I'd be nervous to wear a Ti ring. It's not uncommon for people to badly jam a finger and have to visit an ER to have the ring cut off. My understanding is that this would be very hard to do if the ring is titanium.
Yeah, when AOL gobbled up Netscape I got to make a couple of trips out to Dulles for a project I was working on. I think I was the second or third Netscape employee to sport an AOL badge. It was interesting. I spent the whole time either really impressed or really appalled.
Impressed at the data centers. They have the biggest, nicest, most thoughtfully designed datacenters I've ever seen. For example, their "raised floors" are actually not raised, the subfloor is sunken relative to the rest of the building so there's no ramp to push big machines up. And there's two feet of subfloor! Ah, they certainly know how to build datacenters. *sigh*
Appalled at the philosophy behind the network. There was no separation between AOL the company and AOL the service as far as the network went. Employee accounts were just regular AOL accounts that were flagged with special privileges. That meant if one of those accounts got cracked, and you bet they did, the cracker had access to all the family jewels.
This was a Big Problem for them, obviously. Instead of creating some separation between the service and the corporate net they had just converted all the employees to SecurID logins. It really lowered the incidence of cracked employee accounts but was a pain for the users. I noted that in the article part of the complaints about the service seemed be centered around the use of the SecurID tokens.
Dilbert: "What color database do you want?" PHB: "I think the mauve ones have the most RAM."
I remember carefully talking my boss out of buying a million dollar performance management package that *only* worked on Solaris, would require another quarter million in hardware, and only served to make pretty pictures from sar output. They ran a free audit on a bunch of our heavily used servers and confirmed what we already suspected-- we were fine, we didn't need their stuff. My boss finally agreed not to buy the software, but I think he was really heartbroken over it. He loved the graphics.
"But look! You can drill down!"
Really, the answer to this problem is finesse. Most PHBs are fundamentally well-intentioned, they just don't understand all the issues. They aren't supposed to, that's your job. So when they show up at work excited about the all-in-one doodad they heard about on the radio on the way to work, you just have to be a little patient. Do a little research. Be tactful. Say, "Wow, that Doodad seems to be a really interesting product, unfortunately they only recommend it for use up to 50 users and we have 10,000."
Treat the PHB like an idiot (even if he's acting like one) and he'll get defensive and insist on throwing his weight around. Be respectful and maybe even a little submissive and you'll earn his trust. Then life gets a lot simpler.
Not long ago I found myself working two jobs. I had to get out of bed rather earlier than I was used to and tended to start the day pretty groggy. I don't drink coffee (upsets my stomach) so I needed another solution to perk me up in the AM. I found that chewing gum worked incredibly well. After chewing on a piece for about ten minutes I felt far more awake and alert, and the effect seemed to last long after the stuff went in the trash.
So I started thinking. I'm a horse person, I have half a dozen of the beasts. Horses are programmed to chew. It's believed that the muscles involved in the chewing process actually help pump the blood through all the vessels in their head. Without the chewing action during grazing blood would tend to pool in the horse's head. After my gum chewing revelation I wondered if a similar principle might apply in humans. It seems logical that increased blood flow could lead to an increased feeling of alertness.
I'm an LDAP advocate. It is exactly the right solution for a lot of problems. It is extremely powerful and flexible, and the more I've used it the more uses I've found for it. Once you've experienced the power of a fast and reliable central repository for a spectrum of IT information you never want to go back.
But. But.
LDAP, to be really useful, must be a way of life. You must put it in the center of your IT universe and defer always to it. It becomes the final "owner" for all your information. I found this invaluable, as suddenly the nightmares of maintaining a thousand different instances of the same or similar data just vanish. People get really excited once they realize all that LDAP can do for them. It's so flexible and extensible that you can put almost anything in it.
But this power comes at a pretty high up front cost in time and effort. If all you really care about is user auth it's probably not worth it. When your world revolves around LDAP, the hassles involved with getting PAM working on all your flavors of Unix and all that stuff become minor. Yes, you can get your NT domain domain to talk authenticate through it. Yes, you can get all your web servers to authenticate through it. It's not always easy, though. Often it's quite hard.
But if you commit to it, and follow through, the dream of one password everywhere is just one of the many rewards that you will reap.
