That time of the year…
Holy shit
I tweeted about this yeaterday, but it’s worth repeating/amplifying. This is SO FUCKED UP.
Month: October 2014
October 25-26, 2014
Oh gosh I’m cheating already – 2 days in one post. Saturday I literally sat on the sofa for quite a long time. Watched M lifting weights in the NC Weightlifting Championship via internet livestream, since she had to get up at the crack of dawn to drive to Cary for the competition. They had a pretty sweet streaming setup – 3 cameras, instant replays, etc.
I had some goals for the day, and since they involved computing work, they (a) took 10x longer than I had hoped and (b) required enormous amounts of unexpected pre-work before I could do what I actually wanted to do.
This included an unanticipated upgrade to Yosemite on a machine, so that I could install XCode (I guess in retrospect I could have installed a Mountain Lion-suitable XCode from the developer website, but oh well, whatever, it’s free), so that I could install Homebrew, so that I could install Apache 2.4 & FastCGI PHP.
So anyway. Surprise, Yosemite comes with a new version of launchctl, which has been made even more arcane and confusing, so as to further punish those of us who want to run daemons or scheduled processes.
I also installed a new [shitty] smoke detector, to replace the older defective [shitty] smoke detector. Because I can’t bring myself to pay $400 for a house full of Nest smoke detectors which will still require one to push a button to shut them up.
Had dinner with M at Guglhupf, which was about the same as last time (kinda loud, pretty good food, something just not quite comfortable about it). We were literally in bed by 9:30. She’s sick, but I don’t know what my problem was. Exhausted.
Sunday I spent the entire day at the Pinhook, prepping, doing a 5.5-hour simulcast of an afternoon-long rockshow, then tearing all the stuff down & taking it back to the radio station. It’s kind of fatiguing to spend hours at a time listening intently for bad words so that you can push a little yellow button to make them disappear.
I have no idea if anyone listened/enjoyed the show. I hope at least 10 people did. 10 people seems like a reasonable number of people to entertain with 8 hours of my Sunday afternoon/evening.
Oh! In the morning I had a short Twitter exchange with Chris Suellentrop, whose reasonably interesting GamerGate op-ed in the Times was marred by a kind of ill-informed comparison to comic books. I’ll leave you to seek it out if you’re so inclined.
I’m currently 4 issues behind in New Yorker reading.
Grateful Dead’s Soundsystem – Hollywood Bowl 1974
they carted this thing around with them on tour, right? incredible.
I’ve posted about the Dead’s early 70s setup before. Basically the only reason to endure any of the Grateful Dead Movie is to see this thing in action.
Dear White People and the Issue of Sexuality
Dear White People and the Issue of Sexuality
Last night I went to see Dear White People with my friend @liveinsidelikeits1999. The movie was electric. I quipped later that I could write an article every month for a year and wouldn’t feel as though I exhausted things to say about it. One of the central characters, Lionel Higgins (played…
Desperately hoping this movie comes to Durham soon (and dreaming of it playing the Northgate instead of the Carolina).
October 24, 2014
Work is work. Had a good chat with a potential project sponsor, got the first (of what will be many) warning that next year could be tricky, funding-wise. One good thing about our program is that we’re a hybrid recruiting / tech incubator program, and those demand curves don’t always mirror each other, which gives us a little bit of insulation.
Between calls, I played through this great little record three or four times:
GYPSY PERVERT by MANNEQUIN PUSSY
After work, ran over to the Pinhook & checked out the setup for our WXDU simulcast of Sunday’s Know Your Poll show/party. 2 – 7 p.m. – we’d rather have you there in person, but if you can’t make it: 88.7 FM in Durham, or wxdu.org everywhere.
October 23, 2014
Day two of the All Things Open conference. One of the opening keynotes (here in the modern era, every non-breakout talk is a keynote, I guess) was by the Chief People Officer at Red Hat. She spent the whole time speaking in kind of vague terms about the need for diversity in tech, citing the current heavily skewed numbers, and talking pipeline.
Which is certainly important – we could still do a million times better at eliminating all the cultural biases that work against girls who like math, science & computers.
However, among people who actually regularly think and talk and write about this topic, the consensus is that it’s utterly pointless to work on pipeline issues until we’ve done something substantial about the actual culture within the industry first.
And that’s one subject that the CPO of Red Hat was pretty much silent about.
