Meandering streams of consciousness

We want you!

2011-03-04T13:36:00.000-08:00

to volunteer at PyCon!

Come meet the speakers and chair a session, or be a runner!
Sign up at http://us.pycon.org/2011/schedule/sessions/

Other volunteer opportunities remain - Sign up at http://us.pycon.org/2011/volunteer/onsite/ to help out.

If you're attending PyCon, please volunteer. Remember, PyCon is a volunteer-run, community-based conference. That means you!

Consider the tuple...

2010-12-11T21:38:00.000-08:00

I remember learning Python and wondering what a tuple was for. Why wouldn't you just use a list? Or a dict?

What I've come down to is a few thoughts such as:
1) if I want sortable items, use a list. (list.sort in Python is way fast!)
2) if I want to use an item as a key and find the related info (value), put the key/value pair into a dict.
3) if I want to have possibly-heterogenous-but-related items in a specific unchangeable order, consider a tuple.

Tuples can often be overlooked as a data structure in Python - but can be really useful for things like x,y coordinates or GPS coordinates or timestamps or addresses. It's important to have them in order - you don't want to mix up the x and the y, or the hour and the minutes. You can't do much *to* tuples, they have no methods and are immutable(unchangeable), although you can search in them with in. If you have a tuple that needs something changed, you'll just have to replace it with a new tuple.

Of course, a kewl thing in Python is that you can mix and match. You can have a list of tuples. Or a dict of tuples. Tuples are really useful as keys in a dict, because they're immutable, unlike lists. So, for example, you could have a dict, with keys that are tuple of gps coordinates, and values of a place name at that location, or a house price at a particular address, or you can use "in" to find all the keys that have, say, Sunnyvale, as the name of the city, and find out some value related to Sunnyvale.

Lists and dicts get all the press in Python, because they're really useful and fast. But tuples are pretty awesome in their own way...

EDIT to add examples:

In a list mylist = [2,1], if you call mylist.sort() you get [1,2]. If 2,1 is a coordinate point, then sorting it to 1,2 is a REALLY BAD THING and could lead to really bad bugs.

OTOH: mytuple = 1,2 and you call mytuple.sort(), you get an error because (1,2) is not sortable. This is a GOOD THING, leading it to be usable as a hash (key) in a dict, and for identifying specific things.

A list has no business being coerced to a tuple in order to act as a key in a dict. I think that's an abuse of list. You'd be better off thinking of tuples as a record in a database. "213 1st Street" means nothing when sorted in a list ['1st', '213','Street'), but means everything when left as a tuple ('213', '1st', 'Street') as it should be. Tuples are great for data - when the position *means* something, not just an "ordering". People ask, "why don't you just have named field". A phone number doesn't really need named fields for the 800 to mean something and for it to be important that it not have its order rearranged. Take the following two tuples: (408,555,1212) and (555,408,1212). If you treat them just as lists, you could end up sorting them and they'd be "identical". But they're not identical - they're phone numbers for completely different parts of the country and the structure is meaningful. Which means, tuples would be appropriate here, and that structure is what makes them good as keys.

Recipes aren't for following

2010-08-03T21:22:00.000-07:00

Saw this recipe in my latest issue of _Bon Appetit_ for curried red lentil, kohlrabi and couscous salad. Looked interesting BUT...
DH doesn't like curried lentils so much, and especialy not as a salad. He likes lentils, just not curried. Also, we need to have some extra protein due to diabetes II in the family. Finally, I felt like pulling out my crockpot today.

So....I made two dishes today: Salt Pork with lentils and kohlrabi, and eggplant caponata.

Chopped 3 onions (2 white 1 red) and sauteed them in olive oil until soft
Tossed half into a crockpot with a chunk of salt pork from the freezer and some chicken broth to cover. Turned crockpot on high. Reserved the rest of the cooked onion for caponata.

Chopped 3 bell peppers (2 orange, 1 red), 2 stalks of celery, 2 carrots, and 3 kohlrabi.

I still say Kohlrabi looks like an alien. But it tastes somewehre between a potato and a radish. Interesting. So, I took the leaves and rinsed them, and chiffonaded them and added them to the crockpot. Then I chopped the kohlrabi bulbs. Even though they were small, they had some touch parts, so I will get bigger ones next time. I had tried doing the "boil 30 seconds then shock in ice water" trick to get the skins off but that didn't help. So I just took a paring knife to them.

Dropped about half of the chopped veggies into the crockpot. Added the lentils (about a cup of red lentils) and poured in broth to cover.

What to use for spices?

I decided to go with mustard and paprika(to go with the salt pork); black peppercorns and garlic powder, of course; some cumin seed to add some highlight; and then saw the black coriander. So I added one of those, and ground the works up in the grinder. Added half (about a tsp) to start along with about a tsp of salt.

A couple hours in, I added another tsp or so of spices, and some hot water cuz it was looking a bit dry.

All in all, it cooked about 6 hours, about 2 on high, 3 on low, then another hour on high to finish it off and make sure everything was soft. When it was time to eat, I took out the pork and pulled it into chunks to add to the plates, (removing the fat and bone).

I took a cup plus of the cooking liquid in a small saucepan, brought it to a boil, and added a cup of couscous. After setting 5 minutes, I fluffed it with a fork.

For presentation, I put down a swipe of good dijon mustard on the plate, piled the pork and a half cup of couscous on one side, then filled the rest of the plate with mixed salad greens topped with a cup of the lentil, kohlrabi mix.

Yummy and filling. We had it with a white French burgundy. It didn't need anything else. It was SOOOOO good. Yum! And all because I saw a recipe for curried lentils and couscous... ;-)

Oh - and the caponata got prepped in the meantime so it's ready for tomorrow's dinner. But that's another post...

Living off the Land(line)

2010-07-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

So, I just finally hooked up a phone to the landline. Mind you, they installed that at the same time as our internet. I just hadn't actually plugged anything in yet. OTOH - I have used my cellphone extensively. Now, I've got to update my Google Voice number to ring the landline.

It was odd, telling Alex that we needed to get a new phone. It wasn't clear that I didn't mean a cellphone. ;-) So when I walked into Best Buy tonight to grab a new phone, I was prepared to ask for a landline phone. The default is no longer landline - it's cellphone.

Even odder is realizing as I type this that it isn't really a landline! It's a VOIP service with AT&T Uverse. So, I guess we're not on the phone lines anymore, for real. Okay, I realize that many folks have switched already; it's just briefly unsettling to think about the change. (I feel so behind!) Guess now we have finally and truly joined the digital age.

The importance of being Ernest

2010-06-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

We have a new member of the family. He's a small black lab mix, come all the way from Taiwan to be adopted. When we adopted him yesterday, they told us he had been adopted first about a year ago by people who wanted a puppy. Two days ago, instead of returning him to the no-kill, doggie rescue people, the jerks dropped him off at a kill shelter! Luckily, he's chipped and the doggie rescue folks rescued him before he was euthanized. When we adopted him yesterday, they were calling him Turnip! (Shades of Black Adder...)

So, we have determined that his name is going to be Ernest. And he's a Very Good Dog.

EDIT:
Apparently, he's also a Very Clever Dog. He knows how to open doors. The pocket doors are less than 2 seconds for him to open. And now he's figured out how to open the bedroom door. The one with the doorknob that turns. Yeah. He can somehow open a latched door with a doorknob. Oh boy.

Cooking and nostalgia

2009-11-22T19:59:00.001-08:00

Today, I'm cooking wild boar ragu in the slow cooker, and polenta. And it reminds me of when we lived in Italia.
Wild boar is something we ate with my step-son's girlfriend - her family had local hunters give them wild boar. The flavor is rich and gamey in a good way.
But Polenta will always remind me of our honeymoon - up in the Italian Alps. The little hotel we stayed at invited all its guests to lunch at their Malga (a traditional farmhouse up slope from the village). To get there, we all walked along a path, through woods and flowers, along a creek, and then emerging to a pasture, high in the mountains, surrounded by grass, and rock, and flowers, with the sound of the creek audible below. Children played, running around with the dog that had accompanied us up, a happy little dog who was all energy and bounce. We sat and drank wine and chatted and explored while the hotel folk cooked over an open fire. The meat had been roasting since the morning, but the polenta - oh, the polenta pot was a thing to behold. A HUGE copper pot, over a wood fire built into the side of the farmhouse, at just the right height for us to take turns stirring with a wooden spoon that was at least 2 feet long. The polenta bubbled and boiled like the proverbial cauldron for hours, getting thicker, and creamier. Meanwhile, they plied us with coldcuts and bread and wine, but then came the grilled pork sausage and then the roasted venison and the polenta. All the picnic tables were set with bottles of red wine, as we sat at picnic tables under the summer sun, and ate until we couldn't eat any more. And as the evening began, we all walked together, down the long path, (very glad it was downhill), back to the hotel, before the next day's adventures.

PyCon Awesomeness

2009-11-15T13:58:00.000-08:00

I was just looking over the talks and tutorials for PyCon 2010, which is coming up in February in Atlanta. All I can say is, wow! This year's lineup is incredible. We've got 2 days packed of tutorials, 3 days packed of an incredibly variety of talks aimed at all levels of pythonista, PLUS open space, poster sessions(new this year), lightning talks, and more. I can't wait!

Why I'm riding the bus

2009-10-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

EDIT: I'm talking about BICYCLES here except for one mention of motorcycles. Bike == BICYCLE, not motorcycle, in this post.

About 20 years ago or so, I was waiting at a busstop, minding my own business. Some guy walks up to me and asks: "Do you know why I'm riding the bus today?" I wasn't sure what he was up to, but figured it didn't hurt to chat with him. "No, why?" "Because I'm alive."

And he reaches into his backpack and pulls out the two halves of the bike(as in BICYCLE) helmet he was wearing the week before, the helmet he was wearing the day a car ran into him on his bike.

I had always been pretty conscientious about wearing a helmet when on a motorcycle but hadn't been as much on a bicycle. I hadn't really been biking much lately, so didn't even own a bike or a helmet.

But ever since then, whenever I get on a bike, the helmet goes on. Period. Or I don't get on.

I'm really glad I met him. Especially last Wednesday, when someone in a car ran into me on my bike. I knew my bike helmet was on, and I think that allowed me to relax enough to just go with it and not tense up much. So nothing is broken. My back is sore, my shoulder where I landed is a bit bruised. But nothing is broken. Including my head - which I think connected with his windshield and I know hit the ground when I slid off his hood flat on my back on the ground.

My thanks to the man with the two helmet halves - whoever he was - and I wish him a long and happy life. And thanks to my friend Jacquie who tightened my helmet straps a few days before the accident.

There may be long-term effects to my back or things that haven't shown up yet. But my head ain't cracked open. And I'm alive to tell this story.

Time to get a new bike helmet.

Why women don't talk enough

2009-09-29T12:11:00.000-07:00

So, the call for proposals for PyCon is out and has been out for some time. It's been circulated around. I've personally sent it to a number of women's lists I'm on. So, why don't I see any proposals from women yet? (Besides mine...)

Some reasons I've heard when I've asked women friends over the years about why they haven't proposed a talk:

a. I don't have time
None of us have enough time. I know we women have a lot of "extras" that we do every day and hobbies tend to fall by the wayside. I'm a full-time student at Stanford, with a husband, a house, 2 cats, and a teenager who doesn't want to do his homework. If I can submit a proposal, so can you.

b. I don't know enough
No one knows everything. And if you're closer to the n00b level, you'll understand what a n00b needs to hear better than an expert. Which brings us to:

c. There are experts/package creators there
Even if the creator is there, they may not be speaking, or they may be so deep into the package that they have no idea what real users of the package actually have trouble with and need to know. You do. So tell the rest of us about it. It's okay to have talks about the same package at two different levels!

d. I only use Python for this limited weird niche:
There are a lot of people interested in how to use Python for niches, and the more niches that presenters explore, the more the rest of us learn about the rich breadth of our favorite language.

e. I'm scared to speak in public:
PyCon is one of the friendliest, most tolerant conferences out there. We're all just a bunch of fellow enthusiasts: you're speaking to friends. So get out there and teach us all about something Pythonic that you love. Trust me, before I speak, not only do my knees shake, my *cheeks* shake! (It's hard to speak when your cheeks are shaking - try it sometime. ;-) But people at Pycon are ON YOUR SIDE - they *WANT* you to succeed. So, it's okay if you're a little shaky at the beginning. They'll be polite and listen anyways, because they want to hear about what you're presenting on. And once you've started, you'll be okay. Trust me on this.

So women of Python - please submit your proposals. Don't let the guys have all the fun and glory. I want to see *you* on stage at PyCon!

http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/proposals/

Status Expectations and Gender

2009-08-20T23:45:00.000-07:00

This is a repost of something I wrote for a women-only mailing list so that I can point to it publicly. Many workplace and other community issues between genders may be related to Status Expectations on interactions. Here I try to summarize some current sociological theory on gender:

Subconscious beliefs about status affect our expectations when we interact:
*Lower status people are expected to be less competent than higher
status people, by default.
*Lower status people are viewed as having less "legitimate" claims to authority.
* Finally, the higher status person is expected to act authoritative
(decisive, proactive) and the lower status person is expected to act
"communally" (working to ease social relations, inclusive, considerate
of others, reactive, etc)

When two people interact in a situation, these expectation color our
perceptions and interactions, so, for example, the higher status
person is given "the benefit of the doubt" and their skills,
behavior, outcomes are judged less harshly than the lower status
person. The lower status person's skills are judged more harshly
(mistakes are evidence of their lower competence, while successes are
downplayed - is this sounding familiar to anyone?), and any attempt by
the lower status person to act authoritative is viewed as an
illegitimate power play. The lower status person doesn't have "the
right" to act authoritative.

