Trip Story: Wellington (Part II)

I've been writing up posts about our recent trip to New Zealand. Last time, I started telling about our time in Wellington, which was our last stop after Auckland and Taupo.

We did not go out all that much in Wellington, because the main goal of our time there was to see family. We spent a lot of time at my in-law's house. Petunia invented a new game called "Balloon Bop," which involves hitting a balloon back and forth. If it hits the sofa, you win. If it hits the floor, you have to say "oh, man!" sort of like Swiper does. In the initial rules, this meant you lost, but Pumpkin got involved and the rules evolved to include scorekeeping, and letting the balloon touch the floor just deducts points. I think. To be honest, I still don't fully understand the rules. I suspect they continue to evolve.

My mother-in-law is an excellent cook, so we ate in a lot. However, our third day in Wellington was an exception. We went out to brunch at the Maranui Cafe at the surf lifesaver's club in Lyall Bay. I described it in my "awards show" post, so I won't go into details here. After brunch, we let the kids play for awhile on the nearby playground, but eventually the wind got too much for us, and we took them back to my in laws' house... and left them there while Mr. Snarky and I went downtown for some drinks and shopping. Mr. Snarky and I both got some new clothes, and enjoyed the chance to linger over a couple of beers.

That evening, the entire family went out for Mexican food at La Boca Loca, a taqueria in the next suburb over from my in law's. The food and the margaritas were good- I definitely recommend this place.

The next day, we gave the kids their choice of what to do, and they chose to go back to the Botanic Gardens. We had lunch at the cafe, and then walked over to the duck pond and fed the ducks.

The ducks get a feast.

I took the kids back up to the playground while Mr. Snarky moved the car, then we all took the cable car back down the hill.

Watching the cable car arrive

We drove back to our home base at my in-law's house, and had a bit of a rest. Then we walked down to the park by the water in Seatoun.

A swing set with a view

My in-laws offered to take the kids back to the house for us, so Mr. Snarky and I enjoyed a stroll along the recently developed section of the waterfront that his family have christened "millionaire's walk."  They are skeptical of the wind turbine one of the millionaires has installed, but I think it is graceful enough to be more of a functional sculpture than an eyesore.

Sculpture or turbine?

The next morning, the kids went to a local story hour with their grandparents, and Mr. Snarky and I drove over to meet his sister for lunch. On our way over, we spotted a moai, and had to stop and take a look.

Maybe this is why they don't have hair?

As you can see, it was pretty windy. The moai turned out to be a replica given to the city as a gift from Chile.

We had pies at Patrishas and they were awesome. Then we headed back into the city center to check out a beer bar his mother wanted us to visit and report back on. We thought that Hashigo Zake was pretty nice, although since we were stuffed from the pies we did not sample their food. Also, their beer selection was slanted heavily toward California beer, since they had just had a big Fourth of July party. As amusing as it was to find Frogsbreath IPA in plentiful supply (it sells out quickly here in San Diego), we stuck to our goal of sampling local beers, and they had enough options on tap and in the bottle to keep us happy.

We returned to Te Papa to see a few things the kids had prevented us from seeing on our first visit, and wandered around downtown a bit more. Then we drove back to my in-law's house for our final dinner in New Zealand.

The next morning, we packed up and loaded into our rental car for the last time. We said good-bye to my in-laws at the Wellington airport, then flew to Auckland, and from there to LAX. Then we drove home, glad to be back in the warmth, but sad that our vacation was over.

Weekend Reading: The Too Exhausted to Find a Theme Edition

I am completely wiped out for some reason. The beer I had with dinner didn't help. I am now less stressed-exhausted but more sleepy.

But I won't let that stop me from giving you some good things to read! I just won't try to find the unifying theme. To be fair, perhaps there isn't one.

First of all, Tragic Sandwich interviewed me about some of the ideas in my Taming the Work Weekbook.  She asked good questions. I'll let you judge whether I gave good answers!

I really liked this blog post from Shawn Lent about being a dancer whose dreams grew to include more than dance. I think there is wisdom in it for people in a lot of different fields. We can get so caught up in proving we can succeed in exactly the field in which we trained that we can lose sight of the chance to bring the insights and tools we gained in our training to other fields. She argues persuasively that doing so isn't giving up on the dream, it is growing the dream.

George Saunders gave a rather nice version of the traditional graduation speech. I like his reminder that the actions we regret are often the times when we could have been more kind than we were.

This a really nice post about how to stay friends with people who have kids. The only thing I'd add is that lunch times during the work week can be an excellent way to keep in touch, since I already have child care sorted during that time! Mr. Snarky and I have several friends who do not have kids, and we do make an effort to invite people over, but not nearly as much as we should. I found it via Blue Milk.

Tressiemc posted a really interesting article about the marriage of Hip Hop and country music. Getting to read random thoughtful analyses like this is one of the joys of the internet.

