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One Month Later – A Look Back At Israel

It’s been one month to the day since I’ve returned from Israel… but with as busy as we’ve been with wedding planning and life, it feels like it was forever ago. I think many of us agree that it was probably the best week of our lives, and it sounds like most people are pretty grateful that I went ahead and photo journalistically documented the entire event – even I have been reliving it daily in my desktop wallpapers and screensavers.

Here for you now are some of my favorite photos from the trip, followed the itinerary and some of the highlights.

For more photos (especially the ones with people), check out my special Israel Edition of Jarchiver.

Day 1: Welcome to Israel

Arrival in Tel Aviv

After a 12 hour flight, we were all happy to be on land again and ecstatic to meet our totally awesome tour guide, Beni.

Bus Tour to Jerusalem

No time to waste, it was off to Jerusalem via the official Bellinson Family tour bus! Beni introduced us to the land, culture, politics, and more along the way.

Touring the Old City and Holy Sepulcher

A stroll through the bustling markets and then to the supposed place of Christ’s death.

Day 2: Discovering Jerusalem and Digging up the Past

Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum with survivor Eliezer Ayalon

As you can imagine, Eli’s story was heartbreaking and the Holocaust Museum was an experience which you could call “rough.” It was an amazing experience to meet a man of such strong will and graciousness.

Beit Guvrin Caves – Dig For A Day

Here we were able to participate in an ongoing archeological dig, something I’ve always wanted to do. Most of us found at least one or two bits of 2000 year old antiquities – mostly shards of pottery, small bits of coal and long petrified animal bones.

Western Wall Tunnels

In the tunnels, we were the closest one can get to the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant containing the Ten Commandments was kept according to the Hebrew Bible.

Day 3: Bar Mitzvah Day!

Cooper’s Bar Mitzvah

This was my first experience of the Jewish religion and it was a lovely ceremony.

Israel Museum

Here we had a chance to see some of the art and traditions of the Israeli culture, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Day 4: Heading South – Dead Sea and Masada

Masada

This mountain top was once the home to a group of Jewish extremists, but when troops from the Roman Empire threatened their livelihood they turned to mass suicide rather than give themselves up as slaves to the Romans.

The Dead Sea

It’s true!! You totally float in the Dead Sea! Quite a strange experience, indeed, but very cool.

Dinner in a Bedouin Tent

After visiting a botanical garden and seeking out some wild ibexes, we headed up into the mountains to a remote bedouin camp for an absolutely wonderful dinner.

Day 5: Heading North – Galilee

Central Galilee Partnership 2000 English Program

The Jewish Federation of Detroit is partnered with an Israeli elementary school which we visited and learned a bit about the students and their lives.

Ayelet Hashahar Shooting Range

Time to shoot some uzis!! My first gun shooting almost went out without a hitch – right after instructing us on safety, the teacher shot a live round off right across me while showing me how to pull the trigger. Nice.

Day 6: North to Tel Aviv

Golan Heights Jeep Ride

Off-roading through the cattle fields up to Golan Heights where we met with former colonel, Kobi Marom, to talk politics and relationships with neighboring Syria and Lebanon.

Army Base Security Tour with Kobi Marom

Next, we headed to an Israeli Defense Force base and met with a few soldiers, saw a bunch of missile launchers and ate a bit of Bar Mitzvah cake.

Tel Aviv Tour

And lastly, it was back to Tel Aviv for a few hours of touring and our final Israeli dinner before embarking on the incredible 25 hour journey back home (ouch).

…

So As you can see, it was a fully loaded week – and that flickr set doesn’t even begin to cover it. For more photos (especially the ones with people), check out my special Israel Edition of Jarchiver.

Posted in Photography, Travel | Tagged 2011, family, Israel, Travel | 2 Responses

Weekend Genealogy: Headstone Hunting in Chicagoland

If you’ve been following my blog / twitter / facebook, then you probably know that I recently bought a new car. Well this weekend, I travelled back to the land of Illinois to acquire said car. While there, I took the opportunity to seek out a few ancestors who I knew were in the area. My sister graciously accompanied me.

Overall, our search was a huge success – we found two sets of great-great grandparents and 14 relatives total!!

The Schick Family at Oakridge

Starting with Oakridge Cemetery in Hillside, we knew where to look as our mother had been here before and told us that the family was in section 3, and sure enough there they were. This plot includes my great-grandmother Ella Schick Lindstrom, her parents (my great-greats!) Conrad and Mary (Pagels) Schick, and a few of Ella’s siblings. All of the Schick’s had lovely matching headstones.

