08.24.08

dogs rolling in stinky stuff

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:23 pm by ducky

I don’t think I’m the only one who thought it was odd that dogs like to roll in stinky stuff, even feces. This seemed like a bad idea — it would let their prey smell them from afar, right?

I just came up with a hypothesis for why dogs roll in stinky stuff: as defense against other biting animals (including other dogs). If dog A is covered in feces, and dog B bites dog A, then dog B might get sick from the feces. This might discourage dog B from biting dog A.

Yes, it is true that if dog B bites dog A, then dog A could get fecal material in the bloodstream from the bit, but if dog B punctures dog A’s skin, dog A is already in a heap of trouble. We forget, since modern antibiotics are so good at eliminating infections, that infections are A Big Deal. (For example, Calvin Coolidge, Jr. died of an infection from a blister!) So it might be that its use as a deterrent is worth the extra risk of greater infection.

So why don’t cats roll around in stinky stuff? Perhaps because cats fight with their claws, while dogs fight with their mouths. If cat A rolls in feces, and cat B scratches cat A, then cat A is at higher risk for complications, while the feces pose no risk for cat B.

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08.09.08

McCain's adultery vs. Edwards' adultery

Posted in Politics at 10:59 am by ducky

Scott Rosenberg recently cited something on electoral-vote.com saying there is a double standard going on regarding McCain’s adultery and Edwards’ adultery. It implies that McCain ought to be getting hassled about his adultery.

I am a liberal and not a McCain supporter, but to be fair, there is more going on in the Edwards story than adultery. Edwards also:

1. did it with an employee, who appeared to get preferential treatment as a result
2. did so recently
3. lied repeatedly and convincingly about it

Because of point 1, Edwards’ affair is a relevant issue. His interaction with employees has a direct bearing on his management abilities. It is especially troubling that he would use funds entrusted to him to reward people he liked: that makes me really nervous about cronyism.

As far as I know, McCain wasn’t fooling around with his subordinates. (And if he did, that would be big news, as his subordinates at the time were almost surely all men!)

As for point 2, we’ve all done things we were ashamed of when we were younger, and people are generally pretty willing to look beyond youthful indiscretions (and even to be pretty open about how old you can be to be “youthful”). G. W. Bush certainly got a pass on his past drug use, just as people don’t seem too upset about Obama admitting some cannabis use in college.

Furthermore, life had to be pretty rough on McCain when he got back from Vietnam. He had to readjust, he had to do physical therapy, his wife was not only different from the one he’d left but who had willfully hidden significant physical changes from him, etc. By contrast, John Edwards had a wife who he clearly loved, was kind of at the top of his game, and to the best of my knowledge was not in physical pain. So while I don’t think that McCain’s affairs reflect well upon the man, I don’t think they reflect nearly as poorly as Edwards’ affair does upon him.

Point 3 I think is most important. Because Edwards was so convincing when he lied, now nobody will ever trust anything he says again. Had he lied badly — where everyone could see that he was lying through his teeth — it actually would not have been so damaging. When he said, “oops, I lied”, if everyone had said, “yeah, duh!”, then he would in some ways be seen as more trustworthy. “Well, he’s not lying this time because we can tell when he’s lying.”

(I am reminded of seeing William Shatner — a legendarily unconvincing actor — on the news, absolutely heartbroken and grief-stricken that his wife had drowned. Someone in the room said, “Well, at least we know he didn’t kill her.”)

Now, electoral-vote.com and Scott seem to argue that McCain’s adultery should matter because he is trying to portray himself as the “morals president”. (I hadn’t noticed that McCain was trying to portray himself as the “morals president”, but I actually haven’t been paying him much attention.) However, “morals” is a code word for a particular set of value priorities. It doesn’t actually mean that he is the candidate of high moral standards, it means that he aligns himself with a particular set of value priorities: pro-guns, anti-choice, pro-small-government, anti-welfare, pro-miliary, pro-Christian, pro-traditional gender roles, anti-gay, anti-drugs, etc.

