[Cc'd to my dad for his interest; Dad, this is part of a discussion on
a mailing list for women who use Linux... I'd be interested in your
thoughts on the stuff below]
On Wed, Oct 06, 1999 at 03:26:53PM -0400, Blackjax wrote:
> I know what you are talking about because I grew up with parents who were
> much the same way. My mother is intelligent, but really lacks technical
> aptitude or interest and my father views anyone with less technical aptitude
> than him to be less intelligent, because they don't measure up to the only
> standard that he considers important. He does not consciously realize
> he does it and has trouble seeing it even when it is pointed out to him,
> because to him, there is nothing wrong with his behavior. It is not really
> a male vs. female thing, it is a technical vs. non-technical, he has no
> problems I've noticed with respecting women who tend to approach things
> the same way he does.
Wrt to intelligent but non-technical mothers...
My mother died when I was about 7 years old, after a couple of years of
cancer, so I never knew her very well. However, she was a seamstress by
profession, and I picked up a love of textiles from her.
As a young child, I used to play with string and taught myself something
like macrame' from first principles. I used to knit, crochet, embroider,
and sew from the age of about 7. I still do many of these activities
(especially sewing, as I make my own costumes for SCA things).
Talking to another geek friend of mine recently, he mentioned what a
mutual friend had said to him about Tauruses (we're both tauruses, though
I'm not into astrology) -- that they like good sex, good food, and sewing.
Well, my geek friend is also into sewing, also for SCA costuming purposes,
and we got chatting about the way we sew. See, sewing is hacking. You
have a problem which you have to solve with a mixture of intuition,
design, mathematics, and concentration. Especially for those of us who
don't use pre-bought patterns, the design process and the topological
contortions required have a *really* hackish feel to them.
My friend then pointed out that both his programs and his sewing projects
share another common problem -- he has heaps of them lying round half-
finished. Well, so do I. You see, we've *done* the interesting design
part, and the rest is just boring fiddly implementation. I'd figured
this was just an ADD thing, but I guess that's just giving a label to
something, not explaining it.
Now, whether it has anything to do with being a Taurus or not, I'm inclined
to believe that hacking and sewing have a *lot* in common, and that I get
bits of my hacker mentality (the creative bits) from my mother, while my
father (who used to be a systems engineer for IBM when I was a kid) got
me going with Lego Technic and electronics kits and my first C64. He
doesn't have the creative hacker mentality, but he does have the underlying
interest in technical things.
What was the point of this post? Ummm. Probably something about what
we inherit from mothers who might not *seem* to be technical, but who give
us skills that we need to be good at what we do. (This ties in with my
pet theory about female geeks putting their social skills to use in the
human-factors end of software development, too).
Anyway, nuff rambling.
K.
--
Kirrily Robert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://netizen.com.au/ - Internet and Open Source development and consulting
Level 10, 99 Queen St, Melbourne VIC 3000
Phone: +61 3 9602 2452 Fax: +61 3 9642 4955
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
