Category: culture-and-politics

Geeks Talk Sexy – The Other Half of the Population

Photo credit: hoyvinmayvin

The description says: Geeks Talk Sexy is back – bigger and better!

And it certainly will be bigger and much better.

So we’re kicking off with part 2 of the sexygeek series. Of course we always planned to do more. But I got a feeling part 2 might shock people because its quite distinct.

This time its all about the female geeks, except instead of the usual discussions about woman and men which we’ve all heard quite a few times. We’ll be digging down into the deep mystery of relationships between the two.

  • How do girl geeks and guy geeks interact in the geek community?
  • What happens when we go from techy hack day to romantic hack date?
  • What are the problems we have to overcome?
  • What can we do to make everyone feel comfortable in their role?

Yes the nitty gritty or you might prefer the nuts and bolts of male and female relationships within the scope of the geek culture.

Most discussions center around woman in the workforce, as entrepreneurs, in places which were along time ago though as only for men. But there is little talk about relationships of men and woman. In actual fact I’m kind of lying. There is quite a lot information but they tend to be buried deep down in places where most of us don’t go looking. So we’re uncovering and discussing it on Friday 4th Feb at Madlab. We may also have a very special guest stopping in, so what you waiting for? Sign up now at our event page.

Disclaimer

Now I have to add the very serious disclaimer because people are going to get very irate about the whole thing.

We are fully aware that this title and concept is only a vague approximation to reality and that gender is not just binary. We are in no way assuming that there are only straight, cis, monogamous, male or female geeks. For the purpose of the talk we picked the most obvious intersection for arising problems, which is the role of women in the geek community that is usually only discussed from a professional point of view.

We hope this decision does not offend anyone (although I got a feeling it will) and that people of all genders and orientations join us for the talk. Please do get in touch if you have got serious concerns.

The whole series

I said in my new years resolutions for 2011, a lot of things regarding Take Geek Culture to new heights. We (me, Samantha and Hwayoung) have worked hard on the series and have some cracking surprises to come. I really hope people bear with us, the first one was great and we learned a lot from that one but it was ultimately very difficult because we tried to cover a load of issues in one overview session. In this one we will stick to one subject, so it will be a lot more tighter. We’re also hoping to have a special guest join us for the event, who that will be will be revealed later. To get you all started, there is this Comfort-a-Crying-Woman

Next in the series we will be exploring Gay, Lesiban, Bi, Poly, Transexual and what ever else there is. I’m happy to say we have some help from Simon Carter who has stepped up to help us better represent section of geeks talk sexy. Me, Samantha and Hwayoung are not that familiar with most of these. So to do them any real justice we certainly need help.

Of course its all about part 2 right now, so what you waiting for? Sign up now!

BBC Backstage in the guardian again

So now the ebook is out there, this pretty much spells the end of the BBC Backstage project. The backstage site & blog will go into a deep freeze so none of the links will be broken. It was interesting to read the Guardian wrap up of backstage, there was some good quotes from our interview way back in December 2010. But what got me was after a while was the slideshow from Rainycat. She was so good at documenting things. Of course afterwards I spent about a hour or so going through my own photos tagged bbc backstage.

I’ll say it again, BBC Backstage was an amazing project to be part of and even run. Not just the big stuff but also the small stuff. The good times (the many events we did, the prototypes and finally getting our own backstage playground servers off the ground) and the times when I thought I might be sacked (such as undermining the podcast trial by launching our own using blip.tv or crossing the hacker/BBC divide by sympathising with the DRM protests).

Its been simply incredible and looking back through the pictures, I see a lot of really happy people. Theres no doubt I’ll be chasing the high of working on backstage for quite some time to come. I think I remember a conversation I had with Rain after her attachment came to an end.

"Working for the BBC should be that way, and anything we can do to make that happen is always a good thing."

As always thanks for tags hackers of the new world, hopefully what we do next will be even more exciting that backstage ever would have been.

Online dating goes a little like this

Me on how to have more sex

According to Stephen Mount, online dating goes something a little like this.

Person A: Hi

Person B: Hi

Person A: What’s your financial circumstances?

Person B: I’m skint

Person A: Bye

In my experience this is certainly not true. It would be interesting to hear where Stephen is meeting these ladies? The only time I’ve ever had someone challenge me about how much I actually earn is when I went speed dating for the first time and it ended up on ITV 1 primetime.

The woman (who I won’t screen shot for her own sake, although I really would like to) who is person A in the following role-play and I’m person B.

Person A: So what do you do?

