Bridge School Benefit

I made it to my first Bridge School Benefit concert this past Sunday. Performing on the 28th were Regina Spektor, Tegan & Sara, My Morning Jacket, John Mayer, Tom Waits & Kronus Quartet, Jerry Lee Lewis, Neil Young & Metallica. *whew* It was quite an incredible lineup, and with the exception of Metallica, I was quite impressed with how quickly each performer set up & tore down to keep the show moving. All sets were acoustic. I had never heard of Regina Spektor before the concert, but I was very impressed with her music - I'll have to get one of her albums.

Maybe I'm just too easy, but I loved Tegan & Sara, too. I had only heard their one big song before, and was impressed with the rest of their material. I also hadn't known before the show that they were twins. Pretty neat.

Tom Waits with the Kronus Quartet had to be the best performance of the evening. The energy was amazing, the crowd was thrilled, he sang new songs and old songs and didn't hold back at all. I particularly liked his performance of The Day After Tomorrow. His energy and connection to the audience was just amazing.

It was quite an honor to see THE Jerry Lee Lewis perform as well. He did all of his big hits; Roll Over Beethoven, Sweet Little 16, Good Golly Miss Molly, and Great Balls of fire and a few more. We got to dance to Jerry Lee Lewis live - wow, truly a once in a lifetime experience.

I feel asleep during Neil Young. I swear, most of his 35 minute set was one song (and my friends, who did not sleep, agreed). I like Neil Young, he was just a bit too mellow for me live.

And then there was Metallica... oh, sweet, Metallica, what are you doing? First of all, it took them at least 40-45 minutes to set up (other bands did tear down & set up in 15 minutes), then their roadies came out and did sound checks for at least 10 minutes - conflicting horrendously with the music the amphitheater was playing to entertain us during the break. If I never hear a monotonous "Hey, Hey, Hey" again, it will be too soon.

I love Metallica. I saw them the first time in the 80s on their Justice For All tour. I have most of their albums, I used to play many of the Black Album tracks on my bass guitar. I was just really annoyed with the long delay and annoying roadies, so I started in a bad mood. For some reason, they chose to do mostly covers - which is alright, but covering Rare Earth? That was a bizarre choice. It got better, as they moved onto Nazareth covers and finally into Metallica songs. I'm not sure why they did so many covers, when it was much more interesting to hear Metallica songs done acoustically (and in one case, a completely new arrangement). I think this was my 5th or 6th time seeing them in concert, and I guess I just wanted more Metallica. Once they got to playing, and playing their own stuff, they ROCKED.

It was a great day out - I love being in the lawn for these types of concerts. Much more freedom for dancing, walking around, and just hanging out.

Good geeky fun song

this just popped up on IRC - a guy singing about the basic mess we're in with IPv4 to the tune of American Pie. Definitely worth the extended version listen!  You just might be a networking nerd if you find yourself laughing out loud more than once... ;-)

Miss Molly Bell's class

I've been taking a 10 week intensive acting class in Menlo Park on Monday nights - it's been great so far! Molly's been dancing our behinds off, and we've been getting exposure to more contemporary work than I've ever seen before in my years of doing community theater! She's very direct, and is getting a lot out of each of us. I'm still stuck in some of my personal classic ruts (like trying to belt notes that really should be sung in my head voice), but she's given me some exercises to help with that. I just need to take time at the piano this week to try to work through them. She also gave us each two monologues to prepare for next week. We don't have to have them memorized, but still, a lot of work to do!

It's so good being home again - I'm still just unwinding my head from the Grace Hopper conference. That was so intense, too! I was up every day by 7:30AM EST, and generally busy with conference related activities until 11:30 or midnight. Now, just to get caught up on my missed work, and act on all the cool things I learned here.

