Anachronistic Mom Blog

Television and the cognitive surplus

From Clay Shirkey, here's a wonderful blog post about critical technology. It bounces from the critical technology being gin, to the critical technology being sitcoms, and finally focuses in on the elephant in the USA's living room.  For decades, we're been bottling our brains up and feeding them to the television set.  Check it out. Brilliant stuff.  Here's an excerpt:

And television watching?  Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.  Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

And here's another excerpt. I love this guy!

In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

The IT Conversations channel and interviews with innovators

John Udall's blog
Here is a pointer to the IT Conversations Channel and Interviews with Innovators

Fanpost: Tim Spalding, founder of Librarything

I love this product. I love all the ways that you can associate things, find connections, find new books.  It's awesome.  Yeah, yeah, the Amazon lists are nice and all, but essentially they're just one person's opinion, you know?  At Librarything, the information itself holds sway.  Books are given categories by hundreds of users, ranked, and the software tells you patterns.  Who do you have the most books in common with? What else is in their library? (One of the most common secret questions that lies in the heart of a booklover.)  Wow. These books are neat.  What other books does this person have? In the hallway, next to their bed?  In the reading corner?  What kind of books do they have most of?  What do they say about them?  Who else has this book?  What else did the people categorize as this category? 

This is an utterly sublime application for booklovers and I bow low to Tim Spalding.  Have no idea what the podcast sounds like though - I detest podcasts.  (Oddly enough, I prefer the written word!)  Heh.

Oh - since I am writing about Libarything, here is a link to the Librarything blog. 

Silicon Valley Secrets

A few months ago I was interviewed by a 19 year old intern who asked me why people blog in the silicon valley. "Because of the secrets," I said. "It's such a secretive place that we're bursting at the seams." While I was utterly captivated by this idea, the intern decided to focus her article on the parallels between our mom-based blog and phone sex blogs. (Yeah, right.)

Hey, it's an approach. One of those residual "girliness" category things.

But I kept thinking about secrets and the silicon valley. Any piece of society has their secrets. Heck, the American south has made a whole literary name for itself by mining a pastiche of repression, secrets, and strange characters. What makes the silicon valley unique is the high tech business. And what makes us interesting is what we're not talking about - our secrets.

The six degrees of separation theory postulates that we're all connected - with six jumps through people that we know to connect anyone on the planet. Seems just a bit western-specific but heck, it spawned an internet company (or fifty), a book or two, a game, a play, and a movie. Good street cred. Here in the silicon valley (and connected technology world), it's more like three degrees of separation. Everybody has a secret or knows someone who does.

I remember going out to a romantic dinner with my husband before we were married. We were seated in the corner right behind, as it turned out, the CEO of his main competition, who was recruiting a hot prospect. There we sat, romantically hidden by a large fern, as he ran through a full description of his cash position, product strategy and largest customers. Eventually we had to start nuzzling one another and behaving in a besotted fashion in order to keep our table (it was a crowded Saturday night), but it turned out to be a highly valuable meal.

I also remember taking a hot engineer to lunch with a VC (venture capitalist) friend about 18 years ago. The VC kept eyeing a table with two men dining and on the way out, he stopped at the now-empty table and looked to see who had paid the check. "It tells a lot," he said.

One of the things that always tickles me about the silicon valley is the gossip factor. When I first came here, I didn’t really know that men gossiped. Ha! The men I know here in the valley gossip far more than the women.  And everyone gossips.  Gossip here isn’t classic social/sex gossip though. It’s about money. Success. Who's doing what business with whom. New ideas. And technology is the biggest, sexiest thing around. Picture an enormous elephant with blonde hair and boobs, lounging in the middle of the living room. Dressed in the finest Fendi wear. Buffing its toenails, with huge clanking bracelets sliding up and down its forelegs. THAT's technology in the valley. The coolest new product - awesome!  Oooh, check it out.  And <insert name here> just started a new company with <insert name here> making <oops, can't tell you> and funded by <insert name here.>  What fun!

But here's the thing: Nobody talks personal in their blogs. This particular blog is about what it's like to be a silicon valley mom - sort of. But you notice that we talk about the everyday stuff. Nobody's talking about what it was like when everybody and their dog lost their shirts in 2001. Nobody's talking about mates disappearing for literally years, about husbands who come home and endlessly pace up and down the halls, cellphones glued to their ears. You might hear us speculating generically about the "effects of stress," but we don't tell you about the constant "just got dropped in the roller coaster" feeling about being 3/4 of a million dollars in debt - and worrying every single day that your life will go up in flames.  We don't even get any really amusing stories about the gloriously (and not so gloriously) "monied" valley types.  (Now that Steve and Larry are aging, that is.)

