Women are Winning Social Networking

I've been thinking on this subject for a while, and the graphics in this TED talk did a great job of highlighting just how much that women are dominating social networking.

Women outnumber men on social networking sites by a substantial margin across all age brackets - both in terms of number of participants, as well as average time spent.

A related thought is that perhaps the tide is turning on the great "shortage of women in technology." Men have dominated computers, electronics, and video games for decades. It has often been lamented that there aren't any good video games for women and girls, and my electrical engineering courses in the 1990s were certainly laughable - more than 90% of my classmates were men.

Social networking might just be the video game that women have been waiting for.

What I think of my Mac

So I bought a mac a few months ago. I'd been curious about them for a while, and as a computer geek attracted, but also a bit reluctant to jump on the band wagon.

My reservations: They tend to cost about twice as much as PCs for the same technical specifications. These days what's important to me are mostly lightness & portability, hard-disk capacity, and high resolution on the monitor. For the past few years processor speed and memory capacity (RAM) seem to be less important to me.

But I decided to take the plunge for a couple of reasons - I've been wanting to try my hand at writing iPhone apps was a big one, as was a sense that most of the "fun stuff" has shifted to macs - like writing iPhone & iPad apps - but also a lot of the really good web development stuff, and - I'm not sure, just a sense of the "centre of gravity of tech innovation" having made a shift from PC to Mac in the last year or two. Or perhaps I've just been reading too many Apple tech news blogs. :)

I also wasn't enjoying learning Windows 7 or Vista. I couldn't find anything particularly worthwhile for me in the new OS, and I wasn't enjoying having to figure out again how to do things I was able to do easily in XP.

Anyway - I bought one of the new MacBook Airs that came out in October. It's good - sleek, light, and I really love the large, multi-touch track pad. Physical design wise, Macs really are head and shoulders above most of what the PC market has to offer. The mag safe power connector is particularly excellent, as is the nice small size of the power adapter in the first place.

But is it really worth it - that's the question that has been in my mind. I guess it's worth it to me because I'm finding out what macs are all about.

Is it really easier to use? I wouldn't say so precisely.

What bugs me about it? The lack of function keys on the keyboard does bug me a bit. But mostly it's the feeling of being "only a consumer" - part of what I understand to be Apple's philosophy is about design, and about "taking things away" that they deem unnecessary, but as a result I keep bumping into things that I want to do, and am accustomed to being able to do on a PC, but can't. It feels like wearing a straight-jacket sometimes. Oh, and the other thing that really annoys me are the and the "smug apple punks." But I'll leave that for another post.

Things I find really bizarre (and stupid) on my mac:

1. You can't turn off the start-up sound - a jarring "dong" that happens when I have to restart/reboot the computer - which is admittedly rare - but still what a ridiculous noise. Yes I've tried the "start up sound" preferences panel hack - but for some reason it doesn't work for me.

2. I also can't believe that it won't stay on with the lid closed. Yes, I've found "Insomniax" - a hack that makes this possible, and I have also come to understand that it's for a practical reason (ventilation through the keyboard) but - I still find it ridiculous. Since I use it to play all my music, I like to leave it on with the lid closed and the music playing. It's so easily configurable on windows, it just seems so strange that it's so "off-limits" on the mac.

Alright, I'll end this post here. I have a bunch more to say, especially about iMovie, but I'll break it up into several posts.

This Blog is Back Online

After a long hiatus, I'm resurrecting this blog.  I've had some thoughts rolling around that I've been wanting to write down in longer form than are suitable for twitter or facebook, so I'm going to write some of them up here in the next while.

I scanned through my old posts, and yes - some of my views have changed in the intervening 4 or 5 years since I posted most of this, but it's still stuff I wrote - and a lot of it I had forgotten about - some of it is really pretty good (if I might say so myself)

Anyhoo.  Stay tuned.

Still Here

Just to let you know that I'm still here. I haven't posted for a LONG time, but all is well.

Scooter Box

Check out the set-up that I have for my scooter now.

A waterproof, lockable (Pelican) case underneath a milk-crate that is quick & convenient to throw stuff in.

Like it?

I outlined how I did it in more detail in a post on urbanscootin.com

Mom & Dad

Finally got some film developed & found this great shot of my mom, dad, and my dog lucky in Tofino.

My Tenacious Nephew

Check this out. My nephew Thoran - a year & half old - look at how intensely he's clinging to the toboggan. This little guy enjoyed the snowy end of November we had here on Vancouver Island. He hung on through a whole bunch of runs through the deep powder before he had enough!

Are Tea-Lights Green/Eco-friendly?

