Archive for December, 2009
I’ve been thinking of a way to try explaining my long-term-outlook-short-term-action way of thinking – the “plan to improvise” thing I keep talking about – and just did something that seemed particularly illustrative, and hence and documenting it.
Situation: it’s well past normal lunchtime. I have just realized this. I think “well, I should go down and eat sometime,” but don’t want to leave my warm and toasty room.
Response: Instead of gritting my teeth and plunging downstairs into the coldness to get food, I reach over and turn off the heater, and set a trigger in my mind for when I next notice the temperature. At some point, the room will cool down to the point where I go “ah, it’s cold.” And when I get up to turn the heater back on, I’ll remember my trigger and go “ah, but while I’m up, I might as well go downstairs where it’s equally cold, and get food.”
Complicated? Sure. Worksforme? You bet.
I follow the path of least resistance on a small timescale, but work over the long timescale to make that path of least resistance the one where I actually want to go. Instead of pushing giant wheels uphill, I dig little downhill paths before them. It also makes it way easier for my later-self (and others) to follow in my footsteps later on.
I enjoy being lazy; it gives me the opportunity to be smart about my laziness. Does that make sense?
Ah! It’s a bit chilly in here now. I think I shall go turn on the hea… I mean, go down and get some lunch and then turn on the heat. Sweet.
Monday, December 21st, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 2 Comments »
All right, today is a long day, a switch-back-and-forth day – a couple work tasks, a couple non-work things that are distracting me. Eventually one of the work tasks will make me hit my groove and hyperfocus-sprint to get the Big Things That I Want To Do Before I Hibernate done. ‘Till then, here goes.
Hari, sometimes I just love listening to the way you think, because it helps me recognize how I see the world a little more, even (especially) when we don’t agree. (Also, I’m not sure how many people would understand me when I rattle on about my ideal “if I have to learn about fashion” interface being Pandora.) Olin does drill in a very practical approach to problem solving that emphasizes results rather than rhetoric. And I am also glad that I’m able to drill to the bedrock and lay a foundation for widespread, significant, and tangible results for the ideals that I hold, and that I can do this together with others who share those ideals. It’s the way I happened to need to be trained for 4 years, and I got what I needed.
Andy P and I touched on this again yesterday as he drove me to the airport. This semester was his bedrock semester; he finally learned the solid coding skills needed to implement some of his ideas. This semester was my “climb to the sky and look around” semester; I have a better idea now of what skills I need to drill in on learning next. (There are a lot.) We talked about zooming in and out of different levels of focus and meta-ness, and how you needed the ability to both switch zoom levels and the ability to stay in one for long stretches of time, and how you needed to grow that awareness, and what we were starting to see ourselves grow into, and how we needed to be balanced out.
Though I’ve never met them, Rebecca Leung and Lexi Tsoi make me want to try learning unicycling once again.
As I posted in the comments for their video: If you’re up for teaching a crusty alumna how to ride, I’ll visit campus some weekend once the spring comes. I never did get past riding a few feet in a straight line.
I need to take Mark Penner up on his offer to teach me Go.
And I need to say thank you to Andrew; he knows why.
When I count my blessings, I count the people first.
Monday, December 21st, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
After a couple months pacing the cliff, I finally dived in and posted on Geek Feminism.
Well, jumped in once – which is not predictive about how much or when or how I may jump in again in the future. But… yeah. Momentum building slowly; eventually these dots may connect to show a forward-moving vector.
A nontrivial amount of cheerleading and hand-holding took place along the way, and I’m extremely grateful to the many extremely patient folks who’ve sat with me through multiple drafts of multiple essays. Honestly, the revision process has been more about the revision of the way I think, and getting up the guts to hit the “Publish” button, than it has been about the content of the writing itself.
The thing that’s run through my mind for the last few months is that Geek Feminism’s content looks something like this:
- Beautiful, coherent essay!
- Beautiful, coherent essay!
- Linkspam of beautiful, coherent essays!
- Beautiful, coherent essay!
…and then I come along and add
- as;lkdjfa;lksdjflskdjag;slkdjs
You may know the feeling.
“The Heroine With… what are her thousand faces?” is more a braindump than an essay, but it’s there.
