The person arguing with me (I maintain I wasn't arguing with him, since I had nothing to argue about--the stuff in the book is the stuff in the book--he can pay attention or not) was saying that first names, even into the future, are an excellent indicator of race. I asked if they may be a better (though fallible) indicator of ethnicity. Since his answer was "same thing!" I could walk away knowing my blood pressure was better this way. Like, seriously, why tell a black chick with a Hispanic/Israeli/Irish name and at least three Natashas on her mother's side that you can divine anything from first names--and use Natasha as your example?

In fact, rather than the pageview article everyone was reporting on yesterday like it had already had an effect on all the babies named in 2012, I'd love to see a chart of naming trends in ethnicities. Who wants to call their kid Arya? Just white Anglo Americans? Who?

I just received a call from a student inquiring about a job I have open, and he sound JUST LIKE Dr. Nigel-Murray from Bones. I am not sure I could work with him!

Oh man. I didn't fall asleep till after midnight and slept through my alarm. I still ended up with 7 hours sleep and yet I'm EXHAUSTED. I have no concentration or motivation, whatsoever. And, of course, I have a ton of work to get done.

When I started doing tech support, nearly 15 years ago now, people were often surprised to be working with a woman. I just realized I'm on a conference call with two other women, and we're all comfortably discussing our various programs. I don't know if it's because I'm working with companies with a computer bent more often, but women are by no means remarkable in my sort of tech stuff. Even when I'm talking to people working on their own, without corporate backup, no one's surprised to be talking to a woman. I'm still sometimes mistaken for a man, but that's more because I have a low voice and people sometimes hear my name as Tommy.

For the first two years I worked here, I was the only woman in Tech Support. Six years into the job, I'm one of four. The world, it progresses.

Connie, that's good to know!

Suzi, that's pretty much my every day. I've been trying to recalibrate my internal clock, but it hasn't worked so far. My clock wants to stay up til 1 am and sleep til 9am.

Most of the time I like working at home. I get a lot done. Today, my bed is calling me and it is just down the hall. Technically I could take a nap and just work later than usual but I have all kinds of stuff I need to do this evening and I have tix to see TDKR (going by myself). Maybe I'm just anticipating being even more exhausted tomorrow.

When we did the IT scavenger hunt, our team was 4 chicks and a dude--1 IT project/development manager, one systems business analyst (me), one tester, and I don't know the other chick--I wonder if I can look her up--what the hell was her name?--I'm avoiding literal parentheticals because y'all won't tell me how to punctuate this, and look what crap I'm writing instead--ah, she's the admin for Business Objects. The guy is mainly Telephony in the Infrastructure team. We work together a lot when it comes to spinning up new web sites. Anyway, we were one of two teams with that demographic. So when we had to take pictures in the mirror, although the rules allowed for a gender split, we just yanked him into our washroom.

My boss complains, and not rarely--that the direct report he has most contact with is female, I'm one of the indirect reports that he has a lot of contact with, his CIO he reports to is female, and the president of the company is female. Many of the people that will sit on executive teams of a given project will be female, since the head of Marketing is a she, as is Compliance, HR, and a few of the other VP level positions.

My boss complains, and not rarely--that the direct report he has most contact with is female, I'm one of the indirect reports that he has a lot of contact with, his CIO he reports to is female, and the president of the company is female. Many of the people that will sit on executive teams of a given project will be female, since the head of Marketing is a she, as is Compliance, HR, and a few of the other VP level positions.

I have trouble seeing that as something to complain about, as my industry is female-dominated and most of the rare guys in it seem to be the squirrel-y problem cases.

COMPACT FLUORESCENT BULBS ARE KILLING YOU: [link]

ita, if you're interested in baby names from a rather more fact-based perspective, the best place online is [link] - and read the comments on blog posts, there are a couple of very knowledgeable commenters amongst the "what should I name my baby" people.

The hard part is, there are a lot of questions for which there's not any hard data collected, like race/ethnicity.