Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Ads, ads, and more ads
Sorry, folks, looks like when I changed my template I gained THREE AdSense ad blocks, which made the site a little ad-heavy. I've removed the extras. Back to our regularly scheduled blather.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
What I'm reading these days
I'm having my consciousness raised lately, thanks to a strange situation that has me reliving my college days as one of the guys to every Nice Guy in town. Here's what I'm reading:
Geek Feminism Wiki: A fantastic source for geek feminists, focusing mostly on feminism within the IT work environment.
Heartless Bitches International HBI is the first place I saw an explanation of Nice Guys, and I'll tell you--I recognized so many of the men I've known in it.
What is a Nice Guy™? A guy explains Nice Guys.
More on these issues later, I think. I'm still mulling it over.
Geek Feminism Wiki: A fantastic source for geek feminists, focusing mostly on feminism within the IT work environment.
Heartless Bitches International HBI is the first place I saw an explanation of Nice Guys, and I'll tell you--I recognized so many of the men I've known in it.
What is a Nice Guy™? A guy explains Nice Guys.
More on these issues later, I think. I'm still mulling it over.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Mark My Words
I first came across the concept of Cascading Style Sheets in 1999, and thought it was the coolest thing ever--it reminded me of word processing back in the days of Word 2.0 for DOS (the first version of Word I used). In 2000, I started evangelizing to anyone who would listen--but nobody would. I was told that CSS was never going to take off, because the browsers would never support it. That it was too hard for most people to understand, and anyway, why was it necessary when you could do all that boldfacey stuff with HTML? I tried to tell them that XHTML was the way the web was going, and I talked about web standards all the time, but again, they told me I was wrong, and that if I really wanted to be at the forefront, I should learn Dreamweaver.
As is my habit, I assumed that if that many people (seriously, it was at least four) thought I was wrong, then maybe I was. I learned Dreamweaver, and I learned to slice-and-dice in ImageReady... and then I went in and cleaned up the code, because I couldn't believe I was TOTALLY wrong.
But two years later, the people who told me that were teaching classes in CSS and touting it as the greatest thing in the history of the Internet, talking about the box model and separation of content and presentation and table-free layouts and semantic HTML as if they had invented such things. They were all about web standards, too. None of them remembered that I had tried to talk them into those things years earlier. But the fact remains that I was right about the future of the web, and as time goes on, I have continued to be right about which technologies are going to catch on. PHP? Yes. LAMP? Yes. I actually thought JavaScript was going to go away, so I was wrong about that. But usually, I'm right.
So here's my advice right now, to myself and to everyone else: Learn HTML5 and CSS3, because you will need to know them. Mark My Words.
As is my habit, I assumed that if that many people (seriously, it was at least four) thought I was wrong, then maybe I was. I learned Dreamweaver, and I learned to slice-and-dice in ImageReady... and then I went in and cleaned up the code, because I couldn't believe I was TOTALLY wrong.
But two years later, the people who told me that were teaching classes in CSS and touting it as the greatest thing in the history of the Internet, talking about the box model and separation of content and presentation and table-free layouts and semantic HTML as if they had invented such things. They were all about web standards, too. None of them remembered that I had tried to talk them into those things years earlier. But the fact remains that I was right about the future of the web, and as time goes on, I have continued to be right about which technologies are going to catch on. PHP? Yes. LAMP? Yes. I actually thought JavaScript was going to go away, so I was wrong about that. But usually, I'm right.
So here's my advice right now, to myself and to everyone else: Learn HTML5 and CSS3, because you will need to know them. Mark My Words.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
A year gone by
I just noticed on my Blogger dashboard that my last post here was a year ago today. I'm still a stay-at-home geek, although I think that might change sometime soon... unless I decide to go back to school, which is always a possibility.
The problem is, there are too many things I would like to do, and too many skills I would like to bring into whatever I do next. I was a librarian for a while, and I know I enjoy working in a library (I was a library tech while working on my degree, and that's when working in the library was the most fun). I did IT support and web development for a while, and I actually do like helping people troubleshoot their problems. I feel like a complete dolt where design is concerned, but I love building interactive sites that actually DO something. One of my first PHP projects was creating an interactive quiz for pharmacy students that helped lead them to the right answer, instead of just giving them a WRONG or a RIGHT result. That's not to say, however, that I wouldn't enjoy learning about design, because I do understand design principles; I just can't seem to apply them to web sites.
