Am I blue

You know, the trouble with ever signing up to receive emails from—well, any company, really—is that once you’re on their list, the emails just metastasize. And the stream never stops.

Case in point: I get an extraordinary number of marketing emails from Air France/KLM,'s Flying Blue, especially considering I invariably delete them without opening. I certainly don’t avail myself of any of the offers. So I want to unsubscribe.

But the problem is, they insist that you log in before you can unsubscribe. And to do that, you need to jump through more hoops than you do to log into your bank.

As you might imagine, I have no clue what my password is, seeing as to how I apparently only used it to set up the account six years ago. But if you want to reset your password, you have to answer your security question. Which—see above about the six years gone and I have no notion of what I put as the answer to that at the time.

Result: my account is blocked.

Which would be fine if that meant they’d stop sending me the flipping emails. But noooo.

I’ll have to call their 800 number and tie up their staff, just to get them to cease and desist from filling my in-box.

Guys—really?

In the bag

I was waiting in line at Panera Bread the other day. Well, not “in line”, because PB just can’t seem to master the notion of customer management; so I really mean “I was waiting in the area that includes the bakery display, the coffee urns and the registers (of which there are four, but I’ve never—no matter how many customers are waiting—seen more than two in use concurrently) and where customers congregate in a loose aggregation”.

At any rate, a young woman was conferring with a member of staff, when I noticed her handbag. Or, shoulder bag. Or gigantic, shiny tote bag.

(Apologies for the picture quality; I was taking it on the fly while trying not to look like a sociopath.)

I was just trying to figure out what a “kiss-hug-kiss-hug bag” might be. Or why you’d want to carry it around.

Avian affairs

I sometimes walk around a neighborhood in Mountain View where most of the houses are probably mid-century (with a smattering of McMansions where someone’s bought the property for upwards of a million dollars, scraped the edifice and slapped up something pretentious). A few weeks ago I saw this basket in the magnolia tree:

Well, too early and too high for hiding Easter eggs, I’d have thought. And when I got up close, here were the contents:

So I’m thinking that the householders were putting out materials for birds to do a little home-building of their own. Because, like I said, too early for Easter; and eggs (even symbolically) might be a little insensitive.

Kind of nice, really.

Building boom

There’s a lot of construction going on here in the Valley They Call Silicon, and Cupertino is just teeming with sites-in-progress, what with the new Apple headquarters going up, and apartments and shopping/eating centers nearby.

The Apple building, tellingly, is doughnut-shaped, with the focus entirely in on itself. This reflects both the secretiveness and self-centeredness of the culture as defined by Steve Jobs. It’s close enough to me to be on one of my walking circuits, when I shot this of the cranes behind the 12- or 15-foot fences:

But actually, what I find rather interesting is that there’s no apparent work week/weekend configuration for this construction. Weekday, Saturday, Sunday, holidays, the trucks are trucking, the cranes are moving and there’s non-stop road wetting to keep down the dust. Even on the rare occasions when it’s raining. And I’m not making that up.

In fact, here’s evidence from a shopping center (or maybe it’s an apartment city, it's hard for me to tell the difference at this point) on Stevens Creek Boulevard:

We live in strange times.

Gratitude Monday: Systerhood

Something really serendipitous happened last week. The SVForum, a non-profit that fosters information exchange around the tech industry here in the Valley They Call Silicon, put on a day-long conference Saturday in conjunction with International Women’s Day, which was yesterday. They called it Women in Tech Festival, and it cost $150 to attend.

Well, as you might imagine, that put it out of my reach.

As it happens, I’m a member of several women-in-tech email downloads, most of which are focused on various local areas (DC, Seattle, Bay Area). But one of them, Systers, is run by the Anita Borg Institute (those wonderful people who bring us the Grace Hopper Celebration every year; you may recall that GHC last year was where Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella forgot that one of women’s superpowers is their Twitter accounts); that one is global, and there are a lot of very interesting discussions passing across it.

On Tuesday, a Syster from Girls Can Hack announced that she had one free pass to the conference, which she’d give to whichever one of us emailed her first. I didn’t see the announcement until two hours after it had hit the list, and I figured that it had pretty much been snapped up within the first five minutes. But I thought, what the hell; I emailed her, and I forgot about it.

Well, blow me if that evening she didn’t reply telling me I got the pass! I know you don’t want this mental image, but I was doing the happy dance.

And as it happened, it was a great conference—very energizing speakers and panel discussions, fascinating startup pitches, good networking setup and well-planned transitions. I was particularly heartened by the diversity of attendees—more than just ethnicity, there were ages ranging from early 20s to probably 60s and maybe beyond; and way more than software developers. And yes, even a few men.

(I got a particular kick out of one speaker, who dared organizations to distinguish between real innovation and supplying a ping pong table when it comes to corporate culture. Also, the moderator of a panel who described her career path as “directile dysfunction”.)

Plus—and here’s the kind of spooky part—they had a small “trade show” area, where the startups and sponsoring organizations could demo their products. One of the displays was for HP recruiting, since this was held at an HP facility. And so it was that the very first person with whom I chatted was their recruiter, who came to HP with their acquisition of Autonomy, which is one of my target organizations (they do major league actionable data analytics, and I am all about the knowledge management, baby).

She’s got my details, and she said she’d reach out to me this week to make a connection with that division, so fingers crossed…

Well, it was a terrific day all around, and I am profoundly grateful to Girls Can Hack, to Systers and to the serendipity of me sending that email even though I was sure I was spitting into the wind. Sometimes, I guess, the wind turns just as you’re in the act.

You've come a long way, baby

I wasn’t going to post anything particular for today, even though it’s International Women’s Day, and Google has a doodle and everything.

But then I saw a photo on Twitter, of a plaque, and possibly installation art.

And I thought, well, that’s kind of interesting. So I clicked on it and idly scrolled down the comments. And stopped at the second.

And there we have it. Silent women scrubbing pavements and live sex with teen-aged girls streaming for free.

Thanks, Amelia, Sylvia, Malala, Ada, Eleanor, Golda, Sophie, and all the rest of you great gals, for all your perseverance and sacrifice.

#MakeItHappen