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Monthly Archives: August 2007

a women-focused users group: the very, very beginning

Thursday, August 30, 2007

I mentioned nearly a month ago that we were starting a group whose goal is to get more women involved in open source. We had our first group meeting this evening.
We decided on a “chaining” strategy for invitations - no broadcasts on mailing lists we aren’t subscribed to, and people should feel a bit responsible […]

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gut-wrenching photography, convergence on war

Saturday, August 25, 2007

If you haven’t seen this Nina Berman slideshow, go there now.
You can also read the NY Times article about her work on this project. I’ve subscribed to Jen Beckman’s blog for a while now, and been blown away by the photographers she curates.
I was impressed with the access that Ms. Berman had to her subjects. […]

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PeaceMaker and indie educational software

Saturday, August 25, 2007

I played this game PeaceMaker for the first time this week. The goal of the game is to establish peace in Israel by finding a two-state solution to the conflict. Here’s the NPR story. They have a list of assumptions the game adheres to with this telling bullet point:

Small concrete steps, not grandiose plans

I […]

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the kecky county fair

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Yesterday, our friends Becky and Kate had a county fair on the street in front of their house. There were more than 30 entries to the judged crafts which included: pies, baked goods other than pies, canned food, sewing and needlepoint, livestock (bees and chickens!), gardening and “other”. The “other” category included a cow sculpture […]

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synchronized scanning talk

Friday, August 17, 2007

I normally post a long email about PostgreSQL talks we have here in Portland for PDXPUG meetings. Below is a draft of what I’ll be sending to the list.
The August 16th meeting began with a short discussion of Rules vs. Triggers. I didn’t come up with an EXPLAIN operator to talk about, but had […]

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non-profits and systems administration

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Wouldn’t it be great if the non-profit world could embrace free software? In my head, I’ve seen a giant Venn diagram labeled “VALUES” with Open Source/Free Software overlapping significantly with the of non-profits. Here’s a small one:
I think that non-profits are certainly not ignorant of open source. In Oregon, our legislators tried to pass […]

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creationists using nature precedings to pre-publish junk science

Thursday, August 9, 2007

This paper was added to the Nature Precedings site today.
The title grabbed my attention - “The saltational model for the dawn of H. sapiens, chin, adolescence phase, complex language and modern behavior”. Ok, I’ll admit that it was those Jean Auel books (in 9th grade) that sparked my interest in non-fiction about the […]

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kaizen and change

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

My coworker gave a brief, but inspiring talk yesterday about kaizen. He brought up the wikipedia definition of the word, which focuses on the business meaning and primarily efficiency. Then he talked about what it means to him.
Kaizen is often heard in the same sentence with “continuous improvement.” I’ve heard it so often that […]

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end of an era

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Having read this article, I’m now looking forward, come this December, to your front-page exposé on the real identity of Santa wherein you attempt to ruin Christmas for millions of children everywhere.

Fake Steve Jobs has been unmasked. (uh, yeah, spoiler to follow)

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group cohesiveness

Thursday, August 2, 2007

A couple days ago, I had my mind blown by this Clay Shirky talk from 2003. It was like someone was sitting in the room where we had the women’s BoF at OSCON. He lists three group patterns: sex talk, vilification of outsiders/enemies, religious veneration. We managed to skip over the sex talk (although I […]

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