Women are lower status than men (in contemporary US society, and in
many/most contemporary societies.) While education and experience can
increase our perceived status regarding competence, we are still
viewed as not having "legitimate" claim to authority. In other words,
women can be competent, but we still have to "be nice" otherwise,
we're violating what it means to be a woman (in contemporary US
society, "being a woman" includes "being nice".) Women are perceived
(rightly or wrongly) as having higher social skills than men, we are
held to higher standards on social skills than men (because we are
lower status).

Unfortunately, (white) women were socialized with the same status
expectations as men, so we hold these same expectations when we walk
into a situation. (There is some evidence that African American women
have different status expectations when interacting within a group of
African Americans - but share the hegemonic beliefs when interacting
in mixed racial groups.) We assume the man is more competent by
default (unless we have some reason to believe otherwise, such as
higher education), and we assume the man will be in charge (again,
unless we walk in with a higher "rank".)

snip of a description on the mailing list of being seen as "difficult"

This is the problem of how the lower status person is supposed to get
ahead - they're perceived as less authoritative, so they don't get
promoted to positions of authority, but if they act authoritative,
they are violating norms, and are not promoted because of their
"inappropriate behavior". (Yes - it is a double standard and a serious
catch22.) Women fall afoul of this regularly (the glass ceiling is
partly based on this effect.)

Women who *do* get ahead, often are the ones who were able to smooth
ruffled feathers by "being helpful" and playing on their social skills
strengths, to get the men to accept them as peers. At that point, they
are sometimes able to act more authoritatively without it being viewed
as "illegitimate". It's hard to accept this, though, as not just
continuing the stereotypes and reinforcing them. Either way, it's an
ugly tangled knot. Do we act "nice" to get along and perpetuate the
stereotypes? or do we act "authoritative" to get ahead, and run the
risk of being stuck in a position where we're not allowed to advance
because we're viewed as "too bitchy"? Ugh.

On trust and diversity

2009-08-19T21:13:00.000-07:00

First read The Terrible Bargain
Then read Just below my skin

Everyone should read those - both of them. Because they give two different perspectives on what it's like to live in a world defined as heterosexual male, able-bodied, neurotypical, with most everything else a "diversity issue". What's funny for me is, I don't feel like I "fit" even in this sort of story. And I want to give my perspective because it falls somewhere in here - just different enough to, I hope, spur people to keep thinking.

I have never experienced the sense of fear and distrust portrayed in the Terrible Bargain about males. Primarily, I think, because I'm NOT neurotypical, and my enculturation or socialization or whatever you call it, didn't really take. I do remember people (especially my mother) talking to me about my interactions with others, especially males, and I suspect, trying to convince me that I was doing things that might be dangerous somehow. But, honestly, I've rarely had trouble from men, as a woman. I have had occasions where there was overt sexism - the principal at my junior high who was convinced that "wargaming is for boys", the two men who tried to threaten me (one carrying a baseball bat) at night at a busstop, being accused of being a "bitch" on occasion (which I mostly found amusing) I'm not immune to harrassment. But I am, I guess, mostly oblivious. I have never really felt a sense of exclusion or being dismissed for being female when pursuing my interests - whether those were RPGs, firearms, electronics, or computers (among others). And I have never felt the sense of generalized mistrust of males that is described in The Terrible Bargain.

I have , otoh, experienced that sense of mistrust - not about males -but more often about women, and mostly, female neurotypicals. (I was, for example, terrified before my first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, but had no fears of walking into OSCON, or any "mixed" conference.)

You see - I don't *get* cultural norms. I have a form of what's best described as "culture blindness" - I don't just pick up the "unspoken rules" of behavior. I don't think the same way that "everyone" seems to. I keep learning more about the ways I think differently, by reading and asking and learning. But the biggest problem I've had in life is with neurotypical assumptions (especially from women) of what I "should" just "know". When I do something that ticks someone off and they respond to my query of "what did I do wrong" with "if you have to ask... " then I just can't learn anything about how to fix it. Worse is when they simply decide that I'm deliberately intending to be rude or whatever, because of my phrasing, when I had no idea that it would be interpreted that way, and don't ever bother to *tell* me or *explain* to me that it's taken that way. I've fallen afoul of that sort of thing numerous times in my life.

It's *NOT* that I don't care. It's that my perception of "norms" or of "courteous behavior" or "politeness" or whatever you want to call it is DIFFERENT because of my different brain. Unfortunately, since I grew up in the Midwest of the US, and am white and female, I'm *assumed* to be somehow empathetic and better at socializing and all sorts of things that - I just am not. So when I violate those norms, it's assumed I'm doing it *on purpose*.

When I'm with women, I get this more than with men. Because with men, *generally* (not always but more often than with women) if I *ask* about why they're acting pissed, they'll tell me. Or if I upset them, they'll challenge me on my behavior - and I get to find out what I did wrong - at the time, so that I can avoid it in the future! If they never tell me, I don't know!

I treasure the people in my life who have taken time to explain to me when I've done something that offended them. The African American woman who explained to me that the term "buckwheat" (which I'd been using for my son for a couple of years at that point) was racist, or the person who explained to me why "Indian giver" is a slur. Thank you to those of you who have taken the time to explain to me so that I can avoid unintentionally offending others.

So - what's it like in my world?

What if you had to move as an adult to an alien culture that just happens to speak your same language, but with different meanings for many of the words, with different ways of "being polite". What if, because you happened to speak the "same" language, you are assumed to just know the cultural norms - for example, the holidays, the rules of the road, the little rules of interaction, that are just different enough from your own culture so that you get tripped up regularly. And what if, instead of explaining patiently to you what you did and how to avoid it in the future, everyone assumed you were tripping up on purpose because "everyone knows that" and anyone who does it "wrong" is deliberately being a troll. How comfortable would you feel in that society?

Welcome to what it feels like to live in neurotypical society.

So yeah - I tend to be, I think, more tolerant of those who have sincere questions about things like "disability 101" and "feminism 101" because frankly, most folks don't grok "neurodiversity 101". While I understand being tired of explaining what it's like to be a woman in a man's society, I perhaps have less sympathy than I might if I were neurotypical - because I am different in an invisible way. Because the neurotypical has no idea how many assumptions they are making about everyone - and when they refuse to explain in response to an honest query - they're doing *no one* any good.

No - you don't have to *personally* explain every single thing in great gory detail to every single person. But please provide pointers and a brief, clear explanation: "when you said x, I felt y, because z" and "you can get more info about this at url..." If that's too much to ask, then you have insufficient tolerance, imho, for the neurodiverse who actually *need* that explanation or for those who are simply new to your form of diversity and don't know your cultural assumptions.

Maybe this makes me a bad "ally" for whatever 'ism' you're promoting. Could be. Or, it could be a plea for everyone to please assume the best of everyone's intentions, particularly when we're *asking* for help in understanding. Because there's too much out there for *any* of us to learn on our own. The more you explain (or point to explanations) that help us all understand better why you feel the way you do and react the way you do, the better off we *all* are, and the easier time we *all* have to avoid tripping over landmines that we were unaware of.

So - thanks to the posters of The Terrible Bargain and Just Below My Skin. It *helps* to read these perspectives. Thank you for taking the time to help others understand. Including me.

Now, where'd I leave that asbestos long-underwear...

On Python and diversity

2009-08-05T13:31:00.000-07:00

After Kirrily's OSCON Keynote, several of us had some great hall discussions and lunch discussions on the topic of women in opensource. As a result of the discussion, Aahz, a fellow pythonista, posted a call for diversity and created a new list for Python users to discuss improving diversity in the Python community.

So far, we've had a great discussion - lots of respectful participation from people of varying viewpoints. I'm so proud to belong to a community that cares about this topic (not just women in opensource, but all forms of diversity) and is taking steps to address it. I've always loved the Python community for its welcoming, friendly, accessible nature. I am also aware that, like most Open Source projects, (and indeed, the tech field in general) there is room for improvement in the diversity of our membership, committers, and officers.

If you're interested in Python and want in on the discussion, the new list is at http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/diversity

Join us in working to make the Python community even better than it already is!

Working with excel from Python

2009-06-19T08:32:00.001-07:00

A new site for gathering up-to-date information about with Excel files in Python. Working with Excel Files in Python

It has links to tutorials and modules, and even a googlegroups mailing list. Looks useful for anyone who has to work with Excel from Python.

Trippin' thru the Twitterverse with #captaintripps

2009-06-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

The first posts from @larry_underwood on April 29 set the stage:

Been having some weird, weird dark-ass dreams lately. Maybe I'll write a song about them. Something about @VegasWalkinDude

Whoa. This thing is serious. RT @healthmap alert phase is 5 per WHO press conference http://bit.ly/ZaRr0 #swineflu #h1n1

And some people are calling #swineflu and #h1n1, #captaintripps. Baby, I'm not digging this at all.

If these names (@larry_underwood, @vegaswalkindude, @motherabigail) bring to mind dreams of cornfields and crows, then you should follow @larry_underwood et al as they tweet their way thru #thestand, as it might play out nowadays with social networking and cellphones.

An impressive performance so far. I'm following over 2 dozen related accounts -- I've set up in a folder in my rss feed. I can't keep up as well on the standard twitterclient - even seesmic. But I'm an oldphart. I expect younger folks will be able to keep up just fine. In any case, if you haven't read Steven King's The Stand, now's the time. And if you have, follow these folks.

M O O N, that spells Twitter. Even Tom knows that.

Dirty Pitchers and Conference Presentations

2009-05-02T00:19:00.000-07:00

Due to the nature of the discussions I've seen on this topic, I am disabling comments for this post.

I like dirty pitchers.

I like looking at sexy images of men and of women (I've made no secret that I'm bi). I enjoy watching pr0n movies on occasion, and consider a bit of whips&chains to be added spice. I've posed for some, ahem, risque photos (in my younger, more adventurous days).

Yep - I appreciate pr0n.

What I *don't* appreciate is the use of pr0n, or sexually suggestive (or so-called "glamour") images of scantilly-dressed women, in tech conference presentations.

Now - I've already said I like pr0n. So what's the big deal?

The problem is the effect the use of such images in presentations is likely to have on the (inevitably) few tech women in the audience - women who've already overcome stereotype threat, low self-efficacy, and other barriers to entry to the field and who still may suffer from imposter syndrome (don't know the terms? look 'em up!), who have made the decision to attend in spite of the low numbers of "people like me" (other tech women) - who are likely to feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, who may feel, once again, that they don't really belong here (here == 'the tech field').

And no - this isn't about being a "repressed American". I lived in Italia and have seen and enjoyed the myriad sexy images of women (and men) in magazines and billboards there. But be honest with yourself: those images on the magazines and billboards are there *because* they are sexy and because sex sells (blame a million years of hardwiring for that). That's an appropriate context for those images. But what does being sexy have to do with a professional tech conference? What is showing images of "sexy women" saying about the role of women in tech? To far too many women (and men) it says that women belong at conferences as decoration - welcome as boothbabes, tolerated as marketers and maybe recruiters (after all, sex sells) - but not recognized as colleagues, as professional programmers or sysadmins or hardware techs.

The more images like this in conference presentations are viewed as appropriate by presenters or organizers at tech conferences, the less women will feel they "belong" in tech, or at least, at tech conferences. Is that the message you want to send? Is that a consequence you're willing to accept for the sake of a lame joke, or brief moment of tittilation?

VDay

2009-02-15T13:37:00.000-08:00

Last April, my friends Harry and Michael invited us to get tickets with them for Cal Performances. One of the performances was for Valentines day - Academy of St Martin in the Field. I bought a pair of tickets, conspiring with them over dinner and a nice hotel - they're far more familiar with Berkeley than I.

So, last night we all four went to the concert. My beloved and I checked in to our lodging, and Michael and Harry picked us up and took us to dinner at a nice Thai place. The concert was great.

We stayed overnight in Berkeley - at the most delightful little B&B. The Rose Garden Inn on Telegraph st in Berkeley. It was kitschy and quaint and lovely - several buildings placed around a central garden full of fountains and gazebos and murals and wrought iron bistro tables. The room was small, with a queen bed (but nicely firm mattress) and had a gas fireplace in the corner, and a little balcony where he could step out to smoke.

I brought along a Cava and we shared a toast with Harry and Michael after the concert. This morning, the skylight awoke us with natural light (my second favorite way to be woken), and my beloved brought me a glass of Cava in bed! After a while, we wandered down to the complimentary breakfast - eggs, bacon, sausage, waffles, pastries, etc. And at lunchtime, we checked out and I drove him to his bridge tournament at an SFO hotel. I'll see him late tonight.

