Kathleen McGivney

Farewell to Jack

Best. Cat. Ever., originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

My amazing cat, Jack, passed away last night after fighting advanced cancer.

The first time I saw him, my then-partner and I were in the animal shelter, looking to adopt a cat. We looked at all the cute kittens and older cats, and then came to this big, regal black cat near the back of the shelter. He was facing to the side and we could only see the right side of his face at first. There was a little note pinned to his cage that said, "I hope you don't mind that I only have one eye." At the moment we read that note aloud, he turned to look at us. We were hooked the second that he looked at us with his perpetual wink.

He was an incredibly sweet cat who loved cuddling and lounging on laps, and everyone who met him loved him. He will be deeply missed.

(Photo by my awesome photographer husband, Atom)

The illusion of silence

I've always been a sporadically prolific blogger. I've gone through periods of time where I've blogged daily, but that usually only lasts a few days in a row. Every once in a while I'll blog more than once in a day, which is usually when I'm feeling particularly wordy. More often than not, and of course most recently, I haven't blogged much at all, which makes it appear as though I've gone silent. This, however, is just an illusion. For example, during the time period between my last blog post and this one, I have tweeted approximately 180 times. I've also typed thousands and thousands of words into Skype, AIM, IRC and Signals, our internal microblogging product. I'm not silent at all. So why the blog silence?

I suppose it's because I no longer use my blog as an outlet for small ideas and comments - I use Twitter for that. I don't use it to bitch about my day - I use the group chats I have with my friends on Skype for that. I don't use it to share hilarious links with my friends - I use Twitter or AIM for that. I don't use it to talk about work - I use Signals for that, and this particular blog (unlike several past blog iterations) is my personal blog, on which I rarely discuss work anyway. It's not that I'm lacking inspiration or topics, just that I either have other outlets for them or I don't have the time or inclination to flesh them out into longer posts.

This isn't a problem that's new to blogging - in fact, when I first started blogging, after the initial honeymoon period of realizing that I had my very own self-publishing platform on which I did not have to censor myself or cater to anyone else's approval, my posting frequency was erratic at best, and I know that many other bloggers run into the same issue. I have no solution to this problem (and I don't really know if it's even a problem!), so I need some ideas.

So what motivates you? What gets you to flesh out tweets into posts, or take that idea you talked about with your friend via instant messenger into a full-on blog post? What keeps you posting often, and more importantly, what do you do when you hit a dry spell and can't come up with anything to blog about?

Liveblogging the Lotusphere 2010 OGS

I probably won't be the most prolific or detailed on this topic, but I am sitting next to Team Socialtext and we are both blogging the OGS.

8:00 AM: Opening band are winners of America's Got Talent. Really great act. Now I know why I heard loud drumming during my session yesterday!

8:05 AM: The guest speaker is WFS!!!

8:10 AM: Ol' Bill is talking about collaboration in movies. Maybe the studios need to use Notes. Or Socialtext! :-)

8:17 AM: BobP just called some Lotus competitors "desperate". OH SNAP I wonder who he could possibly mean?

8:20 AM: BobP announced all the product-specific mini-keynotes later today. Talking about how Lotus aligns with IBM's greater Smarter Planet initiative.

8:22 AM: 18,378 new customers since Notes 8! And more smacktalk about M$.

8:25 AM: Focusing on cloud computing and "Collaboration Agenda" - working with industry-specific solutions.

8:30 AM: BobP feels sorry for "competitors". Poor little Ballmer.

8:35 AM: BobP introduces Alistair as new GM. Alan just burst into a cloud of maple leaves with Canadian pride.

The 60-second review: B&N's nook e-reader

I've wanted an e-reader for a while now, mainly because my book collection has gotten out of hand. I figured that the only way to avoid having to line every wall of my house with bookshelves was to get an e-reader. I compared the features of the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and Barnes & Noble Nook, and decided on the Nook. I pre-ordered it in November and got it last night. I took a quick tour, downloaded a couple of books, and have a few likes and dislikes, but overall I am pretty satisfied.

Build quality: The Nook feels very solid and well-made in the hand. It's a good size, measuring 7 3/4" high x 5" wide x 1/2" thick. It's nice and sturdy. The buttons for page turning are part of the plastic casing and are flush with it, but have little nubs so you can feel them in low light. Very nicely designed.

Setup: Setup was very simple. Charge the device fully, turn it on, sign in with your B&N account. The Nook automatically connected to an available wireless signal (it uses AT&T's network). The touchscreen keyboard is big enough that I didn't fat-finger anything when signing in, but it was a little slow to react, causing me to type a couple of letters twice. Easily fixed with a backspace, but the responsiveness could use a little speeding up.