And at this point, I have to admit that I feel like an a$$. Somehow, in my excitement over Conrad and Mary, I neglected to photograph Marie Schick’s headstone – I took soooo many photos I must’ve thought I’d gotten her when I didn’t!! Thankfully my sister nabbed a shot!

The Niedzwiecki’s at St. Adalbert’s

Next up, we headed over to St. Adalbert’s in Niles to look for our great-grandparents – Henry and Agnes (Sinwelski) Niedzwiecki. To find them we had to use the burial lookup kiosk, which worked fairly well – but could certainly use some UI adjustments. We found them pretty easily; they both had lovely matching headstones, as well.

In addition to Henry and Agnes, we also knew that Agnes’s younger brother Herman was buried here. Herman died of acute gastroenteritis (infection of the digestive tract) while he was still baby, at the age of one month. As it turns out, Herman was buried in a “term grave,” meaning there is no way to know exactly where he is in the cemetery as these graves are generally unmarked and the caskets are stacked up on top of each other. Here is a great article with more detail on how term graves work: Where are grandma and grandpa? Confusion over term graves

The Sinwelski’s at Holy Cross

In searching the cemetery database at St. Adalbert’s, we came across a few other familiar names in the Sinwelski tree – all now lie rest at Holy Cross Cemetery in Calumet City. Since Calumet City is on the Illinois/Indiana border, I decided to make the detour on my way back to Michigan.

My first stop was in Section 19, Lot 5, where two of Agnes’s brothers lie – Frank S. and Eugene F., both WWII veterans. Interestingly, their graves were separated by an unknown couple – the Grout’s. There were a few other Grout’s surrounding them as well… hmmm.

Just a few yards away, across the road and in the adjacent Section 18, I found another brother – Roman H.

And last but definitely not least, it was time to find the most challenging of them all – Leo and Mary Sinwelski, the Sinwelski sibling’s parents and my great-great grandparents – in yet another adjacent section – Immaculata. All I had was a lot number (no block or grave number), and the numbered signs placed around the section with the intention of providing guidance were really rather confusing, plus I had to clear snow off every grave. But soon enough, I found what I was looking for.

These two were not side by side, but rather toe-to-head – at Leo’s feet lies Mary, which I found to be somewhat strange. Another interesting point is that the database listed Leo with the last name Szinwelski, but his headstone spells it without the “Z.”

Well, that’s it! I think between these great findings and my new car, this qualifies as a pretty successful weekend :)

Posted in Genealogy | Tagged ancestry, cemetery, Chicago, family history, Genealogy, headstone, tombstone | 4 Responses

Farewell to a Legacy

As many of you know, I’ll soon be saying good-bye to the car that I’ve been driving for almost 10 years now.

My 1993 Pontiac Grand Prix.

The Prix has seen her share of good days and bad. From road trips to roadsides, I could always count on an exciting time. She’s come quite a far way in her lifetime of 18 years – rolling in at just over a quarter million miles!

And although she’s had her troubles over the past few years, she’s continued to press on well beyond my highest expectations! In fact, I’ll be taking her on her final hurrah this evening – a five hour, 300 mile drive to Illinois. At this point, I’m about 75% confident it will be smooth travels – so wish us luck!

Farewell, old gal. You’ll be well cared for where you’re going.

Posted in General | Tagged cars | Leave a response

Weekend Genealogy: Walerja

Going to try this out and see how long it lasts… This weekend, I discovered my 3rd great grandmother, Walerja.

Walerja was born in Polish Germany around 1868 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1886 at the age of 14. She married twice; first, around the age of 20 to my 3rd great grandfather – Unknown Szynwalski, also of Polish Germany; and second, around the age of 30 to Unknown Szymczak, also of Polish Germany. She had 10 children, but only 5 of them were living in 1910 – including my 2nd great grandfather Leon. Szynwalski.

All of this information, I’ve been able to extract from one 1910 U.S. census record found on Ancestry.com. Of course, all of it is unverified, but at least I now have a theory and an idea of where to look next!

Additional Finds

First, my 2nd great grandmother (wife of Leon. Szynwalski), Mary Szareck’s New York Passenger List entry. I now know she emmigrated from Dabie, in Polish Austria, at the age of 18. She was 5′2 with blonde hair and blue eyes and destined for Chicago. I’m not sure which ship is the S.S. Bremen in the photo, but either way, it’s no luxury liner.