I was a copyeditor for a while, but I kind of hate that. I've also done a lot of writing and desktop publishing and all of that kind of thing. I wouldn't mind doing the desktop publishing thing again, but I've come to realize that I'm really not all that interested in writing.
One of the things that has led me to that realization is that I've been doing some SEO writing for an Evil Content Site (hint: it's not Demand Studios). And... I don't like it. I don't like feeling like a hack. I don't like it when a friend who's a real-life professional journalist chats me up on Facebook in the evening and asks what I'm doing, and I say "watching TV" when I'm really cranking out 400 words on Caring for Your Pet Armadillo while my husband watches TV. Then today I got a note from an editor--not my editor, but my editor's boss--saying that a phrase in one of my articles duplicated a phrase found in another article online, and stressing the need to have absolutely 100% unique content. The thing is, I know I did not plagiarize that phrase. But the thing about this kind of writing is that there is so damn much of it, and it's all over the web, and you see the same phrase over and over again until it sticks in your head, and I think that's a problem that I don't want to be part of.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice to make enough to pay for the difference between three-day-a-week preschool and five-day-a-week preschool. I'm just thinking I'll have to do it in a different way.
The problem is, there are too many things I would like to do, and too many skills I would like to bring into whatever I do next. I was a librarian for a while, and I know I enjoy working in a library (I was a library tech while working on my degree, and that's when working in the library was the most fun). I did IT support and web development for a while, and I actually do like helping people troubleshoot their problems. I feel like a complete dolt where design is concerned, but I love building interactive sites that actually DO something. One of my first PHP projects was creating an interactive quiz for pharmacy students that helped lead them to the right answer, instead of just giving them a WRONG or a RIGHT result. That's not to say, however, that I wouldn't enjoy learning about design, because I do understand design principles; I just can't seem to apply them to web sites.
I was a copyeditor for a while, but I kind of hate that. I've also done a lot of writing and desktop publishing and all of that kind of thing. I wouldn't mind doing the desktop publishing thing again, but I've come to realize that I'm really not all that interested in writing.
One of the things that has led me to that realization is that I've been doing some SEO writing for an Evil Content Site (hint: it's not Demand Studios). And... I don't like it. I don't like feeling like a hack. I don't like it when a friend who's a real-life professional journalist chats me up on Facebook in the evening and asks what I'm doing, and I say "watching TV" when I'm really cranking out 400 words on Caring for Your Pet Armadillo while my husband watches TV. Then today I got a note from an editor--not my editor, but my editor's boss--saying that a phrase in one of my articles duplicated a phrase found in another article online, and stressing the need to have absolutely 100% unique content. The thing is, I know I did not plagiarize that phrase. But the thing about this kind of writing is that there is so damn much of it, and it's all over the web, and you see the same phrase over and over again until it sticks in your head, and I think that's a problem that I don't want to be part of.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice to make enough to pay for the difference between three-day-a-week preschool and five-day-a-week preschool. I'm just thinking I'll have to do it in a different way.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
More secret status updates
SAHG...
...had forgotten what it was like to talk to somebody on the phone when they're stoned and you're not.
...is usually sympathetic to the jobless, especially right now, but can't stand it when people refuse to learn anything new, and then complain about not being able to get jobs that require up-to-date knowledge in their field.
...wonders if she can get rid of somebody by relentlessly offering unsolicited job-seeking advice.
...now wonders if she can get rid of the friend who keeps sending stupid forwarded right-wing crap by responding with forwarded left-wing crap.
...has way too many friends she doesn't actually like, and too few that she does.
...had forgotten what it was like to talk to somebody on the phone when they're stoned and you're not.
...is usually sympathetic to the jobless, especially right now, but can't stand it when people refuse to learn anything new, and then complain about not being able to get jobs that require up-to-date knowledge in their field.
...wonders if she can get rid of somebody by relentlessly offering unsolicited job-seeking advice.
...now wonders if she can get rid of the friend who keeps sending stupid forwarded right-wing crap by responding with forwarded left-wing crap.
...has way too many friends she doesn't actually like, and too few that she does.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Once a geek, always a geek
This morning I ran into someone I knew in junior high. In my son's nursery school, no less; his son is in the same class of 12. What are the odds? Well, I could figure that out, I suppose, if I knew the size of each class in my junior high in each of the last two years of the 70s... and I suppose I'd also have to know how many duplicates there were, so I could count unique individuals. But that seems like an awful lot of trouble.