As far as implementations, I've used Netscape/iPlanet and I've played with OpenLDAP. I used to work at Netscape so I'm biased, but I'd say spring for the iPlanet stuff if you can afford it. I found the OpenLDAP ACLs unintuitive and I heard reports that replication is unreliable.
A final caveat. If you do choose LDAP, and you choose to make it a central part of your IT infrastructure, make this your mantra: "Read often, write seldom". LDAP is *NOT* a database. Let me repeat. LDAP is *NOT A DATABASE*. When people realize everything you can put into LDAP the first thing they want to do is try to make believe it's Oracle. Try to use it for write intensive applications and the only person more miserable than your users will be you.
I myself was a Ultima Online "widow" at one time. I kept thinking it was just a phase and would play itself out. After about 18 months of it the EverQuest betas came out and I knew it would never end. I packed my bags and left. Sure enough, he moved on to EQ and I haven't seen him since.
Back in UO days I knew a housewife who would arrange her RL day around shearing her UO sheep. I guess they regenerated their wool a certain number of times per real day, and you had to time your shearings properly to get the most wool possible.
But all that wasn't as bad as one guy I knew who kept forgetting and calling his wife her EQ name in RL. When his boss finally came to fire him he had fallen asleep at his desk with EQ still on the screen.
I'm only about 2k wirefeet from the CO (really!) so I'm pretty lucky. It's not the cheapest, but I've been happy with the service. Hopefully XO pulls out of their financial woes and keeps the bits flowing.
I took a BSD class once and Dr. McKusick said, "If you want to learn algorithms buy Knuth and put it by your bed. Every night, read an algorithm. You will fall asleep. But if you don't you'll learn an algorithm!"
This never seemed like a satisfactory solution to me. Besides, I was never a Comp Sci major and I'm scared of Knuth! I would definitely buy an approachable, readable algorithms book.
We'd already been kicked off one flight due to mechanical problems after sitting on the tarmac for ages, rerouted with an extra connection, and stood in several amazingly long screening lines. We were tired, cranky, and standing just a few steps away from the gate to the plane that would finally take us home. Would you choose that particular moment to lodge an official complaint?
Yeah, we should have complained. But when all you want to do is Go Home it's easy to be apathetic.
Returning from Thanksgiving my boyfriend and I were rerouted through Minneapolis. We were hanging out at the gate, waiting for our turn to board. Of course they have extra security people doing random searches right at the gate these days. My boyfriend noticed that the guy who was doing the "random" searches only selected cute young women to pat down and go through their carry-ons.
We laughed about that a little, he jokingly suggested I stand behind him since I was an obvious candidate for a "random" search. Lo and behold, just as we were about to board I got pulled out of line and felt up by the security guy. My boyfriend was not so amused.
It is definitely frustrating that these extra searches which might conceivably be useful are being carried out in the most useless and insulting possible way.
The last time I worked at a company big enough to worry about this kind of stuff we had several policies on retention based on what the data was. Alas, I didn't find out how important it was to follow these policies until a bunch of stuff got subpoenaed. I hadn't been able to bring myself to expire a bunch of internal newsgroup stuff and well, it was bad. Not that we were doing anything illegal, quite the opposite...
So don't think it can't happen to you. Seriously. These policies exist for good reason.
Anyway, our policies. Source code was archived forever. Period. Financial data was kept to the letter of SEC regs as long as we had to keep it and no longer. Mail backups were recycled monthly.
Employees were strongly encouraged to delete mail after 30 days, but it wasn't enforced technologically. I think the rule was universally ignored.
Frankly, a lot of what the policies do is set up plausible deniability if the subpoena comes and the documents aren't to be found...
First and foremost, I swear by my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Yeah, they are spendy, but they are perfect for drowning out CPU noise and random cube-farm chatter. They are also extremely comfortable to wear for long periods of time. They tend to be a mild deterrent for random interruptions, which I find to be a bonus. Be warned that people will be forced to extreme measures to get your attention when you are wearing them.;-)
Second, drink water. Get a nice big container and fill it from the local water cooler. Sip from it constantly. When it is empty, you will probably have to go to the restroom. On your way back fill the container again. Rinse and repeat. You will stay hydrated and your bladder will enforce an occasional stroll. Never underestimate the importance of hydration!
