Archive for October, 2009
For those interested in open source in higher education…
The Teaching Open Source Summit (TOSS) and the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) it was a pre-conference to have finished, and notes are up from both the full day of TOSS and the TOS session at FSOSS, replete with plenty of whiteboard pictures. Thanks to everyone who helped with notes, from IRC backchannel transcription to whiteboard scribing to photographing to transcribing notes to editing the wiki page, and everything else that’s going to be helpful for posterity.
Here’s one of our whiteboards – the link to the notes has many more. This one is the “what is needed?” project voting board.
Now it’s off to the mailing list to see what happens next.
Friday, October 30th, 2009 | fedora, olin, sugar, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
…that I was successfully able to Be Stupid today. In a good way! In the “I’m just going to jump in and do things and ask questions and whatever happens, happens” way. And it was, in fact, Not Stupid to do so. Huzzah!
Toronto was fantastic. I’m in Chicago now and am probably going to be decompressing through most of the next morning and afternoon, catch up tomorrow night and Sunday morning, and be back on top of my game by the time I hit DC late late Sunday night.
I’m also going to try to avoid dwelling on the discovery that I will actually be in the Philippines the weekend of my cousin’s wedding (which I’m glad to make!) and will therefore be compelled to, ah, wear appropriate attire (which I’m somewhat less thrilled about). I’d kinda hoped that I could skip that part. If I am exceedingly good with these negotiations, I may be permitted to wear pants. Maybe. If I’m really good and lucky and various people feel merciful (or just exasperated, as I’ve grown more stubborn over time). This has never worked before, but I should at least be able to prevent them from buying me a gown, because (1) dress shopping is not how I want to spend my time in Manila, and (2) I will never wear it again.
So there’s figuring out that, and getting my bass and celebrating my dad’s birthday. It’s Halloween, and it feels weird not to be dressing up for Halloween; it’s such a great excuse to go completely overboard with costume hackery. The most utilitarian one was probably my first year of college where I wore pajamas and built a frame behind me and attached sheets and pillows and my blanket so that it looked like a vertical bed (as if you’d stood up and your mattress remained attached to your back, with local gravity still working appropriately).
It was also the day a big lab was due, so I’d pulled either a double-near-triple or triple-near-quadruple allnighter right beforehand, so during my classes on that day, I leaned back, found a pillow already under my head and a blanket already around me, and slept…
And that’s exactly what I’m going to do right now.
Friday, October 30th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Credentials. I don’t like them, but it seems like I may need more of them shortly. For one, I’m interested in hacking academia, and the best way to hack something is from the inside, and they put rather a lot of stock on pieces of paper up in the ivory tower. For another, I tend to need to prove my geek cred more than most folks that I know.
Steve told me that I should get accommodations (interpreters, CART, etc) in graduate school. I told him that would be very hard for me to do (not to get access to those services, but to allow myself to ask for them and use them). Both of us know that we’re both right.
Running outside today, I was reminded (nothing happened, just jogged an earlier memory of another time I was running and had a similar jacket of similar too-large-for-me-ness) of the peculiar moments only made possible by my hearing loss. I’ve always had a somewhat androgynous physique and wear clothing such that I’m not infrequently mistaken for a guy in passing; I also can’t hear high noises. I also didn’t wear my hearing aids at all between the ages of 10 and 16, during which time I went through puberty and befriended other girls who’d done the same, except with much more apparently female clothing choices and figures and such acquired in the process (I must have missed that memo; I still don’t have, nor do I want, a purse).
So when I was out walking with some female friends shortly after I had gotten my new hearing aids – pretty good-looking young women in feminine (but not at all skimpy) clothing walking several steps ahead of skinny (and ~2 years younger) teenage Mel slouching in a thick jacket (who’d gotten distracted and dropped back to look at something and was running to catch up) – I overheard commentary like this for the first time as we passed a group of guys.
“Hey, baby.” *whistle* “Hey, pretty mama.” (etc.)
The following thoughts rapidly flashed through my head.
- Wait, what?
- They’re talking about my friends.
- But not me. But wait, I’m about to walk by them.
- SLOUCH MORE! ACKNOWLEDGE NOTHING! LOOK LIKE BOY!
- …it worked! Feel slightly guilty now.