What is important is the alignment with those value priorities.  As far as I can tell, Rush Limbaugh didn’t suffer much from getting caught with a drug habit: that didn’t change his alignment with the “morals” crowd’s politics. (He would have been in much worse shape if he had lied repeatedly and convincingly about giving a $100,000 donation to MoveOn.org!)

So while it might be nice wishful thinking on liberals’ part that bringing up McCain’s past indiscretions would make a difference, I really don’t think it would. 🙁

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07.29.08

geek cool alert: Triage

Posted in Hacking, programmer productivity, Technology trends, Uncategorized at 11:01 am by ducky

There’s a cool paper on a tool to do semi-automatic debugging: Triage: diagnosing production run failures at the user’s site. While Triage was designed to diagnose bugs at a customer site (where the software developers don’t have access to either the configuration or the data), I think a similar tool would be very valuable even for debugging in-house.

They use a number of different techniques to debug C++ code.

• Checkpoint the code at a number of steps.
• Attempt to reproduce the bug.  This tells whether it is deterministic or not.
• Analyzes the memory by walking the heap and stack to find possible corruptions.
• Roll back to previous checkpoints and rerun, looking for buffer overflows, dangling pointers, double frees, data races, semantic bugs, etc.
• Fuzz the inputs: intentionally vary the inputs, thread scheduling, memory layouts, signal delivery, and even control flows and memory states to narrow the conditions that trigger the failure for easy reproduction
• Compare the code paths from failing replays and non-failing replays to determine what code was involved in that failure.
• Generate a report.  This gives information on the failure and a suggestion of which lines to look at to fix it.

They did a user study and found that programmers took 45% less time to debug when they used Triage than when they didn’t for “real” bugs, and 18% for “toy” bugs.  (“…although Triage still helped, the effect was not as large since the toy bugs are very simple and straightforward to diagnose even without Triage.”)

It looks like the subjects were given the Triage bug reports before they started work, so the time that it takes to run Triage wasn’t factored into the time it took.  The time it took Triage to run was significant (up to 64 min for one of the bugs), but presumably the Triage run would be done in background.  I could set up Triage to run while I went to lunch, for example.

This looks cool.

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07.24.08

My MS thesis is done!

Posted in programmer productivity at 5:45 pm by ducky

I have finished my MS thesis, Path Exploration during Code Navigation!

Research summary

Here is a summary of what I learned during my two years of research; the thesis covers most but not all of the following:

I started out at UBC asking what good programmers do that bad programmers don’t. That raises the question, what is “good”? Good clearly has a time-to-complete component, but also a quality component. I looked around and couldn’t find a worthwhile quality measure, alas, so settled for looking for speed measures. I found some, talked about them on my blog, and summarized them in the first part of my VanDev talk. The big take-away for programmers is “Don’t get stuck!” (Note: this part is not written up in my thesis.)

Don’t get stuck!

How do you not get stuck? The literature seemed to imply that less-effective problem solvers in a domain (not just CS) tend to stick to one hypothesis for way too long, only abandoning it when they hit a dead end. The literature sure seemed to say that a shallower search over more paths (hypotheses) was better than searching one path more deeply. In CS lingo, a more breadth-first search (BFS) apparently is more effective than a more depth-first search (DFS).

Confirmation bias

This is consistent with a large body of research in Psychology about confirmation bias. If you have one hypothesis in your head, you will tend to over-believe evidence that agrees with that hypothesis and under-believe evidence that does not agree with that hypothesis. (For example, if you believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was trying to get more, you’d tend to believe reports that Hussein was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger and discount reports by UN weapons inspectors that he did not have WMDs.) There was a really neat paper Dual Space Search During Scientific Reasoning which found that giving people a few minutes dedicated to coming up with as many hypotheses as they could meant that they solved a specific problem much, much faster than a control group that started problem-solving immediately.

If you think of exploration paths as hypotheses of the form, “If I explore down this path, I will find what I’m looking for”, then this says that you would want to keep a few exploration paths in play at a time. You wouldn’t want to try to explore them all simultaneously, but you’d want them in the back of your mind to keep you from the trap of confirmation bias.

