shadows of echoes of memories of songs

There are some things it's very hard to talk about, but:

invisiblechoir has lamented the fact that every time she thinks of a certain song she loses a certain contest (sorry!). As a result of her mentioning this, I now have the opposite problem: every time I lose said contest, which is quite frequently thanks to the welcome message on this timewasting device, the part of my brain that deals with persistent earworms takes a bullet from the other meme gun.

PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.

A rather sweet spammer writes: "Your site has very much liked me. I shall necessarily tell about him to the friends."

Nothing on the internet has very much liked me, unfortunately: I hard-rebooted the Airport Express (in order to reset the password (in order to reconfigure it to limit connections to specific MAC addresses (in the hope that it might then be faster because nobody e.g. from next door could sneakily steal our bandwidth))) and it stopped working. Does anybody have a spare Airport to save me from the sharks?

( what do you mean 'stopped working'? )

Earlier this year I also broke the Playstation 2, by switching it on, thereby not only stopping us having that particular shade of fun but also preventing Owen from learning to sing. Bad girlfriend. I then tried to buy a replacement on eBay, but it never turned up (though I did finally get a refund).

If I had the same effect on cattle that I seem to have on consumer electronics, I'd have been burned as a witch by now.

I saved this as a draft, and forgot about it. For those of you who are watching today's episode of j4 before going back and catching up with the last few weeks', the quick summary is, I had to talk to some student about 'geek culture' and how women are from Visual Basic and men are from Modula-2. (For those who are watching next season via bittorrent -- does it rain at Glasto 2008? And incidentally, Does She Ever Actually Shag Him?) Anyway, here's the (slightly tidied up) version of what I wrote:

Well that was pointless. I talked to this chap, he didn't seem to have very much clue what he was doing, he looked about 14 and frankly terrified of me, but I tried to answer his questions without too much handwaving/ranting, and filled in his survey, and let him take a picture of The Geek In Her Working Environment, har har. My god, though, my desk is a mess. Coffee and books and a DVD and some half-wilted roses in a vase and biscuits and a contact juggling ball and a stuffed badger and a waving maneki neko and biscuits and speakers and torn-off pages of my poem-a-day calendar (Robert Frost's 'Fire and Ice' yesterday, ace stuff) and cherry 7Up cans and heaps of paper and a hairbrush and a load of books on Ubuntu, XSLT, Perl, SOAP, and Web Design. He asked if he could "observe me working" for an hour, and I panicked and said no. For one thing, I'd have to get my office-mate to agree to it, and for another thing, well, just NO. Also, no.

( vignettes of office life in which our heroine isn't as funny as she thinks she is, and tries to turn little thoughts into a big picture )

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of the user-agent string as a metaphor for gender.

Today I have: managed to book Glasto tickets for me and my mum and EIGHT other people despite EPIC FAIL on the part of seetickets (amazingly there are STILL TICKETS LEFT after several HOURS); tidied the house (a bit); sorted out some stuff to go to charity shops; filed all the boring admin BORING BORING BORING; helped Owen pair A MILLION AND ONE socks (he is very good at pairing my infinite supply of black socks, but we still ended up with about 7 really-definitely-odd ones); played piano (probably pissing off the new neighbours with incompetently-played Rachmaninov preludes); listened to Owen's piano practice (recognisable tunes with BOTH HANDS AT ONCE! did I learn that fast? I wish I could remember); identified all the tasks that we need to do for planning our w*dd*ng (and even made some Decisions, amazingly); made tasty roast chicken (I say 'made', but really, all you do is shove half a lemon up its arse and put it in the oven for an hour and a half, and the 'tasty' owed more to evolution than to the lemon) and tastier plum tart (which I actually did make); and replied to a couple of emails (though the backlog is still doomful).

Today I have not: done the work I was going to do this weekend; got any further with any of the on-the-go knitting projects; written up the EIGHT PAGES OF RANT triggered by the mini-conference I went to on Thursday; read any more of Ulysses.

Look, really, though, I reckon if enough of us joined forces we could write them a better booking system. I seem to remember thinking this last year, too (and this year's is worse).

We could make our millions, honestly (or at least have free gig tickets for the rest of our natural lives).

Who's in?

That dialect meme (that's the LJ definition of both 'dialect' and 'meme', there), stolen from taimatsu).

FWIW, I grew up in or near: Uxbridge (2 years), Crawley Down (4 years), Bramhall (2 years), Loughborough (10 years), and during that time went to 4 different primary schools and one secondary school.

