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From 7-9 this evening much mud was acquired.  Many sprints were sprinted (OK, as quickly run as I could pull off – I was definitely bringing up the rear, but that’s not old age – I’m just slow).  Many tackles made, many times tackled.  Passing drills successfully accomplished.  Sore, but not in an amazingly awful way.  Will see what tomorrow looks like.

Amusing anecdote: was asked if I had played before.  Yep, played at UMBC.  Oh, did you know so-and-so?  Probably not, graduated a long time ago.  Well, maybe you’d know her anyway, she’s 26?  Uh huh, not so much.  I’ll count that as them not being able to judge how old I am (ten+ years older than their “old” player from UMBC).  And/or, more rationally realize we were playing mostly in the dark.

Much fun had by the old rugger!  Can’t wait for the next practice, and then my first game!

 

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God does things in interesting and exciting ways..  discussed things that were high points for the week with the college group this morning, and mentioned my excitement at possibly playing rugby again.  The young man to the right of me, relatively new to the group, very quiet, spoke to me at the end of our session and was excited to hear that there’s rugby in the area.  Turns out, he was a scrumhalf and would like to play again.  Thank you, God, for giving me an opportunity this weekend to both be excited on my own behalf, and the opportunity to share that with another person who seems to be looking for his place in a new country (young man is here from Africa), new church, and new group of people.

Now, low side: turns out we may need adults to help travel with the college group to Florida for their retreat trip in May.  The college students can’t drive the rental van, and of course, we want to make sure their travels are safe.  I love this group of people, am happy to work with / alongside them.  But a week at the beach, with a mass of college students (ours + possibly hundreds more), with a 19 hour van ride?  Personally hellacious.   This week is a missionary weekend at our church – folks describing opportunities for ministry amongst hardships in the field.  This trip to Florida, and I know how ridiculous this sounds, would be my personal hardship stint. I know that sounds ridiculous: a beach trip in America as hardship?  For a 35+ year old person who sunburns easily, has all sorts of mental hangups with being in a swimsuit, and then to spend a week in that environment where I’d stick out like a sore thumb, PLUS 19 hours in a van each way??!   Talk about needing to step forth in faith that God would use my discomfort and fish out of water challenges to his glory.

Very interested to see what God will do with both of these areas over the next few months…

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“Everyone” thinks open-source is good.   Software that’s free to you; software whose code is available for you to learn from, extend, or modify; software that’s presumably updated periodically by a hoard of magic elf volunteers for the sake of their own technical intellectual gratification.

Now..  are you one of those folks who contributes to an open-source project?  Hmmm – very different angle.

Now…  are you one of those folks who figures out how to run an open-source project, bringing together the disparate interests of that presumed hoard of volunteers into one uber well-running machine?

Wow.  I used to think that the hardest job in the world to do well would be to set up a high performing team at a fast food restaurant.   Staff turn-over, low pay, and the like.  I’m beginning to reconsider: the most interesting leadership and management challenges seem to be in the open-source space, particularly for projects that have a significant user base and vested interests from many parties interested in driving direction.  Lots of smart people, lots of competing interests, lots of feeling of a need to get somewhere in particular, lots of directions in particular.

Neat things to think about…

 

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Watching for news of OSCON again this year.  Proposal submitted, waiting for word.  The topic I proposed a year or so ago on W3C and OpenAjax Hub seems to have prepared me well for topics ongoing at work nowadays.  May this year’s proposal topic serve me as well, AND get me a ticket to Portland.  Hoping to score the trifecta: a trip to the open-source software convention, an opportunity as a girl geek to speak, and an opportunity to highlight my / my company’s role in something pretty cool.  Hoping!

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Callie and I decided to do the talent show at church together this year – reasonably happy with how the skit turned out, in terms of writing, and what a blast to get to do it with Callie.  She’s a natural clown, and we had a whole lot of fun working it out, practicing, and then performing.

