• Last January at Macworld Expo, we were asked to sit in on a MacNotables podcast recording. We're always happy to punditize, and we weren't going to miss a chance to hang out with smart people like Tonya Engst, Andy Ihnatko, Ted Landau and Chuck Joiner. We can be heard on MacNotables #802. And if you're wondering, yes, there is a picture of us at that link all crammed into the one small recording booth on the show floor.

• In March at SxSW, Charles Wyke-Smith, a best-selling author and a heck of a nice guy, interviewed us for PeachpitTV. Yes, it's us, and not just out disembodied voices! I only watched enough of Peachpit: Live from SXSW with Dori Smith & Tom Negrino to check to see if I was wearing the same shirt that I'd been wearing in the January picture, but I'm told that later in the video, I do let Tom get a word in edgewise.

• Because we had a great time doing MacNotables in January, Chuck asked me to help him launch his new podcast series, MacJury. I was happy to, and last week I recorded my first episode: MacJury #805: The Death of Adobe GoLive, The Clones Won't Go Away, and All Those Macs Sold along with Jean MacDonald, Dave Hamilton, and Dan Pourhadi.

• As I'm not the only pundit in the family, Chuck tapped Tom to appear in the very next episode, MacJury #806: iTunes Same-Day-As-New DVD Purchases, Movie Selection, the Apple TV and More along with Jeff Gamet, Steve Sande, and Matt Neuburg. A good time was had by all.

Check 'em out! And if you ever want a guest speaker on your podcast, let us know.

In the royalty package, a note, on bright yellow paper, warning me and presumably all authors receiving checks from Macmillan, that the check is only good for 90 days, so to be sure to cash it before then.

Which leads me to wonder if the Macmillan accountants need to remember they are talking to authors, the motto of whom, as a general class, is and always shall be cash the check before they change their mind.

When I see that warning on a royalty check, I always snicker. Then I wave goodbye as the check gets sucked into the ATM. My goal in life is to cash checks as quickly as the IRS cashes my tax payments.

Photos of a Masonic handbook from 1920 called King Solomon and His Followers -- A Valuable Aid to the Memory. The text is written in shorthand.

That sounds interesting, I thought, and went to check it out. As the Flickr page loaded, I wondered to myself, "What if… nah, not a chance. That would be waaay too coincidental."

When the page loaded, though, it turned out that it was not too coincidental— the cool Masonic book from 1920, written all in code, that he has? I've got one, also. I remember getting it at a used bookstore in Laguna Beach, which means that it must have been sometime between 1980-1985. It's somewhere around the house, I'm sure, in a box somewhere.

Now that he's got some info about how to translate it, I'll have to see if I can dig up my copy.

I found that the only way I could handle Twitter was to ruthlessly police and prune the list of people I follow, so that I kept interruptions to a minimum. And even then, when I'm working, I turn off Twitteriffic, switch my chat message to "Working, IM with care," and sometimes even quit Entourage. My problem with social networking is that it wants to be, well, social, and clamors for my time and attention. That's already in short supply.

So, why should I be any different?

I've now joined Evernote, socialthing!, and brightkite.com. I may or may not still have invites for any of these, so if you want one, ask away.

And feel free to friend me if you want on any service that has the capability; I'm almost always "dori".

But it also points up some of the mistakes of the past, and how much my tastes have changed over the years. At around the 15 minute mark on the bike, Emerson Lake and Palmer's Karn Evil 9 suite came on. Haven't listened to it in years; didn't even know that I'd ever ripped it. So I thought, "I think I'll listen to it all, just to see if I can figure out why I used to like it so much back in high school." I remembered it's about a half hour long, which was the right length for the remaining workout.

I failed. Miserably. I got through about a third of it, then the Hammond organ noodling and Minimoog "strings" just did me in. Not to mention the pretentious lyrics. Didn't even get to the "Welcome back my friends..." part.

I'm not a progressive rock guy anymore, I guess. Though I still like some mid-period Genesis...

As a Salon subscriber, I'm annoyed that any of my money goes to keep publishing Paglia's insanely egocentric rants (I find her even more insufferable than Cary Tennis, who so needs a good slapping-around). I'm thrilled to read Kathy G.'s Paglia takedown, because I've never mustered the energy to write one myself: Camille Paglia in Salon: WTF?. Kathy gets extra credit for linking to Molly Ivins' 1991 Mother Jones article about Paglia, which I'd never read. Damn, I miss Molly.

• I'd meant to point to GeekSpeakr.com, which is a wonderful new resource for finding women speakers for tech conferences. If you're a woman who would like to be doing more tech conference appearances, go add yourself there (unsurprisingly, I can be found here).

  There's been previous attempts to do lists of women speakers, but they've always had issues. The one at personism.com is primarily focused on the arts with very little tech, and the one at The Speaker's Wiki (started via Blogher) suffers from, well, the same problems that any openly-editable wiki does (and yes, I did do a private writeup on the problems I found and offered to help out to right them, but I never heard back—no surprise there).

• The Upcoming group Needs Women Speakers may have already been a small force for good. A few days ago, I came across the RubyFringe conference, whose front page then included a blurb saying:

  GIRLFRIEND DAYCARE

  Have a spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend tagging along to Toronto? We're running a 'girlfriend daycare' to help evade the boredom that is often spawned from being the less-nerdy travel companion. Details soon.

  I pointed this out in the group's discussion area (subject: Egregiousness…), adding "Because, y'know, girlfriends are children who need to be taken care of, not adults who can be allowed out on their own in a strange city!"

  But if you look at the conference home page now, it says:

  TRAVEL COMPANION?

