Practical advice for rolling out your own community event.

I have to admit that I don't like a lot of pagan fiction. It's preachy, or it's historically revisionist in hamhanded ways -- In The Matriarchy We Didn't Roll Like That, I Tell You What (Until Those Aryans Came) is practically its own subgenre. It may also be that the ways that I think about religion are less reactive than many pagans; reading stories whose thrust is pretty much Secret Pagan Maybe Not Socially Acceptable doesn't interest me unless there's something else going on. It's up there with the Teen Realizes Maybe They Are Gay books for disinterest despite belonging to that group. Please, tell me a story about *anything else* that involves people like me. How about a pagan who's returning home to care for his elderly parents, or a pagan who has to choose between her rock band and her reliable job, or a pagan who solves mysteries now that she's retired? But most of what's out there as explicitly pagan fiction is kind of more like less well written fantasy novels, on one of three really predictable themes. Every so often I try one, but I prefer actual fantasy novels -- and, embarrassingly, sometimes they're closer than the pagan fic. ("Blackmantle" was better than any pagan fiction book I've read for representing characters like me, for example. And that's made-up Celts in space!)

Anyway, every so often, I give pagan fiction another go. This went about as well as it ever does for me, which is to say not very. "Brigid's Charge" is an early American colonial story about a secret witch from England who comes over to marry a Christian and discovers that he's a Quaker. She lives mostly quietly among the community with occasional tension with the patriarchs, until she gives birth to the Jersey Devil. Sort of. It's a weird book, and the author seems to have based it in research on her own family tree to some degree when looking for the historical roots of the Jersey Devil legend. The plot is all over the place, and the story isn't very well paced. There's weird buildups of tension for no real reason. Sure, that happens in history, but you don't really want that in fiction. Nothing ever really gets resolved until the very end, and then suddenly it's very trite. I think what the author was trying to accomplish works better if you're predisposed towards looking for American pagan precedents before Gardner, but that's not really important to me, and the writing doesn't stand on its own as something I could relate to or be engaged by. Two chance meetings out of five.

I also didn't like Kari Sperring's "Living With Ghosts", which surprised me. (I had expected to.) It's a bit too much suspense/horror for me, though, with the feeling of a big looming unseen threat that's going to get you. It's not badly written, it's just not the kind of story that I tend to enjoy. I did like the level of detail brought to developing the city and the elegant but spare descriptions of the physical objects in the world; Sperring does a wonderful job of describing it such that you can almost feel yourself there. Still, I didn't like this book in the same way that I didn't like "Dark City". (So, if you did, this might be for you!) It's good, the world-building is excellent, it's just not for me. Three and a half lurking shadows of death out of five.

I was delightfully surprised by "The Unincorporated Man" -- the Kollin brothers have come up with one of the better premises for a horrifying sci-fi dystopia that I've heard in years, and they deliver on all the promise of it. In this future, everyone is incorporated at birth, your parents get a 20% share, the government gets 5%, and you have to sell shares of your own personal stock in order to finance your education (or anything else you want money for, really -- you are your loans). There's life-extending technology and space travel... and in the beginning of the book, a cryogenics adjustment expert presides over the reanimation of a 300 year old frozen guy they found down in the mine. As he's older than that change in society, he is the only non-incorporated person in the world. Carnage ensues.

The idea of selling shares of yourself is powerfully gut-wrenching to me, so right away the authors had a great gimmick. They explore it without clubbing you over the head with ideology -- I couldn't tell until halfway through the book if the author was a liberal appalled by corporate malfeasance or a libertarian appalled by lack of personal freedom. There are sympathetic characters from all over the political spectrum; I love the major villain. He's not a guy I'd want to sit down and have tea with, but safely in a book he's fascinating and flawed in very human ways. You see him fail. It gives him depth, and when he gets back up you feel you have a much more complete picture of him. There are plenty of political, social, and economic themes explored, and at least so far (I understand there's another book in the series that just came out in hardback) the authors are using them to provoke contemplation rather than to stand on a soapbox. This is the best new sci-fi I think I've read in a couple years; I'm very glad that I picked it up at Tattered Cover. Four and a half nanobots out of five.

