Dear Mark Shuttleworth

Dear Mark Shuttleworth,

“Women” is not a synonym for “people who don’t use, understand or create technology”.

Having used Linux for about 10 years, and being a current Ubuntu user, it’s really disappointing to hear a major figure like you, head of the Ubuntu project, say that “Linux is hard to explain to girls”.

At the University of Waterloo, Prabakhar Ragde gives a lecture to first-year computer science students about the history of computer science. He talks a lot about Alan Turing, the father of computer science, and he mentions that Turing committed suicide at 41 because he was persecuted for being gay.

Then he asks us: how much further would computer science have advanced if Turing had lived?

We can ask ourselves: what other talents are being lost to computer science, as we speak, because of prejudice? Comments like yours make existing female open source developers feel like they don’t belong there, and they make new women who are thinking of maybe giving it a try, feel like they won’t be welcome at the boy’s club, so why bother. Is the field so full up on genius and talent that it’s worth dismissing more than half the world’s population as potential developers, contributors and users?

I would urge you to reconsider this unfortunate remark, and issue an apology.

–

Chris Bell has a great blog post about this topic.

5 easy ways to improve the Bangkok Film Festival

Dear Bangkok Film Festival organizers,

I love film festivals, but it seems like you’ve made it as difficult as possible to enjoy and even attend this year’s film festival. Here’s how you could make it better next year:

1) Simplify your web site. Make the information I care about: the schedule and description of movies, ticket prices, theatre location, which showings have directors in attendance easy to find. Right now, your flash freezes my browser and it’s almost impossible to find the information I want. I don’t care about flash animations of high-society Thai people, hit counters, boring press releases or ads and neither will most festival-goers.

2) Improve your online schedule. Make an online HTML schedule, where the user can click on the movie title and get a popup window with all the details inside.

Right now, to decide which movies I want to see, here’s what I need to do:

• download a pdf schedule with the times, locations and only titles of the movies
• take each movie title and google it myself to see if I’m interested in it, one by one.

This process is so annoying that I almost gave up and didn’t attend.

EVEN BETTER: If you want to step into 2009, make a little “my film festival” app, where I can make and save my own personalized schedule of all the movies I want to see, and share it with my friends. You could easily use this to show people some ads from your sponsors, sign up people to a mailing list for next year’s festival, and find out which movies are popular.

Right now I have to write this down on paper by hand, and that’s so 1985.

3) Better signs at the theatre: Please put some signs telling me where I can buy tickets and how the ticketing works, like “buy coupons here”, and “redeem coupons for real tickets here”. I stood in line for 10 minutes just to be told I had to stand in another line to buy an individual ticket (not a book of 6 coupons, which then still need to be redeemed for tickets). It’s a big confusing mess.

4) Please have enough programs. People love movie festivals because they can see a lot of movies in a short time they wouldn’t normally see. You want people to see lots of movies, because you’ll make more money. If I come to see one movie, chances are I am interested in seeing more than one. When I tried to get a program with all the movies, there were already none left, despite it being 2 pm.

5) Hang up descriptions of all the movies where people can easily see them. When you ran out of programs, the only alternative to find out about your movies was to stand at the counter looking at one binder of movie descriptions with a long line of people forming behind me. Not cool.

People love movie festivals, please make it easier for us to come see your movies!

top 10 things i will miss about nong khai

10. Fresh air!

9. watching the Mekong river go by

8. The sunsets on the mekong, different every day.

7. Biking past the forest temple, seeing people herd cows and buffalos in the late afternoon sun

6. Having hamburgers at Milford’s New York Bistro and Vietnamese food at namnueng deang and having vietnamese curry at the little vietnamese place with pictures of her children graduating on the wall and the bowlegged Siamese cat that likes to be cuddled like a baby on his back, and the vietnamese woman who makes Jok, and and her husband who makes Radna, and the Issan guys who makes roast chicken on a spit, and the snobby woman who makes fruit juices and the fat waitress who recommends all the best food at Dee Dees and the roti place which is so popular you have to order 1 hour ahead of time!

