March 2006 Archives

The Birthday Girl
Originally uploaded by synedra.

Happy Birthday Victoria! My daughter turned 9 yesterday and we had a weekend filled with celebratory fun.

On Saturday we had a wonderful party at the Perfumer's Apprentice in Santa Cruz. The woman who runs this place is truly incredible, with her love of all things scentual and her vast stores of knowledge. I bought an ice cream cake from Coldstone, and Linda (the Perfumer's Apprentice lady) did pretty much everything else, and as a mom I can tell you it was one of the least stressful birthday parties I've ever been involved in. Some of the moms stayed to play and we ended up with 16 people mixing and matching the smells to find the best combination for them. Everybody created their own special scent (using the hundreds of essential oils available for mixing) and went home with a vial of scented oil as well as some body mist. It was like a girly science experiment party and it was incredibly fun for everyone. I can't recommend this place highly enough if you live anywhere near Santa Cruz. It's a real treat and quite a deal at $15 - she's created a wonderful space just to hang out in, and the making of your own perfume is a great bonus.

Mixing perfume is hard work
Originally uploaded by synedra.

Instead of having all presents for Victoria, we had a game swap, so all the participants got to go home with a fun game to play as well. I really prefer this kind of thing for larger parties, because otherwise you end up with a gazillion things that never get played with again, and it's much nicer than the usual goodie bags... I think we've all had enough of those for a lifetime :-)

We came home on Saturday and colored eggs for Sunday (see below :-). Also Victoria got her presents from us, including a FireFly cell phone, which made her deliriously happy.

On Sunday (her actual birthday) we went up to San Francisco to participate in an Ostara ritual put on by the Reclaiming group - we headed up there with my cousin and her family as well as another friend and her daughter. The weather couldn't have been nicer for spreading out a bunch off food on a neat sheet and enjoying the day. Not surprisingly, the circle got started somewhat late, but once it started everyone had fun, singing, dancing, playing with a parachute... and at the end there was an egg hunt for all the kids. My daughter happily reports that it was a wonderful birthday weekend.

Welcome Spring!

As I've mentioned I've gotten a job at Socialtext, which has been a very rewarding job - I tend to spend too much time working but it's generally because I like what I do.

Many folks ask me "What's a wiki?" Well, what *is* a wiki, and what do you *do* with it? I found the niftiest example of what a wiki is at 43 blogs, a list of the 43 best blogs... a wiki list. Which means that anyone who views the page can edit it. Go ahead, add your blog, remove another one, the only rule is that there have to be 43 blogs on the list when you're done, because 43 is the magic number of web 2.0.

I spend a lot of my time these days thinking about how people use the web, and recently, through 43blogs, I ended up at BoingBoing (I couldn't resist clicking a link that said 'boingboing'...) and then from there I found a mention of this hysterical text-adventure version of World of Warcraft. Then I went on to look at other things, and a little later I realized I had to share that link, but alas, I am not in the del.icio.us habit and I had to retrace my steps to figure out which of the zillions of paths I'd followed had led there. Eventually I found it (the sad truth is that even though I could find the end point I needed, for some weird reason, to find out *where* I had found it). Thinking about patterns like this is something our company does a lot of.

One of the reasons this blog doesn't get much love is because I spend a lot of the day blogging internally. And while the blogging features of our wiki product aren't great, I'm becoming very addicted to the idea of LinkAsYouThink, so as I type this entry I'm finding this whole html linking thing getting in the way of my stream of thought. Very sad.

In more mundane news, it looks like we'll be moving back to Scotts Valley, which is nice because almost all my friends live up there.