Other folks have mentioned forcibly removing fluorescent lights. I actually don't like it to be too dark, but my eyes get really irritated if I have to stare right into a fluorescent fixture. In the past I have solved this by using mosquito netting to create a screen. It was quite functional and looked ok. The netting diffused the light and softened it.
I like to create my own space by having lots of colorful stuff in my cube. Pictures, of course, and always toys. I favor yo-yos. Yo-yoing is a great break and helps to lubricate thinking. You have to stand up, stretch, move around. Learn some tricks. It's a great conversation starter, and you come back to the problem at hand more relaxed and focused.
The company I work for has been building boxes with these drives. All of a sudden we've had five of the 75 GB Deskstars come up with bad sectors in past week, rendering filesystems un-fsckable and generally wreaking havoc. We had an emergency meeting just this morning to discuss the issue. I also have replaced probably half a dozen of these suckers in my poor little IDE RAID box over about four months. Frankly, I blamed the RAID controller for being fussy, but I guess I was wrong.
Whoever thought Mozilla was short for "Mosaic killer" needs a history lesson.
Before Netscape was Netscape it was called Mosaic Communications. The browser they made was still called Mosaic. People may remember back in the day, pre 1.0, the betas had this spiffy logo with tiles that revolved as a progress indicator.
The browser was envisioned as the Killer Application for the Internet, much as the spreadsheet was the killer application for the PC. Somewhere in the back of my closet is a Mosaic Communications t-shirt with a big Godzilla look-alike on the back and the words "The Killer Application". That was the original notion of Mozilla. Mosaic was the killer app, we weren't trying to kill Mosaic.
Then, of course, UIUC came out and slapped us around for using the Mosaic name so the company adopted the Netscape name instead. No more Mosaic, no more revolving tiles logo. This is why we all had to live through the "throbbing N" status indicator for 1.0. They just didn't have time to come up with anything different before the release.
I've done more sysad interviews than I can count, so I've come up with a bit of a "method".
The first question I always ask is "Can you describe a project you've worked on that you are really proud of, what you did, and why?" This gives them a chance to brag a little, and puts them at ease. I really try to draw them out on this question, to get them to go into detail.
The second question I ask is "Now tell me about a project you worked on that you would do differently if you could do it again, and why?" Anyone who has been a sysad for more than five minutes has made mistakes. You want someone who has learned from them, and can explain what they have learned.
Then I move into the "clue check" portion of the interview. Generally questions one and two have given me an idea of how technical this person is so I can ask appropriately difficult questions. As others have mentioned, I find it's better to ask "how to" questions that are answerable in the context of any flavor unix. Asking about flags to certain commands is just useless.
One question I nearly always ask is "What is the difference between a symbolic link and a hard link?" or the corollary "Why can't you hard link across filesystems?" It's *amazing* how many people who claim to be sysads can't answer that.
I then move into troubleshooting, which is really the meat of the interview. I paint scenarios and ask the interviewee what steps they'd take to diagnose and resolve the problem. "The performance on the mail server is unacceptably slow. What do you do?" "The load on the ftp server is going up to 3000 and then the machine hangs. What could be wrong?" I try to get the person to tell me what commands they'd run, what output they'd expect if it turned out to be X problem versus Y problem. I explain that I'm not looking for a specific answer, I just want to see what their mental process is.
I end with "fit" questions. What hours they like to work, if they prefer to work alone or in groups, etc. This lets the person relax again and allows you to end on a good note. The last thing I do is ask if the person has any questions for me.
This system has worked very reliably for me. I've yet to recommend someone that turned out to be a dud.:-)
As far as I can tell, there are as many women in IT as really want to be in IT. I wish it were otherwise, but the aspiring techie women that I have worked with have typically lacked the "fire in the belly" that drives guy techies to be really successful in the business.
I don't think this is because women are stupid, or that IT is intrinsically hard. Women are just socialized with different values and priorities, and geeking out is not usually one of them.;-)
That said, women who bitch and moan about the glass ceiling bug me. In my experience my advancement has been pretty much based on how hard I worked and how smart I am. If you are good enough, your gender becomes irrelevant. Sure, every now and then a poorly socialized male makes a stupid comment, but that's what a sense of humor is for!
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be nervous to wear a Ti ring. It's not uncommon for people to badly jam a finger and have to visit an ER to have the ring cut off. My understanding is that this would be very hard to do if the ring is titanium.
Hear, hear!
