Archive for November, 2009
Great – I just spent the entire night being frustrated about how I had to stay up all night in order to get uninterrupted productivity time, and thus half the productivity time wasn’t actually productive. I love my family, I do. It’s just… I haven’t found a way to resolve the compatibility issues between the world I was born into and the one I want to make. Every time I think I have, I haven’t.
Sometimes it works and I can pull the two together, and this happens more and more, and that’s real nice. And then sometimes I have to choose one to run towards and one to run away from, and… well, I’ve made the choice which one to go for when I have to choose. I can usually be a daughter and a Mel at the same time. And then sometimes I’m… a Mel.
Today: world-bridging FAIL.
Tomorrow: another chance to dance the balance right.
Right now I nap for an hour (yeah, it’ll be enough sleep; I’ll take another nap at lunch) and then I get into my car (yay car!) and do a first sprint from the hills. I wanted my piano tonight, but people were sleeping, and playing piano was what triggered the FAIL in the first place.
Frustration is okay. But sleep is good now. And I’ll figure out a way to be both here and me at the same time when I wake up. We’re just going to try again tomorrow.
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
如果你看这份 http://planet.fedora-zh.org, 对不起我的中文不足够的翻译。 我会尝试写中文时，我可以。
(For those reading on the Chinese planet, I am sorry my Chinese is not good enough to translate this post. I will try to write in Chinese when I can.)
For those reading on the English-language Planet Fedora, I’m trying to learn how to participate in the Chinese-language Fedora community, and chronicling my adventures (as usual) as I go along.
Kin Chew posted instructions on how to enable Chinese character input in Fedora 11 – I should screencast an F12 version now that the new release is out. But thanks to Kin Chew’s instructions, I’ve finally started typing in Chinese – less than 5 minutes from beginning to read his post to typing 谢谢 (thank you) in a comment, including the reboot. My prior adventures in that language have all involved either dead trees or individual copy-pasting of characters from online dictionaries. Yes, it’s painful; that’s why my prior online output in Chinese probably numbers less than 100 characters.
Ah, the power of documentation. See, it’s not that this was hard – but prior to Kin Chew’s post, Chinese input was (1) something I didn’t need to do, and was interested enough to maybe spend 10 minutes trying to figure out, and (2) something that took me more than 10 minutes to figure out, and therefore something that I didn’t do. And I keep reminding myself that this is what it feels like for new people looking at joining the projects that I care about.
Next steps: figuring out how to make Chinese characters display correctly in GNOME Terminal and Konsole so I can see #fedora-zh without having to fire up xchat separately (I use irssi and screen for IRC), then figuring out how to tweak and run lingobot so I can understand #fedora-zh without having to pile through my dictionary all the time. I have a grasp of enough basic grammar that a word-for-word translation should enable me to begin squeaking by – vocabulary is my main deficiency at the moment.
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 | fedora, fedora-zh | 1 Comment »
My dad works for a company that distributes medical equipment – things like gauze and medicine cups and tubs to throw up in. The machines for making barf-tubs are actually extremely cool – but then again, I like injection molding machines and manufacturing equipment in general.
They also make gloves. Sometimes their customers do interesting things with them.
Basically, Medline has a line of pink gloves from which a portion of the sales goes towards funding mammograms for underserved populations, St. Vincent Medical Center took the gloves and made a dance video for breast cancer awareness, and the internets have been muchly amused.
It made me smile, so I thought I’d share.
Saturday, November 21st, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Accidental archive-stumbling across: I used to be very shy. And to a large extent, I still am.
“Books are very safe friends. When you read them, nothing changes between you and them.” –Me at 19
But you know, the cool thing about friends is that they can change. And that you change. And that both of you can change and still be friends. It’s a simple thing to learn, but there are many simple things that I’m surprised by.
One of the things I’m most deeply afraid of is that someday, I’m going to be lonely again. I now know, intellectually, that this is almost certainly not true; this was not the case for quite some time (and it hasn’t gotten anywhere outside my brain yet). Until I was 12, I didn’t know that people with whom to not be lonely with existed – life was mostly about being isolated in a crowd, and I would keep companionship with the books I read, and wish the authors that I loved weren’t dead, or similarly unreachable – for a very shy child, a grown-up that you have to blindly write a letter to is very far away indeed.
