Archive for April, 2005
Diversity
Meri Williams makes some excellent points about diversity and gives some reasons as to why most of the really popular technical blogs are written by men, despite there being many women involved in technology and many women bloggers. I completely agree, and have to admit to feeling slightly annoyed by all the “where are the women” type discussion as my answer to that is that we are here … we’re just busy!
I think that many of the reasons are mirrored in the offline world. Individually I tend to get on with men better than with women, however once a month I go along to my favourite business networking group, which is specifically for business women. I love this group because everyone turns up and can openly talk about the fact that they haven’t been able to work today because their child has been ill, or that they have spent all weekend standing watching football games or driving children to dance classes, or have just burned the dinner because a client called and they forgot about it. Then we all get down to discussing business. The fact that we have all of this other stuff going on doesn’t take away from the fact that we all run successful businesses, and sometimes it is nice to be able to talk about it, however I have never been in a mixed networking group where this has happened. Even with men I know well, who I know spend a lot of time doing school runs and so on, they seem to switch into some kind of ‘business mode’ and you wouldn’t even know that they have a family.
I think this is a similar dynamic to that which we see on blogs. Here I will talk about web development, the Small Person’s ballet classes, the study I do with the Open University, post pictures of sprouts … whatever I feel like. I don’t feel the need to partition parts of my life off from one another and this is my personal site, so it reflects me, not just the code that I write or the business that I run.
Teaching the Small Person XHTML
The Small Person has had a computer since she was three and a half, she is pretty good with it and very rarely needs parental technical support. Recently she has been begging me to teach her to “make a web page”. I did hunt around the web and (probably not surprisingly) found nothing that would help a 7 year old to start writing XHTML. So, I have started to write her some basic worksheets, the first of which I gave to her this evening.
The problem with teaching very small people how to create an XHTML document is not the language itself, she soon picked up the fact that things have to have a start tag and an end tag, but it is the fact that she had no point of reference as to how a document should be structured. She looked at me blankly when I explained how to create a level 2 heading, “what’s a level two heading?” Terminology that seems fairly obvious when explained to an adult has no meaning to her, which makes explaining things something of a challenge. She was most excited about the appearance in her browser of things she had typed into the document, so whether she understands or not she is having fun.
Next year the school will start to teach them how to “build a web site”. As far as I can gather this involves giving them some dreadful package that allows them to literally draw a webpage. I have a plan to encourage the Small Person to insist they validate these masterpieces – although we have a little way to go before that! If the way I have explained things to the Small Person seems to work I’ll put these worksheets somewhere in case they are of use to anyone else, however if anyone has any bright ideas for teaching this stuff to very young children I’d love to hear them.
Mac Mini
In sympathy for my advancing years my very lovely boyfriend bought me a Mac Mini for my birthday. It’s so tiny! The Windows desktop it is going to replace is a Shuttle, so not exactly a monster of a thing, but you could stack 5 Mac Minis in the same space.
First impressions are good – it feels fast, applications launch very quickly and Mail.app is as nice as Kmail which I use at work. I have to have a mail client that I am happy with, email issues make me grumpy. Other than that I’m still just poking around at the moment, playing with my new toy. I’ve ordered Office so once that arrives I might actually be able to get down and do some real work.
Adobe Aquire Macromedia
We’re waking up this morning to the news that Adobe has acquired Macromedia. What this means for the product lines of both companies remains to be seen – Dreamweaver and GoLive were direct competitors and, as Drew has already pointed out, the functionality of Fireworks can be found in Illustrator and Photoshop (even if not in such a convenient and inexpensive package).
Time
I’m going to be THIRTY next Saturday. I remember when 30 seemed impossibly old, grown-ups were 30 … it was practically middle aged.
Today we took the Small Person to an audition for the National Youth Ballet, sat in the waiting area it seemed only a few weeks ago that it was me doing the auditioning. Almost ten years on I’m one of those ballet mothers, more nervous for my daughter than I ever was for myself, wondering if I’m doing the right thing by letting her dance, and knowing that if she wants to do it I wouldn’t be able to stop her anyway.
I’m with Molly on the issue that time seems to be speeding up, however while 10 years seemed to have been compressed into 10 minutes as I sat in that waiting room today, when I look back it’s been one hell of a journey from there to here and I wouldn’t change any of it … even the really dodgy bits! It’s all part of who I am and what I do. It’s taken me nearly 30 years to be able to honestly say that I’m happy, to be at a point where I can look forward to the next day, month, year or ten … so I’m not too bothered about turning 30. I think it’s fairly unlikely that Saturday will see me becoming a “grown-up” though, that would probably involve the wearing of proper shoes and going to bed early, wouldn’t it?
