29 Jun
So I recently started jogging. I know, I know, I’m ruining my image as couchbound layabout, but it’s true. (If, by chance, you were unfamiliar with this image, let me take this opportunity to spoil all chance of being thought of as in particularly good shape.)
I’m tall. Really, really tall. (Yes, taller than that one friend of yours. No, I don’t care if he’s single. A swimmer, you say? Does he have a sister?)
Now, what you may not be aware of is that there tends to be a few downsides to being tall.
On the plus side, I never get heartburn and laugh heartily at the signs that read “please ask for assistance for items on this shelf” at the pharmacy. On the other hand, humans tend not to have joints built to handle a larger frame, and with much greater distances to pump, our hearts don’t work as long.
One other issue tall people can face is actually pretty difficult to claim as a particularly bad thing, — though it is if you’re as unaware of it as I was. Differences in proportion and scale being what they are, I can gain 20 or 30 (or 60) pounds without anyone really noticing much difference.1 Including me, unfortunately. (Yes, that’s right. I just complained about my appearance being too forgiving. Stone me now.)
However, as ridiculous a “problem” as that is, it’s actually not super for one’s health, particularly if you don’t realize it for a year. In late 2008, wracked with knee pain so severe that my doctors had been talking about osteoarthritis and the possibility that I might be unable to walk by the age of 40, it was discovered that I was just in disastrously poor shape. In fact, despite walking fairly regularly and having a “healthy” BMI[2], I’d managed to develop virtually no muscle mass whatsoever.
On the one hand, this was a relief. On the other hand, it would have been nice to have had no culpability whatsoever.
So, back I went to physiotherapy. Again. Years ago, I tore the crap out of my rotator cuff while working as a shop assistant in a giant ladies’ clothing store. Carrying jeans, yes. You see, the thing about jeans for tall women is that they have to be much longer, contain more fabric, etc. The thing about bones for tall women is that they don’t just tend to be longer, they also tend to be bigger. So we’re not talking about carrying around Size 0 capris here, we’re talking dozens of pairs of Size 16 and 22 jeans, each leg several inches longer than what a regular store carries. It adds up, trust me.
Messageboard testimonials suggested Vancouver’s best physiotherapist was Kelvin Tam of Kelvin Physiotherapy Clinic. I am pleased to report that this appears to be highly accurate.
“So let me guess,” he said, looking at my chart. “You hurt your shoulder playing volleyball?”
“No.”
“Basketball? Softball? Soccer?”
“…lifting pants?”
I think Kelvin still thinks I might be making that up. This would be much better if I hadn’t seen him a further time for my elbow, suffering from both golfer’s and tennis elbow — from using the mouse too much. I had to make a significant lifestyle change there too as well.
Annoyingly, if I had injured my shoulder or elbow playing sports, I probably wouldn’t have had this problem with my knees. Of course, I likely wouldn’t have suffered those injuries either.
So, several months of physiotherapy and exercise later, I’m finally moving up from walking to jogging. So far, things seem to be working out okay. I’m currently in week two of the Couch-to-5K Running Plan from Cool Running. So far, so good, but it’s pretty exhausting, I have to say. I suspect I’m still not quite in good enough shape, given my struggles last week, so I’ve inserted a second “week one” into my own exercise regimen.
I’ve also been eying the Nike+iPod gadget for my iPhone — which is ridiculous, frankly. I don’t need that and I really don’t want to use any of their social media features like sharing how far I’ve run/limped about. Let’s all just assume that things are going really well for me, okay?
Anyway, dealing with sports bras and running shoes is novel, but dealing with bikes is fun! Yes, I’m secretly an aspiring bike nerd, and I’m finally able to ride one again. Sadly, it turns out that Catherine-sized bikes are fairly difficult to come by, but I’m pleased to report things are progressing smoothly despite that. I will post details of the great bike-building project shortly!
[1] Case in point: as of the writing of this post, the last time a close friend has called me a “skinny bitch” was approximately 36 hours ago.
[2] Seriously, Body-Mass Index is the worst possible measure of physical fitness there is. Not only does it have trouble scaling at the top and bottom ends, but it doesn’t even account for what that mass consists of. Ouch.