 

The Treasure Chest

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Adding a few habits of late: Scrabble, Words with Friends, Pinterest…  lots of things that sort of have me engaging with folks, but only in a tangential way.  Lots of late work hours, so these let me kind of keep in touch / ping folks, without requiring it to be at a reasonable hour.

Statistic I’m keeping track of of late: PopTart meals.  How many “meals” did I eat by grabbing PopTarts out of the kitchen at work, because I haven’t managed to break away to go get something else, and I didn’t think enough ahead to bring in a healthier lunch.  Last week’s PopTart count was three, I think: some were lunch, some were dinner.  Aiming to get that metric down a bit.  I don’t actually even enjoy PopTarts.

You may have gathered that life has been busy, particularly the work part of life.  This weekend had me home with the kids as Jason was out of town.  An odd shift in thinking / scheduling.  Though I’m still now up at 11:45 on a Tuesday night for no real reason – just mostly habit.  Grrrr.  Need better habits.

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Lots of proposal writing of various forms going on lately. Wrote an SBIR, which we’ll hear about in a few weeks. Advised on another. Wrote an OSCON abstract, per my norm. (Hey, one way to get more women presenting is to be one of those women who presents!) Have notes for a mobile application that I’d like to write to (1) knock some socks off at work for folks who thing I’m “only” managerial, (2) demonstrate some neat technologies that may help us in various ways, and (3) build something that’ll help make next year’s charity auction a bit simpler. While I’m doing everything else with that app, I’ll use it to make me a bit smarter on Git and push forward some ideas on building a geek community.

But all of those are just ideas on paper. They’re informed ideas, to be sure, based on reading up in various areas to make sure I’m not painting us into any corners. But they’re not working code. Need more working code. I think the challenge is to just, well, start! It’s so easy to scribble ideas, to build up that portfolio of useful things to work upon and pick from. But eventually, I’ve gotta kick my tail into gear with action, and focus in on a particular area to get some specific bit of success.

Tomorrow’s goal for the evening: download jQuery Mobile 1.0, build one screen for my auction app, and commit that screen to Git. That’s it – nothing more noble. But it gets a dev environment and two bits of visible outcome (screen + code in repository). It’s something, and something to build upon.

If it weren’t 1:00 in the morning, that would be the set for today. But time to stop procrastinating sleep…

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Writing a proposal for work. Realizing I overuse the following words:
– key
– capability
Wishing I knew a way to get Word to give me a word frequency picture, so I could see where I’m bludgeoning someone with ‘and this is key, and a key concept, and a key capability’…

My overall writing and editing process works out something like the following:
– brain dump which has half-formed thoughts, extraneous details, and not quite reasonable flow… gathering raw materials, basically
– edit for flow: what ideas need to hit full force, in what order?
– edit for wording: my first dump of words is usually too long and needs to be written to not be so lengthy / imposing / voluminous. (See, I need to edit this post for wording!)

I was mean and pushed out the roughest rough draft to a few members of my team today to make sure I was heading to some sort of reasonable realm. Good feedback from one team member in particular, and need to make sure I laud her in the right circles at work. My ulterior motive in letting some see “raw raw” is to show how rough and dirty these things start, so someone itches to show how they can do it better. Nothing like showing a low entry bar to suck folks in past the ‘oh, I couldn’t do that’ kind of idea….. Leadership gamesmanship of a sort…

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Highly amused by the release notes for Sencha.io‘s beta3 release. Included below in their entirety.

Release Notes for Sencha.io 1.0.0

Release Notes: Release Notes: October 24, 2011
Version Number: 1.0.0
New In This Release

* General Enhancements
o .
* General Bugs Fixes
o .
* Known Issues
o .

I guess if you’re 1.0, by definition there are no enhancements or no bug fixes. Gonna guess there may be some known issues, though. For comparison, as well as to explain why I’m amused: Our projects list the deltas between our alpha versions in the release notes for our alphas. Alpha2’s release notes will list new features added in that alpha since alpha1, as well as any major bug fixes since alpha1.

This empty template just highly amuses me…