5. My little room, listening to the storms outside at night, opening the windows to let in the night air, watching a million seasons of America’s next top model on the cable

4. Bicycle riding at night to 7 when it’s so quiet

3. Bicycle riding at sunset in the villages outside, all the kids waving at you like you’re a superstar, the deep, deep beauty of the countryside

2. Temple fairs! Issan music and dancing, and funny Issan guys with checkered shirts

2b) Thasadej market

2c) Antonio’s Italian cafe, his expresso

2d) running into everyone at the Vegetarian restaurant

2e) The delicious smell of soi Mutmee

2f) Poon and Valerie and Julian and Ae and Anton and David andJustins and Pim Jong-Il and Kevin — all these great people!

2g) Don and Jiim, who run my building, how hard Jiim works

2h) The Sunday night market, with its puppies and limes and chicken embryos and “touk yang yi sip baht” stores

2i) The Haisoke Club Tai chi group!

1) The fresh air, the clarify of the light which falls on this part of the world like no where else, the wide open sky, serenity.

people’s democratic republic of booty shaking, Sept 5th, Raindogs, Bangkok

Hey guys, I’m DJ’ing Sept 5th at Raindogs with Andrew Jones and James Alexi:

my teacher the pimp

How would like foreigners to come to your country to teach your children and promote sex tourism?

That’s exactly what happens here in Thailand. The number one hit on Google for “english teaching bangkok” is for Stickman’s Guide to Bangkok., one of the most famous Thailand sex tourist sites.

Apart from his helpful and comprehensive section on teaching English, Stickman’s site
has everything you need to optimize the experience of coming to Thailand to purchase Thai women for sex and relationships, and features helpful sections on “Thai Bargirl Investigations & FREE Thai Girlfriend Advice”, a weekly column about what’s up in various Bangkok girlie bars, and (if you want to lost all remaining faith in human kind) a reader’s submission section.

Stickman, the author of this site, is a teacher. Would you want him teaching your children? Would you want anyone from that site teaching your children?

storms, floods and other small town life

One thing I really like about small town life is that everything is an event: stuff that you wouldn’t even bother to notice in a big city becomes super exciting!

Tonight there was a big storm in Nong Khai and after it was finished I went with an old guy from my building to look at the flooded streets. There’s about a foot of rain in some streets and it’s funny to see people drive through it.

As we walked past the restaurant, this Thai woman asked us where we were going:

Woman: Pai nai? (Where are you going?)
Me: We’re not going anywhere. We were bored in our rooms and we came to look at the flood.
Woman: Wow, ok.

Another aspect of small town life is everyone is always asking you to teach English somewhere. Why not? I thought, (see “small town life, nothing to do”) so today I “taught English” to a class of 7-9 year olds. I say “teaching” because it’s really more like herding a bunch of animals than any kind of learning anything.

So we played a game where I told them different actions in English and they had to do them (“jump, sit down, clap your hands, spin around”) and then different students took turns being the “boss” and telling everyone what to do. This went down well because it involved screaming and running around, which was what they were going to do anyways.

Then I tried to go for a bicycle ride in the country side, but I ran into a guy I know who bought me a gin and tonic. That one gin and tonic was so strong I had to walk my bike home, I was so drunk.

