I said that we were on a buying spree, and I wasn't joking. Our the newest hire was so expensive that all the current authors had to agree to take a pay cut (it was either that or sell ourselves to Stratics). But this wasn't remotely a problem. Everyone agreed to take 50% pay cut for the privilege of hanging out with Elizabeth Lane Lawley, the incomparable author of mamamusings, the biggest of the big brains at our fave blog Many-to-Many, and one of the chosen at misbehaving.
As everyone in the blogosphere already knows, Liz is an associate professor of information technology at Rochester Institute of Technology, and director of their Lab for Social Computing. She works mostly on social computing technologies like weblogs, wikis, virtual worlds, and collaborative information retrieval. She also works on the topic of gender imbalances in technology and education.
Like Aaron, we undertook the necessary due diligence on Liz prior to inviting her. However our detectives had a harder time finding out incriminating information about her. They commented that Liz was a "mystery wrapped in an enigma, surrounded by a blog." By interviewing her classmates they discovered that she passed our mandatory geek test, as there was talk of her early years spent typing in the BASIC code for "Hunt the Wumpus" into her Dad’s TRS-80 computer (and saving it on a cassette tape drive, natch) and using graph paper to map out most of the original "Zork". Grad school classmates recalled that she spent many fruitful hours wasting taxpayers' dollars hogging bandwidth in "Adventure" on ARPANet. Recent shopping receipts salvaged from her trashcan show that she has her own GBC, Gameboy SP, Gameboy DS, and PS2, and our detectives believe that she bought these machines because her kids got sick of their mom hogging their machines.
Outside this we don't know anything about this amazingly-private public figure. Oh, except that she can bench press two thirds of her body weight.
Welcome Liz. We're delighted to have you with us at last.
