Month: August 2004

Categories
Diversity

Breaking more glass

I have been remiss in congratulating Halley Suitt for breaking into another bastion of geek brotherhood – ITConversations. Her new Memory Lane interview series is an interesting addition to the lineup, and I’ve enjoyed listening to her recent interviews with Joi Ito and Dan Bricklin.

I personally think that Susan Hockfield, the new President of MIT, would be an exceptionally good candidate for this series. Hint, hint.

Now, if we could only get at least one woman into the It Garage group blog. I believe this is an open participation weblog, and I thought about contributing myself, but I’m not sure what the focus of the site is. It seems to be focused more on project management than tech, and to be honest, I think that I’m too close to the metal for the site.

That would be funny, wouldn’t it? A woman being too geek for a technology-based site?

But not too close for other events. Tim O’Reilly was kind enough to invite me to this year’s Foo Camp, but I had to decline (with due appreciations and much regret–this is something I would really enjoy). However, I am submitting a presentation proposal for next year’s Emerging Tech Conference, and possibly next year’s OSCON, too.

I’ve had some ideas kicking around in my head a year or two, and I think it’s time I got back into the fun, or at least try to get back into the fun: lot’s of people submitting proposals–I’ll be competing with the best. I figure if my presentation(s) is picked, I’ll know enough webloggers in the area who might be kind enough to offer me a place to stay, and this will keep costs down.

Categories
Diversity

Breaking glass

When I worked at the Women’s Center at Yakima Valley Community College back in the late 70’s, I interviewed the head instructor of our mechanical engineering program about women participating in his program.

I remember him saying that he welcomed women into the program, as long as they were serious about studying in the field. I asked him what he meant by being ’serious about the field’. He gave as an example one young woman in his program that he felt was a waste of time to teach because she wasn’t that serious about her studies.

Why?

Well, it seems that she would get up early every morning and carefully apply makeup and arrange her hair before coming into class. The teacher felt that anyone that spent that much time getting ready in the morning, wasn’t spending enough time with her studies, and therefore wasn’t that interested in putting the time into getting a degree in engineering.

It wasn’t difficult to see from this conversation why the number of women in engineering and computer science has been dropping steadily since a high participation of 35% in 1980’s, when I received my CS degree. Even if most of the professors weren’t as obvious as the man I interviewed, the engineering field, as a whole, has not been welcoming to women.

So it was very good news to hear today, via Julie, via Misbehaving, that the new MIT president is Susan Hockfield, the first woman president at this notoriously male dominated bastion of geek engineering technology.

The Slashdot thread associated with the announcement makes an assumption that Ms. Hockfield was selected specifically because she’s a woman; an assumption based on the fact that MIT is seeking to reverse the acknowledged sex discrimination that got it into trouble the last few years. However, I would say her background had as much to do with it, though I imagine that being a woman did give her an edge – MIT is genuinely trying to open its doors to more women, and having a woman at the head could only help. And we need this help.

According to statistics, less than 20% of participants in current engineering programs are women. In fact, the numbers have been dropping while women’s participation in all other fields of science, except computer science, have been raising. Frankly, we need more women participants, and not just because there’s something obscene about a country priding itself on equality, when some of the more lucrative professions are so obviously dominated by men.

According to projection forecasts, we won’t have enough engineers and ‘hard’ scientists to fill this country’s needs by the year 2010. If we don’t start recruiting women in this country to enter these professions now, chances are we’ll be hiring women engineers from Iraq, India, Russia, China, or South Africa in less than a decade.

Categories
Government

Car registration

I am about to set off on a journey, an adventure through time and space. I’m about to enter…

The car registration zone

Since this is an even year, and my car is an even year car (though it was released for sale in an odd year) to renew my registration, I must have a safety inspection and an emissions test certificate. Having to get both is a pain; however, when I received my renewal notice, I also received a form that I can use to get a certificate through the mail. That’s how astonishingly good the people here in Missouri are: they can receive your certificate request in the mail, put their noses out the window in your general direction, and tell that your car is running fine.

The safety inspectors aren’t quite so sensitive, and therefore had to take my car down and have the brakes inspected and whatever else done. Simple enough. I took the car down to my favorite auto shop and even had time for a nice frozen coffee drink while I waited.

In addition to these forms, I also need a personal property tax receipt as cars are taxed as personal property here in Missouri, and they don’t want you driving it if you haven’t paid your taxes on it. However, simple enough: pay your tax, and a receipt is mailed to you.

Now, if I was one of those people, those organized people, this would be the end of the adventure. I would take my mailed personal property tax receipt, emmissions certificate, safety inspection, and renewal form and go to the handy online site and just renew the registration. The tags would be mailed to me and I would be done.

But you know what they say: organized in code, chaotic in real life.

I paid my personal property tax late this year because I’d never had to pay personal property tax and forgot to pay it, putting the bill aside until the last minute, as usual and promptly forgetting it. When something triggered my memory about it, it was already a few weeks late and I had to pay a small late charge, and never did receive a receipt. So now I have to go down to the country government office and pick up a copy of the receipt–unless my license office has a fax machine to do this, but I don’t want to wait in line at the office just to find out if they have a fax for this.

But first though, I have to stop by the auto place and get a copy of the safety inspection, as I lost the other one. I’m not scattered – really I’m not. But it’s a small slip of paper and I put it away for safety, and now I can’t find it in the place I put it. I did find the one for last year’s registration, but I don’t think this will be that useful.

Still, this gives me an excuse to get another nice frozen coffee drink, before heading to the government office to get a copy of the property receipt before heading to the license office to get my tags to put on my car, or I’m going to get a ticket next week.

