Archive for the “Personal” Category

The rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I was tagged by Tristan Nitot and Robert Kaiser.

1. My last year of High School was at the Oakland Public Zoo, along with 30 other students and 1 teacher, housed in a single room near the admission gate. The school had nothing particular to do with animals or zoos. It was a short-lived (one year, actually) experiment in educational alternatives amidst the general decline of Oakland public schools. Some 20 or so of my closer friends found a way to avoid the last year of regular high school (student body of 2500) and still graduate; the Oakland Zoo School was my escape route.

2. I headed off to study at Peking University based on a single telegram I never saw (this was before the World Wide Web) from the chancellor of Peking University to the Chancellor of U.C. Berkeley which — I was told — said “W.M. Baker welcome to study at Peking University for one year starting February.” I was in Taiwan at the time, a copy of the telegram was mailed by U.C. Berkeley to my parents’ address and my mom read it to me over the phone during a hurried collect call.

3. My first computer was actually a set of keys to a friend’s office where his 8 inch disk CP/M machine lay unused.

4. I graduated from U.C. Berkeley (undergraduate population 20,000) in an undergraduate degree program that was so small it had no graduation ceremony. That degree is in Asian Studies, which encompassed China, Japan and “South Asia.” The Oriental Languages Department took pity on us and asked the handful of us graduating to join their ceremony. That was an experience for my parents since all of the speeches were in either Chinese or Japanese.

5. I started my first law firm job a week late so I could finish anti-rabies treatment in Katmandu, after being bitten by a dog in Samye, Tibet. I started by last law firm job 5 weeks late so I could recover from what had been hard-to-diagnose malaria picked up on some small islands off of Lambok, Indonesia.

6. My first few weeks as a Netscape employee (fall of 1994) were so tumultuous that I thought I was likely to be thrown out. Fortunately Jim Barksdale’s arrival as CEO calmed the setting.

7. I joined Mozilla knowing full well that it was a very bad career choice, giving up a likely VP level role in a then-very-successful organization for a funky role in a unknown and precarious project.

I tag:

• My husband Casey Dunn, one of Mozilla’s great anonymous contributors, who I know still has some secrets hidden away
• Bob Sutton, whose thinking is both broad and extremely relevant to Mozilla
• Karim Lakani, because his tweets don’t yet capture quite the same power as his blog
• Joi Ito, whose life is so online he’ll have to dig deep for new factoids
• Danese Cooper, who knows more about various open source projects than almost anyone
• Jonathan Zittrain (who may tag less than 7 people), who is a font of creative thinking about our online lives
• a whole set of mozilla people who have already been tagged

Monday was a busy day in the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. It’s a good thing we chose a service event that didn’t require registration, since many of the projects that did were full by early morning and registration closed. Our site also had far more volunteers than had been expected, but more was better. The organizers made extra trips for tools and water (non-potable water for the plants we were planting, not for us to drink).

It turns out Mori Point is a spectacular site that needs a lot of restoration. Replanting a hillside doesn’t sound like a big job, but planting 20,000 plants with only handtools turns out to be significant. We planted 1200 or 1300 yesterday, adding another batch of flags (each flag noting where a plant has been planted) to the hillside:

We even received a certificate of service, aimed mostly for kids I think.

Monday is Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday in the United States. Mozilla offices in the U.S. will be closed. This year President-Elect Obama has advocated that more of us celebrate the holiday through volunteer public service activities. I’m planning to participate through habitat restoration in one of the national parks along the California coastline. These parks are a spectacular public resource that need a surprising amount of maintenance (habitat restoration, trash collection, trail maintenance) to retain the fullness of their beauty. I often think I’d like to do this and the coming holiday seems the perfect time.

Last Monday I voted by mail, for the first time ever. I thought I would be traveling on election day so I voted by Absentee Ballot. I’ve voted this way before, but always before I’ve physically delivered the Absentee Ballot to a voting official by dropping it off at the voting office. This is the first time I’ve actually put my ballot in the mail. It was creepy. I didn’t like it. The idea that my vote now depends not only on the election mechanism but on the postal service as well is disconcerting. I probably put double the amount of postage necessary. I kept looking out my window to watch for the mail truck stopping at the mailbox. I at least wanted to see my vote get out of the mailbox; but somehow I missed it.

Next time I’m going to skip the mail.

Every once in a while I realize that I am unquestionably part of a particular demographic group. This happens periodically as I look at our late 1990’s vintage Subaru Outback Wagon and realize how many gazillions of people in our area drive this car. I had another, odder moment a while back. In this case I’d call the demographic group “Silicon Valley Family.” My husband, son and I were returning from Calgary. At the Calgary airport, one goes through US Customs before getting on the airplane rather than when one lands. This particular day the airport was quite empty, there were no lines and we walked right up to the Customs Officer. My son is under 10 and so I was explaining that in some places crossing a national boundary is a very big deal, and talking to the customs officer can be very tense. Who knows, maybe he’ll be in a tense border crossing some day and understanding the value of behaving appropriately will be important.

The three of us arrive at the customs officer. He fiddles with our passports for a bit, then asks “Are you related?” What an odd question. After a moment I answer “Yes, we’re married and this is our son.” He looks at us for a moment and then asks our son “How old are you?” A moment of hesitation occurs, part shyness and part testing out a new idea since this is the first person to ask my son his age since his birthday a day or two before. A rather long series of questions follow, which my son manages to answer. It’s not threatening, but it’s odd. And it’s long.

Then the customs officer turns to my husband and asks “What do you do?” It’s a formal tone of voice, an Official question, not chatty at all. My husband answers ” I write software for Stanford University.” The customs officer turns to me and asks the same question. I start to answer “I run a . . .” I hesitate, as I used to say “I run a non-profit organization that makes software” and that response is not accurate enough for me now. So I end up saying “I run a . . . software company.” Now I feel strange.

The officer turns to my son and says “And what do you do?” He adds, in an iroinic tone of voice, “And are you working already?” My son thinks hard. He’s been following the conversation carefully and knows some answer is expected. After a moment he gets it, thinking I suppose to the educational games he’s been playing during vacation. His face brightens, his voice grows confident, and he announces “I USE the software!”

The Customs Officer has met his match. He almost even laughs, then ends the interview and waves us on. And there we have it. The Silicon Valley family — software everywhere.