cyberpunk feminists

An interisting paper on cyberpunk women

From: River Runs Through It-Norman MacLean

     "... but you can love completely without complete understanding."

     Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was
young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

     Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of
course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends
think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where
the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start
fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light
of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and
memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count
rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

     Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through
it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks
from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless
raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are
theirs.

     I am haunted by waters.

I believe that this is the quote from the book. I believe that in the
movie he adds "even jessie" before "but I still reach out to them".
He leaves out (?) the 2nd sentence of the 1st paragraph, and then
leaves out the word "arctic" in the next sentence too. Otherwise it
is unchanged when Redford reads it at the end.

Just Beautiful.

TV

On my way to the train I was talking with a co-worker about my
relationship with TV. It is well established that most TV is not good
brain food (even most of PBS and discovery channel is like faux health
food: you're still better off reading a book or having a discussion.)
If you are only trying to lead an intellectually stimulating life, I
can think of no need to have a TV, and it might only be used for art
films or other such, if it did come in the house.

However, most of us, even me, aren't solely interested in intellectual
stimulation. Sometimes we feel a need to turn off our overly active
brains, sometimes we want to relax, utterly and completely, without
anything mentally taxing. TV provides a way to do this. I've got two
problems.

First, I'm not convinced this is necessary at all, maybe reading,
relaxing in a sauna, whatever, is better for us than TV. Maybe TV is a
crutch that doesn't really help us do what we want it to: help us
relax. Maybe it eats up more time than it gives back. I feel like the
idea would be no TV. Go out work, play, whatever. Then come home and
relax by sitting in a chair by a fire and reading, or napping, or
taking a bath. One might be better off if that were one's life. But
I'll conceded this point and let TV in my door. Let's say that I
recognize that TV has some value as a relaxation aid. How to manage
it? This leads to...

Problem 2: Once you let TV in, it starts taking over. It's
addictive. One way it does this is by scheduling your life for you.
You find things you want to watch and now you're tied to its schedule,
rather than your own. This problem has been eliminated recently (for
me and many others) by TiVo. You own your time again, and the TV
doesn't control your schedule. It is _great_ for this. And has
improved my life a lot, since I no longer worry about scheduling my TV
times to watch what I want.

However, scheduling is just one way that TV inculcates itself into your
life. Once you get in the habit of watching, it's hard to stop. You
get addicted. TiVo doesn't stop that, it feeds it. TV is addictive
because even though the product is pretty junky, the fix is so cheap
that you can't help but do it. TiVo makes the fix even cheaper. I.e.
no annoying ads, you watch whatever you want starting when you want to
start it, and you can fit it around your life. Sounds good, and it
is, but it means you don't have to think, just plop your growing ass in
front of the TiVo and you get mildly entertaining drivel, and the
drivel starts and stops when you want it to. It's still drivel
though. Drivel may be helpful in small doses as a soporific, or
something similar, but what if all you ever do is come home and turn on
the drivel box? Addiction.

I'm in the midst of thinking about upgrading my cable service, so that
I can obtain a higher-quality of drivel. Specifically this revolves
around getting soccer drivel that I might watch instead of basketball
drivel and football drivel. Sports drivel seems to be a speciality of
mine, and like 24 and other addictions, it seems to work by "if you
don't watch the first one, the second one is less fun to watch." I
have to keep up with the regular season so that I know what is going on
in the playoffs, etc. I don't really even have any teams I get behind,
I just watch sports. Often it's a way to relax on a weekend, but
it's more than that too, and why can't I relax by reading a good book?

Do we (Americans) watch TV because there is nothing better in our
culture, or do we have nothing better in our culture, because we watch
TV. Does that apply to me? Will the increase in choices coming due to
TiVos, iTunes video, and the obvious extensions, mean that we watch
less? Or more?

Excellent mantra

From the mod_perl book:

Which is more important: saving enough memory to allow the machine to
serve a few extra concurrent clients, or using off-the-shelf modules that
are proven and well understood? Debugging a reinvention of the wheel can
cost a lot of development time, especially if each member of your team
reinvents in a different way. In general, it is a lot cheaper to buy more
memory or a bigger machine than it is to hire an extra programmer. So
while it may be wise to avoid using a bloated module if you need only a
few functions that you could easily code yourself, the place to look for
real efficiency savings is in how you write your code.

New Climbing Year

Jan 9th- First climbing trip of 2006. Pinnacles. I was sick up until
a day before so we weren't sure if we were going, and our first day
back in the gym last week revealed us to be weak and out of shape from
the holidays. Upshot was that we weren't sure we were going until the
day before. Then tghe day before we went out an ran 6 miles too fast
(not very fast, but for us, fast). Tired legs.