All in all, a most pleasant valentines day and night.

Testing new app

2009-01-29T17:37:00.001-08:00

MacBreakWeekly recommended Blogo. So I'm trying it out. We'll see how well it works for me. Consider this a test.

Serious levels of geekitudinous love!

2009-01-17T23:41:00.000-08:00

Today, My sweetie switched iPhones with me. I had the original iPhone -paid the geektax and everything (the $100 refund from Apple went to an iTunes certificate that I'm still using... ;-) My sweetie had a 3G iPhone. Life was good.

But - he just doesn't use his iPhone the way Ghod (Steve Jobs) intended. I mean, he only used it as a *phone*. Hardly any other apps on it!

I, on the other hand, have been lusting after one of the Clarifi , a lens to slide over the iPhone lens so you can read barcodes!It works with Snappr.

Did I mention that I have *everything* on my phone? I've read several books with Stanza, listen to music with Pandora, do my grocery shopping with iNeedStuff, use both iCal and googleCal on the phone, it's even my alarm clock (because, unlike my regular bedside clock, I can set it to ring at 6:30am MTF and 7:00am W and 8amTh, to fit my son's wacky school schedule), and it's got all my contacts, and it syncs with mobileme so I don't have to worry about losing stuff. And did I mention that mine is an 8gig but his is 16gigs?

So - yeah, we stood in line today at AT&T and after a while, they called us up, swapped out the sim cards, and sent us home. I'm in the middle of re-syncing after restoring the phone. As soon as I restored it, it asked 'restore from backup?' oh yes!

I love my phone. And I also love my sweetie. And he loves me. Obviously.

How dreary to be somebody...

2008-12-26T16:36:00.000-08:00

It's odd. I've spent over a decade online, and have been perfectly happy posting rather private information to thousands of strangers.

Yesterday, however, I had a rather... disconcerting experience. Twittering on a #feed to a bunch of fellow flybabies (people who use the techniques for organization, etc, of the site flylady.net) and someone on my Facebook asked me what #flylady was about. It's not that I'm reticent to talk up Flylady, since she and her site have been quite helpful in dealing with my ADD-like executive function problems. But it was an odd feeling to be forcibly reminded that stuff I'm doing here, or on twitter, might show up in Facebook, or Plaxo, or elsewhere, on someone's feed.

What comes to mind is from John M Ford's classic "Final Reflection" in which the saying recurs: "If I had not wanted it heard, I would not have said it." The society is one of constant observation, cameras, bugs, etc, but it applies to the Internet as well - that what I post here, or anywhere on a social network, now, will show up in unexpected places.

Although I *know* this... occasionally, I find it discomforting. Too public. Too many people following what I'm saying - and not just strangers; people I know!

As Emily Dickinson put it:
“How dreary - to be - somebody!
How public - like a frog -
to tell your name - the livelong June -
to an admiring bog!”

Ribbit.

One of my favorite people is having a sale of shinies

2008-12-11T22:55:00.000-08:00

Elise does the most awesome jewelry. Gorgeous beadwork and delightful wire wrap, etc. Go see her stuff. They make great Yule gifts!

http://elisem.livejournal.com/1385731.html

Too much stuff

2008-12-04T16:41:00.000-08:00

So I'm doing a leave of absence for the winter quarter from school. Just too much stuff needs to happen RIGHT BLEEPING NOW (where, NOW, means now and for the next couple of months.) Things should settle down by March, but in the meantime, just doing what I need to do to keep my head above water. I just do not have time for classes and homework and tests and papers on top of everything else in my life right now.

I'm just glad it's an option.

Yeah, this puts the graduation back a bit, but, as a transfer, there were too many core classes for my major that I would have had to make up next year anyway. So this way, I can focus on doing everything right, rather than trying to do everything at once and doing a half-a$$ed job of it.

If you use iwantsandy

2008-11-25T10:10:00.001-08:00

iwantsandy's creator, Rael Dornfest, got a new gig. Sandy's giving her two week notice...

http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy/topics/a_fork_in_the_road_an_important_announcement_about_i_want_sandy

If you need an alternative, RemembertheMilk is pretty good. Not as personal, but reliable... and there's an iPhone version.

How right they are...

2008-11-19T17:41:00.000-08:00

The analysis indicates that the author of http://annaraven.blogspot.com/ is of the type:
INTP - The Thinkers
[INTP]
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

http://www.typealyzer.com/index.php?lang=en

Doing my part...

2008-11-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

Just spent a couple of hours volunteering doing data entry at the Obama campaign. ok...
<\crossing fingers> It's really hard to type with crossed fingers... ;-)

Tomorrow, we're off to Berkeley to look at pythons. Yeah - the snake. We may be bringing home a python for the household. That would be *sweet*. And our local petfudstore sells mousecicles. (Frozen mice.)

Time to wind down now with a book and then off to bed...

Got this on several Stanford e-lists

2008-10-31T09:12:00.001-07:00

Native American and German Ancestry donor needed
From: Caren McCormack < caren@mccormackmedia.com >
Subject: Urgent donor needed

Hi all,

I am writing you with a very serious and urgent request. My friend, a local mother of three and elementary school teacher, is fighting for her life. In January 2008, she was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), the same leukemia I battled. After five rounds of intensive chemo, her cancer returned. It was then doctors found she had been misdiagnosed and was actually fighting acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Because she has received so much chemo already, her body will not handle the normal course of treatment for ALL.

She needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life. And she needs it soon. Currently there is no match for her on the national donor database or on international databases. She is looking for someone of Native American AND German ancestry . The percent of each heritage is not important.

Two action items:

1. If you fit this description and are willing to help, would you please contact me? You must be between 18 and 60 and healthy to give. You can be tested for free via a simple cheek swab you can do at home.

2. If you don't fit this description, could you please forward this email to others? I'm convinced there's a donor out there. We just need to cast the net wide enough.

Please help us find someone.

Caren

Questions: caren@mccormackmedia.com

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama

2008-10-19T11:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOyD_fvTzos

This is worth listening to - what a great way to explain his decision.

Learning and Cognition class thoughts

2008-09-24T00:01:00.001-07:00

In my"Topics in learning and cognition: innovation and discovery" class, we've got a number of readings coming up but for tonight, we read Plato's Meno. Alex and I discussed it and he brought up much of the philosophical/spiritual information below (although not all).

In it, Socrates (as described by Plato) discusses knowledge. The first part is all about the problems of definition. What is "being good"? What is "a bee"? This brings up the problem of describing words using other words. Rule-based semantics is difficult. Definitions don't work well.

What is a chair? something with 4 legs that you sit on. Well, what if it's something with a pedestal and wheels, but you still sit on it? Is it still a chair? Do we really store definitions in our brain? Not really. It was thought at one time that we really stored the symbolic representations of things like "chair". But, not so much.

So what do we use for semantic categorization?

Two theories are prototypes and exemplars.
Prototype theory suggests that with multiple experiences, our brains naturally build up "prototypes" - the "ideal chair" for example, and that we categorize new instances based on how close they match a particular prototype. There are issues with this, but we have evidence that our brains do *some* of this. Plato and Socrates (and some Christian mystics) might have felt that we were really discovering the "ideal chair" that already existed, that we had knowledge and were just "remembering". Socrates (according to the Meno reading) believed our experiences in past lives led us to have inner knowledge that we were "remembering" like this. (This begs the question, for me, of how we built up *new* knowledge, if we were just remembering things rather than learning them.)

Another theory is that, rather than prototypes, we simply store weighted connections of properties of our exemplars, of the experiences, so that we have a lot of exemplars - instances of experiences with objects with legs or pedestals that we sit on, and most of those are called "chairs" so if this new experience also has legs and is for sitting on, it's going to be labelled a "chair". Coherent covariance, as McClelland would put it.

Rather than cached prototypes, we have runtime evaluation.

Going back to the Platonic 'where does knowledge come from' question puts it into the spiritual/philosophical realm -
Plato/Socrates might have felt knowledge was already within us, just needing to be "discovered" or "brought out". Some mystics have felt that we contain all knowledge within us - and meditation, to reduce the distractions of the external world, the mundane, will allow us "insight" to this internal knowledge. Socrates describes it in this dialog as coming from past lives. Some mystics feel that humans contains shards of godhead and that, like Saint Theresa, it requires shutting out external distractions and looking within, to realize that one is united with God, and one has always been so. Thou art God, as Valentine Michael Smith would say.

Buddhism, as Alex reminded me, has two views of this - that one can approach from sitting meditation, as mentioned, or from walking meditation. Walking meditation allows for using the external to connect the inner shard with the external divinity.

In any case, a question arises - if Plato is right and we already know this stuff, why is it not accessible? Why is it "covered up"?
Learning theory suggests that much of what we store as memories are cue and context dependent. The cues may retrieve many potential stored memory patterns, but there is interference with all the other patterns also associated with that cue. Context helps.
One reason we have trouble with free recall is because there are too few cues and far too much interference. Cued recall is better because we have reduced the interference.

Plato's "innate knowledge" also reminds me of Chomsky's contention that language is "innate".

I still wonder though - if it's innate, why? Where did it come from if it isn't the result of experience and learning? Some folks such as Jung suggest things like the Collective Unconscious. Which, to me, is just another version of the shard theory.

In any case, one of the questions we're exploring in this class is where does "new" knowledge, "insight", "innovation" come from? How do we encourage it? Can it be taught?

In my experience, insight is a process of synthesis. For me, it's the opposite of "learning". Learning, for me, is best done by giving me a framework, then fill it in - so I have context. Otherwise I feel like I have a shitload of bricks in a pile, and no idea what to do with them, and by the time I'm told where they're supposed to fit, I've lost half of them.

Insight, otoh, is a process of taking a bunch of constructs, and suddenly, forming a bridge between them, so they're no longer separate ideas, separate structures, they're a village, or a concept.

Neurologically, taking various mental representations, and connecting them - building new synapses, so that one's perceptions are changed.

So - perhaps, this is why creative people and madness are so linked. Those of us whose minds tend to 'shortcircuit' and build connections in the 'wrong places' may be more likely to build connections between memories, and semantic categories, and "knowledge" that neurotypicals (NTs) wouldn't.

Some of this relates to the Central Cohesiveness and "gist" - neurotypicals have "strong central cohesiveness" and tend to remember the "gist" of a list of words, for example. Aspies and Auties tend to remember the separate details, but may not remember the "gist" and are said to have "weak central cohesiveness". NTs are likely to generalize in cases where Aspies and Auties don't - for similar reasons.

One of Socrates' tricks (esp in the Meno) was to show someone how baffling definition really is - how much people rely on assumptions and preconceptions. This is neurologically valuable - as my prof was fond of saying "memory is for predicting the present". We need to cache things, label things, categorize and stereotype and generalize, in order to have some idea how to respond to the present, to our experiences, how to perceive and interpret them. And yet, it's also far too easy, as we know, to fall into those stereotypes and not even realize where they are building concrete walls around our perceptions and thoughts and understanding, even of what we think we know.

Part of providing for creativity, then, is tearing down the walls, challenging assumptions, shredding preconceptions, so that new perceptions - meaning new neural patterns - can be created.

Unfortunately, that is a state of uncertainty, which most folks find extremely uncomfortable - not only in themselves, but in others around them. We revere certainty - and mock or fear those who are uncertain, who challenge our own certainty. Saints and mystics are best accepted when far away, or in the past.

So the question becomes, for me, how does one encourage creativity and innovation, without leaving the person unable to deal with the "real" world? And how does one teach without boxing in perceptions, without diminishing ability to form new and unusual connections?

But now, it's almost 1am, and I should sleep. And leave the discussion of Kabbalah and Connectionism for next time...

John McCain - Liar

2008-09-14T00:58:00.000-07:00

ACLU's Constitution Voter drive

2008-09-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

Our goal is to sign up 300,000 Constitution Voters by October 15th to demonstrate our power.

We will deliver your messages to candidates at all levels of government, all across the country. We must let our leaders know that when we step into the ballot box, the Constitution will be the first thing on our minds.

I Am a Constitution Voter

I believe that no one -- including the President -- is above the law.
I oppose all forms of torture, and I support both closing the Guantánamo Bay prison and ending indefinite detention.
I oppose warrantless spying.
I believe that government officials, no matter how high-ranking, should be held accountable for breaking the law and violating the Constitution.
I believe that the Constitution protects every person's rights equally -- no matter what they believe, how they live, where or if they worship, and whom they love.
I reject the notion that we have to tolerate violations of our most fundamental rights in the name of fighting terrorism.
I am deeply committed to the Constitution and expect our country's leaders to share and act on that commitment -- every day, without fail.

... and world peace.

2008-09-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

I honestly broke up laughing watching this. I couldn't listen to it without thinking "and world peace" the entire time.

Abuse of Power

2008-09-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

After the years of administration's abuse of power, I am horrified at the concept of another administration that considers abuse of power acceptable. Palin is being investigated for such abuses. Let's not do this again. Let's get someone who understands the Constitution into office, for a change.

