Palatable Patterns

Unintelligable Fashion Statements

Over the past few days — first in Los Angeles and then in San Francisco — I have been seeing a flurry of fashion “statements” that are saying something to me vastly different than I’m sure they were intended to say.

“I do not own a mirror.”

This seems to be the most popular.

“I am legally blind.”

Or it could be this one.

“I borrowed these glasses from Angela (from “Who’s the Boss”).”



Why? Weren’t they dopey enough looking the first time?

“I just got out of my time machine — straight from 1982.”

Again: wasn’t it bad enough the first time?

“My stylist went to the Pat Benatar School of Hair Design.”



‘nuff said.

“Legwarmers — if they were cool enough for Jane Fonda and Olivia Newton John, then they are cool enough to revive!”



Gods help us.

Seriously, I’m not sure what is worse: the fact that I am old enough to remember these abysmal fashion statements from their Regan-era incarnations… or the fact that they really haven’t gotten anymore attractive this go around.

Christ, I feel old.

I told you so’s

I used to find “I told you so” one of the most gratifying phrases in the English language (at least when I was the one who gets to say it; I hate it when my husband says it). I have found, though, that the older I get, the more bothered I am by the reality of having issued a warning that was ignored.

Actually getting to say, “I told you so” doesn’t have the same gratification as it used to… because no amount of getting to be right changes the fact that, inevitably, we are now faced with a mess that was entirely avoidable. The fact that I warned about it, or tried to alert people to it, pales in comparison to the fact that I am now stuck cleaning up something that never should have been a mess in the first place.

This is doubly sad because that “I told you so” moment used to be what made leading the ‘clean up crew’ worthwhile for me. Now that there is no joy in it, it’s largely drained any sense of pleasure I ever had out of cleaning up other people’s messes.

The Assumption of Multi-Tasking

It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve finally come to accept that age is not just affecting my physical self, but also my intellectual one. I got into certain habits at the age of 26 which, a decade later, I have to break for pure practicality’s sake, because they are simply not possible, anymore. Things such as working past 9:00 p.m., getting a full night’s rest sleeping on a red eye flight, keeping details in my head and NEVER writing anything down, being patient when people repeat themselves, and rapid-fire context-switching and multi-tasking.

That last one is the most dangerous because, in the tech field, the basic assumption is that everyone multi-tasks. This assumption is so prevalent that if someone walks into a meeting without a laptop, smart phone or iPad, they get strange looks. People who walk around with a pad and paper are the subject of jokes and teasing. It is simply expected that, during a meeting, you are doing other things.

There is a knock-on affect to this which particularly bothers me: because the assumption is that everyone is multi-tasking, there is a very rude and sloppy habit of inviting everyone and their brother to a meeting. The result is that people’s time is wasted carelessly, because there is no consideration put into who is truly needed for a meeting and who merely needs to be informed of the results after the meeting is over.

After all, if everyone spends every moment of their day doing multiple things at once, then why do we need to respect people’s time by being selective and deliberate about who we include in meetings?

Since there is nothing in the universe that bothers me more than having my time wasted (except possibly having my team’s time wasted), this is something that has been particularly frustrating to me lately. People carelessly and impolitely sucking up working hours by dragging me to meetings which I have no real reason to attend means that my real work — the work that requires thought, concentration, problem-solving and in-depth analysis — gets pushed to off-work hours.

And, because I’ve turned into a dismal old hag who can’t stay awake past 9:30 p.m. to save my life anymore, this means getting up at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. to get work done. But since people schedule meetings for me until 5:00 or 6:00 p.m., my days just get longer and longer, I get more and more tired, and things that used to never phase me start bothering me more and more.

(And, for the purposes of this rant, we’ll skip the massive impact this has on my physical health, husband, friends, family and social life.)

Of course, the other way in which my multi-tasking problem continues to manifest itself is emotional: once I start getting upset at people wasting my time, I find that I struggle more and more to shake it off, get my head back in the game and push through what I am capable of getting done.

Yet one more example of why my next career is probably going to have to involve working with dogs. They never even try to multi-task. It’s one of their most endearing qualities.

A Tour of Kiev

We spent Sunday touring Kiev. What started out as a five hour tour, turned into a day-long event, once we had a late lunch, and then moved on to shopping.

Kiev was beautiful, and though the wind was a bit chilly at times, it was a sunny day that was great for walking around outside.




