Category: Personal

Blast From the Past

A lot of things from our younger days can be disappointing when you revisit them as an adult. I used to love Yodels cakes (aka HoHos, if you’re not in the Northeast), for example — the cake, the filling, the crunch of the chocolate coating as you bit into it — but they taste like crap to me today. At any rate, I’m here to report that there’s at least one thing that I still love as much today as I did when I was 15:

Swedish Fish

Oh how I love them. (Except maybe the green ones. I eat them first because I like them the least. )

I love Swedish Fish so much that I rarely buy them, because I know all too well that I’ll eat the whole damn bag in one sitting unless I exert a LOT of willpower.

I had some today. I’m trying to be good and not gobble the entire bag of them, but it is not easy.

9/11/01

Six years.

I was thinking this morning about 9/11, and about closure.

They say that 9/11 was the Pearl Harbor of our generation. I suppose that’s so. But America had closure for Pearl Harbor eventually — we fought and won World War 2.

What do we have? Iraq, which regardless of whether we win or lose is not closure, because Saddam Hussein didn’t cause 9/11. We don’t have Osama Bin Laden, and for all we know, we never will. He may be skulking in a cave in Asia, or he may be rotting in an unmarked grave. Either way, no closure there.

So what do we do?

I had some thoughts last year about time and the memory of pain. I find my feelings haven’t changed all that much since then.

Two years after 9/11, it was still painful for me to be at work that day. Tomorrow will be an normal workday for me; we’re even having a special event, part of a new product launch.

But in my heart, I’ll still feel the pain.

God bless you, Kath, wherever you are.

I Need a New Handle

I’ve been going by ‘Fiat Lux’ online for 4+ years now, but I think it might be time for a change.

I’m getting very tired of being called ‘Fiat’ by people, for one thing. I’m a person, not a car. Yet for whatever reason, people fixate on the first part of a name when creating a nickname, not the second half.

As I’ve said before, I’m also getting very tired of having my comments on WordPress blogs filtered into the bit-bucket because whoever runs the Akismet spam filters decided that the phrase ‘Fiat Lux’ is spam.

So what are my options?

I’ve been using ‘rslux’ as my blog handle on WordPress blogs recently (it’s also my Twitter handle), so that’s one option. It’s not terribly catchy, though, and it incorporates my middle initial, which I don’t usually use, so it has the potential to be confusing.

I could also start using my real name more. It’s not my first choice either, because frankly it makes me feel unsafe. Being female and having an easily Google-able name makes me gun-shy of putting my full name online more than I need to, although I’ll be the first to admit that any information any stalker could ever want or need about me is already available online, one way or another. Plus, if I were that concerned about my privacy, I would have picked some other domain name for my blog.

There’s also an argument in favor of using my full name — doing so is better for my own personal branding. But as Kathy Sierra saw, that’s a very two-edged sword. I’m just not sure I want to go there.

I suppose I could split the difference of all the options and switch to using ‘Lux’.

There’s one other issue to consider — there are some blogs where I’ve been a regular commenter under my current handle. I either have to keep my current handle, or risk losing my identity and credibility on those sites.

What do you think?

Making Friends and Eating Chocolate

Scott and I headed up to San Francisco today to catch the Ghiradelli Square Chocolate Festival. We had a great time, and tasted a lot of yummy chocolate goodies.

We also got to make the acquaintance of a very friendly bird (a Cockatoo, I think) who was visiting the festival with her keeper. She stepped right onto Scott’s good arm and allowed herself to be petted and photographed:

Scott and Friend