Jim always tries to keep pitch counts-i.e. how many pitches have we
done in a year, and he tries to get us up around 100. Last year I
think we broke that easily, as we got twentysomething on half dome (
Taska and I got 30-40 on our vacation in October but Jim doesn't get to
count those...) Anyway, I'm not sure that counting pitches is too
sensible, but I can at least do that:

Pinnacles 1/9 Elephant Rock 5.6 (J) and 10a (TR)
Smiling Simian 5.8 (VKJ) (Short but fun)
Even Coyotes Like it Doggie Style 10a (KJ)
(Good route, 5 bolts)
Dos Equus 5.8 (VKJ)
Twinkle Toes Traverse 5.7 (J)

6 pitches (I guess we count TRs) nice and easy intro to the year

Last Day at Work

One of my good friends at work left today for another job, and another
is leaving next week. Said goodbye today, though I imagine I'll see
her "around." Both of these people came to our group at around the
same time I did, and they are both a little over 30, like me, so it
makes me think about a couple of things:

1) NPR recently ran a story on morning edition about
generational differences in the workplace. To paraphrase that, and add
some comments on my own-remember of course, these are generalities and
sterotypes:

Number one difference between the baby boomers (who tend to be our
bosses), and the gen xers (i.e. me and my departing friends) is the
time staying at one employer. We xers tend to stick around for 3-5
years. That's enough time to learn useful skills, contribute to the
workplace, and then begin to desire to learn new skills, which are
generally not available in the same workplace. These days, the skills
one needs on the job are always changing. Jobs change. Technologies
change. Missions change. xers thrive on this change, and we adapt
well, mainly because we are always trying to keep ahead of or at least
in step with changing trends. Moving to new positions, especially in
new employers, helps us stay abreast of new changes, and keeps us
employable. We generally see our most important asset as something
like "adaptability" or "learns quickly, " rather than thinking of some
particular area of expertise or skill. Good people, we think, are
good people, regardless of years of fortran programming experience.
That's why x-ers dominated the dot coms. There was no expertise, new
businesses were/are being invented.

Boomers tend to want to stay in the same position much longer, and
often see it as a failure (of employee or employer or both) if someone
leaves after a "short" time. Employers are tied more closely to one's
identity, and perhaps skills, business sectors, etc. didn't change as
rapidly in the past. An employer didn't have to work as hard to retain
a boomer, because they naturally wanted to stay. x-ers tend to
naturally want to move on after a while, and thus and employer must
work to retain them by offering development paths.

It begs the question, should employers even try to retain employees?
The traditional wisdom is that an employer should attempt to retain
employees. They should try to do the career development thing,
training, paths, etc. But why? Is it possible that new blood _is_
actually needed every once in a while, and maybe more often than it
used to be? Maybe we should strive for a workplace where everyone
shifts around every 5 years or so. Cross pollination, etc. It keeps
people out of the infamous comfort zone as well. Academia has done
this for years. grad students, post-docs, they all do great work
partially because they have short tenures then move on. The
institution attracts good grad students and post docs based not on
their pay but on the placement of the leaving postdocs and grad
students. Anyone who knows me knows I was not a big fan of the
academic life, but maybe in the big picture that's a sound model.
Rather than thinking of career development paths as trying to "retain"
good employees, think of them as "attracting" the next good employee.
Maybe that's a better model. Clearly there is personal and
situational variation, so the grad school model of pretty rigorous
timelines might not be appropriate, but employers should/are thinking
more about this model, rather than "stay with us forever." Presumably
many are, I wonder how far people are going with it.

Another interesting difference mentioned in the NPR piece was work-life
balance. Apparently xers want more outside life than boomers did. My
opinion is that so many xers saw their hard-working boomer parents'
relationships collapse and end in divorce and/or absentee parenting
that they want to avoid that. There is probably also something to be
said for women in the workplace who feel they have a right to be there,
rather than feeling they have to fight to prove that women can work.
This new generation of women workers probably is more vocal about
wanting time off for families. Hopefully modern fathers are becoming
more vocal as well, saying if the mother gets to take some time off,
the father should too. And hopefully (near to my heart) childless
folks are saying the same thing, "I don't have kids, but I should be
able to take time off just like s/he does. After all maybe I chose not
to have kids at this point because I wanted to do X, where X is not
work"

2) (I'll bet you don't remember what the numbers refer to:the 2 things
that my friends' departure made me think about-the NPR story and...)
What about me-should I leave soon too, since my peers are leaving, is
my alarm clock ticking? (Of course I recognize that my (potential)
employers might read this too, but I believe, perhaps idealistically,
in keeping a consistent, defensible set of beliefs and actions. If I
write something here that my employer has a problem with, they should
speak up, and if can't explain it honestly to their satisfaction, then
we do have a problem, but one that goes deeper than a few words on a
blog...)

As it turns out, while I've certainly thought about it more due to my
friends' departure, I don't really feel my alarm clock ticking. While
a lot of xers fall into the above feelings, I may be different. First
my job involves a lot of problem solving on a daily basis, which keeps
me fresh, I am still learning new things in my job. Secondly, I lived
in academia, with constant transitions, for a while, and I left, partly
to gain some stability. This bodes well for my current situation, and
badly for my alarm clock, since it seems to mean I value stability more
than the typical xer. Keeping abreast of change, and developing new
skills to cope with change certainly resonates with me strongly, but
perhaps I find ways of fitting that in, or maybe I am lucky, or maybe
my alarm will go off a little later.

Regardless, I think the xer/boomer patterns are interesting in general,
and probably both sets have something to gain from understanding the
others' patterns. It isn't a question of "old fogeys" and "young
upstarts" since I think the relevant comparisons are looking at
different generations when they were at the same place in their
careers/lives. It also isn't right and wrong, just different, boomers
need to recognize that the workplace will be increasingly dominated by
people with a different way of thinking, and xers need to realize that
others in the workplace may have a different natural expectation than
they do, and it isn't necessarily wrong.

Blackberrying

Has anyone looked up the Sylvia Plath poem in relation to the handheld
device... I had better do that.

Anyway, I think I need to have one (a device not a poem..)