Jessica and I were talking tonight about various people in my life. I was telling her about friends who were pregnant, those who had a couple children, some with their first. I was telling her about my ultimate friends, my gardening friends, my (now-ex) co-workers, my possible new co-workers, and other people when our conversation drifted to one friend in particular.

We talked about him for a while, until she started asking questions about him that I couldn't answer. I mean, I thought I knew this guy pretty well, but what was his favorite color? Um... I can't say I recall Mark's or Doyle's or Mike's or Andy's or Roshan's or anyone's favorite color but Kris', mine and my little brother's (but his might have changed from the red it was growing up to green or blue or purple, for all I know).

If you're wondering, mine is yellow. Cornflower yellow to be more exact. Not that you can tell with my website.

The conversation led to more questions, though, and even fewer that I could answer. Jessica was surprised. Some of the questions seemed obvious to ask, about significant events that my knowing about wouldn't have seemed unreasonable. Wasn't I curious to know?

The stories had never been offered. I never asked.

Curiosity is an interesting urge, one that I've always had in spades. Not knowing something would drive me nuts, and to anger sometimes, when I was younger. Sure, academically, such a desire is a tremendous force. In the real world, however, needing to know that which, in reality, you don't REALLY need to know, leads to all sorts of heartache, both in the knowing and the not knowing.

The idea of not knowing, and being okay with not knowing, is a remarkably new phenomenom for me. I'm still curious about a lot, and sure, there are a lot of conversations I would love to overhear, decisions I would love to know the reasoning behind, and events of which I would love to be the fly on the wall.

However, knowing isn't always what it's cracked up to be. Sometimes the knowing causes pain in ways we could have never foreseen. And sometimes not knowing is a fine state to be in, because sometimes having the knowledge, knowing the trainwreck that's about to happen, and being unable to affect the outcome, can be an overwhelming burden.

If my friends want to share stories of their past with me, I'll certainly listen. Those are their stories to tell. If they're not ready to tell me, or are never ready to tell me, that's fine, too.

I guess I've finally learned not to be nosy.

If only I could learn tact. That would be nice.

Okay, so, note to self: "Girls in Tech" is not limited to girl programmers. There are lawyers and business women and PR women and contract specialists and caterers and designers and, well phooey, lots of other occupations.

And apparently, all of them are skinny and gorgeous. Holy crap, why is the first thing I notice about all of these women (other than the fact the ratio is 30 women to 3 men), is that they are all well-dressed, made up, thin and for the most part fabulously gorgeous?

Dammit, it's distracting.

My single male friends need to come with me to these events. The ratio of beatiful women to normal women is about 4 to 1 right now. Might be higher.

Kris likes to arrive at airports early. In contrast to this desire to arrive early to the airport so that he can go through customs, er, security stress free knowing he has lots of time to make it through and saunter to the gate, he likes to be the last one on the plane. He wants to board the plane, find his seat, sit, and pass out. Why he can't do this when people are still boarding, I don't know.

As a result of the former Kris quirk, I've started arriving at airports earlier and earlier. I don't particularly mind, as I can write or read when I'm sitting at the airport, it's just a strange way to travel: less stressed. I'm used to being late and being stressed.

So, today when I was trying to figure out what time to leave the house to arrive at the Girls In Tech (a Drupal site!) Negotiations Workshop on time, I budgeted a certain amount of time to grab food, drive to the train station, buy a ticket, make the train, train to the City, walk to the location and sign in on time. Unfortunately, I budgeted TOO much time, made an earlier train, walked faster than I expected to walk, and arrived before the volunteers at the front desk arrived. No one to sign me in.

Adriana Gascoigne, one of the lead organizers, was kind enough to point me the way, and off I went.

I'm here, by myself, wondering, crap, is way early better than slightly late?

So, I went to take a match-yourself-to-a-candidate poll site, choosing 2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz as the one to run through. Kris had commented this morning that McCain was the bottom for him, which was funny, as he had registered Republican in the 2004 election in order to vote for McCain - his quixotic attempt to boost the demented village idiot from office. I was excited McCain was leading the Republican candidates after yesterday's primaries: we might actually have two candidates worth voting for if Obama wins the Democratic nomination.

Yeah, so the poll. I took the poll, annoyed at the question on health care, as none of the options were what I wanted. The question and options were:

15. What should be done about health care?
a. We need a national health insurance system that makes sure everyone is covered.
b. Keep the current system, but cut regulation and give health insurers more control.
c. No significant changes are needed at this time.

My answer would have been: scrap the entire system, and remove the gouging insurance company middle men. Doctor's offices charge $200 a visit because they know the insurance company is going to pay out only $60 of it, and the patient will pay $20. If the insurance company didn't discount so much, the doctor wouldn't inflate the prices, and those without insurance wouldn't be gouged with the $200 bill.

Something like that happened to me when I went in for a doctor-ordered MRI back in the mid-nineties. I received the bill for $2500. The office had taken my insurance information, but never bothered to submit the claim. Instead, they billed me, added late fees and threatened to send the bill to a collections agency. When the insurance company finally paid the bill, it was discounted to around $500. Gee, $2500 from the patient, or $500 from the insurance company. No wonder they went after me.

The problem with a National Insurance program is that someone has to pay the costs. 98% of the time, it'll be the healthy people paying for the unhealthy people (yes, a made up number, but you knew that, right?). I'm not sure people realize that tax revenues don't just appear out of thin air, they are paid by individual people (yeah, yeah, you really think corporations pay that much? Maybe that's where future revenues should come from - have to think about that one). So, when someone decides to spend 200 billion dollars to take down one man who shot at his daddy, that money has come from the pockets of the people around me. When Hillary proposes some everyone's covered insurance plan, that's my tax payment that's paying for that smoker's lung cancer.

