KatysBlog

Agave is one of my favorite plants. I am growing an agave
hedge along the side of our driveway; in a few years, it will be
taller than I am. The stiff and thorny strap-like leaves arrange themselves
like a living sculpture. Weeding around agave is painful (I use very long
tongs). Some photos of my agave just after a light rain:

Images Copyright 2009 by Katy Dickinson

Here in the Sun Labs area
of the Menlo Park Campus is a coffee bar bulletin board which has
been accumulating comics for years. Some are cut or torn out of
papers or magazines or comic-a-day calendars, others are printouts.
Most are either from Dilbert,
XKCD, or
Doctor Fun.
Since XKCD is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License, the original comics can be
included in this blog. Old Dilbert cartoons are harder to search for
and are very restricted in how they can be reproduced. Doctor Fun is
no longer published but there is a good
Dr.Fun’s
Cartoon Search page.

One of my favorite postings is the list of
Merged Book Contest Winners, including:

• “Green Eggs and Hamlet” –
  
  Would you kill him in his bed? Thrust a dagger through his head? I would not, could not, kill the King. I could not do that evil thing. I would not wed this girl, you see. Now get her to a nunnery.
• “Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi”-
  
  Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to prove Rudyard Kipling’s theory that the mongoose first came to India on a raft from Polynesia.
• “Paradise Lost in Space”-
  
  Satan, Moloch, and Belial are sentenced to spend eternity in a flying saucer with a goofy robot, an evil scientist, and two annoying children.

The most melancholy cartoon is by
Sipress from the 3/23/2009
New Yorker, showing the head of a company speaking to a large group of employees gathered in his office: “We’re still the same great
company we’ve always been, only we’ve ceased to exist.”
One of the funniest is a chart comparing

How the HR department reads your resume vs.
How a programmer reads your resume. (I haven’t been able to tell
where this comes from, but I found copies all over the net.)
My addition to this board was a page from The New Yorker
(9/21/2009) with a story by Paul Simms called

“Attention, People of Earth”.

Below is a sample of what some very educated geeks think is funny.

Doctor Fun

• 
  Hiram P. Doodle and some of his many patents
• 
  The HP DittoJet

XKCD

The Board

Images Copyright 2009 by Katy Dickinson

The new
Willow Glen Lions Club was one of many organizations
providing volunteer crossing guards for the

Trick-or-Treat Trail sponsored by the

Willow Glen Business Association on Lincoln Avenue. Thousands
of little kids walked the trail, collecting candy and treats from
the local businesses. Since
Halloween was on Saturday this year, children went to school in costume
the day before. The Trick-or-Treat Trail was on Friday, timed so that kids
could go right after school. There were many dogs in costume too because
of the special contest for them.

On Halloween itself, John and I had dinner with some friends in Palo Alto
and then made the rounds with their kids. One Palo Alto house had a very
elaborate witch’s cave, another had an

Area 51 scene, complete with spacecraft on the roof, jeep on
the lawn, and creepy alien experiments. We saw the house that
dresses its concrete goose for all holidays and admired her witch’s
costume. Rumor had it that
Steve Jobs’ house had the most elaborate decorations but the kids
were tired so we didn’t go see.

Willow Glen Trick-or-Treat Trail

Palo Alto Halloween

Images Copyright 2009 by Katy Dickinson

I have recently been experimenting with
Facebook
Fan Pages. This is a Facebook web page not for an individual or a
membership group but rather in support of a cause or organization. The
instructions imply that these pages are often used for celebrities,
bands or businesses. It seems to me to be a good way to provide pointers
and basic information without too much structure.

I have created two fan pages:

• 
  SEED Engineering Mentoring Program. This has 37 fans so far. I added links to
  the new Sun Labs technical report
  
  “Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009” and to
  Katysblog and welcome ideas of what else fits.
• 
  Young at Heart, Children’s Worship Service for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (Saratoga, California). This has 8 fans so far. Some of the photos I took for that
  page:
  

I am still working out how best to set up a Facebook Fan Page, playing
with the options and reading through tutorials, like

How to: Create a Facebook Fan Page and

5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page and

Facebook Group vs Facebook Fan Page: What’s Better?. My biggest problem so far is that Facebook’s Search is good for people but not so much for not-people (group, cause, business, organization names). The people I usually ask for advice on
new tools say they have never created a fan page either. So, I am now the
expert (scary thought)! Still working on it…

Images Copyright 2009 by Katy Dickinson