Dr McGrath's presentation was full of statistics about female participation in CS, but here most powerful point was one that extends across all professions and genders. The behavior she pointed up is this: When a person is engaging in a behavior that runs counter to their culture's stereo-types, the individual has a strong tendency to set the bar for performance higher than a person who fits the stereo-typical norms for that activity. What this means is that a woman participating in a CS degree program will feel she's failing and "not good enough" at an activity unless her grades are B+ or above. The average grade of women departing CS degree programs is .. no joke... B+.
Add to the sense of a requirement for perfectionism when you're running counter to stereotype that being counter to stereotype can seriously inhibit a person's connection to the faculty and mentoring opportunities and... well, no duh. People who are not the "norm" for a profession -- *any* profession -- will be much more likely to drop out unless they are blessed with serious gift and ability to work solo or unless a workplace/academic environment can make a serious bid to reach out to them.
Interestingly, we know that recruitment and sincere efforts at inclusion *work*. CMU used to have even lower than industry-normal percentages of female CS students. I think it was 7 or 8 percent. But a serious change of mindset on the part of the faculty who reached out to female students sent female retention rates through the ceiling and a recruitment drive now has the CS department made up of 40% women. Unheard of in the discipline. And this is one of the best schools in the country.
Maybe this is no eureka moment for the rest of you. But for me, it certainly lays out some root causes I've never quite been able to identify for a set of knee jerks I've mostly overcome now. Anyhow, go Girl Geek Dinners. It was fun.
We spent so little time in Guatemala City it's hard to express the odd scattering of impressions we had of the place. Reviewers tell us we weren't missing much and whatever else is true, it's got all of the worst elements of a modern US city. Circuit City and Hooters. MacDonalds and poverty. Something about the lay of the mountains feels like a tropical West Virginia city. There's cognitive dissonance on everything. I'm full of confused thoughts I can't quite force into fruit. And then we're gone.
Antigua, with its one and two story buildings, exceedingly bumpy streets and internet cafes on every corner is something else entirely. And our hotel feels like a third thing. First, the easy part. Our hotel. You drive up the dusty street to a heavy wooden gate. Someone opens the gate and you drive into a walled retreat full of green things and the sound of falling water. The gardens have both a pool and a children's playground tucked into them. Although this particular hotel on the outskirts of town has a little more space and can do more with its gardens, at this point we know that this sensation is common to almost all the hotels in Antigua. A heavy door, a walled garden and you. It's very Guatemala. It's also not something that would transplant to midAtlantic weather more's the pity. The Guatemalan highlands in the rainy season are bright and shiny as a new penny all day until late afternoon or early evening when you get a light shower and the middle of the night when you get a full deluge. In the dry season it's just the same only without the rain. Sunny and 75 degrees all day long thanks to an elevation of between 4000 and 11000 ft above sealevel depending on where you are.
So the hotels provide a lush garden and a sense of intense privacy. The town... is complicated. Like any town that fishes so heavily from the international tourist stream, it becomes on some level quite ordinary. You can eat Italian or French or even Indian in Antigua. You can find good maple syrup and stinky foreign cheese. English and German and Italian and backpacks and Tevas are everywhere. Guatemalan Spanish is considered to be a comprehensible and "clean" Spanish by the rest of Latin America and Antigua is packed with language schools catering to those who want to learn. The loss on this front is that while actual Guatemalans *do* live and work here, they really can't afford the real estate anymore. If you want to know Guatemalan life as they live it... this is no place for you. If you want to buy the rarest finest things made in Guatemala and don't know where else to look, though, this is one of the better places for you. Someone has edited for your eye and figured out how to tell you what you're buying and though you're paying the tourist markup, it's still quite cheap by US standards.
So we spent two days here, getting the blear out after the plane ride. Figuring out how to get from place to place and letting the kids have all the panqueques (pancakes), pony cart rides and pool time they wanted. We'd be back and we'd go shopping, but this was just a jumping off point for us. A getting our bearings point. Our main desire was to get off the beaten path and get to the beach.
