I took an evening flight from SFO to Tucson last night. It was a full flight on a small plane and I’m pretty sure half the people on the plane were headed to the Grace Hopper Conference.
When I got tmy hotel room I opened the sliding doors, stepped out onto the balcony and looked up and immediately saw Cassiopeia.
I left the door open to let in fresh warm air and got a bunch of moths flying around so I captured most of them and sent them back outside — too bad there isn’t a screen door.
cloud spackling
This morning I woke up to this view of a hillside of cacti and street lines of clouds.
they're everywhere
I met some new friends for breakfast (Moya introduced me to Anne who introduced me to Patricia and then Colleen complimented my shoes and then others also showed up for breakfast!). I got my registration badge and Hopper assignment and couldn’t figure out how to order the colors and words. This is what I ended up with – trying not to make the green and red look to christmas-ish!
ordering decision
My hackintosh is back to 10.5.6 after a trial run with snow leopard. I’m hoping this NetBookInstaller/NetBookMaker get some bugs fixed soon for mic & headphones – it’s a much cleaner path to hackintoshing! Thanks, Meklort!
Sarah Franklin, South Portland, Maine school teacher for 45 years, “Schools should be safe havens for children, places where all children feel welcome, accepted, and safe” <– what she said!
Give this No on 1 campaign a few bucks to help them put and keep this ad on the air and hope that Maine doesn’t have the same experience as California-post-Prop8.
And Sam Putnam, this gorgeous kid? Give him more airtime! I’m curious why the women with him are described as his mother and her partner — aren’t they both his mothers?
I do a lot of griping and complaining and bitching about how the tech industry and tech conferences are so gender unbalanced. I’ve been using computers since I was a young girl and been attending plenty of tech conferences for the past 15 years.
My first computer
Some of my griping comes from my experience in college where I was often the only girl (or one of 2 or 3 girls) in a math or statistics or computer science or other geeky class. Some of it comes from my work experience of often being the only woman in a meeting or on a team or being asked if I’m the assistant when attending a meeting with a male colleague or employee (I’m not the assistant – I’m the head muckracker, a.k.a. Chief Scientist). I discovered Systers (and other women-in-tech listservs) in the early 1990′s when I started my first job out of college (working on a mostly male team) and I’m still subscribed to the Systers email list. My grandma worked in math and science her whole life and was often the only woman in a room, on a team, and was always horribly unfairly underpaid. Basically I have a bit of history with my cynical feeling towards the lack of gender balance in tech.
A few years ago my wife went to the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference and loved it. I’ve been trying to go to it ever since (they provide free childcare!). Last year I applied to be a Hopper (volunteering in exchange for free conference registration) and was accepted. I declined because marriage became legal in California and my wife and I got married right around the time of last year’s conference.
This year I applied again to be a Hopper and was accepted and now I have a plane ticket and a hotel reservation and a list of devices and power chargers and cables to bring and I’ll be on my way next week!
I idealistically believe and hope that the tech industry will join the current millenium and catch up to other professional industries, like medicine and law, where there is a gender balance. I also hope that people who are leaders in the tech industry, particularly men, will continually point to and try to eradicate this inbalance instead of shrugging their shoulders and saying not much can be done or that they don’t know what to do.
In my ideal world, I would always attend tech conferences that had a decent gender balance, but that mostly doesn’t exist … yet. My favorite conference, so far, that has a good balance of people and has a bit of geekiness to it is the Gel Conference each year in NYC.
I’m thrilled to be going to a tech conference with the gender pendulum swinging the other way for once – where the conference will be mostly women instead of mostly men. I’m not super comfortable with any gender imbalance, but if I had to choose, I’d rather swing back and forth between “mostly men” and “mostly women” to try to obtain a balance, and not always be with just men or just women.
Lucy with her great-grandma in 2006
Our daughter Lucy, currently 5 years old, wants to be a scientist when she grows up. She came up with that on her own (and I do my best to modulate my excitement about her interest in science). My wife and I tell her she can try to be anything she wants, including a princess who rides on a unicorn (this morning, “Mommy, I hope unicorns are really real in real life. I don’t want unicorns to only be pretend”).
