The final resting place for old Mac software

Since I'm between books, I'm doing "fun" things such as cleaning out my office. I've been unpacking boxes, some of which have been hanging around since we moved here six years ago. I've bundled some of the finds in an eBay auction: Macintosh Software - Mixed Lot of 36!. Interested in old, pre Mac OS X software? Check it out! It a grab bag of ancient Mac goodness!

You read it here first

I'm busy busy busy, so no real blogging today, but I just wanted to make this prediction here so that when it happens, I can point back to it and say I told you so:

Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court will be Karl Rove.

JSAN

New to me: the JavaScript Archive Network:

JavaScript Archive Network is a comprehensive resource for Open Source JavaScript libraries and software.

Their goal is, so far as I can tell, to be the CPAN of JavaScript. I thought it was a great idea until I looked at their code — yikes! Imagine JS written by people who knew a whole lot of Perl and just enough JS to get themselves into deep trouble.

Am I biased? Absolutely. But I can't see why this is superior to this, or this is superior to this. In both cases, the latter is more flexible, more intelligible to non-programmers (i.e., more maintainable), and tested in considerably more browsers. You make the call.

Not just the girls

Scoble says:

Dori Smith writes that she's recommending that girls stay away from the computer science field.

Not quite (and I didn't say what he put in quotes, either). Here's what I said last April:

Last night I was talking with Sean and a friend of his, and Sean mentioned that his friend was thinking about being a computer programmer. I said, "Don't do it — It's a crappy career choice!" and he looked stunned that someone was advising him against it.

I mentioned this now because every so often I get chewed out because I say that I don't believe that encouraging girls to become programmers is a good thing. It's not that I don't believe that girls should be programmers. It's that I don't think that anyone should plan for a career as a programmer.

And I added in Robert's comments (to someone in response to his opinion about his young daughters):

A lot of this has come up lately because I've been giving career advice to my (very smart) 17-year-old son, which has made me do some serious research & thinking about what the future's going to be like. What you think of as high-tech is going to be the equivalent of my parents saying that I should go into a career that involves electricity — of course their careers will involve high tech, because everything will involve what we currently think of as high tech. What there won't be (imo) is what we currently think of as programming or IT jobs; those will be split between highly specialized fields or just a generic part of some other job.

Buying advice

If you need a way to charge your iPod Shuffle when you're near an outlet but away from a computer, here's our advice: don't buy the Apple iPod USB Power Adapter (Amazon price: $27.55). Instead, buy this Belkin USB 2.0 4-port hub (Amazon price: $22.79).

Sean's going to go visit his (computerless) grandmother next month, and he wanted to take his Shuffle with him. We knew that he'd need a way to charge it, and were happy to find out that the hub I'd recently bought him charged the Shuffle just fine without being hooked up to a computer.

Yes, it requires a power cable (which the Apple one doesn't), but doing double duty goes a long ways with us. More pictures here.

Juxtapositions

I may be the only person who reads both Susan Kitchens' and Eric Meyer's blogs. But the juxtaposition of this and this is just too creepy.

Me in July

Lisa is probably right below when she says I don't flog my doings sufficiently, so here's what's up in July:

• Tom and I will be talking about Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger at NCMUG on July 19. There's more info here.
  
  
• I'll be talking about Inside Dashboard Widgets at The Advanced Developers Hands On Conference (aka ADHOC) in Michigan at the end of the month.
  
  
• I recently talked to The User Group Report about Dashboard Widgets. This is about the closest this blog is ever going to get to a podcast, so check it out if you want to know what I sound like.

Small laptop bag

Tom told me that he was looking for a small messenger or shoulder bag that would hold his 12" AlBook, so I've been keeping an eye out. The Small Drift from stm looks to me like it would fit his needs. More info and pictures can be found here.

And while I'm thinking about gadget bags, does anyone reading this know who made the 2005 WWDC backpacks? So far as I can tell, Apple carefully removed any trace of of the maker, and as I think it's a great bag I'd like to be able to recommend it to others.

Mac OS X 10.4.2

About the Mac OS X 10.4.2 Update: yes, it's out. And for those keeping track, here's the entirety of what the update notes say about Dashboard:

The Dashboard widget Unit Converter requires much less CPU usage after installing this update.

Where have all the women gone?

Enough people have pointed out the article Where Have All The Women Gone? to me that I finally got the hint that it wasn't the same piece I read a week or two ago. I read it, and while I mostly agree with what he's saying, I disagree with some of it:

"Women don't feel valued by IT. They are forced into being a certain type of person, i.e. a white male model: linear, analytical, 24/7, in-your-face, your-job-is-your life... Women don't see a future for themselves [in IT] as they are."