Why not?

Can't do it. Sorry. Everybody's in bed with one another -- God Forbid you should alienate someone or piss off an investor or leak a secret. And anything can be a secret. People regularly go into "stealth" mode here when they start companies, and I have seen best friends (admittedly, two highly neurotic, type "A" ones in this particular case) circling one another when talking about their new companies, not telling a thing. For months.

I think it's too bad. If you want just technical stuff you can always go to www.techdirt.com and get the word about companies and such, but wouldn't it be fun to have some really bitchy billionaire wife who no longer cared just let it all hang out? Or someone whose wife/husband just drove a company into the ground, talking about just which loser aspects of their mate's behavior were the reason that 20 mil of VC funding got flushed away?

Insider trading? Ha. Don't look at me to tell you. It would get back. But I do chuckle at some of the names. Multimillionaires? From what I've seen and heard, some of these people could use most of it in therapy. But you didn't hear it here. Valley sex secrets? Told one by one, after several drinks, and never in a way that could impact potential funding.  Stories about out-of-control wives who do things like buy second houses for their children to play in (so the décor in house number one stays pristine?) Talked about over dinners by laughing valley types – and recognized by people at the next table.

There's something else. If you want to be a success in America, especially the silicon valley, you can do it.  We're one of the best meritocracy systems around.  First step?  Be a success.  Yup. You heard right. That's the law of the valley.  Hang up a shingle, say you're already what you want to be, and then go do it.  Very few junior types around here.  Everybody's a big, swinging ...Ahem.  Yeah.  Well the 2001 crash got rid of the worst of the posers (rumor has it that they first went back to living with their parents, and now they're all either in alternate careers or working on the "package a feature, call it a Web 2.0 product" frenzy), but it's honest to goodness valley culture that you don't show weakness.

This is respected. It's how we do things. And when you're keeping up appearances, you keep smiling (and keep your secrets quiet.)

Here are some typical (and real) valley secrets and situations. Do any sound familiar to you?

• You have talked with 180 VC's and nobody will fund you.
• In your startup, your working-from-home, equity-paid engineers have stolen the source code and are holding it hostage until you renegotiate their contract, giving them the ability to license it.
• Your best programmer is manic depressive and "codes better" without his meds.
• The president of your company has disappeared and it later comes to light that he's been murdered by a woman who works on the assembly line.
• Your ex-boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse is being investigated for something which you can totally believe and which tickles you mightily.
• One of your executives has a collection of knives, which he likes to play with and often leaves lying around the office.
• One of your coders is having a sex change.
• Things suck and you don't want people to know.
• You're in talks to sell your company for millions of dollars and terrified that information will leak and the deal won't go through.
• The deal went through just as your best friend's company tanks and he loses everything.
• Your best friend's company just sold and your company is tanking.  (What do you talk about over dinner?)
• You went through negotiations and hired a top-level, very well-known firm to prepare the paperwork - they screwed it up and the deal is off. 
• You find out that a competitor’s CEO was part of the swinger’s scene several years ago.
• In a period of insanity, you founded your company yourself. It's three years later, you have maxed out three credit cards, your employees are furious at you, and you're looking as good as you can while you're praying that someone will buy you.
• You are now worth a hundred million dollars and all of your friends are having a hard time financially (as many are in the valley.)

Are you bursting at the seams?  Is the pressure getting to you? Allow us to help you out.  Give us a nice anonymous comment and spill the beans!

This first appeared on the Silicon Valley Mom's blog

Revenge of the Marketing Bunnies

Reading Pamela's post on the Silicon Valley Mom's blog about skinny, noxious fashion types (from Menlo Park and Atherton!), clutching their designer bags as they bitchily Blahnik their way through the mall, gave me pause.

It's true that the silicon valley has changed.  Years ago, in the silicon valley's naive, young years, it was just a vast post-academic, post cold-war arena, populated by thousands of geeks. 