Tab support for Breadth-first-search

I noticed that Firefox tabs were much better at helping me keep track of different exploration paths than Eclipse tabs did. Firefox lets me open a bunch of search results in new tabs — putting those “hypotheses” in the back of my mind — and then, once I’ve opened all the search results I’m interested in, explore each in turn. Eclipse opens every file in a new tab, which doesn’t help you keep track of exploration paths. (Imagine if Firefox opened every Web page in a new tab. That would suck.)

User study

Armed with papers that suggest that breadth-first-search (BFS) was better than depth-first-search (DFS), I made a modified version of Eclipse, called Weta (for WEblike TAbbing), so that it had Firefox-style tabbing, then ran a user study. I specifically wanted to see if a more BFS-ish approach would help, I set up a user study like this:

1. The subjects did two programming tasks with stock Eclipse.
2. I told them about the research that said that BFS was better.
3. I showed them how to do a more BFS-ish navigation with Weta
4. The subjects did two tasks with Weta.

Most of the subjects pretty much loved the idea of Weta, but none of them ever used Weta to keep track of multiple exploration paths, different branches in the exploration tree. They used Weta, but they used it to mark places on the main trunk for them to come back to later. They’d open the declaration of an element in a new tab, immediately switch to the new tab, and continue down that path.

Why didn’t they use BFS?

Why didn’t they use BFS in the way that I had trained them? Several possibilities:

• Time? Maybe they didn’t have enough time to get used to using Weta. After using Eclipse for years, maybe two twenty-minute tasks just didn’t give them enough time to adjust to a new way of doing things.
• Complexity? Maybe the cognitive load of navigating code is so high that the cost of switching paths is high enough that switching frequently isn’t worth it. Maybe Web navigation is easy enough that the switching cost is low enough that BFS is worth it.
  • In twenty lines of a Web page, you probably will only have two or three links to other Web pages, but in twenty lines of Java source you will probably have twenty or thirty Java elements that all have relationships to other Java elements.
  • Web pages only have one kind of link; Java elements have multiple kinds of relationships to each other (calls, is called by, inherits, and implements).
  • Code is harder to read than Web pages (assuming that you read the language the page is in). You don’t have to worry about conditionals and exceptions in Web pages.
• Confirmation bias, not BFSness? Maybe what is really important is that people not have confirmation bias, not that they use a particular strategy. Maybe just writing down three ideas for what is the root of the problem would be simpler and would require less effort.
• Bookmarks? Maybe developers wanted/needed bookmarks even more than they wanted BFS tools. In the Web navigation literature, the code navigation literature, and casual conversations with my friends and colleagues, I kept hearing that the list of bookmarks gets so long that it becomes unwieldy.
  • Mylyn is an Eclipse plug-in that is all about hiding information that you don’t need, so I asked the Mylyn team to hide all the bookmarks except those that were set during the currently-active Mylyn Task. They did, and they actually finished before my user study. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize the possible importance of bookmarks on my study, so didn’t bring it up. That feature of Mylyn was new enough that even the four regular Mylyn users in my study didn’t know about it.)

It would be interesting to see what people did if they had Weta for a longer term, and also to see what they do with bookmarks if given the Mylyn bookmark enhancement.

Other factors affecting getting stuck

While it wasn’t what the study was designed for, I noticed several things that multiple subjects had trouble with. One type of difficulty was Eclipse-specific, and one was not.

• Search. The Java Search dialog and the Find dialog both tripped people up, especially the Java Search dialog. I put in an enhancement request for a better UI for the Java Search dialog that has been assigned (i.e., the Eclipse team will probably do it). I also put in a request for a better Find dialog, but they indicated that they won’t fix it. 🙁
• Lack of runtime information. Static tracing frequently took the users them to different places than the program actually went. I give a handful of examples in the writeup, but here’s one:
  • In one of the tasks, users needed to do something with code that involved a GUI element that had the text “Active View Size” in it. They all did a search for “Active View Size” and went to a method in the class DrawApplication. They then did static tracing inside DrawApplication, following relationships from Java elements to other elements. It pretty much kept them inside the class DrawApplication. However, DrawApplication was a superclass of a superclass of the class that was actually run when reproducing the bug! Three of the seven subjects never noticed that.