Then I saw IMSA, and saw that there were people (kids, even!) I wanted to be with, and I knew I probably wouldn’t get to go there as my parents were strongly opposed. But I fought anyway, because… I’ve never been particularly good at giving up. Two years later, I got the impossible. And I lived the next 3 years happy – but happy with a timeout, because I knew I’d graduate, and I didn’t expect to ever find this thing-that-was-not-loneliness again. When we graduated a few weeks after my 17th birthday, I thought I’d just had the 3 happiest years I’d ever have in my life. But at least I’d had them – and I climbed my thinking tree out back over the school’s pond, and cried, and cried, and mentally prepared myself to go back to what I was before.
And then I went to Olin, and found there was another place I could belong. And then it was “wait – there are these special places – how do I find these special places, please let me keep finding them – and when I find them, please let them let me be a part of them!”
And then I learned that I could make them. (Well, more precisely – help make them.) It’s still taking a while for that one to sink in, but it is wonderful.
It surprises me when other people are surprised to find that I’m shy and introverted (though I have, a few times in my life, been surprised in turn by the same thing in people I greatly admire). It’s usually painfully obvious to me that I am shy and introverted, but I guess that when I get excited (which is often) the magnitude of my excitement covers up a lot. Shyness and introversion are not the same thing. The introversion’s never changed; I need to be alone to recharge, though I usually get those hours by not sleeping at night, by writing, and usually by doing both at the same time. (Making my writing world-readable whenever possible preserves that introversion time while guarding against over-seclusion.)
The shyness is something I still have a lot of, but less painfully so than when I was younger, and I hide the remnants better now. Over time, I’ll (hopefully) look less visibly uncomfortable in public (and in photos/videos/etc), and (again, hopefully) be able to speak/present without needing to freak out privately before and after, and (really hopefully) have that be a result of less shyness rather than masked shyness. I’m content to keep on making steady baby steps in that direction. Had a recent large triumph in this arena in Singapore, actually – one that lasted a whole week. Still trying to figure it out, and will write more when I understand it better.
I think that my fear of loneliness recurrence and my shyness are somehow related, though they’re not the entire picture. You only flinch when you want to protect something you think might actually be fragile. I still too often have that cringing-puppy “oh god, please don’t hurt me, please be happy” flinch either visibly or inside when I manage to catch it fast enough to keep from showing. And how could anyone hurt me? They could leave me alone. And yet I’m still possessed of a strong wanderlust and sense of independence and often want to be left alone, because I need that space to think.
I don’t think that’s a pre-emptive “leave things before they leave me” reaction, as being left alone and being lonely are two different things. I think I need both – to be alone sometimes, and yet to not be lonely. I need to be able to be alone so I can introvert-recharge, and I also need to know that when I’m done, there’s someplace I can come back to. That going away is for as long as I need it and as short as I want it and that I can decide to pass through the door in either direction at any time. That homes really are places that take you back no matter what.
This reflection ended up going in a direction that I hadn’t planned, but that’s the great thing about stream-of-consciousness typing.
“How can I know what I think until I see what I type?” –not-quite-Karl-Weick (Greg introduced me to the original quote, which replaces “type” with “say.”)
Indeed.
The point is that people don’t really have points of view on things until they have had occasion to express them. And sometimes we surprise ourselves by the opinions we express on things we haven’t previously given much thought to. Clearly, having occasions to express opinions is a prerequisite for having opinions at all. (source)
I’m grateful that I ended up with writing as an outlet, because no matter how shy and introverted I am (or really, was), I could create a space where I could have a voice that at least I could hear. It’s been… 12 years now since I really started doing that. (Thanks, Mr. Panitch.)
And… wow, it’s well past 5am at this point. Time for me to be insomniac and pensive sans computer now.
Saturday, November 21st, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Sometimes I like to start my day by reading things. Sometimes I like to end my day by reading things. Sometimes I randomly start taking notes and post them.
Going through Scott Radvan’s Wireless Guide draft for Fedora 12 was a nice way to start the morning – it does a good job of bringing together a lot of previously scattered information into a coherent whole that mere mortals such as myself can actually make sense of.