Miss Molly Bell's class

I've been taking a 10 week intensive acting class in Menlo Park on Monday nights - it's been great so far! Molly's been dancing our behinds off, and we've been getting exposure to more contemporary work than I've ever seen before in my years of doing community theater! She's very direct, and is getting a lot out of each of us. I'm still stuck in some of my personal classic ruts (like trying to belt notes that really should be sung in my head voice), but she's given me some exercises to help with that. I just need to take time at the piano this week to try to work through them. She also gave us each two monologues to prepare for next week. We don't have to have them memorized, but still, a lot of work to do!

It's so good being home again - I'm still just unwinding my head from the Grace Hopper conference. That was so intense, too! I was up every day by 7:30AM EST, and generally busy with conference related activities until 11:30 or midnight. Now, just to get caught up on my missed work, and act on all the cool things I learned here.

GHC: goodbye

It's about time to go and finish packing and head to the airport. I'm in Innovation Strategies: Finding the Big Idea, but I have to leave early and the session started late, so I'm not going to write anything up on this session - but Brittany is blogging this session right next to me, so it'll be covered :-)

Sponsor Night last night was incredible - got to talk to so many amazing women, meeting new people, reconnecting with friends and even bumped into a woman, Heather, that I went to Snider High School with in Fort Wayne, IN. Small world!

This was such an amazing conference - I've got so many things to take away from this. So much to think about. I'll try to write more thoughts on all of this later - but for now, I need to pack!

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

GHC: Entrepreneurship: The Fundamentals (and Fun) of Idea Generation

Entrepreneur Denise Brosseau led us through two exercise on idea generation.

The first was a bit hectic, as the assignment was not totally clear to everyone. We all knew we were supposed to be talking about existing products, but many of us were coming up with new improvements/add-ons/etc for these already existing things - when we were actually supposed to be discussing other people's recent improvements to various technologies. We learned techniques that worked and several that did not. We were under an extreme time crunch, which force us to keep moving and really focus, but didn't give us any time to flesh out ideas. We also realized, too late, that our group was too large to communicate effectively. These were all the concepts she wanted to get - and we had fun in the process!

Our second exercise was to come up with new ideas for computers in 8 categories, things like globalize, futurize, and expertise. One of the women in my group quickly realized we had 16 people, so we then divided into brainstorming groups of 2. We were able to get a lot more ideas out and could each focus on a specific area without being inadvertently constrained by the other minigroup's thought branches.

This was a lot of fun & gave me a lot of ideas about thinking out of the box.

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

GHC: Panel: Outstanding Women in Computer Security

This panel had women from both industry and academia: Carol Taylor, Eastern Washington University; Rose Shumba, Indiana Univeristy of Pennsylvania; Kathy Jenks, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Becky Bace, Infidel . The moderator, Carrie Gates from Computer Associates, asked each woman to start out answering a few set questions. I've captured a few of their answers and related ideas below.

Carol Taylor recommends having a multi-disciplinary background to be successful in computer security field, and she loves the field because there are never ending problems that are very socially oriented.

Rose Shumba said grants from NSF & Cisco really helped her to get involved in information assurance, as they wanted a security lab set up and to have security worked into their courses at IUP, so she really had to dive in and get hands on experience. She recommends that you attend as many conferences you can, including black hat conferences, in order to keep your skills sharp.

Kathy Jenks sort of morphed from an individual contributer developing software into a management role, which eventually led to being in a position to bring up an awesome team of security engineers for the Solaris operating system. (that's the group I'm a member of ;-) To be successful, she recommends being curious, paying attention to the industry and discussing security from an objective perspective.

Becky Bace grew up in the south (North Alabama) and started her own company in 1998 (Infidel). She got into security on accident, by taking a job a friend recommended her for and suddenly found herself working on an early Intrusion Detection System. Since then, she's written two books on security, funded security research programs (like CERIAS at Purdue) and companies, among many other major accomplishments in the industry. Becky Bace mentioned again how important mentoring was to her career success (a repeated theme in this conference!) She sees this as a great field for women, since it is still growing, is very dynamic and has great social implications.

This was a really cool panel - it was so neat to hear from successful women in the industry!

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.