Dangerous Ideas

Wow, that was the most fun I’ve ever had deciding not to go to a conference! Thanks to everyone who expressed an interest in trading me their time for an all-expenses paid trip to RailsConf. I’ve met a lot of people I think I’ll be working with in the near future, including Sarah Mei, the person I’m sending to RailsConf.

It’s funny … just the other day I was talking with Jason Wong about recruiting strategies. I was actually offering to sell him by RailsConf ticket. I knew he had been interested in going but was too busy to really think about it during his run for a position on the local Democratic Central Committee. Turns out Jason couldn’t go, either, but after the conversation with him, I thought, hey, why not try to combine transferring the ticket with trying to find some cool Ruby and Rails programmers to work with?

Some of the people who can benefit the most from the inspiration and knowledge exchange that takes place at conferences or seminars often can’t afford to go to them. Either they’re starting out as programmers or, like Sarah, they’re seasoned developers who are relatively new to Ruby and don’t work for a company that will sponsor them to go to something like RailsConf. Many people in this situation are women, who I’m especially sympathetic to since seeing our numbers decline so much in programming (for the curious, I didn’t choose Sarah based on gender; I chose her because she has great skills, works with non-profits, could take the time off, can work legally in the U.S., lives in San Francisco – a perfect combination!).

It was especially great how many people were attracted to the social justice parts of my post. That was so cool! There were several people that were actually more interested in just working with me than RailsConf itself.

It was all serendipity this time, but the experience was so good that I’m thinking of offering one or more all expenses trip(s) to RubyConf in exchange for programming hours, too, assuming there’s interest.

If the logistics work out, I’d also like to combine the offer with mentoring by an experienced Ruby programmer. Again, the offer will be open to everyone, but I’ll of course be making an extra effort to let women and other underrepresented programmers know about the offer.

I posted my original offer on Ruby mailing lists plus also on Systers (where Sarah saw it) and LinuxChix. Any suggestions for other places to post offers like this that will reach women programmers and programmers of color?

It’s so great that BlogHer 2006 has child care! I don’t have kids yet, but I’m still excited. Despite claims of living in an equal society, women still bear a much greater burden for child care in the U.S., and even as someone who’s not (yet) a mom, I think one of the best things that jobs and events can do to get more women involved is to provide child care.

It would be great if more conferences took this into consideration. BlogHer is the first technical conference that I’ve known of to provide childcare (although I don’t go to too many tech. conferences, so it could be more widespread than I think). Way to go! It’s both a great practical service and a great example to the tech. community!

Looks like Ron Dellums won the election for Oakland mayor outright. I guess this means that progressives will be able to focus on electing Aimee Allison to Oakland City Council (District 2) in the November election.

I’ve worked on campaigns in San Francisco and Oakland, and I have to say that Oakland has a much more personal feel. When I volunteered on Matt Gonzalez’s campaign in S.F., he seemed a bit removed from us. Last year, though, I, along with several others from CJWP, helped organize one of several candidates forums for the District 2 Oakland City Council election. The candidates were approachable, and I got to talk to Aimee Allison a bit and helped with her campaign during the final days (I didn’t want to commit to a candidate before our forum took place). She came in fourth last spring, but this year she’s in the runoff for the D2 seat. One of my fellow organizers of the D2 forum was Andre Spearman; this year he’s the mayor elect’s campaign manager.

Oakland’s slightly larger than half the size of San Francisco, but so far it feels like it’s easier to talk to civic leaders. This gives me a lot of hope that we’ll have positive meetings with leaders when we try talking to them about low-income housing in Oakland, with particular regard to the PacRen evictions in Chinatown.

Ajax was really cool before it got named ‘Ajax’ – Google Maps and Gmail, for example, had wonderful features that other Web-based mapping and e-mail services didn’t. Back then, I loved Ajax (before it became Ajax). I also liked some of the early applications that became well known at about the time Ajax started taking off, like Basecamp and Odeo. There are times when it just made adding an item to a to do list, for example, really easy – no need to reload the page! That was the Golden Age of Ajax (scary to think of an age that lasted such a short period of time), when Ajax made me feel like I could do more quicker.

