Leave it to CoDe Magazine to let me write about the problem some of us programmers have when we really have to pee, but we just want to get that last line of code working. I also talk about my own impatience and obsessions around programming and suggest that I might not be the only developer with these traits.
MVP Corner – Coder’s Anonymous
It’s in the current issue (Nov/Dec 2007) and is also now online.
While you can read all about the actual sessions at ReMix07 Boston through the official blog posts that are on the main site as well as from many blogs written by attendees, I am back to my old tricks writing about who I saw and talked to at this event earlier this week.
[A New DevLife post]
I glanced at this headline:
Train Derails In Ohio; Explosion Heard
and thought it said
Train Derails In Ohio; Expression Blend
I know that your brain definitely fills in the blanks for you a lot which is why the SHAPE of words plays a huge role in being able to speed read. But I’d say this was a little bit out of context.
Tatiana pushed up two more essays this morning and mine is one of those.
It’s not quite as serious or challenging as some of the more thought provoking essays have been, but it is definitely from the heart!
As part of the Women in Tech series at OReillyNet, Lauren Wood writes about serving on standards committees and how the people who are there representing a great variety of interests, manage to make it all work.
Lauren is a Sr. Technical Program Manager at Sun – so she represents a BIG interest! I also read Lauren’s bio and my jaw dropped even more when I saw this:
Lauren holds a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics
“Gulp!”, says the gal who majored in History at a teeny tiny liberal arts college in Central New York.
One of the Women in Tech essays that has been published so far was about mentoring and inspiring young women who are interested in tech. Nelly Yusupova tells an amazing story about how she was so overwhelmed after day one of a computer class in college that she almost quit the class. But she decided that somehow she would overcome her terror and challenged herself to not just take the class but to get an A. And the rest is history. 🙂 She also talks about the importance of role models and mentoring.
I was really touched by her essay.
A few days later, I experienced a different type of mentoring and realized that, in a funny way, it had a lot in common with what Nelly was talking about.
I have a lot of tomatoes in my garden and wanted to make sauce and freeze it. Some friends said I should can it. I tried canning a few quarts and you could see that after two days they look like something that could potentially get me arrested for crimes against humanity.
My friend Geri spent 1/2 hour on the phone with me explaining how to really do it properly. I still thought I would be better off just freezing as I just did not have the confidence to try it again and didn’t want to ruin my whole summer’s bounty of tomatoes. But I talked myself into it and called my neighbor to borrow what I had learned from Geri was one of the key tools for canning – a big canning pot. My neighbor, Michaela, said she had finished her canning and loves to can and loves to share the knowledge.
So she brought down her pot and a notebook of pickling & canning recipes (and tips & tricks) that her mother in law had lovingly assembled for her as a Christmas present, then came back after I had gotten the water boiling (it’s a BIG pot). Michaela spent a few hours with me while I played assistant (that’s like code-monkey, I guess) as she canned the laughably small output of 4 quarts of sauce I had cooked. Everything but the tomato paste was from my garden – basil, oregano, thyme, chives, rosemary. When all was said and done, we listened to the satisfying pops as each jar sucked it’s lid in. That’s a pretty good indication that I won’t be the cause of family wide botchilism this winter.
I realized that this is an age old type of mentoring – not just limited to a mother passing knowledge on to daughter. Sure, I had plenty of places I could read about canning in books and on the web. But having Michaela show me was more like sharing secrets and there is something intimate about it – the little things that you don’t get by reading. For example, watching her constantly tossing each tool she used for the canning process back into the boiling water without thinking about it – perhaps a trade secret. 😉
So much in history is about women passing knowledge to women, and men to men. Of course that’s changed a lot. (Like, duh! :-)) But there is still something very instictive and natural about it. In I.T. it’s a little harder because there are not so many women for younger women to seek out for that intimate passing on of the little secrets to our success.
Obvioulsy we all learn from and share with each other and I always fear that my thoughts will be taken out of context and challenged. I am not trying to poke anyone or start a debate. I’m only thinking out loud about how my canning experience made me think of Nelly’s essay and wondering why I was drawing that connection.
