Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

08 Jul 2012, 20:56 p.m.

Taking Stock

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2012 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

This weekend I:

  • took a capoeira class for the first time
  • went to the top of the Empire State Building for the first time
  • saw open culture and open source friends, old and new
  • caused about ten Wikimedians to see "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind"
  • walked bits of the High Line park I'd never seen before
  • saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen for the first time
  • shared my career origin story with a few high schoolers
  • rewatched a bit of Arrested Development
  • watched some of Ken Burns's documentary Prohibition
  • reread Jean Merrill's The Pushcart War
  • worked with OpenHatch on this week's hackathon
  • caught up a bit with other friends and family
Hey Sumana, next time you think you're wasting your time all the time, YOU'RE NOT.

And in my continuing catalog of things women talk about, in case you need help passing the Bechdel test in your fiction:

  • gardening, plant identification, and methods
  • whether to start a startup, and when, and how
  • health insurance woes, birth control, sex education, and the new HIV home test
  • how to structure work to reduce burnout risk
  • working at nonprofits versus for-profits
  • how to prepare kasha
  • New York's joys and confusions
  • being the children of immigrants
  • how to improve engineering education, and the importance of finding martial arts classes that have friendly instructors and other friendly students
  • old TV shows, and the music licensing barriers that keep them from DVD release
  • whether going to a particular conference would forward one's goals
  • choosing a college or major