]]>You've decided to take your kid someplace your neighbors arch your eyebrows and say "Is that really a good idea?" and "Wasn't there poverty/civil war/famine there recently?" First order of business is to mind your health -- if the CDC suggests shots GET THEM. For Guatemala they recommend Hep A (which every child in the US receives at age 3 anyway) and Typhoid both of which are food and water born illnesses. For the lowlands they recommend malaria medicines if you're going to be there long and a liberal use of 30% DEET bug repelants for kids, 70%+ for adults no matter how long you're there. Permethin is something you can spray on your clothes to kill mosquitos should they land where they can't bite. Whatever your feelings about the evils of DEET for daily use in your home country, suck it up and don't get malaria. Or dengue. It's a couple of weeks. Use the DEET. Carefully. Age appropriately. But use it.
Other medical oddiments you can't live without: Pepto for Kids. Pepto for Adults. Imodium. Emetrol. Powdered gatorade which when diluted to about 1/3 strength is a health practioner recommended electrolyte replacement for illness, Advil for Kids. Advil for adults. Bandaids. Neosporin. A thermometer. Purel. Did I mention the Purel? P-U-R-E-L. You will learn it is your dearest friend. If you use it regularly whenever there's no soap, all of those other things I listed (except perhaps the bandaids and the Tylenol) will be irrelevant.
For the conservative, you might also ask your pediatrician for a prescription for some heavy duty antibiotics and a couple of epipens. We didn't ask for the antibiotics. We figured if we got scared enough to think we needed antibiotics we'd be finding a doctor in-country but the epi pens are something I no longer feel safe traveling without even as an adult. In Thailand 10 years ago, I who have no food allergies, got a case of hives from eating *something* on the night train to Chengmai. If I'd had even a kid-strength pen then I'd have used it on myself. Get an epi pen. And then laugh about how you didn't need it. If you don't use the soap/Purel you won't be laughing.
Purel or soap are only a part of your new religious discipline mostly related to eating and drinking. You never drink anything that wasn't sealed before you opened it. You never eat anything raw unless it had a skin that is no longer present. You only use a straw if you see it wrapped in paper and remove the wrapper yourself. You can break these rules and you might even get away with it as long as you're sensitive to the overall cleanliness of the places you eat. I talked to a guy who had been eating fresh salads in all sorts of restaurants for weeks with no ill effects. And bully for him. But he's not three years old and his dysentery is his problem to deal with in isolation. My dysentery or my kids gets out of hand and 3 other people are getting scared, bored and grossed out by it.
Other than your food observances, there's really only the one great commandment you break at your extreme peril. Wash. Your. Hands -- With. Soap. You do it before you eat. You do it every time you use the bathroom. You do it every time you touch the ground. You do it just because you can't remember when you did it last. I am convinced. If you will just do this, you can avoid almost every ill that comes your way. Our family case study was an interesting one. Betsy still sucks her fingers. Ginger doesn't. We warned Betsy thoroughly and carefully that we didn't want to stop her sucking on her fingers but that if she wasn't careful about washing she could be violently sick. We warned Ginger, too. But she's three. And not interested in hygiene.
What can I say? The results were notable. Ginger was the sickest of us all. While she never threw up, and we never had a day when we were stuck because she had to be near a bathroom every 15 minutes, we fought about handwashing, fed her Pepto like candy and carried diapers at the ready incase a toilet was completely inaccessible (it never came to that). Reed came next. He munched Pepto and cursed a bit. I took no meds but felt a tad ill. Betsy? Betsy was an OCD hand-washing maniac. And she was absolutely untouched.
I'd heard it from my nursing friends. I'd heard it from my teacher friends. I knew my special ed teacher sister in law, swears by it. Wash. Your. Hands. With. Soap.
I'm a convert. I think I'll go wash my hands now.
(P.S. Super Happy Dev House will begin at my house in either late September or early October depending on how swamped I am when I come back from vacation.
Date announcements will happen just after Labor Day.)
