Traveler's Luck

04:12 pm - Geek Kit

Geek Kit
Originally uploaded by karenbynight

11:50 am - Database Geekery

Lately, my thoughts and non-contracting energies have been turning back to computers. Which, after all, is what a sabbatical is for, right? To remind you that you love your field, that it's creative, exciting work.
( geeky details below )
That's the point of these little projects, to gain and re-gain knowledge, and to enjoy the simple joys of creativity in my career field.

09:47 am - I Am Not A Techie

(dusting this off and updating it from something written years ago)

I am not a techie.

I'm a geek. I'm a Computer Scientist if you're formal. I'm a Systems Administrator if you want to be specific, and a sysadmin by preference. I'm a coder at times. I'm an Operating Systems Analyst, a Systems Engineer, or a Systems Architect depending on which employer you ask. I am root. According to User Friendly, I'm also God. ("Root, God, what is difference?") I'm a nerd, certainly, and a dork often. Thanks largely to my mainframe programmer father, I'm a geek by birthright, by culture, by education, and by profession. But I am not a techie. It's damning with faint praise. It's the diet coke of geekhood: just one calorie; not geeky enough.

01:08 pm - Awesome Technology Coda

Also, for those who create things with fabric: quilting seems so much more appealing with the knowledge that I could cut perfectly-shaped blocks for more complex quilt patterns, and never have to deal with all of the technical complications of having mis-shaped blocks.

08:36 am - Laser-iffic! or, Technology is Awesome

I make these hats, you see. They're polar fleece berets, where the top is an 8-pointed star instead of a circle. I've made them for eight or nine years, since I saw my friend Andy wearing one and thought "I MUST make that". princeofwands has five or six of them himself, including the one he calls the "+3 Hat of Flirting" that's in one of his user icons.

The only problem with them is that they're a real pain to pin and cut out of fabric. The internal corners on an 8-pointed star are quite fussy, as is the circular hole for the head. It probably takes half an hour to pin and cut a single hat. I got wise eventually and asked princeofwands to pin and cut any hat for him or to be given as a gift from both of us. He doesn't much like doing it, either.

But last week, when I decided to make yet another one for a nifty friend's birthday, my thoughts turned, like they so often do since I've had a TechShop membership, to lasers. I originally thought of cutting an acrylic template to use a roller wheel cutter with, but then I thought, "why not just cut the fabric on the laser?". Turns out that polar fleece is a plastic that's perfectly acceptable to cut with the laser cutter. So I pulled out my handy vector drawing software, drew up the patterns again, and went off to TechShop. And now I'm in engineer / fiber geek nirvana. The pieces are fast to cut, perfectly-shaped, and therefore much easier to sew together. Last night I cut out pieces for 15 hats in 2.5 hours. In this case, if step 3 is "profit", step 2 is probably "Etsy".

More generally, I love sewing but hate pinning and cutting. And now, for any piece that can be described in a vector drawing program and is smaller than the 18"x24" bed of the laser cutter, I no longer have to.

07:07 am - On This Particular Day

I'm not sure I've ever understood April Fool's day. I do find humor in some of the pranks, especially the better-planned ones, but for me that's far outweighed by a certain distress at the idea that people are intentionally dirtying the information stream, a stream already muddied by urban legend, malicious intent, and the slow reasoning powers of my own brain, among many other things.

So, as has been my tradition on this day, I remind you that Severus Snape shares my opinion of April Fool's day. Must buy more bloody whiskey, indeed.

02:33 pm - Signal Boost: Excellent Harlan Ellison Collection for sale

Some friends are going through difficult personal circumstances, and so are selling a really excellent collection of Harlan Ellison books, many of them rare, first edition, and/or signed. If you might be interested in purchasing such a collection at a fair price, take a look at the post.

I know nothing about the collection, but I know the people, and they're good people.

02:43 am - Knitting Hats

CIMG2124.JPG
Originally uploaded by karenbynight

08:31 pm - Some Days are Like That

My favorite Demotivators poster has a sinking ship, and the caption "it may be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others". It's totally the truth today.

