“I was crippled by Impostor Syndrome”: One woman’s story – If you want to understand me, you should read this. I’m not as bad as this lady, but I identify strongly with what she’s saying – especially as regards my career in IT. I always undervalue the things I’m good at and tend to disbelieve compliments when I get them. And sometimes it doesn’t help living with someone who is very clever himself. My saving grace is that there’s still a small part of my brain – maybe 15% – that is completely egotistical and thinks I’m awesome at everything. If I just listened to that part more often, I’d be unstoppable.
Category: Computers
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A familiar neck
Saturday was the apps4nsw development day, a “hack day” event where programmers were challenged to mash up government data in new useful ways. The Snook went along as part of the Yahoo team. (He tried to get me to go, but I felt like a day at home knitting was a bigger priority.) I followed along throughout the morning on the Twitter stream when I saw a bunch of people retweeting a Flickr photo. I clicked through and saw a very familiar neck…
Hey! That’s my Snookums! I immediately emailed to tell him he was Twitter-famous.
The project he helped with didn’t win a prize, but I was proud of him just for taking part.
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Felafel Land
Last week there was a bit of a brouhaha when Eddie McGuire referred to western Sydney as “the land of the felafel” on his radio show. (My personal feeling is that it was probably only 25% racism and 75% Eddie-being-a-dickhead, but whatev.) Anyway, the Snook is going to the apps4nsw “Hack Day” event tomorrow, where developers from around Sydney will spent 10 hours mashing up government data in new and interesting ways. As practice, he decided yesterday to test Eddie’s hypothesis. He pulled restaurant data from TrueLocal to create a heat map of the kebab shops in Sydney.
Some interesting results there. Plenty of felafel available in the CBD, but once you go over the Harbour Bridge, you’re in a veritable felafel desert.
Incidentally, if you have any inspiration for an app idea for the Snook, leave a comment or drop me an email. He’s even dabbling in iPhone development too…
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So frustrated.
I feel like my pre-verbal nephew who can’t enunciate what he feels and is reduced to caveman-like outbursts of rage. DAH! DAH DAH DAH!
- I tried to buy an international calling card at the Chinese grocery near my house tonight. I spent like 10 minutes reading fine print on stupid posters and flipping through brochures and finally found the one I wanted. I spent $10 on it, walked back to my house, and realised it was for recharging mobiles, NOT using with a landline. I ran back over, expecting them to exchange it. They refused. Policy of no exchange on phone cards. “But I was here 2 minutes ago! This isn’t what I thought it was! I didn’t scratch the PIN off! I SHOP HERE ALL THE TIME!” They told me I could come back and see the manager tomorrow. I said I needed the card for a call at 6am in the morning. No go. I finally threw it on the counter and told them I’d never shop there again. Tomorrow I’ll stop in just long enough to tell the manager the same.
- Okay, so having wasted $10, how am I going to connect to the RRT show tomorrow at 6am? I could ring on the landline, but obviously it’s the principle of the thing now. So I just spent a goddamn HOUR trying various ways of doing it via VOIP. I tried the stupid ShoePhone. I tried using Google Talk. I tried it with telephone. I couldn’t get any of them to work. At best, I’d get choppy audio that sounded like it was coming through a fan. I’m going to have to suck it up and pay to ring in.
- I used to have several cron jobs that did useful things at this site, like processing Moblog posts (emailed images from my iPhone) and updating my podcast download stats and posting my Google Reader items. Sometime in the past few months, Quadrahosting changed something and they all stopped working. I spent a couple fruitless hours with the Snook trying to fix them. No go.
- Earlier this week I spent $60+ on Moneywell for my Mac and our iPhones. It’s personal finance software that’s meant to sync to your phones. Yet the first evening, we couldn’t get the sync to work at all. One phone would work; one wouldn’t. Sometimes neither. Then today suddenly without changing anything, they’re both working. Until they stop.
WHY DOES EVERYTHING SUCK? If supposedly smart techie people like me can’t figure this crap out, how the heck is the rest of the world?
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RSS Feeds
I put RSS feeds on the Tapestry Craft website today, so now you can see whenever I upload new products. There are even category-specific feeds, so you can subscribe to just knitting yarns or cross stitch kits or whatever. Huge thanks go out to the Snook, who helped me with some decidedly non-trivial coding issues. He rocks.
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Poker-playing robot
Hey Jenny: I’m interested to hear what my “cousin-in-law” Dave has to say about this poker-playing robot. I almost think it’s a flawed experiment to begin with, because the whole point of being a good poker player (as I understand it) is to read your opponent. The cards you get shouldn’t matter at all. But a computer just can’t (as far as I know) interpret the millions of subtle bits of body language that humans are capable of. And conversely, there’s no way for the human to get a read on his opponent’s game other than by the card’s he’s shown. It just seems like more of a stunt than anything.
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Wii Related Stuff
How much do I love my friends? This morning Eva e-mailed me a link to the forthcoming High School Musical videogame. SQUEEEE! And it’s going to be for Wii! And then Bex sent me a link to a pattern for a drawstring Wiimote carrying bag. Fun Monday so far!