And then something like “my god, do they… hear this all the time?”
I think I just forgot about it afterwards. It wasn’t a thought I could do anything with then, and I’m not sure it is now, but I reckoned I’d at least write it down.
Friday, October 30th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Today was a small quiet fail on my part in some (er, many?) ways, though there were good and productive parts of it, and it certainly wasn’t an awful day. Basically, I wasn’t brave enough to be dumb. I need to learn how to stand up and interrupt, how to be confident enough to think that if I’m lost, maybe other people are as well, that my stupid ideas might… well, maybe they’re stupid, but maybe they might also be helpful. Should have taken that risk. Might have shaken things up some. Dunno.
I’m trying to figure out what scared me this time, because I’m usually perfectly content to be the idiot in the room. And I think it’s two bad habits I thought I’d expunged but apparently did not.
- I can’t follow the conversation very well, so I can’t tell if this is really actually the situation or if I’m missing something.
- Somebody else will do it if it’s really important.
They’re really the same thing. #2 is justification to give up after thinking of #1. And #1 is borne of the thought “I have nothing of real worth to contribute here,” because if you think you are worth bringing into the conversation, then you’ll make other people accommodate you.
The setup was crappy for lipreading, and I didn’t think of that at the start when I picked a chair. (Not sure what I was thinking. Probably “oh, an empty seat.”) I was forever leaning back and forth to see everyone’s face and at some point I just got tired and decided it was more productive to swarm through things on my computer. I tried to IRC backchannel, but there weren’t a lot of folks in channel, and it just didn’t work out that way. Usually, folks catch on when I start taking notes and help me fill the gaps in, and Chris did some (yay Chris!), but there wasn’t enough momentum there for me to get into the swing of things, and… well, I did okay. Especially during breaks, talking with small groups, I did okay. With individual conversations, fine. At dinner, fine. But I was definitely off my game; I could have done better, could have done more, had I been willing to be stupider. I’ll not make that same mistake again tomorrow. I need to follow my own advice to fail soon and loudly and repeatedly until the bug is fixed; I had a silent traceback today and that’s no good.
To be perfectly clear: I’m reporting a bug in myself. I’m not complaining about anything else but my own lack of reaction to do things I should have done. It went okay, but I think there was a chance for it to be completely awesome and that I could have done something but didn’t. Not going to beat myself up over it; just going to learn from it. Move on, make tomorrow totally kickass, don’t repeat the same mistake twice. This is one that I had to make at some point. I’m going to say these things now (well, type them out with some difficulty) because intellectually I know I have to wire them into my brain, even if I don’t quite believe it myself yet.
I am smart. I have things to contribute. People should hear and understand the things I have to say. I should do them the courtesy of showing them how they can best accommodate my full participation.
AWKWARD! NOT PART OF BRAIN YET! Why is the notion that I might have worth still something that’s incredibly uncomfortable? Well, moving on. I’ve learned stuff, and that’s good.
Yesterday…
Now yesterday was cool. We went the wrong way on the highway coming out of Seneca, and I persuaded Greg to drop me off at the airport (since he was staying at the airport hotel) so he wouldn’t have to turn around and drive all the way back to drop me of during rush hour. <Soundtrack: whatever music was playing during the Star Wars Episode II scene where Anakin leaps out of the speeder and plunges five stories through traffic to land on the bounty hunter’s ship. (Great chase/fight scenes, decent music, awful movie.)> So I was standing at Terminal 1 of Pearson International with a backpack and a picture of a map stored on my camera and no idea of how the Canada public transit system worked. It was a grand adventure!
Ran upstairs, asked around until I found a place that sold bus tokens, got one, raced downstairs and onto the first bus I saw that was about to depart; that ended up depositing me at a train station, whereupon I stabbed my finger onto the subway map, went “eh, that place looks good!” and rode most of the way there before getting impatient and swinging off a couple stops early and then wandering zig-zag through the streets, passing hardware stores and funky clothing outlets and tattoo parlors and a ton of bars along the way. Fan-freakin’-tastic.