I loved this essay from Roxane Gay about how women journalists should get to write about topics other than women. (You'll notice I am not linking to any articles about the "women's topic" du jour, the opt out article- I have seen some good articles and posts about the article, but I am resolved to stay away from that topic, so you'll have to go find them on your own. I just don't have the emotional bandwidth to deal with that topic right now.)

I found this book excerpt about the starvation required to be a model infuriating. I do not buy fashion magazines and I do not buy designer clothes. But I suspect I am still complicit in this in some way. It is disgusting. If your clothes only look good on someone who has starved herself to emaciation, then you are not a good designer. Full stop.

I've recently discovered eShakti, and they seem to have a better approach. I am, however, really annoyed that the act of clothing myself requires so many ethical considerations. It is ridiculous that I have to think about whether the people who made my clothes were paid fairly and provided safe working conditions, but at least that is a consideration that men have to make, too. It is extra ridiculous that I have to think about whether my clothing purchases are supporting a system that encourages young women to starve themselves. Why do we still have to fight to have an industry that our money supports make products for us, not someone's impossible and unhealthy image of what they wish we were?

Ahem. Let's end on a happy note. This story about My Little Pony Dungeons and Dragons delights me. I particularly love the picture of the little girl ready for battle.

A Project of One's Own

Work has been unbloggably tough lately, which has been hard on my self-confidence. This led to the following tweets last night:

Woman in tech survival tip: have a personal project you can work on to restore self-confidence when circumstances conspire to undermine it.
— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) August 7, 2013

That last tweet may be a people in tech survival tip. I don't know. I've never been a man in tech.
— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) August 7, 2013

As a woman in tech, though: it is bad enough when ppl around you underestimate you. Is worse when you start underestimating yourself.
— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) August 7, 2013

And then I went off to work on my personal project. That project is in far too nascent of a state to share, but I will say that it is a Drupal-based project and I am really enjoying it. Working on it is good for me for many reasons, but the most important is that it is all mine, so whatever progress I make is also all mine, and the self-deprecating voice that lives in my head can't diminish the achievement by assigning credit to someone else.

Having a way to quiet the self-deprecating voice in my head is essential for me. People often think that the hardest part of being a woman in tech is having to put up with sexist comments, or having to represent all of womanhood as the sole woman on the team, or even having to fit in to a culture in which all the in jokes reference a geek culture that often excludes women. But for me, it is none of these things. I don't enjoy sexist comments, to be sure, and I have been known to reply tartly that I'll need to tune in to the sisterhood to answer some clueless question about "what women think," but I can usually shrug those things off. I don't get all of the geek culture jokes, but I get enough of them to fit in just fine, and since I enjoy sci-fi and geeky comics like xkcd, this has never been a problem for me.

No, for me, the hardest part is the way that the subtle (and not so subtle) reminders that I am not the same as everyone else undermine my confidence. I did not grow up programming in the way that my colleagues did- although I did have one programming experience in junior high. I was given a Texas Instruments computer as a hand me down from a cousin who no longer wanted it. I plugged it into the (also hand me down) black and white TV I had, and picked up the manual to try to figure out what I should do with it. There were some instructions on BASIC, so I wrote a program to play "Ode to Joy." And then I didn't do anything else, really, because I didn't have any other ideas.

When I told that story at a work lunch, the other people at the table were clearly surprised I'd coded as a kid. They had the grace to recover relatively quickly and try to hide their surprise, but their surprise didn't surprise me. I am so completely used to having people underestimate my technical skills and background that I am actually surprised when a new team member doesn't do that. Whatever the reason for this underestimation- my gender, the fact that I am primarily seen as a project manager now, or something else entirely- the effect is the same. Couple that chronic underestimation by others with weeks like the last few I've had at work, and it is far too easy to start underestimating my own capabilities.

My personal projects are antidotes for that, and that is why I make time for them, even when my work and family responsibilities try to squeeze them out. I will cut back on exercise, time with friends, even sleep before I drop my projects, because the projects are quite literally essential to my sanity. They are the only way I have found to tell that annoying self-deprecating voice in my head to shut up and let me work.

Do you have a self-deprecating voice in your head? How do you shut it up?

Trip Story: Wellington (Part I)

In many ways, the entire reason we took our family vacation in New Zealand this year was to go to Wellington. Mr. Snarky and I both really like Auckland, and were glad to have the chance to visit some friends there. We had fun showing the girls Taupo. But the purpose of the trip was really to see my in laws in Wellington.

Luckily, Wellington is a pretty nice destination.

The day we drove to Wellington was the rainiest day of our trip. This made it hard to burn off steam at a playground after our lunch. We made up for that by stopping for afternoon snack at a great seaside playground in Paraparaumu, with several cool toys for the kids, including a huge climbing tower that Mr. Snarky also enjoyed.

