3 Twilight books down, one to go :-)

Eclipse (The Twilight Saga) by Stephenie Meyer

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is my favorite in the series so far. A much more compelling plot than the first two books, with a very exciting climax with unexpected twists and turns.

I am still very annoyed with the glamorization of an uber-exclusive relationship. I mean, really, it's not healthy to see only your boyfriend - 24 hours a day, particularly not for emotionally developing teenagers, yet it wasn't until this book that Bella's father even mentioned that he wanted her to spend time with other people besides Edward. And her father isn't even aware of the fact that Edward spends all night, every night, with her.

Not to mention how controlling Edward was of Bella early in the book. That type of behaviour is never healthy, but can be especially dangerous with teenagers who are still developing a personality.

Other than those nits, the story in this book was compelling and a real page turner.

Of course, since it is a "juvenile" or "young adult" book, it is a very fast read for an adult.


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Up to my eyeballs in tests

As a Change Request Team advocate, I am stringent about asking for test results and always very annoyed when an implementor complains about how complicated the tests are to run.

Now after having spent the last several days finding working test hardware from our pool of test machines, and fighting with test installations and executions... I'm still waiting for my baseline results. I haven't even run the full tests on my own bits yet.

Which is another story.... while my builds were successful and my changes to libelfsign seemed to be kosher, I found that after doing a bfu that my test machines wouldn't even boot.  No, I didn't change libc... so I was very surprised that such behaviour was seen. Yes, I knew things like kerberos and IPsec would not work correctly if libelfsign (a core component of the Cryptographic Framework) wasn't working - but inability to boot? I was shocked.  With some help from pwernau and meem, I finally got one of the systems up in single user mode to discover the linker was doing something... unusual.

Fortunately, a very responsive Rod Evans came and looked at my limping test system and figured out what the linker was doing wrong (and also something one of the libraries in my calling path was doing wrong), and now I've got systems I can play with.

Except when I forget to sync my x86 build workspace with my sparc workspace and I build archives without Rod's fix... and then wedge another test machine.

Hopefully the code will be up for review soon, when I will add another blog entry detailing what it is exactly I'm trying to do and why.

Just finished the second Twilight book, New Moon

New Moon (The Twilight Saga, Book 2)
by Stephenie Meyer

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I liked this book a lot more than Twilight, as I found the characters more interesting and better developed. I loved the character of Jacob Black, though I did find the constant foreshadowing in Twilight and this book about Jacob's tribe ruined what could've been an interesting plot development (as I saw it coming in the first book!)


Jacob Black is the one character that isn't totally self absorbed and not overly melodramatic. Yes, I realize these are supposed to be teenagers, but I don't remember being that bad (but perhaps it's selective memory :-).


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OpenSolaris Turns 4!

Wow, it's been four years now since Sun launched OpenSolaris.  We've come a long way since then - built up a budding community, taken lots of contributions from outside, and we're even turning out a pretty decent OS based on this now! It's on my desktop, laptop and home machine.  There's still a lot to do, but overall I'm very impressed.

It's been very cool doing code reviews openly and getting design feedback directly from the real world before any code is even written. This has greatly changed the way I do my job, for the better!

Continuing the Lemming theme... I finished reading Twilight!

Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1)
by Stephenie Meyer

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Okay, I'll admit it - I didn't want to like this book. I am a huge fan of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, so I did not see a lot of this book as being as original as many folks said it was (ie vampires with feelings and intelligence, as opposed to cold blooded monsters). That aside, the story is compelling and it is a quick and easy read for an adult. I now feel like I can relate to the rest of the world that has already read this book. Finally, I am so glad I am not a teenager anymore, though, and so easily caught up in such intense emotions. :-)


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Professional BusinessWomen of California: Closing Session

The closing session of the Professional BusinessWomen of California's Conference closed with a panel from Fortune Magazine's 50 Most Powerful & Highest Paid Women in Business list.

Laura Liswood, Secretary General for the Council of Women World Leaders was moderating and started out describing her adventure she had when she sought out to interview all 15 living women who had been president or prime minister of their countries. It was an interesting journey, one she was even surprised she was able to complete!

Our panelists that afternoon were Safra Catz, President, Oracle; Deborah McWhinney, President, Citi Personal Wealth Management; and Joanne Maguire, Executive Vice President, Lockheed Martin.

All of the women discussed career paths and how to get what you need from your career.  They all had good advice, but some pieces of wisdom from Ms. Catz really stood out to me.  She noted that no one will make your career easy for you - you need to make your own opportunities. And, back to our  Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide, she simply stated, "you don't ask, you don't get." Then finally, "You're not men. You may be better."

Unfortunately, most of the time for the panel was used up by Liswood's introduction and the two previous speakers and the session ran over by 30 minutes. This meant many of us missed our trains - I know, I was running to the train station with several other women, none of us really appropriately dressed for running :-)

On the bright side, I did get to meet an energetic woman that was just a bit sweaty, like me, on the train, and discuss all that we saw and heard during the day.

Professional BusinessWomen of California: Afternoon Keynotes

The afternoon keynotes at the Professional BusinessWomen of California were focused on financial advice and retirement planning.

Valerie Coleman Morris started out with some sage advice: "Don't worry about what you've lost, you can't get it back."  Harsh, but true. I know I've personally spent too much time on the "what if" game for my 401K and other investments.

Ms. Morris's emphasis on this for woman is due to the fact that in general women spend 13 years less in the workplace than men do - which means we really need to start thinking about retirement sooner and more seriously, to make the most use of all of our working years.  Yes, this is SO hard to think about fresh out of college - all I can say is that I am so glad that there was an older man in my first day of orientation at work that told me retirement is sooner than I thought and talked me into starting my 401K right away.

She warned us that because women live longer, we are more likely to find ourselves with many medical needs that are not covered by any sort of insurance. More reason to save.  Also, she said the average age of widowhood was 55.5, so you won't be able to count on joint social security income or anything of that sort.

Ms. Morris also cautioned all women that were in a committed relationship to make sure that they knew where all the accounts were, where to find account numbers, and any brokerages holding any investments.

To keep our financial planning paranoia going, the next speaker was Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz - yes, the same family as the famous Charles Schwab brokerage. Ms. Schwab-Pomerantz stressed how concerned she was that financial planning of any sort was not being taught in school, and how critical this good planning is for all of us having a secure future.

Ms. Schwab-Pomerantz talked about how to keep our heads above water, even in this economy, giving these few "easy" guidelines to follow (okay, they're not easy, but they definitely have merit and I'm pretty sure she knows what she's talking about):

• Have an emergency fund




•  Should be a minimum of 3 months worth of expenses




• Minimize debt




• Should not have more than 30% of your income in debt




• Save




• Hard to think about while minimizing that debt and creating your emergency fund, but she said that if you think you'll need a retirement income of $50,000 a year you will need to save at least $1.25 million. Wow!




• Have a will and a trust




• Again, hard to think about while young and healthy, but you have no idea what will happen when to either your or your spouse.




• Health Insurance




• Without this, one health crisis may wipe out all of your savings and put you back to square one at any time.

Both of these women gave me a lot to think about!