Kathleen McGivney

Ciao 2008, it's been real

It's the end of the year, therefore it is time for all bloggers to get all introspective and do a "year in review" post. (It's in the blogging bylaws. Look it up.) As many of you know, 2008 was a rather eventful year for me. I got married, left IBM, started two companies, traveled a lot, renewed an interest in cooking, and became a well-versed patient advocate for my father. I feel like 2008 flew by in a blur of sometimes awesome, sometimes difficult, but always incredible occurrences and learning experiences.

I thought about how I'd try to sum up all of these things that have happened in my life in 2008, and realized that it would have to be an incredibly long blog post if I wanted to do most of these topics any justice. Instead, I decided to do a summary in a convenient bulleted list, followed by some of my favorite photos from 2008 after the jump. Sometimes it's easier to tell stories through images.

Note: It was hard to pick just these images, since there were so many more that I loved this year, but if I included them all it'd take 15 years to load the page. So I picked a handful of highlights.

Travel:

• Flew 109,753 miles total, 103,105 on American, 6,648 on JetBlue. 
• Countries visited outside U.S.: Canada, Italy, Belgium, U.K., San Marino
• Cities visited outside U.S.: Rome, Orvieto, Civita di Bagnoregio, Bologna, Rimini, San Marino, Ravenna, Asolo, Pisa, Venice, Florence, Assisi, London, Brussels, Antwerp, Bruges, Toronto
• Cities visited within U.S.: Chicago, Boston, Worcester, Syracuse, Watertown (NY), Orlando, Nashville, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego

Professional (Tech):

• Conferences: Lotusphere in January (was also supposed to go to UKLUG, but life interfered)
• Closed second-largest deal in Lotus history in June.
• Founded Sakura Consulting in July.

Professional (Other):

• Launched Hanne Apparel in November.
• Photographs published on Premiere.com in several articles in the summer.

Personal:

• Got married to the most wonderful man I know on April 12, 2008.
• Plenty of other stuff happened, but that is the most important!

All in all, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster, but at least it's been interesting! After the new year, I'll be posting a lot more about what's going on at Sakura Consulting and what I'll be doing at Lotusphere. But for now, enjoy some photos of these and various other highlights of 2008 after the jump.

Festive cat says: Happy Holidays!

Festive cat is festive, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

I'm working on my year-end wrap-up post, which will include some images I haven't edited yet (so I'd better get right on that, since the new year is staring me right in the eyeballs). I leave you with the very best wishes for a happy holiday season. My dad's cat, Melvin, shares those wishes in between trying to eat the Norfolk Island pine tree behind him.

Remembering JSH

One year ago today, I lost a friend and colleague, Jonathan Sir Hendrey, to a sudden illness. It still shocks me that he is gone - I can't imagine anything that could take away that amazing spirit. I can still remember his funny stories and his quirks, his brilliance at explaining the most dry, complex technical problems in entertaining ways, his willingness to try new things.

Last year, on the day he died, I posted a story about JSH, which is one of my favorites because it illustrated how much fun he'd have just doing a mundane thing like buying a car. This year, I am going to remember how he was the last time I saw him, in August of last year. We sat in the lobby of a hotel during a conference and caught up on how our lives were going. We talked about work a little bit, but mostly about how happy we both were with the developments in our personal lives and relationships. He was so happy and content and I'm glad we were able to share that little moment together.

I still miss him very much and I know many of my friends and colleagues do too. We're all thinking about him today. I hope we can all get together and share memories and stories about him soon.

Why Circuit City sucks

And probably, why its business practices allowed it to go bankrupt.

Despite the fact that Circuit City filed for bankruptcy in November, I still chose to purchase some items from them when they had their Black Friday sale. I was out of the country at the time, so I made my purchases online. I ordered two 2GB SD cards at $4.99 each, a 4GB SD card at $9.99, and the Left 4 Dead Xbox 360 game that just came out for my husband. That wasn't on sale, but they had $8 flat shipping for most orders, and it seemed silly to spend $8 to ship less than $20 of products, so I added the game.

