As a female geek, if I get stuck I go to resources such as safari.oreilly.com, lynda.com, or the forums for answers. And I will also go to men who I believe can help me. After all, we're in the same playing field and most times I'll get a good answer no matter who I ask, male or female.
I think there are as many men as women who don't want to get into technology in quite the same depth as most of the members of this forum. I don't understand the automatic assumption by some people that women don't want to get as "up to their eyeballs" in it as their male counterparts.
Even scaling down to 4 days a week has its consequences - I still have the same workload as before (early morning website updates from my home included), but am hit with a barrage of e-mails on my "days off" and demands for immediate additional changes to the website that I manage. So really, scaling back left me with no days off at all.
I'm seriously considering changing careers so I can have some sort of life outside of the office...
Good idea. Make it a double opt-in list (where the recipient must click on a link to be kept on your mailing list) so that when you're done you might actually have a number of usable e-mail addresses.
I got it to work on a Macbook under Parallels, but it heats the machine up. The fan kicks in and the "mooing" of the fan is too loud to enjoy the flick.
I also got in on the $15 US/year deal, and have used it *a lot*. In contrast to your 768k experience, I'm on a 7 meg DSL connection and the sound quality is great with no lag. So your bandwidth theory appears to be accurate.
I only know a few people who are using SkypeOut. Most people I know are leery of anything that isn't a land line, even when the sound quality is equal or superior to a land line. And they won't try it even when I tell them I paid $15 for a year of long distance. Go figure.
I'm in rural Utah, and am getting a 7 meg connection at my house through Qwest. However, a little farther up the hill we can only get a 1.5 meg business connection for 15 workstations. Go figure...
A crockpot is your friend if you don't have the time or skills needed to cook meals from scratch. Do a little pre-prep (cut stuff up, brown meat and veggies), dump ingredients into the crockpot, and let it go for 8-10 hours. Dinner's done when you get home from work or school. Same with a bread machine. Put ingredients into the machine, and set the timer so you have fresh bread with no extra filler or preservatives when you get home.
I agree with you, especially the part about the salad dressing. Balsamic vinaigrette isn't supposed to be sweet! Here in the States, salad dressing is loaded with sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup. Ditto for bottled spaghetti sauce, peanut butter, and a host of other products. I've started watching the labels on things a lot more in an effort to reduce the amount of sugar I'm getting, and making more things from scratch and freezing them for later use.
It's okay, I'm used to that response. No one believed I was female when I ran a stand-alone BBS in the early 90's (until they started coming over to my house to play Barren Realms Elite when the Canadians were kicking our butts), and they didn't believe it when i first got onto the 'net on a VMS college server at about the same time. (looking down) Yup, definitely female:):)
Now that I've thought of it again, Barren Realms Elite was a pretty hot game too, maybe not in the top 10, but gave several us a good excuse to get together once a week and play. Legend of the Red Dragon was great too.
Kheph
Plus, women can get addicted to the "toys" just as easily as the guys, can spend just as much time gaming; tweaking their home systems (mine started out as a defective 10 mhz XT back in 1989 and I've been rebuilding it ever since), learning a new OS, trying to get 3 devices to work on the wireless at the same time, hell, trying to get a Vonage box to work on the same network as the other aforementioned devices; cleaning up their friends' and family members' spyware-infested machines; dropping a new power supply into a teary-eyed sister's machine because it died *right* in the middle of filing her divorce papers online; using Skype on a Macbook as the home telephone...
I can't imagine *not* working in IT, it just feeds my addiction...
Sometimes it works out differently. I'm the female IT manager for a small company. I don't program, but have handled just about everything else since I've worked here. I started out as the receptionist after a post-911 layoff, and was promoted less than a year later because I was able to resurrect a dead DOS-based voicemail system. Over time the IT duties have been split between myself and a co-worker (also female), and I now do the design, production and webmastering of the company website, and design ads and other printed materials. I still set up and rebuild machines, diagnose network problems, make software and hardware purchasing decisions, and other general IT-related stuff. There's not much management involved, what gets done by whom is usually decided on the ride up to the office.
