Tuesday I was a guest speaker at Mrs.A’s gifted class. She’s teaching a group of 9-12 year olds web design and asked if I’d come in an talk for an afternoon.
So I spent 30 minutes talking to them about the basics of user centred design and how the internet works. Then I helped them trouble shoot their table based layouts and font tags.
“From your 77 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 809 items…”
No wonder I don’t read any books any more.
I read John Resig’s article Sub-Pixel Problems in CSS a few days ago and found it to very useful information.
And then today I had an “ah-ha’ moment – this this is why I hate coding flexible horizontal navigation menus.
A few
weeksmonths ago Jeffrey Zeldman posted a summary of the results of an An Event Apart fact finding mission on women in IT (web design was deemed too liquid a field to study). Jeffrey’s blog post sure sparked a discussion and a few basic ideas came up:
- is there is something about IT that doesn’t attract women?
- do men and women contribute different things?
- do women self promote? do men do it more? how is it perceived?
- how much of the above is cultural or learned behaviour?
In response to all of that I can say: I think men and women are fundamentally the same and any differences in our behaviour is cultural or taught. This is based on any number of my own personal observations the most relevant of which are: no matter what the stereotype, there is always an exception to what is considered typical or biological behaviour and that around the world the typical traits of each gender are different things in different cultures.
If there is a difference in the number of women doing something (a career in this case), it follows that there is some learned behaviour responsible for that disparity.
I’ve been talking these ideas over with my friends and I think the most interesting new piece of information to come out of this discussion, for me anyway, is the idea that men and women communicate in different ways and communicate with each other in different ways. So while a man might demand a raise and be respected a woman might not even phrase a request for a raise as a demand. The idea that the lingering pay disparity might be because women just haven’t asked for a raise is kind of a new thought for me.
I spent a few weeks thinking women needed to learn to be more aggressive and then at one of the panels at the CADE-AMTEC conference on gender in online discussion one of the other audience members (the only male in the room) suggested that maybe men needed be socialized to be less aggressive. The idea that maybe women have it right was a new idea for me too. I suspect the ideal path lies some where in the middle and is, at any rate, not the decision for one person to make anyway since a society changes only when the majority of the people who comprise it change.
I wrote most of this within two weeks of Jeffrey’s blog post and I was going to delete it rather than posting it but, well, some new information came up so I thought I’d post the two together.
Also mentioned in the discussion in response to the blog post was the idea that many of the women doing web design don’t think of themselves as web designers and aren’t in IT, they’re women in pink collar jobs who are doing design as part of a slew of other duties they have.
Last week we had a meeting with the leaders of our distributed web publishing community. These are the people who are in charge of ensuring their entire department or school is following our guidelines before a change goes public. They evaluate pages for good IA, UX, adherence to coding standards and writing style guidelines, and nitpicky details too. It was a room full of very talented women, all women, who contribute to the web site as a small part of their other job duties.
This whole gender thing really makes me think.
Macs have always struck me as more of a religion than an operating system. A family friend and I have a long history of a friendly Mac vs Windows rivalry. He’s the Mac evangelist and I was, well, I wasn’t a Windows evangelist but I guess I played the part of a disbeliever.
At some point in 2004 he finally won the argument and I promised my next computer would be a Mac. But then I got cold feet and I signed up for a course that required I have a Windows machine and I bought a some assembly required Windows box from one of those cheep no name computer stores that come and go over night. This particular store had been recommended to me a couple times and had stuck around for 5 or 6 years so I figured it was fairly reputable.
A year later the Windows box self destructed. First I bought a new power supply, then a new fan, then new memory, then a new mother board and finally I stopped short of replacing the hard drive and just pronounced the damn thing dead.
Out of excuses to not buy a Mac and very mad at my last Windows machine. I rented a Mac one for a week to see if I could live with it and decided, at the very lest, the whole command vs control thing would not drive me crazy. Once I discovered I got educational pricing (the job would suck if it wasn’t for the benefits!) I couldn’t even argue with the price. At the very worst I could wipe the hard drive, install Windows, and pretend I never bought a Mac. Apple also has a very articulate environmental policy which doesn’t hurt at all.
