Plenty of girl geeks here too, of course. Mary Hodder just spoke from the floor. Liz Henry is sitting a little ways away. Yesterday Liz was wearing little cat ears… or maybe badger ears? Today she looks more normal. Kind of.
There’s a chef talking, eggbeater… “I’m just a a food blogger.” She’s emotional about the May first demonstrations… “my industry is supported by undocumented labor…” She laughs about how people in her industry “don’t get” computers. She “gets” computers.
There’s a woman talking now… Erica, missed her last name.. thinks of blogging as a radical act.. speaking about differences between communities… open source in 98% men… kaliya hamlin takes the mike and suggests that women can and should show up at the tech conferences…
Halley takes the mike, to comment. Not all of the commenters here today are actually geeks. But most of them are!
Lisa Sabater… culture kitchen went from static html in 2024 to whatever it is today. She thinks of herself 9among other things, I’m sure) as a self-taught geek. Lisa invokes Meg Hourihan, geek-wise…
Millie Garfield finds her blog has changed her routine. Moved on from the Boston Globe and coffee to checking her favorite blogs and reading the comments on her blog.
Having a weblog is not being a geek.
Repeat.
Whose geek street cred are you questioning, Shelley? That’s a pretty geeky list up there. Kaliya: geek. Liza: geektastic. Mary: hugeass geek.
I learned computer programming on punch cards when I was 6 … and at every engineer job interview the focus of the interview was the interviewers’ slack-jawed wonderment that I was “interested in computers”.
But I shouldn’t have to say that, because to a lot of people right now, being able to modify the html in a Typepad template makes you a studly geek. It doesn’t help to mystify things even more and make a caste system of knowledge and counter-hipness to make a bunch of people (women) feel ignorant and unwelcome in tech conversations.