I enjoy the variety of my job. I'm not on a straight 8-5 schedule and wear a t-shirt and jeans most of the time. At times, if I have a tight deadline, I just load everything onto my laptop and finish it off at home. I've got a great office and great people to work with. I live in an area where salaries have never been great, but I guess there's always a trade-off. At least I enjoy what I do for a living.
Thanks for the info, I did run into the i586 bug. Didn't know about the respins site either. I'll remember that the next time I reinstall. Hopefuly changing the SELinux settings will fix the problem with the two Windows apps I want to run.
Night before last I tried to install the drivers for my Nvidia card (a 6800 GS) into Fedora Core 6. I downloaded the package from the Nvidia website, started the install, and got a message saying it needed to be compiled for my OS. In the middle of the compile it gave me an error. After searching through user forums for an answer to that, I discovered that I could do a yum install kmod-nvidia to get a Core 6-specific package. Went through that exercise, only to get another error saying there was a conflict with the kernel. Searched more forums and finally came with a fix for that. Total time: 3 hours.
I had also tried Ubuntu Feisty on the same machine, and neither the Audigy sound card nor the Deck keyboard would work correctly.
Finally, there were a few Windows progs that I was running successfully under Crossover Office 6.0, that stopped running under their latest version. I downloaded the CXO manual and saw that I was going to have to modify my Fedora setup to get them to work, that had something to do with the Fedora security setup. I'm not knowledgeable enough yet to know what end result that modification would have. So I'm scrapping CXO entirely.
If I (a reasonably experienced Linux user) have to go through all this brain-damage to get things to work, there's no question as to why more average users aren't jumping on the Linux train...
At my house, Apple will. I've been running dual boot XP and Fedora Core 6 on my desktop PC, and have reduced my XP usage to only a few essential applications, mostly graphics related. Enter one Macbook into the picture. I load Parallels onto it, and create XP and Fedora images. Now I have 3 operating systems on one portable little machine, and all of my business software works on it. I'm seriously looking at replacing the desktop machine with a Mac for its graphics capabilities.
At the office, well, that's a different story. But I toss out the possibility of Linux as an alternative to M$ products at every opportunity. So far it hasn't worked, but as the cost of running Windows and Office on company equipment accelerates, and not being able to purchase new machines loaded with XP, I'm hoping upper management will start to get interested.
Add to this the fact that, from the day the first child is born, being a mother and housewife becomes a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week job with no vacation time for the first 18 years;)
I'm over 50. If I want to be reminded of something, I'll put it in my pocket PC or whatever the next-gen calendar device is going to be. There's no reason why, when someone hits middle age, they should be targeted with inane devices such as the Pill Pet. I'm still waiting for a version of Windows to come out minus all the pop-up balloons and idiot prompts; I certainly am not going to want a car or toy telling me what to do.
Nice that M$ is modifying the Vista EULA to accommodate those of us who build our own machines. Now could they please do the same for the DRM on their music files? The last time I upgraded my PC, MediaPlayer decided that I had my music loaded on 6 (!) machines, and told me to call M$ to fix it. After 45 minutes on the phone, either on hold or trying to get someone in India to understand what was happening, only to be told that I'd have to call back the following Monday to talk to someone in the U.S., I deleted all of the music files I'd purchased from MSN.
CD Universe (www.cduniverse.com) is now my source for music. Their CD's even work under Fedora Core 6 which is my main OS now;)
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As a female geek, if I get stuck I go to resources such as safari.oreilly.com, lynda.com, or the forums for answers. And I will also go to men who I believe can help me. After all, we're in the same playing field and most times I'll get a good answer no matter who I ask, male or female. I think there are as many men as women who don't want to get into technology in quite the same depth as most of the members of this forum. I don't understand the automatic assumption by some people that women don't want to get as "up to their eyeballs" in it as their male counterparts.