This guy doesn't pull any punches

2008-09-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

I know how he feels -- I was so disappointed with McCain. I told Alex, after the republican convention, that I guess I must seem really naive, but I hadn't realized until then just how completely unethical McCain is.

http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2224950/33308988

The lurkers support me in email...

2008-09-10T12:33:00.000-07:00

I've been seeing a number of libertarian and constitutional views of Obama since I posted my plea. An example:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/09/why-libertarian.html

A plea to my libertarian friends

2008-09-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

I remember 2000, the election between Bush and Gore - when it seemed a pointless choice between demopublicans and the republicrats, a choice between gun rights and abortion rights. I detested Reagan and Bush Sr. and their war on drugs. I hated Clinton because of his executive orders, handling of Waco and Ruby Ridge, and general lack of respect for the Constitution.

In 2000, I voted for Harry Browne.
In 2004, I voted for Badnarik.
Good libertarians, both of them. Neither of them stood a snowball's chance in hell to get elected, but I was registering my protest, standing by my principles...

And since 2000, I have seen my country and my constitution shredded in the name of a false patriotism, a "war on terror" that's being fought in the wrong place, and the rights we took for granted, e.g. Habeas Corpus, being stripped from us with barely a ripple of protest. The spinmeisters in Washington, the Cheney croneys, the Karl Roves, have told the big lies over and over, have promulgated a politics of fear to the point that my country, my people, accept these totalitarian changes as necessary evils. I'm afraid of what another 4 years will do to our children - to their understanding of what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights actually means. I fear that we've lost a generation of Americans - who already have no idea what it means to be *free*. Between the war on drugs and the war on terror, the idea of the administration having the right to do whatever it wants to, has become the status quo.

Yeah - Obama ain't my perfect candidate. He's not libertarian. He doesn't have a perfect voting record - if times were different, I might focus on his defects, his flaws, his lack of libertarian creds.

But I live in the world I helped create.

I was wrong.

When I didn't vote to defeat Bush - I was wrong.

And I'm sorry.

Right now, I'm terrified because Palin has gotten Republicans energized - that so many people heard her speak and were energized by her and let her lies stand. That people actually think she's *for* helping parents with disabilities, that she's against earmarks, that she cares about the environment. Some actually see her as a step for women's rights! This is a woman who cares nothing for the rule of law. And they're going to go out and *vote* for McCain and Palin. McCain is likely to die in office if he's elected, leaving Palin in charge, a thought which horrifies me.

So - I'm asking my libertarian friends, to please please, look around at our country right now. And think about the unintended consequences of letting Bush/McCain/Palin continue to ignore our constitution, continue to ignore the rule of law and treat our citizens as subjects. You hate the Nanny state, and the Police state. So do I. McPalin will turn this country into a totalitarian hell. I wish we had a free election this year, that we could vote our conscience and vote for libertarian candidates without having to worry about the consequences. But - we're not in a free state. This year, there *will* be consequences of not working against McPalin. Please - don't be so blinded by idealism and desire for perfect candidates that you don't do what you can to defeat McPalin.

This election is not about taxes, or the economy, or the war in Iraq, or even global warming.

This election is about the Constitution and the Rule of Law.

There is a clear choice between McPalin and Obama: Mccain voted against restoring Habeas Corpus. Obama voted for it.

Barack Obama actually cares about the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Barack Obama cares about the education of citizens, about the ability of people to make their own choices, and about the *rights* of citizens - Obama believes in the Bill of Rights. Is he a perfect libertarian - of course not. I'm sorry that Bob Barr or Ron Paul won't get elected. Obama has a chance to get elected and start us back in the right direction!

I believe that this year, the stakes are too high, the times are too perilous to vote any other way. I'm not sure our country can survive another 4 years like the last 8.

Together, my libertarian friends, we can fight for our country, work to get our country moving back in the right direction, so that *next* time, we'll have the choice of voting for true libertarian candidates, and we'll still *have* the freedom to speak out for our ideals. If we don't defeat McPalin, I'm not entirely certain that next time, we'll have those options.

Join with me in defeating McPalin. Join with me in supporting, this once, a major party candidate. Help elect a candidate who cares about the Constitution and the Rule of Law: Barack Obama.

Sincerely,
A libertarian for Obama.

Palin's lies were beyond the pale

2008-09-03T20:46:00.000-07:00

Can people really be that blind? When you can fact-check her claims in 20 seconds on Google to determine what she actually vetoed (solar and wind energy) and that Obama actually authored over 800 bills and sponsored another 1000 (http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message509824/pg1).

And then there's Giuliani, who was busy conflating Iraq and Al Qaeda. Ugh.

We're watching an episode of Sex and the City to recuperate. ;-)

(Edited to correct some minor typos.)

Update: And let's not forget her lies about the Bridge to Nowhere...

I feel geeky, oh so geeky...

2008-09-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

I've been having geeky fun today.
First: playing with Google's new toy: Chrome. I am *LOVING* the interface. Haven't encountered any gubs yet. ;-) {crossing fingers}

Last: I svned from the repository a checkout of the XML versions of the book Alex and I are working on. Yay! It works. And I've been doing a lot of FTPing lately too. I know there are people who do that sort of thing every day and think I'm silly for feeling geeky about it, but... deal.

And in between, I set up a conference call, and managed to sneak Agile Methodology and Test Driven Development into the project I'm working on for school. It's even going to be a part of the grant request we're submitting! Go me!

Read this analysis

2008-09-01T22:01:00.000-07:00

Read this to understand
what this election is really about.
What Obama's candidacy represents is a promise, not to make us a people again, but to make us a people for the first time. To those of us who believe in liberal democracy, this is a promise of exhilarating, almost unspeakable hope. To those who do not believe in liberal democracy, what it promises is a setback, and a major one.

More on politics

2008-09-01T16:06:00.001-07:00

A few thoughts on the current situation:

Obama gave a kick-ass speech. If you haven't watched it - you should. Go google it.

McCain's timing for the announcement was intended, imho, to draw attention away from positive reactions to Obama's speech. I seriously wonder if he pushed for someone totally bizarre like Palin in order to draw more attention away. Later, he can have her "drop out graciously for the good of the party" and he can revert to someone more boring and less likely to get him news.

McCain is down in the way of the people trying to do their jobs in New Orleans. Grandstanding... Obama - is staying the hell outta the way so people can do their jobs - and asking his supporters to donate to organizations that are helping.

Obama needs to take gun-owners, hunters, and union members seriously. Gore lost, at least in part, because folks felt they had to choose between abortion rights and gun rights, and more chose gun rights. Picking Biden cuts into Obama's chances of keeping those independents and centrists - but his speech did a pretty good job of pushing away from any extremist position about guns.

Those of us who care about science have more to worry about - if Palin does gets in, we're going to lose even more support for real science - she's a creationist, doesn't believe humans have any impact on global warming, and is against stem-cell research, as many have pointed out.

This year, we need to focus on the core values and rights of the American people - and the Bush Administration is violating those, and McCain promises more of the same - with or without Sarah Palin. Democrats need to keep emphasizing the positions that Obama took in his acceptance speech on Thursday - that there are more things that unite us as Americans than divide us, and that even in the most divisive areas, we can find common purpose.

I thought you were a libertarian?

2008-08-29T22:12:00.000-07:00

After my twittering while watching Obama's speech - a friend accused me with "I thought you were a libertarian".

I do consider myself a small-l libertarian. (I've never been a Libertarian party member). I voted for Harry Browne. I believe in individual freedom and limited government. I worked for concealed carry reform in Minnesota, and have always been staunchly supportive of gay rights, abortion rights, and opposed to the war on drugs.

I am also a pragmatist.

And I believe that, this year, we need to focus more on rebuilding our country than on ideological purity. Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate - and if I were a single-issue voter, I wouldn't vote for him. But I do believe that he will uphold the Constitution, *unlike* the current administration. I do believe that he will rein in the abuses of our civil liberties. Probably not as far as I'd like, but far more than if McCain gets in. I believe that he will work to restore our pride in America, and some of our belief in America and what it stands for.

Perhaps, if I were more of an idealist (and less of a cynic), I'd believe that, if we just let things *really go to hell*, the American people will *rise up* and we'll have a revolution to take back our country. After watching the erosion of our liberties over the years, with the willing consent of those whose liberties were being taken, I no longer believe that.

Is there a better, third-party, truly-libertarian candidate? Unfortunately, this year, I don't think any third-party candidate matters. Because this year, they won't get in. This year, I intend to cast my vote and spend my energy on a candidate who has a chance to get in and who won't further destroy my country once there. Once we've rebuilt and reminded Americans what it means to be American, maybe we'll have a shot at pushing forward and getting a real libertarian candidate into office. But first, this year, we have to recover America from what has been done to her.

This year, I'm voting for Barack Obama. Because, even more than being a libertarian, I am a patriot. And dammit - I want my country back!

SciPy conference - afternoon

2008-08-21T14:01:00.000-07:00

SciPy Documentation Editor:
NumPy decided, instead of creating a bunch of documentation, to create a documentation *framework*! This looks really useful for open source projects. And the sources are available to use elsewhere. We definitely should look at using this for other python projects.

Documentation appears to be the theme of the afternoon sections. It's nice to see that documentaiton is getting attention here. Too often it's an afterthought (if at all.)

Sphinx is a python documentation generator. Currently used in matplotlib. Sphinx avoids separate "printed" and "online" docs. Based on reST. Again, this looks good.

In general, most docs suck. Too many say things like: "xyz is the foo port of bar", which only works if you're coming to foo from another OS or Package that uses bar. Some folks are going directly into foo - and needing to know what the heck xyz does and how to use it. Setting up frameworks that *work* provide easy entrypoints for folks to contribute to an OpenSource project - even if they're not 1337 hackers itching to commit patches to the core.

SciPy conference

2008-08-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

I'm at the SciPy conference today. I didn't sign up, but Alex gave a keynote and I got to ride on his coattails. (Although I'm being hit up for presenting in the future...)

Alex talked about the problems of black boxes and that "abstractions leak". He gave some nice examples of why you want to understand at least a couple of levels lower than the abstraction you're using (eg., statistical packages won't fix sample bias problems).

The next speaker after break talked about graphing networks - a package called NetworkX. This was a really gorgeous graphing package that looked like it has a really simple, usable API. I particularly liked that in the examples, they used
import networkX as NX
rather than the usual "from blah import *". It's important, particularly in tutorials and FAQs, imho, to SHOW where all the functions you're using live. Explicitly showing all the dots makes it clear where these things live. Using import * hides that. My compliments to the NetworkX people for not hiding things.

One of the use-cases they mentioned at the beginning was for synchronizing oscillations, and I immediately thought of neo-cortical neural synchronization, which they mentioned at the end when they demo'd their oscillation synchronizer.

NetworkX has a very pretty gallery of graphs to show some of its possibilities. Check it out if you have any graphing or complex network modeling needs.

The next talk was on intervals. It harked back to Alex's talk, which was amusing. Pay attention to your numbers - including the algorithms and packages you're using to calculate things. It was fun to watch - it reminded me how much I actually *like* math. (I was the geek who used to solve quadratic equations for fun.) I'm not so good with trig and logs (although I've gotten better). Anyways - I really enjoyed the intervals talk - it was fun to see a purely mathematical coding talk; it's pretty rare.

We're going to have to head out this afternoon to the airport. If I catch any more presentations, I'll post about them.

Social-wise, the SciPy people were very nice. We got picked up at the airport, driven to our hotel, and they took us to dinner. This morning, breakfast included *protein* (Yay!) not just carbs. And I got to meet another Minnesota girl - who's now working in neuroscience down at Berkeley. We're going to get together when we're back.

In short - I've really enjoyed being here and I plan to attend SciPy in the future. If you are into scientific uses of Python at all - I encourage you to attend.

Pasta with breadcrumbs and sensory perceptions

2008-08-17T23:16:00.000-07:00

Okay - I admit that I'm a foodie. I love food. Not lots of it - but fun variations on food. I like cooking. Not the day to day grind of it, but the idea of taking some raw ingredients and making something totally unexpected from them. Synergy, as my art teacher might call it. Shopping for ingredients is lovely. I'm quite fond of the Italian rhythm of daily life - go shop for whatever looks good today and make something with it.

I also love watching cooking shows. Giada de Laurentiis and Mario Batali are two of my favorites. Giada is so sweet and fun to watch but not terribly authentic. Mario is great for very *authentic* Italian food. So, Giada did a recipe recently - Rigatoni with breadcrumbs. I tried it tonight. Sort of. I used some tomato sauce with red peppers and garlic - which I heated in a pan with olive oil. I didn't use Italian croutons but rather Italian breadcrumbs - along with some roasted almonds and toasted pinenuts. I mixed the breadcrumb mixture with the cooked Rigatoni in a bowl, then poured the heated sauce over. It was actually really good. We had it with a nice Vernaccia.

I especially like how easy and quick it was. I plan to make this again. Although, I suspect it will never be the same as the way I made it tonight. I don't much follow recipes - I tend to just add things that smell right.

I love cooking - it's such a sensual experience - taste and texture and smell and sound and sight and kinesthetic pleasure. I never believed much in just 5 senses - there's kinesthetic sense (which I've gotten better at over the years) and sense of time (which I'm not good at)...

