Archives: August 01, 2005

Queen of the Geeks

Tuesday, 30 August 2005 11:59 PM

I've heard people describe me many ways, but I think this article is the first to describe me as a "proud girl geek."

Clearly I'm both a girl and a geek, and I suppose I'm kind of proud of both, but I wouldn't have thought to string all those concepts into a single phrase. Still, it's interesting to know how other people see me. (Or at least, how one journalist does.)

I find it fun to talk to journalists. Only later do I worry about how my words are going to read in an article. In this case, Bill Loeffler quoted me terribly nicely and I think I don't sound completely lame, which I often seem to when anyone writes down my actual spoken words.

This article is extra special for me, what with me appearing in a photo. The print version of the article includes many photos of geeky types, including Steve Carrell and that Napoleon Dynamite dude in their respective movie roles, plus I think Bill Gates and some others. I am the only female pictured. But after all, what female "celebrity" geek could they have used? It shouldn't be at all surprising that they sent a photographer all the way to Butler to take a picture: I'm practically a rare species.

When he interviewd me for the article, Mr. Loeffler asked when I first noticed that geeks had become acceptable, and I said I didn't particularly remember ever feeling not acceptable. I thought about my answer later and realized that's not strictly true. On one hand I've never felt odd about being geeky, maybe because it's sort of amusing. I mean, I didn't just attend computer camp: I taught there for two summers. That's just funny.

But for a very long time I did feel perhaps too smart for regular society. I brought it on myself partly, by correcting people's grammar for example. I finally got over that, but the damage had been done. Even my family nicknamed me the Walking Encyclopedia.

Later, while I was in college I used to avoid telling people where I went to school because I found it was a conversation killer. Someone would say, "Wow. You must be smart." And what could I say back? "I'm just good at taking tests." It was very awkward for me. Plus I hated small talk, the simple things people say when they're trying to meet each other and find common ground. Why did people waste time saying meaningless stuff? I came to believe that I didn't like "ordinary" people.

Meanwhile, at MIT I was nowhere near the smartest person. I failed a course, gained a healthy measure of humility, and got some perspective. Once I finished school and started working at high tech companies, the problem of feeling out of place disappeared, because of course everyone was smart, everyone had gone to name brand schools, everyone deserved to be there. Eventually I grew to be a better conversationalist so that I could smooth over awkward pauses, and I forgot about feeling so out of place.

As the article suggests, it's also possible that geeky people are more accepted these days. Everyone feels out of place at least some of the time, maybe most of the time. In a society that prizes beauty and coolness, geeks are natural underdogs -- and who doesn't like to root for the underdog?

Side note: Here's a little slice of life in a small town.

My mom wanted to buy extra copies of today's paper, so she could send the article to relatives and so on. She stepped up to the counter of a drugstore in town with two copies, and the clerk said, "You've got two copies of the paper here. You want to put one back?"

Mom said, "No, I meant to buy two. My daughter's photo is in the paper."

"Really? Where?"

And they proceeded to look for the article, standing right there in line.

When she saw the picture, the clerk said, "That's Cummings Coffee Shop! I used to go there on dates. That must have been seventeen years ago."

And the two of them -- keep in mind they've never met before -- talked for a minute about Cummings, how it used to be the town soda fountain and a big hot spot and now it's still got ice cream but also serves espresso and cappucino, and why I was in the paper and how long we've lived in Butler. And eventually they finished and Mom paid for the two papers and left.

Can't Keep a Funky Rooster Down

Monday, 29 August 2005 11:08 PM

I have overcome my fears and hung the concrete-and-stained-glass rooster on the kitchen wall. It looks fab: Click the picture for a bigger view.

It's not done though. I am not entirely crazy about how the gray concrete looks with the chartreuse color of the wall, plus the yellow table fails to coordinate with chartreuse as well, so I've planned to put an accent block of paint around and about the rooster. In keeping with the 50s tone of the whole thing, I'm thinking turquoise.