Person B: I work for the BBC on a special project which I love

Person A: Oh thats a shame, I heard the BBC don’t pay very well

After a slight delay (I was weighing up in my mind how this would play out)

Person B: Well that only matters if your a gold digging ******

Person A: **** ******* ******** ******

Lets say the next 2.5 mins were some of the most difficult conversation you could have with a stranger…

Luckily its only ever happened once and even more luckily it was not caught by the camera for the ITV viewing public, because that would be too embarrassing at the time but ever so funny now.

5 reasons why I can’t date muggles

Geek dating?

From Tara Hunt, 5 reasons why I can’t date muggles

  1. We speak a different language: just today I told a nice man who wants to meet me for coffee that I couldn’t because I had the Montreal Python meetup to go to. His response? “You are into snakes?!”
  2. The most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me is to use my avatar in the mockups of their web app. Flowers, poetry and the like just can’t quite measure up anymore.
  3. A list of some of the stuff that turns me on: hackathons, data, a vigorous debate on web standards, competing for the most badges on Foursquare, pushing to production from dev…see?
  4. Most men are uncomfortable with our arguments being resolved on Quora.
  5. I kinda want to use the Angry Birds theme as my first wedding dance someday.

Bonus: using the word muggle brings on puzzled looks in the first place!

Entertaining slight of words by Tara Hunt, glad she shared it with the world (outside of FB). I would suggest I have a list like this…

  1. We think about different things: I don’t care about xfactor or what the latest soap/pop sensation is going through on ITV2.
  2. One of the most romantic thing you can do for me is: Organize a candle lit game of werewolf with a bunch of friends in a park late one summer night.
  3. This is the list of things which attracts me: Intelligence, the ability to truly inspire, hacking and educating others to hack, sharing useful knowledge.
  4. Most woman I’ve met are uncomfortable with the transparency of my social life. (but maybe thats a good thing).
  5. I am a geek but not a stereotype, I certainly will be dancing well to snap rhythm is a dancer at my next wedding.

Time to hack the Pacemaker

Pacemaker in my Hand

I love my pacemaker but Tonium have really screwed the community of pacemaker djs.

It started when they moved lets mix from a pacemaker community to a generic dj community. I understand the reason why they did it but the pacemaker only djs were pretty much invaded by all types of other djs. Tonium did setup a getsatisfaction account and people started using that to voice there concerns. But after a few years, get satisfaction reports Pacemaker monitors but is not active in this community. There hasn’t been a update in years now and there’s still plenty of outstanding issues.

My pacemaker is still working as good as it always has but I could certainly do with a replacement battery. It currently lasts about 2 hours while recording is on, it use to last about 5 hours.

I couldn’t get the Pacemaker editor working with Wine again, so I finally switched to using VirtualBox (virtualisation) the closed source version because you have to use the USB to talk to the Pacemaker. It is a pain having to drag the mixes over and export them but it does work.

Open source Pacemaker

on the forums…

Amias Channer wrote 1 day ago

has anyone reported tonium to the eff for GPL violations ? you are required to make source code available if you use GPL’ed code and the EFF have a legal fund to force companies to do this tonium, please save yourself a lot of money (you will have to pay their expenses) and publish the damn code. its not hard to do. i will help you if you don’t know how.

musicinstinct commented 1 day ago

I noticed if you go into settings on the device, select ‘about’ and then ‘legal notice’, then scroll down to the bottom you will find a notice that source code is available by sending 5 EUR to GPL Compliance Manager at Tonium AB. I wonder if anyone has tried this and successfully received it?

Amias Channer commented 1 day ago

http://getsatisfaction.com/pacemaker/…
this thread suggests that they have been refused every time.

So it looks like Tonium could be in breech of the GPL, but this may take a long time to resolve its self.

So its time to hack the pacemaker

I said for a while since the pacemaker does actually mount on Linux, it should be easy to hack it specially because it seems to store everything in .pacemaker and uses a SQLlite database for most of its things.

Musicinstinct wrote

I’ve also managed to access the tracks database using sqlite manager in Ubuntu, but in order to successfully install new tracks I would need to create the metadata. This is an XML file and should be doable if we can reverse engineer the format of the beat mapping data, or get access to the source code.

So now its the race to understand the XML format and create a schema which works with the pacemaker. Of course there is now another forum if your interested in following the hacking.

Fun times ahead…

The bechdel movie test

Scott Pilgrim vs The world (2010)

Zoe Margolis sent me a link to her review of the new Tron Legacy on Screen Jabber. Although I was thankful for her review because Cristiano and Melinda had also seen it and said some pretty bad things about it, I saw a link to the Bechdel Test.