If I were better at planning, organizing, and sense of time, I might have considered doing cooking more seriously. But really, I can only handle about one course... and even "sides" can be challenging for me at times. At one time, I raised vegetables in my garden, canned, and baked the daily bread for my family. I briefly flirted with the idea of a small business making bread - I love the feel of kneading the dough - it's so *alive*. Nurturing it until it's ready to bake, then pulling it out of the oven and slathering that first slice of bread with butter. Oh yes. My children, to this day, are fans of the "heel" of bread. But bread takes love and attention, attention I don't have much these days for anything but schoolwork and trying to keep the house from imploding under the clutter.

In the meantime, quick delicious dinners from a few simple ingredients is just the right touch of "home-made" for my life.

Finding normal?

2008-08-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

How do we know what's normal? It's amazing how many friends I've had who, when talking with others, suddenly realized that what they thought was "normal", wasn't. Even bodily functions - yeast infections, celiac disease, hearing loss, ... It's amazing how often we take for granted, problems that are solvable. If we extend that into the differences in how people think or learn, we have an even wider field to play in. Where do we draw the line between "has trouble socially" and Asperger Syndrome? When do we decide that "I'm just not good at ..." vs figuring out that "I can do ... but only with this workaround." Only by communicating with each other, reading, sharing knowledge, do we learn not only what's "normal" but also what's *possible*.

odd brainstate

2008-08-11T20:09:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here - my plans for this evening went away POOF because I'd thought I was going to SF to a meeting but the meeting is tomorrow. And I also got some interesting information in the mail. Nothing earth-shattering - just my Social Security statement. I realized how little I've made over my lifetime. In 31 years, the average has been less than $10k a year. Yet on that, I bought a house, two cars, and raised two kids - up to the day I married Alex. It's really odd to consider.

But - mostly, where my brain is - is away. I'm feeling - quiet.
Slowed down.
My brain has gone into relaxation mode - theta state.
I am aware, conscious, but simply here. No planning, no tomorrow or yesterday. Just now.
I get this sometime.s
It's a good place to be - except that most of the time my life doesn't permit me to remain. Most of the time, I am expected to be here by this time and there by that time and very time oriented and time consciouse. And yet, I am amused by all the people who mediatate or take drugs to achieve thius state of no time. In this state, I simply am - no awareness of time flow. I can guess that time has changed - becuase there are different items in the collection of memories in my brain - and yet - I have no *experience* of time "passing" or "moving" or "flowing".
It's amazing how much trouble such states have gotten me into in the past, how little tolerance our society has for people who live in this brainstate - in this timeless existence. And how many think they want it.

Amusing.

And now - and I know NOW when I am done for now writing this post and so I am ready to move to the new "now" thing of checking the pasta pot and finding out if water is boiling so we can cook dinner.
But for now - I sit - quiet and still - and smile. and breathe. and watch and listen and feel.

Now - in this state - I hear and feel things differently - textures are all important and I crave texture - but only when I am moving. Other times, I am simply istting - and feeling and hearing and sensing but not deciding, not "thinking". Just here now.
.
.
.
Deep breath. Some unknowable, uncounted period of time (so the standard language usage claims) later, I breathe deeply, and move to go look at the stove.

women in FOSS talk

2008-07-23T11:46:00.000-07:00

Pia is giving a talk on Heroes: Women in FOSS.

Heroes feel a little bit different. Start small, then realize it's a lot different.

Think of:
10 tech women you personally know
5 non-tech women you know
3 issues around gender in ICT

Surrounded by men, and thought: These women don't know what they're missing.
Then realized, it's a widespread problem in western society.

This is NOT a GENDER issue! It's a cultural issue. Not due to body parts, but due to societal expectations.

Everytime you say "I support women in nontraditional roles" you're reinforcing that tech is a "nontraditional role" for women and that "I'm a freak".

Odd sayings:
women aren't interested in computers anyway
she must be butch to be into computers
you're not really a woman, you're one of us
you're too pretty use mutt
women like "creative" jobs
"nontraditional"roles for women

Every generation, what you have to deal with is more subtle.

Girls are high users of internet, gamers, not as polarized as boys,

Girls and boys = how they used tech differently: Boys either loved computers or hated them. Girls, just used them.

focused on social good - so FOSS is great, not on money or politics.

If you're not a "nerd" (male), then you must be this big scary monster. Had weird things assumed about her because she's into IT.

Smash the stereotypes: in positive ways.
we come in all shapes and sizes.

7.3% women in FOSS.

Isn't the point of free software to get involved? We need to get the word out.

Lots of pictures of women in FOSS.
Not that many sysadmin women

Dorothy Okello - uganda, doing great wireless stuff.
Amy Jiang = leader in China on free software.

New website:
geekfeminism.wikia.com
or geekfeminism.org

Real issues:
active discouragement: no jobs due to the bubble burst
stereotypes = need to be comfortable in ourselves as women
lack of empathy: try to not be "surprised" about women in FOSS
hard to not share the negative stories! lead by inspiring.
Jerks and lack of leadership/policies lead to mass exodus of women.
codes of conduct. not just about being good to women: be excellent to each other.

Real pathways:
show profiles of awesome women and men
go to schools and universities
working with children

be the change you seek

what do we need?
know the facts
connect with each other
assume stupidity over malice
fulfill our dreams
education about pay, negotiation and expectations
empathy: we're hackers and people too

women need to not hide
encourage others
empower women *with* technology
talk about positive stories

Philosophies of FOSS are really interesting.
FOSS is the world's most powerful platform for social change. Meritocratic, cross-everything, extremely diverse. Succeed in spite of politics, social, agendas, Digital Divide.

managing

2008-07-15T11:58:00.001-07:00

So I've managed to put about 40some PDFs on the site we're using to collect everything. It's a pain collecting all of it - I hadn't done a very good job of organizing the stuff when I was in "research" mode. Now I know better and can do it better. I'll grab pdfs as I go and ftp them into a holding area so they're all in one place. Silly me. Ah well. Live and Learn, right?

I am *SO* tired right now. I shouldn't be. Don't know what's up with that. I've just not been feeling all that well - still feel jet-lagged. Ugh. Anyways - off to meet with the guys on my project.

Guess it's a sign from above

2008-07-15T00:04:00.000-07:00

My university's research server just went down for the night. Can't access anymore articles. Guess that means it's time for me to go to bed. Tomorrow's the meeting to talk about the project I'm working on, in preparation for submitting the proposal at the end of the month. Tomorrow night I pick up my daughter from the airport about midnight. Friday, we drive away to OSCON, which I have to finalize plans for the trip, and get us all packed.

Somehow, I don't think the other summer interns are having quite the same experience I am... ;-)

Going to OSCON?

2008-07-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

Here's my personal schedule. Looks like it'll be a fun conference, with many choices to make. My wonderful daughter will be joining us. I've marked some of the items as potentially of interest to her.

See you there!

2008-07-11T18:08:00.001-07:00

Trying out lifecast on my iphone.

Geolocate this post

Posted with LifeCast

Quick review of five fave new iPhone apps

2008-07-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

1. Jott for iPhone rocks! It allows you to take a voice note with one touch to record, one to stop, (touch *anywhere* to start and stop, you don't need to look at the phone), and does its best to transcribe (pretty good job too). And you can categorize your jotts to "work" and "home" if you want. Way more useful than the VoiceNote app I tried. Very useful for keeping notes of stuff while you're driving. Love it. EDIT: The transcriptions are really pretty good.

2. Yelp on the iPhone. Location aware, duh. Built-in obvious categories like:
*coffee and tea
*bars
*restaurants
*drugstores
*gas stations
*banks
And has an "open" filter so you can see only the ones nearby that are *open*. VERY useful app.

3. Facebook: yeah - i know Facebook has had an iPhone version for a while. I like that t allows a simple interface for facebook. The contacts list is great for finding people's info: you can dial or map them directly from here. The mini-feed is cute. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a simple, obvious way to respond to an individual directly from their "mini-feed". You have to go to Friends, find that person in your friends-list, then you can eventually compose a message. It would make more sense to be able to click on the person's name on their mini-feed, and have it bring you directly to their contact page so you can send them a message.

4. NowLocal: local headlines when you want it. Simple. But asks every frickin' time to "use local?" information. Just let me click an "always use local". There is a way to change where you want news for, when you want to do that. So - just save my preference for "use local". EDIT: pretty repetitive - not very good at updating. I suppose if I only tried it once a day, it might be better.

5. Google Mobile Apps: search is easy. Also gives a quick connection to docs, talk, iGoogle, blogger, etc. (Mostly, just brings you to the website for those, but still, it's easier to get there.) Some of the sites could be better optimized for iPhones. Blogger, for example, is just not sized correctly for the iPhone. OTOH - the gmail page is pretty nice. Easier to get to the search my mail part. Looks good. EDIT: Google Reader on iPhone is really good. I'm impressed.

Okay - that's my top 5. Gotta get some work done now. Ciao everyone. And good luck on the iPhone updates!

blogger on my iPhone

2008-07-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

Woohoo.

to the tune of "song that never ends"

2008-07-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

This is the update that never ends
It just goes on and on my frendz
Some people start updating never knowing how it was
but now their phones are bricking and they can't make calls because
this is the update that never ends....

Waiting [im]patiently

2008-07-10T23:10:00.000-07:00

iPhone 2.0 is due to release ANY TIME NOW. Well, a few hours from now. There's even a beta version out there that people are downloading. It's crashing some of their systems, but working fine on others. I figure, I didn't jailbreak my phone and I can wait 8 more hours. But I've already got the mobile apps downloaded to install as soon as I've got 2.0! Woohoo!

Transitions and changes

2008-06-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

I've been sitting on this one for a couple days, before posting it. Note that some of the effects I was having were likely hormonal-induced - ah the joys of being a female aspie... In any case, here's the post, for whatever it's worth.
**************************************************************

"The shortcomings that can occur in this method such as the basis instability, the collision of hash table, and the noise sensitivity will be discussed. Among them the noise sensitivity is a serious problem. This can always cause the recognition procedure to fail." -- Kao, Chang-Lung
http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA225839

So, usually I'm pretty flexible, I think. I handle changes and transitions pretty good for an Aspie. Some days, when I'm stressed, it's harder. And it always catches me by surprise, and worse, catches others by surprise.

A couple days ago was an example. I had a good but full day. Had everything planned out and things went pretty smoothly. I even got my last paper of the quarter finished. Woot! Then had the eye exam (my and my son) from hell - I hate when they shine the damn lights in your eyes, and worse is flashed light, and there was this machine that we had to flash my eye repeatedly (to take a picture) because she couldn't explain clearly to me what I was supposed to do and when I finally understood (after a dozen flashes into my light-sensitive eyes), we got a decent picture of each first try. So, I wasn't in the best shape after that but I survived, so I went to Costco and grabbed stuff quickly since I was on a deadline, and managed to get checked out reasonably quickly. Even got the stuff home okay and son helped unload. Headed off to pick up sweetie for a meeting.

Then, in rapid succession, I tried to park (and had trouble with other cars and shuttles and buses) - but parking there is always a hassle. So then I finally park and call sweetie to tell him I'm there (cuz we have a meeting to go to, so there's a deadline to beat), and my bluetooth earbud doesn't work, but I don't realize that at first, and finally realize that he's already answered and I just can't hear him thru the damn earbud, so I put the phone up to my ear and say hello a couple of times and FINALLy hear *him* but of course, by this time we're both frustrated.

So I tell him I'm there and he says to meet him in the lobby of building 40. So I go there and of course, it's locked, because it's almost 6pm. So someone lets me in and I wait, and he arrives and we go to get food.

We'd planned to just grab and go - he wanted to be to the meeting on time (so did I), and he worried that my usual "take a bit of many things" style of eating there took too much time. So I'd already offered to just grab a salad. This is what we planned this morning. But - there's a barbecue. So he says we should get barbecue. It smelled awful, and I was confused because I thought he wanted to grab and go, and then thought well, maybe he just wanted to have something besides salad. I tried to explain that he could grab whatever he wanted, we didn't have to have barbecue, but that didn't work. And he somehow got the impression I was upset at him.

So then, I have to try to explain why I'm upset. I wasn't upset at him. I was just tired and stressed out and having trouble with all the changes of plan that were happening (the phone, and the bbq, and sitting down to eat instead of grab-and-go) and the horrid smell of the barbecue (it ended up much better than I'd feared - I was able to get some reasonably unsmoked stuff - it smelled like they were doing severely "hickory-smoked" stuff... or over-using the liquid smoke or something.) but I can't explain things like that on the spur of the moment well. I'd gotten my tastebuds up for a fresh, light salad, and suddenly I was facing heavy, strongly flavored hot foods. He wanted to know what was wrong, and kept wanting explanations but my explanations weren't helping things at all and I was just getting more stressed because how do I describe all this when I'm already stressed. I tried saying I was just tired and he responded that maybe we should just go home.

I finally managed to say, "Just let me sit quietly for a minute to settle down." And he let me alone so I could regroup. And the evening ended up turning out just fine.