Second, my great grand uncle (son of Leon. & Mary Szynwalski), Edward Sinwelski’s WWII Army Enlistment record. Edward was married to his wife, Vera Carnagey, in March of 1941 and enlisted in the army a month later in April of 1941. According to the record, he served as a Warrant Officer. After a bit of googling, I’m still not entirely sure what this position entailed, but it’s definitely respected. I found a SSDI for Edward that indicates he died in December of 1982, so I do know that he survived the war. Unfortunately, there isn’t an image for this one.

Those are this week’s big ones – see you next week, I hope!

Posted in Genealogy | Tagged ancestry, blogging, family history, Genealogy, Passenger List, US Census, WWII | Leave a response

RootsTech 2011 Wrap Up

Wow – RootsTech 2011 was an absolute blast, indeed, a techie-genealogists dream come true! I almost don’t even know where to begin, there is so much to say (and so I apologize, because this may get long)! I learned so many great genealogy tips, began formulating some great ideas for genea-tech applications, and met a plethora of interesting people!

If you’re unfamiliar with RootsTech 2011, it was an inaugural conference event at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, that aimed at bringing together professional and amateur genealogists, technology creators, and technology users with the goal of reducing friction and generating stronger ties between the two fields of genealogy and technology.

A side note on Utah, Mormons and Family History

I’ve never been to Utah before, nor did I prepare by doing any sort of research on the city of Salt Lake, so I really had very little idea what to expect. I did know it was a genealogy hub because of the Family History Library, but I had completely forgotten about the massive Mormon population and never really bothered looking into the connection between family history and the Latter Day Saints.

As I quickly learned, Mormon’s are such avid family historians because they hold the belief that people who have died before them can be baptized into the church by proxy, allowing ancestors who weren’t living church members to join them in the afterlife. This essentially means that if your grandfather was a serial killer or baptized Catholic, for example, you could be baptized by the church of Latter Day Saints on their behalf, thereby allowing them to leave their “spirit prison” and join you in the heavenly afterlife. Apparently, people like Adolf Hitler and the Pope have been baptized vicariously in this way. From what I can tell, Mormons base this belief on a single New Testament scripture line:

“Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?” — 1 Corinthians 15:29

For more on this controversial concept of baptism for the dead, there’s a great article on Wikipedia.

That all being said, I found Salt Lake to be a very strange city – comprised mostly of white folk, most of whom seemed to be Mormon, and many of which were recruiters. While this population did seem to contribute to the overall sense of safety and order of the town, it definitely left something to be desired. I can’t say I’ll ever go back to Salt Lake except for the next RootsTech conference which is already scheduled for February 2-4, 2012.

Back to the conference! Between the keynotes, sessions, nightly events and vendor exhibits – there wasn’t any time to waste. So, let’s get to the highlights!

Sessions

Digital Images for Genealogists & Technologists

Lead by Geoffrey Rasmussen of Legacy Family Tree, this session looked at tools and techniques to help with digital image cleanup, preservation and organization. Geoffrey focused primarily on using Photoshop Elements and Picasa for both manipulation and organization, but touched on a few other services as well. Both PhotoShop Elements and Picasa offer offline photo organization as well as online backups (for a fee, of course). And since both services offer slightly different features, Geoffrey suggested using the combination for ultimate organization and meta tagging assistance.

This was a very interesting session for me personally, as I recently developed my own DIY photo archiving solution: jarchiver.com. At the time of development, I had avoided services like Picasa as I felt they were too detached from other aspects of genealogy and in the case of sites like Flickr, required hefty monthly payments. While I’m still not sure what my ultimate photo organization solution is, a lot of good ideas definitely came out of this session. I discovered another interesting option from one of the vendors called PhotoLoom, which ties your tree into your photo storage – so I’ll definitely be looking at this service in the future.

Systems and Methods for Geospatial and Temporal Interpretation of Genealogical Data

Bernie Gracie lead this session which went over using his site, AncestralHunt.com, to break down brick walls by looking in depth at the geographical locations and migrations of your ancestors and their communities. Most of the session was a demo of the service, which made it clear that there’s a lot of potential for this kind of research – especially since a large part of what the site offers is community collaboration.

Since the nature of family tree research is so fluid, Bernie suggested using the site as a tool for ideation and theorizing, rather than a place to keep verified data. This concept in itself is worth noting. A related idea was presented by Jimmy Zimmerman in an Unconferencing session: since our trees are ever changing and since we often encourage collaboration, while simultaneously fearing the inadvertent destruction of all our hard work, why not implement a kind of version control system for family trees?! Think github for your ancestry! You want to invite your cousin to work on your tree, but you don’t want her going in and tearing shtuff up – create a “branch” of your tree that see can work in! When she’s done she can submit her changes back to you and it will ultimately be your decision whether or not to include them in the main trunk.

