G’s Place

i can haz research paper?

cute song about early internet days…

via

I read about Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in Literature from the Subterranean Homepage News.  Here is the part of the speech that resonated with me:

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

I think this is a good point. If you are information literate, you know how to find information. You see the web as an interconnected place, with windy roads that can lead the adventurous to primary sources of information. If you are not so lucky, you get trapped in the facebooks, myspaces, etc etc. It scares me a bit to think my kids have all this information at their fingertips, and worry that they haven’t been taught how to seek information, and how to be selective in their information sources.

What happens when no one reads? No one has a thirst for knowledge? Who controls information? What happens to those without a voice? What happens to our history…how will it be told? If no one writes, if no one cares to read, what happens to us as a society?

Brianna, she also said “Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.” I did my best to give you a good head start!

I am catagorizing this under geekdom. I have always considered myself a literature geek. So, now I am off to read some more of the latest novel I am reading: Rhett Butler’s People.

I am sure you have heard the story: a 15-year-old girl met a 25-year-old on MySpace, falls in love, and the guy comes to get her to elope with him.

But the guy is actually a 40 something sexual predator.

I am listening to the dad, who says he’s computer stupid. It sounds like he did alot of things right. He had the computer in a public area. He tried to look over his daughter’s shoulder to keep up with what she was doing. But he needed to do more.

If your kids are on MySpace, you have to be on MySpace. Tell your kid that they have to friend you. My son told me I was the worst friend ever when I did that to him, and I reminded him I’m not supposed to be his friend. I watched what he did. What his friends were doing. I only told him he had to change something one time. I was able to watch what his friends were up to, and start conversations about it. He hated it. I am hoping one day he’ll understand.

If your kids are younger, make a rule that they can only IM or friend people that they know IRL (in real life). Make them tell you who the kids are (they will have WEIRD names, so make them tell you!) Tell them from very young to refuse to give ages and locations, if they can’t do that hide that info, and if they can’t do that, LIE. Say you are 66 from someplace across the country.

If you don’t understand this, leave a message or email me. I’ll try to help you figure it out. Social networking sites can be fantastic - they can help keep in touch with family in different locations, keep in touch with friends who move, and help the kids with homework (no really it can). You just have to keep on top of the kids. It’s the best insight you will ever get to your kid’s life…take advantage of it!

I always wonder when I read the laments of how women for some reason refuse to flock to high-tech careers if the lamenters ever bother to talk to women who have chosen these careers.
I am having my own personal work issues now…I have always felt I had to choose between being myself (which will mean some people will see me as a bitch) and using all the good southern training I learned to be seen and not heard so that I fit in at work. I’m not going to go into details here…that is what my boyfriend is for (thanks Bri!)….but I need to figure out how to stand my ground and not get pushed aside without coming across as a bitch. Is that possible?
These articles were helpful in showing me that when it comes with dealing with women at work, men do have blind spots. They don’t realize that a different communication style is not a bad thing.

I agree with what Barbara Annis at WITI careers wrote about challenges and barriers for women (I am summarizing here..):

1. Dismissed - not taken seriously because of communication style (will listen to a man but not a woman..if even if she makes the same point first)
2. Tested - constantly having to prove credentials, instead of just getting to do the darn work!
3. Third Sex - trying to act like a guy so you will fit in. If you take it too far and be aggressive like guys are, you get labeled a bitch.
4. Excluded, Avoided - not invited to lunch or other extra activities with your group.
5. Tokenism - getting promoted just because they need a woman (I have seen this first-hand)

1-4 have happened to me in the past, and several of them are happening to me now as we speak. I also like this advice from Ms. Annis:

What does work is strategically, and by design, building relationships with the influencers in the company. What does work is speaking up and starting to address some of those blind spots yourself. What does work is making the commitment to be part of the change and not part of the status quo.

But how do you do address the blind spots without coming off as the dragon-lady? How do you address the status-quo if the guys in charge think everything is okie-dokie?
Especially in a world where if you do get to hang out with co-workers they treat you like a guy. And do things like check out all the admins as they walk past your table in the cafeteria. To the point that it interrupts conversation?

What is strange about that is that it starts EARLY. One of my son’s friends went with us on a college visit. She goes to the technical high school, and is in the welder’s program. She is with all guys, and they do the same thing to her. She wants to go into a technical career, and all I could tell her is that the boys don’t change, so she has to get used to it.

You know, even something as simple as making swag t-shirts in women’s styles would be a nice start.

Even worse are co-workers that only come to you when they need administrative help. I’m not an admin, I have a set of highly specialized, in-demand technical skills. I want to use them to help my group, but I feel as if the only input they value is my non-technical input. Which puts me in a bad place…if I can’t get my hands dirty on more advanced technical stuff, that means I will fall behind. So I am left with two choices:

1. Fight tooth and nail to keep up. That means expending huge amounts of energy figuring out how to insert myself into situations without coming off as a bitch. It means carrying around a huge shield to absorb the disappointment and isolation I feel when I am rebuffed.
2. Giving up. Get left behind. Get out of tech.

It’s way easier to take my skills and leave. I have plenty of soft skills to carry me into a different life. But that would mean leaving all my geek ways behind. No more in depth discussions on how things work, and how hard would it be to make it on my own. I would just become a normal girl again……oh wait I never was a normal girl. Being a techie was the first thing that ever did make me feel a little normal. Infinite loop.

Star Wars + nSync

guess I have to figure out how to embed…

check it

While looking at a video of Kelly Clarkson singing metal, I had to explore a blog called Negro Please. One of the first posts I looked at was about old photos being retouched with color to look more realistic.

 It’s actually pretty cool.

See it here, since I can’t seem to enbed videos either.

grrrr I don’t want to have to deal with this on my own, but I don’t have enough access to the blog software to customize anything!

oh yeah, video via metafilter.