Even scaling down to 4 days a week has its consequences - I still have the same workload as before (early morning website updates from my home included), but am hit with a barrage of e-mails on my "days off" and demands for immediate additional changes to the website that I manage. So really, scaling back left me with no days off at all. I'm seriously considering changing careers so I can have some sort of life outside of the office...
Good idea. Make it a double opt-in list (where the recipient must click on a link to be kept on your mailing list) so that when you're done you might actually have a number of usable e-mail addresses.
I got it to work on a Macbook under Parallels, but it heats the machine up. The fan kicks in and the "mooing" of the fan is too loud to enjoy the flick.
I only got two-thirds of the way through Firefly :(
I also got in on the $15 US/year deal, and have used it *a lot*. In contrast to your 768k experience, I'm on a 7 meg DSL connection and the sound quality is great with no lag. So your bandwidth theory appears to be accurate.
I only know a few people who are using SkypeOut. Most people I know are leery of anything that isn't a land line, even when the sound quality is equal or superior to a land line. And they won't try it even when I tell them I paid $15 for a year of long distance. Go figure.
I'm in rural Utah, and am getting a 7 meg connection at my house through Qwest. However, a little farther up the hill we can only get a 1.5 meg business connection for 15 workstations. Go figure...
A crockpot is your friend if you don't have the time or skills needed to cook meals from scratch. Do a little pre-prep (cut stuff up, brown meat and veggies), dump ingredients into the crockpot, and let it go for 8-10 hours. Dinner's done when you get home from work or school. Same with a bread machine. Put ingredients into the machine, and set the timer so you have fresh bread with no extra filler or preservatives when you get home.
I agree with you, especially the part about the salad dressing. Balsamic vinaigrette isn't supposed to be sweet! Here in the States, salad dressing is loaded with sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup. Ditto for bottled spaghetti sauce, peanut butter, and a host of other products. I've started watching the labels on things a lot more in an effort to reduce the amount of sugar I'm getting, and making more things from scratch and freezing them for later use.
Files from legal, DRM-free download sites like http://www.emusic.com/ will probably fall into this trap as well.
My mouse and keyboard just quit several times yesterday, and I had to do a hard boot to get them going again. I guess I know why it happened now...
First I check to make sure the nightly backups completed properly, *then* I go for coffee.
It's okay, I'm used to that response. No one believed I was female when I ran a stand-alone BBS in the early 90's (until they started coming over to my house to play Barren Realms Elite when the Canadians were kicking our butts), and they didn't believe it when i first got onto the 'net on a VMS college server at about the same time. (looking down) Yup, definitely female :):)
Now that I've thought of it again, Barren Realms Elite was a pretty hot game too, maybe not in the top 10, but gave several us a good excuse to get together once a week and play. Legend of the Red Dragon was great too. Kheph
Nethack. I'm still playing the DOS version. :)
And I'm a female
Plus, women can get addicted to the "toys" just as easily as the guys, can spend just as much time gaming; tweaking their home systems (mine started out as a defective 10 mhz XT back in 1989 and I've been rebuilding it ever since), learning a new OS, trying to get 3 devices to work on the wireless at the same time, hell, trying to get a Vonage box to work on the same network as the other aforementioned devices; cleaning up their friends' and family members' spyware-infested machines; dropping a new power supply into a teary-eyed sister's machine because it died *right* in the middle of filing her divorce papers online; using Skype on a Macbook as the home telephone...
I can't imagine *not* working in IT, it just feeds my addiction...
Sometimes it works out differently. I'm the female IT manager for a small company. I don't program, but have handled just about everything else since I've worked here. I started out as the receptionist after a post-911 layoff, and was promoted less than a year later because I was able to resurrect a dead DOS-based voicemail system. Over time the IT duties have been split between myself and a co-worker (also female), and I now do the design, production and webmastering of the company website, and design ads and other printed materials. I still set up and rebuild machines, diagnose network problems, make software and hardware purchasing decisions, and other general IT-related stuff. There's not much management involved, what gets done by whom is usually decided on the ride up to the office.