Let's not perpetuate some Victorian notion that women must either be sluts or virgins. Personally I thought the article was hysterical.
Sarah (another girl)
Hey Topher! What's up? ;-)
Yeah, when AOL gobbled up Netscape I got to make a couple of trips out to Dulles for a project I was working on. I think I was the second or third Netscape employee to sport an AOL badge. It was interesting. I spent the whole time either really impressed or really appalled.
Impressed at the data centers. They have the biggest, nicest, most thoughtfully designed datacenters I've ever seen. For example, their "raised floors" are actually not raised, the subfloor is sunken relative to the rest of the building so there's no ramp to push big machines up. And there's two feet of subfloor! Ah, they certainly know how to build datacenters. *sigh*
Appalled at the philosophy behind the network. There was no separation between AOL the company and AOL the service as far as the network went. Employee accounts were just regular AOL accounts that were flagged with special privileges. That meant if one of those accounts got cracked, and you bet they did, the cracker had access to all the family jewels.
This was a Big Problem for them, obviously. Instead of creating some separation between the service and the corporate net they had just converted all the employees to SecurID logins. It really lowered the incidence of cracked employee accounts but was a pain for the users. I noted that in the article part of the complaints about the service seemed be centered around the use of the SecurID tokens.
Sarah
Dilbert: "What color database do you want?"
PHB: "I think the mauve ones have the most RAM."
I remember carefully talking my boss out of buying a million dollar performance management package that *only* worked on Solaris, would require another quarter million in hardware, and only served to make pretty pictures from sar output. They ran a free audit on a bunch of our heavily used servers and confirmed what we already suspected-- we were fine, we didn't need their stuff. My boss finally agreed not to buy the software, but I think he was really heartbroken over it. He loved the graphics.
"But look! You can drill down!"
Really, the answer to this problem is finesse. Most PHBs are fundamentally well-intentioned, they just don't understand all the issues. They aren't supposed to, that's your job. So when they show up at work excited about the all-in-one doodad they heard about on the radio on the way to work, you just have to be a little patient. Do a little research. Be tactful. Say, "Wow, that Doodad seems to be a really interesting product, unfortunately they only recommend it for use up to 50 users and we have 10,000."
Treat the PHB like an idiot (even if he's acting like one) and he'll get defensive and insist on throwing his weight around. Be respectful and maybe even a little submissive and you'll earn his trust. Then life gets a lot simpler.
Sarah
Not long ago I found myself working two jobs. I had to get out of bed rather earlier than I was used to and tended to start the day pretty groggy. I don't drink coffee (upsets my stomach) so I needed another solution to perk me up in the AM. I found that chewing gum worked incredibly well. After chewing on a piece for about ten minutes I felt far more awake and alert, and the effect seemed to last long after the stuff went in the trash.
;-)
So I started thinking. I'm a horse person, I have half a dozen of the beasts. Horses are programmed to chew. It's believed that the muscles involved in the chewing process actually help pump the blood through all the vessels in their head. Without the chewing action during grazing blood would tend to pool in the horse's head. After my gum chewing revelation I wondered if a similar principle might apply in humans. It seems logical that increased blood flow could lead to an increased feeling of alertness.
Or maybe I was just high on minty freshness!
Not only is it quiet, it really impresses the chicks...
:-)
I'm an LDAP advocate. It is exactly the right solution for a lot of problems. It is extremely powerful and flexible, and the more I've used it the more uses I've found for it. Once you've experienced the power of a fast and reliable central repository for a spectrum of IT information you never want to go back.
:-)
But. But.
LDAP, to be really useful, must be a way of life. You must put it in the center of your IT universe and defer always to it. It becomes the final "owner" for all your information. I found this invaluable, as suddenly the nightmares of maintaining a thousand different instances of the same or similar data just vanish. People get really excited once they realize all that LDAP can do for them. It's so flexible and extensible that you can put almost anything in it.
But this power comes at a pretty high up front cost in time and effort. If all you really care about is user auth it's probably not worth it. When your world revolves around LDAP, the hassles involved with getting PAM working on all your flavors of Unix and all that stuff become minor. Yes, you can get your NT domain domain to talk authenticate through it. Yes, you can get all your web servers to authenticate through it. It's not always easy, though. Often it's quite hard.