If I ever settle down, I’d like to think that, in addition to pets, a piano, books, a garden with foodness (or access to one, since I harbor no delusions about the utter non-greenness of my thumb) my bedroom could eventually look something like this. (Via Skud, from IRC.)
Tyler’s fault: Seeing photographs of the children of your high school classmates is really weird. (They’re incredibly cute, though!)
Tangentially via Brian: Epistemology is one of those topics I always thought I should read more about, so I went and did that today, and so that’ll just percolate in my brain for a while too… (I think it was Tim who described testing to me as “applied epistemology” last year – that definition made me stop and think.)
Toshio had a fantastic deconstruction of a sample “how I got started in Fedora” case study (which he made up for the purpose of that exercise). I think that kind of analysis is needed more, and will be passing it on as a “look, ain’t this cool?” example to some ethnographically-minded folks who might be interested.
Via my brother: an adorable marriage proposal that was an actual item on dealnews.com tonight.
While trying to sort through my current thoughts on “openness” (yep, broad term) I looked to see if I’d braindumped on it before, and I had – it’s still an essay draft waiting to be picked apart and rewritten and done well, but Sam’s comment is something I wanted to toss out for reflection again.
The opposite of openness is not privacy, but isolation.
I’ve got another author to read: Jerry Weinberg. Thanks to Eric Nehrlich for making me aware of Jerry’s work – although the post in which he did is both a tribute and a sad one.
Quixotess offers to transcribe videos for accessibility – I’ve left my thanks in a comment, but it basically boils down to “wow, you offered this before we asked? That makes a huge difference! Thank you!” Now, if there are any thought-provoking videos you’ve ever wanted me to see (and possibly write profusely on ;-) but I couldn’t understand before… (Actually, Quixotess makes me wonder whether I could offer something similar – surely my crazy typing speed must be good for something, right? But I can’t hear, so I can’t transcribe audio or video… maybe I could transcribe photos of whiteboards or somesuch?)
(This also reminds me that I should talk with my alma maters while I’m in town about that scholarship.)
And then I visited the library, so now I have dead trees to read as well. Hurrah!
Saturday, November 21st, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
While reading Matt Jadud’s blog via Planet TOS, I came across the blog of Cory. Cory is one of the students working with Matt on Operation: Stick Figure Army. His recent post “how to cope with the design phase?” was about how he (as a blind hacker) goes about a process that most engineers rely on highly visual tools for (UML, sketching on whiteboards, etc). I can’t comment on his blog without a login I’m not sure of how to get, so I’m writing a longer blog entry as a response instead. (For those who don’t already know, I’m a deaf* hacker.)
First of all, I like the way Cory and his professor handled the question on how to assess his understanding of UML diagrams (a visual convention for describing program structure and a required topic in a class Cory is taking). He has to demonstrate understanding of the concepts; it’s just that the input and output methods for that understanding are different.
…even though I may not be drawing diagrams, that doesn’t mean that I’m not responsible for knowing how each diagram is used and how to describe one.
Reading Cory’s description of how he describes UML diagrams in text reminded me of the time in elementary school where my music class was going through the instruments of the orchestra; we were listening to sound clips from different instruments and had to write about each one. Since I can’t hear high frequencies, my reports went something like this: “The tuba sounds like this, the bassoon sounds like that, the piccolo has a fascinating history and an intricate key mechanism that I will now diagram…”
I don’t believe that a fundamental property of the software development cycle is that it is visual. I think we make it that way because most people think it is more convenient…
I agree. And I don’t believe that a fundamental property of high-bandwidth conversation is that it’s auditory, either. I know many people who, at the present moment, find phone conversations to be the easiest way for them to communicate with others long-distance. But that’s different from saying phone conversations are the most effective way of doing so, depending on your goals (for instance, phone conversations currently – usually – don’t get logged for posterity, let alone logged in a way that can be automatically translated). Similarly, there are undoubtedly highly effective non-visual ways of doing design. As someone who’s highly visual myself, I don’t know what they are, but I would love to learn. (One of the reasons I enjoyed reading Cory’s posts is that my hearing forces me to rely so heavily on visual input that I often forget to run thought experiments suspending the assumption that I can.)