Two days later, on November 30, I received a shipping confirmation, telling me that my orders were in three separate shipments because they were coming from different warehouses. They shipped each 2 GB SD card in a separate shipment, and the third shipment contained the 4GB card and the game. Now, remember, they only charged $8 shipping, and they shipped three packages via FedEx to me. I think that might be a loss right there, unless they have extremely discounted shipping rates from FedEx. In any case, the first two packages showed up within a few days, but the third package never came. I checked its status via the provided tracking link and it indicated that the package data had been transmitted to FedEx but that the package had never been picked up. FedEx's fault? A sticky-fingered warehouse employee? Who knows.

I called the customer service number today and after asking me approximately one billion questions they told me that the only thing they could do is escalate it to an "investigator" who will follow up on the package and call me within three days. So now, Circuit City has my money (they charged me when they packed and "shipped" everything), I don't have my merchandise, and I'm told to just wait around for someone to call me back. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and let their investigator call me back, but if I don't get a call back in the next few days I'm filing a dispute with my credit card company. That'll add yet another debt and debtor to what I'm sure is a growing group in their bankruptcy proceedings.

Next time, I'll just buy my stuff at a local store. Lesson learned.

Break your resolutions

When I lived in L.A., I had a party a couple of Januaries in a row with a running theme: break your resolutions. The first year I did it on January 2 or something ridiculous like that, because it was funny to do it that close to New Year's day. Now that I'm in NYC and we're paring down our travel schedule come January, I figured I'd resurrect it. This time I'm doing it on January 10, to give everyone ample time to actually try to keep their resolutions before succumbing to the temptation of my ginger butterscotch cookies.

As the time for the party gets closer, I'll be posting some trial runs of recipes that I plan to have at the party as well as asking for suggestions. I think it's a good way to motivate myself to take more photos of what I'm cooking and to share it with the small subset of the world that will read about it.

For now, I'll just post a draft of the current menu. All items are finger foods, to facilitate snacking and mingling. Feel free to post any suggestions for yummy finger foods in the comments. Keep in mind that I'm making almost everything myself, and though I can prep a few things the day before, most of it has to be made the day of the party, so anything overly complicated won't work well.

I've gotten several of these recipes from my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen, several from some recipe books I have, several from Eric Ripert's blog and several from just thinking, "huh, I'd like to cook with this ingredient. Let's see if I can find a recipe that incorporates it". As I post each item, I will link to any original recipes and post my adaptations here as per usual.

Menu after the jump.

Quick trip to London

Atom, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

In an effort to reuse a restricted ticket after canceling our trip to UKLUG in September, my husband and I took a quick trip to London for a long weekend. Luckily, thanks to some fantastic service from Calumet, I got my new Canon 5D Mark II on Friday a few hours before we left the States. We were glad to be able to bring the camera to test its features, especially the HD video and higher ISO range.

Coincidentally, Robert Scoble was also in London this past weekend and organized a Tweetup for Sunday night at a tasty local restaurant. We geeked out over the camera, and took a number of test shots. We also introduced everyone to our Lensbaby Composer, which is the latest version of the awesome lens that takes the soft-focus, dreamy images I've blogged about before. Robert shot this image of my husband explaining the Lensbaby. It's a cool image and the selective focus really captures the movement well.

Atom also shot our very first test video at the Tweetup, which is posted on Vimeo. We did no editing with that video, and there's no story there - just a quick test to see how the HD video looks, and it looks great. On Monday, we went to the London Eye at dusk and shot some stills and video of the ride, which we will post shortly. I plan to actually edit that video and overlay it with music, so please feel free to recommend a video editing program that supports HD video.

More photos from the Tweetup are on Flickr in my London Tweetup 08 set. All images in that set were shot with the 5D Mark II.