]]>So, I've spent the past 3 days at YAPC::NA 2008 and for all my friends who don't work in perl, I rather pity you. It's not that your Java, Ruby and bizarro flash-interpretive languages aren't good to write. They are (some of them -- ahem). But *you* haven't seen Ingy the professional ham do a strip-tease. (Tossing his underwear from behind the curtain, I tell you!) or heard Matt Trout get good laughs out of righteous indignation and the word fuck or heard the "I'm f*cking Steve Ballmer" song. (Which I'm trying to find, but it seems not to be online anywhere. Not shocking since it was just released "into the wild" about 45 minutes ago and it would've been spoiled if anyone had seen it early.
Point being, the perl people? They are fun. And friendly too. There were 350 people here, most of them seasoned programmers even if they were new to perl and the level of investment in the community was very high. My frivolous regret? I didn't bring enough cash with me to the auction to compete for the right to be the auctioneer in charge of selling off lunch with Larry Wall. (Who accepts being sold like an expensive tart every year with real grace). And as much as I like perl what this really reminded me is how much I love code. My code. Your code. Any code someone is really joyfully writing.
Therefore, I hereby declare that (as soon as I clear it with my spouse) there will officially be a monthly SuperHappyDevHouse at my place in Washington once a month. Dates to follow. If too many people want to do this, we will be forced to find alternate space but what the hell. If I don't set dates to hack. I don't hack. So come on over. Coffee's brewing.
]]>And the list grew. And it grew. And it grew. And the RSVP list sat. And it sat. And it sat. Until two days before the shindig when suddenly a flood of "yup, yup. Planning to be there!" Phonecalls came to me while I was trying to work. 1,2, 3...15... 25... ohgodohgod 32 kids. Right. And attendant parents. Whom we will have to feed and entertain.
Now a blow-by-blow account of sitting up until midnight prepping goodie bags, stuffing the pinata (because who could resist letting little kids beat Dora the Explorer with a big ole stick) might not interest you. And a post mortem of things we ought to have done (for example starting the grill at 9am and prepping ALL food the night before) also might be overly nitty gritty. The party happened. Reed, my mom and I worked like crazy. Betsy seemed to have a pretty good, though somewhat overwhelming, time and she and Ginger collapsed in an exhausted puddle when it was all over.
But when the party was all over, we still hadn't opened presents yet. And that's worth a discussion. I thought hard about whether to post this post. Would attending parents who read this blog be offended? Did I care? I dithered. I fiddled. And in short, anyone who is insecure enough to wring their hands and say-woe-is-me-she-hates-us-cause-we-didnt-include-a-gift-receipt has got it all out of proportion. I hate no one. The things Betsy was given were lovely. And other friends could use this entry. Nuf said. People with little children who will attend parties in the future, consider the following rules next time your kids are invited to a birthday. The following are good birthday party ettiqutte for (at least) the preteen set.
1. As a matter of ettiquette, it's polite to call the inviting parents and ask them what their preferences are about gifts for their kids.
2. If you make the aforementioned call, it is negated as a politeness unless you actually USE the information so gleened to buy an appropriate gift.
3. Especially if you did not follow rules 1 and 2, it is polite to include a gift receipt with what you buy so that it can be returned if it's a duplicate or ... ahem... deemed hopelessly inappropriate.
4. If for some reason you really can't do 1, 2, or 3... buy something without monstrous Disney or other marketing push behind it. Books -- especially classics -- are *very* safe purchases.
5. Extra credit for thoughtfulness goes to parents who put presents into gift bags instead of wrapping them in wrapping paper. This is for two reasons: a. It makes parental pre-snooping of gifts to be sure there's nothing you don't want your tot to have much much easier and b. You can reuse the gift bag next time your own child takes a gift to a party.
I may actually have an ammendment to the overall list next September about how you should behave when the parents ask that no presents be brought. I think that's what we're going to try for the next few years.
Peace, yall.
K.