I want to be clear - he wasn't being obnoxious about his questions - they were perfectly valid questions and he wasn't yelling or chastising me or anything, just I couldn't explain well and it wasn't getting better with me trying.

Yeah - I normally have no obvious problems with changes and transitions (or when I do, I cover it pretty well) but sometimes, like after the hectic quarter I've had, it's just harder to cover. Sometimes, I get reminded forcibly that, oh yeah, I'm really not neurotypical, even if I can often pass as normal these days.

So - how does it feel - changes, transitions...
it feels like standing on a moving surface - having to constantly adjust and shift balance while juggling multiple fragile plates and smile dammit and don't forget to make eye contact, and don't talk too loud or too soft, and don't swing your arms too far, and remember all the things you'll have to juggle tomorrow too, and here - add this teacup in to the juggling and oh - the surface just started shifting on another axis, so don't try to keep balance the old way, gotta do the new balancing act - but suddenly, and by the way, there's only room to stand on one leg now... and why are you acting so upset? Explain yourself coherently dammit!

It's not always this bad. It's rarely this bad. I've worked really hard on dealing with transitions, being flexible, not being too tied into expectations while still managing to not completely get lost in the chaos and shifting sands of spacetime...

Just, sometimes, it's hard. Sometimes, I can't just suddenly go with the flow. And it's even harder when I'm trying really hard to meet someone elses's deadlines and schedule. I can easily go with the flow if I can just go with the flow and don't have any external deadlines to meet. I just can't do both at once. If I have to *be* somewhere, then I have a deadline and I'm in "logistics" mode and switching out of planning and logistics mode while still maintaining some hold on the logistics and planning... it's just not easy for me.

I don't know if I'm explaining this well. I'm trying to just give you all a view into what it looks like from the inside, not *always*, just sometimes. And I'm not saying there's anything anyone needs to do different, just trying to explain now so that maybe, when I'm in the midst of another time where I'm having trouble, I can maybe just say "remember the post on transitions and changes? I'm having one of those days right now." The hardest part is convincing the other person that it really truly has nothing to do with them. It's a reaction to all the little things that all happen within quick succession on top of each other to unbalance me.

What does help: just give me some space and time (quiet, no demands or questions or processing) to decompress, to regroup. Don't try to interpret my bodylanguage or tone of voice when a sudden change or transition has happened - mostly, you'll probably not be terribly accurate. I'm likely not upset at you, or angry, or anything like that. I'm most likely, just trying to re-orient myself to the new situation. And frustrated at my own lack of flexibility. Mostly, I just need to be informed of the new situation and then left alone for a short time to re-integrate everything.

It's like trying to modify a list while sorting on it, (or trying to modify a hashtable while it's being rehashed?). It's often a pretty unstable process. Let me just finish processing everything first, then we can go on from there.

Research Reflection

2008-06-10T16:19:00.001-07:00

For my Writing and Rhetoric class (on Web 2.0 and Online Activism), I have to write a "Research Reflection". I figured, given the topic matter, that I would post it here. This was the 2nd of two required courses. The first one focused on writing. This one focused on giving presentations. Woohoo.

As my topic, I wanted to address neurodiversity - autistic activism on the web. My hypothesis started as "The Internet has Changed the Nature of the Conversation on Autism."

It was difficult trying to fit *my* process in with the class process. I tend to read a lot of stuff, let things percolate in my head for a while, start writing, then figure out what I'm trying to say. I think with my fingers. The class required us to do a research "proposal" presentation first - which required me to *almost* write the presentation/paper but not quite. And we had to submit it to our "peers" to discuss it beforehand and get feedback. Then we had to start on our draft, so we could submit a draft of our "research based argument" (an 8-page paper) with an outline, first to our "peers" and then to the instructor. But FIRST, on MONDAY, we had to sit thru a weird exercise to "help us define our thesis statement". Then we had to create the presentation. Then we had to present it in "rehearsal". Then we got to *finally* present the damn thing.

All of this stuff is probably a very useful process for someone (say, an 19 year-old who'd never created a presentation in their short lives) but for me, it really felt like it short-circuited my own internal/external process. It was like getting in a car, and revving it up, then turnign it off, starting again and driving a block, turning around and going home, again and again, until I was finally able, in fits and starts to get to the presentation.

I'm not blaming the teacher, mind you. This is the process they're supposed to teach us. She was very patient with my sometimes obstreperous reaction to the whole thing.

It also seemed really odd to have to create the written paper and then create a presentation based on the written paper, but wait! the paper isn't due until... and is the paper a script or a paper on its own? Because the kinds of evidence to even put *into* a presentation and the kind of *flow* for a presentation are so totally different. It's hard to think about them at the same time without feeling like I was interfering with both.

All in all, I'm glad I survived the course and that it's over with.

Oh - I'm supposed to "consider how my understanding of the relationship between form and content has developed throughout the quarter." It hasn't. Well, I did learn how to embed YouTube videos (the *right way*) into a keynote slide, with editing and everything. That was kinda fun. Even wrote up a "how-to" for the kids in class - hope it was helpful for them. Don't know if anyone used it though.

Lessee I'm also supposed to consider:
Have my thoughts on my project changed since the proposal (and similar questions)?
I was disappointed with how much the old message of tragedy and gloom and doom still persists. So over the course of research, my thesis changed from "it changed" to "it broadened the conversation, rather than replacing the old messages." So it's a more "complex" argument than the original, but more faithful to the reality of the situation.

How did I take my written argument and adapt it to the needs and interest of a listening audience? It wasn't just listening, it was also viewing. I used video-clips to structure the presentation, and questions for signposts. I didn't delve into detail on any of the issues, but kept it fairly shallow - just going over the points I had to. I started with a question to the audience, to help them feel involved. I also used various body language and tone of voice changes to emphasize my points. I wanted a clean - simple to read - slide format. I went with just black-on-white, but added a cropped photo of a spectrum along the bottom to emphasize that autism is a spectrum (and that neurotypicals are on the same spectrum!)

How do genre and media impact the writing process?
Um, which genre and media? Considering that I live on the 'net, it didn't change much for me. I've been a netizen since late 94, and never looked back. So - for me, this was my natural environment.

How do genre and media impact the research process? For example, do web-based research sources require a different approach and perspective than print-based sources? How so?

I view web-based sources as primary sources. Just as anyone could write a book, a letter to the editor, a pamphlet, or a letter to someone, people can write their views and perspectives on the web. Most blogs and many sites provide comments, which acts like a peer-review system. In any case, I view the web as just another source of data - just easier to access. Many articles and books are easily accessed via things like google booksearch and google scholar (I *adore* google scholar!) And with de.li.cio.us, I can tag things and explore sites others used similar tags on. With web-sources, you need to track when you accessed them (particularly a source like wikipedia) since the source may (and probably will) be edited and updated. Some folks had trouble with youtube videos being removed. That's why I found out how to download and clip them myself, so that I didn't have to worry about the potential transience of items on the web. All in all, as someone who's done research both before and after the advent of the web, it's WAY better now.

Why I love the web

2008-06-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

Okay - it ain't perfect. Amazon went down recently and Twitter is down more than it's up and other web 2.0 services are often up and down.

On the other hand - I have 5 presentations and a whole lot of research notes backed up "on the cloud", as we speak. (I also have copies on my thumbdrive...) I don't have to worry if my laptop get stolen, or crashes. I don't have to worry about a data disk getting stolen or losing pieces of valuable paper. AFAIC, the more I have on the web, the more I live my life online, the easier life is for me. So yeah - I'm a fan of places like Google (who truly improves my quality of life) and Apple and Amazon. And a lot of little companies that also make my life better. Wesabe helps me keep track of my finances. Google helps me learn new things, research, and save what I've found with tags so I can find it again (and help others find it). IwantSandy and RemembertheMilk both help me remember important things. Google calendar tracks important appointments and events, (like "refill my prescription" and "give the cat its flea treatment") and google docs let me collaborate with others. Podcasts and RSS feeds keep me up to date on the world. Email, IM, Facebook, Twitter keep me in contact with friends and communities.

I just took a class this quarter on Web 2.0 - activism on the web. Some folks complain about the "Cult of the Amateur" or worry about the funnelling effect or privacy concerns. I understand these concerns, but for me, they don't diminish the value of the web. So yeah - there's a whole lot of really awesome companies out there doing some pretty kewl stuff and I'm all for it! I look forward to its expansion.

I'm just sitting here with my head in the clouds, computing...

What I'm doing this summer and why it matters

2008-06-07T20:22:00.000-07:00

Some of my friends from school are going off to corporate internships for the summer - Apple, Google, etc. I'm pleased for them. Some are going to work with startups. Kewl.

I'm doing a research internship. I'll be working on a project to help kids who've suffered trauma in their lives. Yeah - it's a pretty specialized use of what I'm studying. It'll require someone with a very interdisciplinary background.

I am way more interested in this than in whether I can help some company improve their website so someone can decide to buy a watch at store x or store y. Yes - some of the stuff the corporations do is going to affect billions of peoples' lives, some in small ways, some in larger ways. I'm very glad that people are doing that stuff. It's useful and affects a lot of people, directly and indirectly. The various uses of HCI and of programming range from trivial to incredibly kewl. I applaud anyone who thinks of the user and how to make their lives better.

But, for me, many of the projects really don't matter to me personally nearly as much as possibly helping some kid overcome the trauma in their life. and, y'know - if one of these kids overcomes the trauma sufficiently to go to University, they could be the researcher who finally cures AIDS or cancer or figures out how to stop alzheimers or the entrepreneur who invents the next Google or something else really awesome. In any case, if it works, we will have improved their lives - directly - and longterm. And to me, that's a far more worthwhile use of my summer than whether someone can use their mobile phone to find out if their buddy is at the same bar, as kewl and geeky as such things might be. (I like geeky kewl stuff. I'm a serious geek.;-) Anyone wanna join me on Brightkite?)

It kind of scares me to think about how much responsibility I'll have in this project. Yeah, it would probably be way more comfortable to be in a big company where there's plenty of people to watch out for me, where others set the agenda and run the show. No, I won't be completely alone, but there's so much I need to do on my own, that I need to figure out for myself, and design, and create, and manage, to make this work. So yeah - it's scary. But it's a good scary. I just hope we can pull it off. Cuz that would be totally awesome.

EDIT: I do hope that what my friends are doing at their summer internships matter to them just as much. I'm not at all saying those things don't matter... just that they're not something I'm passionate about, while this is.

binary

2008-05-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

So, the woman next to me at a GoogleIO session decoded the binary on our badges: they say ATTENDEE. That's kinda neat. Too bad the TShirts aren't right: they say GoogleKO. ;-)
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/28/google-gets-fancy-with-google-io-tshirts-too-fancy/

Google IO Keynote

2008-05-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

I really liked Marissa's speech this morning. She did a good job of providing the flavor of Google's decisionmaking and focus on userexperience. Her descriptions of how they do A/B split testing was kewl. Especially when she gave realworld examples. I was happy to be the one in the audience to point out what the differences between three versions of ad was - there was differnt amounts of whitespace above and below the yellow ad bar.

I knew some of the stuff but it was fun to hear her take on it. And she's a good speaker.

google earth api ROCKS! and other Google IO stuff

2008-05-28T16:16:00.000-07:00

OMG - the new API for Google Earth on the web is absolutely awesome! I am so looking forward to that.

Google DocTypes - Hitchhikers Guide to the Web. ;-) DocTypes will be following the Python BDFL model. Neat.

Note: lots of women at this conference. Google did a good job of getting woman developers here.

Are we there yet?

2008-05-26T23:13:00.000-07:00

Bad Astronomy writes:

Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling that world, both of them acting robotically, and both of them hundreds of million of kilometers away.

Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.

Many years ago, I watched Columbia go up in flames. I was home sick from work that day and had turned on the tv, ... I sat and wept. Crying for the loss, and fearful that the dirthuggers might use this to quash humanity's best hope for survival.

Looking at this image, I am in tears again, in hope that maybe, just maybe, we can find something that will spur on even the dirthuggers to renewed effort. That maybe, this will remind us that we, humankind, might have an option besides scratching the dirt forever until we blow ourselves up or destroy our home planet's ability to sustain life. In awe of the potential, if we only let ourselves *try*!

And the child inside me gazes up at the stars and whispers, "Are we there yet?"

23andme

2008-05-26T21:54:00.000-07:00

So, along with so many other geeks, I've just spit in a plastic tube and we're sending it back via FedEx tomorrow.
Within 6 to 8 weeks, I should know more about my family background and medical history. I'm adopted, so this will be important information, a bit more so than for those who can already trace their family history using geneology, I think. Every time I go in to a new doctor, they ask "and has anyone in your family ever..." and I have to explain that I have no idea.

I *think* I'm Irish, English, French, and Polish ancestry. So my adoptive parents were told. But was that just from the mother's side or from the father's too? Who knows. In any case, I'll finally be able to give my kids more than "I dunno" for their medical history. That, in itself, is worth it.

Keith Olberman's response to Hillary's RFK comment

2008-05-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyf811vluHg

Santa Cruz County Fire Recovery Fund

2008-05-25T20:54:00.001-07:00

Go to
http://www.cfscc.org/page10002588.cfm

if you want to donate to the relief fund.

