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Barbie, you can do it!

Yes Barbie, the possibilities are endless! Dream big because you can have it all! I am a girl! I am a computer geek! I own my own business, men (and women) pay me to show them how to use computer software and write programs! I am a mother! I am a grandmother!

If you aren’t familiar with the Barbie book “I Can Be a Computer Engineer”, you aren’t missing much. It’s a horrible story to present as a role model for young girls. (As if Barbie qualifies as a role model! ***)

In this story, Barbie is a computer engineer who needs the boys to code a game for her. She infects her computer and Skipper’s computer and needs the boys to fix it for her. Sheesh. No wonder there is a shortage of women in technical fields. Books like this tell girls they are incompetent with computers and need boys to fix things for them.

Barbie as an inept computer engineer

Not all men have the attitude of the writers at Random House. I remember a Dell consultant telling me “Women make better Microsoft Exchange administrators.” So yeah, some men know we are very capable around computers.

Fortunately Random House pulled the awful book this week after receiving a firestorm of complaints over it’s sexist portrayal of girls.

Barbie you can do it

*** I say this as someone who grew up with Barbie. I had an early Barbie, one of the first Skippers. I sewed Barbie clothes for my own daughters. I still have some of my dolls here, somewhere, and a box of Barbie doll clothes I made for the kids in the basement.

Mattel pulls book, apologizes for portraying Barbie as inept computer engineer in picture book

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Windows 7 SP1 came out how long ago?

And even though i have automatic updates enabled, it wasn’t installed? I only discovered the problem because IE9 would not install (hey, WordPress wants me to use it :)) and I discovered Sp1 was not installed on that computer.

Here’s hoping SP1 will install… and maybe put an end to the 4 updates that won’t install (or keep reinstalling – I’m pretty sure at least 2 are properly installed but Windows is too dumb to know that. :))

 

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My second AirDesk

I’ve had an airdesk for a little over 6 years, since a friend introduced me to one. I love it – it was in my office in TN and i used it all the time. I put it in the office here and used it when i worked in the office, which is not 100% of the time (like i did in TN). I’m under a deadline and have been working in the living room a lot lately but tired of using the laptop on my lap – for some reason, it was too easy to get distracted with the laptop on my lap  (plus my arms were getting sore). So i moved the airdesk to the living room. But now I don’t work in my office at all because i don’t have a laptop desk there… so i ordered one for my office. I also got a mouse shelf and cup shelf. I’m not sure which desk i will use those on yet.

Yes, there are cheaper “solutions” for using laptops on couches… but its highly configurable. It’s easy to adjust – and adjusts in every way imaginable. My laptop DVD was broken twice because i set it on the floor – with the airdesk, I just need to push it out of the way.

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Office Communication Server

Is the worst application I have ever installed in 20 years. Exchange server was a piece of cake to install and configure.

Very little is automated in the OCS installation. The failure messages are not very clear and its nearly impossible to figure out what is wrong.

First error: windows media not installed. It took forever before i figured out i needed to install the Desktop Experience crap on my server. (WTF? Why is it needed on a server?) Then it halted on an activation error. After another wasted  few hours, i found an article that it was a hotfi that needed to be uninstalled.

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You know you are old…

Year: late 80’s, early 90’s. Chris was about 12 or so. We were at the farmhouse and mom told him to call my sister’s and talk to her kids. He stared at the rotary phone and had no idea how to use it.

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Facebook can be so annoying.

It’s bad enough that its a virus… I’m serious. I was talked into signing up for facebook during a meeting about the Outlook Social Connector and within an hour had 40 “friends”…  but the real virus is the applications and the crap they litter the feed with.

I finally figured out how to hide farmville and other updates (click on the Hide button in the feed and you can choose to hide updates from the application).  Then tonight my daughter called to ask how to get rid of the photo collages that apps added. It took us 15 minutes to figure it out we needed to remove the tags.

Facebook is a time wasting virus.

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GPS & Weather Radar

We went to see Mom over the weekend and had to drop Cece off at school on the way home. The forecast called for possible freezing rain in the higher elevations so we left early to avoid the bad weather. I had the GPS up, Desktop Weather Max set on radar maps, and updated the GPS fix on the blackberry weather bug app every 10 min so we could get current temps (radar maps load slow) . Based on the radar maps, it looked like we were running about 15 min ahead of the storm as it moved into northern tier of PA and southern tier of NY.

I’ve used a GPS for years with my Tablet PC and Street Atlas (from Delorme) and often wished I could overlay weather radar so we could see where the storms were.  Both when we lived in TN and also now when we head east on I-90 along Lake Erie or west on I-80 through IN, it would really be nice to see the local temps and radar so we know what we’re running into when the weather is bad.  My Blackberry and the weather bug app can do this and its really helpful, but I wish my GPS map could do it – I like the bigger screen and it seems like it loads faster than the blackberry maps.

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“Are you at the computer?”

I hate it when the kids call (from Chicago, Philly, Canada etc) and that’s the first thing they ask. It means they want me to look something up for them, often an address or phone number. Hopefully, they’ll do it less with smartphones, although it usually is easier to look it up on a computer than using a phone’s browser.

When I lived in Tennessee, my son used to call from the grocery in Ohio and ask where to look for something. As if i know how his grocery store is laid out! I suppose I encouraged it by answering correctly “try the isle where the canned veggies are”.

Cell phones might make life easier… for the caller.

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“I can’t find the Internet”

How awful! I couldn’t find the Internet. We were already behind schedule for a road trip and I wanted to get some work done in the car, so I needed my MiFi, but it was missing from my laptop bag and wasn’t in the glove compartment. I finally found in it a handbag I don’t usually use, but it’s the perfect size for the netbook and has a slot for the MiFi. 

I really need a case for “the internet” so I can clip it to the computer and not lose it. (Losing the MiFi is my biggest fear – I never had that problem with the PC Card – it was always in the computer. )

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Bad weather, the Internet and GPS

There is nothing like bad weather to make you appreciate what you can do with modern technology. We hit snow in the Dayton area and wondered how long it would last so I looked up the radar image at weather.com and compared it to the map on my computer. Thanks to GPS, I knew about when we’d get into clear weather. Cool.