And now I’m going to return to my regularly scheduled workingness. I’ve got a website to deploy, a scholarship to run, a lot of tickets to go through, some scripts to fix…
Monday, December 21st, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
I like frameworks. I like using them as tools. I like running random thought experiments with them sometimes. Today’s framework, which I’ve written about before: Hofstede’s Framework for Assessing Culture. With the recognition that, as Brian Bingham says, “all models are broken, and the best model for a cat is a cat – preferably the same cat,” here’s the quick gedankenexperiment I’m running to see what my cultural calibration is according to this framework’s dimensions.
Low power distance. “This dimension measures how much the less powerful members of institutions and organizations expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.” I understand that power is distributed unequally, and I have learned to navigate worlds with high power distance, but I strongly prefer cultures where “people relate to one another more as equals regardless of formal positions” and where “subordinates are more comfortable with and demand the right to contribute to and critique the decisions of those in power.” Note that this means I do accept the need for formal positions and hierarchies of decision-making and that power sometimes needs to be distributed unequally for things to get done, but I think that the rationale behind that power-granting should be transparent (and therefore, eventually, changeable when circumstances warrant) at all times. I will gladly follow someone, but I first need to know why.
More individualist than collectivist, but not by much. “This dimension measures how much members of the culture define themselves apart from their group memberships.” I expect that I, as an individual person, will “develop and display [my] individual personality,” but a large part of my identity comes from the long-term communities that I have chosen to join (or remain in). I’m a Mel, and if you ask me what that means, I’ll tell you that it also means I’m a member of my family and part of this American/Filipino/Chinese cultural mix, I’m an engineer, I’m learning how to be a woman, I’m a hacker, I’m a member of these open source communities, I’m part of CommArch, I like tea. But these groups weren’t assigned to me (well, for the most part – the family and gender ones are an exception) and I know how and why I want to be a part of those groups, and I define my own relationships to them.
Feminine. This one was a surprise to me, but after thinking about my rating for “power distance,” I had to revise myself from “androgynous” to “feminine” on this scale. The Femininity/Masculinity dimension is about the “value placed on traditionally male or female values (as understood in most Western cultures).” I value relationships and quality of life over competitiveness, assertiveness, ambition, and the accumulation of wealth; I value quality of life over quantity of life. “In [masculine] cultures, the differences between gender roles are more dramatic and less fluid than in [feminine] cultures.”
The thing that threw me off in the beginning is that I can hold my own extremely well in a masculine culture, and have done that for so much of my life that when I stumble into a feminine culture, I’m at a total loss for how to cope, even if I agree with it – if that makes any sense at all. Perhaps it’s like the way I feel when I encounter Deaf culture and the functional practices they’ve developed to accommodate not having auditory input – it’s an “oh yes, this would be so much easier if only I were used to it – I’m totally not used to other people doing this, how do I deal with it?” thing.
Extremely low uncertainty avoidance. I might even go so far as to say I actively seek out uncertainty. I don’t usually “attempt to cope with anxiety by minimizing uncertainty” – at least not in the environments I seek. I’m confident enough in my ability to minimize uncertainty in my own mind when needed that I can throw myself off cliffs into deep water and expect to be expected to be able to swim. Now, this isn’t true for all areas of my life; notably, I have an extremely high uncertainty avoidance value for relationships and identifying with minority groups. But generally speaking, I love chaotic improvisational randomness because I know that I can hold my own.
Long term orientation. I plan for the future – the far, far future. The twist is that I improvise in the present to do so – my long-term plan is to improvise. I know I’m very impulsive and spontaneous and can’t always see that long horizon in the moment that I’m acting, so when I do pull back and think of the long-term, I set things up so that when I’m spontaneous, I make the choice that my long-term-looking self would want to make.
There. I have now deployed Hofstede’s framework on something that’s probably a total misuse of its intended purpose. What does this tell me? I can cope in a number of different cultures (and I’m usually pretty decent about quickly recognizing where these dimensions lie in a culture I’ve just stumbled into), but some things are harder for me to deal with than others; high uncertainty avoidance drives me nuts and I have a hard time with it, high power distance is annoying but I’m just so used to it that I can cope, and I’m ambidexterous in the remainder, whether that’s by nature or by training. Now I can keep a slightly better eye out for things that might be tough to cope with in the cultures I find myself surrounded by.
Mostly this was just a lovely way to start the morning. Some people begin their mornings with coffee; I begin my morning with reading and gedankenexperiments. (Except for the times I begin my morning with “AIEEE LATE FOR CLASS” – but those days are over now.)