I really liked the sculptures around the WWII Museum, even though we didn’t have time to go inside. (Well, Matt went in, but the rest of us walked the grounds instead.)







And see? I don’t dislike all cats. This one is supposed to bring good luck if you pet it’s head and tail at the same time.


I think my favorite thing, though, was the whimsical nature of the sculptures and playground near yet one more church. (I’ve crossed my threshold on churches for a while.)





After we concluded the tour, we went to a great old retro place (with lots of Communist-era decor) for Vereniki… though I ended up getting two of my all-time favorite treats: pelmeni and vinaigrette salad (the only way I like beets!). Once we wrapped up with lunch, we went walking through downtown to do some shopping.

Heather and I marveled at how on earth all the skinny women managed to walk on the cobble stone in 5 inch spiked heels without killing themselves.

Quote of the day:

Alora: “After seeing all these skinny ass women, I can’t eat an ice cream cone.”
Heather: “But they’re all eating them! They must put something in it to make them so skinny. I think we should give it a go.”

And while I applaud my British colleague’s well-applied sense of justification, my diet starts now. Downtown Kiev was like being in Los Angeles. One of my legs weighs more than most of those women. Yikes.

Go-Karting in Jena

Our big cross-team event for our week in Jena was go-karting. But really it was ping pong, pool and foozball while waiting to go-kart. And, because it was Germany, we got to do it all with beer. Ha.


Sasha was ready for a nap before we even got started.


Artem finally gave up the idea that I would stop taking pictures of him just because he refused to look at me when I had the camera out. Happily, he did finally start smiling, though, even when he was looking away.



As always, Sasha B. is a riot — even if he was all sweaty from a highly physical set of back-to-back ping pong matches.


The foozball games were endlessly entertaining as well.




Nastya and I teamed up in a game of pool against Matt and Sasha. Nastya’s attempt to demoralize by trash-talking the guys didn’t have as big of an impact as my sinking a ball for them at the end. We lost, but only barely.


Me and Sasha, waiting for our turn to hit the track. We were on the same team, and he rather enjoyed running circles around me.


Nastya and Sasha B. watching another team race.


I’ll upload the video later, but Sasha B. was a maniac at the pool table. And quite the sweaty boy once he was done playing.




The caps they gave us to go under our helmets were endless fodder for terrorist/airport security jokes.


Me and Matt, enjoying hanging out with the team.


Ilya and Marat preparing for another round on the track.


Yet one more game of pool with Marat, Eugene, Artem and Nastya.


Sasha B., Ilya and Nastya chilling out for a moment between games.


This is what Sasha looks like when he gets bugs assigned to him. We told him this should be his new Skype picture.


Our team shot at the end of the evening.

And then after we got back to the hotel, most of us piled in Sasha’s room to do a vodka tasting: Sasha’s Ukrainian vodka and Matt’s California vodka. The Slavic purists objected to the Californian… but the Californians liked it. Maybe a little too much. But there is no photographic evidence of that part of the evening. Thank goodness.

Team Dinner in Germany

With work being so busy, we didn’t get much chance to go out — and definitely didn’t get much chance to hang out with just our team. But on Wednesday night, we went out to dinner and enjoyed a night out, with just us.

Unfortunately, German restaurants tend to have trouble handling large groups. So a table for nine is hard to come by. Eventually we found a place that pushed together two bar tables, that could (sort of) accommodate nine people.

In addition to food and drinks, Ilya decided to teach Matt how to play a Russian card game called “Fool.” Good thing, too, since it took nearly two hours to get everyone’s food out to them. BMW’s much-trumpeted boasting of “German efficiency” does not appear to apply to German restaurants.

Arrival in Germany - March 2011

I’ll write more about the ups and downs of the trip later, but since work is so crazy and time is short, I’ll start with some quick pictures, and circle back around to the rest later.

Sunday, March 27, 2011


My arrival in Frankfurt. I’ve gotten so used to flying domestically, that I forgot what it was like to get on a really big plane.


(Artem, Sasha S. and Sasha B.)

After catching up with my guys from Kiev at the airport, we decided to head to downtown Frankfurt to walk around a bit, before picking up Matt and Ilya from the airport that evening. (It turns out, we were really on a quest for sausages and beer.)


Frankfurt has a lovely river walk through downtown. And, though it wasn’t quite as warm as I like, it was still a very pleasant day to be outside.



