Monthly Archives: April 2009

Geek Arrogance and Chauvinism

I read with mounting horror Aaron’s post about the Ruby conference, and the various things that he linked to from it. Unfortunately, it’s an old and familiar story.

Unfortunately, it reminds me of attitudes in another community I used to be very involved in – Perl. Attitudes within Perl seem to have changed an awful lot in the last 10 years. I’m sure a lot of that had to do with the discovery that Allison Randall was smarter than any half-dozen of the rest of us put together. But, too, it had a lot to do with the examples of folks like Larry Wall and Casey West, who demonstrated by their actions that it was possible to be brilliant, but still be professional. This is a message that many boys (I hesitate to call them men) within the Ruby community haven’t grasped yet.

Having been involved in the planning of ApacheCon for the last seven years, I’m also horrified that the planning committee for a (seemingly) respectable conference would accept a talk that made no secret of the fact that it would use jokes about pornography to make its points.

I’ve written before about how pornography is treated as acceptable for public discourse. That was 6 years ago. At least in the technical circles *I* work in, this attitude has lessened, but not vanished, in that time. It is far less common for me to hear reference to porn in every day technical discussion than it was back then. I don’t assume that the people in question believe, as I do, that pornography itself is damaging. I think it has more to do with the realization that some discussions simply don’t belong in professional settings. When someone spends good money to travel and attend your conference, they deserve to be treated with professionalism and respect, not treated to a stream of pornographic images and sexual innuendoes.

And this isn’t just about alienating the women in your audience. Turns out that some heterosexual men actually believe that objectifying women isn’t a good thing. But even if you don’t accept that belief, you owe it to your audience to treat them with professional courtesy, and recognize that they are paying a LOT of money to attend a technical conference, not a peep show.

Shame on Matt for putting together this presentation. Double shame on GoGaRuCo for accepting this talk. Shame on the decent men in the audience (assuming there were any) who didn’t get up and walk out after the first slide. Shame on the chauvinistic boors who are defending Matt in the various forums where this is being discussed.

Turns out, in the real world, it actually matters if you’re a jerk. It’s time for the Ruby On Rails community to grow up and realize that being professional isn’t a weakness. But it would be grossly short-sighted to merely point the finger at them and not take a close look at the attitudes within our own communities – be they technical or otherwise – and seriously reconsider our common courtesy in the work place.

BAHA

I am now wearing my new BAHA Intenso ®, which I acquired about 2 hours ago at the UK Hearing Clinic.

As we walked out of the clinic, I heard a fire engine siren, and I knew which direction it was coming down the street before I saw it. This is a pretty big deal, since have lacked directional perception in my hearing for more than 20 years now, so I assumed this would be something I’d have to relearn. But I heard it, and immediately knew that it was to the left of me.

The device itself works amazingly well. In fact, when I first put it on, we thought that we’d have to send it back and exchange it for something less powerful, because even moderately loud noises were painful with the device set on a hair above zero. However, the audiologist adjusted it, since the gain and low-tone setting were both cranked all the way to max, and it was much better. Even now, I’ve got it set on 1, or somewhere between 1 and 2, and it is very loud.

I am sure that it will take a long time to get used to it, and that I will have headaches for the next few days. But, to be able to hear is pretty amazing.

On the way home, Maria drove, so was sitting on the left of me. Turns out that when she mumbles inaudibly to herself, she’s actually saying intelligible things. Who knew? 😉

About ten years ago, I went to an event where Dr. Vint Cerf was speaking. His wife was there with him, and she has a cochlear implant – not the same thing I have, but much more complicated and amazing. At question time, one of the suits asked the standard question that you ask technology wizards. What’s the most amazing advance in technology in the last 50 years? And, of course, being Vint Cerf, the expected response was some blather about how the Internet has changed everything. But, being Vint Cerf, he said instead, my wife’s cochlear implant.

The purpose of the Internet

It is the right, and, indeed, some might say the responsibility, of ever cat-owning-internet-user to post pointless photographs, and, when possible, video footage, of their cat doing perfectly normal things.

Don’t say you weren’t notified.

New Name, New Look

No, there’s no particular reason. Just a whim I had. And, of course, most of you probably read the site on some other aggregator, so you’ll never notice, which is fine with me.

Long ago, I posted a lot of wine reviews, and the site theme made a certain amount of sense. I don’t remember the last time I posted a wine review.

More and more, the site isn’t even technically focused, but tends towards poetry and random notes. So the theme is composed of scans of my moleskine cahier notebook, and the title is the title of my first book of poetry, which some of you saw at ApacheCon last month.

Unfortunately, notesinthemargin.com is already another site. Maybe I’ll come up with another name later.