27 Jun
This Thursday, I’ll be attending the opening of a new show at On The Rise Artist Collective on Granville Street.
Back to the Drawing Board features new works by Vancouver artists Kristina Fiedrich and Jana Vackova. Personally, as both a fan and close personal friend of Kristina Fiedrich, I can say with authority that you should definitely come to this.
On The Rise Artist Collective is located at 2231 Granville at 5th Avenue in Vancouver. (Map, courtesy of the Georgia Straight.) Back to the Drawing Board opens at 5PM July 2nd and runs until July 26th, 2009.
Download the PDF.
09 Jun
Bridget Botelho writes about an experience she had at the New England VMware Users Group:
My “outsider” paranoia was made poignantly clear when the older gentleman sitting beside me during lunch asked out of sincere curiosity, “So, why do you write about technology? Wouldn’t you rather be writing about fashion or something?” My imaginary response was “Why, Yes! I would also love to spend my days writing about the latest additions to the My Little Pony collection and playing with Barbie dolls.” In reality, I was too insulted to think of anything witty to say, and was trapped in a flashback to when my brothers told me I couldn’t play G.I. Joes because I’m a girl.
Wow, that sounds awesome, Bridget. (Fortunately, her experience there wasn’t all negative.)
I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot lately. I routinely attend the Vancouver Drupal Users Group and while female attendance is predictably low, it is in line with the estimated figures for the broader Drupal community: About 10%. More to the point, I definitely haven’t ever felt like my presence there was questioned because of my gender. (My terrifying physical stature and violent temper, sure, but gender?)
This makes me wonder if there’s a difference between the development and IT communities. Aside from LSL and web development, my techie cred is largely limited to networking — and that world seems pretty impenetrable, frankly. I’ve definitely encountered my fair share of guys from the IT sphere who question my technical credentials, and while I’ve never worked in formal software development, I know it has are far more similarities with web development than with networking.
On the other hand, this presentation did come up at a recent Ruby conference, as did one at this year’s DrupalCon, that asserted Drupal developers’ experience could be gauged by beard length. Web development is certainly not an egalitarian, bias-free zone. However, in the ensuing aftermaths of both, there were plenty of guys speaking out against them, and that’s important.
What’s your experience?
20 Apr
Recently, there’s been a lot of media interest in a woman named Melissa Huckaby — though not that Melissa Huckaby — and what it’s meant for her to be confused with an accused murderer and sexual predator: media attention, vandalism, death threats, etc, etc. Scary stuff.
I, on the other hand, share my name with a number of moderately Googleable women, none of whom seem to be serial killers or skinheads or anything terrible like that at all. That said, the most prominent ones tend to be fairly embarassing. So who are they? A couple other Catherine Winters have written embarrassing books, but that’s thankfully a lot better than it could be. No, my fellow Catherine Winters are pretty harmless.
The first Catherine Winters‘ story is pretty tragic, however:
Nine-year-old Catherine Winters was last seen around noon on March 20, 1913. A family friend named Dan Monroe spoke to her as she walked along the town square toward her Newcastle, Indiana home. On that day, the schools had closed due to an outbreak of measles and Catherine had spent the morning playing with her pal Helen Stretch. As she skipped toward home, she wore a “red sweater coat,” a white straw hat, and a black and white checked gingham dress. She had brown eyes and light brown hair.
They never found her. At the time, it was a huge mystery — was she kidnapped by gypsies? Did she run away? Her disappearance was covered in a 1913 silent newsreel.
Of course today, we can all guess what happened and it’s pretty horrifying. I really can’t fault her for having the same name, particularly when she met such a tragic end.
Second to her is a Catherine Winters who is also pretty hard to be irritated by. Catherine Winters of Lindon, Utah is 12 years old and plays the flute really, really well. I figure she doesn’t need crazy people picking at her for being good at stuff, so I’ll forego linking to any of the sites that list a little too much personal info.
Catherine, if you ever read this:
- Tell your parents to think about password protecting some of those photos of you. Flickr is a good option for this.
- Don’t let high school get you down in a couple years. In my experience, Catherine Winterses don’t like high school.