I bought an innocuous bottle of ArmorEtch from Michael's Crafts in order to etch some glass for a Christmas present. I opened the bottle this morning, and I appear to have gotten some on my bare thumb. It was only then that I realized that the stuff was a (presumably weak) solution of hydrofluoric acid. That stuff is NASTY. Look it up. Strong solutions spilled on 2.5% of body surface have been known to kill. Weak solutions can permeate the skin and burn from the inside out, because the fluorine binds with the calcium in your body. I was supposed to meet princeofwands and tutordennis for brunch; instead, they met me at the local emergency room.

Allow me to recommend not going to the San Mateo County Medical Campus emergency room if you have a choice. Despite my explaining to everyone I talked to what hydrofluoric acid is and why I was so worried about an acid burn that did not show on my skin, they put my case down as a low priority and it took four hours for them to treat me, which they did by calling a poison control hotline and asking their advice. You know, when I go to an emergency room, I don't necessarily expect better care than I could get by treating myself off of information I read from the Internet... but I certainly do expect that care to be executed somewhere within an order of magnitude of the time it would take me to care for myself with information off of the Internet. I plan to contest the emergency room bill when it shows up.

To add insult to injury, no nearby pharmacies had the appropriate antidote, so I ended up driving to Rainbow Grocery for it. I managed to prepare a preliminary treatment for myself by around 8 hours after I poisoned myself. Not exactly an advertisement for modern American medical care.

In any case, my thumb is numb, but I don't think I've injured it more than a bit of nerve damage that will probably heal itself. Poison control believes that the solution was too weak and the contact too brief to do any lasting harm. I'll find out over the next couple of days. I've got a solution of calcium gluconate in a sterile water-based surgical lubricant (aka K-Y jelly) held onto my thumb with a finger cot. I've got a fresh gallon of milk in my fridge, my preferred source of bio-available calcium, and I'll be drinking absurd amounts of milk and eating tons of cheese over the next couple of weeks. I think I'll survive my own stupidity handily, and not qualify for any Darwin awards any time soon.

But do let me serve my life's purpose today, and remind you to remember your proper materials safety, even if it seems absurd that in a society where it takes an adult ID to buy spray glue or paint, exceedingly dangerous chemicals could be sold over the counter at a chain crafts store.

Current Mood: tired

02:44 pm - More Politics: Same-Sex Marriage and the State's Interest in Marriage

( again, politics after the cut )

03:13 pm - My Thoughts on Politics and the Presidential Race

( Isn't politics one of those things our parents say should not be discussed in public? After the lj-cut is not public. )

09:14 am - Grace Hopper Convention

I am like other women; I'm among over 1400 other computer geeks, mostly women, at the 8th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Like the previous one I went to, the first, this is proving to be a very important experience for me, and I'm so glad dangerpudding organized for me to go.

Instead of cataloging the things I've seen, I'll just leave an indicative quote, that has given me much to think about: I wish it was a meritocracy, but I think that it's quite clear: there isn't a meritocracy. I'm sure of it: women are neither lazier or dumber than men. - Mary Lou Jepsen, founding CTO of One Laptop Per Child.

05:53 pm - Happy Birthday to A Lot of People!

I share my birthday today with an astonishing number of lovely people: the charming pusifoot, Princess rightkindofme, the incomparable Fran (earthpig's wife -- does she have an LJ account?), clever cynan_poly, and handsome ttmooney. Happy birthday, everyone!

11:36 am - "I Turned Out OK"

My pants are clearly cranky lately, as I am easily irritated by things I hear in conversation and on the radio. This one has bothered me for a long time:

When used in an attempted logical argument of any kind, I/he/she/they turned out OK is not good support for whatever you're arguing for. These statements usually look like, "BB guns aren't dangerous for kids; I had a BB gun when I was a kid, and I turned out OK." It's ex post facto reasoning. This particular argument form is seductive because it looks like your basic If A Then B statement, except that the B is referring to a person having a satisfactory life. Whatever A is, it wasn't entirely causal to a satisfactory life. Think about it: your life is so complex, did any one factor make or ruin your life? Your mom worked outside of the house, are you destroyed forever? Your aunt helped you with your math homework, has everything been bliss since? Further, it generalizes the specific. Human lives are so complex that some of the six billion of us are guaranteed to be outliers in either direction. You can't make any assumptions about the lives of the rest of the six billion from one person. Or eight people. Or everybody you know.

