Breifly on Chinamanda Ngoi Adichie's "We Should All Be Feminists"

The bad – it’s just an essay, and they shoehorned it in this tiny little book.

The dimensions are small, and they had to make the covers thicker to give it a bit more heft.

The good – it is short. Though it may lack some nuance, it is a quick-hitter.

The better – this gives voice to a woman outside the white milieu.

The best – It shows the need for feminism everywhere. Ngoi Adichie has a strong voice, a storyteller’s voice. And it is a world voice. Big fan of that. I’m convinced. We all should be feminists.

Becoming Unbecoming by Una: A Review

Picked this up off the shelf, sight unseen.

It was a smart pick.

The story is about a young woman, growing up.

The background is the hunt for the so-called “Yorkshire” Ripper, a serial killer who was tracking down women and killing them.

The killer took too long to get caught because the people looking for him were incompetent. They were incompetent in that they were men who made unfair assumptions about women.

All the men do.  Though there is the backdrop of the useless police, the story can be seen as a universal story of women growing up - where the threat of sexual violence is complete both in society as a whole and even within relationships. It was a powerfully told tale, and one that makes me worry for my daughters in the future and all the daughters ever.

A review of the Fitbit Charge HR

I write this because I forgot to put it on as I walked out the door this morning.

I'm not wearing it, and my wrist feels naked. I was walking to work when I realized I had forgotten it, too late to turn around and go get it.

I was just walking in the hallway to a colleague's office, and I thought "getting my steps in" and was sad when I realized that they don't count.
Those steps will not be on the device, and they won't show up in my app.

I had first bought one of the cheaper versions of the activity tracker, one of the zips that I kept in my pocket. I must have hit it on something, since I looked at it and the screen was cracked. The tracking still worked, but I thought I should just level up and get the more involved version.

I like this one better because with the one I put in my pocket, it was easy not to think about the steps. The main reason I even started was because I wanted to be more conscious of the activity I was doing, and hoping to do more of it. The quantification here helps. I can see how many steps I did today versus yesterday.

I'm not certain how accurate it is though. I have a feeling that it overestimates my mileage. That's not wholly important to me because the way I look at it, it is an instrument that is comparable to itself. That is, of one day it tells me that I did 5000 steps and the next that I did 6000, I know that I was 20% more active than the day before. I think the same for the heart rate monitor, which is handy because it shows you what's going on inside you in real time. I think that though I don't use that info for fitness, it is what makes this a must-have tracker. Plus the battery last fairly long and charges quickly. You just have to not forget it when you have it on the charger, and then have your wrist feel naked all day.