Actually, no. I am that sort of person (except for being male): I was raised with two brothers; live with a husband, son, and male cat; and spent years working in mostly-male environments. I'm perfectly comfortable in that milieu — but it doesn't help me get a job.

Which is why some of the best and brightest are dumping the Silicon Valley for equally lucrative and more fulfilling careers in other fields.

Lucrative? Fulfilling? Snicker. Sorry to tell you, folks, but the economy since 2001 has been losing jobs, not gaining them (or at least not gaining in sufficient quantity to match the number of people joining the workforce, which means net loss of employment). There just simply aren't jobs that are equally lucrative. And for those of us who, like me, honestly enjoy programming, there aren't any that are more fulfilling. So no, that's not why we're leaving.

Bonus link: Liz Lawley is going to the UK, to a conference on Integrating Research on Girls' Choices of IT Careers. I'll be cash money right now on the number of times — zero — someone will bring up the 800 lb. gorilla in the room: they're encouraging girls to choose a career path that, by every metric I've seen, is decreasing in both number of jobs and wages for those jobs.

Sounds like a joke, but it's not

Go listen to While my ukulele gently weeps. Really, it's good, and worth your time.

Bragging about the kid, AP edition

Another in an ongoing series: We got the results of Sean's Advanced Placement tests today. A score of 3 (out of 5) is passing.

• US History: 5
• Biology: 4
• World History (taken last year): 4

We're immensely proud of him. Great work, Sean!

All diet drinks, all the time

Thanks for most of the comments to Dori's post below. This is where I get (with her blessing) to publicly say to my wife, "I told you so." Last night, I asked her why she gave a crap about the opinions of Robert Scoble. I've met Robert; person-to-person, he seems like a pleasant guy. But IMHO he's a bit too self-important these days. I'd say that he's drunk with power, but then I think "Hey, what power?" The group of people that thinks he's the cat's meow isn't one that I care to be associated with. Perhaps that's just because we move in different spheres; I'm in the Apple space, Robert and his buddies are heavily invested in the Windows monoculture. I find most of the things that he talks about on his blog to be of little interest; because I've been a writer for so long, I'm pretty immune to spin and cheerleading for any one company's products. It's mostly not relevant to what I do or what I care about. That's why I rarely read his stuff.

I'm especially not desirous of anyone's approval (except Dori's) of what I write about here at Backup Brain. This blog, for me, mostly exists as an outlet to write about subjects (usually politics and culture) for which I don't get paid. I get paid to write about tech stuff, and while I will do pieces here about tech, it's not my main focus. I'm happy when other people read what I write here and like it, but I do it mostly for myself. I certainly think that anyone who is judging my wife's technical ability by what I write about diet drinks shows a baffling lack of judgment. Robert, don't make your next career in Human Resources!

Speaking of diet drinks: Diet Pepsi Twist with Lemon: One and a half thumbs up. Pretty good, and as usual with lemon-flavored drinks, it hides the aspartame aftertaste.

Invisible? Confused with others? What's the difference?

I've been ranting about gender and tech issues again, and instead of putting y'all through it, I've been putting it over on Shelley's blog, Burningbird, as comments to her post And Ruby isn't just a Gemstone. Scoble noticed that and said:

I see that Dori Smith is insisting that she's invisible again. I don't get that. Dori, have you ever thought that we don't link to you because you're talking about Diet drinks and things to do in California's wine country instead of geeky stuff?

Okay, let's do a count of posts that'll be on this page after this goes up:

• Posts by Tom about diet drinks: 1
• Posts by Dori about Healdsburg: 1
• Posts by Dori about geeky topics, or stuff that at least started out as geeky topics: 9

So, what can we take from this? Robert noticed only two posts: one that I didn't write, and one (out of ten) that I did write that was on a non-geeky topic. And while he disagrees about my perception that I'm invisible, I think that he just did an excellent job of proving my point. Thanks, Robert!

And I've ranted before about how this blog doesn't count in many lists because it's not a single-person, single-topic blog. If it was just Tom writing about politics or Macs, he'd get more links. If it was just me writing about being a Mom, I'd get more links. But hey, this blog went up long before there was a "right" way to do things, and we have a lot of different interests, and if something we post doesn't interest you, skip it. There's no test; you're not required to read every post. But please, do give us credit for the ones we do write, not one out of ten or ones that we don't even write.