I've noticed lately that I've been reading the weirdest mix of articles and blog entries to the end, but closing, or bookmarking and forgetting, many other articles that seem like they should be of use or interesting to read. This really grabbed my attention last night when I noticed that two tabs I'd left open in Firefox since Friday involving stuff I can do to make my KDE install on my laptop lighter weight were sitting there without even being skimmed first, yet I ended up opening a link from a syndication feed talking about flu vaccines and antivirals, and how they may not be as effective as common perception believes, and finished reading the whole long ass article in one sitting. (Here's the article in question: Does the Vaccine Matter?) Not only did I read the whole article, I ended up wandering wikipedia on the topic for a little bit, and checking out information on other flu pandemics that have happened in recent history.

As of last night, I couldn't have told you why I was having this weird shift in focus, I know I have the attention span for long works of writing. Heck, I've been known to sit and read whole articles on wikipedia simply because it was there for me to read. Then it occurred to me when I was attempting to read an article on the Danger/Microsoft server failure fiasco. The problem isn't the content of the articles and the blog entries, it's the absolute failure in these articles to communicate. I was actually interested in what happened with the Sidekick server failure, because at one point in time I had been interested in owning a Sidekick. The people writing the articles spend too much time wanking, take forever to get to the point and basically I get bored waiting to get to the point and give up on the article.

As a person who considers one of her favorite authors to be Neal Stephenson, I should be able to claim I have some degree of patience when it comes to getting to the point in a written piece of work. However, I do also have a high level of expectation on the quality of the writing. If the writing can't be considered prose, if there isn't enough links to outside information or information included in the article to bring me up to speed on all the names being used, or if more than three-quarters of the article is occupied by random shit that doesn't actually reference the title that brought me in to read, I don't have the patience for it.

I originally posted this on KubuntuForums.net, but I felt that I put enough long winded effort and I have little enough overlap between there and here that I would repost this here in hopes of opening dialog with some of you who read my journal.

The last few days, I've been watching things pop up on the various syndication feeds and news sites I watch about Shuttleworth's sexist comments in his keynote at LinuxCon. Reading these things, I was concerned about it, but I elected to try to reserve my judgment until I could find a transcript of the keynote, or find a video to watch it.

For those of you who missed the hubbub, I'll link you to the blog post which finally pointed me to where I could see the keynote for myself: Mark Shuttleworth's Community Has No Women.

My first impression was some annoyance. As a female, and a geeky techy one at that, I have encountered a lot of the sexism that the various articles and blog entries I've seen are complaining about, so the idea that someone who is the spearhead of the distribution I use is supporting this steaming pile of dren did concern me, to make a minor understatement. The quote that seemed particularly condemning was this one:

"How many of you guys know Till [Kamppeter]... making sure that your printer, your mom's printer, my grandma's printer just work out of the box...if we can do the same with sound, if we can do the same with wi-fi, we can do the same for various other amazing subsystems that are going to come into the kernel...if we approach this from the perspective of saying "How do we make this just awesome for end users" then we'll have less trouble explaining to girls what we actually do."

However, the other thing I've noticed a lot of commentary on is his choice of male pronouns and to use the word "guys" instead of people quite frequently. This irritated me greatly. I am not objecting to his speech ticks and I'll address those in a minute, but these complaints made me think of the women who have done such damage to the feminist cause by contorting it in the name of trying to further it. I'm sure everyone in this forum has encountered at least one of these women... the sort that instead of striving for equality, they speak down about men, they act like they're entitled to reparations for the abuses foisted upon our foremothers (as they always b*stardize "masculine" words into a more "feminine" form), and feel that equality should only apply where it is beneficial to them, not to pesky things like jail sentences, child custody, alimony payments or military service. My perspective on feminism is one of frustration because of women like this, and this mess that was sparked by Shuttleworth's keynote is only serving to bring to the forefront why I think my own gender is part of the reason I still make less than my male coworkers who I either out perform or are at least on par with. Before I go off on more of a tangent, I'll get back to my original point.

I did say I would address his speech ticks, so here's my take on them. I consider myself at least a little bit of a literary nerd. I grew up reading early and often, chewing through books like most kids would go through crayons and candy, and even dipping into my mother's extensive fantasy collection at a younger age than most people would have expected. My heroes are people like William Shakespeare, Neal Stephenson, Ray Bradbury, Franz Kafka, JRR Tolkien, HP Lovecraft, HG Wells, and Neil Gaiman. To say I am a little familiar with the English language, even if it is mostly the American b*stardized version of it, is probably a safe thing to say.

