Hi, I'm Abby.

Hi, I'm Abby, and right now, it's March, 2005.

This is my personal web page. If you want what passes for my professional web page, you can find it at Stanford University's HighWire Press, which is where I go every day and do what I am told, in exchange for which they pay me. It involves sitting at a desk and typing a lot, going to meetings, occasionally having arguments which get very heated even though in 5 years, nobody will care or remember, looking at incredibly gross pictures (because that's the only kind they put in medical journals), and boosting the morale of my cow-orkers with my special, patented brand of snide-and-snarky wisecracks.

Apart from the shockingly important and mind-blowing work that I do for a living, I suppose it bears mention that I am, in fact, the product of a complex breeding and child-rearing experiment which was designed to create a purely biological textile mill. Yes, it's true: I am a textile mill. In the event that civilization as we know it were to collapse (in which case, I don't know why or how you're reading this web page), this fact will suddenly become deeply meaningful and I will instantly be the ruler of a vast and unimaginable empire in which status is determined by one's ability to care deeply about the implications of the direction of twist in a piece of string. Indeed, you'll probably even score points for arguing about the word "string" being the right choice or not.

Edward and Inanna the cat January 2005

I live in Sunnyvale, California with my husband Chad and our son Edward, who is now a first grader. We now live in our second yellow house on this street in Sunnyvale, having recently moved some 50 yards down the street from the old house

Edward, who is exactly like me and exactly like his father, fulfills that ancient parents' curse that they all issue to their children -- you know, "Someday, you'll have a kid just like you, and then you will understand." But in the way that these things work, he's also nothing like anybody else. Here is a photo album of Edward's scholastic progress, which is I guess what happens in this day and age when you run out of space on the fridge. Edward's professional growth was well-chronicled for a while, by Erika.

Our yellow house

We're rather partial to Sunnyvale as a place to live in Silicon Valley. It's centrally located, fairly diverse, and our neighborhood features things like kids walking around on the sidewalk and playing, and people who aren't computer professionals -- fast becoming an endangered species in this neck of the woods, I think!

Our yellow house is, so far as we are able to tell, 2 years older than Sunnyvale, which means it's coming up on being a century old. For California, this is downright ancient. Being a Franquemont, I have of course put a little effort into researching the house and the local history of the area as a result, and I'm always interested in hearing from people with interesting pointers to local history type information. Someday when I get around to it I figure I'll have at least a page of links here somewhere.

Here's a list of some places in the general area which I think do not suck, in no particular order at present. Included are restaurants, stores, and random places, along with a bit about the places and why they make my recommended list. I have been meaning to put together a "places that do suck" page also, but haven't actually done so yet. Maybe it's just too depressing, or something -- what if it ended up being longer thant the positive list? Heh.

Edward and Chad playing pinball, December 2003

We live not far from Moffett Field, which beats the heck out of living near the San Jose International Airport, like we did when we lived in Santa Clara, which is where Edward was born. Moffett Field is host to a variety of interesting aircraft. It definitely beats living near a regular airport, because there's much less traffic and when there is traffic, it's always interesting -- ranging from an air show, to being where the President flies into, to carrier-based aircraft staging, and training flights from time to time. You haven't lived till you've had an A-10 demo taking place over a runway a half-mile from your house. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

We all enjoy pinball machines, and have gotten to collecting and restoring them and whatnot. Chad does all the hard work and I just, ah, provide expert testing. Seriously, pinball is a long-standing interest of mine and I'm totally thrilled that Chad enjoys working on them as much as I enjoy playing them... and vice versa of course. And, we enjoy motor vehicles.

What My House Looks Like

Crochet in progress Fall 2003

Some things into which I've sunk a fair bit of time in the past include aquaria, surviving the purchase of a home in Silicon Valley, running FOAD, expanding my cooking horizons some, luring my sister out here with her daughter, occasionally playing my guitar, and trying to learn more about my car. For the past couple of years, however, I've been spending whatever free time I can dig up on fiber-related projects -- crocheting, spinning, doing stuff with yarn. I've been a spinner, weaver, crocheter, knitter, yarn dork in general, since I was a toddler. What with coming from a long line of very accomplished women, who sucked my father into textiles before I was born, and largely growing up in a weaving town in Peru, I probably never stood a chance of not being a yarn dork.

Sometimes it boggles my mind to think that I now reside in a rather quintessential California suburb. After growing up largely in Chinchero, Peru and living in places like Riobamba, Ecuador and surviving being a teenage gaijin in Japan's Tsukuba Science City, and then going to Simon's Rock, quitting, and running off with bluesman A.C. Reed, and then quitting the music scene and becoming a nutball ISP sysadmin at the now-defunct tezcat.com in Chicago, though, it was probably about time I tried the hackneyed ol' American Dream on for size. Or something.