The fog cleared, and I saw the CN tower. It’s a tall thing with a round bit that looks like a flying saucer with a ton of windows at the top. Greg had said – I think on the drive down to Rochester, or walking to BBQ in Rochester, or something – that whenever one sees a tall thing with round windows at the top, there was probably either a restaurant or a bar up there, and that sometimes they span around. What the heck, I figured. Let’s go find out if that’s actually true.
- There is indeed a restaurant up there.
- It spins.
- It also serves a rather tasty eggplant parmesan. (That is the cheapest thing on their menu; I ordered the absolute minimum. And then I decimated the bread basket, because… hungry.) (I did leave a nice tip.)
It is the kind of expensive fancy place that people dress up in suits and ties for. I was lugging a somewhat scruffy-looking brown laptop backpack and wished I’d brought an Emergency Collared Shirt for such occasions… except not really. I was happy to have no ability to change out of my t-shirt, honestly. ‘Cause if I had, I’d probably have felt compelled to do it, even if I hate any semblance of dressing up.
Finished my food, finished gawking at the city spinning under me, noticed that it was dark and maybe it was time I should head home. Discovered Toronto’s network of underground tunnels and loped through them awhile, singing Beatles songs because I was the only one down there and liked the resonance of the space. You say you want a revolution / well you kno-oh-woah-oh / well we all wanna change the world.
Caught a train back north and walked back to the house from there. I think an accurate portrait of me might be this: a subway car, strange city, empty, late at night, with newspapers strewn around, sitting by a window, wearing a jacket several sizes too big, arms wrapped around a backpack balanced on my knees, flickering in and out of various threads of thought just about as fast as the underground tunnel lights whip by.
Writing these notes for my future self; I want to remember yesterday’s romp through Toronto, and today’s lesson.
Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
I’ve been on the road and running back and forth, so here are snippets from the last few days.
Young-person metabolism abuse for 3 consecutive days (…heck, I do it mostly every day). Consumption of an extended 4-course English supper plate (to which I added 3 additional courses). Consumption of a Rochester Garbage Plate chased by a slice of lemon pie. Greg also did the plate + lemon pie, to the amazement of Luke, who didn’t finish his. Greg also started eating salads for lunch the next day, whereas I got two bowls of soup, sushi, a jug of sweet tea…
Thanks to Rikki Kite for patiently reminding me to get over my “…but, but, but, attention does not want!” paraonia. The interview we did (over a month late due to my aforementioned paranoia) made me reflect and think about some things in an extremely helpful way.
Had interpreters for the first time in years last night at the Innovation Center mixer at RIT. It was… fascinating – I’m going to use that word because I don’t know exactly what my reaction is/was, to be honest. I enjoy having the extra experiences to mull over, though. I’m – weirdly enough, it was kind of helpful and cool, but probably in different ways than you’d expect. Aah. I am not used to being somewhere they’re used to accommodating folks who can’t hear, and counter-compensating (or whatever you call compensating for your usual compensations) is hard because I haven’t really practiced it before. I have such a hard time turning off my coping mechanisms; that’s what happens when you’ve used them nonstop for 20 years.
Also, introversion is a funny thing, and a long drive is actually very, very fun when you have good company to talk with.
I said this after Karsten’s, and I’ll say it again after Karlie’s: fresh eggs are freakin’ wonderful. Oh, I want chickens and dogs and a cat and a garden and a piano and little kids to play with! Not to have – certainly not now – but to visit, and to borrow, and… just to see.
I wish I could also repeatedly borrow a car instead of buying one, but I kinda need one right now. Oh well. While I have to put up with owning a car, I might as well enjoy it and learn things. Must ping Eamon about the possibility of swapping Auto Hacking 101 lessons with Something Else lessons…
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
There is something in this speech by Ursula Le Guin that compels me. There is something in me that is repelled by parts of it, ignores parts of it, and skips parts of it. It is strange and foreign and I can’t grasp most of it, and that’s how my brain is managing to read this and not get overwhelmed with the rewiring it would take to grok it more. But it is fascinating, and it is turning in the back of my mind. The thoughts that have formed into words have fallen into two sentences:
- It’s more than about being male or female; I see the thing she is describing as being correlated with gender, but not… defined by it, or tied to it; the… I can’t articulate what it is right now, only what it is not quite.
- I do not speak that language.
I understand parts of it, though. Or at least parts of it speak to me.