I was given Bernd Heinrich's "Why We Run: A Natural History" by miss_adventure; we were both delighted to find out that our favorite naturalist expert on corvids also happens to be a record-holding ultramarathoner. (Dude has talents!) This book is a scientist's love letter to running. He talks about his training leading up to his 62 mile race (when he was already past 40), interspersed with divergences into muscle development and fiber composition in insects, birds, and humans, how to compare the VO2 max of an antelope with that of a swallow or a human runner, what effect diet has on performance, and persistence hunting. It's a long ramble, but all of the parts of it are interesting to the scientifically minded. I don't enjoy running the way he does, but I vicariously enjoyed his running through getting to read about it. If you're a runner, this might be a good pick; four rambles through nature out of five.

I found "The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic" by sheer accident; I was on Paperback Swap looking for a copy of Laney Salisbury's "Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art", and found this book instead. (Based on how much I loved it, I'm totally going to make sure that I chase down "Provenance" too!) I could not put it down; it's the kind of high adventure that commands your attention. I had no idea quite how awful diptheria was as a disease; I am profoundly grateful for vaccination that spares people that horror. The officials of the time had to decide whether to send diptheria-stricken Nome the serum by new and unproven airplane or by arduous but known-good sled dog, and this is the story of the epidemic, its medical containment, and the heroic people and dogs that got the serum out as quickly as caninely possible. It is all the more fascinating for being true; no one could make up history this weird. I had already intended to try to learn how to drive sled dogs this winter, but now I'll be thinking about the people who really needed to know. Five running machines out of five, and the pick of this batch of books.

I originally became aware of "So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction" because blackholly has a story in it, and I generally enjoy her work. And, well, I'm kind of a sucker for fairy tales. The anthology is well put together, though there are a few annoying typos in there that should have been caught before production. (Small presses; it happens sometimes.) I love anthologies for the chance to sample the works of new authors, and indeed, the wishlist has expanded by a few books based on the stories that I liked best. Overall, they were well chosen, mostly not about OMG Teenage And Gay WTF, and many of them were hilariously funny. I'll keep an eye out for other anthologies from Lethe in case I similarly enjoy them. Also, I think this "So Fey" has the shortest record for time spent in my house after I finished it and before I passed it off to someone else; only a few hours. [grin] This is fairy-appreciating country here. Four swishing satyrs out of five.

Surely the most infuriating read in this batch was Melissa Boyle Mahle's "Denial and Deception: An Insider's View of the CIA". It is horrifying. I will admit that I had an incorrect view of the tone of her book from the cover -- I like spy books, and being "featured on the Daily Show" did lead me to think that she wasn't going to be a hard authoritarian. But wow, is she ever. The book claims to be an analysis of how there was sufficient intelligence failure that we didn't see 9/11 coming well enough to prevent it. Her answer is basically "after the Cold War, we got soft, we got cowardly, we stopped with the secret militias and we shouldn't have, we stopped having worldwide presence and we shouldn't have, we cut manpower and funding and we shouldn't have". She takes the tack that if you're going to be a world-spanning empire, BE a world-spanning empire. Obviously, this is not my political cup of tea. I grit my teeth and kept on reading it anyway, since I do try to periodically read things that I disagree with in order to better understand other points of view. But... wow. Her discussion on Iran-Contra is something like "Okay, we lied to Congress about engaging in an illegal war to overthrow a democratically elected government in another country... but they were leftists, so fuck 'em". (No, really, she pretty much says that.) This makes her difficult to read without throwing the book across the room.

Her descriptions of CIA culture and their utter dedication to the mission, serious embracing of "deny everything", and complete lack of apologizing for any of the various illegal, immoral, or otherwise fucked up things they did in the name of the mission are awful to read; it's totally Get Off My Team. The intelligence people I've met have seemed quite reasonable individuals, but Mahle's descriptions of operational culture there make everyone sound like a bunch of sociopaths. Super, super creepy. I did find bits of it useful to have read -- hearing about their perception of now-Secretary of Defense Gates and how he was perceived to have performed as director of the CIA, for example, was fascinating. The story Mahle tells is necessarily somewhat disjointed, and there's two conventions in text for redacting information (italics to show what the CIA wanted taken out of the first edition, blackout block text for what they wanted taken out of the second edition), which is useful. Still, reading it, one *has* to take it with a giant grain of salt... when she spends the whole book telling you how she unapologetically lied publicly all the time to get the mission done, it's hard not to wonder what she's trying to accomplish with writing and speaking, and how much of that is true. Three and a half heebie jeebies out of five.