So, with the exception of Catherine Winters who disappeared in 1913 and Catherine Winters who plays the flute, the rest are kind of lame:
There’s Catherine Winters, who in 1983, wrote a single entry in the 1980s Sweet Dreams series, How to Talk to Boys and Other Important People. I’ve had people ask me if that one was mine. (”Yes. Yes it was. I was a published author when I was 2 years old.“) I strongly suspect that this is the Catherine Winters who wrote for Young Miss magazine in the early 1980s. If it is, today she’s writing for Health.com and is not as lame as previously asserted. Either way, it’s surprising that someone as prolific as this Catherine Winters could be eclipsed online by a book written 25 years ago.
[Update: May 28, 2009: Catherine Winters good-naturedly confirms that she is, in fact, not as lame as other Catherine Winters have worried and doesn't sue me. (Thanks, Catherine!)]
There’s a “Katherine Winters Hair Salon” in Irvington, New York. I’m not actually sure of the spelling of her first name, but apparently, the proprietor isn’t actually named Catherine Winters. I’m not totally sure where the name comes from. As of this writing, there’s only one extremely negative review available on Google:
“If she didn’t give me a bunch of attitude for leaving and offered me a discount to come back when she got her ____ together I might have come back. I wouldn’t go back if she paid me.”
Finally, there’s the Catherine Winters who self-published a 48-page book called Being Single and Loving It. In the author’s own words:
I wrote this book because I had experienced some shortcoming also in the area of being single and praying for the right mate to come my way after my journey on being single I am now happily married to a wonderful husband but if I had not stood still just for a second I also would of miss my blessing. I hope and pray that my book would give you some things to consider while your waiting on God and soul searching for what you want your mate to be.
You know, a lot of people look down on self-publishing because it’s not seen as ‘legitimate’ or because you don’t have ‘editors’ or ‘proofreading’ and can have ‘problems’ with ‘grammar’, but to them, I say, balderdash! I’m ordering this right now.
So that’s the big four. Still, that’s not even counting the myriad Katherine/Kathryn/Catharine/Cate/Kate/Kat/Cat/Cathy/Kathy Winter(s)es out there! There’s too many to count, so I picked out a couple entertaining ones.
- In 2008, New Orleans resident Mary Catherine Winters, a nurse at Omega Hospital, (Yes, really!) gave $419 to Hillary Clinton.
- In 1976, British ice dancer Kathryn Winter won gold at the inaugural World Junior Figure Skating Championships. At two sentences in length, she has the shortest Wikipedia entry I’ve ever seen.
- Kathy Winters, NASA Shuttle Weather Officer, gets quoted in the press all the time and apparently has the authority to scrub shuttle launches. I feel this more than makes up for going by “Kathy”.
- Dr. Kathryn Winters, a pediatrician from New Mexico, has at least one patient (or more likely, at least one patient’s parent) who likes her, but thinks her staff is rude.
Interestingly, Catherine Winters have a tendency to be fictional!
Who shares your name?
13 Apr
A few weeks ago, I bought a new Kensington Expert Mouse to use at home. A friend helped me out, by having it shipped to her address in Washington to take advantage of a really good deal Amazon.com was offering to US-based customers. I ended up saving something like $60. Sweet. Deal.
So, my first Amazon sale completed, I was feeling pretty positive about them. Until yesterday.
Sunday morning, I was alerted to news of a somewhat poorly-planned decision at Amazon: to better cater to America’s “moral majority”, Amazon decided to excise the popularity rankings of LGBT books, delisting them from search results. Some authors’ books can only be found by searching for an unrelated title and clicking on the author’s name. Other authors’ entire selections have been delisted.
According to a thread on Livejournal’s Meta Writer community, Amazon has de-ranked such titles as Brokeback Mountain, Tipping the Velvet and Stone Butch Blues. This begs the question: what on earth are these sheltered, bigoted Amazon customers searching for that is going to make them get all red-faced and choke down vomit upon discovering those books in their search results?
“Well, I never!” they’ll exclaim, spittle flying forth, “I wanted to read about the non-gay history of Brokeback Mountain! How was I to know it was fictional?”
In his blog post on the subject, Raul (Hummingbird604) compares the move by Amazon to last year’s “Motrin Moms” debacle. He also raises the question, is Easter Sunday a good time to be organizing a protest? Absolutely. Is Easter Sunday an okay time for Amazon PR to take the day off? Obviously not.