But if you commit to it, and follow through, the dream of one password everywhere is just one of the many rewards that you will reap.
As far as implementations, I've used Netscape/iPlanet and I've played with OpenLDAP. I used to work at Netscape so I'm biased, but I'd say spring for the iPlanet stuff if you can afford it. I found the OpenLDAP ACLs unintuitive and I heard reports that replication is unreliable.
A final caveat. If you do choose LDAP, and you choose to make it a central part of your IT infrastructure, make this your mantra: "Read often, write seldom". LDAP is *NOT* a database. Let me repeat. LDAP is *NOT A DATABASE*. When people realize everything you can put into LDAP the first thing they want to do is try to make believe it's Oracle. Try to use it for write intensive applications and the only person more miserable than your users will be you.
Good Luck!
I myself was a Ultima Online "widow" at one time. I kept thinking it was just a phase and would play itself out. After about 18 months of it the EverQuest betas came out and I knew it would never end. I packed my bags and left. Sure enough, he moved on to EQ and I haven't seen him since.
Back in UO days I knew a housewife who would arrange her RL day around shearing her UO sheep. I guess they regenerated their wool a certain number of times per real day, and you had to time your shearings properly to get the most wool possible.
But all that wasn't as bad as one guy I knew who kept forgetting and calling his wife her EQ name in RL. When his boss finally came to fire him he had fallen asleep at his desk with EQ still on the screen.
In Mountain View, CA
I'm only about 2k wirefeet from the CO (really!) so I'm pretty lucky. It's not the cheapest, but I've been happy with the service. Hopefully XO pulls out of their financial woes and keeps the bits flowing.
I took a BSD class once and Dr. McKusick said, "If you want to learn algorithms buy Knuth and put it by your bed. Every night, read an algorithm. You will fall asleep. But if you don't you'll learn an algorithm!"
This never seemed like a satisfactory solution to me. Besides, I was never a Comp Sci major and I'm scared of Knuth! I would definitely buy an approachable, readable algorithms book.
We'd already been kicked off one flight due to mechanical problems after sitting on the tarmac for ages, rerouted with an extra connection, and stood in several amazingly long screening lines. We were tired, cranky, and standing just a few steps away from the gate to the plane that would finally take us home. Would you choose that particular moment to lodge an official complaint?
Yeah, we should have complained. But when all you want to do is Go Home it's easy to be apathetic.
Returning from Thanksgiving my boyfriend and I were rerouted through Minneapolis. We were hanging out at the gate, waiting for our turn to board. Of course they have extra security people doing random searches right at the gate these days. My boyfriend noticed that the guy who was doing the "random" searches only selected cute young women to pat down and go through their carry-ons.
We laughed about that a little, he jokingly suggested I stand behind him since I was an obvious candidate for a "random" search. Lo and behold, just as we were about to board I got pulled out of line and felt up by the security guy. My boyfriend was not so amused.
It is definitely frustrating that these extra searches which might conceivably be useful are being carried out in the most useless and insulting possible way.
The last time I worked at a company big enough to worry about this kind of stuff we had several policies on retention based on what the data was. Alas, I didn't find out how important it was to follow these policies until a bunch of stuff got subpoenaed. I hadn't been able to bring myself to expire a bunch of internal newsgroup stuff and well, it was bad. Not that we were doing anything illegal, quite the opposite...
So don't think it can't happen to you. Seriously. These policies exist for good reason.
Anyway, our policies. Source code was archived forever. Period. Financial data was kept to the letter of SEC regs as long as we had to keep it and no longer. Mail backups were recycled monthly.
Employees were strongly encouraged to delete mail after 30 days, but it wasn't enforced technologically. I think the rule was universally ignored.
Frankly, a lot of what the policies do is set up plausible deniability if the subpoena comes and the documents aren't to be found...
First and foremost, I swear by my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Yeah, they are spendy, but they are perfect for drowning out CPU noise and random cube-farm chatter. They are also extremely comfortable to wear for long periods of time. They tend to be a mild deterrent for random interruptions, which I find to be a bonus. Be warned that people will be forced to extreme measures to get your attention when you are wearing them. ;-)
Second, drink water. Get a nice big container and fill it from the local water cooler. Sip from it constantly. When it is empty, you will probably have to go to the restroom. On your way back fill the container again. Rinse and repeat. You will stay hydrated and your bladder will enforce an occasional stroll. Never underestimate the importance of hydration!