• @cmartin0 Oh, I used to redirect error output all the time, usually for cron jobs with expected but unimportant errors. in reply to cmartin0 #
• It's almost time! Are you in the cool kid's club? http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1009qpeijrfn/event #
• Holy crap, I wish WoW looked as nice as Project Sword #
• HDR *photos* to iPad? What does this mean?! #
• .@cowtacular You could TOTALLY swallow the new ipod shuffle. #
• I can has nano? #
• I think I'm going to the Apple Store and buying a Nano and an Apple TV ASAP. #
• So I pre-ordered an Apple TV. Gonna wait to play with the nano first, though… #
• Super hyper now. And the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack is reminding me of how awesome Scott Pilgrim was. Highly recommended, will watch again! #

My neighbor keeps getting terrible renditions of this song stuck in my head. I like the original much more!

Also, I like this fan video much more than the official video.

Via Mashable

Interactions between LJ and Facebook flow in one direction: People who interact regularly with mimerki are likely welcome to know me on FB (where my public persona likes archaeology links and things like that); people who know me on FB should only know mimerki through invitation. Please don't share my content to FB or Twitter. If I wanted to share info there, I would.

Also, as a PSA: I am no longer the only Mimerki on the internet. Someone else claimed the username on Twitter. I do not have a Twitter account and if I add one I'll probably let ya'll know (and whinge about it almost as much as I do about FB).

I suppose it’s not that much stranger than Kingdom Hearts… Full Metal Disney (via @jzy and @codinghorror)

• RT @codinghorror: RT @TALlama: @codinghorror more unicode humor:
  ☃+☼=♒ #
• @cmartin0 updatedb; locate foo ? in reply to cmartin0 #
• @zombieite I enjoy almost all theater vastly more than almost all movies. in reply to zombieite #
• @BethSkw Why is your page trying to make me log into twitter? I'm not doing it. in reply to BethSkw #
• I kinda want to switch banks just my current bank is so very bad with this computer stuff. #
• @mcgrof I deal with checks so very rarely that I would probably never get to use that feature. in reply to mcgrof #
• Are all credit unions so insufferable in matters of technology? Is this the tradeoff we make for good int. rates and good customer service? #
• No more bank madness, no more troubleshooting rails apps – Time for lunch! http://bit.ly/cJ5VX6 #
• Amusing: the # of people that give odd looks when you remove license plates on the side of a busyish street, esp. since no one SAYS anything #

I am pleased with how these turned out. (The cookies, not the blurry photo.)



Hopefully they'll help us raise some money for Child's Play this weekend!

a cat named linux, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

In memory of our old family cat, my sister's old kitty: Linux.
1996 - 31st August 2010.

-->

• @ptreadwell I think 'filming' would still work, even though it, too, is a euphemism. The title is still very purple though. in reply to ptreadwell #
• @ptreadwell Or foo-foo mixed drink vomit :) in reply to ptreadwell #
• It needs to rain harder so I don't need to wash my car. NY is going to get some very dirty license plates mailed back to them! #
• @vertigojones Then I'd just have dry crusty soap and icky pollen and dirt on it. It's not even close to raining out. in reply to vertigojones #
• @slithy_toves That's terrible! Same eye? in reply to slithy_toves #
• @slithy_toves Well, as long as the surgery in the other eye "took" then hopefully you will be in the clear after this! in reply to slithy_toves #
• @jhelwig Once my OR insurance becomes active, my NY insurance goes away, and NJ will charge me $8/day for having plates w/o insurance. in reply to jhelwig #
• @zombieite: Better start drinkin'! http://bit.ly/9u6C4o #
• How is the built-in XSS protection in #RoR 3 any different from the old #php magic_quotes? Isn't this a known, explored, failure? #
• @waquo Can we trust it to determine the right place reliably, though? I'm sure the PHP folks thought that was the right place, too. in reply to waquo #
• @waquo Too lazy (or inexperienced) to protect against SQL injection seems similar to too lazy to protect against XSS in reply to waquo #
• @waquo I worry about code that has already been written securely, and forward compatibility. Reconfiguring everything to turn this off=bleh in reply to waquo #

Attention, dog people! This is for you.

Via Ladies of the PQ

This post entitled Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men was making the rounds when I got back from camping yesterday. It's a "just do it" rallying cry, which is not unreasonable (more women trying will likely result in more succeeding) but one that's made a bit blindly, unaware of some of the barriers that those who try are facing.