I think the discrepancy between runtime behaviour and static tracing is important. Subjects spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was executed, or went on wild goose chases because they got the wrong idea about how the code executed.

Suggestions

In addition to the little suggestions I had about the Java Search Dialog and the Find Dialog, I suggest that the IDE be enhanced to give developers visual information about what code is involved in the reproduction of a bug. I’ve talked about this wonder tool before, but I think I can be more concise here:

1. Let the developer set things similar to breakpoints that mark which code that is broken during a run. Set a “start logging” breakpoint before things get messed up (or at the start of the code by default); set a “stop logging” breakpoint after things are known to be messed up.
2. Colour the source code background based on whether the messed-up code was fully, partially, or not executed. (EclEmma already does this, but does it for the entire run, not for selected sections of the program execution.)
3. Use Mylyn to (optionally) hide the Java elements (classes, methods, interfaces) that were not executed at all during the messed-up section of code. Now instead of having to search through maybe three million lines of code to understand the bug, they’d only have to search through maybe three hundred lines.

If you want more details, please see the full thesis, comment here, or shoot me an email message (ducky at webfoot dot com).

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07.21.08

tabbing behaviour

Posted in programmer productivity, Technology trends at 5:09 pm by ducky

I did a very quick, informal survey on how people use tabs when looking at Web search results. Some people immediately open all the search results that look interesting in new tabs, then explore them one by one (“open-parallel). Others open one result in a new tab, explore it, go back to the search page, then open the second result in another tab, etc. (“open-sequentially”). Note that the “open-sequential” people can have lots of tabs open at a time, they just open them one by one.

To clarify, open-parallel means control-clicking on the URL for result #1, then on result #2, then on #3, then on #4, and only THEN and switching to the tab for #1, examining it, switching to the tab for #2, etc.  Open-sequential means control-clicking on the URL for result #1, switching to the tab for #1, examining #1, switching to the search results page, control-clicking on #2, switching to the tab for #2, examining #2, switching to the search results page, etc.

I was surprised to find that the people who had been in the US in the early 2000’s were far more likely to use the open-parallel strategy. There was an even stronger correlation with geekdom: all of the geeks used the open-parallel, and only two of the non-geeks did.

Notes on the survey:

1. The subject pool is not representative of the general propulation: everyone who answered lives or lived at my former dorm at UBC, has a bachelor’s degree, and all but one have an advanced degree or are working on one.
2. I classified people as geeks if they had had Linux on at least one of their computers and/or had worked in the IT industry. The person with the “sort-of” in the geek column doesn’t qualify on any of those counts, but was a minor Internet celebrity in the mid 90s.

What does this mean?

What does this mean? I’m not sure, but I have a few ideas:

• I suspect that the geeks are more likely to have used a browser with modern tabbing behaviour much earlier, so have had more years to adapt their strategies. (Internet Explorer got modern tabbing behaviour in 2006; Mozilla/Firefox got it in 2001.)
• One of the benefits of the open-parallel strategy is that pages can load in the background. Maybe in 2001, Web access was slower enough that this was important and relevant. Maybe it’s not that the geeks have been using tabs longer, but that they started using tabs when the Internet was slow.
• It might be that the geeks do more Web surfing than the non-geeks, so have spent more time refining their Internet behaviour.

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06.09.08

Hillary-ites for McCain?

Posted in Politics at 5:34 pm by ducky

There are a number of stories out right now, like this one from US News, about how Clinton supporters are mad as hell at Obama and the Democratic Party for the sexism that Clinton had to endure during the campaign. The venom in the comments section of the above article is really breathtaking.

I am way, waaaaay unconvinced that Obama should apologize.

While there certainly were a whole lot of sexist comments in the mainstream media about Clinton, I don’t think that it is fair to blame Obama or the Democratic Party for that. Obama and the DNC do not control the mainstream news media. (And they *certainly* don’t control Fox!)