Sasha reminded me that I needed to get an actual picture of myself in Frankfurt, instead of just taking pictures of other things. I always forget that part.




All in all, the trip itself was long but uneventful, and the few hours we got to spend in Frankfurt before leaving for Jena was nice.

The final photographed event for the night:
The joke for the night was: “How many Ukrainians does it take to load an American van in Germany?”

Of course, it wasn’t until we loaded up, with me in the back buried under suitcases, that Ilya realized the van was a stick shift… which he doesn’t know how to drive. Fortunately, Sasha was happy to take the wheel on the 3 hour trek to Jena.

SXSWi: Interactive Narratives

This was just cool. And in my quest for a way to marry my love of writing and telling stories, with a way to make a living, this is fabulously appealing. In the session called “Interactive Narratives: Creating the Future of Storytelling” the panel discussed something incredibly cool: telling a multi-threaded story across social mediums to build an interactive experience between author and audience.

The similarities to both LARPing and fanfic are stark, and incredibly fascinating. I’m still organizing my thoughts about this, but it’s basically taking the kinds of things that fan groups have organically done and doing it in a structured way for either artists (as a simple narrative format, such as literature) or brands (as marketing entertainment).

The idea is to take a story, ideally one that is capable of standing on it’s own, and publishing it via one medium (e.g. a blog), and then to have interactive ‘sidebar’ stories that branch off as stand alone subplots around it, via alternate mediums — Facebook characters, Twitter interactions, text messaging, a smart phone app, etc. If each piece can stand alone (which is quite a feat of story architecture) while also contributing to the larger story as a whole, while also soliciting and incorporating audience feedback into the process, then you’ve basically got a whole new real time literary construct.

This is not dissimilar to what my friend Ryan from righteousMENACE and I talked about doing, but it was great to hear some specific examples of how it worked, and to see the test case that the panel constructed.

Very cool stuff. And the absolute embodiment of why SXSW is a constant source of pleasant surprises.

SXSWi: VRM

In a Sunday session called “Shopping as a Revolutionary Act” I got a pleasant surprise. It’s something I wasn’t previously familiar with that now I want to dig into more: Vendor Relationship Management.

This is the inverse of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The idea being that instead of vendors relying on collecting data from customers, that customers own their own data (increasingly relevant issue) and that they can provide it to vendors so that the vendors can use self-selected data to provide the consumer with a more meaningful experience.

This concept constantly makes me think of Hulu’s ad voting functionality. I always vote on commercials for Hulu. For some people that might seem strange, but for me it’s logical. I’d rather give Hulu the feedback they need to serve me commercials that might be relevant to me, rather than ones that I find horrific to have to watch.

However, on many, many occasions, I’ve thought about how much I would prefer if Hulu had a preferences page in my profile where I could set my advertising preferences with as much detail as I have the stomach to manage. This would be particularly helpful, because then instead of just saying “Yes” to a Petsmart commercial, I could say “Yes” to the dog Petsmart commercial and “No” to the cat Petsmart commercial.

I would imagine that this could have some interesting potential for Hulu (and similar companies) as well, because it would give them the ability to go to advertisers and say, “We have X users who have deliberately opted-in to commercials about Y.” I would think this would be a valuable sales opportunity for them.

Even more valuable, is that Hulu could do this and then lead the way in the VRM space. If they allowed me to export my advertising preferences into a generic/standard format, I could then import them into VRM and then be able to re-use it elsewhere.

One of the most interesting things that came up in the session was when the CEO of Shwowp said that, in her attempt to raise funding for her business, Angels and VCs listened to the concept and sort of shrugged with a general disinterest… yet large brands and marketers were salivating.

This is particularly interesting to me because it tells me that the marketing/advertising side of the world recognizes that in a world where people with money are increasingly able to insulate themselves from advertising (one of the most interesting long-term affects of the freemium business model, IMO), there is huge, huge value to people who are upfront about what advertising they consider worth getting.

This makes a huge amount of sense to me, and is something that I want to brush up on some more, because I find it incredibly interesting. After all, not only would I rather get served a commercial from Petsmart than from Gerber, but I would think that Gerber would rather not waste CPM fees on me, and that Petsmart would like to know that I’m a high income dog mom who doesn’t like cats and who is willing to spend insane amounts of money on her Shih Tzu.

So why are Angels and VCs too short-sighted to see that?