Being Amber Rhea

I know I should be glad men are writing about sexism in tech (and I am) but stuff like this always kinds of annoys me too. The person who marked it for me in del.cio.us (btw, I can’t remember who this person actually is; their del.icio.us handle isn’t one they use elsewhere, apparently!) said this:

Hmm. Good article, but I find myself not wanting to link to Yet Another Man Discovering the Issue (sigh). Still, the code-of-conduct proposed seems pretty good, and at least he links out to women in his post.

It is a good post, and I’m not annoyed at the post itself (because as I’ve said before, it’s vitally important for men to talk to other men about sexism), but rather the culture around such posts, I guess is what you would call it. It’s like, it’s only taken seriously when a man writes about it; when a woman does, we’re just whiny bitches. Which is the whole point, but irony is lost.

So Rusty wrote a thing to import my old blog (first database, April 2002-January 2004; second database, March 2004-April 2007) into WordPress. Yay! It’s something I’d been wanting to do for a long time but hadn’t felt like doing myself, because I didn’t know how easy or hard it would be, and how much time I’d have to spend poking around in shitty documentation and message board threads full of haughty asses. As it turns out, the PHP was pretty simple - very similar to the PHP for my original blog, actually - it was just finding the WP-friendly XML format that was a pain in the rear. The documentation for that is (surprise!) shitty, and apparently Rusty had to do a lot of hunting around to find the right format. See, that is the kind of thing I don’t have the patience for. Like just today for instance, I was trying to find out how to edit my .htaccess file to restrict virtual directory listings. I actually don’t care that much (if I did, I would’ve done it a long time ago) but for some reason I got a wild hair today and decided it would be a good idea. First I went to see if there was an easy setting to check on or off in the Dreamhost control panel. (Control panels have made me forget a lot of command-line stuff; PHPMyAdmin, in particular. I used to do MySQL by command-line only. Now I just don’t care enough anymore.) There wasn’t. So I did a Google search hoping to find what to add to my .htaccess file. And I couldn’t find it! Everyone was trying to be so damn cute. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s these self-righteous uber-geeks on message boards. Somebody had gone on a message board and asked the very same question I was asking; well, to be precise, they phrased it like, “How can I restrict virtual directory listings?” You know what some asshole wrote in response? “By editing .hatccess.” Thanks for nothing, asshole! And then somebody else was like, you have to set the blah blah option, with a link to the Apache man page. And who can read that thing? Look, I’m a pretty hardcore geek (I just don’t feel like I always have to thump my chest about it and get into a pissing contest over who knows the most obscure terminology) but I don’t have time to sit around and try to decipher that stuff. I know it’s an Apache configuration thing. And you, Smart Guy, on the message board thread, obviously know how to do it. So why not just paste in the line of code, let Google pick it up, and then everybody else searching for it in the future will quickly and easily find their answer and get on with their day, instead of slogging through man pages like a “real” geek, or god knows what.

I’m just so over the days of trying to “prove my creds” as a geek. I just don’t care. I have a Master’s in IT, but even the minute I say that, I look like an ass. But I do. I’m a programmer, and if I have to prove my creds, I can always say I wrote my own blog with PHP. But see, I don’t have to prove anything. When I was in school, there were always those guys (always guys) who would make everything a competition about who was geekier. Does anybody like being around them? That shit is fucking annoying!! And it always stuck in my craw in a particular way because they always assumed I didn’t know anything. Because I was the girl. So surely I must need their “computer help.” I mean, even tonight, I said something on Twitter about importing my old blog into WP, and somebody @ messaged me and said something like, “Let me know if you need help or advice.” And I KNOW this guy was just trying to be nice and friendly, but I’ve heard stuff like that for so many years, from guys who maybe sincerely thought THEY were trying to be nice and friendly, but were assuming I was technologically illiterate, that it rubs me the wrong way.

Anyway, like I said, I’m done feeling like I have to prove anything. I guess it’s like my hardware phase, which was roughly late 2000-early 2003. I collected old computers (mostly Macs). I loved delving under the hood of a Mac. To earn extra money, I did things like install RAM and configure software. I built PCs (but felt dirty doing it, so I stopped; I just couldn’t in good conscience keep foisting Windows onto people). Even well into 2004 I had a server in my bedroom, for godsake.

I remember walking into Best Buy in Athens, with my husband, to buy parts (in my PC-building phase; call me a mercenary, I guess) - inevitably the person (usually a guy) at the front of the store would look at my husband and ask what we needed. And even when I spoke - saying something like we need a blah blah watt power supply - he would REPLY to my husband!! Infuriating!!

But anyway, one day I woke up and realized I wasn’t interested in hardware anymore. It hadn’t happened suddenly. My interest had just faded away, without me noticing, until one day it dawned on me: oh, I no longer care about this stuff. And it’s true. Now, I could not give two shits about hard drive maintenance (I guess that’s more of a mix of software and hardware, but I digress) and finding cheap motherboards on Overstock.com.

