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.

Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite authors, and this quote from him, which I read in an article in the NY Times (A Literary Ledgent Fights for a Local Library), has just endeared him to me that much more:

“Libraries raised me, I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

While I don't actually make much use of the library, instead electing to borrow books from friends, or spend what little spare cash I have on acquiring books to keep for my own, in a way building my own library, I understand the importance the library plays in the lives of people who either can't budget to buy their own books, or aren't privileged enough to be surrounded by people who also enjoy reading. Also, while my reasoning for lack of faith in the colleges and universities, I can agree with both his reasoning for lack of faith in them, as well as identify with the sentiment due to my own experiences.

Also mentioned in this article is his dislike of the internet. This makes me sad, as to some degree the internet serves the same role that libraries do, making information much more available to the masses. I can understand that it's sometimes hard to sort the signal from the noise, but the same problem can arise in the library too. I used to spend time in the Castro Valley library, when I was growing up, but it didn't take me long to get frustrated there as once I started looking for good science fiction, all of it was only available by transfer from other libraries, and most of what I was looking for was usually checked out from the other branches anyways. I didn't have the patience to wait for these books to come in, so I sought other sources for my reading material.

They're currently building a new library for Castro Valley, and so far the building looks pretty cool, so I may actually go check it out when it opens. Who knows, I may even start spending more time in the library again if their book selection has improved and expanded since I last gave them a chance. However, I am a lover of books. I don't like reading them and letting them go. I like collecting them. I like being able to go back and pick them up at random to find quotes, or to be able to hand them over to a friend to share the love, knowing that I'll get my book back having introduced it to someone new, and to have shared its knowledge.

I hope to one day eventually have a proper library room in whatever house I settle into long term. A comfortable room with big plush chairs, a nice window to let just the right amount of afternoon light in to read by, and floor to ceiling bookcases. Being the dork I am, there will likely be a library room computer, with a way to catalog all my books in it, possibly using a :cuecat as a barcode scanner.

So, deepestsender updated so it'll work with the Firefox 3 rc1 and I am most happy. The *buntu people, they hadn't seen fit to release the release candidate to the repositories yet, but someone else in the community for the extension pointed me towards somewhere that I could get my grubby little hands on it in such a way that I could install from Adept Manager. So I happily installed that earlier today, and installed the newly updated version of Deepest Sender. It is scary how something as silly as one little extension can make such a large difference in one's browsing experience. Now all I need is my Gmail manager back, and Firefox will be back to normal again. Yay!

Now, here are some awesome links that came to me via e_henderson_rss, the blog of the very talented artist Erica Henderson (actually blog here: failatlife.blogspot.com). The first up: Fresh Baked Bread, Anyone? Gruesome Body Bakery, which is so many levels of awesome. I'm the sort of sick twisted bitch who'd actually put such stuff on my dinner table for a nice party, and not say a thing to warn anyone before hand.

To follow that, a children's book to explain why Mommy's getting plastic surgery. My Beautiful Mommy. Yeah, I really really don't want to start that rant, but I felt the train wreck needed to be shared.

And here's one that I am tempted to give my business to: Flapart, a website that makes replacement book covers with amusing titles and artwork to match. Some of the titles include "How to Overcome Nymphomania", "Do-It-Yourself Liposuction" and "How to get your Sister/Brother kicked out of the House". The Nymphomania seems like a good one to read on a BART train, subway, or crowded bus, just to meet random guys.

Also, going to see Indiana Jones tonight. Sounds like it'll be fun, so I'm looking forward to it. Unfortunately, my Dashing Hat shirt from Questionable Content didn't arrive in time. Oh well, that's what I get for ordering it too late in the game. It'll still be awesomeness to behold when it arrives, and I will most certainly wear it much. It just would have been more awesome to have it to wear to the movie tonight. Oh well.

I just read this post on techdirt (techdirt.com), Faking Death to Get out of Mobile Phone Contracts, and while I keep expecting to hit saturation point on the stupidity of people, I keep being amazed by the things I read about.

One thing I could never understand, especially since I used to sell cell phones, is why people would willing submit themselves to a two year contract for service from an industry that has a reputation for having horrible customer service. I don't care how much money you save on the phone up front, how can being locked into a contract and losing every last ounce of negotiation power and being out of warranty coverage even close to benefitial?

The difference between a one year contract and two is usually between $50 and $100 dollars, though occasionally it can go higher because of special promotions, but how much is it going to cost you if something happens to your cell phone in that six to nine month period between the end of your one year warranty and that magic point where your carrier will happily give you a new discount in exchange for a contract extension? If you're using a GSM carrier, like AT&T or T-mobile, you'll be out buying a phone that's a year or more older off of someone else second hand, and you won't know what horrors this person has subjected the phone to before you got it, and won't have a guarantee that it'll work 'til you're able to extend your contract to get a newer phone again. If you're on a CDMA carrier like Verizon or Sprint, well, then you get to either buy a phone outright, or see if you can coax customer service into activating an old phone if you can find an old one to buy off of someone and hope it doesn't have an esn that's flagged as stolen.