Other folks have mentioned forcibly removing fluorescent lights. I actually don't like it to be too dark, but my eyes get really irritated if I have to stare right into a fluorescent fixture. In the past I have solved this by using mosquito netting to create a screen. It was quite functional and looked ok. The netting diffused the light and softened it.
I like to create my own space by having lots of colorful stuff in my cube. Pictures, of course, and always toys. I favor yo-yos. Yo-yoing is a great break and helps to lubricate thinking. You have to stand up, stretch, move around. Learn some tricks. It's a great conversation starter, and you come back to the problem at hand more relaxed and focused.
The company I work for has been building boxes with these drives. All of a sudden we've had five of the 75 GB Deskstars come up with bad sectors in past week, rendering filesystems un-fsckable and generally wreaking havoc. We had an emergency meeting just this morning to discuss the issue. I also have replaced probably half a dozen of these suckers in my poor little IDE RAID box over about four months. Frankly, I blamed the RAID controller for being fussy, but I guess I was wrong.
sclatter
Whoever thought Mozilla was short for "Mosaic killer" needs a history lesson.
Before Netscape was Netscape it was called Mosaic Communications. The browser they made was still called Mosaic. People may remember back in the day, pre 1.0, the betas had this spiffy logo with tiles that revolved as a progress indicator.
The browser was envisioned as the Killer Application for the Internet, much as the spreadsheet was the killer application for the PC. Somewhere in the back of my closet is a Mosaic Communications t-shirt with a big Godzilla look-alike on the back and the words "The Killer Application". That was the original notion of Mozilla. Mosaic was the killer app, we weren't trying to kill Mosaic.
Then, of course, UIUC came out and slapped us around for using the Mosaic name so the company adopted the Netscape name instead. No more Mosaic, no more revolving tiles logo. This is why we all had to live through the "throbbing N" status indicator for 1.0. They just didn't have time to come up with anything different before the release.
sclatter
I've done more sysad interviews than I can count, so I've come up with a bit of a "method".
:-)
The first question I always ask is "Can you describe a project you've worked on that you are really proud of, what you did, and why?" This gives them a chance to brag a little, and puts them at ease. I really try to draw them out on this question, to get them to go into detail.
The second question I ask is "Now tell me about a project you worked on that you would do differently if you could do it again, and why?" Anyone who has been a sysad for more than five minutes has made mistakes. You want someone who has learned from them, and can explain what they have learned.
Then I move into the "clue check" portion of the interview. Generally questions one and two have given me an idea of how technical this person is so I can ask appropriately difficult questions. As others have mentioned, I find it's better to ask "how to" questions that are answerable in the context of any flavor unix. Asking about flags to certain commands is just useless.
One question I nearly always ask is "What is the difference between a symbolic link and a hard link?" or the corollary "Why can't you hard link across filesystems?" It's *amazing* how many people who claim to be sysads can't answer that.
I then move into troubleshooting, which is really the meat of the interview. I paint scenarios and ask the interviewee what steps they'd take to diagnose and resolve the problem. "The performance on the mail server is unacceptably slow. What do you do?" "The load on the ftp server is going up to 3000 and then the machine hangs. What could be wrong?" I try to get the person to tell me what commands they'd run, what output they'd expect if it turned out to be X problem versus Y problem. I explain that I'm not looking for a specific answer, I just want to see what their mental process is.
I end with "fit" questions. What hours they like to work, if they prefer to work alone or in groups, etc. This lets the person relax again and allows you to end on a good note. The last thing I do is ask if the person has any questions for me.
This system has worked very reliably for me. I've yet to recommend someone that turned out to be a dud.
As far as I can tell, there are as many women in IT as really want to be in IT. I wish it were otherwise, but the aspiring techie women that I have worked with have typically lacked the "fire in the belly" that drives guy techies to be really successful in the business.
I don't think this is because women are stupid, or that IT is intrinsically hard. Women are just socialized with different values and priorities, and geeking out is not usually one of them.
That said, women who bitch and moan about the glass ceiling bug me. In my experience my advancement has been pretty much based on how hard I worked and how smart I am. If you are good enough, your gender becomes irrelevant. Sure, every now and then a poorly socialized male makes a stupid comment, but that's what a sense of humor is for!