I have lots of "small thoughts" for today, in no particular order.

• Earlier this week I had a flattering Internet experience that I feel a little funny about blogging about. I’ve been enjoying the "connect the dots" world of LinkedIn since one of my colleagues persuaded me to join earlier this year, but for me, the experience has been more ‘fun curiousity’ than ‘professional networking.

  Until the charming email from the currently-coolest-brand-name-Internet-company’s recruiter arrived earlier this week.

  It was the kind of invitation that I had to fantasize about, but after enjoying the daydream (including the "I wonder if they’d pay enough for us to actually enjoy life in the Bay Area?" part), the facts "I’m having a baby in 4 months and Jill just moved down here in June!" brought me back to reality.

  I sent back a nice note saying that I was flattered by their interest but not interested in changing jobs — or regions of the country! — at this time. I can’t even imagine taking on another big change right now. But wow was it flattering to be asked to dance.

• Lil Smudge is getting a lot kickier. I’ve spent most of my life vaguely dissociated from physical reality — absorbed in a book, a conversation, or whatever I’m thinking about at the moment. So all this physical stuff is jarring on so many levels, and the action keeps me from being able to ignore it.

  My prenatal yoga class* has added an interesting layer to all of that.

  Over the last few years, I’ve come to ‘get it’ that I have a thing about being supposed to know how to do "this" — whatever "this" is. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s just a thing I do.

  In most of life, I’ve learned how  catch when I’m doing it and laugh at myself.

  In the physical realm, not so much. I suspect that’s why the last few times I’ve tried to start exercising, I’ve made it about 3 weeks and then given up or gotten hurt. (I believe in the power of subconcious sabotage. Sometimes an accident is just an accident, but sometimes it fits into a pattern.)

  My point is that this prenatal yoga class has been incredibly confronting for me. I know I’m not as good at this stuff as the other people in the class, and I hate that feeling. It brings up that thing I do.  

  So yesterday, I did a new thing I’ve been learning to do to handle myself and the situation when I catch myself doing that thing I do. I busted myself to the instructor after class. We talked about how much I was resisting her corrections in class, and how confronted I was. I think it helped her too, so she knew it wasn’t personal or anything she was doing wrong.

  And now I have a friendly ally who will help and support me getting physically ready for Smudge to be born, and who will be able to remind me that I’m doing this because of a commitment that’s bigger than me.

• Fruit & Veg Count, 10/26: 1 banana. The downside of prenatal yoga is that I can’t eat dinner before, and I don’t get home until about 8 pm. At that point, I want the fastest, most filling dinner option available. Jill made pierogies, and I inhaled more of them than I planned.
• God, I hope someone senior in Dick Cheney’s office gets indicted today.

  And was anyone surprised to hear Jeb Bush ‘take complete responsibility’ for problems getting water/ice/food to survivors of Hurricane Wilma? W can’t blame the locals in the gulf coast but not in Florida, so Jeb has to be the fall guy for FEMA failures there. Speaking of government "actions" that hopefully will lead to people being indicted at some point.

* The prenatal class is not ‘hot yoga,’ in case anyone was worried.

Boing-Boing includes a link the 100 oldest still-registered domains in the .com domain. The list is interesting, but reading it made me feel visionary old in Internet years.

I first got online in the fall of 1987. I don’t remember exactly when, but October is probably a safe guess. Reno told me about it and showed me how to use e-mail, then our friend
Justin helped me figure out how to email Brian at MIT and Todd at Stanford.

One of my favorite things about email was that back then, each location that the message passed through sent a little message back saying (essentially) "Your message just passed through the University of Texas," or "Your message just passed through PARC/Xerox." 

It took a message about 2 minutes and 6 or 10 nodes to reach MIT, and a little less to get from Reed to Stanford.  The line of text would interrupt whatever else I was doing — really, whoever else I was emailing — on the amber screen of the VAX terminal until it arrived.

(The fact that I found that so interesting may explain the three Maps of the Internet posters in my cubicle. I am a nerd.)

And all that started before at least 6 of the 100 oldest still-registered .coms. Maybe 7 — one registered in late October.

