About

October 9, 2009

Don’t let the blonde hair fool you . . . .

I’ve been partner to delightful experiences around web content & community for about a decade for sites like HuffPost. Over the past few years, I’ve worked namely on data-driven conversion design – getting users into an app’s workflow, downloading, onboarding, & purchasing.

SXSW Interactive 2011 - Austin, TX

Currently, I’m working on the most exciting opportunity I could ever dream up leading creative at mozilla.com. I’m a temporarily displaced Brooklynite and pug lover/rescuer who is starting to love living in San Francisco.

If I could give any advice to anyone, but especially to girls and women, I’d refer to The Diamond Age, By Neal Stephenson: “…dispense with what makes you like all the other girls and concentrate on what makes you different.”

I’m also over here:

Some favorite quotes:

“All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory.

I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization that everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”

– Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man


“The difference between stupid and intelligent people–and this is true whether or not they are well-educated–is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.

They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations–in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.”

– Ms. Matheson to Nell, The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson


“In your primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life.

Your life up to this point has given you all of the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. If you don’t think about them, you’ll be psychologically unwell.

If you do think about them, you will become not merely educated but intelligent, and then, a few years down the road, you will probably give me cause to wish I were several decades younger.”

– Constable to Nell, The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson


“We must dispense with what makes you like all the other girls and concentrate on what makes you different.”

– Ms. Matheson to Nell, The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

 

“You can try to act the same–we have tried to make you the same–you can pretend it in the future if you insist, and you can even take the Oath–but it’s all a lie. You are different.”

– Ms. Matheson to Nell, The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

 

I am suggesting that you are one of those rare people who transcends tribes . . . .

– Ms. Matheson to Nell, The Diamond Age by Neal Sephenson