I can’t do anything about it. I don’t even really know what it means. It’s certainly not OK. Why do you force me to click this button?
I *HATE* user interface things like this, and I expect better from Apple.
Worse still, it’s happening every 2 or 3 minutes, for the last 3 hours. Getting mighty tired of this.
Just a quick reminder that I will be speaking at PHP|Tek in Chicago, about mod_rewrite, in just a few days. You should come. Chicago is a great city, and PHP|Tek is an incredible conference. Lots of energy and excitement and smart people. And it’s in Chicago. What’s not to love?
I commented extensively on Skippy’s post about ELTU – so extensively, in fact, that it seems worthwhile making it into its own posting. I hope it doesn’t come across as overly critical of the work that folks did on the FooCampApache, or whatever it was called, that was done at ApacheCon in Amsterdam earlier this year. I have to admit, I simply don’t get the concept, and didn’t get much out of it. But almost everybody else that I talked to about it said that they loved it, and that it was a raging success. Maybe I’ve just been attending traditional tech conferences for too long.
——
I’ve been fairly skeptical of the entire concept of unconferences, for a number of reasons.
The main one, of course, is that I’ve never seen it done in such a way that I personally found to be useful. It seemed like a lot of people waiting around for something to happen, and then saying how successful and energized it had been, when nothing happened. Seemed like a huge waste of time and floor space.
The other one is that I would personally be very reluctant to send an employee to a conference (whatever cool or hip meta-foo-bar-un label was put on it) when I couldn’t tell what, if anything, they might get out of it. Perhaps if they were closer to home, that would be less of an issue, but being so isolated from the tech centers of the country, these things are never here.
I’ve been involved in a number of local tech user groups, and several of them eventually devolved into a situation where a very small subset of the group had to come up with topics each week/month in order to keep the group functioning. It strikes me as highly improbable that a room full of random strangers will spontaneously organize itself into useful conversation – primarily because I’ve never seen it happen.
We did an unconference at ApacheCon this year, and other than a lengthy argument over whether it was a *camp or a foo-something or bar-something-else or unconference, I never saw much discussion about how to actually do it effectively. There seemed to be a perception that if you just have a room, Good Things Will Happen. This was not my experience. What I saw was people giving talks that were rather less well prepared than they would be at a “real” conference, because they somehow expected discussion to pick up … which it didn’t.
Turns out, however, that we did most of the things wrong that you (See Skippy’s post) point out. Closed doors. Separate small rooms. Designated speakers. Pre-determined schedule with not much flexibility for later change. Specific facilitators who seemed to feel the need to instruct us on How Things Should Be Done.
One of these days, I’d really like to attend an event like this that is well done, so that I can observe it being done, at a conference for which *I* am not responsible.
On the other hand, maybe it *was* well done, and I’m just so steeped in the formal conference mindset that I can’t see it.
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.
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.
Maria painted another painting.
You can see more of her paintings at BeautyOfAshes.
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.
I have a photo in the new edition of Woman’s Day. Pretty cool.
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.
Photos of the Jeep roof replacement HERE.