And that last statement shows a horrible bias of mine against people who require preventative medical intervention.

I can't say it's particularly merciful. Another topic I should think about before just spouting drivel. The drivel I would spout would be something like most obese and overweight health problems can be prevented by exercise and life-style changes. Many of them are choices. Yes, it's incredible hard to exercise every day if you don't have motivation (like a sport you love), or a friend to go with you. Not exercising is a choice, though, and the consequences are a result of that choice. Same with smoking. Same with (currently illegal) drugs. Ultimately, though I don't like to admit it, the same with depression, which often has a physical cause that needs to be addressed (though, sometimes it's just life).

Yes, there are illnesses, diseases and health issues that aren't consequences: some cancers, juvenile diabetes, Down's syndrome, other genetic anomalies (hell, migraines with aura caused by weather changes - try to blame that one on me!), . These are the ones that should be subsidized by insurance.

Yeah, don't even get me started on the question about the death penalty.

At the end of the quiz, when I received my results, my thought was, huh? Who the hell is Chris Dodd?

Yay Wikipedia!

Chris Dodd and his political positions (we'll forgive him for his gun stance, and applaud everything else).

I'm still voting for Obama.

Wow.

As part of my goal to "get out there" and be "more social" and "network" (all in quotes because I don't particularly like those phrases), I've been signing up and going to various events, such as last week's Bay Area Geek Girl dinner, and tonight's New Tech Meetup.

The make up of this event is based around four demos at the beginning of the event. Four companies send representatives (usually developers) to demo their product, usually a website, to a crowd of about 140 people.

When I walked into the room where the demonstrations/presentations were held, I was sure I was in the wrong place: the New Tech Meetup crowd is WAAY different crowd that I'm used to at tech events.

Instead of the usual crowd of twenty and thirty somethings, all technical, all with projects of their own, most in t-shirts and jeans, with the occasional sweater or sweatshirt, everyone here was older or, more likely, more experienced. The age groups was probably mid-thirties to late fifties (implying to me, money more than passion), and all in business dress. There was practically no color in that room. I saw one guy in an orange t-shirt, and I had on a red shirt. Everyone else was in brown or dark blue.

Disturbing.

After briefly surveying the room, noting that many people were in groups, as they probably knew each other well, or were networking very well, I walked towards the back to sit next to a guy eating pizza by himself. I quickly struck up a conversation with said person, Doug of muck.net.

Doug explained that there were usually 4 or 5 demonstrations, 3 or 4 of which you'll think, "WHY? Why oh why did you make this site?" and one you'll think, "Wow! That's cool!" Each presentation has a questions session after it.

My purpose in coming to this particular presentation was to see how it went so that I could present next month, though I realized as I was walking to the car that I'll actually be in Boston at the Drupal Con 2008, so I'll have to shoot for April instead. I explained what I was doing with rereuse.com, leaving out the part of trying to launch one website a month. He laughed at the thought there might be a potential viable business around helping people give stuff away, but asked me to let him know when I launch the site to beta.

The four sites demonstrated tonight were:

1. Skitch.com
   A way to (seriously) interactively annotate images on the web.

2. hubdub.com
   A current-news outcome forcaster market, where the wisdom of the crowds and news sources is used to answer member posted questions

3. blogbard.com
   A text to speech to MP3 website where you can specify an RSS feed and download the spoken version to yout iPod.

4. seero.com
   A geo-video site where you can tie location into videos, in real time with the right equipment. This demo, although initially disastrous with the presenters' inability to connect to the internet, was the "wow, that's cool" demo of the evening. It was very much the "killer app" for GPS, allowing people with properly enabled phones to essentially annotate their surroundings.

   Of course, it means their surroundings can be plastered with advertisements, too, ruining the effect, but barring marketing overload, it's a great idea.

Now, the reason I went was was not to see these particular demos, though they were interesting, but rather to see what the crowd was like, what the environment was like, what questions were asked, and what did the presenters do right or wrong, so that I did the good stuff and didn't do the bad stuff.

Questions commonly asked:

1. What's your business model? How will you make money? What's your revenue model? (Every demo got this one.)
2. Who is your target audience?
3. How expandable is your site? Do you have an API? How much effort is it to add new services?
4. How are you currently funded? Self? Goal to be acquired?
5. Who is your competition? What is your competitive advantage over them?
6. What's your single sentence pitch?
7. What's the future use of yoru site? Where do you see the site two years from now?
8. How do you prevent your system from being gamed?
9. Do you have historical information? Is it publically exposed?
10. What is your input methodology?

Also of note for presenting in this environment:

1. Repeat the question before answering it, as not everyone in the room will hear the question correctly the first time, perhaps not even you.
2. Stand up when answering questions: the disembodied voice at the front of the room is disturbing for those in the back.
3. Have a local server ready with the demo, if possible, in case the internet goes down before or during your presentation.

Other notes:

How hard is it to turn off your phone for a 45 minute demo session? I mean, come ON. Over six different phones rang during the four presentations, with one owner saying, "Hello? Hello? No, I can't talk right now." If you can't talk, DON'T ANSWER THE PHONE!.

Apparently this issue comes up every year or so.

This was a great event to go to. I'm glad I went, and, as odd as it sounds, I'm glad I went alone to gather the information I needed for my later demo.