Monthly Archives: December 2006

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I’m still figuring myspace out. I guess it doesn’t quite gell for me because I already have a blog (this), a website (the rest of the site, sadly rarely updated), various photo albums, etc; I feel like some kind of sad fangirl making ‘friends’ with musicians I don’t personally know and finally I don’t have anything to promote so there’s no USP for me.
Otoh, if I’d seen this earlier I could have been in Nick Cave’s new bands video.

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Four work Christmas parties down, one to go.
The bathroom at work was suddenly girly again as everyone rushes to whack on some slap before the final party. The luncheon today is a big posh do held in the City of London, with lots of ritual cheers and a toast to the Queen. The first year I went an old man came up to me at the end and told me “they’d decided I was the best top”. I still have no idea what that means but I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean best Top.
It’s properly cold in London now – last night I had to wear gloves for the first time, and temperatures are heading below 0C overnight.

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I can’t remember how I ended up there but I’ve just read You Don’t Belong. Margaret Cho took a transgendered friend she describes as ‘female bodied but masculine’ to a fund-raiser, and when they went to the toilet they were hassled by other women there. I guess it’s timely because I’ve just been reading Stone Butch Blues but as heart-breaking as that is, you’d hope that the world had moved on since then.
I thought this point was really interesting: “If it was really a man in there, I doubt they would have caused such a commotion, but since Ian was female bodied, these women felt they could punish, to lash out, because it was one of their own. They had somehow given themselves this permission to gang up, to shame, to rudely question, to unfairly and unduly punish. And for what? For the crime of being true to one’s self? For not adhering to the strict rules of gender?”
His account is in a second blog post, Gotta Go, Gotta Go Right Now.

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Blimey!
“One of the best ways to go green at Christmas is to give up the turkey. The meat industry is responsible for more of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions than cars, according to a UN report.” Guardian

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This article really makes sense for me. Not in terms of what should be taught in American schools, but in terms of why I’m a geek and what that actually means. Once you get past the barrier of what could be described as a formal language system – syntax and vocabulary – programming is all about the fuzzy stuff:
“The majority of his contemporaries apparently claimed that using the logical, left-brain symbols associated with their work was NOT how they did their work. These were simply the tools they used to communicate it. What they used to do the works was much… fuzzier. Intuition. Visualization. Sensation (Einstein talked of a kinesthetic element). Anthropomorphizing. Metaphors.”
Also, from Code like a girl:
“Because caring about things like beauty makes us better programmers and engineers. We make better things. Things that aren’t just functional, but easy to read, elegantly maintainable, easier–and more joyful–to use, and sometimes flat-out sexy. A passion for aesthetics can mean the difference between code that others enjoy working on vs. code that’s stressful to look at.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between good code and bad recently because I’ve been migrating someone else’s codebase to new templates and it’s been a bit of a nightmare. I feel almost tainted by dealing with such dodgy code but in some ways it’s been a good learning experience because it’s reinforced that elegance and the ability to abstract and refactor code is really really important. Though I’m not too sure ‘code like a girl’ works as a generalisation because apart from the gender stereotypes, this ugly code was written by a woman.
I’ve only recently discovered Creating Passionate Users but it’s a joy to read.