Posts Tagged with “life”

Last week I participated in an online question and answer / discussion session called Air Mozilla. I thought someone might ask me a question like “Yes, but what do you actually do all day?” So I made some notes. If it’s useful I’ll try to do this periodically. Here are some of the things I spent time working on last week. There was also a bunch of product, organizational and other issues that are constant. I haven’t listed them, only listed the things that jumped out at me as particular areas of focus last week.

• Mozilla Foundation Executive Director search. Spent time with the recruiter, potential search committee members and some resumes we’ve seen.
• Mozilla Corporation General Counsel search. Interviewing, evaluating.
• Speak at first Air Mozilla video broadcast.
• Speak at Fortune magazine’s imeme conference.
• Mozilla Foundation board topics in general.
• Thunderbird. We know Thunderbird is overwhelmed by Firefox and web related work now. I’m convinced that’s the right priority. So, how to help Thunderbird? How to improve mail in general?
• Caught up with Brendan on state of work in the standards bodies.
• Community Empowerment / Giving review of recent proposals.
• Finalized upcoming talk at OSCON (with much help).
• Assist another open project on achieving sustainability as an independent project.
• General management, product, organizational and recruiting topics (this covers a lot but is also true every week).
• Stopped pretending my shoulder will get better without attention and started some minor physical therapy.

When I came back home from some recent travels I learned that my husband and son had had some trouble getting to school on time. How did I know this? No one said much about it, but the family computer gave the secret away.

Our “family computer” lives in the kitchen. It’s a combination of a Mac mini (the little box) with a Dell combination TV / monitor. My husband has long wanted to be able to watch the football while we’re in the kitchen. So a year or so ago he hooked up this system. It turns out that we still rarely turn the TV and we use the computer a lot more than the TV. (It’s not enough to have both our work laptops in the nearly dining room and various other bits of computer gear through the house. No, we really “need” an extra computer )

The morning after I got home I was groggily dragging myself around the house trying to wake up when a giant booming voice came rolling out of the kitchen. After a bit I realized it wasn’t my son yelling, it was a distorted computer voice announcing “School Departure Blast-off! Five minutes and counting!” Followed by a loud and perky version of Devo’s “Time-out for FUN.” After 5 minutes of Divo, it is time to get out of the house. Weeks later, it’s still working. Periodically we change the voice. My son is horrified by the idea of an alarm clock, but finds this approach completely natural.

So far, 2006 has been a year of intense arm pain. Last December the pain in my shoulders and neck shifted from the chronic, tense shoulder computer hunch so many of us experience to something different. To pain so sharp I would wake up gasping if I tried to role over in my sleep. I’ve moved the trackball to my left hand and that, combined with a lot of acupuncture and physical therapy, has improved things significantly. Now I’m back to a chronic problem, though in my arm rather than neck. I have a suspicion that I should stop typing altogether for a few weeks and see if that helps. Until then I’ll try to get more written about what I’m working on.

This weekend I had a bad fall to the trapeze net during my flying trapeze class. I was lucky and didn’t get hurt, only scraped a bit. (A half inch cut starting at my eyebrow and a friction burn on my forehead). But it was the kind of fall where one could get hurt, and no good instructor would let a student continue to make the mistake that lead to that fall.

The root cause was a mistake many people make quite often with this motion, which is called a “layout.” Basically one does a backward head over heels rotation with a straight rather than a tucked position. During the first half one holds on to the trapeze bar. Then one lets go, rises above the trapeze bar, completes the rest of the rotation and is caught. The common mistake is to rush at the last minute, particularly when the catcher is there. One learns a flying trick first to the net before the catcher is there. In these cases, there is no possibility of a catch, the flyer knows she is going to the net. The layout is one of the hardest tricks to make the transition to having the catcher in the air. For me that’s because the layout it feels like the flyer is going to kick the catcher in the head. For others it’s a fear of actually knocking heads with the catcher. And for many of us it’s the feeling that the catcher is *right there* (!!!###) and so we need to complete the rotation quickly.

Like many others, I do nice layouts to the net and poor layouts to the catcher. I’ve probably caught 50 of these, and catch them regularly. But they are never good catches. They’re OK, or poor, or maybe better, but they are never good. I’ve heard the mistake described in many different ways and understand it intellectually, but have never been able to translate that into action. Over the weekend I rushed a lot. I also made an earlier timing mistake and the catcher was over-eager and tried to make the catch even though he should have let it go so I could land in the net safely. So I landed badly, banged my face up, and was lucky I didn’t break my nose or foot or pull a hamstring, etc.

This caused some suddenly clear thinking. I had to sit out a few turns to recover my balance and wait for the cuts to stop bleeding. During this time I had a revelation. My husband, in a comment breathtakingly like something my Dad would have said, noted that the fall had “knocked some sense into me.” Suddenly I put it all together.

I could feel the position of my body at the moment I made the mistake. I could see in my mind’s eye the visual cue at the moment I make the mistake. I could hear the instructor’s verbal command at the moment I make the mistake, and, most amazingly of all, I could suddenly feel *both* what I do next when the catcher is there AND what I do correctly when the catcher is not there. Suddenly I am holding in my mind both alternatives. The moment is frozen — the kinesiology, the visual, the audio — and I feel the two alternatives. One is panicky, rushed for time, racing for the catch. The verbal command to let go of the trapeze bar is translated into a rush to get to the end of the rotation, not enough height, too much spin, and ultimately the dangerous trip to the net of a few minutes before. The other alternative is free, open, floaty. The verbal command to let go of the trapeze bar is now the signal to *begin* the floaty second half of the trick.

Now I’ll have to wait for my next class to see if all this intellectual activity actually results in a change of behavior!

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.