I stumbled on this link this morning and found it amusing.

http://regender.com/index.html

If you put an URL or a google search into this, it will switch all the gender references on the page, including most American names. Richard’s blog was particularly funny (especially the picture of Meredith), as was mine. I thought Leta’s would be funnier. Peter Mulvey’s news page was very funny.

In other news, I have now tested no less than 8 different kinds of toothpaste, including plain baking soda, and plain water, and brushing my teeth still makes me sick. I think I’m going to buy one of those waterpik spray things.

Thanks, Sean, for linking to the Wired article in your comment about the Anti-Spyware Coalition.

Towards the end of the article, there’s a quotation from Ben Edelman that has gotten under my skin. What he said was, "You don’t need a committee of 50 smart guys in D.C. sipping ice tea in order to decide [people don’t want spyware]." (emphasis mine)

As one of the group of people who sat in a room in DC for 2 days, and on numerous heated conference calls, debating and revising these documents, that line just made me feel invisible. And indignant, not only for myself, but for the surprisingly large number of other smart women who actually were in that room and on those calls.

For as long as I’ve worked in the high-tech world, both as a lobbyist and inside tech companies, I’ve had a practice of actually counting the diversity in the room in Big Meetings. (No wonder I didn’t make it as an academic; I’ve never kept those notes.) Men nearly always outnumber women, sometimes 4:1 or more, and the room often has no African Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans. Usually there is at least one Asian, but the room is generally very white.

The Anti-Spyware Coalition meeting, by contrast, was roughly 30% women. And it wasn’t just women from corporate communications offices, as occasionally happens. There were women hardcore technologists, product people, and lobbyists too. And while the room was very white, there was at least one African American and there were at least two Asians.

But even though it is a frustrating fact that there are not very many women in these technology/tech policy circles, it is even more frustrating to have the myth that "there aren’t any" constantly promoted. That simply isn’t true, but repeating it and repeating it and repeating it, and behaving as if it were true, does make women feel unwelcome, and weirdly defensive.

I know that I used to be pretty humorless about inclusive language, and I swear, I’ve lightened up a lot since college. But there’s just this visceral reaction I have to feeling invisible — I hate it, and I can’t ignore it. I don’t think Ben was trying to be sexist. I think he had a picture in his mind of what that meeting probably looked like, and women just weren’t in it.

And I guess the bottom line is that’s what sucks.

I try not to blog about work much, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I spend enough time and energy there.

But I’m working on something I think is cool, and I hope those of you who are technological will participate.

The Anti-Spyware Coalition is a group of big Internet and anti-spyware software companies, and consumer and public interest organizations, that are trying to come up with a common framework for talking about spyware, helping consumers protect themselves from it, and dealing consistently with spyware and adware companies.

We created some draft documents (PDF file) towards that effort, and between now and August 12, we’re seeking public comment. What did we get right? Wrong? Forget? Misunderstand? Fail to address?

There are also 80+ articles online about the Coalition, although almost all of them are edited versions of the same two. But if you want to know more, from a neutral third party, go for it.

Because this blog is really about my personal opinions and life, I haven’t gotten into too many work-related posts. But I really like what I just wrote as an official EarthLink Protection Blogger, on a new Google offering that lets you search your own search history from anywhere, so I’m going to comment on it here.

The only thing I’ll add that I didn’t say over there is, you would not believe how much my vocabulary expanded as a result of being a parental controls technology professional.

But what really cracks me up is that ThinkGeek is now offering a t-shirt for fetishists of a genre I’d never even heard of before getting into this line of work. And when I first saw it, I immediately sent the link to some of my former colleagues with the question, "Is it wrong that I thought of you when I saw this?"

Jessamyn is always a great source for things that are both random and facinating.

For example, you can now get satellite photos from Google Maps.

Here are links to a few places I have lived:

• Milwaukee, the house where I grew up
• Washington, DC, my first house (wow, you can really zoom in close on that one…a little scary, but not surprising)
• Reston, VA, our first home together. Zoom in close enough and I swear that’s Jill’s car in our parking space. Our condo was in the unit positioned like a "C" in the building, on the top/inside of the "C"