At the check-out the other day, someone pointed out to me that - as I put my shopping in my cloth grocery bag - that the 100 tea lights I was buying weren't very enviro-friendly. I haven't previously been a huge consumer of tea lights, but I am starting to use them much more lately.

At any rate, I had to concede that there are some drawbacks - the most obvious to me being the metal holder that is not burned during use. Each candle has a metal holder that must be discarded.

Naturally Reduce is the first word of the three R's (Reduce. Re-use. Recycle.) This is a given in my mind, and behaviourally I reduce all consumption in my life as much as I can while still feeling balanced (ie that i am not being unfair to myself).

Given that, this leaves Re-use and Recycle. Re-use i'm working on, but for now I'll concentrate on Recycle. Is the metal part of a tea-light recyclable? It's metal, so it's a good candidate in theory. Ultimately it will depend on one's local recycling service, and i have not yet phoned my service to inquire, but I will.

Information on the web is surprisingly sparse. Have so few others cottoned on to the eco-unfriendliness of tea-lights as yet? One reason for this post is to put more material out there on the subject. Frighteningly I was able to find only one relevant link as I write this, it is:

http://www.waverley.gov.uk/recycling/

So apparently in Waverley (UK) - "The metal bases from tea lights can also be recycled in the [metal] bank." Phewf. Someone recycles them.

I was a little concerned that the inevitably unconsumed wax remaining the in metal holder might disqualify these bases from being recycled, but then most metal recycling processes will use a lot of heat already and would presumably burn off the excess wax as a matter of course.


As a final thought: Standards can be good. In fact they can be quite green in many cases. The tea light is a standard candle format for which there are a great many modular tea-light candle-holders, and it sure is convenient. It would be nice to find tea-lights without the metal bases - please let me know if you come across any & if so where I can find some...

Jan 2011: Edited to replace the photo which had gone offline since the original post.

Adversarial Model of Government

Someone something out to me the other day. Something fundamental about the Canadian system of government and how the "House of Commons"/Legislatures work. The current party system, where one party forms "a government" and the other parties form "the opposition" operates in a fundamentally adversarial fashion.

She contrasted this model with a "co-operative model." I thought I would pontificate briefly on this thought. Personally, I like the term "collaborative" and I'm going to throw out the terms competitive & conflict-based while I'm at it.

Collaborative in my book is the process of working together towards a common goal. It brings to mind co-operation for me, but strictly speaking I think I wouldn't exclude conflict/adversarial based collaboration, and I would definitely include competitive collaboration.

I can actually see each of these types of collaboration at work in the current system. Election is a competitive model, where candidates compete for the most votes in a given constituency. The House itself definitely operates in a conflict/adversarial way. I think that's related to the party system - this arbitrary definition of "a government" and "an opposition" - terms which are meaningless to me in a non-majority situation. Perhaps if all candidates were independent, there would be more co-operation (and competition) in order to build enough support to pass legislation. Such a model might move more slowly than a majority government, but then again - what's the rush?

[CR] Displaying Stats on your Blog

Subtitle: : Making StatCounter.com work on Blogger/Blogspot

Google doesn't offer any built in stats for blogger/blogspot, but it does offer a few recommendations in the help section. The coolest of these in my opinion is StatCounter (www.statcounter.com) The best feature is the world map that it generates with markers where different people who have accessed your blog are from.

I had a bit of difficulty getting it to work for me here on blogspot so it thought i would write up a few notes on what challenges i had & how i solved them for - as they say - posterity.

_________

First of all - go to statcounter & sign up for an account & all that. I didn't find any of that too difficult, other than slightly tiresome.

When it comes to the generate html code phase - in the "StatCounter Code Setup Wizard" I chose the following:

a) Visible Counter
b) Unique Visits only
c) Counter Image
d) Choose your own colours. I did opt for the "View My Stats" Link
e) I did choose "Yes my website uses frames" but i doubt it matters. I tried "html only" code, but in the end it didn't matter much. In the end i used the default javascript-containing code.
f) I went for the "Default Install Guide"


I got as far as that without any difficulty - where i had some trouble was "Where do I paste this code to?"

After quite a bit of trial and error, I went to the "Template" section of my blog and found i could put it in there. At the bottom of my template there was a commented section that said:

"!--This is an optional footer. If you want text here, place it inside these tags, and remove this comment. --"

Actually i didn't remove the tags as intructed, but pasted the code in between this tag & the /footer tag and Voila - my stat counter is up & running.


It's at the bottom of the blog - scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page to have a look. If you click the "Detailed Stats" link, you can actually see the up-to-date stats for this blog. The "Recent Visitor Map" link at the left of that screen is the cool map I mentioned that will show you where your visitors are from.

At any rate - I hope that works for you & Happy Statcounting.