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Jackie's Space5月12日 I love New York!I love New York!
There are so many differences between living in New York City and living in Redmond. I know that sounds obvious and maybe I wouldn’t be as amazed if I’d lived in Seattle instead. I guess this is my first time ever living in a city. I’d always been a suburban girl.
I’ve only had one really bad experience so far. DHL couldn’t deliver a package to me. First, they needed a signature. Since I don’t have a doorman, I was able to sign the slip to authorize them to leave the package. Unfortunately though, it takes a key to get into the first part of the building where the mailboxes are. The postal service must have that key, and UPS has also managed to get through the door. But DHL couldn’t. I called them up to ask if they could deliver after 6 so that I could be home, but they couldn’t. I asked if they could deliver to a DHL shipping location near my apartment, but they couldn’t. The only option I had was to pick up the package from their warehouse location at 12th Avenue and 40th street. I looked at the subway map. There are no subways that go out to 12th Avenue! You can imagine at this point that I was a little irritated. Eventually I ended up walking to 12th avenue, navigating the empty warehouse, and after being bounced through 2 floors I got my package (MSDN subscription in case you’re curious).
So I’m not yet used to not being able to receive packages and drive to places. But I think the benefits far outweigh that experience.
The subway is amazing! There is more diversity than I’ve seen in all the time I was in Washington. I realized that it had been a very long time since I’d seen any children or older people. When I was in Redmond, I only saw people from Microsoft. Now I see all sorts of people every day. It’s exciting to people-watch.
There’s so much to do here, I need to keep reminding myself that I don’t need to do everything the first month. So far I’ve been to a Yankees Game, toured the Bronx Zoo, played Frisbee in Central Park, bought new shoes during a lunch break, taken the train to visit friends in New Jersey and Long Island, eaten at countless amazing restaurants, waited on line for a movie from the Tribeca Film Festival (we didn’t get in), bought furniture for our 350 sq. ft. apartment, seen a few movies in theaters, watched Law & Order in HD on Tim’s awesome TV, and cooked my own rendition of “Sun dried tomato angel-hair pasta ya-gotcha”. I still haven’t seen any plays, been to any museums, or thrown any wild parties. 4月6日 Moving to New YorkHi Everybody,
I'm finally doing it, I'm moving back to New York!
I've had such an amazing time here in WA. I've learned so much and everyone I've met has been amazing. It's gonna be hard to leave all of you.
To help us stay in touch, I'm going to try to blog. I've switched the settings over to "Messenger List only" so that I won't feel like I'm writing to the whole world. I might switch back if people want to use the RSS feed, or if it causes too many problems.
I'm going to try to be vaguely interesting and not just tell you about all the bruises and papercuts I've gotten while packing.
So first interesting thing: at lunchtime debate today we talked about the issue of illegal immigrants and argued two sides.
It's sort of a lesser of two evils scenario. Giving everyone amnesty will encourage people to break into America. Deporting people raises questions about children, conditions at home, etc. What do you think? 12月5日 Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in ComputingWhat a great book! The authors ask why women seem to be less interested in computers and computer science than men, and then come up with suggestions for high school and college programs to attract and retain more women. Everything in this book rang true, and I can imagine that my cs classes would have been much more relevant to me if the professors had read this book. There's a distinction between the reasons men love computer science and the reasons women love it. On balance, men like computer science because they like programming and the satisfaction of success. Women tend to like computer science because of the ways you can use it to solve problems in other fields. Many cs classes feed into this bias by focusing on purely technical problems without explaing the broader significance and showing how the algorithms can be used to solve real world problems. Another obstacle the book discusses is that women often have less previous knowledge than men about computers. Entry level classes biased towards boys might assume that the students already know DOS commands, the general process of creating a program, and several terms and acronyms. Girls were less likely than boys to own a computer, or have previous programming experience. And when the boys in their first cs class show up throwing around words like RAM and Megahertz they feel like they don't know enought to be in the class. The book also deals with the stereotypes of computer science majors. Women who value work-life balance are scared by the image of a nerd pulling all-nighters and the idea that they'll have to give up all of their free time and other interests in order to suceed in the field. The most impressive thing about this book was the results that Carnegie Mellon showed after incorporating the feedback from the research. In 1995 women made up 7% of the incoming class. By 2000 the number had risen to 42%! They also showed great improvements in the number of women still enrolled after two years. The author's website is at http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~gendergap/. 12月4日 In the beginning...there was pen and paper, or ink and papyrus, or something that basically meant that any written communication could go from one person to one person. If you wanted ten people to read your letter you had to sit down and write out ten copies. Then along came the printing press and we could distribute our ideas to a much wider audience. I wonder if Mr. Gutenberg could possibly have imagined blogs. |
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