Yah. I feel that. Ok, I don't live it, but I live at all times at essentially two disasters worth of remove from it. One good trainwreck taking the family, one good business tidal wave taking the job. Or maybe a physical disability. Point being, the full cup that runs over for me is shatterable. So's yours, probably, whether you notice it or not. You can't look over your shoulder all the time in fear, it aint healthy, but then there's Molly sitting right there struggling with the ultimately ineffable, the how do you go on, the need for something to get up in the morning for. Hell, Molly's hardly the only one.
My personal answer to the fear of living old, alone and unspeakable is simple, maybe simple minded. Don't look. That sort of future is one that is called into being by thinking about it. Feel it creeping at your spine and breathing in your ear, but you never turn round. You walk like Perseus out of Hades, towards the light. Find things to love, even if they're not what you wanted to love in the beginning. And walk on.
Of course, I've acreted quite a pile of people and things to love. Easy for me to say that. And Perseus failed, so who the hell do you have to be to never look round? You'll note, if you followed the link to Molly's post I haven't said a damn thing about her professional sense of despond. She's multipublished, brilliant and broke. I'm middle of the road competent, no luminary and not broke. My recipe is somehow the same. Don't look round. Take new contracts, write new books. Earn, earn, earn. Do everything new today so the might have beens don't eat you.
Good luck, Molly, be strong. We're rooting for you.
]]>She proceeded to spend the next 3.5 days kvetching with a steady temp of 101 and no other symptoms. The doctor says her ears are clear and she's not in any danger. This didn't stop her from sleeping like hell, tossing up any medicine we tried to give her within 5 minutes of us trying to get it down her and being in general, a complete, utter nightmare to be around.
Did I mention that I had her at home through an entire 4 hour conference call I was on Wednesday during which she never once slept or that she managed to vomit in my bed not once, not twice, but THREE times Wednesday night? This in spite of a real effort on my part to prevent it after the first time.
She's turned the corner. She's sleeping peacefully and eating like a little truffle pig. Now *I* feel queasy. And of course there's mission critical work to be done and I've had a sick baby-sized block preventing me from getting to it. Today, Friday, all of the barriers finally got pulled out so now I get to figure out how to work on the weekend with children in the house.
Which would be fine if I could get some SLEEP first. Bleah. Tired. Very. Very. Tired.
]]>Some friends have suggested DreamHost as a possible new home for this blog and others have suggested TextDrive and while I don't see anything actively wrong with either of them, I tried to hit DreamHost's homepage off and on for several hours yesterday and they seemed to be slashdotted. Needless to say, this doesn't impress me in a place I'd be putting my own piddly website no matter how much of a self care user interface they've got built.
TextDrive, by contrast has an "all the cool kids are playing here" sort of allure since the founders are all open source geeks and they're begging for mini-angel investors promising lifetime hosting. I can't decide whether trading potential lack of service for lifetime hosting is ok. Is this a save-by-spending idea that will pay off or is this stupid? If this weren't a potentially buy-once-never-worry-about-it-again sort of deal, I would just make a choice and be done, but 500 bucks is 3- 4 years worth of hosting money. I have to be there a good long time to make it a worthy expendature.
The third possibility to complicate this matter further is that I can get my old free colo space back, I just can't do it for another couple of months. Of course, then I have to admin the box and I have exactly no time for patches or upgrades and this domain's availability is no longer just a nice-to-have for me. Oh... and I'd have to buy a box which would probably cost at least as much as lifetime TextDrive.
Thoughts? If you read this via lj feed, I'll look for comments there, otherwise anything sent to my firstname at this site .org gets to me. No, I don't turn on comments. It's just another place for spam to pile up. Will let people know how this decision plays out since some of you are also about to become refugees from the great dissonant.org shutdown.
]]>2006 will be a challenging year. But the challenges have changed. Learn to work from a place of proactive creation rather than reactive fear. (The new job supports this.) Take active steps towards all the things I want for my family over the coming years. Remember to enjoy the full array of gifts we seem stunningly to just keep having. Keep hands outstretched to the life full of people we drift and almost don't see. Live. Just live.