After the morning’s breakouts, the CPO was back to moderate a panel discussion about women in tech (the panel consisting of about half of the women who were speaking at the conference). I’m going to see if I can embed all of my tweets from the panel here:
Women in tech panel starting out with the panelists talking about their varied & non-traditional routes into tech. No “right” way. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Going from being geekiest person in entire high school … so weird when ppl assume yr not technical as a woman. #ATO2014 #womenintech
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Men in Estelle Weyl’s cohort still in enterprise; women are contracting/solo, because enterprise wanted to channel them into mgmt. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
The RedHat VP from this morning is trying to direct the discussion back to pipeline. & now trolling us w/ “is diversity important?” #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Now Megan Squire is laying into media/pundits who like to pick up on superficial correlations/guesses and won’t do the research. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Estelle Weyl speaking up for ALL the ppl who are underrepresented in tech: different races, genders, orientations, religions, ages. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Megan Squire gets a round of applause when she says we can’t just focus on pipeline & then drop those folks off at the same industry door.
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Finally a (vaguely stated) question from the moderator about ways to maybe improve the culture. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Megan Squire: when she teaches, she makes a point of varying the coding exercises, not just the standard dry number sequences. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Lots of applause when panelists start talking about being interrupted, talked over. Amplify & acknowledge women’s voices & ideas. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Estelle Weyl: In tech there is a Dave:women ratio: average team has as many guys named Dave as it has women. #ATO2014 #changeTHATratio
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
. @ericastanley talking about the low ratio being self-perpetuating. Hard problem. Mentoring is crucial. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Make job descriptions more approachable – women & men (at present anyway) read “nice to have” skills lists differently. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Simple thing you can do: read #ATO2014, follow & RT women in tech. @anildash RT’d only women for a year, so you can at least *try*.
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
(note that in that last tweet above, I was suggesting that conference attendees should find women tweeting in the conference hashtag & follow them – more generally, if you’re on twitter & are interested in women in tech, there are hundreds – try this list.)
It was awesome to see the panelists sort of take matters into their own hands, and [repeatedly] bring up culture & institutional sexism, even in some cases by ignoring the questions the moderator was asking.
I saw some great talks, some merely good talks, learned a few things. Oh, and thanks to the conference organizers not ordering enough box lunches to go around, I got to walk up the street to Capital Club 16 and have a beer & a schnitzel sandwich for lunch.
Came home, ate some fish collars (!) from Saltbox. Ricky described them as like eating chicken thighs, and that was actually oddly apt.
Watched the last episode of Lonesome Dove. Tommy Lee Jones finally got to do some actual acting – and he was great. On the gore front, got to watch one character try, and fail, to shove an arrow the rest of the way through Robert Duvall’s knee. Also got to see Ricky Schroeder with a terrible mustache.
“Art” in the Parks
Via Erik Sugg, yr daily dose of clueless entitlement run amok. Sigh.
i’ve been working hard for the last little bit to help put together this killer NARAL pro-choice NC benefit. so stoked to help bring body/head to NC for their first ever show here. if you’re local, c’mon out – it’s a saturday, it is guaranteed to rule *and* it supports a great and local cause. killer poster by julianna thomas.
tickets / details here – http://kingsbarcade.com/2014/11/15/bodyhead-with-solar-halos-jenks-miller-rose-cross-nc-presented-by-naral-pro-choice-nc-three-lobed-recordings/
October 22, 2014
Got up early to drive to Raleigh for day 1 of 2 of the All Things Open conference, an enterprise-oriented open-source conference. The group that runs it is based in Atlanta (where they run a similar conference in the spring), but between Red Hat, RTP and the startup scene here, there’s probably far more reason to have one here than in ATL.
I never go to conferences, so I have no real points of comparison, but: the speakers are knowledgeable and approachable, and present at varying levels of polish, from Very to Not At All. The organization is sufficient, if not especially mind-blowing (although this year’s is way better than last year’s). There are some women speakers, but not enough to make me happy.
(Two of the six talks I saw today were by women, and both rooms were packed to overflowing, so hopefully that’ll lead to even better balance next year.)
Everything I saw was pretty wonky, far too much so for a general-purpose blog, so I’ll spare you the details. Although I will say that I continue to be amazed at watching people walk in 2 minutes before their designated start time & then struggle mightily with laptop/projector issues.
Also this can serve as a reminder that Mac people still need to travel with their own fucking VGA adapters.
Anyway. Low-key nerdy fun; a nice paid vacation that includes the chance to get at least the names & urls of projects that I could probably make use of.
Made the final decision & arrangements to simulcast the Know Your Polls party on WXDU – it’s a get out the vote rally & concert at the Pinhook on Sunday afternoon from 2 to 7 pm. Lots of good bands: SOON, Daniel Bachman, Some Army, Shirlette Ammons, Hammer No More the Fingers, Midnight Plus One, and PIPE. Show up at the Pinhook if at all possible, but if you just can’t get away, tune it in at 88.7 or wxdu.org