You’ll notice that today was a record because I talked to *two* foreign guys in one day and they were both *ok*. No sex tourist/sexpat topics were mentioned at any point. I enjoyed talking to them. Meeting one such person in one day sometimes happens, but is still rare enough to be noteworthy. But two? Holy shit.

acclimate: a cool new mag for expat women in bangkok

Finally, someone has figured out that expat women in Thailand are a market worth catering to:

Acclimate Magazine

I really like their mission statement:

Acclimate gets it. We understand the struggle, because we’ve experienced it ourselves. We address the issues of identity loss and readjustment, while helping expatriate women find their own passions and their own best life in Bangkok. We offer inspirational stories from women in our community who have managed to find their way through unbelievable trials. And we never forget about the small stuff that makes life just a little easier, like where to get a great haircut, or where to go for the best foot massage.

how to do laundry by hand, country-style

“You can get a big tub and do your laundry by hand!” the Thai owners of my building announced happily when I asked them if there were any washing machines I could use, or some kind of laundry service.

Me: “Um….ok….um…how would I do that, exactly?”

Like most Canadians, I’ve washed one or two things out by hand in the sink, but any kind of large-scale laundry-washing endeavor has involved, you know, WASHING MACHINES. But washing machines are actually rare here, especially the real, modern kind so hand-washing everything is pretty common.

Of course, any place poor enough for laundry machines to be a novelty probably has lots of people I could pay to do my laundry. However, I like doing chores myself. Also, while it’s easy to pay people to do stuff for you in Thailand, it can be quite hard to get things done the way you want. (See: “it’s so hard to get good help these days”) — so in most cases it’s a lot simpler to do it yourself.

Here’s how you wash laundry by hand:

1) You need a big laundry tub, about 3 feet wide a laundry brush, and of course detergent. If you’re a princess like me, you need rubber gloves too. The giant tub is important, it really doesn’t work well to do a lot of laundry in your sink.
2) Put water and detergent in the tub, then the laundry. Make sure everything is wet, then let it soak for 1/2 hour.
3) Using the laundry brush, take each item of clothing and inspect it for stains, and give it a good scrub with the brush.
4) Drain the water, and put in new, clean water.
5) Let stuff soak a little bit more
6) Drain water, and twist out the water from each item. Once you have to twist out a towel or jeans, you will have a newfound appreciation for centrifugal force: it fucking sucks.
7) Hang each item on a hanger and put it out in the sun. In Thailand, where temperatures reach 40C, no one except hotels own dryers: it takes about an hour for clothes to dry in the afternoon sun.
Done!

an explanation of the automatic language growth method

Someone knocked on my door today to ask me to teach them English (I’m not joking!) They want private lessons, and I’m at a bit of a loss because I really, really believe in the method used at my Thai school, where you spend hours listening before you try to speak. Many people don’t like this method because they want to speak right away, but in my experience, especially with a tonal language like Thai, those people who speak early NEVER learn how to speak properly, and their accent is awful. They will never sound like a native speaker.

Similarly, I’ve studied both Japanese and Italian at university, and while I did well at the time, I remember maybe 5 words of each, now. Thais typically learn English in school for years, and most of them can barely speak at all. In both cases, it doesn’t stick. Whereas I feel like I will remember the Thai I know until the day I die.

I think in Thai even, sometimes now. I have to mentally translate to speak to my mother, because some ideas pop into my head in Thai.

Here’s an interesting video of David Long, the director of the Thai program at AUA, explaining the ALG method used in my Thai class:

khun baan deocan, the video

Here’s the video for Pai Pongsatorn’s Khun Baan Deocan:

For those unfamiliar with Issan (and not sick of hearing about it already from this blog , here are some details from the video:

* The food you see the singer making in the beginning is Issan food: stuff like laap, som tam (papaya salad), weird stuff like fermented crab. I think the point of the video is that the singer opens an Issan restaurant, and all these “real” Issan people go eat there, and then it’s delicious, so the singer is *really* Issan, or something like that. (Thais, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.)
* Notice the deliberate “country” styling, in normal Thai videos, they make people look as rich as possible.
* The people you see eating in the restaurant are all wearing uniforms of jobs that Issan people working in Bangkok would have: taxi drivers, construction workers, food sellers, security guards.
* The singer is WAY darker skinned than anyone you’d ever see in a Thai pop video.