did the Holy Spirit transfer a complete God-conceived embryo to human surrogate Mary?

Falling in love again

2009-12-25T22:48:53-05:00

It is Christmas day, and I am reading the newspaper again. Although my career has been in journalism (albeit B2B journalism [business to business] which many consumer newspaper people don't consider ACTUAL journalism) I stopped getting a daily newspaper maybe four or five years ago. I have been reluctant to admit that fact to friends who are reporters and editors at daily newspapers, especially as most of us have found our careers in jeopardy in recent years.

The publishing business is in trouble as the disruptive force of Internet publishing has taken away its power. Anyone can be an online publisher today. Google gets a majority of advertising revenues these days while newspapers, saddled in debt, are watching their revenues decline as newbie online publications such as the Huffington Post and even bloggers eat their lunch. These newcomers are not encumbered by debt, old expectations, and muscle memory of how the business has been run and how it has performed for the last 50 years.

But I digress.

That's not why I stopped getting a daily paper delivered to me. I stopped because it felt as if the Internet had given me attention deficit disorder (ADD). I'd started telecommuting and I'd sit down at my computer before I'd changed out of my pajamas. I didn't get up for hours and hours. The newspapers that I used to read as I drank my coffee before I ever powered up the PC began to pile up unread, unloved. I missed them, but I felt as though I didn't have time for them anymore. Really they were being crowded out by reading so many things online. I canceled my subscription to the local paper. Back then it was the San Jose Mercury News (then a Knight Ridder paper).

Once my first baby finally arrived, the thought of ever reading the paper again evaporated. I remember my mother came to visit in the weeks after Jack was born and I renewed my subscription to the paper for the time she was staying with us. But I canceled it again when she left because I wasn't reading it. It was too difficult to rattle the big newspaper pages into position for the story I wanted to read when I was also holding an infant and using a breast pump.

After we moved back to the Philadelphia area nearly three years ago I tried again, subscribing to the Philadelphia Inquirer. But again they piled up, so I let the subscription lapse. We switched to Sunday only. But even that was too much. A few times in the last year I picked up a Sunday paper at the supermarket, hoping that I would get to read it but thinking that even if I never did at least there were the coupons. But I couldn't even make time for that. It seemed like yet another task to overwhelm me amidst my full-time career, having two preschoolers and remodeling our recently purchased house.

And yet tonight I found myself flipping through the paper and falling in love with it again. And there is my dear friend's byline. And here is another interesting story. Look at this turn of a phrase here, and here is some local news I didn't know about. And how lovely it is to read it on the couch after dinner as they boys watch Nick Jr. for a half hour before bath time.

But the difference tonight is that I am reading it on a Kindle, the eReader from Amazon.com. I don't know why, but it feels easier to me and accessible in a way that the paper newspaper does not anymore. It feels less wasteful to me in an age when printing ink on paper for something that is disposed of in a week's time seems frightful. It pleases me that the "newspaper" is quickly downloaded onto the Kindle. It is the newspaper I used to know and love only better. And suddenly I feel like I see that there is a future for "newspapers" or whatever they will be called in the future. Here is hope.

What is disappointing is the news stories over the last year or so about the business model Amazon is looking to force onto newspapers, whereby Amazon gets 70 percent of revenues and newspapers get 30 percent. That's pretty extreme folks. Who is doing all the work here?

But I LOVE the delivery model. I love the reading experience on the Kindle. I love that any word I don't know or public figure who I'm not familiar with can be explained to me by a dictionary or encyclopedia entry on the spot and all I have to do is put the curser on that word.

This is the future of publishing, I am certain, after just one day with my new Kindle. It's everything it used to be and more. And better.

Sure, there will still be collectors editions of printed books for authors to sign, but they will be like the vinyl records in stores today -- collectors items not designed as the primary method for mass consumption of content.

(Yes, through some very thoughtful work, David was able to get me a Kindle for Christmas without exceeding our austere price limit on gifts this year. (He got some people to go in together). )

I wanted one very much, and I thought they were cool. But the experience has exceeded what I was expecting. I'm sold on this new format. Now I hope that all the issues with different formats (standards, vs. Kindle format, vs. whatever else) can ultimately be resolved. Because this shit is awesome.

"Infrastructure will collapse. Voltage spikes." But the news and journalism and great writing will survive! Yes it will!

I know it's wrong to love a pile of semiconductors, but I do love my new Kindle . Yes I do.

The Man, 1. Me, 0.

2009-12-17T22:29:16-05:00

Everybody is complaining about money, or lack thereof, these days. I am no exception.

Tonight we got the notice of the tuition increase at daycare of 6 percent. Which would be OK if either of us had gotten a raise of any kind in the last three years. Instead, David got a 15 percent pay cut last January and I got an unpaid furlough every other Friday over the summer. For the two years before that our salaries remained the same.

I've found myself looking forward to Kindergarten. One of the reasons we moved to this house in this neighborhood was because it's so close to a good elementary school -- about 50 yards down the road, across the street, there is a path that leads to the schoolyard. And it's a good public school, which means we are already paying for it with our taxes. No more $$$ required.

Jack will be ready for Kindergarten in September. Must. Survive. Til. Then.

Meanwhile, as I often do, I find myself thinking about alternate scenarios. What if we stole away one of the teachers from the school to be our nanny? OK, well, we couldn't afford that either. What if we shared her with another family in our 'hood? Then we could pay her pretty well and she'd still have less kids then she does at the school.

I think about these things, and then I get overwhelmed and am paralyzed.

Which reminds me of my new year's resolution for 2010 that I started early: Simplify.

I'm not gonna think about it tonight.

I am a breast pump aficionado

2009-12-16T07:55:00-05:00

You might call me a breast pump aficionado.

I have two good Medela Pump in Style pumps -- a shoulder bag one that I got used on eBay and a back pack one that a friend gave me after she was finished with it.

I have another manual pump that I bought for emergencies and used for traveling after I stopped regular pumping but was still breastfeeding.

And I have another double electric pump that's ok, but it's no Medela PIS. I tried it once, but it just wasn't effective enough.

And then I once had a Whisperwear pump, but I sold it. Just not up to snuff for exclusive pumping, which is what I was doing when I bought it. I felt like I had to use the Medela to finish after I used the Whisperwear in order to get really empty.

Yeah, and so I have owned some breast pumps.

I haven't used any them since July 2008.

But they used to be a fixture in my life. They traveled with me everywhere. They were my ever-present companion. They became a badge of pride.

I gradually became more brazen about using them in public. I went from hiding away at home to pumping in an airport lounge, in my seat in an airplane, and in my seat on a packed Amtrak train from Philadelphia to New York (when I was so full I felt like the milk was gonna come out of my eyes). I pumped in my boss's office. I pumped in my boss's boss's office. And I asked the president of my division of the company I work for, whom I'd never met before, where I could go to use my pump.

So this month is the end of an era. I'm giving one of my really good pumps to a friend and former colleague whose baby is due in February. I will be shipping the pump to her this month. And it feels good to know it will be going to a good home.