The only dismissive comment that I remember Obama making about Clinton was the “I like you okay, Hillary” comment, and he took heat for that. I think that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton both played much, much closer to the racism line (and they took heat for that).

Did Obama mean to be sexist? Probably not. Did the Clintons mean to be racist? Probably not. It’s a long campaign, people get tired, they make little slips, move on. I think the Clintons owe Obama much more of an apology for racism than Obama owes H. Clinton for sexism. I’m willing to forgive the Clintons; let’s move on.

There is also a lot of anger about the DNC “stealing” the Florida and Michigan votes. I think that everybody was very gentle with Clinton about that because it was clear that she was beaten, and nobody wanted to look like they were piling on. Let me be a bit more blunt: Obama didn’t “steal” Florida and Michigan, Clinton did! She wasn’t entitled to any of those votes, because of rules that she agreed to. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot, and didn’t campaign. It would have been surprising if a newcomer who wasn’t on the ballot had managed to get as many votes as someone with total name recognition who was on the ballot. The Florida and Michigan elections were not fair elections, and for her to keep insisting that she had won strained my patience with her.

Furthermore, while Hillary had to deal with sexism in the mainstream media, Obama has had to deal with an enormous amount of crap from rumour and innuendo. From the comments section: “I despise the MSM for not telling the voters the truth about Obama associations. He has no normal friends. terrorists,people full of hate for this country and i believe his wife is one of them.” or ” The same can be said for the President and Obama…. he has had bad company. He hangs out with Wright, Ferrakahn, etc….”

Um, excuse me? Didn’t B. Clinton pardon a bunch of sleazy people? Members of the FALN terrorist group? Mark Rich? Didn’t the Clintons associate with some very shady characters? Wasn’t B. Clinton’s own brother a cocaine addict? Me, I don’t think that it’s fair to judge people too harshly by what their associates do and particularly what their associates (e.g. Wright) say. We are all human, none of us is perfect.

I understand that Hillary backers are hurting. I understand that Hillary represented for them, a hope that our society had gotten past its misogyny. I understand, truly I do, and how crushing it can be to discover that no, it isn’t. But to blame Obama and the Democratic Party for that seems highly misplaced.

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06.08.08

My (almost) lunch with Steve Wozniak

Posted in Random thoughts at 12:00 pm by ducky

One day, probably twenty years ago, I was in a car with a bunch of friends of mine, and Arthur asked the question, “If you could have lunch with anybody, who would it be?” I immediately answered “Richard Feynman”, having just finished one of his highly entertaining books. A chorus of voices rang out: “But he’s dead!” “You didn’t say they had to be alive”, I retorted.

After a bit more thought, I chose Steve Wozniak. He was famously geeky, and interesting to me because of that. I had heard that he had started a company Unuson, and was excited about what new technology The Woz might bring out. And he was alive.

While Arthur’s challenge of who to have lunch was was purely hypothetical, it got me thinking. My father had been in the Physics Department at the University of Illinois with two-time Nobel Prize winner John Bardeen. I had realized years later, after Bardeen had died, that I could have probably gotten to chat with John Bardeen if I had asked when I was a kid. The idea of lunch with Steve Wozniak gnawed at me, and finally I wrote him a letter, telling him that I would like to have lunch with him. I expected him to say no, but to my surprise he said yes.

It turned out to be difficult to actually schedule the lunch, between my schedule and his, but we finally got a date and time settled… and then I had to cancel because of jury duty. After that, it fell through. I don’t remember precisely what happened, but I have a vague recollection that he simply got cold feet. This made perfect sense to me; if I were a wealthy celebrity, I don’t think I’d meet a stranger for lunch!

Still, the experience made me bolder about asking to meet people. At one point a few years ago, a talented young man named Ping Yee popped up on my radar. On the day when I saw his name in my daily San Jose Mercury News in two different articles on two different subjects and ran across his name in some source code, I decided I would try to meet him. I think he was kind of bemused and puzzled at that, but I ended up having a very interesting lunch with him.