You could see them walking down Palo Alto's University Avenue at all hours of day and night, thousands of geek-feet encased in Birkenstocks and white socks, the sound of bearded, whuffly geek laughter drifting in the air as they chatted about Usenet groups, technology, startups, and various hacks.  All over the valley, you could see them congregating in the traditional "geek clumping packs" as they ogled new technology at Fry's, listened to presentations at SLAC, or frantically gathered "gimme" products at the weekly trade show extravaganzas.

There was geek music, geek entertainment, geek culture, and geek love. It was awesome.  Everyone looked pretty bad, it's true, but having lived here in the eighties, I can attest to the fact that it's just because nobody cared, and not because they did the wierd eighties fashion stuff.

But now, as Pamela points out, there's a new force in the valley and her name is ... if I get this right.... raving fashion-conscious, social-climbing, nasty-to-the-"help" bitch.

Oh dear.

What could have caused our beautiful valley to slide into typical upper-middle class suburban nastiness?  What could have caused our beloved Stanford Shopping Center to turn into a miniature Westwood Village?

Let's look into the causes.

If fed enough wine, some people here in the valley have been known to speculate that it's a revenge of the marketing bunny kind of thing. The ubiquitous marketing bunny was first brought in, if I remember correctly, by Apple computer, as sort of an eye-candy accoutrement to the technical company that had everything.  Marketing bunnies were liberal arts-educated, often blonde,  meticulously styled, and were the first significant aesthetic social force in the valley.  Marketing bunnies were not known for a particularly rich inner life, however, and most were very bored by high tech.

Well, it's twenty years later, and many of these ex-bunnies have married our geeks and settled down. What happens to an aging marketing bunny?  The hair stays blonde (sometimes as many as 15 different shades!), the features harden, the lines begin to be strategically botoxed, the lips plumped. And the goals?  The interests?  The activities? 

Yup.  Self. And how self looks. And how self exercises. Fashion, of course. And then ... the bitterness of aging. (caution: that's an extreme example)

But you can find bitchy Prada-wearing post-bunnies in every single suburban bastion of wealth.  And I'm not sure that I buy this theory. That our geeks got ... dare we say ... eaten? by some sort of blonde female vacuosity-generator turned nasty?  It just seems too easy to blame the bunny.  Maybe societal forces turned her into a raving bitch.  Maybe it's not her fault.

A second theory is that there's just too damn much money around here, and that Americans who make a lot of money have no idea who to model themselves after, so they choose old Dynasty characters instead of doing something neat that they are passionate about. This is a highly amusing theory and makes for good party conversation. I like this one. 

And another, connected, theory goes back to the phrase "rich inner life."  You see, one of the best things about geeks and the silicon valley is the un self-consciousness.  I'm not talking about every-day life. I'm talking about enthusiasms,about passions.  Hobbies, joys, fun things  with (let's face it) a high dork factor.  Kind of the opposite of fashion, if you think about it.

In other parts of the country, young professionals engage in formalized rituals: parties, bars, and dating.  These rituals are based upon self-consciousness, and have been designed for years to perpetuate society.  You know: cute girl is raised to have "nice values," is educated, meets cute guy, gets married, and ... um, joins junior league? 

Nothing intrinsically wrong with that system, but what if you start introducing large sums of money into it.  Whammo!  Raving bitch with Prada.  I'd bet you anything.  Oh. And I forgot part of the description: If cute girl doesn't wear the right cute clothes, or if her parents aren't rich enough, other cute girls cut her to bits and shun her. Nice, huh?

Now you could either ban fashion (which, in my personal book, might be a good idea), or you can raise your child with passions and enthusiasms to resist the most powerful social nastiness.

I've always found it odd that boy-hobbies seem to lead towards action, but so many girl-hobbies lead towards looks.  Maybe it's time to really work on helping women develop outward-based passions and joys.  Stuff that's NOT about themselves and how they look, but is about almost anything else (even the dreaded horse lust).  Girls with real passions have a natural defense against bunnyhood.

So how can our silicon valley defend itself against the bunny-carried virus of upper middle-class social viciousness?  Perhaps an unnatural interest in fashion can be treated as a slight brain anomaly.  Or perhaps children who display fashion thrall should immediately be taken in hand and their brains engaged.  What is fashionable and "pretty?"  Why?  What is the difference between being fashionable now in our culture, and in other cultures, at other times?  Are pretty people better? Do they have more power?  Discuss.  How has fashion had an effect on politics? Has it helped to topple societies?  How is fashion like architecture? Do girls use fashion against one another?  How? Do you want to be like that?  And so forth.

