5 Things I Learned in the Last 24 Hours

• Stay low on the corners
  At roller derby practice the coaches (and the other skaters) are always telling me to bend my knees and skate low to the ground. Conceptually I get it—low center of gravity, less likely to fall, less distance to fall, these are all good things—but yesterday it really hit home when I was racing some other girls and started taking the corners super-crouched down. Man, it makes you zoom!
• Even a mouthguard can give you blisters
  These frickin' mouthguards are huge. They fill places in my mouth I didn't even know I had. Maybe if I knocked a few teeth out first I'd have more room to fit the mouthguard in...
• How to launch a successful blog
  Have (lots of) good content that you're passionate about; get involved in your blogging community; syndicate with RSS feeds. I guess it sounds obvious when someone spells it all out, but, well, I found it interesting (as I ponder the hypothetical launch of my own professional blog at some point... maybe).
• Googlers are (awesome) geeks
  I think we all suspected this one already, but it was totally confirmed today in one of my meetings. One of my teams uses this ad hoc spreadsheet to track the amount of development and QA work needed for certain tasks, e.g. "'implement service X' requires 5 units of dev time and 2 units of QA time to be completed". We were updating these numbers today in our meeting and this one new guy said "Yeah, I'm halfway done with this task, so bump me down from an 8 to a 4" and everyone else sort of hesitated, and one guy said, "Actually, you can't have a 4, you have to choose a 5 or a 3. Somehow it's become convention that you're only allowed to use numbers that are in the Fibonacci sequence." And indeed, as I looked over the 100+ cells in the spreadsheet, they were all filled with either 0, 1, 2, 3, 5 or 8. Weirdos!
• Running in the morning can actually feel good
  Okay, so we didn't actually run today, we brisk walked. But we woke up at 6:30a to do it. And it felt good. Which for us is a big step in the right direction!