Browsing e-books: Browsing e-books and your library is simple. The main touchscreen menu has five sections: The Daily, which contains blogs, daily subscriptions, and the like; My Library, which contains... you guessed it, your library; Shop, where you can buy stuff; Reading Now, which takes you back to whichever book you were reading last (handy!); and Settings, where you can adjust things like the contrast of the screen. I hit up the Shop section first, to buy some books. I used both the Browse Categories and Search functions, and found them both fairly self-explanatory, though I had some issues with the response time of touches on the touchscreen again. It seems to be a software issue, not a hardware one, as it does eventually catch up if I've touched the screen multiple times, so I'm hoping the next firmware upgrade will resolve it.

The other thing I had an issue with is scrolling. If there are more categories than will fit on the touchscreen, you can scroll to view additional ones by swiping your finger on the touchscreen. You swipe up to scroll down, and down to scroll up, which is a little counterintuitive, but works. However, the swipe gesture and the "throw" gesture (as mentioned in the Nook User Guide) are very similar, and the throw gesture causes the list to continue scrolling after you lift your finger up, which is a little annoying. With practice, I'm sure my scrolling will stabilize and annoy me less.

Anyway, since my Nook is registered with my existing B&N account, which has a stored credit card, I was able to purchase books easily with just a couple of touches - one on the book's main page and one to confirm (a step which is necessary, in my opinion, on a touch-based device). Once the book is downloaded, the Nook tells you it'll be in your library within a couple of minutes.

Reading: After purchasing my books, including Death From The Skies! by my awesome friend Phil Plait (a book I highly recommend!), I went into my library to read it. Navigation of books is very simple, and you can skip to different chapters via the table of contents. Turning pages is accomplished by either pressing the next page or previous page buttons on the sides of the Nook or swiping horizontally on the touchscreen. I found the default contrast easy to read and the default font size was a good size, though these are both adjustable in the settings if needed. 

Selection: The e-book selection at B&N is really good, with a wide variety of both new and classic books available. The magazine selection is pretty sparse at the moment, but I think that will improve eventually. There are four newspapers available - Financial Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and Chicago Tribune. I'm hoping the NY Times will join up at some point, but I'm not holding my breath. However, for my main use of the device (books), the selection is great and well-organized.

Overall, I am pretty pleased with the purchase and plan to use the Nook extensively while traveling. In fact, I'll be taking it with me on our next trip without any other backup reading material. There are some minor glitches, but overall the Nook seems to be a great product. 

Some photos of the device in use after the jump.

A new beginning

I've been through a number of changes over the past couple of years, and today I have a fabulous one to share with you. It's with great happiness and excitement that I announce that I'll be closing up shop at Sakura Consulting and joining Socialtext as a Customer Success Manager.

Like it was for Alan, moving to a company that is outside of the Lotus community is a little bittersweet for me. I've been working with Lotus products since 1996, and I've spent most of that time in deeply technical roles. I've spoken at many Lotus-related conferences (and still will in January - more on that in a moment). Most of all, I've met some amazing people during my time working with Lotus products, whether I was a Lotus/IBM customer, business partner, or IBMer. The Lotus community has some of the most passionate, intelligent, and geeky people I've ever met, and I'm happy to have been a part of it for so long.

The move to Socialtext is not only a logical one for me in terms of career direction, but also in terms of the software I'll be working with. Socialtext is all about collaboration, in its culture and its products. That's one of the things that really speaks to me about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 - the collaborative aspect. It's an aspect I'm very familiar with, and why I think the Lotus community was so quick to grok the value of things like Twitter - collaborative software is in our blood.

I could not be happier about my new role at Socialtext, where I'll continue to put that love for collaboration into practice. I'm excited about the software, the company, and the people I'll be working with. I'll post more about my role and the products as I move into my new responsibilities in early January.

Also, as mentioned, I will be speaking at Lotusphere in January - co-presenting with my evil twin Susan Bulloch for two sessions and participating in the Nerd Girl panel and BoF. I'm also looking forward to seeing the usual lot at the bar, where you are all free to buy me a farewell drink. (I kid, I kid. Mostly.)

I don't plan on leaving the Lotus community completely - I will continue to co-organize the Tri-State Lotus User Group with Mitch for the time being, and will be around the various blogs and chats. So, to the Lotus community - thank you for being so awesome over the years, and please keep in touch!

Thanksgiving dinner with a twist

Spiced pear and apple crumble with vanilla ice cream, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

As I mentioned in my last post, our original Thanksgiving plans to escape the country and its litany of Black Friday advertisements were thwarted by my sinuses, so we decided to stay home and make ourselves a little mini-feast. Since it was just the two of us, and one of us is a vegetarian, we didn't want to make a turkey, so instead I made chicken and Atom made something called Match, which is a meat alternative product that is meant to look, taste, and cook like meat. We also made vegan pumpkin bread, gougeres, roasted brussels sprouts, sweet potato & roasted garlic mash, and spiced pear and apple crumble.

I'll be posting a couple of the other recipes later this week. Photos of the whole dinner and the recipe for the spiced pear and apple crumble are after the jump.