With these statements sitting out there as my credentials, I will say that I am not offended by Shuttleworth's use of male pronouns and frequent use of guys were the pseudo-feminists insist he should have used words like people or team instead. Talk to an English language nerd, talk to someone who does formal writing a lot, and they will tell you it is general convention to use the male pronoun when speaking of hypothetical people instead of using the casually accepted "gender neutral" them or they. If using the male pronoun offends your gender equal "sensibilities" it is then considered more correct to use the female pronouns in their place, instead of lapsing to them and they. Some of my role play books do this quite happily, White Wolf in particular uses entirely female pronouns when speaking of their hypothetical players in the character building and game play examples. So Shuttleworth using a lot of masculine pronouns didn't bother me in the least.

To address "guys" in particular, I will point out that in common casual conversation, particularly with those who are in their teens and twenties, it is normal for someone to use a word like guys or dude without care to what gender they are addressing. There are also lots of examples of other words that have both male and female forms where the male form is considered acceptable when addressing a mixed group or even when addressing the female alone. Watching the video, listening to him speaking, it sounded like Shuttleworth was simply trying to speak comfortably with a group of his peers. While one could debate the merits of that approach within a keynote speech at a conference, it is certainly a smaller crime than the attempts to use these speech patterns as evidence of his sexism. I'll even admit that these speech patterns are sexist, but they are not sufficient evidence of Shuttleworth's sexism, they are simply a symptom of long standing sexism within the English language.

I am angry about Shuttleworth's implication that women are inept enough at computer usage that they require things to be dumbed down significantly in order to just tell them about it. I am angry that everything I've heard so far tells me he does not care or does not understand what he said was so wrong. I can give him the benefit of the doubt, and guess that perhaps he's partially overwhelmed by the pseudo-feminists who are not only attacking his statements that were wrong, but are also attacking minor issues that are a symptom of the language reflecting its roots in people who were very sexist.

All that said, Shuttleworth is by far not the only sexist person within the open source community, he is probably far from the worst offender either. He just happened to have been the big money behind a project that is popular, and therefore in the focus of a large number of people. Such things get people lynched over minor things, where the raging idiot, who thinks all women should be barefoot pregnant in the kitchen, that happens to work on xyz section of the kernel, doesn't get noticed because he doesn't have any friends to start with.

I would like for Mark Shuttleworth to realize what he said was wrong, I would like for him to apologize and learn from his mistakes... but I'm not going to jump ship on my distribution of choice because of his poor choice of words in a keynote speech at a conference I didn't even attend and wouldn't have even watched if it weren't for the drama around his poor choice of words. The other things he said in the speech were actually interesting and some of them were even useful and helpful commentary on the open source community. A lot of it seemed to be pretty words to me, but sometimes it takes someone with money and pretty words to coordinate enough people to get things done.

I am sitting at the dealership, and they're poking away at my car right now. The problem they thought that was leading to my cooling fan not coming on turned out to be not the issue, but luckily they had the part needed to replace what really was the issue. The good news is that they have wifi, so I've been able to entertain myself while waiting... and my dad works here, so they've been extra nice to me. My dad took me out to lunch also.

There is still something else wrong with the car, but the joy of having a Kia is that the car's laid out kinda poorly under the hood and is especially hard to work with unless you have tiny tiny hands, or you pull the whole damn thing apart. Either way, not fun. I have been told they should be almost done though, so hopefully I'll be on my way soon.

I did pull a stupid this morning though... luckily my mom was able to help me out. In my rush to make it out the door, because I woke up later than I should have for the time my dad recommended I get here, I forgot to grab the original parts they thought needed replacing... and they didn't have those on hand here. Luckily my mom brought the parts out to me, so they were able to still do the work. I just have to pick her up some nice beer in return. Certainly not a bad deal, it saves me from having to come back a second time... and considering how long it took me to make it in to start with, it would have been even longer before I made it back.

In other news, I have switched my network manager on my laptop, and the new one works worlds better than the old one. The old one used the KDE wallet application to store the passwords, which delayed connection every time I logged in. I'm using Wicd now, and it saves the passwords in itself, so it'll automagically connect upon login. I'm up and running faster now. I'm also hoping that this will resolve some of the connection issues at my friend's house, as he uses some weirdo router for his network, and all his windows machines work fine... so he implies it's linux that's the issue.

For some reason that I am completely and utterly perplexed and unable to understand, I have somehow ended up on the mailing list for Mid Ohio Con. I do not live in or near Ohio, I do not recall doing anything that would put me on the mailing list for such a convention, yet for some reason I've been receiving emails about their convention like someone thinks I want information.

I have emailed them requesting they remove me from their list. We'll see if they behave or not.

Last Thursday marked 26 years on this planet for me. I spent the day hiding from the world at my boyfriend's house. Birthdays seem to make me more anti-social than I normally am, so I've taken to disappearing on the day of my birthday if I can. drwho4 had to work, so I was left alone to hide until he got home around five, then we went out for dinner and caught a movie. Dinner was at some local Mexican restaurant, and the movie was District 9. The former was okay, and I got free dinner on account of it being my birthday, the latter is probably one of the very small number of films I've seen that could qualify as hard Science Fiction.