I’d actually like to learn more about the design practice of looking at edge-case users (not sure if there’s a better term for this). Maybe posts like Cory’s can shed some insight into the advantages of non-visual design systems, or the disadvantages of visual design systems, in a way that makes both of them better for everyone (not just the visually impaired). I look a lot at the benefits of alternatives to auditory-by-default systems because I have to, and sometimes the adjustments I make end up being useful to other people.
Matt pointed out in his response to Cory’s post that the majority of the software development world does not use visual input either.
…the overwhelming majority of our communication and collaboration regarding software developing is written/verbal, not visual. That is, we’re not shipping pictures back-and-forth 24/7—we’re chatting on mailing lists, IRC, and blogs to get things done.
However, I do wonder whether the dominance of text-based communications in software development will continue as tools like inkboard (collaborative Inkscape) continue to be developed, or if an (initially secondary – possibly only within a subculture at first) alternative, more graphical/auditory discourse will start happening. The parallel for me is podcasting and vlogging. They haven’t replaced forums and mailing lists in general online discussions yet, but they are definitely a presence that I grow increasingly more disadvantaged for having to ignore.
Well, mostly ignore. Strictly speaking, I do have the advantage that I can catch some audio, and that I have friends who’ll sometimes take the time to write a video summary for me, or sit next to me while a podcast is running and re-mouth the words so I can lipread them, but for most practical purposes, that’s like saying that publishing documentation in Tamil should be entirely sufficient for English speakers because of the presence of Google Translate. It takes a lot of extra conscious effort, the availability of specific tools and helpers, a lot of extra time, and much is still lost in translation, so it’s usually not worth the investment to even try.
I find it fascinating to see how other people adjust and hack inclusion into a world that often doesn’t assume them in its default case. At least with open source I get to hack on things – and with things – that give me the freedom to shape them into what I need (yay visual system beeps!) but the burden’s still on me to do the shaping and the constant reminding of others that I need accessibility to the things they’d like me to contribute to (for instance, project meetings by phone virtually guarantee my silence). At least the burden here comes with the tools I need in order to assume it. (Mostly. We could do better, but that’s a longer post.) And I’m glad projects like Sugar try to make themselves more-hackable-by-default.
*re: “deaf” – I’m trying to get used to being able to use this word as well, though I can hear some sounds (my hearing loss is classified as “severe”) and grew up mainstreamed in the hearing world (with lots of hacks). It’s a cultural adjustment that I’m consciously learning (with tremendous latency and deep discomfort) to make.
Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | fedora, olin, sugar, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
Back in the US, and despite not having really slept since Tuesday morning (or maybe because I didn’t? my family usually makes me sleep too much…) I’m feeling both awesome and more or less in the right timezone. I’ll be taking tonight as a jetlag crash night and plan to sleep in 8 minutes (when it’s midnight) and sleep heavily for quite some time (more-than-6-hours) but from lots of prior experience and a decent gauge on how I’m feeling now, I think that’s probably all I’m going to need.
This week and next will be gorgeous. Still some hills to climb – plenty to do – but I plan on taking it at a nice, loping pace with occasional sprints. There’ll be downtime between worksprints; I’m in Chicago at my parents’ now and therefore have a piano to play, and there’s a library nearby, and my little brother’s going to be around, and I have a car. Muahahaha. So yeah. Nice easy pace, sprinting, rests… it’ll be a nice rhythm to fall into, even for a short time (~10 days).
On the less metaphorical front, I decided I could probably stand to give an actual running schedule a shot. (I’m skipping to week 3 since that sounds the most like what I do when I randomly run around). I’ll try it this week and next and see how I like following a set routine. I’ve been way less active the past few months (too much sitting at my computer, not enough running around) and would like my muscle tone back now, please… (not that I had much to begin with). I haven’t got a good rhythm or well-developed strategies for staying in shape yet, but as long as I keep on paying attention to it, there’ll be momentum in that area that will go somewhere, and I learn what works by doing things that don’t. (At least that’s what I keep telling myself.) Physical awareness (including awareness of the stuff that isn’t so great) is a nifty thing to gain.
Ok! I made it past midnight! Time to sleep.
Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
What has the media been saying about F12? Check out the Fedora 12 press archive table to find out. If you find an article that isn’t on the table, please add it to the wiki page to help us keep track of F12 press!
If you’re interested in keeping up with the press in as close to realtime as possible, we’re also announcing articles we find on the fedora-marketing-list mailing list with the subject tag [in the news] for easy filtering.