Now, though, Ajax-y things (I’m using Ajax broadly, since it’s applied so broadly) are everywhere. And when Firefox hits 95 perecent CPU utilization I feel pretty far from productive. And this can happen several times a day – that’s crazy! JavaScript libraries like Prototype, Mochikit, and Scriptaculous are great, but maybe they make things too easy.

I guess it wouldn’t be as much of a problem if I only opened up a few Web sites at once, but my usage of Firefox is to have several windows with multiple tabs open in them. I guess this problem could be alleviated if Firefox had the option to suppress JavaScript processing for pages other than the current top page. I hope they add that feature at one point, but in the meantime, here’s my plea to the “Web 2.0” crowd: please apply common sense! Why do people write JavaScript that polls a Web site every 5 seconds? What could possibly possess someone to think that was a good idea?

Here’s a book idea – maybe someone should write a tale of warning to the Web 2.0 developers. Maybe call it “Crash 2.0” …

Update: The ticket has been traded! Thanks to all who wrote to me!

I have a ticket to RailsConf in Chicago, but I think I’m going to have to give it up. I’d be happy to sell my ticket to someone else for the original price ($400).

Of course, that’d be boring (but totally acceptable), so in the interest of getting to work with more people in the Ruby and Rails community I thought I’d also offer an option for a trade … If you don’t have the dough (or would prefer a warmer fuzzier alternative to paying with cold hard cash) I’d be willing to pay for your ticket (or even for the ticket plus airfare, hotel, and car) in exchange for your time. The requirements for this are:

• You need to be a good programmer. By good programmer, I don’t mean the look-at-me-I-can-do-super-fancy-metaprogramming-while-chewing-gum-backwards type. After all, only about 20 percent of programming requires mad skillz (and I think we have that covered) It’s the other 80 percent I need help with, and that just requires someone with a good foundation in programming, common sense, and the ability to get stuff done without much direction. And programmers who have a great foundation in other languages (e.g. Smalltalk, Python) but who are relatively new to Ruby and Rails are welcome to try to convince me.

• You think you’d enjoy working with me and my company. To get an idea of the sort of person I am, you might want to check out my blog (well, if you’re seeing this, you’re reading it now). Also, some info about my company. It’s called Colorful Expressions (to evoke the feeling some people feel with their computers). We’re a consulting company (we don’t have a fancy money-generating Web application – yet, anyway) that works mostly with small businesses and non-profits. We have an interest in working for social justice organizations and often end up charging a lot less than your typical programming shop would as a result.

• You’d be willing to negotiate a favorable rate of exchange and be willing to work (paid) for time in addition to the trade if necessary. After all, I have no idea who you are and I’m going to be making more or less a snap judgment, and it’s also hard to just stick a nearly random person into a project for a few hours and expect something great to happen.

It might be that no one will want to take me up on a trade – heck, even I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea or just silly – and I’ll just end up selling the ticket. But at least I tried to be creative … ;-)

If you are interested in either buying the ticket or working out a trade, please e-mail me at jennyw@dangerousideas.com with “RailsConf” in the subject (this address gets huge amounts of spam), or, if you want to share your reasons with the world, feel free to post a comment here (but either e-mail me separately or include your contact info).

P.S. Chicago a really fun city to visit. For vegetarians, Soul Vegetarian East and The Chicago Diner are two great restaurants not to be missed. Also, since RailsConf overlaps with Chicago’s 2006 Pride Weekend, there are tons of once-a-year events happening. I hope that people going to the conference get a chance to explore the city.