And now the same is true with a lot of programming-related stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I still think PHP is great. I just don’t sit around at night creating database-driven applications for fun like I did a few years ago. If I need to whip out some PHP, I certainly can; but that’s the thing, nowadays it’s more about need than, I guess, creating a need. I write HTML, CSS, and Javascript - and the occasional smattering of XML and XSL - all day at work and I love my job; but I don’t create random web sites at home for the hell of it anymore. I do think CSS is awesome, of course, but it’s just not the centerpiece that it once was to me. I’m much more focused on getting stuff done, finding the tools to do a job and using them, than messing around with code just because I can.

And yeah, I do get testy when people assume that because I don’t sit up at night coding, that I can’t do a certain code-related task, or that I’m not “geeky enough,” or whatever. Every once in a while someone will start explaining something to me (this reminds me of that NY Times editorial, or maybe it was LA Times, I don’t know, one of those, entitled “Men Who Explain Things”) and I get pretty snippy with them because I don’t like this assumption of ignorance. They always seem so proud of themselves. “Oh let me explain to the girl how the DOM works!” No thanks; I know. Just because I’m not talking about it every second of the day, why must you assume I don’t understand it?

It’s just a matter of how I want to spend my time, and I’ve found other things I choose to devote my time to instead. And this isn’t a judgment on those who DO still enjoy such pursuits; I mean that was me until pretty recently! Just for whatever reason, it’s not fun to me like it used to be. (And I really don’t mean that in the sort of sad way it sounds here.) Such is life.

So all this is a very long-winded way of saying thank you to Rusty for writing the thing to import my old blog! I am very grateful, and better you than me, because I just don’t feel like messing with it, even though I know I can. :) You even converted the old categories to tags… awesome!! :)

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As of this moment, I know I have an issue w/ an unclosed div in the old posts because the comments are closed, but I’ll fix it later. Update: Fixed!

Lately, Melissa keeps writing stuff that feels like something piercing my gut and brings a tear to my eye, and then I struggle to put into words what is resonating so deeply and why. Here’s the latest installment. And my rambling commences after the cut.
Read the full post »

I arrived here in Boston (for WAM!2008) a few hours ago, and am chilling in the hotel room, trying to catch up on email, and waiting for Dacia to arrive. I’ll try to do as much blogging as possible this weekend - I still need to blog about last night’s APC panel, although you can already see some of my commentary in my tweets - but for now, I just want to link to Regina Lynn’s latest Sex Drive column in Wired. She interviewed me, Dacia, and Melissa. Here’s an excerpt:

“Lots of people were at South by Southwest [when the Spitzer story broke] and didn’t have time to check e-mail every five minutes,” says Amber Rhea, organizer of the upcoming Sex 2.0 conference in Atlanta. “It didn’t matter. They used Twitter, text messaging — they did interviews with hardly any advance notice.”

Rhea says that for the first time, there’s a critical mass of people putting forth a concerted effort to make sure the media can’t ignore sex workers. Building on a foundation built by former sex workers of the past 30 or so years, many of whom went public with books, articles and speaking engagements after they retired, modern sex workers have the message — and the means to get it out.

Mobile connectivity makes it possible to channel the collective wisdom of a broad, geographically diverse group directly to a smaller number of public faces, almost instantly. Sex workers across the country could share their thoughts on the subject without outing themselves, while those who could put their real names and faces forward in the media could speak with a strong peer-support network.

Be sure to read the whole thing!

Scratch that; submitted with the only comment being, “Are you fucking kidding me??”

DEAR ABBY: There seems to be an awful lot of women exposing themselves on the Internet in graphic sexual fashion. My wife says that men degrade themselves by looking at them.

My question to you is, what is more degrading? Looking at them, or women exposing themselves? — WONDERING IN PUYALLUP, WASH.

DEAR WONDERING: For a woman to post graphic sexual images for people she doesn’t know to view strikes me as more degrading because it indicates that she thinks she has little else to offer.

However, for a married man to view those images could also be considered degrading — and threatening — to his wife. Many women have written to me because their husbands spend more time looking at porn on the Internet than having a sex life in their own bedroom. In other words, the practice became an addiction.

*headdesk*

Again, I ask, “Why oh WHY do so many people persist in the idiotic belief that taking nude photos of yourself means you have no self-respect??”

I do not understand.

[Via Dacia]

Sherry wrote about her son who won’t stop playing those goddamn video games. She mused:

This got me to thinking about online social networking. I have friends that I text message more than I speak to. I have friends who will only engage in email conversations because they are too ‘busy’ for lunch meetings. Are we allowing our lives online to affect the way we see the world?

I am still a proponent that social media and the way the Internet is evolving is capable of making the world much better in a variety of ways, but perhaps we need a parent reminding us to stay focused on our priorities and make sure we maintain some sort of balance.

And in the comments, I replied:

Eh, I don’t know. This is the kind of thing the alarmists, haters, and curmudgeons always use to try to show that technology is ruining the world. But you know, there’s a HUGE difference between planting yourself in front of a computer/video game/whatever for hours at a time such that you neglect your other responsibilities (e.g., homework, chores, family time), and integrating technology into your life in a responsible way as a means of supporting or growing offline relationships.