How will it look? It will be a sight to behold.

I still need to measure out and tape off exactly the right block of space. Unfortunately our long run of sunny weather seems to have come to an end, and now I also need to wait for a dry day. But soon, soon, it'll be done.

UPDATE: Anthony, who is more proficient with Photoshop than I am, suggested that I add a drop shadow to the mockup to make it look less fake. So here's how that looks. He also said he thought
the color block would be smaller, more like a frame than such a wide expanse. Or maybe
a nearly arbitrary stripe that would just join the rooster and the light switch. I'm leaning toward the stripe now.

In Which Problem-Solving and Experimentation Skills I Learned in College Come Into Dubious Use

Wednesday, 24 August 2005 10:31 PM

So I have this big concrete rooster sitting on my kitchen floor. It has been there for nearly a year.

It was made especially for me by James Simon, an amazing and creative local sculptor. It's quite cool and big -- three feet tall and two feet wide. Technically it is not all concrete -- the rooster himself is made of stained glass and some other stuff. Click the little picture to see a larger version -- even the big picture doesn't come close to showing how cool he is, with his irridescent and multi-colored feathers and sassy look. The rooster is looking or poking at what seems to be an egg, which also is somehow funky/sassy. The egg I mean. And the background material is this special concrete that is quite strong even when it's thin, so it can be used for wall hangings and other things you wouldn't ordinarily see in concrete.

The thing is, it's still concrete, and even thin concrete is quite heavy -- 80 lbs heavy, to be exact. Which comes back to the issue of the rooster's still being on the floor after these many months, despite its sheer coolness and my deep desire to display it. I'm very worried about hanging it properly so as to avoid destroying either the rooster or my house.

Finally this week I recruited my brother Anthony to help. Anthony went to architecture school. He is therefore my go-to guy for all subjects related to houses, interior design, landscaping, whatever. Together we located the studs in the wall, pounded in some heavyweight picture hooks, and hung the thing up. And it looked very, very good.

But here's the thing: I was still worried about it crashing down, breaking the rooster and ripping a gaping hole in my wall, most likely in the middle of the night and also right on top of one of my cats. Or both of them. The more I thought about it, the more clearly I could envision the horribly fractured rooster, the gaping black hole, the dead cats.

So, we took the rooster back down and set him on the floor again.

At this point I started looking around my house for places to display the rooster on a stand, something solid and unmoving. But my house is already chock full of things that I like exactly where they are, and I wanted the rooster in the kitchen to catch the morning sun. The wall I'd chosen was the very best place by far, and there was no room for stands there. The rooster would have to be hung.

Anthony proposed various other fastening schemes, like running a piece of wood across several of the studs, or running one down the studs with bolts attaching at several points, or a piece of metal spanning the wall behind the rooster.... It was all wild and heady, and too much for my simple 50s-retro kitchen. (Which, as Anthony pointed out, is already straining its envelope trying to contain a concrete-and-glass rooster.)

Finally he suggested simply testing the picture hooks. "What if we loaded them? Put all your weight on the hooks and test them."

This seemed like not the kind of test I wanted -- I didn't want to actually destroy my wall -- but loading the hooks with something the same weight as the rooster yet less irreplaceably breakable seemed like a good idea. If the hooks could bear real weight for a couple of days, then I'd be confident enough to hang the rooster for real.

And now we come to this picture, which is the testing rig. Click the photo for a larger view.

Yes, that's a dog leash. No, I don't have a dog. I did have a dog, for eight days about five years ago. It's a long story, but the point is I've had this dog leash in the garage for ages and now it's being put to valuable use.

And yes, those are two 20-lb dumbbells tied to the leash. With a broken-down box from drugstore.com to keep them from scraping the wall. The plan is to leave the 40-lb load on the first hook for a couple of days, or however long it takes for me to overcome my fears, and then we'll test the other hook.

(Actually: I added a five pound weight after the picture was taken. Don't want to cut things too close, you know.)