It’s also annoying that all the female characters in the film are wearing high-heels, as if all women in the digital future are – or should be – obsessed by looking as sexy as possible, rather than wearing something more practical and fitting for the dystopian environment. TRON: Legacy certainly doesn’t pass the Bechdel test.

So I had a look at the Bechdel Test, and found the rules.

  1. It has to have at least two women in it
  2. Who talk to each other
  3. About something besides a man

Wow this has got to go in future Geeks talk sexy conversations! I had no idea such a thing existed but boy oh boy are they interesting. Inception barely passes the test with a dubious mark.

Marina writes

Yeah, I think I’d go beyond "dubious" and say it fails–both because Marion Cotillard’s "character" is actually part of a male character’s subconscious and because the (<10-second) conversation she has with Ellen Page’s character is at least subtextually about the male character.

However Scott Pilgrim vs the World also bearly passes with a dubious mark too.

Danny writes:

I’d call it dubious. Knives and Tamara talk about how much Knives hates Ramona, and how Knives is dying her hair. It’s dubious because both conversations are really about Scott.

Knives does talk to Kim about the band, but it’s not really a "conversation" so much as three lines of dialouge ("Are you a drummer?" "…Yes" "That’s so cool!". I still think it counts, though.

This is fantastic but also its sad that so many films stereotype woman into stupid roles.

RemCloud vs Mydreamscape

Dirty Si sent me a message to say go check out remcloud.com.

From there About page…

REMcloud is a social and information network that connects people all over the world around the most universally shared human experience; our dreams.

REMcloud allows you to see what the world is dreaming about at any point in time: tapping into the worlds collective consciousness in real time.

Dreams are the deepest connector of the human element and are extremely powerful. Think about this:

  • Fact: When you dream, your body is completely paralyzed and you cannot move
  • Fact: Your brain is more active when you are dreaming than when you are fully awake
  • Fact: Many blind people can see in their dreams
  • Fact: Babies dream, even before birth
  • Fact: The Romans interpreted dreams in the senate, as they were thought to be messages from the gods

We created REMcloud because we love to share our dreams with our friends and family. We soon noticed that our friends and family networks wanted to share their dreams with more of their own friends, so we opened up REMcloud to everyone.

Until now, dreams have been thought to be an individual experience. REMcloud’s social network is showing that dreams are in fact a global experience; where a recurring dream, a nightmare, a funny or scary dream, is often shared by at least one other person somewhere on the globe.

This is what REMcloud is all about – making deep connections happen for people all over the world, around the most unique and powerful experience we all share: OUR DREAMS.

So how does this compare to the idea of mydreamscape? Well there a like and to be frank if you trace it the genesis of the idea you will find Remcloud wasn’t setup before I blogged about a social network for dreams. Remcloud’s Privacy Policy also seems a little wolly for the data your handing over. I’m also thinking while reading through the about us page, that there not exactly in it for the long run, it strikes me as a flip it type site.

Interestingly there using a microblog format for the site. Just like how I originally thought of mydreamscape which was using status.net.

So generally its interesting but really missing the point, or at least there aim is very different.

REMcloud’s mission is to become the largest repository of human consciousness.”

Ok maybe not. I’ll have to email them and ask them some questions…

Memes where do they come from?

I’ve taken my eyes off mydreamscape for a few weeks recently but I’m back on the case. Recently attended a nice lecture (I was recommended by my hypnotherapist Shannon) which reaffirmed what I’m trying to do with mydreamscape.

The organic chemist August Kekulé claimed that a ring in the shape of Ouroboros (an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.) that he saw in a dream inspired him in his discovery of the structure of benzene.

As noted by Carl Jung, this might be an instance of cryptomnesia (cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without it being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, not deliberately engaging in plagiarism but rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.)

In the session/lecture I attended Susan Leigh who was the guest speaker, talked about dreams but from the point of view of a hypnotherapist. The idea being if someone comes to you for help, you might be able to get an idea of what and where there problems take root. However there was still lots to learn for someone like myself.

I wrote notes down while she was talking but here’s a few of the key points.

  • Dream descriptions are not as important as how they make you feel.
  • Within the first 30mins of falling a sleep, you are treated to a preview of all the dreams you will have that night. Like a set of trailers for that night
  • Repeative dreams obvioulsy say a lot more you that one offs.
  • The dreamer is the best person to describe and make sense of there dreams. The whole dream dictorory thing is questionable, although broad concepts do still some what apply.
  • Friends and family who know the dream may be better that a expert at understanding elements of the dreamer dream.
  • Food and drink can have a serious effect on dreams
  • Using self hyponisis its possible to artect your dream
  • Mental fatigue creates images which are not helpful
  • All manimals dream
  • Dreams are symbolic and people generally have 6-7 dreams a night

Susan mentioned the work of Dr Keith Hearne who is a internationally known British psychologist who conducted the world’s first sleep-laboratory research into ‘lucid’ dreams. Funny enough I didn’t know but I’ve actually got a book of his on my bookshelf Understanding Dreams.