Google Earth for Genealogy

This session, lead by Lisa Louise Cooke, host of the Genealogy Gems Podcast, demonstrated how you can create virtual tours of your ancestry using Google Earth. These tours can help tell your family story in a very visual and engaging way, so they’re great for people don’t quite understand your obsession with genealogy.

To create a tour, you essentially plot a bunch of points on Google Earth which you can then “play” through. Each point can contain any amount HTML including embedded images, videos, and audio recordings. So as the tour plays and Google Earth pans around the globe to each point, it launches each coordinate description allowing you to effectively tell the tale of your family.

Events

Night at the Clark Planetarium

As unrelated to genealogy as astronomy is, this event was a pretty great time. Between the free food (which was pretty tasty), 3D IMAX movies, star shows in the Hansen dome theater, prize drawings, and other exhibits, there was plenty for everyone to do.

My favorite part of the night was watching Hubble 3D in the IMAX theater. Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, this eye-candy film documented the efforts of the seven astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis and their mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. The whole film was full of breathtaking views of Earth, distant galaxies and other celestial presences. It was really just a pleasure to take in.

Late Night at the Family History Library

As the heading implies, the Family History Library stayed open late especially for RootsTech attendees. Genealogists were able to utilize the libraries resources and expert knowledge through midnight. There were also a few showings of the newest “Who Do You Think You Are?” episode featuring Tim McGraw, but I skipped those to see what interesting documents I could dig up.

I started in the family history book section and looked for family surnames but didn’t come across any matches. Next, I moved to the computer and began searching through all the paid databases I normally don’t have access to. I wasn’t as prepared to do research as I should have been, so I basically performed a bunch of generic surname searches with focus on a few key ancestors. I managed to come across one concrete document – a death notice from the 1943 Chicago Tribune for my great grand aunt, Marie ‘Bibs’ Schick.

I also found a few leads on my great-great-great grandfather, Christ Pagels, which could very well pan out!

Vendors

Flip-Pal

Flip-Pal definitely stole the vendor show with there amazingly awesome portable scanner. This battery-powered mobile scanner will take 300-600dpi scans and comes with an SD card that’s pre-loaded with stitching software allowing you to take multiple scans of large documents that can be seamlessly pieced together later on. And just incase you don’t have an SD card reader in your computer, they even throw in a USB adapter (seriously, awesome bonus)!

Now when I say Flip-Pal stole the show, I wasn’t kidding – they sold out of their conference stock each day and had to get more shipped in every night. There were hordes of people around their booth in awe of the nifty little device. And while I didn’t buy one on the spot (simply because I didn’t want to carry it around with me, nor was there a conference discount), I promptly ordered one online when I got back to the hotel.

Check out this glowing review of the device for more info.

GeneTree

GeneTree was the other vendor I found to be of great interest. They provide a genome mapping service similar to that of 23andMe, which I’m already participating in. Talking with the folks here definitely helped to clear up some of the confusion I have with my 23andMe results and their vendor demo session provided a lot more background on how DNA moves from parent to child and how you can begin interpreting the results. I’ll likely give their service a try as it’s focused on the genealogical aspect, rather than both health and ancestry, and includes a lot more in terms of graphing and data interpretation.

To show my support and intent, I picked up one of their very sweet t-shirts:

Salt Lake City

While I didn’t have too much free time to tour around the city, I was able to visit the LDS temple and visitor center, a few local pubs, and the infamous Salt Lake. I saw some very cool things, and many, many strange / interesting things. Here’s a sampling:

The Cool

The art
The lake
The mountains
The old architecture
A Star Wars theme song playing bagpiper

The Weird

Mormon recruiters
A Mormon rave
Adjacent wedding & nude photo shoots on the lake
Dead birds all over the lake bed
The lack of cultural diversity

Conclusions

All in all – RootsTech was a pretty good time and I can’t wait to see what they pull off next year! There’s already been a ton of great feedback and the blogosphere still can’t stop talking about it.

I’ve posted all of my photos over on jarchiver, my personal photo archiving app, so check those out for even more good times.

Now it’s time for me to end this novel and get back to my research – I bought three pretty awesome books on Sweden, Chicago and Google from the book vendor! See the photo for book details and to see the awesome laptop bag I got as a participant of RootsTech!