Finally, if you’d like to join us in planning our Marketing efforts for F13, we’re collecting ideas between now and our December 8th meeting (immediately after FUDCon). Join the conversation on the mailing list, or if you just want to drop in a brainstorm, open a new ticket in the queue with your ideas (FAS login needed). Here are some of the ideas we have so far.
Original”Newsboy” photo by KellyB, licensed CC-BY.
Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | fedora | 4 Comments »
There’s a lot in my head that I want to get out, and Narita Airport has a free internet cafe. Typing is slow because I keep randomly hitting the “change me from English to Japanese” key, and punctuation is in different places, but my hands will learn.
I had a wonderful time in the Philippines. My digestive system is still recovering. I’ve dreamt of those mangoes for two years, and I’m not sure when I’ll be back to eat them again. The wedding was epic; over 30 tables with an average of more than 10 people per table at the dinner party alone. (Seriously, I thought all weddings were that way before this fall.)
Also, it’s not fair I’ve gotten the chances that I’ve gotten, and the freedom, and the opportunities… as many uphill battles as I’ve had to fight, at least they were fightable. The fact that I’ve got the freedom to learn and work on what I love, that I can move, meet people I want to meet, make my own mistakes – that I even grew up in circumstances that allowed me to form the kind of stubbornness that makes me question things and sometimes tackle them with flying fists (the fact that I grew up in a place with libraries that had these books that gave me such ideas) – that’s… argh. I know it’s not a helpful way of thinking, but why do I deserve that chance any more than they do?
And when I tell stories about the things I’ve done that I love, and things I’ve seen that are new notions in that world (latest weird concept: husbands modifying their careers in response to their wives – it also took a while to explain the concept of stay-at-home dads) it’s only inspiring and world-expanding if there’s a chance that their world can expand in that particular way, you know? Sometimes, even if you’re free, you can’t go back and help the others. And that’s always been hard for me. And that’s always made me really appreciate the opportunities I’ve… yes, worked really hard for and earned, but I still call part of it luck because I know others who deserve those chances too, and didn’t get them.
It’s one of the reasons I feel uncomfortable with privilege and try to give it away as fast as possible. Also makes it hard to calibrate my sense of what I’m worth and what I deserve, but I’m working on that. When I phrase it that way it sounds really selfish – I reckon in large part it is, but I also have to think about it more because I am afraid to think about it, and that’s always been an indication that I should.
On the up side, I felt like myself this entire time in Manila, and that’s a happy accomplishment. I didn’t have to wear a single dress, was able to talk my way out of most of the wedding makeup (and wipe the rest off before the actual ceremony), and usually get folks to shake their heads and smile at the crazy American engineer instead of getting mad at me these days. I’m becoming more and more able to carry the person that I want to be with me as time goes on and I get more chances to grow into being that person in spaces where it’s a good thing – encouraged, even expected – instead of something I have to consciously and constantly fight for. And when I can keep that sense of who I want to be no matter where I am, folks start respecting that, and getting to know me as a Mel who’s good at being a Mel, rather than as a Not All That Great Whatever-Else-Was-Expected. The hardest bit about inventing a new category is explaining to everybody else exactly what you are, but… well, I’ve gotten used to that over the years.
So many of the things I blog are replays that I just have to get out over and over again until they either run through or I find a way to resolve that thought cycle in a more productive way. My version of a traceback.
All right. One hour to my flight boarding – I’m going to run around like a maniac now in an attempt to utterly exhaust myself, because sitting still for the duration of a Tokyo-Chicago flight is torturous enough as is. More brewing in my head, but I’ll try to spill it into a notebook. I brought two with me this time just in case. There are advantages to not sleeping much – you get time to think.
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
I did something today I should have done a while back: relicensed all my blog and website content under CC-BY-SA. It previously included a noncommercial clause, but after reading a discussion that included a link to “The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License” (I believe the link came from Rahul – thanks, Rahul!) I went “whoa, I haven’t actually thought about this before – crud, this makes my website incompatible with… FIX! FIX!”
My site and blog content are now compatible with the Fedora wiki, itself recently relicensed. (And many other things as well.)
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | fedora, teaching open source | 3 Comments »