There's already an excellent response out there which says most of what I wanted to say: Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Playing the Blame Game. Basically, quit trying to blame it all on men or women or society or math test scores and try working together to create solutions. All of these things (and more) are to blame, but pointing it out isn't nearly as helpful as finding work-arounds.

But there's still one thing I'd like to pull out of the original article:

We beg women to come and speak. (...) And you know what? A lot of the time they say no. Because they are literally hounded to speak at every single tech event in the world because they are all trying so hard to find qualified women to speak at their conference.

Let me tell you a story. One year, it was announced that one student in my department was going to get a special job. Over the months afterwards, I heard a lot of grumbling. The problem was not that said student couldn't do the job: the person was an excellent candidate. The problem was that the student had been the only candidate. The university had quite a number of other talented students, and they had not been made aware of the upcoming position or given a chance to apply. The person who got the job was the same person regularly nominated for special scholarships, invited to special events, seemingly given first right of refusal in many other projects. The upper academia equivalent of a teacher's pet.

The problem was that the university saw themselves as having a single exceptional candidate, when in fact they had probably 10, 30, or more.

I think this is what's starting to happen when it comes to women in tech. Sure, there might not be enough of us. Sure, it's no where near the 50% of the population. But that doesn't mean you get to ask the 5 women you know or have seen speak before and then sigh and say "it's too bad no women want to participate." Like the university, you're probably missing at least 10 times as many who are qualified, but haven't been quite so heaped with honours so they're harder to find.

If all the women you're asking are all busy, it's not necessarily a sign that all possible excellent candidates are busy; it could just be a sign that you're looking in the same place as everyone else.

Because I interact with a lot of other techcnical women, I know there are many good people who just don't hear about speaking opportunities. And others have so many requests they can't handle them all.

So in the spirit of being useful, here's some wider places you should look if you're trying to find some great women speakers. Maybe not all of them have given keynotes and been interviewed a dozen times, but they're still interesting people who could enhance your event:

• The Grace Hopper 2010 schedule includes a many women speakers on a number of topics. (I'm on the open source track!) I found the calibre of speakers at GHC 09 to be especially high, so it's a great place to start when looking for a great speaker. Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of candidates? Talk to @ghc and ask for help making the right connections.



• Geekspeakr.com is intended to help events find technical women speakers and vice versa. You can search by keywords or just browse around. These folk have all signed up saying they're willing to speak!



• My university Women in Science and Engineering group ran the Carleton Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering last spring, and I was especially impressed with the the technical speakers during the day (i.e. before 5pm) because they were presenting graduate level research and ideas in ways that were accessible and fascinating. These women are definitely a cut above when it comes to science communicators!
  
  
• There are many women's groups around you can ask. I'm a member of Systers (originally for women in SYStems, now a more general women in technology group) and Linuxchix (a group for women and allies interested in Linux or other open source). But there's lots more such groups.

And that's only scratching the surface of places I'd look if I wanted to find good female speakers. Need some more help? Just ask!

School is gearing up again for the fall, and one of the biggest challenges my first year students seem to face is time management. So here's a small lesson from Professor Greg Wilson:

Rule 1: It’s Not Thirteen Weeks, It’s Three

This was the hardest one for me to learn, and it’s almost always the hardest to get across to both students and their clients. University terms may be thirteen weeks long, but students are usually juggling five courses, and many have part-time jobs as well. That means they can only put eight hours a week into their project without sacrificing grades somewhere else. If you figure a full-time work week is 35 hours, that means students actually spend 8×13/35 = a bit less than three weeks working for you.

Take a look at the rest of his excellent post on Three Rules for Supervising Student Programming Projects for some other hints about what his most successful students had in common. It's interesting reading for mentors, teachers and students.

My dad and brother are doing Itikhaaf this year. I don’t think my dad has done it before but my brother has in Saudia Arabia. I am curious if he does it in the Masjid Al-Haram or any of the other masjids. They spend the last 10 nights of Ramadhan in the masjid. They sleep the days (except when they have to wake up to pray) and wake the nights in devotion and extra prayer. Yes they can do extra prayer during the days too. They can’t leave unless to get food or some emergency.