Our Thanksgiving tradition

Belgian beer is strong, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

When my lovely husband (pictured above) and I first started dating, I traveled a lot for work. He quickly obtained a passport and adapted to my insane travel schedule, often accompanying me on trips to conferences. Towards the end of that year, we realized that we had no vacation days left, but both of our employers conveniently gave us both Thanksgiving day and the following Friday off. So, we did what every travel-addicted nutjob would when they find themselves with a long holiday weekend off - we went to Europe and visited friends in Belgium.

This became a tradition for us, and each year since, we have gone to Europe for Thanksgiving, thus avoiding having to make the difficult choice as to which family members win the Kat and Atom lottery*. The first year, we went to Belgium and visited Liege and Bruges; the second year, Italy, where we visited Rome, Orvieto, and Florence; and last year, Belgium again, where we visited Antwerp, Bruges, and Brussels. This year, we had a trip planned to London, and were scheduled to fly out yesterday. Unfortunately, my immune system got wind of this and went out and picked itself up a hefty virus**, and I didn't feel well enough to travel, so we are staying home and cooking ourselves a tasty Thanksgiving feast, which I'll hopefully be coherent enough to photograph tomorrow (which will likely depend on the levels of cold medicine in my blood). In the meantime, I thought I'd share some photos from our past European Thanksgiving trips. Enjoy!

*Our egos aren't actually THAT big. It's more like Kat and Atom Russian roulette.
**Not pigflu. How do I know? The internets said so.

Photos after the jump.

Art imitating life

My husband as art, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

Last week, my husband, my partners in Hanne Apparel, and a few of our muses went to GMHC's third annual Fashion Forward event. This was our second year attending and sponsoring, and we had a fantastic time! One of the highlights this year for us were the fashion students walking around the party sketching the attendees. We bought a couple of the sketches - one of my daughter, and another one of an anonymous fabulous fashionista, but missed out on this one during the event. Fortunately, my husband is fairly recognizable, and one of the event organizers saw this sketch of him after the event and sent it to us. I love it! I especially love how the artist captured his favorite new red shoes.

I'll be back to my semi-regular schedule of posting recipes, travel photos, and the occasional technology rant shortly. In the meantime, if you're in the NYC area, we're looking for some more authors at the NYC Metblog, so if you want to write about NYC, post a comment over there and let us know!

Giving back my birthday - again

Note - this is a featured post that will be at the top of the page until my birthday. Scroll down for newer posts.

A couple of months ago, I posted about signing up for the DonorsChoose.org Give-Back Birthday challenge. Even though my birthday is in August, I posted about it in May because there were a number of projects that needed funding right away, and I wanted to bring people's attention to them.

Now that my birthday is a few short weeks away, I have gone through and updated my birthday page with many new projects that still need funding. As I stated in my original post, I will personally match the first $2,000 donated. The projects I've chosen need a total of $5,242 to get them all fully funded - that means if $2k is funded by people who want to give me fantastic cash and prizes for my birthday, and I match the next $2k, over 75% of the projects in my list will be fully funded!

So please donate - even a $5 donation means $10 goes to a needy classroom. Many employers do company matching for charitable donations, too, so your donation could easily be tripled if your company and I both match it. If you'd rather set up your own Giving Page, please do so, and let me know in the comments.

TriState LUG's next meeting, cookies included

As you may have noticed if you follow the TriState LUG Twitter feed (and you should!), there is a fantastic TriState LUG meeting coming up next Tuesday, July 21 in Newark, NJ, with great sessions by Akiba Saeedi about Sametime 8.5 and Declan Sciolla-Lynch about XPages. As you may also have noticed via recent blog posts by Jim and Mitch, an attendance challenge was issued. Somehow I got roped into baking cookies if 25 attendees registered, while Mitch merely has to don a tie if 50 attendees registered. I know how much you guys complain about ties, but I think it's at least slightly more effort to bake a few dozen cookies than it is to throw on a tie! At the next meeting, this disparity will have to be reconciled (Jim and Mitch, watch out)!

In any case, we already have over 25 non-IBM, non-organizer attendees registered, so it looks like I will be baking cookies on the day of the event and bringing them there for your enjoyment. I am currently planning to make chocolate chip (sans bacon, sorry bacon lovers!) and ginger butterscotch. I have been informed that chocolate chip cookies are mandatory, but I am flexible on the second cookie variety, so if you are attending, you may indicate your preferences in the comments from the following choices: ginger butterscotch, peanut butter, oatmeal toffee, or blondies (technically not a cookie, but hey! I'm accommodating like that). If I get no comments or there is a tie, it'll default back to the ginger butterscotch cookies, which is a pretty good deal if you ask me. They are delicious.

Be sure to register for the event - we need a list of names for building security - and we'll see you there. Feel free to leave cookie preferences in the comments, though revenge tactics for an attendance challenge for Jim and Mitch for the next meeting are welcome as well!