If I were a real geek, maybe I would have worked out some equations and figured out the maximum load for the studs behind a plaster wall built in 1957, how long the nails needed to be and whether screws or some other attachment mechanism would be better suited to the task. Back in college I might even have known how to solve such a beast of an equation. More likely, I'd have known which more-capable classmate to ask for the answer.

But in the end, do I care to know the actual tensile strength (or whatever) of my wall? Within just a few days that super funky rooster will be strutting his stuff in my kitchen, some way or other. That's what I care about.

Lingering aftereffects

Thursday, 18 August 2005 12:58 PM

By now you've seen all the posts and articles about BlogFest 3: When Bloggers Appear in Public!

Here's one final artifact for everyone: an online copy of the "sign-in sheet" from the event. I know there were at least a few other blogs at the party who aren't on the sheet. I set it out partway through the night, so I think not everyone knew about it -- my apologies to you if you missed checking in.

Actually, maybe some folks didn't want to commit to having been there until they were sure what kind of event it would turn out to be. What if things turned rowdy and we all were hauled off to the pokey? You know how these blogging types can be.

Even I forgot to really check in: I put down My Brilliant Mistakes but forgot all about Sticky Notes, the writing and publishing blog we have over at Fat Plum. What kind of marketing professional am I? Not the best kind, apparently.

Click the image above for a full size version, complete with links to the associated blogs.

(Hey, Life with Five and Eclipse Dynamics! Send me your URLs and I'll link to you too.)

UPDATE: The map is now complete ... at least, as complete as can be. Now if only we can set up that regional map of all the area blogs, we'll really know where we are (or where we're at, for all y'uns round here).

Waa hey!

Monday, 15 August 2005 05:06 PM

It seemed to be touch and go there for weeks, but I will be able to watch Steelers football this season after all: the Post-Gazette is saying that Hines Ward has ended his holdout. Press conference at 6:45.

Drink of the week: Negroni

Friday, 12 August 2005 04:26 PM

I know precious few people who enjoy Campari. Two, in fact: me and my friend Tim. It was Tim who first introduced me to Campari and soda, at a lakeside cafe in the northern reaches of Italy. (That was a shameless brag -- sorry.) At the time I didn't like it, but I'd been having a Very Bad Day and had my heart set on a nice glass of red wine. Campari is just not going to suit anyone set on wine.

It does suit me these days though, very much. It's both bitter and sweet, and it has a lower alcohol content that suits hot summer afternoons extremely well. As with most Italian liqueurs, there's an history to the beverage. In this case, it includes super artwork, such as the Leonetto Capiello poster shown here.

The Campari group website has a magazine that's full of typically overwritten articles on Italian life and la dolce vita. For example, this is from "The Orange":

The oranges appear under a particular light, suffused with poetic atmosphere, as if they had been touched by a magic wand to donate all their components, which, possessing numerous beneficial effects for the health of man, become almost a panacea against every evil.

Maybe it sounds less silly in Italian.

But then again, Campari does seem to impart beneficial effects, at least on me. And so we come to this week's drink.

Negroni

Ingredients
1/3 Campari
1/3 Cinzano Rosso
1/3 Gin
Ice Cubes

Put ice in lowball glass. Add Campari, Cinzano Rosso and Gin and stir well. Garnish with a slice of orange.

Could anything be easier or more delightful for happy hour on a sticky Friday in August? It could not. Salud!

Makeover

Friday, 12 August 2005 01:08 PM

A quick note on the redesign of My Brilliant Mistakes: It's not done.

A longer explanation of the above: I have been annoyed by the me-too design of MBM for some time. Given that I make my living designing distinctive web sites, my use of a largely pre-fab look and structure was an embarassment.

Plus, I'd set up the template when I was still very new to CSS, so the code was frankly crap. Looking at it was equivalent to raising the hood of an old car to find a rat-tangle of wires, corroded metal, and cracked rubber hose, plus what look to be a couple of mumified squirrel carcasses. In short, it wasn't pretty.