Peace.

Posted in Genealogy, Technology | Tagged 2011, family history, flip-pal, Genealogy, genetree, google earth, mormons, RootsTech, Salt Lake City, Technology, Travel, Utah | 1 Response

CodeMash 2011 Recap

It’s been one week since CodeMash 2011 ended and I have to say that I’m still feeling a bit of a geek high from the experience of it all. This years CodeMash was my first developer conference ever, so it was pretty interesting to see the whole dev-geek community come together in all of its energy and diversity.

Overall, I attended three keynotes, a product launch, eight presenter sessions, a vendor session and an open space talk. It was a pretty packed two days to say the least. But of all those events, I’d say the three that stood out to me most were:

Scott Chacron’s (Github) keynote on Developer Driven Development & the Open Source Business Model
Mobile Smackdown – 3 mobile platform developers took 15 mins each to attempt the construction of the same basic Twitter app.
Women In Tech open spaces discussion session.

Read more about each of these sessions below, along with summaries of my favorite sessions.

Session Notes

Netflix in the Cloud

Carl Quinn | @cquinn | Presentation Slides

Netflix in the Cloud was an extremely in-depth look at how Netflix runs their service in the Amazon AWS cloud. This presentation was pretty well over my head for the most part, but it was very interesting to see how a site with so much traffic is structured.

The talk began with a discussion of the downfalls of their old data center solution, followed by a thorough overview of their new, faster, scalable, available, and productive cloud architecture.

There’s no way I could possibly try to explain their setup, so I took a few screen grabs from of the slides (click to enlarge):

Netflix Deployment on AWS
An overview of the Netflix deployment setup on Amazon AWS

Netflix EC2 Instances per Account
A look at Netflix processing usage of Amazon AWS

Netflix Service Interaction Pattern Swimlane Diagram
A request from start to finish, look at all those caches!!

If you’re interested in hearing all the nitty gritty, check out the presentation linked above for a full hour long session video.

jQuery 102

Rod Paddock | @rodpaddock | Presentation Slides

While I was already relatively familiar with most of the “advanced” concepts presented in this talk, Rod Paddock’s explanations and demonstrations certainly helped to reinforce my understanding of those techniques.

Topics discussed included:

The basic jQuery selector methods
Dynamic UI functions like live, liveQuery, and bind – used to attach events to elements in the DOM
Sending AJAX requests with ajaxSend and ajaxSetup
My personal favorite, creating pretty popups with the dialog method
And of course, how to create a jQuery plugin.

To my teammates reading this: If you attended the jQuery Summit web conference in November, there’s not a ton of new stuff, but it’s certainly a good refresher.

Test Driven JavaScript (Vendor Session – Pillar)

Justin Searls of Pillar | @searls | Presentation Slides

This vendor session focused primarily on Jasmine, the JavaScript test framework. I wasn’t able to take many notes, as Justin miraculously managed to fly through 60 slides and numerous demos in a quick 20 minutes, but it was an interesting introduction to JavaScript testing overall.

For those of you wondering why you should even bother testing your JavaScript, Justin referred us to one of his previous presentations: JavaScript Craftsmanship – Why JavaScript is worthy of TDD.

Going offline with HTML5 and iPhone

Michael Ball | @ballmw | Presentation Slides

Webhitter 2.0

Instead of taking notes in this session, I began working on my first mobile web app – which has since evolved into a jQuery Mobile TV remote interface. The “Presentation Slides” linked above are not actually slides, but rather notes. So you may want to use it more as a reference than a guide – there are a lot of good tips.

Developing High Performance Web Applications

Timothy Fisher (Compuware) | @tfisher | Presentation Slides

This was an extremely well put together session by Compuware Technical Consultant, Timothy Fisher, focused on client-side optimization, with an emphasis on loading JavaScript.

Timothy first explained why frontend performance matters (basically because this is typically where the enduser spends the most time waiting, it’s easy to optimize, and you’ll see big results), and then went on to review the most common frontend optimization best practices:

Reduce HTTP requests – combine JavaScript and CSS into fewer files, sprite images
Use a CDN – content delivered by a fast distributed network
Make pages cacheable – add expires headers, use static content
Use gzip compression – “60-80% savings on text based content”
Place stylesheets at the top – keep them external and avoid @import
Place scripts at the bottom – allows page content to be render first, keep external
Minify JavaScript and CSS – save bandwidth / download time
Maximize Parallel Downloads – split components across domains, enables browsers to load more in parallel
Optimize Images – avoid high-res unless it is intentional, don’t let browser scale images, sprite images