So going back through the key points, I’m wondering if I should focus more on the metadata of the dream that the description its self. But also interestingly the concens about gaming or spamming the system isn’t such a worry anymore. The descriptions will be interesting but overall the descriptions won’t be that important plus will only really be interesting to friends and family who know that person.

In actual fact there was quite a lot of talk about the fact people close will be able to interupt the dream. I’m not sure what this means in the face of dream dictionaries (i assume there very generalised).

Lots of food for thought, but it strikes me that until we can confirm what kind of dream the person is having, the ephasis should be on the metadata collected. Roll on the dream recorder…

Claudia Winkleman hosts Film 2010, hold back the sexist stereotypes

From Den of Geek’s Claudia Winkleman vs the People.

Claudia Winkleman is a sexy woman. Some male nerds are uncomfortable around sexy women. Some women certainly don’t like or trust other sexy women. A lot of people, both male and female, indulge in nerdy pursuits to escape from the pressures and perils of dealing with the opposite sex and sexuality itself. If you then unbalance that equation with some misjudged sex appeal they get confused and angry, like at the impossibly perfect models who present shows about Starcraft on Anerican videogame websites, or at the sexy Spock who snogs Uhura (not logical, apparently).

I’m actually not that much of fan of Claudia Winkleman but I got to say there is something very sinister (hinging on sexist) running through the criticism of why she shouldn’t be hosting BBC’s Film 2010 show. I actually thought you she did alright and after the shock of seeing her on the show (I just happen to have the TV on and was expecting Jonathan Ross) I did check out some of the comments across twitter and the blogs (not singling anyone out except the Daily Mail). But alas Den of geek hits the issue where I’m thinking.

Let me be clear about something: I’m not saying that if you are male, and you don’t like Claudia Winkleman, then it would follow that you are a raging sexist powered by the heady combination of hatred, lust and jealousy. What I would argue that it is a combination of her femininity (she’s the opposite of a tomboy like, say, Emily Booth), attractiveness, and track record on reality shows that makes her so unpalatable to many male viewers.

Gabby Logan and Emily Booth both had to prove themselves up to the task by being better informed and better presenters than the majority of their male counterparts, and this is the area where Winkleman is ultimately going to live or die – is her film knowledge up to scratch?

It a sad fact but yes you need to be better that your counterparts. You almost have to shock your counterparts into believing you are amazing. The recent character assassination of Claudia Winkleman has got me thinking about woman geeks again. Of course we are going to explore this at a much deeper level at the series of talks we got setup starting with geeks talk sexy on 19th November at Madlab.

But a geek very much respect for her frank thinking and amazing insight is Tara Hunt, whos been thinking a lot more about her personality in the context of the Facebook movie.

If I had a penis and was 10-15 years younger, there would probably be a movie about me, too. But I’m not. I’m a woman who has been told since she was a young girl that she needs to be quieter, more humble, more demure, more agreeable, more attractive, less outspoken, less ambitious, less aggressive and more ‘woman’-like. I was highly unpopular growing up because I didn’t feel the need to fit a mould. I learnt as soon as I did fit a mould, I was rewarded. I got the academic awards and accolades? I was ostracized + called a show-off. Nobody wanted to be my friend. When I slacked off, dressed pretty and laughed at the boys stupid jokes? I was popular! This didn’t change in adult life, either (don’t even get me started on how dating advice on how a woman ‘should act’ fits into this whole mess)

There will be lots more of this type of analysis at Geeks talk sexy… But for now its worth saying there is something sinister, I’m also saying its not all out sexism but there is certainly a need to change the script.

The rally to restore sanity

Rally to restore sanity

There is something about Jon Stewart’s Rally to restore sanity which I kind of like. Sure it started off as a reply to the whole tea party movement but its certainly spun off into something much larger and actually quite smart.

Jon Stewart really draws together a huge audience of people who fit into the democratic/liberal stand point but not only that, he’s also somewhat respected by some of the middle ground of America. The genius thing is he has made the rally about something you can’t really argue with. It means you can easily have these diverse groups of people rallying together without a problem.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this rally to restore sanity becomes a major date in the calendar. I wouldn’t mind seeing a similar protest/rally in the uk, sanity would be great right now.