I had signed up for RailsConf a while ago and was completely oblivious to the date being Pride weekend. I was thinking I would have to miss out on pride celebrations in San Francisco, but then I realized that Chicago has their LGBT Pride celebration the same weekend. There’s also a Chicago Dyke March, although it takes place earlier than the San Francisco Dyke March. The Dyke March in San Francisco is always a good event – unlike the parade on Sunday, it’s refreshingly non-commercial, and it’s always on the cutting edge of progressive politics. And it’s a fun day in Dolores Park for all sorts of people, not just dykes. It would have been interesting to see Chicago’s version, and also their parade (which is probably a lot different than San Francisco’s which is ridiculously huge and overly commercial), but, alas, I’m not going to Chicago after all since there’s too much to do here.

Ingrid Newkirk of PETA wrote an op-ed piece encouraging research into biotechnology that would allow people to grow meat from cells (e.g., it’d still be meat, but no animals would necessarily be killed in the process). I remember talking with a vegan friend about this a few years ago … if it were possible to grow meat in a lab, without hurting animals, would we eat it? I’m not sure I would, but it’s a very intriguing idea.

Here’s how it would happen: Scientists extract muscle cells by taking biopsies from cattle, pigs, chickens, fish and other animals. From this tissue, they isolate the cells that are the precursors to muscles, and these would multiply in the laboratory to form the muscle tissue — or meat — that people eat.

Researchers say it could be grown in sheets and when it’s ready, some could be sliced off for sale and consumption. U.S. and British researchers say it’s possible right now to produce hamburger, sausages, nuggets and Spam-like meat. Steak may take a little more work, but it probably won’t be long before that, too, would satisfy devotees of rib eye. It’s as natural, say the scientists, as wine-making.

I’d question the “as natural as wine making bit”, but I admit, the idea of being able to wean people off of dead animals with this hypothetical meat is great. It’d open up all sorts of issues, though:

• Laboratory grown meat might even make it legal to eat human flesh. Even if no humans are hurt in the making, this is bound to be controversial. Of course, there already is vegan human flesh alternative.
• Will this come with the same host of issues that GMOs come with? It doesn’t sound as bad, but it still sounds like a lot more research needs to be done.
• Unless they can grow milk in the lab, there will still be veal, since the dairy industry will keep generating calves.
• I wonder how the cattle industry (and others) would respond to this? I can’t imagine they’d just roll with it.

That’s just the tip of the ice berg.

Yesterday, I ran across an article saying that DC Comics is reinventing Batwoman as a lesbian. (I didn’t even know there was a Batwoman … Is this Batgirl grown-up? Or was Batgirl a TV invention like Saturday morning cartoon’s Batmite? It’s so bat confusing …).

Apparently, Batwoman isn’t the only comic book character who’s undergone some dramatic change. Today, I read Jeff Chang’s column on about Asian super-heroes – apparently, a bunch of old characters are being reinvented as Asians. In one case, a white male villain has now become a female Japanese hero.

I think the diversity is great for a lot of reasons (even if I don’t read the comics). I wonder if this will help them diversify their audience, too? I think the Asian characters will be good for Asians, as evidenced by Chang’s column. But will Batwoman attract more lesbian readers? Given the illustration they showed of her in the article, I don’t know if she’s being marketed to women. It looks like she’s wearing high heels and a push-up bra. I wouldn’t have thought that either would be a big help in crime fighting, but at least the men don’t have much more practical outfits. If they were really daring, they would have made her a butch.

By the way, here’s an interesting take on what would comic book covers would look like if they objectified the men as much as they do the women.

Who knew? My friend Anne wrote an article on Babeland’s blog about how you can use a vibrator to help polinate plants. Apparently, the vibrations are a perfect aid for freeing up pollen and moving it between flowers. Anne also writes about nursing moms can use vibrators to help with clogged ducts and how a children’s hospital used little vibrators to help kids sleep at night (the forerunner to the crib vibrators that baby stores sell now).

For those who don’t know, Babeland is a well-known feminist owned sex toy store that’s best known where they have retail stores (Seattle, New York City, and Los Angeles), but also have Web and mail order operations in Oakland. They’ve been a computer consulting client for a few years.