Next, Timothy moved on to loading JavaScript, stating that, “no single Javascript should execute for more than 100mS to ensure a responsive UI.” This portion included:

Using Web Workers to allow for asynchronous JS execution
Various methods of setting up non-blocking JS loads:
- Dynamic Script Elements – can run at top of page
```
var script = document.createElement('script');
script.type = "text/javascript";
script.src = "file.js";
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);
```
- Script Injection – uses AJAX to get the JS. The big advantage is that you can control when the script is parsed and executed, but the script must be served from same domain.
- Recommended Method: Dynamically load the rest of the JS needed
```
<script src="loader.js"></script>
<script>
  loadScript("the-rest.js", function(){
    Application.init()
  });
</script>
```
An overview of open source JS loaders – ControlJS, LabJS, and RequireJS

The presentation slides are definitely worth checking out!

Mobile Smackdown

Jeff Blankenburg (Windows Phone 7) | Chris Judd (Android) | Daniel Steinberg (iPhone)

As the name implies, this was one #BADA55 session where three developers from three mobile platforms took turns in an attempt to build the same basic Twitter application for each of their respective platforms in 15 minutes each.

Daniel Steinberg kicked off with iOS development and literally flew through it – he had to have practiced that before! Chris Judd followed up with Android and made it about half way through development before his time ran up. And Jeff Blankburg didn’t get very far at all with Windows Phone 7.

What does it all mean? Well, probably just that some came more prepared than others, but overall it was a very cool comparison and introduction to each of the development platforms.

The Open Source Business (Keynote)

Scott Chacron (Github) | Presentation Slides

This presentation was the last keynote of the conference, but it was certainly not the least. Scott brought his insight into the open source business and what he calls “developer driven development,” suggesting that any organization can integrate open source methodologies into their practice.

The main characteristic of open source businesses that Scott focused on was this concept of “developer driven development” which essentially boils down to one thing: trust. He suggests that if you trust your employees and give them what they want – they’ll do better work than you could’ve even imagined. Throughout his presentation, Scott touched on roughly five key aspects of DDD:

Autonomy
Power / Responsibility
No meetings
No feature backlog or roadmaps
Free beer!

According to Scott, applying these concepts to your business can result in increased productivity, agile development, and more good ideas. They also give the developers a lot of flexibility in how and what they work on, ultimately keeping developers interested and attached.

Women In Tech (Open Space)

Women in Tech – I love how we all have demon eyes!

Yes! There were women at CodeMash, somewhere around 40 from what I heard, and our numbers are growing!! This informal open spaces discussion session was my introduction to the world of girly geeks, but it certainly won’t be my last.

Coming from a job where I was the only female employee over a three year span, I could definitely relate to challenges of being a woman in tech. At the same time, I feel extremely fortunate to have joined a company like Quicken Loans where gender diversity is encouraged and much more prevalent. I now work with numerous females and I couldn’t be happier – just being able to relate to and identify with other women is a huge boost to motivation, creativity, and overall comfort.

I’ll definitely be looking into participating in more Women In Tech groups – I’ve even discovered Girls In Tech Detroit which I hope to get involved with in the future.

Wrap Up

So there it is, a relatively high-level overview of my CodeMash 2011 adventure. All-in-all, the entire event was a great learning experience and a lot of fun. In fact, my only real complaint was the lack of tea provisions haha! (Seriously though, not everyone drinks pop and coffee!)

Looking for more presentation slides? Here’s an aggregated list of CodeMash 2011 Presentation Slides.

Posted in The Web | Tagged business, cloud, codemash, development, html, javascript, jquery, mobile, Technology, women | 1 Response

I’m on WordPress!

Yay! I’ve made the Mephisto-WordPress conversion and now have one less mongrel process eating up resources on my slice :)

Lovely theme, eh? It’s called Color Paper and it’s FREE from Smashing Magazine.

That is all for now… stay tuned – cool things should start to happen soonish ;)

Posted in General, The Web | Tagged mephisto, wordpress | Leave a response

It’s Alive!!

Very nice. Had to save this one :) Get Your Cyborg Name

Posted in General, Home | Leave a response

I Admit It…I Suck At Blogging

And it’s taken me a whole week to write a post that says I suck at this…

Well, maybe I’ll go for more of a tumble log type setup – that way I can be short, sweet and simple.

Then again… how would that be any different from my Twitter account ?

Well, maybe I’ll post soon… maybe not. I make no promises, but I’ll try harder.

Ciao