• Check out some of the places I've lived!

I don't think I can imagine living here forever... but for the moment, and the foreseeable future, here we are. I may not be a field anthropologist like my parents, but I'd like for Edward to have the benefit of a cross-cultural upbringing like I had. But then again in many respects, any part of California is a pretty serious melting pot!

Chris Franquemont

Ed Franquemont

Speaking of my parents, both truly remarkable and wonderful people... my mother, Dr. Christine Franquemont, is an anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and all-around brilliant woman who can do absolutely everything. Except electrical work, she tells me. Seriously, this is a woman who wrapped up the first part of her Ivy League education at Radcliffe when she was 20, has had not one but two Fulbrights (not to mention countless other badass academic achievements), the latter of which was while she got her Ph.D., in 4 years, with two teenage daughters... okay, okay, I'm really laying it on thick here, but the fact remains that she's the kind of complete badass you would have to think was a fictional character if she weren't your own mother.

And my father, Ed Franquemont... it's hard for me to know what to say or where to begin. He was just as amazing a person as my mother is. He was an anthropologist, a teacher, a weaver, a builder, a historic preservationist, an athlete, a hard worker and true believer. He went toe to toe with a nasty bit of business called Agnogenic Myeloid Metaplasia -- a cold, brutal killer that starts off in the bone marrow and blood and works its way out from there. He fought it hard, never acting like a dying man or thinking of himself that way, until on March 11, 2004, that sonofabitch of a blood cancer took him down. The world is not the same without him, and I will miss him forever.

Yeah, right claims to fame. Well, they're only claims, right? Heh.

USENET

Chad once said, "You can't swing a dead cat on the web without hitting Abby." I don't think that's even remotely true. But, for a while at least, you might not have been able to swing a dead cat around USENET without hitting me. Those days are past now -- I just don't have the time, and today's USENET depresses me more than it does anything else -- but, here is a page full of random stuff about me and USENET, including a collection of archived posts of mine.

I will say, though, that swinging a dead cat around it is probably not a terrible use of USENET in this day and age.

WRITING IN GENERAL

I've kinda always been a writer. I suppose it doesn't hurt, now, that I can type over a hundred words per minute. I kept journals, now sadly lost, from the age of five on, and have only slacked off lately. Some things I have written have even been published -- I've been trying to dig some of them up, but have yet to find many.

The one that springs most quickly to mind is that I was a contributing "panel member" to Daniel Barrett's 1996 book from O'Reilly and Associates, Bandits on the Information Superhighway.

TECHNICAL WORK

Most important, perhaps, I'm the author of the sysadmin man page!

Chad and I run FOAD, our household system, which has snowballed from being a place where Chad got his mail, to being a place where we run general Internet services for ourselves and the handful of friends who have shell accounts, along with a few mailing lists. But that's not much of a claim to fame, everyone and their cat runs something like that around here.

MUSIC

I wrote a lot of songs in my misspent youth. Nothing lately though. One of these days I'll record some and throw some audio files somewhere.

OTHER

I've lived a bunch of places. Here is a page about the places I've lived.

I've also done a variety of kinds of work, at a range of different places. This page talks about some of that and links to some of those places.

Lastly, I have acquired a widely-varied range of skills. This is a list of some of the stuff I can do, skills I think are really important to have, and why.

If they're named Franquemont, they're probably related to me. Here is a page full of stuff about my family.

To my amazement, I seem to have managed to make and keep a few friends! This page is full of links to their web pages and things like that.

In my copious free time (yeah right), I like to do a variety of things. Lately, I don't get time to really engage in much besides screwing around on the computer and reading junky novels.

• Stuff I recommend ranging from books, music, sights to see or places to go, food and recipes, and random diversions.
• My Wheels Things with engines that burn gasoline, heat up, have rubber on the road, are shiny, and have lots of parts that can be wrenched on. Oh... and that go vroom.

• My humor page Mostly stuff I've amassed over the years, a good bit of which I've written.
• I've been getting a kick out of this epinions.com web site. Useful reviews, OpEd style editorial pieces, and I enjoy the writing exercise! The only web-based thing like it, and one of only two web-based things that I've found interesting enough and well enough put together to participate in.
  
• George Rarey's WWII Air Force Cartoon Journals Interesting site, worth a read through.
• The Zippo Lighter An article from Popular Mechanics.
• The Shadow Riders Forum on Delphi is the one other web-based thing in which I participate. I'm no web stuff fan really but the signal-to-noise level, friendliness, and all-around wealth of information about Honda Shadows in this crowd make it a must.