Monday, December 21st, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 2 Comments »
- Collard greens are not a substitute for spinach in recipes. (Thank you, Greg.)
- There exist far more varieties of vinegar than I was previously aware of. (Thank you, Tiemann.)
- What ham hocks are, and that suburban Boston groceries don’t seem to carry them.
- That fresh bacon is an acceptable substitute. Which suburban Boston groceries don’t seem to carry either.
- Reasoning that “bacon is salty pork, so salt pork is a substitute for bacon, and thereby a substitute for ham hocks by the transitive property of equality” does not quite work. Salt pork is extremely salty.
- Potatoes absorb salt. (Thank you, Karsten.)
- Collard greens are very tough.
- (2 hours later) Very, very tough.
- (The next day) Ridiculously tough. I obviously need practice – or perhaps more helpfully, to watch someone who knows how to cook collard greens do it.
- But they taste pretty dang good with just malt vinegar and salt and pepper. Hooyah.
Also, happiness in a cup: take extremely good cocoa, mix with hot milk (in our case, soy) and steep raspberry earl grey in it. I’ve done this before, possibly written about it before, but continue to love doing it every chance I get. Good tea plus hot chocolate equals Perfect Winter Drink. (Well, that and mulled cider. I’ll call that a two-way tie.)
So many things are easier said than done.
“Well,” you say, “assume that I am braced for the battle. Assume that I have carefully weighed and comprehended your ponderous remarks; how do I begin?” Dear sir, you simply begin. There is no magic method of beginning. If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath and wanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, “How do I begin tojump?” you would merely reply, “Just jump. Take hold of your nerves, and jump.” –”How to Live on 24 Hours a Day,” by Arnold Bennett
And yet we pace the cliff-edge back and forth – but the pacing is sometimes just as much a part of the process as the jumping is. You do have to be ready to hit the water.
Sunday, December 20th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
Felix has some FUDCon Toronto photos up reminding me of what I need to practice (that’s Simon/itbegins in the background, by the way) over the next 3 months; Sebastian (my transcription buddy for Diana’s talk in this photo) and I played what was probably the Longest Game Of Pool ever at FUDPub due to neither of us actually knowing how to hold a stick, shoot, or… well, the rules of the game in general. I mean, when you cheer when you hit a ball – any ball – your standards for a “good shot” could improve considerably. But y’know, learn by doing, right? We’re on for a (hopefully shorter) rematch the next time the two of us and a pool table are colocated and are trying to find ways to practice (on opposite continents) in the meantime. I may need to ask for lessons next time I’m in Raleigh.
Reposted my dashmirror design to Hack Ability, with much more conciseness. Melanie and I spent an entire afternoon at the library – she looking for research books, I boggling at the massive graphics novel shelf. Bernie and Caroline came over for dinner, which ended up with Audrey talking with Caroline about Physics, Bernie teaching Melanie how to patch an Activity, and a good deal of pasta bake being consumed by all. I also got to see Hari and chill out about learning styles (with orange-almond chocolate) before he started driving down to Georgia to start his semester off. And Eamon, Liz, and Chris are up for Car Day when the winter ends.
It’s snowing; I’m not sure if my plane will fly today. That’s okay. I have lots of books to read, and things I need to write, and instruments to play with once I find a 9V battery for my bass’s pocket amp, or once Melanie wakes up thus enabling me to play my other instruments. I have a good number of half-formed posts that I could pick up, polish off, and hit the button on; maybe I’ll take that up at some point today.
You can see I’m just letting my brain meander idly now; it’s nice to let it float for a while. I’m going to go and put that Sting CD on again. It fits the weather now. On a tangentially related note, once I learn Italian (on my list of languages to learn, but not under active pursuit) I’m looking forward to reading Calvino in the original. And now it’s time for breakfast and a cup of hot tea.
Sunday, December 20th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Taught this system in about 15 minutes to my cousin Melanie (high school freshman working on her first Big Paper for history; it’s something about People with Swords in Ancient China, so I’m totally reading it when she’s done) this afternoon and realized I’d never written it down, so here goes: this is how I’ve taken reading notes and written papers since I was in high school. I’m also writing this in part to prove that the terminal is useful for things other than writing code, because I did not know how to code when I started doing this.