After I had cooked up the sauce I decided to throw in the gobs of sun-gold cherry tomatoes that were sitting on the vines in my garden which I just couldn’t eat quickly enough. Here’s a pic of them from before I destemmed them and threw them into the sauce.
The Women In Tech essay series began yesterday on OReillyNet. There are 16 essays in total. Read more about it here….
[A New DevLife post]
There are some new vista updates that deal with performance issues and in the list of what they fix I saw two things that had been annoying me. Read more…
[A New DevLife post]
Funny that my last post was a week ago as I was on my way to Michigan. Perhaps the fact that I have been silent for a whole week is testimony to the fact that I was having too much fun to sit down and blog about it!
Both user groups got “the same” presentation: Overview of ADO.NET Entity Framework, but as Jeff McWherter, (who attended both talks and did a lot of driving to do so!) notes, it was very different from one night to the next.
The first night was at the Microsoft office in Southfield, outside of Detroit, at the GANG user group. This one wasn’t an INETA sponsored event, but as long as I was so close for the next night’s meeting, I just came in a day early to do it. There were a whole bunch of fun and friendly folks there and I got asked a lot of great questions. It was also great to see some familiar faces such as Patrick Steele and Josh Holmes (who was on the INETA speaker bureau until he swallowed the red pill and became a D.E.).
The next night I spoke at GLUG in Lansing Michigan. But first I was treated to some local flavor thanks to u.g. leader Joe Kunk who was a great tour guide. Lansing is the capital of Michigan and Joe works for the House and was able to give me a great tour of the incredible and recently renovated state capital building. THen I was treated to lunch at a classic lunch spot called “Kewpees” where I experienced their famous Olive Burger. It took a little encouragement from Joe before I ordered it, but it was pretty good! I found the website with the Kewpee history where I learned that Kewpees was a chain but there are only a few left. One was actually in Utica, NY, about an hour from where I grew up.
After lunch I got to go visit the always fun Betsy Weber at TechSmith. I was surprised that when I was on the phone with her in their parking lot and asked “which building are you in?” she said “all of them”. That’s four buildings though they are building a new (green, LEED Certified… yay) building so they can all be together again. It’s a big and growing company! Betsy introduced me to the president, Bill “We will not share your e-mail address with anyone else, period” Hamilton and (man, I really need to learn to edit when I talk) somehow my past job history at Playboy and Penthouse came up. Luckily, he is a funny laid back guy (which is probably why the whole company seems to have a cool and relaxed atmosphere) so I hopefully didn’t shock him too much (though I think I did try just a little. :-)) Not only did I get to see what’s coming in Camtasia (key to me is that many existing features will be much simpler to discover and use), but I also got a tour of the cool Jing project that had just been released 2 days prior and already had over 11,000 downloads.
Next on my tour was a tour of Michigan State and I can tell you that the locals are PROUD of this university!
The meeting was held on campus and I was surprised that there were almost 50 people there. Unfortunately I had a strange problem with my VPC which was finally solved with a total reboot of my computer (which takes some time to get everything up and running again) but thankfully I was able to do what I came to do. While I was futzing with my computer, the group was introduced to two reps from webhost Verio (located in Florida) who had come up from Florida to meet the group as they were the first to sign up for free hosting for INETA user group members. I was pretty impressed that they came up for this reason!
After the meeting I had a blast at Bennigans with a bunch of folks from the group and the Verio guys then it was off to Ann Arbor for a mini-vacation and the art fair.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this really great trip!
I will post my revised Powerpoint and demos shortly and will write a quick blog post with links to them.
This is my current internet speed:
yet while trying to install the June CTP of VWD Express on a Virtual PC (that has WIndows XP on it and needs .NET 3.5 as part of the install) my 3.38Mbps dowload speed is a bit slower – avg 3KB to 7KB (if I have all of my 0’s in place, I think this is 500 to 1000 times slower). At 3.38Mbps, the 426MB file should take about 20 minutes. This is more like 20 days. Uggh.