While I was at Green College, I invited a number of the university’s top brass to have dinner with my husband and I, in order to give them more exposure to Green College, and I was a little surprised at the number who accepted.

I still haven’t had lunch with Richard Feynman, though. 😉

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05.27.08

Rape by soldiers

Posted in Politics, Random thoughts at 11:49 am by ducky

There have been reports that peacekeepers have been raping children. This is bad, but unfortunately not surprising.  History seems to show that if you give men weapons, little accountability, and few dating options, they will rape.

There is a solution that seems blindingly obvious to me: send women soldiers.

I wonder if there is a place for an all-women, international peace-keeping army.  I can imagine that would be a great way to serve.

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05.23.08

Marriage equality: is the opposition stupid?

Posted in Gay rights at 11:26 am by ducky

The people opposing marriage equality have asked the courts to delay allowing same-sex marriages, on the grounds that there will be a proposition on the ballot in November to write marriage discrimination into the state constitution.

Um, is our loyal opposition stupid?

If there is no delay, then yes, thousands of same-sex couples will get married between June 16 and Nov 4. I can see how my loyal opposition might not like that. It is my interpretation that even if the amendment passes, they will still be married — that the amendment doesn’t have the right magic wording to retroactively dissolve the marriages.

But if marriages are suspended, my loyal opposition will anger off thousands of same-sex couples who were planning on getting married. Their only shot at getting married, then, would be to make sure that the amendment goes down to a screaming defeat. They would donate money and time and talk to all their friends.

You, dear reader, might reflect on Proposition 22, and how it (with very similar language to the proposed amendment) passed with 61% of the vote. However, I will tell you, dear reader, that I worked on the fight against Proposition 22, and the support from the gay and lesbian community was tepid at best. They didn’t see why they should donate money to a lost cause where the worst that would happen is that they would lose the possibility of getting a right that they don’t currently have. There was also a significant undercurrent of sour grapes: “we don’t want your heterosexist institutions anyway!”

The sentiment in the gay and lesbian community is completely different now. They totally understand the importance of civil marriage now. And, if the delay comes through, they will be upset. REALLY upset. They will fight the amendment tooth and nail. If there is no delay, they might get somewhat complacent: “well, too bad for everyone else if the amendment passes, but we managed to get married on 17 June, so we are okay.”

So while a delay would be a short-term defeat for my side, I think it would lead to a huge, enormous victory long-term.

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05.18.08

Advice for same-sex couples getting married in California

Posted in Gay rights, Married life at 3:35 pm by ducky

To my gay and lesbian friends, I am absolutely thrilled that you are going to be able to get married starting on June 16th!

I wrote some wedding advice for (straight) couples a few years back, and I’d like to give some specific advice to gay and lesbian couples who want to get married in the next few months.