My system is largely predicated on the assumption that I am a Lazy Bum, and basically involves 4 tools: cat, grep, | (pipes), and flat text files. These are standard Unix tools, and I’ve never seen a Linux distro without them; Melanie and I already run Fedora, so we were all set.
I grab the text of books when possible (mm, Project Gutenberg) and take advantage of the fact that my computer can read faster than I can. For instance, for history my Junior year of high school, I had to write some paper about the Judeo-Christian belief system. I forget the exact topic now, but let’s imagine wanted to grab out some nice quotes about the symbolic use of… say, swords. I like swords. So I download bible.txt, and…
cat king-james-bible.txt| grep -C 1 sword | less
In English, this means “send (concatenate) the text of the bible through a filter (global regular expression print) that looks for the word ‘sword’ and shows the -Context of 1 line before and after it, then let me scroll through the results (less).” The results look something like this.
01:003:024 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the
garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned
every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
–
01:027:040 And by thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother;
and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion,
–
stolen away unawares to me, and carried away my daughters, as
captives taken with the sword?
–
that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s
brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city
boldly, and slew all the males.
And so on. Instant sworditude, much faster than actually reading the whole darn book (or Book, in this case).
For those looking for a more powerful alternative to grep, try ack. (The website URL is pretty accurate.) I was introduced to ack at TOPP and have never looked back; the main advantage is how easy it is to deploy ack on huge trees of folders swarming with text (or code) files, meaning that you could, instead of just looking in the King James Bible, deploy the above search for swords in every note you’ve ever taken on every book you’ve ever read. Assuming those notes are textfiles dumped somewhere underneath the folder you’re searching in, I mean. It’s made fascinating connections between long-ago reads I never would have thought of on my own, and my papers in college were much improved by it.
I also take my reading notes in flat text files as I go through books. Those textfiles look something like this:
Arnold, Bennett. How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. New York: Shambling Gate, 2000. Print.
P: (5) Lay out things for tea at night so you can make tea in the morning as a nice wake-up call.
Q: (5) [breakfast] The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
N: Hilarious writing style. Read this book whenever the need for British wit strikes.
?: (7) Was this before or after Taylorism?
N: (7-8) This program would only work in a highly literate population. Which I suppose the reader belongs to, as they’re reading the book. But still.
Note a couple things.
- Full bibliography at the top so I never have to figure out the formatting for it again.
- Each note gets a new line, and begins with a letter code for the type of note it is: P for paraphrasing (summary), Q for quote, ? for a question I have, N for a note (my own thoughts), and some not shown here, like R for “reference to some other material I should look up later” (such as when one book cites another that I figure I should read).
- Optionally, page numbers appear in (parentheses) immediately after the note type.
- Super-optionally, tags appear in [brackets] after the page numbers, mostly when I want to be able to associate a quote with a word that’s not in the quote, for ease of searching later.
Then I can make queries like “what were all the questions I had about this book?”
cat how-to-live-on-24-hours-a-day.txt | grep ?:
Or “what interesting stuff was on page 7?”
cat how-to-live-on-24-hours-a-day.txt | grep (7
And so forth.
Confession: I’ve fallen off the wagon and haven’t taken notes like this since I left school. I’m trying to climb back on it again, as this sort of database is gloriously helpful to build. Particularly if one plans on doing lots of reading and writing of papers. Like, say, if one were to consider grad school.
I’m sure this system could be improved; I once had dreams of writing a GUI for it, but found this worksforme enough that I just never made one. There are probably better tools out there for it, there’s probably a lot of regexp-fu I could pick up to do more powerful queries (in fact, this is one of the reasons why I know regular expressions at all), there’s… well, you know what I’m about to say.
Patches welcome!
Sunday, December 20th, 2009 | fedora, teaching open source | 10 Comments »
This kind of conversation is the sort of thing that’s been on my mind with regards to Fedora Marketing recently. If I were to try and generalize my thinking a bit more, it would go something like this:
- Fedora has a lot of wonderful stories to tell.
- These stories are hard to convey – they’re full of subtleties that depend on a lot of context that’s hard for those not immersed in the day-to-day of Fedora (or open source, for that matter) to see.
- We need to learn how to tell our stories to those who don’t already know them.