And as long as the site's dark underbelly was so nasty, I couldn't get psyched to write new entries to the site. The situation reached a critical point.

So, I wanted to rearchitect the whole site to contain only good and useful things, to look smart and sassy, to allow me to add funky features, and generally to make me happy. It was the kind of big project that I could put off until ... well, forever.

So for now we must settle for some cleaned up CSS, a slight but important rearrangement of items on the main page, and the addition of new pages to hold certain other items. Next up: comments! The kids these days are all into comments. And then perhaps some more visual interest instead of a stark white background. From there we'll be able to go anywhere.

For now, enjoy the bright happy colors and bigger type. And as always, thanks for reading.

Festivus maximus

Friday, 12 August 2005 12:37 PM

Last night's Pittsburgh BlogFest 3 was terrific in many ways. It was packed, it was loud (but not too loud), it was festive. Photos were taken, a newspaper reporter took down names and stories, bloggers talked and laughed and argued and laughed some more, beer was drunk in great quantity, a team tried to recruit a blogger for political purposes, scarves were knitted, guantlets were thrown down and taken up, arms were bruised (sorry Matt!), more beer was consumed.... It was all we could have hoped for, and much more.

Wojo says there were something like 60 people in attendance over the course of the evening. That seems incredible to me, but I'm notoriously bad at estimates and plus I was busy talking myself hoarse and much too self-absorbed to count.

People got to meet in person those whose writing they'd read and enjoyed. This was one of the very best parts. I have been amazed how friendly and charming our local blogging community is -- perhaps it's part and parcel of the tone of the area, in that people around here are just plain nice. And of course anyone who keeps a blog and chooses to attend a blogging social event is pre-selected to be outgoing. For me, it was good to put faces and voices with names and writing styles. (For the next event though, I must be sure to study up on who's who and who writes what locally. There are few openings lamer than "Have you been posting much lately?")

One other delightful result of the evening is that there's at least one new blog in the area. Two gentlemen in attendence introduced themselves as long-time readers/commenters in the local blog scene. Through a group effort we bullied them into promising they'd start a blog by 5pm Friday -- and indeed they did create Challenge Impossible, fifteen hours ahead of schedule. Excellent.

In sum, if you were there, thanks so much for attending. I hope you had a fab time. If you weren't there, please know you were missed and we hope to see you at the next one.

The final consensus was that every six months was too long a gap between BlogFest. Look for another get-together in late October/early November.

Last call for BlogFest

Wednesday, 10 August 2005 03:06 PM

Tomorrow is the third Pittsburgh BlogFest. RSVPs had steadily trickled in when we first announced the event, but of the last week or so there's been a veritable wave of responses!

Well, maybe that's overstating it. How about this: There are literally tens of people plan to attend!

Hmm, that's doesn't have quite the right ring either.

All the same, it's going to be a sexy, sexy bunch of folks lounging around Finegan's Wake, talking and laughing and drinking and eating. If past history is any indicator, there will be little talk of blogging. There will be rather a lot of talk of television, politics, sports, and knitting. So, it'll be kinda like any other night out at the local bar (except for the knitting part ... but maybe my local bar just isn't up with the times).

And also all the people will be extremely interesting and cool and just the kind of people whose company you would enjoy. So, you'd best be there.

WHAT: Pittsburgh Blogfest 3
WHEN: Thursday, August 11th 2005, 5:30 PM until I am too tired to talk anymore (i.e., very late for a school night)
WHERE: Finnegan's Wake (near PNC Park) in the Pub Room (412-325-2601)
WHO: All bloggers (and guests -- bring friends)
AND: Creating Text(iles), Inner Bitch, Grabass, and yours truly

NOTE: No baseball game that night, so don't fear North Side traffic or parking.

If you plan to attend, RSVP to blogfest (AT) closkey [DOT] com.

See you there. I'll be the one with the blindingly-bleached hair. Cheers!

Copyright © 2004 – 2007 Cynthia Closkey