I hope my daughter is never the only woman on a team or in a meeting, and I hope she’s always paid for her worth and skills and experience, not for her worth+skills+experience with a discount for her female gender. My grandma would be so proud to know her great-grandaughter wants to be a scientist, and my grandma would’ve loved something like the GHC and Anita Borg Institute if groups and conferences like that had existed in the 1930′s when she was looking for her first job after finishing grad school.
I know a domestic partnership is not a marriage. I have one of each. I’m in a legal domestic partnership which has been superseded by my legal marriage in California. Unless, of course, I leave my home state and travel somewhere where my marriage is not recognized but maybe my domestic partnership is. At the very least, the legal definition of my relationship with our child is still mommy, all over the world, and it’s our child (as well as the mortgage on our house) that legally tie us together regardless of laws.
In Feb 2004, my wife and I were married at San Francisco City Hall.
San Francisco City Hall, Feb 14 2004
When the California Supreme Court invalidated our marriage in August 2004, we became domestically partnered within days to protect our rights when our daughter was born (my wife was pregnant and our daughter was born in late August, shortly after our marriage was invalidated). We don’t have any photos of our domestic partnership form signing.
Then we were married on Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver, BC in March 2007.
Kitsilano Beach, March 31 2007
We were married in San Francisco in Golden Gate Park in October 2008 and in May 2009 the California Supreme Court decided that our marriage was still legal.
San Francisco, October 5 2008
The campaigns to reject referendum 71 in Washington State have brought out arguments to reject referendum 71 because it’s “everything but marriage.” That’s a big fat lie. Domestic partnership is nothing like marriage.
According to Wikipedia, one is very legalese and the other is very touchy feely, guess which one?
A domestic partnership is a legal or personal relationship between two individuals who live together and share a common domestic life but are neither joined by marriage nor a civil union.
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between individuals that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged by a variety of ways, depending on the culture or demographic.
They’re both a legal state, but marriage is usually associated with romance – look at the words in the Wikipedia definition: kinship, interpersonal, intimate, sexual, acknowledged – and domestic partnership has a negative definition: “share … but are neither joined …”
From the records of our family and our relationship, it’s clear that a marriage means photos and flowers and fancy clothes and people showing up and a party and lots of documentation and gifts and records and cards and photo albums. A domestic partnership is a legal document kept in a safe with copies kept with us when we travel (in case someone questions our legal relationship in a time when we need to be recognized as something other than “friends”).
We don’t have any photos from the day we were domestically partnered at the California Secretary of State’s office. We didn’t throw a party and we didn’t send out announcements or receive gifts or dress up or buy flowers — and we didn’t invite anyone and nobody showed up to toast us. There was a bike messenger in front of us in line and my wife was 9 months pregnant and a woman was reluctant to let her use a bathroom.
The “deny domestic partnership” crowd is afraid of their children learning about gay people in school, but their children are already learning about gay people in school. Children with gay and lesbian parents are sitting next to their children in school. They claim that domestic partnership is “everything but marriage.” It’s not.
Domestic partnership rights protect families and children. The Prop 8 groups in California even conceded (and argued in court) that it was okay with them to give domestic partnership rights to gay and lesbian couples, just not marriage (though we are still married and our marriage seems to be doing no harm to any children or schools in California).
Without domestic partnership rights, gay and lesbian couples can jump through legal hoops to take care of each other — and pay legal bills that seem like a gay tax.
Approve Referendum 71 in Washington and retain dignity and responsibility and rights for people who already do more than most couples to secure their legal ties to each other and protect their relationship.
City Hiker, MUNI rider, Parent, Early Adopter, Cocktail Mixer, LGBT rights activist, Chief Scientist and Usability Curmudgeon and Bug Finder at OTIVO, Reader, Pianist, married to Moya
San Francisco, CA
lwaldal at gmail dot com More about me