Her kid playing X-Box all day long really isn’t about technology at all - it’s about a kid trying to get out of doing the shit he’s supposed to do. If it weren’t a video game, it would be something else. That’s what kids do, and that’s why they need parents to teach them that dog won’t hunt.

Unfortunately there are adults who exhibit, ahem, attentuated growth. You hear stories about people whose spouses spend almost every waking hour playing World of Warcraft instead of keeping up their half of the relationship. Or “porn addiction,” for that matter. It could be anything, really.

I think that’s where a lot of people get confused; they put the focus on the wrong thing. The particular technology in any situation isn’t what’s cause for concern; it’s the behavior.

Adults don’t need parents to remind them of their priorities. Adults need to take responsibility for their own damn lives; and if they don’t, well, there are consequences. That’s the way it goes.

Frankly, people who are constantly too “busy” to have lunch once in a while are obnoxious. I don’t want to be friends with someone who’s always got a cellphone plugged to their ear. But I also don’t want to be friends with someone who doesn’t pay attention to our friendship because of any other stupid activity.

BarCamp Atlanta starts tonight, about an hour from now. Apparently we’ll be having dinner on the top level of a parking deck. Swanky!

I have no idea what to expect from BarCamp, but I’m looking forward to finding out. This will be my first hardcore, totally purist unconference (as in, no pre-planned schedule). I’ll try to do as much liveblogging (or pseudo-liveblogging) as possible and take lots of photos.

Kudos to Jeff Haynie for putting this together!

First Duane sent me this cartoon, and then I saw it at Feministe. I’ve been meaning to post it, because it kicks ass.

Heh.

Yep, my site was hacked. So was my other domain, sotsforum.net. That one is still in its hacked stage as of this writing. I have two service tickets outstanding with Dreamhost, but in the meantime, I found that I fortunately had a generic WordPress installation saved on my work computer, which is how I was able to get my blog back up.

Basically what happened was, someone accessed my FTP account illegally (I have since changed the password) and replaced my index.php files with pages full of ads. In the case of beingamberrhea.com, the site wouldn’t load and instead showed a MySQL error, but viewing the file on the server showed that it had indeed been modified at around 4:00 yesterday afternoon. The same thing happened in the wp-admin directory. I renamed both of the hacked files index_HACKED.php for Dreamhost’s reference, when/if they get to my support tickets (I’m guessing they’re swamped, ’cause this kind of thing happened to other accounts too) and uploaded the correct index.php files from the WordPress folder on my hard drive.

Meanwhile, amber.tangerinecs.com has its own problems; it was also hacked, but I had a full back-up of that as well, so I easily replaced index.php. However, I had inadvertently let the domain expire and had to renew it. :P It was registered w/ GoDaddy instead of Dreamhost, and I was not getting emails about registration. Hopefully all should be well, and Dreamhost still has my MySQL database with my 5 years worth of blog posts in it.

Side thought: I need to find a way to backup a site in its human-readable form, not just as a SQL dump!

Anyway. I don’t know when sotsforum.net will be back up, and I feel bad because I had been taking a pretty hands-off approach with that site lately anyway. But it seemed to be a self-sustaining community. Thank god for my WordPress stuff saved on this computer! I was feeling so weird and violated without my blog. I still feel weird and violated because of the hacking, but at least now my blog loads and I can tell y’all what’s up.

Add to that the fact that I woke up with a headache and stomach ache, and it just has not been a good day so far today!

As for my hosting situation after this… I’m not sure. I’ve been a Dreamhost customer for over 3 years and have been satisfied for the most part, and I know security breaches can happen to anyone despite the best laid plans, but still… I’m considering switching. On the other hand, I don’t know if I want to deal with the hassle of switching hosts. Will laziness win out? I do like Dreamhost’s web panel, and I remember back when I switched sotsforum.net from its previous home at HostReflex, what a pain in my ass that was.

Anyway… just wanted to let everyone know what’s up. Gotta work now. I wasn’t on the computer at all yesterday, so I’ll try to catch up w/ email and blog reading today as time permits (which it might not). On the bright side, Rusty and I had a great time with Figleaf yesterday. Photos from the Atlanta Botanical Garden will be posted tonight.

Update, 3:45 p.m. - Still no word from Dreamhost. It’s a good thing I had a WordPress backup! :P This means sotsforum.net is still a spam page, though. I’m sure Dreamhost is really freaking busy right about now, but damn, it’s been all day.

April 27, 2007

Originally uploaded by Amber Rhea.

I have a camera phone now! Can you believe it? I have entered the 21st century (wrt phones, at least).

I’ve never had a “new” gadget like this and I don’t quite know what to do with myself. Get this: it has a 180-degree swivel camera lens.

I do know one thing - so far, text messages via Twitter are fucking annoying. I’m going to leave that shit turned off.

Back to work now; later, I want to blog about an idea I’ve been kicking around in my head, for a new unconference.

Oh and one other thing - please continue to pardon our dust, as I haven’t had time yet to look at that CSS issue w/ permalink pages. K thx.