Musings & Meanderings

They said cheer up …things could be worse.

I cheered up.

Sure enough …things got worse.

If a sense of humor is one of your coping tools, Jennifer’s post is a must read.

All of it ends up wrapped in so many memories, in timeless moments and confidences and love.

On some days the memories roll backwards, so here’s a little boy story:

My younger son attended church with his grandmother on Sundays.
One day, when he was 5 years old, he and I were in the car on our way somewhere.
Apropos of nothing, he suddenly said,

“You know, Mom, that there are really only 2 important rules in church.”

“Oh? What are they?”

“The first one is that you have to love and honor your mother.”

…sounds pretty good so far…

“What’s the second one?”

“The second one is that you have to go to the basement to smoke.”

On the surface it’s all in the Styling
(first impressions… and also maybe all we ever see)

• some of us are mostly just simple html
• a few either can’t manage a WYSIWYG editor or simply couldn’t be bothered
• some of us can’t resist flash pages and more
• adjectives such as elegant or cool mean that our code is so good that you don’t even notice it (and it probably validates too)
• most of us only render properly in one browser

Start interacting with the User Interface
(from trying to get a date to learning whether you should have)

• none of us come with instructions, but some offer lots of verbiage while others remain silent
• if you’ve met others sort of like this one you can probably guess where the buttons are and which ones to push
• we won’t do anything for you until you take the trouble to figure us out
• we try to signal whether we want something from you or prefer that you didn’t exist
• figure us out and maybe we can make beautiful music together

Share activities and get to see Scripts
(hopefully you’ve only gotten engaged and not married yet)

• find out which scripts we like most
• some of us don’t have many so you won’t have to wait long for repetition
• some of us are not into developing this level, and tend to run as few scripts as possible, stalling often to consider anything from security precautions to the costs of increased functionality
• anyone who is mad about RSS might be a salesperson
• can we consider a Freudian interpretation for an obsession with plugins?

Interact with the Language and Database
(sometimes you don’t get to see this until you’re already committed)

• we can be practical and staid
• or strictly limited and that’s that!
• some of us are dynamic and others are just pretending to be
• semantic types can be slow or with a tendency to get stuck, but when they’re good at it you’ve got a winner
• don’t confuse agile and fast with narrow or shallow

Get up close and personal to see the Operating System
(discover morals and values, and bank balances too)

• some are old fashioned and rather clunky but very reliable
• others are easy to use and beautiful but ultimately limited
• DIY grass roots type can be unpredictable but are usually true blue loyal
• DIY eclectic types come in the most flavors
• some of us ‘make it up as we go’ which can make for a pretty bumpy ride with lots of crashes

Find the OS Kernel inside
(knowing anyone at this level, including ourselves, is better than winning a lottery)

• there’s the legacy version …generations of inherited layers of rules (occasionally explodes or implodes in fatal error due to conflicts)
• some are purists …investing much discipline in adhering to core guiding principles
• some of us are put together like a Rubicks cube
• then there’s the master chef devoting a lifetime to creating the ultimate banquet with eight ingredients
• the deconstructionists know that there’s no such thing as WYSIWYG at this level

Isn’t it awesome that both computers and people actually work on all these levels at once?

Hello WordPress.

It’s been a sharp learning curve so far, but even when I’m banging my head against the wall , I still have Louis singing Hello Dolly in the background.

Who knew that I’d enjoy poring over code files in the middle of the night until I figured out what they did or until I found my mistake? (If I’d only known that I should have been reading PHP instead of MySQL manuals first it might have gone a bit faster.) No, this isn’t a gig, just a hobby.

I’d originally thought of waiting to move in concert with other plans, but decided that learning WordPress and joining this community was a wonderful complement to any future development at all, and a perfect place for my personal weblog.

So here I shall muse and meander from now on.

Getting out when you are physically disabled and in pain isn’t easy, and I haven’t done it enough since the major physical setback last December. Attending my first Geek Girl Dinner yesterday evening was great for me in more ways than one.

This was the first time I’ve been in a room full of mostly women with whom I shared work interests and even passions. After a couple of decades in a business where I worked exclusively with men, meeting mostly men in technology hasn’t fazed me much, but I also happen to like being a woman and am always thirsty for more powerful female energy in my life. Combining that with being able to talk about internet and web development topics was perfect.

A few of the people at my table were Sylvia, Director of Client Services at Broadview Software, a company that makes software for the television industry, Heather, who’s with Tucows and who has the coolest tattoo, and Shelley, a web designer with a lots of experience in accessibility. There were many more geek girls to meet… I look forward to being able to attend again.

The highlight of the evening was entrepreneur Leila Boujnane’s talk, followed by an open question session. Leila told her story, of how she traveled halfway round the world and chose technology over medicine, with sassy wit, revealing both a delightful sense of humor and an indomitable will to succeed. Bravo.

The central concept underlying Idée, Inc. is the identification of every digital image to a level of detail comparable in uniqueness to a fingerprint. This concept is, imo, an extremely valuable contribution to the core application processes we need more focus on in harnessing and benefiting from the full and barely apprehended power of the internet. Applications such as Idee’s visual search technology have the potential to support and enable many rich cultural activities beyond traditional media.

One of the things that intrigued me last night was that this gathering represented a truly wide political and ideological spectrum, yet these differences were of no issue in the face of common interests and dreams for the future. This is one of the ways in which women as a group have more power than they realize, in their natural ability to care and connect.

Thank you sponsor Tucows and to my fellow attendees, for an enjoyable evening.

Has anyone posted pictures?