This isn’t gospel or anything – it’s just how I’m currently trying to make sense of open source marketing and what it means for Fedora, for myself, in my own mind. Thinking out loud.
Original image CC-BY-SA by Jarek Tuszynski via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m slowly coming to understand Marketing as “the storytelling team” (among other things). This doesn’t mean we’re always the storytellers ourselves – we shouldn’t be. It does mean that storytelling is what we make it easy for people in the Fedora community to do, whether they’re Ambassadors going to events, developers working with upstream, testers explaining why they’re advocating a bug, or anyone else. We help people tell stories – stories of what they need, stories of what they want, stories of what they’re doing – and once those stories are out there, it’s far easier for people to find each other and solve their own problems.
The Chartered Institute of Management defines Marketing as “the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.” This made me scratch my head for months. What the blazes does this mean in open source? It assumes a top-down dictation and financial gain as the bottom line, and that… just doesn’t work in our world.
Here’s my current rephrasing.
Open source marketing is the community-driven process responsible for enabling users to identify, anticipate, and satisfy their own requirements sustainably.
When we do that, we turn users into contributors. We practice the open source way of enabling folks to scratch their own itches, and the itches of others they care about, by participating in a community of practice where we share our questions and answers and ideas with each other, no strings attached.
This brings me back to stories. I personally find it difficult to tell people what open source is, what any of the open source projects I’m involved with (primarily Fedora and Sugar Labs) are – unless they already know. The only way I know how to explain it is to show people – to bring them to IRC or FUDCon or a mailing list and give them a simultaneous annotation on what’s going on. “This acronym means that, that nick belongs to this person, this project’s history is such-and-such.” The details we all know, and usually assume, but that newcomers don’t. The adage “show, don’t tell” has a second part: “and make sure that your listeners have what they need to understand.”
Challenge: Can you take this kind of conversation (this example is from Ambassadors via the Marketing list) and explain it in a blog post that would make someone who’d never heard of Fedora or open source / free software before understand why we care about this stuff so deeply, why it gets us excited, why we work on it?
That’s the thing I’m trying to learn how to do. Suggestions, tips, help, and companions on the journey are enthusiastically welcomed.
Friday, December 18th, 2009 | fedora | 2 Comments »
- Electrical and computer engineering
- Industrial design
- Product design, likely followed by a masters in mechanical engineering
- Chemistry and business
- Chemistry, hopefully followed by grad school for organic chemistry
- Economics
- Mechanical engineering, with a particular interest in robotics
- Biomedical engineering (this just in)
That’s it so far, in order of age as best as I can remember. I’m the oldest. #3 is my brother Jason; the rest are also girls. I don’t know how this happened, but oh, it makes me happy. And not just for the reasons you might immediately think – there are years and years and generations of context behind this that… well, the short version is just that it makes me happy, that’s all. No expectations, no cheering, no pressure – just a quiet moment and a nod.
The world changes, a little bit at a time.
Thursday, December 17th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Also posted to several Fedora mailing lists.
FUDCon Toronto is over – our largest FUDCon yet! We’d love to get your thoughts on how it went, so:
- If you attended FUDCon Toronto, either in-person or remotely via Fedora Live, please take this survey and tell us what you thought.
- If you didn’t attend FUDCon Toronto but wanted to, please take this survey and tell us how we can help you get to the next one.
- If you didn’t want to go to FUDCon Toronto, please take this survey and tell us why – it’s anonymous. ;-)
Take the survey now – it will be open until January 8, 2010.
There are 29 questions, most of the yes/no variety; the survey takes less than 5 minutes to complete (I just timed myself). A special thanks to Robyn Bergeron, Yaakov Nemoy, and the rest of the Fedora Marketing team for designing the survey so it can be completed in less than 5 minutes! We’ll be analyzing and announcing the results shortly after it closes. If you’re curious about the process, interested in helping us analyze the results, or have any questions in general, join the conversation on the Fedora Marketing mailing list.
Finally, Mo tells me that blog posts with pictures get more responses, so…
Original picture CC-BY, taken by Francesco Crippa, via Flickr
Edit: Robyn adds: “if you don’t recognize the room, but wish you did, or if you heard in a live session that the room was really big but you haven’t seen a photo until now… please take the survey!” and she is absolutely correct. Imagine a rotating .gif that flashes between the three and you’ll have the right idea.
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 | fedora | No Comments »