Road Rage

Today as I drove past the theater at Lexington Green, a car ran a stop sign through the intersection in front of me. Didn’t even slow down. I must have given him a “what the heck are you thinking” kind of look, although I don’t recall exactly.

As it happened, I had made a wrong turn, and I did a U-turn at the intersection to go back the way I had come. When I completed the turn, I saw Mr. No Stop Sign reversing towards me up the road. I tried to go around him, but he rolled down his window and yelled at me “You have a problem!!?” I responded, somewhat flippantly, “I have lots of problems, but you’re not one of them.” and kept driving past him.

He FOLLOWED me back down the road, through the Target parking lot, and part of the way over to Arby’s, where we were going for lunch, as I started getting more and more alarmed that he was going to follow me all the way over there and pick a fight.

What the heck goes through people’s minds in traffic that makes them think that it is sensible to pick a fight with a complete stranger? In Kentucky, I can carry a firearm in my glove compartment even if I don’t have a concealed carry permit, and I can use it to defend myself. That means that anybody that I encounter in traffic might have a gun within arm’s reach. But even if that weren’t the case, what would posses someone to pick a fight with a stranger in a car with a woman and two kids? Had he had a bad day? Was he just looking for a fight, or did I seriously offend him? Did my making a U-turn make him think that I was picking a fight with him?

I guess I’ll never know.

New Roof

BES-51121-37.jpg.jpeg
We got a new roof from BesTop. This morning we started installing it, just putting on the doors. This involved taking a blade to the old ones, which are stitched on to the steel frames. That was a little unnerving, but, once started, it had to be finished.

Now I have a black roof and tan doors, and for the first time *ever*, I can see clearly through the side windows. I kept thinking that the windows were open. It’s always been scratched and fuzzy, particularly when it’s raining.

So, hopefully by next week, I’ll be driving with an entirely new top, free of duct tape and flapping noises.

We’ll post pictures of the process later on.

Resumes

Ben, at work, asked me what I look for in a resume. I’ve been looking at a LOT of resumes in the last 2 weeks, and most of them have been simply dreadful. So I started writing a few of my thoughts. I got a little carried away. So I’m going to repost it here, too, so that my erudition isn’t lost in the ether.

Here’s some of what I look for in a resume.

I look for sentences that tell me why I should hire you. I hate bullet lists. “PHP” or “Excel” or “Linux” in a bullet list doesn’t mean anything at all. “PHP” in a bullet list might mean “I installed WordPress”, or it might mean “I’m a committer on the core of PHP and implemented the internationalization stack myself over an evening, and gave a talk about it a PHP Fest the next morning.” I’d rather read one sentence that tells me why you’re worth hiring than a 20-item bullet point list that tells me that you’ve heard of various technologies.

I look for participation in something outside of work. Whether this is PETA or Habitat for Humanity or an Open Source project doesn’t matter a lot – although participation in O.S. projects impresses me immensely. What I’m looking for is that you have a personality. If you come to work, and go home at the end of the day, and that’s your whole life, chances are you’re going to bore me to tears. People with outside interests are better employees. I want employees who are glad to have the job, sure, but it’s at least as important that they have something to go home for, too.

I look for something that indicates passion. Do you program because you love solving problems? Do you design because there’s an artist striving to get out? Or do you have a computer degree because someone told you that it was a good way to make money? Passion is the difference between doing an acceptable job and blowing everybody’s socks off. If you are working towards a computer degree because you heard there was money in it, but you *REALLY* want to study rocks, you should drop all your classes RIGHT NOW and go sign up for geology. A life working in the wrong job is what makes people go crazy and shoot their co-workers, and nobody wants that.

I look for things in your resume that indicate that I’m not the first person you’ve ever shown it to. Typos, grammatical errors, and misusing technical terms tell me that you didn’t have anybody proofread your resume. Always show your resume to your mother, your colleagues, your professors. Show it to the people who you know don’t care if they hurt your feelings about it.

I look for a resume that looks different from everybody else’s. Understand that this doesn’t mean fonts and colors and designs – I will read your resume in plain text if at all possible. I mean that if it’s just a list of technologies and the fact that you interned at Lexmark, then it looks exactly like the other 25 that I looked at today. I want to know that you volunteer at the library, reading to kids, or that you took a trip to Haiti over spring break, where you installed a wireless network for a non-profit, or that you really really like painting daisies on the side of cars that are stopped at traffic lights. Ok, maybe not the daisies. That might be illegal. But definitely the one about Haiti. Tell me you’re passionate about life.

In short, I want you to tell me why I’ll regret it for years if I let you slip by.