The best 15 seconds you'll spend this weekend

2008-05-25T14:32:00.000-07:00

To vote in support of the California Supreme Court's decision on LGBT
marriage:
1. call 1-916-445-2841 (Governor's office)
2. press 1, 5, 1, 1
(1=English / 5=opinion / 1=court / 1=support)

Yes - it really is that simple to support LGBT right to marriage.

Marriage Ban overturned in CA

2008-05-15T10:33:00.001-07:00

http://www.eqca.org/site/pp.asp?c=kuLRJ9MRKrH&b=4026385

It's been a busy quarter and it ain't done yet

2008-05-15T09:25:00.000-07:00

I love my Learning and Memory class. I want to love my philosophy of mind class but I'm just not cut out for "philosophy". I have 5 classes. In two of them, I'm researching on autism, which is kewl. I have a research internship this summer investigating executive dysfunction. Fun!

More later...

testing a feature

2008-04-24T01:21:00.000-07:00

Just testing out the labelling process on this system so I can pass on info to a friend.

PyCon 2008

2008-03-28T16:33:00.000-07:00

Pycon was fun. I met a bunch of women from devchix and had dinner together. I gave my talk (and survived... yay). There's a link to some videos from PyCon2008 here:http://www.youtube.com/user/pycon08
including my talk on "to RE or not to RE".

perfectionism

2008-01-29T13:04:00.000-08:00

This is why I don't do art classes.

I never know when to stop. and I have no idea how to mount things. I'm afraid to mount my finished art because I might do it wrong. Oh, and I've redone one piece like 3 times and another piece twice.

UGH!

Okay - so tonight I need to just do it.

I have 3 projects basically done except for the mounting. So tonight and tomorrow I'll do that. In between writing articles.

In case anyone is looking...

2008-01-03T09:59:00.000-08:00

I'm in France right now... We started in Provence. A little hotel in Avignon, and a rental car to drive around Provence and visit village perched on edge of cliff after village perched on edge of cliff followed by picturesque village, perched on edge of cliff. We spent Xmas eve and day in Provence.

Then we took the TGV to Lyon, where we *walked* through the old city, which was, appropriate, perched on the edge of a cliff. ;-) Lyon is a lovely town and I want to go back there. We spent New Years eve and St Sylvestre in Lyon - we went to the Opera for NYE (La Vie Parissiene).

Now, we're in Paris. We've just spent a rather chilly day touring - the morning was spent at the Louvre, and early afternoon at Notre Dame. It's funny, I 'd never realized Notre Dame was a still-in-use church. For some reason, I thought it had become either a ruin or "Just" a tourist attraction. It's beautiful inside. I was quite surprised - and delighted.

One of the best parts of the Louvre was actually a special exhibit of Biedermeyer furniture. It was completely unexpected. http://www.biedermeier-specialists.com/
Of course, the jewels and paintings and sculptures and etc were wonderful but the furniture was just so unexpected and, after all the overornamented Louis XIV stuff, completely refreshing.

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark]

2007-11-19T23:13:00.000-08:00

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark]

Mark Pilgrim does a delightful deconstruction of the Kindle. Please read before you consider buying.

They're not "short adults"

2007-11-06T08:56:00.000-08:00

Great post on introducing kids to programming that reminds us to not treat kids like "short adults" and gives a great set of suggestions of ways to introduce a kid, from html to scratch to RUR-PLE. I love that Ned starts by talking about finding out what the kid is interested in. Too many folks forget this part when trying to introduce a new person to programming - wiift (what's in it for them).

POC

2007-11-03T22:55:00.000-07:00

So I'm working on this project for my HCI class.
Every time I turn around I'm more convinced that the best HCI choice we can make is to throw this free fone we got into the wall, repeatedly.

No - I won't mention the specific phone brand or model. I'll just say it makes me really glad to have an iPhone (as if I wasn't already...)

I do want to add that I'm *really* glad to have a brilliant husband for support when the API sucks mouldy rocks...

taking the reins

2007-10-21T00:14:00.000-07:00

While I was gone, I got assigned to a "team" to do projects for the class. I'm always a little nervous about "teams". I've had some good but also some rather unpleasant dealings in corporate culture over that word.

I'm also a little unsettled because I got assigned to a project app that I wasn't involved with discovery or research or storyboarding about it. And apparently no one else on my team was either. They're not worried though. Well, actually, I've only heard from one teammember. The other is not responding to email. (Apparently gone for the weekend.)

When I asked "If there were no users involved at any point in the process, how can it be "user-centered" design?" I mean, I thought that was the point of what we're supposed to be learning. So - his response: "we're all users ourselves."

We're NOT the users in this project. We're the designers - which automatically makes us too close to the product. The users will be the ones who use the app when we're not around. The ones who have to try to figure out how to get the right settings to get the right info without going crazy, who have to figure out an interface they didn't create. It *matters*. HCI isn't just about technical solutions or about following some w3c guidelines. HCI is about *humans* being able to use the technology without getting headaches over it, it's about apps not being designed by geeks for geeks, it's about thinking about the person who will use this app and about what matters to them.

So - being me, I decided to create a googledoc and invited them to it so we can all write down questions (and answers) about what we'll be prototyping. Even if we haven't been able to do the contextual inquiry, we can have a specific "user" to prototype around.

Anyways - we'll see how they respond. I am just not going to walk in on Tuesday and sit down to make something up. If the class was just about generic "innovation" and "making stuff up" - I can do that. But that's *not* what we're supposed to be doing in this class.

So - we'll see how this "team" works out.

Too tired to post

2007-10-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

Just got back from lunch with some of the women from the conference. The last morning was really good and lunch was great. I'm definitely going next year to GHC in Colorado.

So - I'm gonna gnap now and I'll update more later. And do homework. (Gotta do my takehome test that's due Monday.)


Anna

Official GHC 07 Blogger You may comment on this blog by visiting *Grace Hopper forum*.

Why doesn't everyone do this?

2007-10-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

I have a great laptop. It's dualboot, XP and linux (ubuntu).

I just found out something *awesome* that ubuntu does.

You know how sometimes you go to enter your password, and you happen to have your Caps Lock Key on? Ubuntu has a comment show up right below the password textfield that says, "You have the Caps Lock key on."

Until the capslock gets ripped out and removed from every computer, this should be the *standard* procedure for *any* log-in. Yay for ubuntu!

Just to show GHC rocks!

2007-10-19T23:19:00.000-07:00

(and to point out that I'm not going to post *only* about angst), Kori from SIG-CHI (who I met at the HCI panel today) sent me a link to papers by students that had been accepted at the CHI conference. I was inspired enough that I just sent a study proposal to my advisor. GHC rocks!

And now I am going to bed. For real this time. And staying there. ;-)


Anna

Official GHC 07 Blogger You may comment on this blog by visiting *Grace Hopper forum*.

Rollercoaster day

2007-10-19T21:27:00.000-07:00

I had some trouble focusing this afternoon - just feeling down. Worried about school, about networking, about whether I'm "doing it right", worried that my, ahem, forthright manner will alienate the very people who might be deciding internships, jobs, information interviews, providing contacts. It's hard sometimes, feeling like I've got the worst of both worlds - I'm not social like most women, but I'm not as technically focused as most men. I worry that I'll graduate with no prospects, or that I'll "settle" for another dead-end job, or worse, that my past spotty career (mother, housewife, office work, temp work) will be held against me in jobseeking and I'll end up with no job. I worry that I won't realize early enough when I need to apply for internships or that there are other expectations that I'm supposed to figure out for myself.

I know - you're not supposed to talk about this sort of anxiety out loud. I figure, someone out there might be going through this sort of thing too, and knowing they're not alone might help.

In spite of the worries, I managed to meet some really kewl women today. I got to have a really nice chat on the bus with a grad student from my program at school. It was nice to make that connection. We'd not had much chance to get to know each other before. She gave me some helpful advice about getting to know the grad students in the program and not relying solely on my advisor.

The morning presentations on HCI were interesting. There was an interesting diversity of approaches to HCI. My favorites were a woman who is designing a lighting configuration voice response system who talked about using Wizard of Oz discovery for how users actually talked about their lighting needs; a woman who was switching over capture and assessment processes for therapists from handwritten notes and forms to a digital paper and pen for taking notes, and a system that provided the notes and data points, along with video connected with the data points; and another woman who chose to, rather than using online software collaboration tools, had her users use an analog process for discovery, to see how they interacted, and discovered that much of the temporal "flow" of the visual information decision systems probably has more to do with the software constraints than with how they would naturally approach the project. Oh - and one woman had the *kewlest* slide - this 3d data visualizer that turned so you could see it from multiple sides.

Lunch with Systers was great. I met a really kewl woman who lives near me and I think we'll keep in touch. It was also great to discuss rss feeds vs email listservs with women of varying backgrounds.

Oh yeah - and today there was a great presentation on HCI as a gateway to computing for women. I loved it. I think the fundamental user-centered, pragmatic approach of HCI allows people to look at what's really going on, rather than just the theories, and accept that the current paths into tech aren't working for far too many women. HCI isn't a stopping point for many women - a lot go on to CS or other tech pursuits, or come away with increasing awareness of how computers can be useful in whatever they want to do. In any case, it's an entry point that a lot of women *and* other diverse people appreciate. It was great to hear the responses to a question about "isn't HCI just a way of getting away with doing 'easy' stuff"? Humans are the ones with real problems that need solving. Doing the tech is the *easy* part - figuring out these "pesky" humans is the real hard part.

After that, the afternoon was kindof a bust for me - and I went back to my room eventually to nap before dinner. Dinner turned out to be at Universal, outside. Eep. There I was in a silk skirt (boiling) carrying my jacket, expecting more airconditioning. Turned out I wasn't the only one confused about that. (I was glad to hear that.) Toward the end of the evening, I ended up at the piano bar, which was really fun!

It's far too late, but I've needed time to wind down. (I got to do video iChat with my husband when I got to my hotel room - which was great. It's nice having a supportive husband - he loves having a smart geek wife.)

I am looking forward to tomorrow. There's some workshops coming up that look quite intriguing, and I am expecting to learn a lot. Good night all!


Anna

Official GHC 07 Blogger You may comment on this blog by visiting *Grace Hopper forum*.

Trying to keep positive

2007-10-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

I checked my course website for a class, and found out I'd gotten 42/50 on the 3rd assignment. The mean was 45. I felt really bad about that. Like I'm not really very good at this, what am I doing here, stuff like that. It probably doesn't help that I'm tired. The mean was 45.9 on the assignment. The standard deviation was 4.42, so I'm at least within one SD.

I've been talking to myself - reminding myself that I got perfect scores on the first two assignments, and that the 2nd assignment was worth more points. So no, I don't suck.

I did a shoddy job. I was pissed off that the assignment wasn't clear enough (I didn't realize that in time) and I'd done a lot of research on something that I couldn't use, and didn't find out until the day before. So I had to do something "in a hurry". And I didn't really care about the topic. I know - bad attitude. And that was reflected in my work and in the grade. I am hopeful about the 4th assignment though - I think I did a good job on it. We'll see.

The next (5th) assignment should be interesting... I've been assigned to a group - with people I don't know, working on something together that I haven't even found out what. Uffda. I'm a little nervous about it, particularly since I'll be gone until late Sunday. It's a group project and I'm not there. I just hope I can catch up okay (I hate playing "catchup") when I get back.

EDIT:
So I ran the numbers:
I'm right *at* the mean overall for the assignments and just below the median:
Me: .946, Mean: .945 Median: .96

Okay - so, that's not so bad, I guess...

First day at GHC

2007-10-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

Some really good talks. (There weren't any that were bad.) Some highlights:

The Keynote Speaker, Donna Dubinsky, talked about Numenta: a startup with Jeff Hawkins who wrote On Intelligence, which is using biological brain-based concepts (spatio-temporal persistence, heirarchical structures, nodes) to create a new platform. They're looking for interns. Later, their principal architect gave a great tech talk on the platform. It was wonderful to hear that this is possible! That there are people doing this sort of work, commercially. I had had the impression that such things were only available in academia, pure resarch programs.

Later, a panel on interdisciplinary research (ID) was great. I was worried at the start, because I thought it was going to be all academic. There was one woman there from Intel, named Susan, whose ID is anthropology and user experience research - ethnographic discovery - to determine real users needs and convey that to the developers. That sounds awesome!

There was a great talk about re-inventing CS1. Three speakers talked about how they're turning CS1 into a kewl class (or rather, set of class options) that are based around 3D animations, or personal robots, etc. Kewl, fun stuff. And most of it is in Python! Woot!

The talk on "landing your dream job" - I asked a question about women in transition - changing careers. The average person changes careers 3 to 5 times! according to some studies. I wanted to know how do companies (recruiters and hiring committees, interviewers) view career changes. The best piece of advise was that: most recent grads have no life experience and that I can bring my life experience and perspective to the table - present those as strengths.

It was nice to see several women at the conference who are mothers (even grandmothers) and are managing to find ways to maintain.