My birthday party kinda had mixed results. I had more people show up for dinner than I expected to, and had a few people fail to show up for the karaoke that I had thought would. Also didn't help that we're in the middle of Back to School season at work... which leads to an excess of customers and not enough time and staffing to clean and do other administrative stuff, and where people were expecting to be out the door at 9:30, they ended up out over an hour late and missing 90% of happy fun karaoke time.

Those who did manage to join me for the karaoke and the dinner were greatly appreciated and much fun was had by all. Our waitress at the restaurant was absolutely awesome, took great care of us... and even gave me my birthday sundae without putting me through the singing stuff when I'd mentioned having a coupon for my birthday burger. :D Karaoke was at Amador Karaoke, which opened within the last half a year and they've been super friendly every time we've been in. There was Filking (awesome lyrics thanks to Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff), challenging gender roles and glow sticks. There will likely be some video evidence posted to YouTube, if you guys are lucky, I may even post a link or embed it at some point.

Here's a list of goodies I scored, vaguely in the order I received them:

• Sago Palm - from my mom. I'd had one before, but it got knocked off the wall outside my front door by a neighborhood cat, and the roots got damaged which caused it to die. The new one is bigger, and Mom included a pretty pot with kokopelli on it.
• Watchmen Director's Cut DVD - from drwho4, a self professed Homer Simpson gift... though one that I will most certainly enjoy. Hooray for big blue radioactive cock!
• 320GB internal hard drive - also from drwho4. This will be the drive on which my primary partition of my desktop machine will soon reside. Currently, the desktop's primary partition is on a 30GB drive that I've had in my machine since originally building it way back in 2001.
• A Toshiba Satellite L305-S5955 - This gift I will talk more about later in this entry. It was also from drwho4.
• 42 and Linux Inside Case Badges - from my friends who usually host friday night game night. The Linux Inside one has already been placed upon the above mentioned Toshiba Laptop. :D
• Digital Message Tape, small - from the same friends who gave me the case badges. The pen that came with it was dried out, but an ultra-fine sharpie works just as well.
• Cookies from one of my other game night friends.
• Peacock feather earrings and necklace - from my mother. I will likely have to take a picture wearing them in order to properly do them justice. I wore the earrings for karaoke, but will need to get used to the necklace before wearing it out.
• Munchkin Expansions, numbers 4 and 5 - from another one of my game night friends. This brings my Munchkin collection up to the core set, expansions 3, 4 & 5 and a set up level counter dice.
• 2GB of ram for my desktop computer - from the crazy person who is my Assistant Store Manager at work.
• Balloons - from the nice people at the karaoke place. One of them actually says Over the Hill on it, which amuses me so because I only turned 26.

So, as promised, on to the topic of the laptop. First and foremost, I named her Serenity, and she was freed of her Windows shackles pretty quickly. drwho4 handed her over after he got home on my birthday, and we decided to let her charge while we went out for dinner & movie, and I downloaded the kubuntu 9.04 install disc using his Apple laptop. Upon arrival home, an install disc was burned and install progressed quite happily. Wireless worked straight out of the install, and I installed updates and started adjusting settings pretty quickly.

Upon my getting home with her Friday night, I did start copying over files from my desktop computer. My custom purple KDE colors, my settings and config files for Firefox, search engine plugins and all those lovely goodies that make a computer happier. At work on Friday night, I picked up a pretty little Logitech V220 mouse with a blue scroll design on it. I've had the solid blue version on my desktop computer for almost two-thirds to three-quarters of a year now, so I knew it would be a happy fit.

I also attached stickers to Serenity to make her prettier. I have a nice Babyland sticker on her, the Linux Inside case badge and a Jinx horny skull. I will have to take pictures and show both Jinx and Babyland they are loved enough to decorate my laptop. :D I am also considering if there are other stickers that need to be attached to the laptop, but for now she's probably pretty good.

I am so proud of myself though, I have successfully both doing a remote desktop share and an ssh connection through the terminal to have my laptop remotely control my desktop. This bodes well for my being able to copy over files and use the desktop as a file server for my media and crap. I just need to keep playing around with it and learn how to make use of the video and audio streaming through VLC. :D

I do have a little bit more to go through on the topic of birthday... my dad's insisting on having a birthday-ish BBQ thing at his house next weekend... to celebrate mine, his and his parents birthdays (his is a couple days later than the BBQ, and theirs were back in July). I need to come up with birthday presents for all three of them... and I am still pondering solutions. Hopefully will be able to figure something out before Saturday. Have a couple ideas... just gotta see if I can make them work out.