  Have a spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend tagging along to Toronto? We're running an activity program to help evade the boredom that is often spawned from being the less-nerdy travel companion. Details soon.

  One small step for a few guys…

• One of the things I noticed after a few other people started adding conferences to the list was, well, how many O'Reilly Conferences had been listed. I was expecting to get some pushback, but instead, Jesse Robbins, a program chair for their Velocity Conference, not only wrote some nice things in the comments on my last blog post but also joined the Upcoming group.

• The question comes up: what causes a conference to be perceived as needing more women speakers? That may differ for every person who belongs to the group, and it's the main reason why I didn't want this to be just a me-project—what may strike me as plenty of female representation may be seen as way too few by someone else, and vice versa. And while I definitely don't believe in quota systems, my rule of thumb tends to be:

  • Is the speaker list less than 10% female?
  • Are talks by women primarily on "soft" topics—that is, ones like People For Geeks or Running a successful user group? Those, I don't even count.
  • Are there women doing token talks, such as Form an orderly queue, ladies or Heroes - Women in FOSS? My personal score sheet takes points away from those conferences.

    [My apologies to OSCON, but the sessions above are exactly what I think hurts, not helps. Instead, how about more like Java Programming in a Multicore World?]

  • Are there any women on the conference committee?

  That last one, imo, is HUGE. I've said before that I know that it can be hard to get women willing to speak publicly (for a variety of reasons), but you can get them to help with planning. Get more women involved with conference committees, and the end result will be a more diverse speaker list.

• And btw: yes, that last point there is me, volunteering. Want me on your conference committee? Just ask.

In particular, I have a new rant I want to write on women in tech, but it keeps getting longer and longer as time goes on. I will finish it, someday, honest—just not today. But here's a short bit of something that could have been in it:

Jason Kottke recently wrote:

It's been awhile since the last conversation about gender diversity at web conferences. Here's a particularly high profile example of more of the same: Google's just-announced Web Forward conference appears to have a single woman speaker out of 38 total speakers.

This got picked up in a few other places (such as here and here) but for the most part, it wasn't covered as much as I thought it would/should be. So, here's another little push for this to get some attention.

Given that I've been ranting about this issue for several years now (boy, time flies when you're having fun, don't it?) and nothing has changed, I figured I'd try something new this time: creating a group on Upcoming.org called Needs Women Speakers. Feel free to join, and once you've joined, you can add "Needs Women Speakers" as a tag to any conference you see where you think it's applicable.

Naming and shaming… it's certainly not my first choice, but let's see if it helps any…

I have nitpicks with both Obama's and Clinton's health care plans, but either one would be far preferable to McCain's. In the face of a genuine health care crisis, his so-called plan does absolutely nothing to reduce costs or improve access to care. All it does is line the pockets of insurance companies. In other words, it's a typical Republican plan.

Update: Here is a post by one of Obama's health care advisors who presented with a McCain advisor on their competing plans. As expected the McCain "plan" does nothing to solve the real problems we face, and actively sticks its head in the sand to avoid dealing with the most intractable issues. Oh, and it lies about the standard of care in other countries, because apparently you can't be a GOP strategist and tell the truth.

EHR is coming; there are too many reasons for it not to. It is going to be a crucial part of any political plan for healthcare reform; both Clinton and Obama have it as a cornerstone of their plans, and many Republicans support it (though it is notably missing from McCain's campaign site. And if you look at his healthcare page, it's a freaking joke; it's all platitudes and bullshit GOP nostrums like tax credits that won't do a damn thing to solve the real problems that face us). But EHR must be implemented in a way that doesn't lock in the patient to any one vendor's system.

I asked him the following question, which I admit was kind of tough:

"Microsoft operating systems and software are famously insecure, and Microsoft itself has the unfortunate reputation for being a corporate predator. What is Microsoft doing to win the trust of medical consumers, and show them that Microsoft would be a good steward of their private medical information?"

His answer was disappointing. He admitted that Microsoft has had problems in the past, but claimed that the premise of my question was based on outdated information about the security of Microsoft products. He didn't provide an answer about what proactive steps Microsoft was taking to reassure people about the safety of their medical data.

In my view, merely asserting that security problems are a thing of the past, then in effect asking for the public's trust, is woefully insufficient. We still often hear reports of malware and security breaches in Microsoft products. And many people (I'm not one of them, btw) believe that Microsoft is just plain evil; bland assurances of safety will not cut the mustard.

Another issue wasn't dealt with in the panel, and I can't find a mention of it on the HealthVault site, either. That's the Roach Motel problem, where your data checks in, but it never comes out of the Microsoft system. In the past, Microsoft has been infamous for that kind of lock-in, implemented through proprietary formats and by providing no tools for extracting data. According to the site's privacy statement, you can delete your account and personal information, but there's no mention of ways to get the data &mdash your data &mdash out of the HealthVault system, should you choose to switch to another electronic medical records system.

It's clear that all of these systems, from Microsoft, Google, or others, must be required to have an interchange format that all of them can read and write. That's obviously something that would need to be mandated by the government, and possibly regulated, too.

Without a much better answer for health information security, and without knowing how my medical records can be made portable, there's no way I'd be interested in using HealthVault. A name that merely connotes security is no substitute for real security.

Subject: MOO | Order nnnnnnn | Dispatched
From: Little MOO | Print Robot <noreply@moo.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:23:46 +0000

The following items from your order are in the mail:

1 x MiniCards (100)

Please note, as your order will be shipped via First Class/Airmail, it should be with you in around 5-7 working days, but that it won't have a tracking number.

Grump. 5-7 working days from 21 February should have been enough even with a little padding, but no joy.

Sigh.