Anyway, these things are always embarrassing for me because of my memory. I remember pretty much everything. I remember what I was wearing on October 3, 1981. I remember specific turns of phrase in specific Nancy Drew books I haven't read since I was nine. I remember people I went to kindergarten with, and a dream I had in first grade that featured a beautiful rosebud-studded headband I had gotten for Easter and a boy I had a crush on. He liked to play with my Barbie dolls, but that's not why I think he's probably gay: it was that dream. In the dream I rode a bicycle (which I couldn't do at the time, but desperately wanted to) and rescued him from some people who were tying him to a palo verde tree for some nefarious purpose, and at that point I knew that he was never going to reciprocate my crush. But I digress, as usual. The point was that I remember a lot of things that other people don't, and I think it creeps them out a little if I mention it. And so I did not tell this guy that we went to junior high together and that one of my best friends in fourth through sixth grades was his stepsister, or possibly ex-stepsister--his father's current wife, who is in the social pages of the newspaper at least once a week (and I know this because my mother tells me so), might not be the guy's mother. It was weird enough that I recognized him at all. Probably I should have just pretended I didn't know who he was, so I didn't look like the kind of weirdo who goes to the reunion and tells a lot of people who can't remember her name what they were wearing on October 14, 1981, because trust me, I could probably piece it together if I really tried.
Anyway, these things are always embarrassing for me because of my memory. I remember pretty much everything. I remember what I was wearing on October 3, 1981. I remember specific turns of phrase in specific Nancy Drew books I haven't read since I was nine. I remember people I went to kindergarten with, and a dream I had in first grade that featured a beautiful rosebud-studded headband I had gotten for Easter and a boy I had a crush on. He liked to play with my Barbie dolls, but that's not why I think he's probably gay: it was that dream. In the dream I rode a bicycle (which I couldn't do at the time, but desperately wanted to) and rescued him from some people who were tying him to a palo verde tree for some nefarious purpose, and at that point I knew that he was never going to reciprocate my crush. But I digress, as usual. The point was that I remember a lot of things that other people don't, and I think it creeps them out a little if I mention it. And so I did not tell this guy that we went to junior high together and that one of my best friends in fourth through sixth grades was his stepsister, or possibly ex-stepsister--his father's current wife, who is in the social pages of the newspaper at least once a week (and I know this because my mother tells me so), might not be the guy's mother. It was weird enough that I recognized him at all. Probably I should have just pretended I didn't know who he was, so I didn't look like the kind of weirdo who goes to the reunion and tells a lot of people who can't remember her name what they were wearing on October 14, 1981, because trust me, I could probably piece it together if I really tried.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Real Status Updates
A lot of the time while I'm driving along I amuse myself by thinking up status updates that I would never post in a million years. For example:
SAHG is wondering if [xxxxx] knows that he's Twittering to all his Facebook friends, not just the one he direct-messaged.
SAHG feels like she's playing the role of Cordelia in the Dysfunctional Family Theater's production of Lear. (The sister who plays Regan--or maybe Goneril--is on FB too)
SAHG secretly thinks that some of her Facebook friends are idiots, and wishes they'd quit sending her hugs, snowballs, ornaments, delicious coffee, and other things that she's just going to ignore anyway.
Fortunately, Kvetch is back, so if I really wanted to, I could get out some of my irritation by using it. I was going to write my own little web app to do exactly the same thing (sans Twitter, since I'm not really a huge Twitter fan), but Kvetch saved me the trouble.
SAHG is wondering if [xxxxx] knows that he's Twittering to all his Facebook friends, not just the one he direct-messaged.
SAHG feels like she's playing the role of Cordelia in the Dysfunctional Family Theater's production of Lear. (The sister who plays Regan--or maybe Goneril--is on FB too)
SAHG secretly thinks that some of her Facebook friends are idiots, and wishes they'd quit sending her hugs, snowballs, ornaments, delicious coffee, and other things that she's just going to ignore anyway.
Fortunately, Kvetch is back, so if I really wanted to, I could get out some of my irritation by using it. I was going to write my own little web app to do exactly the same thing (sans Twitter, since I'm not really a huge Twitter fan), but Kvetch saved me the trouble.
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