Geeky Mom

My ex-boyfriend (and current friend) has launched a podcast on software security. His first show guest is Avi Rubin, who exposed glitches in the Diebold electronic voting machines. I had an interesting experience yesterday with our new electronic voting machines. Yes, there were a couple of minor problems and I’m dismayed that people keep designing stuff for the average male height. I had to stand on my tiptoes to sign the sheet to open the polls.

Anyway, check out the podcast. Gary’s a smart guy and knows lots of smart people, so I’m sure the show will be thoughtful and interesting. I’ll be subscribing myself.

No one votes. We had only 123 voters yesterday out of 900 something. In the senate race, Sandals received no votes, Pennacchio received less than 10. Also, no one pays attention. I’m sorry, but Casey is pretty weak on a lot of democratic issues. And the Inquirer’s right: he faces a tough battle against Santorum. Don’t get me wrong. I want to beat Santorum, but I’m disappointed that my party didn’t think this through better.

It’s just so sad to see Americans taking the vote for granted. This is how we ended up with Bush. Years of apathy have led us to this point, on the verge of losing some of our most valued freedoms and that makes me angry and sad. There’s six months until the November elections. Educate yourself. Register if you need to. And then get out and vote.

Yesterday, I indulged in really bad things. Hey, it was my day, I deserved it. First, we went to Cracker Barrel where I ate an enormous amount of food, enough to make this one proud. Then we swung by a book store where I considered getting a tome of quality and instead got the book pictured below. I like comics; I can’t help myself. After a bath where I read through half of said book, I spent some quality time on the computer. I actually worked on a web site that I don’t have time to work on at work. It wasn’t really like work and I had fun and learned a lot.

When Mr. Geeky returned from graduation, he made dinner and we planned our evening of sloth. First the pilot of West Wing, then the Simpsons “Monkey Suit,” followed by the West Wing finale. Though the Simpsons episode was funny, I was disappointed, they didn’t make more of the whole separation of church and state thing. Instead, they made it seem like if you believed in evolution, you can’t believe in G-d. I thought it would be easy for creationists to find a win in that episode. Looks like PZ was equally unimpressed.

West Wing was a nice indulgent fantasy about having leaders who are smart and who care. Sigh. Tomorrow, by the way, is our primary here in PA. There seems to be a decent amount of opposition to Bob Casey, so if you’re a PA resident, I’d encourage you to consider your options. I, myself, will be voting for Chuck Pennacchio. I’m currently extraordinarily depressed by the political situation. Over the weekend, I overheard this in a shoe store:

“Do you care that Verizon is going through our records?”
(inaudable response)
“I don’t. I think it’s the right thing to do.”

I swear. I think some people deserve to be dragged off to the gulag. Mr. Geeky and I are trying to find a way to sign up with Qwest. I wrote my phone companies a long time ago, when this whole thing started. I hope they get their asses sued.

If you have a primary tomorrow, go vote. The 2006 elections can’t come soon enough in my book.

Best wishes to all you moms out there. May we all continue to work for a better world for our children.

Apologies for being so quiet around here, but life became unbloggable and politics became unbearable. Bleh.

It’s graduation this weekend and I’ll be attending some of the festivities today. My first freshman is graduating, as are several other students with whom I’ve worked for a couple of years. I always find graduations to be such bittersweet ceremonies. On the one hand, everyone is excited and proud. On the other, everyone is sad to say goodbye to longtime friends.

My high school graduation, I wasn’t all that sad. By the graduation came around, I was ready to be done, ready to leave the place and people I’d know for the last 12 years. And since I’d goofed off enough to miss being valedictorian or anything special like that, for me, the ceremony held no appeal. Besides, the next day, I took off for the beach with her.

College graduation was awkward. My parents were together for the first time since their divorce. You should see the picture someone took of the three of us. We all look as if we might explode at any moment. Like high school, I was somewhat disenchanted by the time graduation rolled around. But I felt like making it through college was more of an accomplishment than making it through high school. My dad offered to take me to Las Vegas. I turned him down in order to hang out with my ex boyfriend and some other friends. I still tell my dad I should have gone with him instead.

I went through another graduation ceremony when I got my M.A. My dad flew in for the ceremony and tended to Geeky Boy, who wanted to go to the bathroom every five minutes. I was 8 months pregnant with Geeky Girl. I looked huge in those robes. This time I felt much more like I was celebrating an accomplishment rather than just going through the motions.