I actually was a bit worried about what to wear. The diversity of clothing was amazing. Women in jeans and tshirts, suits, slacks, dresses, headscarfs, capris, ... I was pleased to see it. Tomorrow, jeans and tshirt for me. (Today was capris and a sports tanktop.)

After the last talk, I skipped the BOF sessions and went back to my hotel room (I'm staying across the street from the conference hotel) and dropped off all my stuff, and took time to change. I'm *so* glad I did. Not everyone, but *most* people had dressed up for the banquet.

I got to dance with Frances Allen! (The first woman to win the Turing Prize.) She was a lovely older woman, who climbs mountains (she was telling about a recent "hike" at 14000 feet!) and dances rather energetically. She led us in a snake dance - holding hands and winding in and out... That was fun.

I had a good day, but it's way late. I'm going to try to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, as the saying goes...


Anna

Official GHC 07 Blogger You may comment on this blog
by visiting *GHC bulletin board*.

cool, hot, cold, loud, dry, too much, too little

2007-10-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

Sensory update

Cool: lots of really interesting talks. And dinner was nice.
hot: 90 degrees outside, room full of women dancing
cold: airconditioning in the hotels so i had to carry (and often wear) my jacket a lot
loud: the music was so loud I couldn't stay for long, and eventually left the room with some other women to chat
dry: I didn't drink nearly enough water today.

Too much: sensory overload, people, people I don't know, noise
Too little: bandwidth, clocks, handy maps, bathrooms, sleep, downtime, quiet


Anna

Official GHC 07 Blogger You may comment on this blog
by visiting *GHC bulletin board*.

Learning by computer

2007-10-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

Okay - this is clear as mud, but I was typing while listening and then the wifi went down (again)

Internal representations:
better to let object with both A and B characteristics be represented by both A and B active rather than learning something as AB. Better for generalization.

What goals:
current focusing on image recognition
want to recognize variations of a picture of an object

starting with an end result, suppose I don't know the structure of the data
can try to build a heirarcy
N^2 algorithm


Anna

Official GHC 07 Blogger You may comment on this blog
by visiting *GHC bulletin board*.

python!

2007-10-18T12:31:00.000-07:00

I'm seeing Python in so many places today.

The Numenta guy's application is built in python. (It says so on the side.)

and a lot of the "fix CS1" programs are starting to use Python to introduce CS to people from diverse backgrounds, providing fun, accessible learning of concepts. Using Python to make "gateway" classes instead of "gatekeeper" courses is useful to increase the diversity of students taking and staying in these intro classes. "but wait" says the CS hardcore geek - "What about the lower levels and pointers and recursion and all the hard stuff people need to learn". PYthon isn't "dumbing it down" and these classes that are being produced are providing learning without having to do it dryly. For example, people in class decide they need to have a function call itself and ask how to do that - this way they learn recursion because they have a use-case.


Anna

Official GHC 07 Blogger You may comment on this blog
by visiting *GHC bulletin board*.

Brain and Computer

2007-10-18T12:26:00.000-07:00

Great talk. I wanna work at Numenta. Applying model of brain to building computers. Propagating information up in heirarchy. Can use Bayesian techniques to disambiguate.

I am so torn (still) between work like this, applying neuroscience directly to computer architecture vs HCI which applies a variety of human sciences to computer interface.


Anna

Official GHC 07 Blogger You may comment on this blog
by visiting *GHC bulletin board*.

GHC update

2007-10-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

So the network was down earlier. I'll update about morning sessions later, but right now I'm in a great panel on Interdisciplinary (ID) Research. It's nice to see that there's industry jobs rather than just academia. Common that ID people feel like they're not able to keep up as much in each. Also was nice to see a person who got into CS/IT sideways like me.


Anna

Official GHC 07 Blogger You may comment on this blog
by visiting *GHC bulletin board*.

Conference morning

2007-10-18T03:57:00.000-07:00

I got my storyboarding assignment in last night. I actually was pleasantly surprised at how it turned out. I think I came up with some creative ideas. The upload wasn't working, so I finally gave up and just emailed a zip file to the TAs.

On the shuttle to the hotel last night, I met 2 women also going to GHC. One had been before and she was really excited to be coming back. That was nice to hear about.

Of course, I cannot remember my assigned blogging sessions - I have a meeting at 8am, and I hope that'll give me the information.

I've been a little apprehensive about this conference. Looking forward to it, but also nervous. I don't think I've ever been in a group of women this large. I'm accustomed to computer conferences - being just one of the guys. I actually had a couple moments of "fashion panic" - worrying about what I'll wear! Ugh. Anyways - I've gotta shower and grab some breakfast now, and then head across the street to the conference.

My typical response

2007-10-16T12:52:00.000-07:00

So, I had to code a program using bigrams to generate sentences based on two very different corpora (wsj and shakespeare). I coded it up yesterday afternoon and evening. It took about 2 hours (aside from discussing data structures with Alex - I got to use the collections.defaultdict for the first time.) I sent it, and then suddenly panicked. What if I misunderstood the assignment? I do that sort of thing pretty often (particularly in this class, for some reason). What worried me was, it was so easy to code. I must be doing something wrong. I had actually done it okay. I just had trouble *believing* that I'd done it right.

I run into this regularly - if it's hard, I worry I won't be able to do it at all, or that I'll need too much help from Alex; if it's easy, I worry I did it wrong. It couldn't possibly be that I'm finally getting enough practice and experience coding to be able to do easy things reasonably easily... could it? Nah. That would require me to admit that maybe I do know some programming after all. And, as I've repeatedly stated, "I'm not a programmer; I just use python to get things done."

I'm beginning to think I may have to change that motto. I am not a professional programmer. But, I do program. So, does that make me "a programmer"? I'll have to let that one percolate for a while...

Creative living

2007-10-16T12:42:00.000-07:00

There's a class being offered on campus thru the transfers program I guess. It's called "The Art of Living Creatively" or something like that. It's about paying attention to your own creativity and learning to foster your creativity.

This is, I think, great timing. I recently declared my major concentration: HCI, and one of my biggest fears is whether I'll be up to the challenge. I'm dealing with "imposter syndrome" - I am starting to maybe believe I can program a little bit. At least sufficiently to do the homework we've had so far. But, beyond that, I'm worried that I'm just not creative enough for a job in HCI. After all, one can learn all the rules, but still not be an artist. I believe I have enough background and am able to learn how to recognize "when it's bad", but that doesn't mean I'll be able to do it right myself. I'm afraid that it may be as much visual art as it is science, and I'm not sure I'm able to do that.

So yes, learning that I *do* have creativity, and knowing I can tap into it, will be quite useful as I proceed upon this path.

Grace Hopper Celebration

2007-10-13T07:41:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, I will be flying to Orlando Fl, for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. I've never attended, but I'm really looking forward to it. I've volunteered to be a blogger for the conference, so you'll be reading a lot about the sessions.

Slowly but surely...

2007-10-12T01:25:00.001-07:00

First it was my computational linguistics class.
Now, my HCI prof was recommending Python as a great prototyping language.
Of course, I just *happened* to be wearing a Python t-shirt at the time...

Even if it's not being taught as a course, Python's recognized by many as a useful, general-purpose, easy-to-learn and use language.

Fascinating

2007-10-10T21:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/do-we-believe-e.html

So apparently, Descartes and Spinoza had a disagreement about whether, faced with a new proposition we:

D: Comprehend
Consider
Accept or Reject

S: Comprehend and Accept
Consider and possibly reject

This reminds me, actually, of a recent CDC study I heard about, from the same source, about how people misremember so-called "myths" that are being refuted, as being true AND that the source of the "truth" was the mythbuster.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/the-deniers-con.html
In other words, Spinoza could have predicted the CDC's quandary.

Popperian assumptions

2007-10-10T11:03:00.000-07:00

I hadn't realized how much my views of science are based on Popper. I had no idea that that's where they came from.

"falsification"
"deduction-based"
"willing to overthrow pet theories based on data"

Those apparently all come from Popper!

Python Rocks

2007-09-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

I did my program for my compling class. Hope it works for my "partner". His job is to run it and find the "glaring errors" in my regular expressions and such. Then he'll send those back to me and I fix them. I do the same for him.

I don't know what OS he uses, so I just sent him the raw sourcefiles and told him to run them by typing python analiza.py It's probably the easiest way. I did have the fun of actually setting it up as modules - there's the main program which calls out to the handler module, which uses a data module full of lists and dicts and sets oh my!

I got to really put sets and the re module to the test. I've not used re much - actually, I've avoided it like the plague. So - yes, it works. But I don't like it much. I remember the comment by Jamie Zawicki (often attributed to the effbot who used it as a sig):

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know,
I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

I'm just really really glad I got to use Python for this class.

The workshop went well. I should have asked people how far along they were - turns out some of them had taken the advice, and pointers to tutorials, and really run with it. But, I think some others were pretty novice, and got something out of the early part of the session. We divided it up: I covered syntax, loops, if/elif/else, strings, and did some hands-on work, then turned it over to Alex who covered regular expressions with re, and lists and dicts.

It'll be interesting to see how the class is on Tuesday. Unfortunately, I'm really behind on my reading for my philosophy of science class so I get to do that tomorrow morning. Then, back to programming, and then, my assignment for my HCI class and then more reading.

Wow. I feel good - but swamped.

Feeling better now

2007-09-28T23:49:00.000-07:00

Went through some slides with Alex and focused on the things I want them to learn. I feel better about it now - I've got a good idea of how we'll go about things and what we'll be teaching. Should be interesting though. These are classmates, and I feel like this session will make a difference.

What was I thinking?

2007-09-28T16:25:00.000-07:00

OMG - so I'm running a workshop on Python tomorrow, for classmates. With, like, no preparation. Booger.

Okay - deep breath. Alex has a bunch of slides on python 101, that I can steal from. I just have to figure out, like, what I'm going to cover and how I'm going to do that. Eep.

I'm thinking:
primitives: strings, numbers, lists
if/elif/else statements
for/while loops
user input
and just running a simple script.
And they'll have to be introduced to python's re module, because we have to do regular expression matching for the project.

So, yeah, it's not complicated but - uffda. I'm feeing really nervous now. I'll be okay, I just need to express that "OMGWTFBBQ" feeling.

Well that was interesting

2007-09-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

My French class dropped me. The department doesn't want students having conflicts. So, that reduces my load.

My Computational Linguistics class instructor yesterday recommended Python for coding the class projects! (Several folks asked, and said they didn't know programming.) I volunteered to run a workshop on Satyrday (Alex offered to help) on Python for those folks. So we'll see if there's any interest - if so, I may be teaching Python! (Just the basics. We don't need any fancy programming for the class projects.)

So much for easy

2007-09-25T17:27:00.000-07:00

So my plan was to take a light load this quarter: French, Phil and HCI. Then I found out about a nifty neuroscience course. Okay - maybe I can fit that in, it's only 2 credits and only one day a week. Then last night, I get an email saying that the computational linguistics course I was planning on taking next year won't be taught next year because he's going on leave. Sigh. So - drop the neuroscience course, and add the CompLing course, because I need that for my major and was looking forward to it. So now I have 18 units and 2 of the courses will be definitely putting me through my programming paces.

One of the things they'll be "teaching" in the HCI course is the "prototyping culture". I've already got that from Python. It's easy to prototype things when you know it's easy to refactor. It was interesting to see how many women were in the HCI class - one of the women asked if it was an okay class since she's not a "hardcore coder". The instructor was reassuring - we'll be working in teams, and as long as someone on the team can handle the programming, we'll be fine. I'm looking forward to this course.

I'm not looking forward to having more work than I'd expected. Ah well.

Plus est en vous

2007-09-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

Today was the Junior Convocation at Stanford. We were addressed by Scott Forstall, the VP at Apple who created the iPhone. He also happens to be a Stanford alumnus, in Symbolic Systems (my major). He was alternately funny and inspiring.

One of his themes was "plus est en vous": there is more in you (than you know). He spoke about how people often will have either fixed minds or growth minds - how fixed minded people will prefer to do things that show they're smart, but growth minded people will accept looking stupid as long as they get to learn something.

I felt, many times, like he was speaking directly to my own fears and insecurities - that I won't be good enough to do what I'd like to do with HCI. And I realized that, yeah, I may not end up being the best and the brightest in the field - but I could be good at it, and I could offer perspective that isn't there for those kids who go into it directly from highschool to college to working in the field. So yeah - it's okay to not be perfect, to take classes or positions that stretch me. Here's this VP who's done awesome things saying that he *hired* for that. That he *looked* for people who wanted to stretch, to take risks, to be willing to not "look smart" in order to *learn*.

He finished by challenging us to look for the "more" in ourselves, to be willing to take opportunities to explore things we had no idea we could do. It is nice to know that there are, at least a few, people out there hiring who candidates for more than just the safe bets. I, for one, find that reassuring.

EDIT: And as I turn to my Gmail, the quote of the day at the top of my inbox:
Babe Ruth - "Don't let the fear of striking out hold you back."

She's Geeky

2007-09-20T07:32:00.001-07:00

I want to encourage every woman in the bay area to attend:

She's Geeky (http://www.shesgeeky.org)
A Women's Tech (un)conference
October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA.

This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.