Feminism + coding geekiness = LOVE

What, has nobody said "That's not HTML, that's XML" yet? :)

This weekend I watched SNL and got pissed over Tracy Morgan's: "Black is the new president, BITCH" statement.

This spurred discussion with friends about the prevalence of both racism AND sexism in this election.

I used it as my Monday morning rant on my blog:

http://tobestalks.blogspot.com/2008/03/black-is-new-president-bitch.html

PS: I don't even pretend to get coding but I get the gist of this and I LIKE!

I helped ordain a minister, which may not seem like a blow for feminism, until you know that she's a feminist UCC woman, who married us with a modified same-sex ceremony last May, heads a tiny but powerful house on the Tulsa University campus that caters to LBGT students, Amnesty International, composts all food stuff after their weekly vegetarian lunch, and more. She served fair trade coffee and chocolates at the reception, and the ceremony was conducted by 80% women. It was really awesome.

I made my husband turn off 'Saving Silverman.' Enough said.

I worked with my daughter on fixing bugs on the programs I maintain. I hope she'll learn enough to be able to maintain software on her own soon, but even if not I'm hoping she'll be one fewer girl who's been socialised away from coding. And anyway, discussing what we were doing was good bonding time.

I volunteered to help out at Take Back the Night at my old undergrad. I think I may run a workshop on victim blaming and how women can help each other by not buying into it.

Maybe I am just a dumbass here, but what do those syntaxes mean? I am guessing "stop" or "slash" or something similar?

Pink, I love the UCC - and their commercials, too. Although my minister (I am a Unitarian Universalist) tells me UCC and the UU church are "just friends."

I ordered a DivaCup, which probably does more to /landfill than /patriarchy, but using it makes you veeerrryyy familiar with yourself, so I decided to post anyway.

ProFeministMale: It's the way you write "end patriarchy" (i.e. end a block of something identified as "patriarchy") in the markup languages SGML or its descendant XML. (You may be more familiar with an application of SGML and XML called HTML, used for formatting web pages, which sadly doesn't contain any way to end patriarchy on the web. If only.)

I officially became a member of the Planned Parenthood NYC activist council.

I played matchbox cars with my daughter and house with my son. Spouse was working 12+ hour shifts all weekend, so I had the kiddies to myself.

Toddler (the son) likes house so much that when he likes something, he says it is "in my house". As in "toast is in my house, dad!"

Let’s look at some ideas. Many cities around the world say they are going to become the ‘education city’. This idea is narrow; it implies and feels as if it is only the education sector that is involved.

It excludes everyone else. ‘A talent strategy for…’ idea would be better: it is easy to understand; clearly many people would need to be engaged; and they can see their involvement from the arts to education to business providing professional development. It can be layered to focus on identifying, harnessing, attracting, sustaining or exploiting talent. Or it can focus on the stages of talent from getting people to be curious, enterprising, entrepreneurial or innovative.

Its weakness it that it could apply anywhere. To say, as Memphis is beginning to say, that it is ‘the city of second chances’ is quite strong. It projects a positive ethos; openness, the willingness to listen, tolerance. It recognizes that the city is disadvantaged without over-egging the pudding. It acknowledges business start-up records are not too good. It opens out to the future and ideally in a decade the slogan will be less relevant, because enough second chancers will have succeeded. To say that Adelaide would ‘waterproof the city’ was a strong idea of theirs, but it has not yet happened. It had an implied economic agenda and spoke powerfully to green issues. The same is true if any other city were to claim it would become the world’s first ‘zero emissions city’ or ‘solar city’, and really mean it. It would provide a mass of business opportunities and put that city on the global radar screen. It would seem interestingly counter-intuitive for a known mining centre or industrial centre to do it as the gut instinct is to see those kinds of city as macho.

Another example of broadening an idea or ‘making more out of less’ is if someone wanted to light a set of buildings or a bridge. Such a lighting scheme, with associated activities and linked publicity, would have to be about more than just lighting some buildings – perhaps it should be about enlightening a place, and Perth being enlightened. In short, lighting a building needs to work harder.