Perhaps fashion is OK, as long as it's kept firmly in context.

And perhaps geek culture could realize that we have a unique opportunity here in the silicon valley.  We have made our financial successes freed from the crippling and often bizarre social restrictions put upon workers  in other career arenas like investment banking, anything that deals with the public, or oil.  Now many of us are settled in our large McMansions or small, exquisitely-priced Palo Alto and Menlo Park homes, and our lives shape the silicon valley of the future.

Where do we take our children, our culture?  We have such great power, intellect, and interest of life here in the valley. Surely success doesn't just stop at Prada and bitchiness?

This first appeared on the Silicon Valley Mom's blog

On Mathematics and Passion

Several years ago I wrote a parenting manifesto which I still follow.  One of the goals was to be passionate about your interests and your life.  And to find other people who are passionate, as well.  "Probably the most compelling and defining moments of your child's life," (I wrote) "will involve exposure to people who are living a passion -- be it teaching, fly-fishing, painting, or being a rock hound."

So let's talk about math.

I was raised math challenged.  When I was nine, after my mother's last divorce, we moved to the California mountains, where we were surrounded by seventies hippie types, animals, a lot of Pink Floyd, and huge numbers of books.  I'm sad to report that the joy of math passed me by.  My mother disliked it and so did I.

Now we live in the silicon valley, where a good friend of mine told me several years ago that she plays "math games in the car" with her child.  I was utterly flabbergasted.  "You mean, like, fun?" I said.  "Oh yes," she said. "We have a lot of fun."  Wow.  This totally blew me away and I have to admit that I spent quite a while trying to think of a math-oriented game I could play in the car with my kid.

Didn't work.  "Gee honey, what's 2 plus 2?" lacked a certain ... resonance (on both sides), and we soon dropped it.  He had to settle for the same mishmash of science information, bizarre cultural and travel tidbits, agnostic rantings, and mommy's non-Platonic monologues on "what is good."  Poor thing. 

But I see him "doing" numbers sometimes and he seems to like them.  I'd love to hook him up with someone who loves numbers, who just experiences sheer joy in them.  Maybe it will rub off.  Certainly it would be nice to at least let him know that not everyone views numbers with a baleful eye.

Enter our good friend Chongo.  He was just over chatting with my husband tonight, and showed me this web page.  Check out the story about Chongo at six at the bottom of the page.  A good cautionary tale about schools and bright kids.

Chongo's page is called How High Can you Count?  It makes sense that some children experience (apparently) a frisson of power when they can count higher than other children.  Yes! (She said, brightly.)  Sounds like Fun!  Oh, I am in so much trouble.  Do I have to be supportive of MATH now?  OK, excuse me.  Sometimes when I blog, the neuroses come out through the keyboard, although I assure you that they are firmly subdued in real life.

So, if I can interrupt my inner voice and stop having the vapors for a minute, this stuff is actually pretty cool. Chongo's pages are about playing with math.  He discovered some Prime numbers and has never lost his love for math.  The thing that I like about his website is that it's not some velvet-wrapped iron fist technique for getting your kids to SCORE HIGHER.  It's a genuine website from a genuine person who just flat-out loves this stuff.

And check out this game that he's put together, called The English name for a number.   Figure out what number you want.  Check some boxes.  Do you want it named using English or American convention? Power of 10? Miscellaneous odd things that you can check?  I put in this number: 789485726475950938484758596969585747383398390450550 and the little applet told me that the name of the number is:

seven hundred eighty nine quindecillion,
four hundred eighty five quattuordecillion,
seven hundred twenty six tredecillion,
four hundred seventy five dodecillion,
nine hundred fifty undecillion,
nine hundred thirty eight decillion,
four hundred eighty four nonillion,
seven hundred fifty eight octillion,
five hundred ninety six septillion,
nine hundred sixty nine sextillion,
five hundred eighty five quintillion,
seven hundred forty seven quadrillion,
three hundred eighty three trillion,
three hundred ninety eight billion,
three hundred ninety million,
four hundred fifty thousand,
five hundred fifty

You know, I am a total non-math fan, and that was even a little fun for me.  Then there's the  cryptographically sound random number generator and ... Oh Lord, I just don't get it.  This is one of the reasons why it's good to cook, so that when really brilliant people come over and start talking with my husband about math and science and technology, I can go make soup.  And such a relief to be the intellectual slacker. I embrace it over here at our house!  Where IS my Agatha Christie book?