And if I HAVE to have a concrete goal -- the Quilt That Will Not Die will be finished this year. Which is of course, why I am compulsively working on the Christmas Stocking That Will Not Die (and which I expect to take another year) instead.
]]>I am exhausted. Everyone's Christmas cards and gifts will go out next week. Oh, and Merry Christmas/Happy Birthday To Me!
]]>Today I've got another one. Several months ago, I saw The Fog of War, a movie length set of interviews with Robert McNamara. Just today I finished Talk of the Devil, which is a set of 7 interviews with fallen dictators: Idi Amin, Mira Milosevik (Slobidon's wife) and Baby Doc among others. Last week I ran across a fantastic article about places to intervene in complex systems and their efficacy/difficulty This led me to go finda set of patterns for expressing feedback loops in complex systems. And somewhere else -- I forget where -- I read something about how Intuit is a revolutionary and how they could begin to reparadigim the healthcare system with their new product, Medical Bill Manager.
So I've been reading/listening to people who have lived through and been responsible for apalling history self-justify or deny responsibility. Either they did what was absolutely right or they were somehow powerless to do other than they did. They were in the moment and usually saw themselves in spite of their sins as saving their people from even worse abuses by someone else. Most of them were irresponsible assholes. A few were genuinely nuts. The road to hell is definitly mostly paved with good intentions.
That gets me contemplating what one person can truly change and where they have to be in the system to change it. And THAT gets me excited when I look at patterns of behavior in complex systems and looking at leverage points. The most effective system changes are not necessarily coming from a command and control structure.
This all brings me to a concrete example of power shifting. For years we've been hearing everyone whine about how the health care system is screwed up, who owns our personal medical records and how the government should or the insurance companies should change everything. But the government and the insurance companies don't actually have that much incentive to change things. People who buy healthcare do. So what would happen if you helped people to balance the knowledge and record keeping advantages that business has over them? If people who buy health insurance could actually see how often their claims were misprocessed and what the total cost of ownership of a healthcare policy is, would they start buying differently? Maybe.
Intuit is offering a new product that gives the patient or policy holder tools to manage insurance processes outside of a single insurer's system of self care. It is trying to do to insurance filings what it did to tax returns and give people a single place to store everything about your doctors and your coverage that belongs to you -- not putting it in the hands of some third party (although you can bet they'll have a web portion of their product just like they do for Quicken).
Anyhow, I don't expect Intuit to save the world or even "fix" healthcare. I don't expect dictators to become self actualized. I don't expect a hurricane triggered by butterfly wings in a way I can directly trace and follow. The world is the same place it was before I started making some of these connections. I just have this sensation as though the true control structures of the universe have been exposed for me -- which all in all is a pretty cool thing.
]]>The rest of you, my undeniably brilliant female friends ... if you ever wondered why you weren't special when everyone said you tested so bright, if you ever felt like someone was going to discover your dirty little secret that you're just not that smart, if you ever wanted to know what happened to you that made you get straight As and feel incapable anyway the answers are in here. Every single reader of this blog who is my actual personal acquaintance needs their nose rubbed in this because I don't have any friends who are not, in their own ways stunningly brilliant. And I would go to some great lengths to beat you all over the head with it.
Some of you are Ivy educated. Some of you are multi-degreed. Some of you are neither. Almost all of you are multi-potentialled and could have done more than one thing well if you'd chosen to. Several of you have already done more than one thing well and are looking at third careers not first or second. I see lots of us stepping back and standing down our own intellectual lives in the name of family or in the name of "quality of life" and calling it balance. I call bullshit on us all. There is a big difference between wanting to work less hours and parking our intellectual aspirations at the door. There is a HUGE difference between supporting our mates' careers and destroying our own.
I've been contemplating what my daughters need and grappling with my own intellectual hopes for the next decade or two. I remind myself again and again of the lessons other brilliant women friends have taught me -- being strong and feeling strong are not the same thing. With an idiotic sense of feebleness and self doubt and over-caution all folded in on the inside, I am still a giant. Watch me walk around the world 10 miles at a step and make it look effortless.
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