One of the problems is that people get hung up on the idea that just because the argument is invalid, it doesn't mean that any premise or even the conclusion is wrong. Like the argument above: I'm not saying that the speaker didn't have a BB gun, or even that s/he didn't turn out OK. I'm not even saying that BB guns are terrible things to give to kids (and, I'm not saying they're not). I'm just saying that you can't argue that BECAUSE the speaker had a BB gun as a kid and turned out OK, that therefore BB guns are OK to give to kids. There are too many factors and too little data to judge that. You have to make that argument for or against childhood ownership of BB guns some other way.

Here is a canonical example of how that form of supposed logic can go horribly wrong; the implied conclusion is left as an exercise to the reader: I have a friend who was abused as a child, and she turned out OK.

04:12 pm - "She's Not Like Other Women"

I keep running into people, both online and in real life, who use the phrase she's not like other women¹ to describe a woman they admire. This time was on some link of a link from the nifty new community prettygeekcomm, describing a blogger the author admires.

Hint: no matter how you're trying to use it, it's not a compliment.

It's all about the subtext. Please don't tell me I'm not like other women. That leaves me to wonder what you think of the majority of women, that wouldn't be better served by indicating all humanity. When I'm really unlucky, people follow up the supposed compliment by telling me how, exactly, the person they're talking about is not like their unfavorable preconceptions of my gender.

dangerpudding tells me that the appropriate response to all of this is You don't get out much, do you?

For the record, though, I am smart, interesting, moderately athletic, sexy, clever, funny, and a whole host of positive adjectives... just like other women.


¹ There's a particularly bad variant of this that is you must be the smartest woman I know which leaves me wondering who, exactly, they know and how it differs from my friend group, which consists of a pleasingly large number of extremely smart, sexy people of various genders.

09:09 pm - Fiber Arts and Small-Scale Economics

I was thinking this morning about how interestingly people view the economics of fiber arts. Basically, a lot of people are surprised that hand-knitting a sweater costs more than buying one in a store. Likewise, home sewing most clothing costs more. I tell people you don't get it any cheaper, but you do get what you want.

On the one hand, you'd think it would be obvious from some basic economic principles. Capitalism tends to drive down the cost of things built in quantity. You get economies of scale. Almost anything produced as a unique item will cost more. So, capitalism optimizes the price of the identical t-shirt everyone buys much better than it optimizes the cost of a unique sweater. Supplies are vastly cheaper in quantity, too, so even if you take consideration of the price of my time out of the picture, a hand-knitted sweater will still cost more than a machine-knitted one, because the difference in price of the yarn is quite large.

On the other hand, it's likely that it's yet another example of fiber arts being undervalued, probably because they're seen as crafts. I haven't seen terribly many people confused as to why hand-made furniture costs more than something from IKEA.

11:24 am - On Doing Stuff

This weekend, I spent a couple of hours at TechShop, using the laser cutter to cut out acrylic shapes as a prototype for a new idea I've got. (Details intentionally vague. This one's going to take some percolating of ideas, and some time. I'll post about it later).

And as I was using nifty and complex machinery to form plastic, I was thinking something that's been wandering through my head a lot lately: Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the Yarn Harlot, describes in her new book how people come up to knitters and say, oh, I could never do that, I don't have the patience. And yet, she says, that's a total fallacy, because knitting doesn't take patience; knitting gives you patience. The same knitter who will happily knit through a 45 minute wait in a doctor's office will vibrate with impatience after 90 seconds if you take away their knitting.

I couldn't agree more. People say the same thing to me, much more often than you'd think. And not just about knitting. Or, more discouraging to me, they say, I'm not smart enough.