One last thing.  At the end of the evening, Chongo took my kid out in the front yard to look at stars, and boy does he have a different perspective! (check out the Astronomy vita!) USUALLY my child gets stories of the constellations, which of course morph into stories from mythology and then, social commentary.   When I went out though, Chongo was talking with him about ... Oh, I dunno. Some wierd space travel time continuum thing.

I realize that I've been waxing rhapsodic over some weird geek stuff (yeah?  Why ELSE live in the silicon valley for over 20 years), and I apologize.  Tomorrow I'll probably get irritated at the mall again, but for today, I just want to say "hooray for passions!"  And thank goodness my child won't have to grow up thinking of numbers without joy.

This first appeared on the Silicon Valley Mom's blog

Life with McMansions

We live in the beauteous and restful neighborhood of Lindenwood, in Atherton, California.

Today was another lovely summer day. We were awakened at 8 AM by a parade of dump trucks, a bulldozer, and a roller - approximately forty feet from our bedroom window. It’s almost 11, and the parade hasn’t wavered. Four years of these noises.  Ah, the birthing pangs of another McMansion. 

My husband, a gentle soul, said this morning that our welcome gift to our new neighbors (in the flag lot behind our home) should be a stack of Marshall amps and an electric guitar. Given to our six year old. My personal preference is recreational jackhammering.

I wouldn’t mind so much, but the neighbor dropped by our home a week and a half ago. “The house is done!” she said. “We’ll be moving in this week!” Great. Nice to hear. The original due date for the project was in February, but July is fine. Today at 8 AM, I got up in my bathrobe and walked to the back of our property. I climbed onto a tree trunk to look and groaned. There is no driveway in the house behind us. We have figured out that the parade of dump trucks probably belongs to the new swimming pool, and … there is no way that this project will be done before October.  Really poor expectation setting there.

Now I can’t blame the nice new neighbors. After all, they bought this lot for an exorbitant amount, and then didn’t touch it at all for four years. Lovely, quiet years - on the back side of the house.  They are very nice and we’re looking forward to having new neighbors. The house is beautiful – a veritable mansion – and I shall be tempted to genuflect as I walk into it. But I am so very tired of the noise thing. 

When we bought this house I was 8 months pregnant. There was a quiet, wooded lot in the front of the house, across the street. When our son turned three months old, they broke dirt on that lot and kept building for our first three years. Napping during the jackhammering phase was a big challenge. Eight months after the front house was finished, the rear neighbor started. We are praying that the side neighbors stay healthy and happy.

Despite the irritations of McMansion construction, I guess you could say that the benefits outweigh the pain.  Sort of.  I mean, such entertaining design choices.  For example, the new house down the street. Despite being on a full acre, they have cleverly designed it so that you can see right into the neighbor’s yards from every upstairs window!

Like many in the silicon valley, we do recreational house tours on Sundays. It’s been amazing to see how large and gothic window frames are getting, and to learn more about modern suburban living styles.  Feels a little like "building materials of kings past," if you pay attention to all of the marble and stone.  Apparently the latest trend is to buy a full acre lot, build a house that protects you from being overwhelmed by the yard (concrete, after all, is so much more civilized than bushes), and then build a full garage-cum-basement underneath the house (because, with such a large house, you don't have space for a garage.)

My favorite example is in our neighborhood.  It's a large home.  The beautiful concrete/tile drive area in front allows the owners to drive into their property, make a full circle, turn and drive into the underground parking garage, and happily park fifty cars! This, indeed, is progress. The biggest driveway on their street. Certainly a masterful indicator.  Took years to build!  I have always wondered if the designer suffered from botanophobia.

And what is located in the new, underground layer of these McMansions? The last one I looked at had a large exercise room (empty), a large movie room, a big hallway, a few other miscellaneous rooms and a laundry room.

My first thought about the space was that it seemed like the perfect place to deflower the daughter of the house when nobody was looking, but that's probably just mom paranoia - forget I mentioned it, ok?

We had thought to stay home today and enjoy the back yard and summer. Now I think I’ll go somewhere peaceful. Like Costco. Maybe they sell Marshall amps.

This first appeared on the Silicon Valley Mom's blog

Interesting url about online ed and kids

This talks about club Penguin and online programs supported by libraries and such.  People are posting about 2.0 apps for kids as well.  This looks very interesting and I'll be following up on this.