Worse, Amazon’s responses have ranged from “yes, we de-rank adult content” to “uh, it’s a glitch?” They haven’t demonstrated any cohesive strategy to managing their response, and continue to look worse and worse, the longer this goes on.
Since breaking Sunday morning, the #amazonfail and #glitchmyass hashtags on Twitter continue to trend highly a day later, inviting responses from Amazon’s competitors.
Amidst a flurry of suggestions that they hold a sale on LGBT books, Powells Books’ Twittter account notes that they will definitely not censor the presence of LGBT material on their site.
@cinemaestro That certainly is disturbing. Fortunately, Powell’s will never censor this material #amazonfail http://bit.ly/3Me5Un
about 7 hours ago in reply to cinemaestro
@zentinal A GLBT sale sounds like a great idea to me. I will check to see if this is something we can get going #amazonfail
about 6 hours ago in reply to zentinal
By Monday morning, the mainstream media was already reporting on the issue:
Oh, and per Smart Bitches, Trashy Books‘ advice: Amazon Rank
Update, April 13, 2:50pm:
An email from an Amazon.com spokesman, reproduced by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, describes #Amazonfail as “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.”
The email goes on to say that a total of 57,310 books outside of the Gay & Lesbian categories were deranked and that they’re in the process of reinstating them.
So what happened? Did some mid-level manager enact some crazy new policy? Can Amazon’s ranking and reporting mechanisms be gamed?
12 Apr
In the summer of 2007, I learned I had a bit of an RSI problem when a can of Coke I was holding suddenly slipped from my grasp and plummeted to the ground. I couldn’t apply enough pressure with my thumb and fingers to hold it in my hand.
One short diagnosis of tennis and golfer’s elbow later, (”Catherine, you use the mouse a lot, don’t you?”) my doctor ordered me to find a less damaging pointing device. Since then, I’ve mostly relied on my laptop’s trackpad.
That’s all well and good while using my laptop, but for desktops, I needed a better solution. It’s really just Cirque that still makes USB trackpads, and those aren’t super either.
The Apple iTunes store provides a dozen or so “trackpad” apps, most of which use VNC to function as an input device alone. These let you use your wifi network to get your iPhone going as a trackpad. Surprisingly, this works fairly well, but it really does take gadget overkill to a whole new level.
So that leaves trackballs. Which is good, because I like them! [1]
So beautiful. So majestic.
Consequently, for the past 18 months, I’ve been using a Kensington Expert Mouse 7.0, the latest version of the classic ADB trackball. Kensington trackballs are so good, in fact, that sometimes I print out trackball-advocacy literature and go door-to-door, inviting people to hear the good news.
The latest version of the Kensington Expert Mouse boasts the same four buttons in a butterfly layout, as well as a one-dimensional “scroll ring” around the ball. The ring’s movement could be a little smoother, but it moves easily and is difficult to nudge by mistake.
So yes, I strongly recommend the Kensington Expert Mouse to anyone, if only because I rely on other people’s continued interest in trackballs to ensure companies keep producing them. Aside from that, trackballs are generally fairly good, egonomically speaking, and also make it more difficult for mouse-only friends to use your computer, providing you with ample opportunity to look smug. If you’re into that sort of thing, I mean.
For my keyboard, I’ve been alternating between my MacBook Pro and a 2005-series white/clear Apple keyboard. I own a Microsoft Natural Pro ergonomic keyboard, but I never liked the “mushy” feeling of the keys. The last-generation Apple keyboard’s keys aren’t buckling-spring. so it’s no Model M, but they definitely have sufficient give and are nicely clicky — within the limits of dome-switch keyboards.
Aside from feel, many Microsoft keyboards have a bit of an issue that’s always bugged me: they tend not to detect the left shift key being depressed when character entry keys have already been hit. This makes my hastily-typed smiley emoticons look terrible: ;0
I am pleased to say that Apple’s keyboards have never exhibited this problem.
Trackballs: A part of our heritage.
[1] Little-known Canadian trivia: the Royal Canadian Navy developed the first trackball back in the 1950s.
However, astute Canadians will note that this photo from Wikipedia shows the DATAR trackball assembly using flat-head screws, rather than superior, patriotic Robertson screws. For shame!