I hope to be going through this again next year, celebrating my Ph.D. And all too soon, Geeky Boy will be graduating high school, then Geeky Girl. For the parents, I suppose, watching their kids graduate makes them proud and sad at the same time, for they, too, must be saying goodbye to a part of their kids as they grow into adults and enter the world.

jill/txt offers commentary on a survey that shows that more women than men play video games in certain age brackets. I’m not what I would consider a gamer, but I do play once in a while. I used to play a lot: children and fulltime work keep one from gaming. I often play games with my kids or watch them play. I am always frustrated, as Jill obviously is, that the gaming marketers still assume women don’t play.

A side note: I’ve been on a bit of a rampage about tech podcasts that exclude women and insult them in much the same way that gaming marketers do. Come on, people, women really do like technology and games. We’re not just simpering little sex kittens.

• Tax cuts that benefit the rich
• Military guy in charge of the CIA
• Hookers and poker
• Darfur
• 31% approval rating
• Debt approaching $10 trillion
• 2400 dead in Iraq
• Is it 2008 yet? Who would really want this job?

Tim Burke is live-blogging the Social Computing Symposium, all of which is very interesting. I was especially struck by this post, written between sessions. Tim calls himself a misfit toy in academia because of his love of this type of technology and extensive use of it, yet, he feels inexperienced among this particular group of people. I experienced a similar feeling when I went to SXSW. Collin responded to that post, observing that he too has had a similar experience of feeling like an outsider at a tech conference.

I think that the three of us all recognize the potential all these new social computing models have for changing the way we live (and in many ways have already changed the way we live). What we might like to see is all of that changing the institutions we work in and the way we work as well. Can you imagine the conversations that might happen if institutions allowed virtual connections via blogs or wikis or cellphones to flourish? Tim imagines in one of his posts rating comments in a faculty meeting so that people could delve further into the ones that are rated the highest. I’d like to see that in some staff meetings too. How about in classes? Wouldn’t it be nice if the president and other administrators had blogs that they posted to regularly or if they came and commented on other blogs, like departmental ones? What if various documents were written as wikis collaboratively? Lots of possibilities.

I’m in a slightly different place, of course, from Tim and Collin. It’s actually my job to experiment with many of these tools and to think about how they might be useful where they may not feel as free to spend time on that. But unlike them, I have no way of integrating them into the larger life of the academy. And that’s where I see some real potential for change.

Over this whole weekend, I’ve been thinking about something, a lot of things, really. These thoughts are not completely well-formed yet; they’re mostly questions, really. I’ve been thinking about the tendency I have, and many other liberals I know, to try to live their lives according to their political beliefs. So, for example, if you are concerned about the impact of too much garbage on the ecology, you recycle. I think this is a laudable thing to do, but I’ve been wondering about the impact it really has.

I’ve not done a good job of living up to my political beliefs in a lot of areas. Take my cars. We have a minivan and an suv. We both drive to work most days. I had been thinking about trying to take public transportation for a week. And then I thought, would adding an extra 1/2 hour or so to my own commute really make a difference in the overall issue of fossil fuels and their shortage and their pollution? Probably not. If I could convince my 200 or so readers to do that? Maybe.

And then I recently read some horrible articles on the Congo and Darfur and I see all the deaths in Iraq. And I think, what lifestyle change would help in those cases?

And I looked into joining a CSA (community supported agriculture), but then Rob tells me that may not be so good.

We all try out here in the blogworld to draw attention to issues that we all think are important, many of which are being ignored or underreported by the MSM. But are we blogging into a vacuum?

Is this the inertia factor? Are there thousands upon thousands of people rejecting the notion of taking public transportation or writing their congressperson or recycling because they figure it won’t help? And what do we do about that?

I’d like to feel like my individual choices made some kind of difference. I’d also like to know what the solution to some of these seemingly huge and complicated problems are. It kills me that on the one hand, we go into Iraq because Sadaam was killing his own people and we do nothing about Darfur or the many other places where dictators carry out or encourage the killing of their own people.

My thinking here has been prompted by a lot of things I’ve read in my little blog community, Phantom’s and Elizabeth’s posts on being spoiled and privilege, Rob’s post mentioned above, but also his post on relativism, Zuska’s post on sexual harrassment. I’ve probably missed a few. In any event, I’ve been thinking and I’d like to take some action. I just don’t know what that action is.

Why are the weekends never enough? I really pushed myself at work on Friday and then collapsed on Saturday and then Sunday went into high gear around the house. I’ve spent the last few hours at work responding to email, making some notes for a presentation and I’m thinking, now what do I do. It’s certainly not like there isn’t anything to do. It’s just that the day is broken up by meetings, so there are certain tasks I can’t tackle. And the whole week looks like this. Plus, my brain is just tired.

Oh, and did I mention there’s a bulldozer driving over the ceiling of my office, shaking the whole building? Yeah, there is.

What would I rather be doing instead? Sleeping and reading, I think. I’ll get out of the slump, I’m sure, but man, Monday hit me hard.