Mr. and Mrs. Housman

Our florist made a blog post containing some info and pictures from our wedding.

Below are some other pictures taken by my groomsmen at various times during the day with their iPhones.

First Look

Hotel Lobby

Waiting on the Limo

Steff seeing herself in the mirror

Bride & Bridesmaid's bouquets

Cake Topper

On the way to the Inn

The Cake

Joel's Boutonniere - yes, your eyes do not decieve you. That's 512mb DDR 2 RAM that came out of Steff's Macbook when I upgraded her RAM last year.

Some of the guys, and I

Sunlight in the window

During the reception

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Rube Goldberg

Snowmen Protestors

Only in Washington DC...

Metro Is Cleaning The Tracks!

Steffanie spotted a Metro utility train cleaning the tracks of snow. Maybe Metro will be open tomorrow?

Blizzard of 2010, Part II

A slideshow of the pictures I've taken, starting when the snow began on Tuesday evening:

The video I took of the enormous snowflakes that started falling around 6:30 pm on Tuesday:

Steffanie took some video of Scarlet, one of our cats, attacking the snowflakes that come too close to the window:

Video from Wednesday mid-day when near-blizzard whiteout conditions were present due to high wind & moderate snow:

Blizzard of 2010, Alexandria VA

Duke Street next to the Motley Fool offices at 10:00 pm. The measurement I took at this location was 26" of snow.

The video below was shot at around 12:30 pm as the last major band of snow was coming through. I apologize for the 'crackling' sound. I enclosed the Flip UltraHD in a ziplock bag to protect it from the moisture and cut a small hole in it for the lens. Also, the video is a bit shaky at times because I was concentrating on not falling on my ass because it was very slippery.

Steffanie shot these two videos while we were out, at about the same time as the video above:

Scarlet watching the snow in the window

And finally, one more of our walk through the neighborhood last night after the snow had stopped:

These are photos I took through the weekend, starting on Thursday night when Steffanie and I made the trek to Whole Foods up until the snow had ended and Steff and I took a walk through our neighborhood Saturday night. On our walk, I took several measurements in untouched areas of snow. The measurements varied from 18", to 22", to 26" in the spots I observed. It's hard to tell which one was the most accurate because of the close proximity of tall buildings and the high winds which have been causing bad drifting. Various locations around the DC Metro Area are reporting totals varying from 20" - 30".

And here are the pictures that Steffanie took:

Future Shock

"Future Shock" by Fraser Speirs. This article is simply amazing. Read it.

Some choice quotes:

For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work".

It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.

Read it.

Women Laugh at the iPad

As I watched the Apple event while at work today in which the iPad was announced, I began to notice a lot of people on twitter joking about the iPad's name. They snickered. They giggled. They were angry. They claimed that Apple had little to no women working there. All of these people were in fact specifically women making these comments. I had been watching the Twitter Trending Topics off and on all morning because Twitter had just opened up local trends for me today. I noticed iTampon and iMaxipad were trending. I then got it. Women call Maxipads, just pads. When men hear 'pads' they think of notepads/writing pads/post-it note pads, etc.

Fine. Whatever. Steve Jobs either didn't realize this when he picked the name, or more likely, he didn't care. What really aggravated me was this article written by Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Swisher's article title is "Memo to Geek Dudes: The Inevitable Maxi Pad Jokes About the iPad Are Lame (And Steve Jobs Doesn’t Care Anyway)". I quote her:

Well, that didn’t take long–even as Apple CEO Steve Jobs was launching the new iPad tablet computer today at an event in San Francisco, legions of geeky dudes let fly with the feminine-protection jokes.

It is the name, iPad, that Apple (AAPL) chose for its newest device that sent them deep into wink-wink-nudge-nudge territory about how it sounded like a Maxi Pad and would hurt the brand.

Get it? Get it! Like a tampon! My seven-year-old could come up with a cleverer comparison.

But Silicon Valley being what it is–full of mostly nerdish boys whose median maturity age hovers between 11 and 12 years old, and none of whom has likely ever handled one–this is exactly what you get.

Ok. I need to stick up for us guys for a moment. I didn't make this naming association until a female co-worker laughed at the name and had to explain why she thought it was funny. Since then, I've seen dozens of women I follow on twitter all comment on the name in various ways. I did not see a single guy on my feed (I follow ~ 450 people) comment on the coincidence of the name. I would like to point out to my female friends (and anyone who reads this) that it is not insensitive of men to not have thought of this. We simply do not use them ourselves, and therefore, they aren't something we think about or even talk about, on a regular basis. The meaning of that word is different in our normal vocabulary. It's a gender thing.

Need some evidence of my statements? Go read all of the comments to Kara Swisher's article. I'll quote a few:

nofasdf 7 hours ago
Actually, if you were following Twitter in real time, the source of most of these jokes are females. Nice try though.

davebarnes 6 hours ago
Well, Kara, my wife's first reaction to the name was: "MaxiPad". My brain made no connection to such products, but hers did.

Ksenia Coffman 6 hours ago
I think it was actually women who first reacted to the name; not men (geeks). Men I asked on Twitter said "my mind did not go there," while women snickered and thought the name was 'hilarious.' Could it be the unconscious 'sexism' akin to unconscious racism of "HP's racist computers" (famous YouTube video) - i.e. if it works for whites (or males) it should work for everyone?

msaldana 5 hours ago
Kara, I think that women are really who are making fun about this, for every guy I know it means NOTHING, it was a woman who made me the first Kotex observation, I truly believe that it only sound weird to women.

melodyakhtari 5 hours ago
Actually, I agree with Ksenia. I saw mostly women reacting to the name, claiming that it was an oversight on the part of Apple's marketing team. Women are obviously more comfortable with that topic than men are, which explains why it was women who vocalized (er... twitterized) their reactions more than the gents. To be honest, that's where my mind went first, too.

How much sleeker would a name like iSlate have been?

I'm all for calling a bigot a bigot. I'm all for calling a racist a racist. I'm all for calling a sexist a sexist. But it's pretty hypocritical when it's women making the naming association and, as you say, act like 11 or 12 year olds, and yet, you blame men for it. Sigh.

I'm not saying some men didn't make these jokes and I'm not saying that all women did, but lets try to keep things in perspective people, and for damned sure, do not blame one gender for something when, as I see it, it's the other gender who is doing it.