I enjoy the variety of my job. I'm not on a straight 8-5 schedule and wear a t-shirt and jeans most of the time. At times, if I have a tight deadline, I just load everything onto my laptop and finish it off at home. I've got a great office and great people to work with. I live in an area where salaries have never been great, but I guess there's always a trade-off. At least I enjoy what I do for a living.
Thanks for the info, I did run into the i586 bug. Didn't know about the respins site either. I'll remember that the next time I reinstall. Hopefuly changing the SELinux settings will fix the problem with the two Windows apps I want to run.
Night before last I tried to install the drivers for my Nvidia card (a 6800 GS) into Fedora Core 6. I downloaded the package from the Nvidia website, started the install, and got a message saying it needed to be compiled for my OS. In the middle of the compile it gave me an error. After searching through user forums for an answer to that, I discovered that I could do a yum install kmod-nvidia to get a Core 6-specific package. Went through that exercise, only to get another error saying there was a conflict with the kernel. Searched more forums and finally came with a fix for that. Total time: 3 hours.
I had also tried Ubuntu Feisty on the same machine, and neither the Audigy sound card nor the Deck keyboard would work correctly.
Finally, there were a few Windows progs that I was running successfully under Crossover Office 6.0, that stopped running under their latest version. I downloaded the CXO manual and saw that I was going to have to modify my Fedora setup to get them to work, that had something to do with the Fedora security setup. I'm not knowledgeable enough yet to know what end result that modification would have. So I'm scrapping CXO entirely. If I (a reasonably experienced Linux user) have to go through all this brain-damage to get things to work, there's no question as to why more average users aren't jumping on the Linux train...
$1500?? I think I'll stick with my blue-led-backlit Deck (http://www.deckkeyboards.com), thankyewverymuch.
Suits me fine. It means that my Macbook and my Linux desktop will still be at the bottom of the list for spambot status :)
At my house, Apple will. I've been running dual boot XP and Fedora Core 6 on my desktop PC, and have reduced my XP usage to only a few essential applications, mostly graphics related. Enter one Macbook into the picture. I load Parallels onto it, and create XP and Fedora images. Now I have 3 operating systems on one portable little machine, and all of my business software works on it. I'm seriously looking at replacing the desktop machine with a Mac for its graphics capabilities. At the office, well, that's a different story. But I toss out the possibility of Linux as an alternative to M$ products at every opportunity. So far it hasn't worked, but as the cost of running Windows and Office on company equipment accelerates, and not being able to purchase new machines loaded with XP, I'm hoping upper management will start to get interested.
Add to this the fact that, from the day the first child is born, being a mother and housewife becomes a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week job with no vacation time for the first 18 years ;)
I'm over 50. If I want to be reminded of something, I'll put it in my pocket PC or whatever the next-gen calendar device is going to be. There's no reason why, when someone hits middle age, they should be targeted with inane devices such as the Pill Pet. I'm still waiting for a version of Windows to come out minus all the pop-up balloons and idiot prompts; I certainly am not going to want a car or toy telling me what to do.
Nice that M$ is modifying the Vista EULA to accommodate those of us who build our own machines. Now could they please do the same for the DRM on their music files? The last time I upgraded my PC, MediaPlayer decided that I had my music loaded on 6 (!) machines, and told me to call M$ to fix it. After 45 minutes on the phone, either on hold or trying to get someone in India to understand what was happening, only to be told that I'd have to call back the following Monday to talk to someone in the U.S., I deleted all of the music files I'd purchased from MSN.
;)
CD Universe (www.cduniverse.com) is now my source for music. Their CD's even work under Fedora Core 6 which is my main OS now