Business slow right now? Looking
Business slow right now? Looking for a gig? I've got someone who's looking for someone to do a little light JavaScripting (cross-platform, cross-browser rollovers, etc.). To the best of my knowledge, you don't need to do this in their office. If you're interested, let me know, and I'll pass your info on to them.
I was going to blog
I was going to blog something today about Dave's comments on women, but Meg said it much better than I could.Well, I find that there were just a few more things I needed to say.
Why aren't there more women speaking at tech conferences?
Huh?
Is that a serious question?
We're not there because our proposals to speak aren't being accepted. We're not there because they can only have one woman max as a speaker for the entire conference, and they've already filled that token slot. We're not there because we're only useful for teaching beginning courses, and they've got a buddy filling that slot already. We're not there because, they say, attendees want to see "new faces," and they've had you before. We're not there because invitations to submit proposals for this conference only went to people who've spoken at their previous conferences, who happen to all be men. We're not there because we don't look like the babes in their sponsor's advertising.
And so on, and so on.
And just to put this into perspective, two data points from this week:
- I just got back from GeekCruises.com's Script 'Scape. Last Sunday, Cap'n Neil (the guy what runs it all) told me after my last talk "I didn't bother to hand out speaker evaluations in your class, because I already know we want you back the next time we have something in your area of expertise."
- Yesterday, I got my speaker evals back from July's Macworld Expo NY, where I did 6 hours on JavaScript. Comments included... well, hell, I'll just include them all, and then you don't have to wonder if I edited anything.
- Good solid workshop--moved a little fast in places, but clear and well-organized
- Dori Smith was very comfortable with the material. She is animated in an often times dry subject. I would attend other lectures where she is asked to speak.
- Dori Smith did a superb presentation. She knows her job!
- Nice presentation
- Dori is great. She is knowledgeable and positive, energetic, upbeat. Thanks!
Just to make it less about me ranting about why I can't get speaking gigs, Dave, why don't you ask your new director of marketing why there was only one woman tech speaker at last year's Builder.com show? Yep, that was me, and just because I got hired for that one doesn't mean I don't want to see more women there.
The disconnect is particularly ridiculous at most web-related shows--the audiences are 40% or so female, but the speaker list is 5% female or less.
My guess: this won't change until women start writing to conference organizers and saying "I'm not going to your show because I object to your practice of having [no women/only one token woman] on your list of speakers."
Hell, why not start that now?I'm not easily flabbergasted. But
I'm not easily flabbergasted. But this story did it for me. Surplus relies on corporate taxes -- paid early. This is so far beyond the usual amount of cooking the books that goes on in Washington, it beggars the imagination.
From last week's cruise to
From last week's cruise to Alaska, here we are on the first formal night. Considering that we're wearing borrowed clothes (United lost our luggage, and we hadn't gotten the bags back at this point), we look pretty darn nice. Photo courtesy of the quite happy Randal Schwartz.
Are supply-side economists (back from
Are supply-side economists (back from the scrapheap of history thanks to the Bush administration) dishonest, or just slow? Find out.
Bush said that there were
Bush said that there were 60 lines of stem cells eligible for publically-funded research, a number that's been widely disputed (it's probably around half that, not enough for proper research). Now it turns out that every one of those lines might not be able to be used. Is this what Bush really wanted - to act as though he was permitting widely popular research, but, to satisfy his anti-abortion constituency, have it be practically useless?
One of the first science
One of the first science fiction novels I read as a kid in the mid-Sixties was Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer (1957). In it, an inventor creates a house-cleaning robot called Hired Girl. I remember being amazed at the idea that a robot would ever be used for such mundane tasks. I think that Hired Girl would recognize the EBot2 as a member of the family.
Here's an excellent op-ed piece
Here's an excellent op-ed piece that clears up the smoke the Bushies are blowing about the surplus that they squandered on the tax cut.
As you know if you're
As you know if you're a regular reader of this blog, we just got back from Geek Cruises's Script 'Scape cruise to Alaska. The only thing that could have made it cooler, we thought, was if it was a bunch of Mac geeks instead of Perl and Python geeks.
Now, Neil from GeekCruises is trying to gauge interest in a Mac Cruise, which he calls MacMania. Vote early and often, and we hope to see you there!
If you sent me email
If you sent me email in the last couple of weeks and I haven't gotten back to you, don't despair. I was out of town last week (actually both of us were) and then I had (very) minor surgery today. Between these two things, my stack of email that must be returned is getting lengthy, but due to the latter event, I need to take things a little easy for the next day or so.
Quote of the day:"Computer people
"Computer people are disproportionately INTJ on Meyers-Briggs Personality type, and are disproportionately likely to consider themselves smarter than everyone else."
Some of us, though, are right.
Latest in the list of
Latest in the list of sites that have so many customers that they want to drive some away: the Bear Trails Couples Resort (if you really want to look at the site, you can go here). That page seems to work acceptably on IE/Mac, despite the demand on the original page to just go away.
All entries © 1999-2008 Tom Negrino and Dori Smith