( what do you call... )

My post about intelligent writing for women seems to have started a bit of an argument; apologies to those whose comments I haven't answered as a result.

This afternoon some student wants to interview me about "geek culture" and "the IT profession", for his research. He says "I am especially willing to interview you to find out why IT is still a male dominated territory". Hmmm. I'm keen to find out:

- what he defines as "the IT profession"
- the extent to which it is still "a male dominated territory"
- whether he's asking men about the gender balance in IT, too

I fear it will be too much of a digression to start going on at him about the idea of geek as a gender.

FWIW I don't feel that I'm not a woman, or not female, just that gender really isn't the most important filter for my personal or professional interactions with other people -- geekiness (for want of a better word), literateness, and (now I come to think about it) age all feel like much stronger factors. (Of course, that's when you pull the false-consciousness card out of your hat, and say "ah, there seems no gender because it is all gender! And AS A WOMAN you can't be expected to see clearly that your femaleness informs everything you do at a subconscious level". The only winning move [and I'm not talking about fluttering my eyelashes here] is not to play.)

Lots of other half-formed thoughts, the clearest of which is "why on earth did I say I'd talk to this chap in the first place", which isn't very helpful. :-/

In the US earlier this month, a group of women announced that they were launching a website for women over 40, called wowowow.com (a play on "women on the web" — an address that, tellingly, they had to buy from a porn site). [...]

The wowowow launch is yet another sign that women are offering up intelligent online content that stands in stark comparison to the narrow focus of many of the women's magazines to be found on the news stands. Wowowow's content moves from high culture (an interview with avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson), to economics (an interview with eBay's out going CEO, Meg Whitman) to politics (one of the recent "questions of the day" was "Which four women would you like to see on Mount Rushmore?" The results were: Eleanor Roosevelt, Susan B Anthony, Rosa Parks and, to the evident surprise of some, Hillary Clinton).

The Wow Factor, Guardian G2, 21.03.08

I don't normally seek out women's magazines, web content for women, books for women, and so on; but I noticed this as I was flicking through G2, and decided to have a look at wowowow.com, just out of idle curiosity. (No, I'm not going to link to it; not because I don't want to worry my pretty little head about hyperlinks, but because I don't really want to give it any more googlejuice.)

So let's have a look at this intelligent content. Starting at the top left:

* Star signs
* "Hair day weather" (it's a really good hair day in Rome, apparently)
* Navbar: Home | Conversations | Posts | The Women | Question of the Day | Change the world
* Latest posts (top of the list: "A how-to video made for the technically challenged")
* Today's feature: "Question of the day: what are you doing for Easter?"
* Poll: If you could choose only one, the beauty aid you can't live without
* "She Said He'd Be Sorry" (Fiction: He said she was plumpish. And it was true. She was fattish)
* Question of the Day: "If Senators Clinton, Obama and McCain were cars -- what would they be?"

I actually can't bear to read any further down the home page, let alone click through. And even letting the content (if you can call it that) speak for itself, the design of the site is scrappy and amateurish (though the five powerful women who threw $200,000 each at the site "hired five full-time, web-savvy members of staff", the Guardian tells us). No, that's not me-as-a-woman saying that I don't like the colour because it doesn't go with my shoes; that's me-with-web-hat-on saying "for god's sake, somebody hire them a web designer -- or maybe, since half of the site seems to be glorified blogging, just get them a LiveJournal and switch them to one of the nice default skins." Hell, everybody expects magazines to have advertising, so they could have had a LiveJournal for free and spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars on hair and beauty treatments.

I honestly don't know what intelligent writing for women would look like, or rather how it would differ from intelligent writing (which seems to be pretty scarce in the magazine world anyway) for any other variety of adult; but I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be limited to horoscopes and hairstyles. There is practically nothing that I can think of that I'd want to read about that has any inherent femaleness to it, anything that would make it belong specifically in a "woman's magazine" rather than, say, the Guardian magazine. The only "women's magazine" I do buy is ( slightly naughty ). I don't think that really counts as what the Guardian means by intelligent content.

I'm currently reading Ulysses. Is that a woman's book? Yes I said yes.

Is there a name for the (il)logical pattern that goes something like:

"I believe/think/have experienced X. You believe/think/claim to have experienced not-X. Therefore you are deluding yourself"

?

I've been tagging it as "false consciousness" in my brain, but that's a bit of a misnomer.