*miserychick is actually happy

It is Ada Lovelace day and people have been blogging about women’s achievement in science & tech. I’m a little too drained from a streak of 15-hour work days (plus yoga) to actually write about much, but considering that it is a day of honoring my kind of stuff, here was my lazy tribute:

As a CS major, the first thing I was taught was the history of personal computer. And the first thing that stuck in my head, without me having to re-read or look up later, was the fact that the world’s first programmer was a woman. Ada Lovelace wrote algorithms intended for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine some time in the 1800s. Then later, when I was learning about compiling programs and how to ‘debug’ a program, I learned that the first person to develop a compiler was also a woman. Grace Hopper created a legacy when she pulled a real life bug out of a computer’s circuit to fix a problem, thereby coining the term ‘debug’.

Sometimes I think it’s a little sad and lop-sided that the technology field is filled with men, but it’s so perfectly natural that it was led by women.

Sent to me by my friend Juliana:
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A Spanish Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.

‘House’ for instance, is feminine: ‘la casa.’
‘Pencil,’ however, is masculine: ‘el lapiz.’

A student asked, ‘What gender is ‘computer’?’

Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer’ should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.

The men’s group decided that ‘computer’ should definitely be of the feminine gender (‘la computadora’), because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;

2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else;

3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval; and

4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

The women’s group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine (‘el computador‘), because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;

2. They have a lot of data but still can’t think for themselves;

3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem; and

4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model…

The women won.
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Two weeks ago (although it now feels like forever ago) – I took a trip to Calgary to visit Mark who was working on-site for the whole month of February. And to celebrate the occasion that was both our birthdays, valentine’s day, chinese new year’s day and Canada family day – we paused work for a bit then rented a car, borrowed some clothes, drove to Banff and went skiing.

The mountains in Banff is absolutely gorgeous and at the Sunshine Village, the ski runs stretch on forever. I’ve only been to a handful of ski resorts in the U.S. rockies, but as far as I could remember, none of them were ever as vast. On the ski lift you could see other ski lifts going in all other directions, taking the little people up and sprinkling them all around the mountain. The terrain felt like another planet and no matter how many people were up there, it was never going to be crowded.

Since it was Mark’s first time on the slope since public school and my first time in almost a decade, we only stuck to the easiest route on a lift named the Strawberry. I was surprised how much I remembered skiing, so at the end of the day I ski-ed down the mountain to the loading area instead of taking the gondola (the gondola ride took 16 minutes), and envied the little kids on their skis and snowboards all the way down.

set on Flickr

(this is the #1 image result when you google for ‘birthday‘. says a lot about our culture. or maybe it doesn’t.)

Happy Birthday Dad. Happy Birthday Julie. Happy Birthday Ana. Happy Birthday Jen. Happy Birthday Vivienne. Happy Birthday Mom. Happy Birthday Andy. Happy Birthday Dad. Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone. Happy Birthday Little Sister. Happy Birthday My Husband. And Finally, Happy Birthday to Me.

My February is always very concentrated with birthdays. Funny how the happiest month of the year is the shortest.

I’ve been to several artist talks here in Toronto, and one of the questions from the audience that almost never failed to get asked is how the artist funds their work.

Which, I find, is a rather personal question to ask after you’ve just listened to the artist talked passionately about his/her work for an hour (or so). Sure, I can understand the curiosity and everyone in the room who’s listening might be wondering the same, but it takes a certain type to actually word it out. Imagine your friend taking you to a house party in a really fancy place owned by someone you don’t know and you show up uninvited then asking out loud how much they pay for rent. *awkward*

Tonight, after Golan Levin presented his body of work, in what was quite an excellent talk, at the OCAD auditorium, some questions were asked and answered and then there was:

“So, who pays for all the fun and why?”

Golan chuckled a bit, he took it in stride though and said that he often wonders the same. To be fair, the prelude to the question was probably the fact that he started his presentation with a little diagram showing how his work doesn’t fall into the ‘useful’ category because people tend to make money there, thus revealing that he doesn’t really make money doing all this stuff. He answered the question by saying that he doesn’t do the ‘fun stuff’ all the time. “I do other stuff too, I just don’t show you any of that here.”

(photo by @katehartman)

And the thing is, at most of the artist talks, this is usually the answer. They will do whatever they have to do in order to do the art. Exceptional cases are when the artist has a collector / rep gallery or is funded to do specific work by certain institutions. But even in those cases, before they can get that kind of funding, everyone will have done something to make money and they’ll never show as part of their art work. Because it doesn’t matter. Because the work has to come out so you just do whatever it is you need to do to make it happen. Most people understand this, and it’s why we don’t ask.

Perhaps the question about who pays for the art isn’t really about the money or the artist at all.  Maybe it’s a way of wondering how it is that the artist gets to do these cool things but I don’t. Just like walking into a party in a fancy apartment and wondering how it is that people get to live like this but I don’t.

It’s funny how nothing tastes that good when you’re eating by yourself, even if it’s the exact same thing you’d make if there was just another person around.

This little yellow post-it note was folded in half and resting on the street car seat I was about to take on my morning commute. The words ‘in Canada’ was facing up so I picked it up to read the whole thing.

Whoever or whatever the situation this was meant for, I find this little sentence to be so brilliantly stated it could almost be a slogan for Canada, albeit one with an ironic twist (but that’s hip, right?). The fact that it was written for someone makes it just perfectly hilarious. Of course, nice Canadians wouldn’t say this directly to someone, but you do have to let them know the rule of the land somehow, right? I mean, eh?

I babysat Laya for an hour while her daddy was getting a hair cut.  She walked in a circle around my living room for a bit then told me that she has a lot of toys at her house and I can go and play with her sometimes (probably from seeing that I don’t have any toys – poor me).  So I showed her my toy and we took a picture of ourselves using Photo Booth.  Then we had a mini-picnic with her snacks and juice.  After she spilled on herself a couple times, she said to me that there’s too much juice and that daddy has to drink it first.  ”Ohhh!”  It was a rare moment of clarity where you realize a 3-year-old had to tell you what to do correctly.  So I drank some juice for her dad.

Then we jumped up and down in my living room for while, good thing my neighbor wasn’t home.  At her size, she can jump, lie down immediately and then get up to jump again with relative ease, but I couldn’t really follow.  She showed me how to do snow angels on my living room floor.  Lacking toys, she managed to entertain herself with invisible things which she shared with me and I had to put them back on the stairs (which, I guessed, was her imaginary toy box).  She announced that there was gonna be a Chanukah party with dreidels and then packed her bag because we were going to Valentine’s Day.  Everything was always spontaneous, imaginary, and never needed any coherent meaning or reason.

I can’t remember anything from when I was three.  It must have been fun.