(And I just realized that there’s a sticky for the emissions test I have to put on my windshield. I have one for the safety inspection on the upper left; the emissions goes on the lower left. I imagine this is so that police who pull you over know that you’re safe and smell good.)

But at least I did not lose my emissions certificate. Or my renewal form. Or my sense of humor (due in part to treating myself to anoher frozen coffee drink and listening to the new Norah Jones CD, the latter purchased from an Amazon gift certificate–the new global currency). But the last time I went to the license office, someone who was registering their car was in a hurry and forgot to set his brake, and it rolled across the parking lot, hitting a big pickup truck that had pulled into the parking slot next to mine, thereby saving my car.

So I’m going to be relaxed about all of this government foofrah; take my time, and enjoy the experience. Not worry about my hair cut. Set my brake. And park uphill.

Well, that went nicely. No problems, no dents in the car, and no lost forms. Nice, shiny new year tags, which means I can continue to drive legally next week.

The licensing place was very quiet so I asked the woman who was helping me about the emissions certificate. She told me that I had my emissions tested through a roadside random testing known as RapidScreen. Specially equipped vans sit by the side of the road and test the emissions of cars going past. If you’ve gone past these vans at least twice in the last ten months, that qualifies you for emissions testing.

Absolutely bloody marvelous! Now this is what I call extremely user friendly technology–non-obstrusive, efficient, and minimizing the effort of those impacted. This might be old hat to some of you, but I’ve only had the car since January of 2002, and my driver’s license since 2001–I’m still at the, ‘gee, new sparkly stuff’ stage.

(When I got back home and checked my weblog, Kevin Murphy, another St. Louis weblogger who has also been taking photos at the Gardens, mentioned how the emissions testing works. And may I say, Kevin – excellent use of those new tags I suggested. )

Categories
XHTML/HTML

Evil is as evil does

Recovered from the Wayback Machine, where you can see this all working.

When I was overcome with an urge to run through the woods, howling at the moon, like a banshee or some kind of wolf woman (albeit one with extremely short hair), I knew it was time to relegate my little HTML retro to the secondary page.

Marquee is evil

blink is also evil

The FONT tag is evil

This page is full of words that blink and crawl and this makes me EVIL!

Sheep are okay.

Categories
XHTML/HTML

BLINK is back!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Phil pointed to a weblog entry that mentions adding an HTML element just for marking untrusted content in a page. With this, Google would then know not to use any links within that section for page ranking.

The concept behind this new addition is that without getting the page rank boosts, the bad mans would give up spamming weblogs and email lists, and the rest of us could go back to exchanging pleasant civilities with one another.

What an interesting idea. Sort of a page rank BLINK element. I can see it now*:

You can also check some helpful info dedicated to…

*BLINK*

Please check out the sites about…

*BLINK*

You may find it interesting to check out some information in the field …

*BLINK*

But why stop at comment spammers? For instance, I’m really pissed that Dave Winer drove right by my state and didn’t offer to stop in and say hi. Mortally wounded. So I think I’ll just enclose any links to his posts within page rank BLINK tags, because I no longer trust him.

In fact, my job here isn’t to promote other people’s writing and sites– my job here is to promote ME. It is all about ME. So why don’t I just wrap all my posts in BLINK tags, and then I don’t have to worry about doing it individually?

After all, this isn’t generating harm to a site, like Vote Links. We’re not taking away a person’s positive link juice; we’re just denying the person positive link juice. No harm in that.

And there are so many other new elements that we could add to HTML to help Google do its job:

The BUTTHOLE tag. This can be used when linking to a butthole. Then when the person’s page shows up in Google, a disclaimer can be attached to the results saying something like, “Someone somewhere thinks this person is a butthole. Proceed accordingly”.

(Of course, we could also call this the WEBLOG tag — most of us are buttholes to someone at some time or another, or we’re not trying hard enough.)

The SICKOPERVERTPREVENTION tag. This can be used to surround content that contains words that will most likely end up in some sick Google search phrase–words like porn, whip, sex, balls, breasts, and sheep.

The DISCLAIMER tag. This can be used to surround libelous content. Then when you’re sued, you can point to the page and say, “See? I used the DISCLAIMER tag. This means I was only joshin’ when I published the content.”

The SUCKUP tag. This is my personal favorite. Use this when referencing a specific individual who you want to suck up to. It could be anyone, from a rock star to a weblogger who has more link juice then you (that is, if they still have link juice with the use of BLINK). We all know that some folks suck up to other folks, but there’s nothing in the writing to prove it. Now we can remove any doubt that sucking up is happening.

Best of all, when the individual searches in Google for people who are sucking up to them, they’ll get back your page. Think of the miscommunications this can prevent?

HTML could get a bit messy with all these BLINK, SICKOPERVERTPREVENTION, DISCLAIMER, SUCKUP, and so on elements — but we just helped eliminate FONT through the use of CSS. Plenty of room for new growth.

Of course, there’s always spoil sports in any grand idea. You know who I’m talking about: they’re the ones who think that adding to the underlying specification in order to accomodate one specific application could lead to markup bloat. Yeah, and they probably also think that the bad guys could route around these new elements anyway. No f**cking fun. (We also need a CONTAINSBADWORDS element, too, now that I think on it.)

Personally, I think we should just BLINK away these naysayers.

*All text examples are from actual comment spams filtered by my absurdly simple and amazingly effective comment spam moderation technique. Patent pending. For licensing, inquire within and bring money. Lots and lots of money.