Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Burningbird

All green

I would be adding more photos to Tin Foil Project, but the weather has been abysmal. Either extremely hot and humid, or thunderstorms, and now we’re looking at flash floods combined with thunderstorms and a tropical storm across the entire eastern portion of the country. Rather furious weekend, weather wise.

I made a version of the Tin Foil Project stylesheet for this weblog, as part of the switcher. I like the green background, and the faint image to the side. However, I have modified the overall look from Tin Foil Project, adding in a bit more color and other odds and ends. And I’ve disconnected the items much more than any of the other styles.

I know I do owe Danny Ayers an apology for doing a ‘green’ weblog when I said I wouldn’t. But at least it wasn’t the green that Danny dislikes. That one is very close to one of the colors published as part of the color forecasting done yearly. It’s called soho green, described as … A fusion of bronze and gold creates this 21st century neutral, elemental and enduring.

My color of green was from using a wonderful little shareware tool Color Cop to sample the colors in this photo. The colors from all my sites are found using this digital color eyedropper.

I used to worry about ‘web safe’ colors until a wise man told me that most monitors can handle millions of colors, and why limit myself to a couple of hundred? Now I test my colors on my Dell laptop, my TiBook, and sometimes the computer at the library. If it looks okay, then I don’t worry about other monitors. I figure if a color comes out glaringly wrong in someone else’s monitor, they’ll just assume I have taste as abysmal as the weather. Most importantly, it doesn’t stop their ability to read the text.

Categories
RDF

RDF and GUMP

Sam Ruby posts a note to a thread on the Apache GUMP email list with several questions about RDF. Stefano Mazzocchi has started answering, but others might be interested in chiming in, either at the list, or Sam’s.

Categories
Political

Fish or cut bait

 got very tired of all the stories about Bush and his National Guard duty during Vietnam. I feel there’s enough to know about George Bush now that I don’t need to go back into ancient history to get yet more data to crunch.

I’m also getting equally tired of hearing about Kerry and his experiences in Vietnam; either him holding these experiences up continuously; or others trying to take them down just as persistently. The events we’re arguing over happened thirty-five years ago. Thirty-five years ago I was a stoned 15-year old school drop out and runaway hitch hiking around the country, just before joining a religious cult.

Thirty-five years is a long time. Are you same as you were thirty-five years ago, if you’re old enough to remember that far back?

At this time, I’m not sure I would want to follow either of these men directly into combat; and I know there are people who I would trust in combat, but would not want as President. Unless we start getting real comfortable with the concept of “President Nader”, we have to pick one of these men–Bush or Kerry–to lead this country into the future for four years.

So I’d rather hear about the problems we’ll be facing in the next four years then who got shot in the butt, and who didn’t show up for their medical, thirty-five years ago.

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.