I bought a 15″ Mac Book Pro.
The first week I had it there were a couple times I desperately wanted my money back but after two and a half weeks these are my thoughts:
Text smoothing
As screen technology evolves I’m sure it won’t matter but right now with this screen on this computer I miss the way Windows renders text.
Work flow
Work flow is the thing that has bothered me the most about switching. I find I lose windows other other windows and occasionally have to minimize things to the dock one at a time to find them again. Then I have to un-minimize them because you can’t alt-tab to things minimized to the dock.
I really can’t make effective use of dual monitors any more because the menu bar stays on the main screen no matter what and tool bars and pallets have to be moved individually.
I also dislike the way applications just pile up. Every now and then I go to click on a pallet or a scroll bar and suddenly I’m an another application.
Learning an new operating system
Switching from Windows XP to OS X was as easy as switching from Windows 98 to Windows XP. And, lets face it, even Windows users are going have to learn a new operating system when they buy their next computer and just cuz it’s pretty doesn’t mean Vista is going to be easy to use.
Running Windows
Running windows hasn’t been a problem. I’m playing with Parallels and I’m going to give VM Ware a go before I decide on which to use but I’ll be happy with Parallels.
Buying new everything
When I bought the Adobe creative suite for Windows apparently it came with licenses for Mac versions as well. Suite. Unfortunately I can’t seem to locate CS2 versions of any of the Adobe stuff but I’m happily running all the Macromedia stuff in OS X and the Adobe stuff in Windows for now.
As for other software, hurray for educational pricing.
iPhoto Booth
Damn this is sheer dumb fun.
Quicksilver
Quicksilver looks like it could be the coolest thing ever, but it needs to be customized to be used to it’s full potential and I’ve found the basic documentation to be kind of sparse. The basic idea of being able to do any task ever with a keyboard short cut is very appealing. I am all about not having to use the mouse.
Verdict
When I told my Mum that I was buying a Mac the first thing she did was seek assurances that I wouldn’t become an Mac evangelist like our family friend. I don’t want my money back but I don’t think Mum has anything to worry about just yet.
Wow, FireFox does not play nice with styling legends.
FireFox, I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.
I’ve been wanting to seriously redo some of the HTML and CSS behind the BCIT site since I came on board here almost a year ago.
Well, I get my wish. We’re going to take some baby steps towards semantic HTML and CSS (POSH if you like) and despite my aversion to being in charge, I’m leading the project.
As a first step I’m trying to write a CSS coding style guide. I can’t necessarily clean up the current mess but I can try to stop any new ones from being made ;)
What I want to do is develop guidelines for:
So far my research has turned up very few examples to help me with the development. This somewhat out dated post is the best I’ve found so far. Part of my problem is that searching for a style guide for CSS is just coming up with guides to styling with CSS.
Do you work with a CSS coding style guide or know any good resources for developing one?
I thought I’d post my summary of Web Directions North that I distributed to the department a month or so after the conference. I’ve been wanting to write a more technical and personal review of it but it’s pretty clear to me that if I haven’t done it by now, I’m not going to get around to doing it :)
So apparently we’re supposed to be encoding ampersands when we write them in the href part of anchor tags.
<a href="http://stephaniehobson.ca/file.php »
?fire=hot&beer=foamy">link</a>
Vivian is such a great motivator. I’m still sorry to see her go.
I just came out of a performance review where Vivian simultaneously told me what a great job I’m doing and laid out the changes I need to make to my life to have the world laid out at my feet by the time I’m fourty.
She said to me that in IT there are kind of two main career paths; one which is super specialized with one specific area of technology and one that sees the big picture and manages.
She thinks I should, and told me I have the right skills and thought processes to, be a manager.
I’m not sure I agree with where she wants me to go but she sure made me feel like I could get there if that’s where I wanted to go :)
Which begs the question, where do I want to go?