• Read Lorem Ipsum and/or the EQCA FAQ about the topic. Those are good, but there are a few things they leave out and a few points that I think are incorrect.
• Consider carefully if you want to get married. I’m a big fan of marriage, but you need to be sure it is right for you. In addition to getting to throw a big party, you become (among other things) responsible for your spouse’s maintenance and their debts.
• Get married between June 16 and November 4, 2008. There is going to be an initiative in November that will shut down same-sex marriages if it passes, but I hear from reputable sources that even if it passes, your June 16-November 4 marriage will be valid. I am not a lawyer, but I believe it is hard to pass retroactive laws, and the way that the amendment is worded doesn’t do the right magic to make it retroactive. Of course, Our Opposition could always file suit saying that it was retroactive, and they would lose, but that would be a big pain so let’s just defeat the amendment, okay?
• Ask your wedding guests to give money to the anti-amendment campaign in lieu of gifts. (Or to NCLR, or to Lambda, or to the ACLU.) Remind people that there is a real risk that the next generation won’t be able to celebrate their love and comittment in the same way if the amendment passes.
• Give money yourself to the campaign, NCLR, Lambda, or the ACLU.
• Book your venue early. I expect that there will be an enormous demand for venues from June 16-Nov 4! (If you are straight, consider waiting until November 8 to avoid the crowds!)
• Make plans for your officiant early. Clergy and Commissioners of Marriage might be heavily booked.
  • You can have a friend officiate via the Deputy-Commissioner-of-Marriage-for-a-Day program. Different counties have different rules, fees, and lead times for that program. (Some counties do not participate.) The EQCA FAQ says that there is a 60 day lead time, but I question whether that is true for all counties (or even for San Francisco — the San Francisco site says “You should come no sooner than 60 days from the date of the ceremony” which I interpret to mean as “Your deputization is only valid for sixty days”). When my uncle-in-law got deputized by the County of Santa Clara, he didn’t have to appear in person, he didn’t have to do a training class, but he did have to swear to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Check with the county that will issue the deputization. NOTE: it is not clear if yYou can get your marriage license in one county and the deputization in another. The wedding does not have to be in the same county that issued the Deputization or marriage license.
  • Note that you do not have to be married or straight to become a Deputy Commissioner of Marriage, so you can officiate at your friends’ weddings. Bonus!
  • You and your friends can get ordinated as clergy very quickly over the Internet. It took me less than fifteen minutes through the Universal Life Church. I am not a lawyer, but it sure looked rock-solid legal to me. However, weddings also are about social validation, and using quickie-clergy does sound kind of shady to some people. (Note: I didn’t feel so bad once I looked at what roles were traditionally allowed to officiate, and figuring out what they all had in common. I decided that the common feature was that they had proved that they were able to fill in paperwork correctly, and responsible enough to mail it in.) I would thus encourage you to do Deputy-for-a-Day instead of Internet ordination.
• You might consider getting married at a County Building and/or doing a joint wedding with some good friends who also will (finally) be getting married. While you are free to do that, as a married person, I would recommend against that unless you’ve already done the big ceremony and party thing. There are (at least) two important functions of weddings above and beyond informing the state that they now have to recognize your relationship:
  • You make it clear to the people who are important to you that this person is special and that they have to treat your spouse as special.
  • The families and friends get to meet each other. While that might not be so important if you’ve been together for a zillion years already, it might be. I was really surprised at how much getting married connected our two families together. (Bad news: you now have to go visit your in-laws at Christmas. You can’t just send your spouse any more.)
• If you get married at a county building (e.g. with one of their marriage commissioners), then (I think) you can get a marriage certificate right away. Otherwise, you have to ask for it. While my husband and I didn’t get asked for one until we moved to Canada (with different last names), it might be more important for you than for a straight couple.
• There are lots of traditions associated with weddings. Some don’t really make sense in a same-sex wedding; some don’t even make sense in today’s hetero weddings. Remember, however, that it’s those strange traditions that make no logical sense that bind you most to your community. Why do you do X at a Foo wedding? Because you are Fooian. Doing X tells your guests (and your spouse) that you value being (or being married to) a Fooian, and that you honour the Fooian traditions.
• There is a huge enormous wedding industry that is designed to extract dollars from your wallets. Remember that it is your wedding and you don’t “have” to do anything. If you don’t want flowers, party favors for the guests, a videographer, or a professional photographer, you don’t have to.
  • Everybody has a camera nowadays, and the cameras take good pictures. We asked our guests to take pictures and send them to us, and it worked extraordinarily well. Hubby and I also sat for a professional photographer in our wedding clothes the day before, and we were really happy with that as well.
  • We didn’t have a gorgeous six-tier wedding cake, and you know what? We were still married at the end of the day. Also, the (flat) carrot cake and the cupcakes tasted wonderful.
  • Unsolicited recommendation: at our wedding ten years ago, Continental Catering in Menlo Park did a fantastic job. A bit on the spendy side, but well worth it. (It was so good that most people didn’t notice that it was all vegetarian.) That was ten years ago, but hopefully their quality would still be good.

Note that there are lots of references to county buildings, county this, county that, but you remember people getting married at San Francisco City Hall. Marriage stuff is administered through counties in California. San Francisco is the only jurisdiction that is both a city and a county. (I think that means it is the only jurisdiction where a mayor could have decided to issue marriage licenses. Thank you, Gavin Newsom!)

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