The Yarn Harlot is spot on: I don't knit because I'm patient, I'm patient because I knit. And more than that: I'm not able to design and create things out of wood and plastics and metal because I'm smart and creative and handy; I'm smart and creative and handy because I design and make things out of wood and plastics and metal.^{1, 2} And I'm not alone; many others are and can and do. It works the other way, too: Despite a year of physics in college, I don't know physics anymore because I don't do physics. I'm regretting the loss, and working on ways to change that. I think the key here is that I see my brain as a work in progress, a moving target, instead of a permanent construction with inherent and permanent limitations.

So, I'd like to say to the people who keep telling me that they can't do something I'm doing because of their own mental limitations: You know, just try it if you want to do it. Fail spectacularly some of the time, succeed spectacularly others. There are resources to make the beginning parts easier. Like me, for example. Express a desire to knit within a 10-yard radius of me, and I'm likely to hand you knitting needles with a cast-on row already started, and show you how to do the knit stitch.

And don't if you don't want to. But be honest with yourself; don't tell yourself I couldn't when you mean I'm feeling oddly pressured to, perhaps by my own internal voices, but I don't really want to. And if you're just making small talk with someone who's doing something you find interesting but don't want to do yourself, try a simple that's nifty! instead.

¹ Of course, there are other ways to become smart, creative, and handy. This is just one of the ways I do it.
² Also, there are limits and real limitations. No amount of practice is likely to make me a concert violinist.

12:07 pm - Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

Apropos of the previous entry, I went vegetarian on 3/29, for ethical reasons. I hit a major milestone last night when I had my first dream that was about avoiding meat instead of about craving it.

I intend to celebrate tomorrow night by taking my best friend on a long-promised visit to Ebisu restaurant for absurdly good (fish) sushi. Which is both in keeping with my basic outlook on life and an answer to any questions about whether I intend to be at least somewhat morally flexible about the whole thing. :-) I don't have much of a choice about moral flexibility here, really; I'm distractable enough that I ate some mini-corndogs at a party a couple of weeks ago, and didn't even think to say "oops" until hours later. :-)

Much thanks to my partners for gentle acceptance and thoughtful conversation, especially the one whose religion I'm rejecting, for not taking it personally, and the one whose religion I'm partially accepting, for never, ever proselytizing.

10:56 am - Determination, Privacy

I've been noticing more and more lately that the more private I am about a decision or goal, the more likely I am to be firmly committed to it. If I'm really committed to an idea, it needs time to germinate in my head, and often time to grow through a fragile seedling phase without too much input from those who might be either excited or disconcerted by its existence.

This plays a little oddly in the arena of blogging, because the converse of it is that if I do post publicly, I want to do this or even I'm going to do this, it means I'm probably somewhat undecided and looking for external encouragement or motivation. The odd thing, of course, is that it makes me seem flakier than I am, because you don't get to hear about many of the times that I've said I'm going to do this and then gone and done it.

I'm not terribly pleased about where this intersects with integrity. I mean, I generally *know* when I'm just floating an idea and trying to gain motivation. So, my internal integrity is pretty high. But I'm more and more cognizant that if the people I speak to aren't aware of it, or if they only hear about the things I am committed to after they're done deals, then I could have a problem with the external perception of my integrity.

Of course, blogging is sort of a fantasy world in itself. I'm more worried about whether that internal/external difference affects my in-person interactions, and how to improve my communication to fix it if it does. So I'm more likely to leave my blogging style alone, where posting I'm going to do X really means I'm trying to gain motivation to do X, but not yet as committed as I'd like to be, and I have done X for the last several weeks already means I made a commitment, but you didn't see it. This is just to inform you of the change.

10:11 pm - A Brief Lesson on Privilege; or I Dress for Me

I'm not going to say too much about the interesting debacle that is the Open-Source Boob Project, but I will say one thing that it brought up for me:

The weird allusion to "but she was asking for it, look how she was dressed" was defended by the author at one point -- and don't make me look up the thread -- with the rationale that women who dress attractively do so to be admired by other people, and therefore, enthusiastically showing your admiration is only appropriate, right? I've heard this one before many times and in many other contexts, and it's not just the conclusion that's wrong but the original theorem is, too. It's a theorem steeped in (generally, but not always, male) privilege and entitlement.

( Let me be perfectly blunt: )