Mr. Snarky climbed up first

I loved the view down to the beach through the flax- quintessential New Zealand.

The tractors are there to pull fishing boats out of the water

After we left the playground, it was only another hour or so to my in law's house in the Seatoun section of Wellington. We had a nice evening starting the process of catching up with my husband's family, but we were all pretty tired, so we went to bed early. Which means we woke up early- or at least the kids did, and they woke me and Mr. Snarky up, too. At least we got to see a beautiful sunrise.

Mr. Snarky took the picture from his parent's back garden. The view was just as good from their dining room and living room. They have a beautiful view.

Our first day in Wellington was chilly, but sunny and not terribly windy, so we headed out for some sightseeing. We found lunch at a mall food court, which allowed the kids to eat cheese scones while the grown ups tried more interesting things, and then we rode the cable car up to the Botanic Gardens. Wellington is an extremely hilly town, so there is a cable car that runs from the main business district up through the university to the Gardens. We thought the kids might enjoy the cable car, and we were right. But they really loved the playground at the Botanic Gardens. I talked about this playground in my "awards show" post on the trip, so I won't describe it again. I'll just show you the view from the cable car stop, which is pretty awesome.

After the outing to the park, we rested at my in law's house for awhile, and then decided to go for a stroll along the beach. The wind had picked up, so it was more of a determined march than a stroll, but the kids enjoyed looking for sea shells- the big storm that blew through the week before we came had left a bunch on the beach. Pumpkin also liked the jetty, which reminded her of the jetty in The Fierce Little Woman and the Wicked Pirate, a book by Joy Cowley that my in laws gave her a couple of years ago.

The next day was even windier, so we made our outing an indoor one, and headed to Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand. The kids were mostly interested in the play areas, but there were several of those interspersed among the exhibits, and we had enough adults along that we could take turns nipping out to look at other things. If you are ever in Wellington, be sure to stop by Te Papa. Like most museums in New Zealand it is free (donations are welcome), and it has a lot of cool things to see, including a giant animatronic baby made by Weta Studios (the folks responsible for The Lord of the Rings).

Creepy, but fun

We saw and did a lot more things in Wellington, but this post is long enough, so I'll pick up the story in a later post.

Weekend Reading: The More Thoughts about Publishing Edition

Work continues to be a bit of a mess... but I can't ignore my list of links about the state of publishing forever, so I'm going to make an attempt at a somewhat substantive weekend links post, all about how the publishing industry is evolving.

I don't know if you've been following the saga of Apple vs. Amazon, by way of the big publishing companies, but I largely agree with this post from Matthew Ingram: the publishers could probably solve their Amazon problem by doing away with DRM.

If you haven't been following it and are curious, The Battle of $9.99, by Andrew Richard Albanese is an excellent overview. (This is link is to an eBook, which will cost you $1.99.)

Right now, Amazon looks dominant in the publishing realm, but Evan Hughes argues in Salon that Amazon is cannibalizing its own success. I don't know that I agree with his entire argument, but I think that he has a point about the fact that the online world hasn't found a satisfactory replacement for browsing in a bookstore- at least not yet.

Kobo seems to be coming on strong as a competitor to Amazon, but they are not the only ones. A company called Zola wants to take them on, too. I'm watching both with interest.

I'm also intrigued by the idea of a Groupon-like business model for eBooks. But I'm not holding my breath for it to happen.

I'm also intrigued by the idea of bringing print on demand to bookstores. I hope it succeeds, actually. Between this and the way that a lot of indies are partnering with Kobo, maybe it is too soon to declare independent bookstores dead.

One reason I care about all of this churn is that I want to see more authors reach more people. Some people are arguing that the new age is just making it harder for an author to get noticed... but Bob Greene's recent CNN piece would seem to provide an object lesson in the fact that it has always been hard for an author to get noticed.

Another reason I care is that I want a nice variety of things to read. Right now, I particularly like to read short eBooks, so I found the opinions of authors C.D. Reimer and Lindsay Buroker on short fiction eBooks interesting. (Quite coincidentally, I stumbled across Buroker's Flash Gold steampunk novella, and quite enjoyed it.)

Magazines used to be another source of solid short reads, and I've been watching The Atlantic's foray into providing eBook content that with interest. Apparently, this is just one of many revenue streams they have been pursuing.

The app companies are also trying to get into the "long reads" (which are really short reads) game. I don't have an iPad, so I can't check this particular app out. Maybe they'll come to Android.

I continue to be fascinated by how we find the things we read. In my case, it is largely by word of mouth (or more properly, word of links...) online, and largely by search on my eReader. I'm not 100% satisfied with either method. In both cases, other methods leak in. I sometimes hear about a book (or follow a link about it) and go find it to read. And I sometimes find interesting things to read from searching on a topic.

What about you? How do you find things to read?