They both have a wife and daughter at home, not doing Itikhaaf. I can guarantee you that one of those daughters is not going to be much help. She’s not yet 3! :)

Thankfully the masjid has a working fridge and stove. The oven hasn’t been used in ages so they won’t use that. We’ll leave one five-gallon container of water with them and they’ll get the toaster oven. I told mom we can stock the freezer with a bag of fries and frozen fish sticks. We will partly bake some little beef pies that mom made and they can finish them up in the oven. And when we cook dinner we will carry it down for them. But since they will keep a car, maybe they can also come pick it up. I told them they can also expect KFC and Pizza and other food I feel like going and buying. After all, we might not be doing Itikhaaf but we will also have/want to spend the nights in extra devotion. My sister-in-law will make sure they’re stocked with snacks. Maybe we’ll move some of the niece’s into the masjid. I haven’t had chinese food in ages. Since my brother has been home I’ve not made pizza.

Empty house. Woohoo. My sister-in-law might spend some time by her mother. I tried to convince my mom she should do it too. Women don’t do it in the masjid. They kinda sequester themselves in part of the house, I think. Imagine…whole house too myself! Woohoo! Unfortunately no.

Now, you might be wondering what is the point of Itikhaaf.

When the prophet was 40 years old, he was spending a night in Ramadhan in the Cave Hira in prayer and devotion. The Angel Jibra’il came to him for the first time then. He received his first revelation. It was the first five verses of Suratul Alaq (Chapter 96 The Clot):

Read in the Name of your Lord, who has created,
Has created man from a clot
Read! And your Lord is Most Generous
Who has taught (the writing) by the pen
Has taught man that which he knew not.

This night is called The Night of Power. Worshipping Allah in that night is better than worshipping Him in a thousand months. So if you catch that night in prayer and devotion you will be…well very blessed.

The problem is nobody knows when the night is. The prophet was made to forget the actual date. Some people say it is the 27th. Some say it is in the last 10 nights. The strongest proofs and the general consensus is that it is in the odd nights of the last 10.

Some people don’t go so far. They just say it is in Ramadhan!

And that is the point of Itikhaaf.
You spend the nights of the last 10 in prayer and devtion, in search of the Night of Power. If you spend all those 10 nights praying (yes you can rest if you need to), you will obviously catch it.

What this really means is we’re coming down to the end!

My brother and father will “sequester” themselves in the masjid sometime Tuesday during the day. This will be the 20th fast and so they will be in the masjid before the start of the 21st day (that is Tuesday sunset!). until the end of Ramadhan (Ramadan will end at sunset before the day we go to the masjid for Eid prayers). Most likely Eid prayers will be Friday 10th and so it will actually be 9 nights?

Why did work have to start back now?
*sigh*

Today is the 18th fast.
I’m getting extremely tired and sleepy now.

I think I mentioned Itikhaaf or the Night of Power briefly in some previous posts here and here.

At first our Jam experience seemed like a failure. We had two attend, and one of them was me. Thank goodness for Charles (acerimmer); his arrival made the afternoon fun. The first difficulty was Internet connectivity -- my laptop reported that it was getting a good wireless connection, but I was only able to use IRC and get webpages for about 10 minutes in the four hours at the library.

So the ability to connect with others around the state, and around the world was pretty much nil.

Technically, I was unable to load Kubuntu Mav in a virtualbox. I found out from Charles that I had not allocated enough memory, and that K/ubuntu's package might be missing a crucial xorg.conf file. Since the Kubuntu developers didn't mention this last point, more investigation is needed.

Also, I was unable to fully load the Mav LiveCD. I found out that my issues were not uncommon: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/TechnicalOverview. This is still alpha software, after all.

My liveUSB key was also a fail, giving the same error message to both me and Charles. I found out that it wasn't my fault, but that of Lucid. After removing that useless LiveUSB install from my cute little 8-gig USB key, I copied the ISO onto it, but Charles was unable to load it into a virtualbox on his laptop either -- incompatible 64-bit systems! I'm not sure what that's about, but hope he'll file a bug about it.

After we talked some about upcoming LoCo events, we decided to leave early. We had both run out of options for testing.

However, the Jam continues through Sunday, and once I got home and got connected again, androidbruce gave me a great idea: swap out my present hard drive for my old backup one, and install on that! Although I was unsuccessful at partitioning off the old backup, which is mostly music, not much harm done to lose it, either. I had hoped to save it, just to be able to play some music during testing. Oh, well! So, as Scarlett O'Hara so wisely observed, Tomorrow is another day!

PS: Also -- more publicity is better! Craigslist? Any other ideas for spreading the word?