17 Dec
| Catherine: |
Some person on Craigslist keeps trying to sell “Guildwars: Fractions”. |
| Catherine: |
I was thinking that was totally a good idea. |
| Catherine: |
You could have “Warcraft: Algebra Adventure!” |
| D: |
Heh. |
| Catherine: |
Ooh, _I_ should license MY likeness! |
| Catherine: |
I could be an edutainment LEGEND. |
| D: |
:) |
| Catherine: |
“Catherine Omega Yells at You Until You Use Commas Correctly, You Illiterate Morons” |
| D: |
“Catherine Omega’s What’s up with that Algebra!” |
| Catherine: |
Exactly! |
| Catherine: |
“Catherine Omega Teaches You DVORAK” |
29 Nov
As seen on Digg: Did you know that Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry for “gulliable“?
09 Nov
So the most pressing question of the post US-election period, beyond “did adults seriously come up with the name ‘labradoodle‘?” and “will Team Obama need to buy their own keyboards?” is clearly, “what is Sasha Obama’s Secret Service codename?”
Apparently, it’s Rosebud. I find that a little weird on its own, but particularly so in light of the others assigned to the Obamas, Bidens and Bushes. According to the Chicago Tribune:
President-elect Barack Obama: Renegade
Michelle Obama: Renaissance
Malia Obama: Radiance
Sasha Obama: Rosebud
Vice President-elect Joe Biden: Celtic
Jill Biden: Capri
President George W. Bush: Tumbler
First Lady Laura Bush: Tempo
Aside from Bush’s codename, which I assume means that someone has a sense of humour, these all sound like cars. Crappy, marketer-named cars.
“This fall, test-drive the 2009 Chrysler Capri and discover an automotive experience that demonstrates why no one wants to buy Chrysler. Act now before the recall!”
Also, as an aside, I love the names-that-start-with-the-same-letter bit and all, but seriously, you guys are positive everyone can hear the difference between “Radiance” and “Renaissance” over an earpiece, right? I ask because the sitcom viewer in me thinks this is going to end with someone getting fired by an enraged President Obama.
08 Nov
Part of being me is that basically every possible task I decide to undertake in my day-to-day life is completely unaccounted for by city planners, architects, designers, doctors, software engineers, and so on. Sometimes, this is simply due to the fact that I am tall[1], as in the case of the face-level wall sconce mounted in the hall next to my desk at work, or the fact that everything from doorknobs to toilets are generally too low for me to comfortably operate.
Other times, it’s due to my trademark life planning.
Consider the following scenario:
I stand in line for the self-checkout station at the Real Canadian Superstore in Metrotown[2], holding a $4 bag of chips and nothing else. Superstore shoppers will note that this bag is going to end up weighing somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1-2kg. In my defense, I’m not allergic to potatoes. So it’s healthy.
Upon actually stepping up to the machine, I am prompted to enter the number of bags desired. Superstore shoppers will recall that part of their no-frills policy, they have a suckass website and charge 3 cents per plastic bag.
I select zero bags, pleased to see that whatever circulatory problem that prevents me from using touchscreen kiosks has temporarily reversed itself. Prompted to scan my item, I do so.
“Please place the item in the bag,” instructs the machine. I do not.
Instead, I toss my chips onto the bag-filling platform, triggering the weight sensor which tells the computer that an item has been added to… nothing, in this case. The machine prompts me to either scan my next item or to complete the sale. I briefly speculate about the number of people who bring their own reusuable bags to Superstore compared to the number of people who don’t want shopping bags because they’re buying the biggest possible bag of potato chips before deciding that it probably isn’t worth attempting to guess whether or not someone is living entirely on carbs and trans fats, just to see if they’re more likely to want to complete the transaction. Besides, I can’t immediately think of a way to make the “I am done and want to pay now” option any clearer.
Fortunately, the “paying” part goes well and only a modicum of grumbling and frowning is required.
[1] (Dude, please stop being offended that I won’t sit in the bus seat next to you. My legs don’t fit in there.)
[2] I am not afraid of Metrotown crowds because I can just push everyone out of my way and they’re usually too bewildered to do anything. Tragedy of the commons, bitches!
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