This isn't even considering details like suddenly finding yourself needing your phone in areas that your coverage doesn't cover, changes in usage due to anything from emergencies to change in family structure, or even something as simple as your carrier being bought out and overhauled half way through your contract. Signing a two year contract means you're at the mercy of your carrier to attempt to accommodate your change in needs, or you have to hope that the new owners of the company aren't going to change things drastically for the worse.

Having been through more than a few of these messes while my father was in charge of my cell phone, I've become more than a little paranoid about cell phone contracts. When I first got a cell phone, our carrier was AT&T (not to be mistaken for the current version where Cingular/SBC renamed itself due to the better brand recognition on the other name), they offered coverage around Dillon Beach, the place my grandfather lived 10 out of 12 months a year. Most of my mom's family was on this carrier in fact, and we made much use of mobile to mobile minutes. Then AT&T decided they should start switching its user base to GSM, since it was a widely adopted standard around the world. About this time, Cingular started sniffing around, and eventually bought them up.

At the time Cingular did this, they had already managed to score a reputation as the worst of the worst in the cellular market, despite being a young upstart. When they bought AT&T, they now held the largest network of users, and this did nothing to help them out. We started losing coverage in areas we previously had used our phones frequently from. Weird charges started showing up on our bill. And at the time I was getting fed up with it, and looking to take my cell phone under my own name and to a different carrier, my dad was convinced to extend the contract on my phone in exchange for a small discount on his bill. He later claimed that he thought he was extending the contract on his own phone, not mine, but even if that was true, small one time discounts on service, without getting a new phone, are completely a rip off for customers.

When finally the contract on my phone was up, I selected T-mobile as my carrier, as while they were a young upstart at the time, I knew multiple people with their service who gave good enough feedback, they were rated top in customer service by JD Powers, they didn't do security deposits (either you passed credit or you didn't) and they only did one year contracts. I selected a phone I liked, it served me well, and about half a year after my contract ended, I looked into upgrading to something with blue tooth, and found out that T-mobile had succumbed to the temptation of the two year contracts. When I bought my current phone, I insisted on a one year contract much to the confusion of the lady who sold it to me.

I was confused about the reaction of the lady who sold me my phone, as while I know they pay her better if she gets the two year contract, and adds on things like the insurance, she had to understand that these things are primarily to the benefit of the company she works for. Her reaction when I say no to these things is not supposed to be confusion, it's supposed to be an attempt to tell me about the benefits of these things. However, her confusion on the topic tells me why the cell phone carriers continue to get away with the two year contract games, people really either don't care or don't understand. There are not enough of us who are willing to hang onto our phone a little longer, who take care of the phone to keep it functioning longer, and who are willing to pay more for our phone up front in order to avoid being screwed over by the company we've contracted for service through.

I suppose my biggest annoyance is, how can paying $5 a month, for 24 months ($120) to make up for the second half of the contract being without warranty on the phone, be a good trade off for paying another $50 for the phone on a one year contract instead and have the option of upgrading the phone at a discount instead of getting a refurbished version of the same phone you had if the phone dies before two years? If was a parent, and had a child that frequently lost things, then the insurance could be worth it, since paying $120 over two years is easier than paying $150 or more each time the child loses the phone, even if the child loses the phone frequently and gets cut off insurance for it. I think it usually takes two or three loses in a half a year to a year to qualify for being cut off, so even that way I'd come out ahead. Traveling business people and people with horrible luck would benefit from insurance also, but most people can keep a phone functioning for more than a year, and can avoid voiding a warranty in that year.

I get especially frustrated because while I hate the companies providing the service, I really don't believe that trusting our government to "fix" the problem with more regulation is the answer. If people were educated, made informed choices (these choices are available, and choosing them more frequently will make the companies sit up and notice), we wouldn't need the government protecting the stupid and the uniformed from themselves.

As much as I hate the pink, I think it would be awesome to have a Hello Kitty laptop. While I think it would be better to get one of the less marketed non-pink themed versions of Hello Kitty, I think the dork factor of having a Hello Kitty laptop would just be too awesome to pass up.

That said, I'd probably be better off modifying a "normal" laptop to be all Hello Kitty themed. Then I could make it purple, blue or something more palatable than the pink. I'm pondering just giving in and getting an apple laptop (to dual boot with kubuntu), and the appearance of those are simple enough that modifications probably wouldn't be too hard. I do like having working warranties though, so I'd probably wait until the warranty expires before attempting any of this.

I think it would be awesome if Hello Kitty, or whatever logo/badge I choose to attach to the front of the case, had translucent bits for eyes (or whatever) to allow the glow of the apple logo through. Glowing evil eyes on S&M Kitty, that would be awesome. :)

House Panel: Why Did Google 'Airbrush History'?

This article seems to be making a bigger deal over this than they should, and it scares me how the government feels the need to step in on the matter. However, I do think the more current images should be in use, and it confuses me that the government wants the current pictures up as they want it to seem like things are cleaned up more than they really are.