Being human isn’t something people can bring off alone; we need other people in order to be people. We need one another.
I need to listen in immersion in order to have any hope of fluency. Where do I go? One of the benefits of travel is that I’ve gotten to stay with friends and their families, see how their households work, how they go about their lives, how they interact with each other. How they live. What they talk about over dinner. What they order, how they eat, how they talk with their kids, their wife, their husband, how they keep their house. It’s… exposure. Exposure to possibilities I hadn’t really seen before, of how a human being can be. The more I see, the more I realize, more deeply each time, how much it is I haven’t seen, haven’t even imagined.
This has to be enough right now. This is something I have to keep on spiral-learning. This is something I’ll keep on sucking less at over time. The right now has to be okay at the same time as the tension for it should be better in the future keeps on pulling. I need both, not just the latter.
Le Guin also wrote a pillow-book for cats.
Today I ran around Karlie’s backyard with two giant dogs in a leaf fight with her two young sons. I ended up muddy and out of breath and thoroughly delighted. I am grateful for the borrowed moments that I have with homes and families, because something like this may never actually be mine.
There are things in life that are heartbreakingly wonderful. For me, I’d describe that emotion as the one I get when I’m listening to a concert, and there’s a violin solo, and the soloist is playing brilliantly, and the melody climbs up, and it’s gorgeous, and it keeps on climbing up until it fades out dancing somewhere you can’t go. You look at the faces of the people around you and they’re absolutely rapt – and you know that there’s beauty there and that you’ll never hear it. But you’re experiencing it too, by being there among people who can. Just in a different way.
Sometimes, fragments of books will get stuck in my mind.
“I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” –Henry David Thoreau
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Shortly after I posted a call for FUDCon ad design help, Charlie Brej and Nicu Buculei leapt into action in #fedora-design and did some lightning rounds of reformatting, and…
The final file is attached to ticket #71 in the design queue. Thanks, Charlie and Nicu!
See, this is why I love Fedora.
Monday, October 26th, 2009 | fedora | No Comments »
So we had the FUDCon ad all finished, and then there was a last-minute change of format, and from B&W to color. But we did it!
…the wrong way ’round. It works this way, Chris is going to print it sideways if we need to, but in case someone wants to pick up a quick last-minute tweak, the ticket’s is #71 in the design-team queue.
Chris notes the final file is needed by noon EDT (approx 4.5 hours from now). We are ok as-is, so this is not a PANIC NOW! ticket, more a “if you want to tweak it, noon EDT is the cutoff” note.
(in #fedora-design)
11:14:29 < brejc8> is that “4.25″ (tall) x 5.5″ (wide)” ?
11:16:09 < brejc8> mchua: do you have the widths and heights the right way round?
11:17:43 < mchua> brejc8: …ARGH
(over in #fudcon-planning)
11:19:12 < mchua> ctyler: um… can you print it sideways?
11:19:22 * mchua should probably not inkscape in the wee hours of the morning
11:19:41 < ctyler> mchua: we could, but it might look… sideways
11:20:01 < mchua> ctyler: “adds visual interest”?
11:20:08 * ctyler feels really bad about the last minute changes
11:20:44 * mchua could add “why is this ad sideways? come to FUDCon Toronto and ask Chris Tyler to find out!”
Monday, October 26th, 2009 | fedora | 2 Comments »
Today’s accomplishments during the Toronto-to-Rochester drive (Greg was driving) were twofold: the first is that I finished my OnLinux slides (including putting in the new presentation content generated by the audience) which will be posted along with a rough guess at a talk transcription later today. The second was that I paid my phone bill.
Specifically, the AT&T bill – the first bill – for my GSM peripheral. Usually, this would be easy; you sign up to pay online, then pay online. The trouble is that AT&T sends the activation code for your pay-your-bill-online account to the device. In a text message. Which would be fine if it were a phone, but it’s a USB peripheral for internets-when-you-are-anywhere.
This would also be fine if I was running Windows, since they have special software you can install to extract text messages from the device. We know that this is not the case, though. Finally, this would also be fine if I could hear enough to understand phone support and ask them to walk me through it, but this is also most decidedly not the case. So I…
- went on instant messenger
- to use AT&T’s relay service in order to
- have an AT&T person mediate between me on chat and
- an AT&T rep on the other side.
This actually worked extremely well, and everything got settled out, and there was one beautiful moment where AT&T put AT&T on hold and the relay operator started typing in the hold music…
It wasn’t a particularly productive car ride, but it was a wholly satisfying one.
Sunday, October 25th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’ll cover the actual conference in a later post (coming very, very soon). Right now I’m going to ramble on two semi-related thoughts just to get this out of my brain.
The first is that I now have a baseline for pre-talk nervousness, and it runs as follows.
- indecisive nervousness upon submitting each of: talk abstract, speaker bio, picture (“am I doing this right?” “are there even pictures of me out there that don’t show me diving away from the camera in panic?”)
- stay up late the night before going “AAH! SPEAKING IN THE MORNING!” until you force yourself to conk out
- arrive at conference venue, spend a good 10 minutes staring at talk slides in the bathroom (laptop perched on the table-ledge-thing in front of the mirror) trying to psych self up enough to be able to stop worrying and listen to the keynote. I’m not actually hyperventilating, but I’m coming reasonably close.
- repeat step #3 for first presentation block
- repeat step #3 for my presentation block
- ZOMG a crowd
- ZOMG a microphone
- HYPERACTIVE MODE ON GO!
- (speaking)
- AAAAA they’re clapping why are they clapping let me go repeat step #3 and calm down
After much thought, I have concluded that the vast majority of worrying displayed in this baseline measurement is utterly useless. Therefore, I will stop.
Well.
That’s easier said than done. But now I know exactly what bits of panic I have to eliminate. I’m pretty sure I can cut out 2, 7, and all but one of 3-5 next time, and diminish most of 1, since I now have a picture and a bio and a rough idea of what a talk proposal looks like. I’m not sure about 6 or 10; those might take longer. I need to learn how to ramp up and down my WHEE! HYPER! levels instead of slamming the switch from one side to the other. (Replace switch with potentiometer. Turn digital to analog. Whatever. More fine-grained control. Will take a while. Been working on it for a while already.)
But it was fun. Like… really fun. I need to write my slides up – I deliberately made it so the presentation materials were cocreated by the audience as we went along, so the “final version” of the slides don’t actually exist yet. And I managed to get people to ignore me, which is awesome, because then they talked with their neighbors to plan how they were going to do things in their project, which would not have happened if I had stood up and went on for an uninterrupted 40 minute spiel, which I don’t think I could have done anyway; I’m really uncomfortable being the center of attention for more than a millisecond, so I have gotten Very Very Good at deflecting it. (Should build up my tolerance, though. Working on it.)
I think the single most effective mindhack that I used to simmer down the “WAIT WHAT AM I DOING?” terror was to think of it as teaching a class. I’ve done that hundreds of times; it’s what I do. I teach. How do I teach? I get people to think and do things on their own – it’s more like an exploratory lab than a lecture. Is there any reason I can’t do that here? Nope. Just because most folks stand up and talk for the entire time does not mean that I have to; it’s about what’s going to be the best use of their (the audience’s) time, and I think the best use of their time is to Not Be An Audience. My usual teaching goal is getting as many people using as much of their brains as possible on something interesting to them – and… from a single sample, the thing that works for 18 year olds learning about feedback systems seems to work just as well for conference attendees. Interesting!
That’s how I’m going to think of talks in the future; as classrooms. Weird-looking classrooms with really fancy A/V. They are bundles of time for which I am tasked with the creation of an environment within which people can explore and do things. Because the important thing is not the words that come out of my mouth – and I said this at the start of my talk – but the things that happen inside their heads, and the things they do afterwards as a result of what happened in their heads. So… talking, teaching, same thing. Incredibly helpful reframing for me. Wish I’d thought of that last week.
That’s the first thing.
The second is that family is wonderful; I haven’t had a chance to really hang out with the Toronto branch of my extended family (very extended – the cousins of my mother) before, and I am related to geeks! The world is wonderful right now. Wow. There are people in my family that I need to meet. They work on submarines. And datacenter-planning software. And… wow. Wow, this is cool.
There we go. I think I am actually sleepy enough to become unconscious now. Toronto… is cold.
Sunday, October 25th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
