This morning I read a couple of very powerful blog posts. This one is about hunger (physical and emotional), and how western women are culturalized to deny our needs for sustanance. This one is about the modern woman’s relationship with alcohol.
Both of them are very intense reads, and both struck a deep chord within me.
Let me be very clear right up front: I’m not sober. I go for very long stints without drinking though. I do this for personal reasons, but all of them can be lumped into two categories: good for me physically and good for me psychologically. I feel more like “me” when I’m not drinking, I’m less anxious, I’m happier, I get more done. Probably because I am not medicating myself with alcohol. I’m a hell of a lot goofier too, which is one thing I really like about me.
It’s hard not to drink. First of all, I like the way different alcoholic beverages taste. I love how different drinks taste with good food. If I am drinking these days, it’s a good bet that a fabulous meal is also involved.
Secondly, alcohol seems to be a really big part of the Austin experience. I plan where and when I go places now. I know if I’m in a no-drinking phase that if I go to brunch there will be interesting bloody mary and mimosa concoctions. Happy Hours (even official ones for work) are about alcohol, not soda water and lime. It’s hard to avoid it….so lots of times just staying home works better for me.
Thirdly, the tech industry has a love affair with alcohol. It is a staple at every event (even ones I’ve planned). At the last big conference I attended, it was cheaper to buy beer than it was to buy a bottle of water (no soda water available at most of the events). I’ve had interviews that we basically bar crawls to see if I could keep up (huge red flag to which I should have paid better attention). I’ve been shamed for not drinking, by managers and friends. It’s really hard to passively avoid drinking, it’s almost as if you don’t drink, something is wrong with you.
I don’t really get that. For me, not drinking is a very personal thing. I am doing it for me, for my own personal reasons. It has nothing to do with anyone else. Because of that, I don’t care if others drink. It does help that I have a network of friends who also are not drinking. We encourage each other before big events, and share all sorts of tips to make it through the parties that are bound to be booze-fests without drinking. But I need to be really clear: not drinking accomplishes my personal goals, and no one has to change in order for me to meet those goals.
Except me. I totally need this change.
So I have a huge favor to ask. I’m not trying to kill your vibe by not drinking. Please don’t go on about all the reasons why I *should* endulge. If I’m not drinking, your persuasion really feels like bullying to me. So please, don’t. I swear I’m not silently judging you.
Let’s just all enjoy each other’s company, no matter what fills our cups.
Attending technical conferences are marathons. You’re in a huge conference center for many hours. You attend keynotes, sessions, and check out all the vendor booths. If you’re a vendor you have booth duty and lots of customer meetings. And there is the opportunity to catch up with the friends that live in far away places. And then there are all the parties….
It’s easy to get caught up and overwhelmed by all of the activities during these conferences. As we get ready for the fall conferences, starting at the end of the month at VMworld, I thought I’d share some of my tips for enjoying these events and keeping a bit of balance.
Wear good shoes. This one is on everyone’s list, because it’s critical! I decided this year that I’m wearing my hiking shoes, even with my dresses if I don’t have booth duty.
When I have booth duty, I’ll by a pair of Sketchers just for the show, and make sure they are broken in. We’re usually not allowed to wear sensible tennis shoes. They only seem to last about 100K steps (or a little over 1 show).
Soak your feet! Figure out where a hot tub is. This is hard to do in Vegas, the pools usually don’t open until after the keynotes and they close pretty early. You can also soak in the tub in your room – Vegas has awesome tubs. Schedule 15 – 20 minutes for this a couple of times during the week, your feet will thank you.
Stretch. Whether you go to the gym or you do this in your room, stretch. It’s really easy to do simple yoga moves that will make your back feel better after carrying around a back-pack all day. Cat-cow is super easy, and it feels so good after a long day.
Order a special meal. Order a special meal, avoid the long lines and get food that is better for you!
Try and find good snacks. This is harder. One trick I’ve found is the gyms usually have free fruit (yet an another reason to plan some stretch time in the gym!). Many of the hotel gyms in Vegas also do smoothies, if you know you won’t make it to breakfast.
Take nutritious foods! You know you are bringing a checked bag so you can haul home your swag, so why not fill it on your way out with nutritious food to put in your backpack. You may need to do some homework first. Here are some of the things I do:
I know the hotel I’m staying in sorta has a fridge, but no microwave. So I’ll probably bring some cold cereal, but if I had a microwave in my room I’d bring oatmeal.
I may bring some small containers of almond milk, you can also get milk in those little containers.
I always bring nuts. If my schedule gets a little weird, this is an easy way to keep my energy up.
I’ve started bringing graham crackers and peanut butter. I have a stash of the plastic silver sets that come with takeout food, so I bring some of those too. If I can find a banana, this is the best treat ever.
Apples travel well too. They are also easy to throw in a backpack.
Bring a water bottle. Especially in Vegas, it’s important to stay hydrated. In the past, the VMworld backpack also had a water bottle. You’ll find water stations everyplace. Make sure you keep your water bottle with you and keep it full!
Go outside. It’s very hard to go outside when you are in Vegas. Make a point to walk outside. In Mandalay Bay, you can actually walk much of the way to the convention center outside. The bonus is that outside isn’t as crowded as the halls inside. However, I’d recommend doing this in the morning, before it gets too hot.
Remember – you don’t have to drink. I realize this one may be sacrilege. There are lots of parties. And in Vegas, it’s actually more expensive to buy water than it is to buy beer. Go figure. If you do drink, remember it is going to dehydrate you. Some parties (like vmunderground) provide a non-alcoholic choice. And there are lots of us who aren’t into the drinking scene…just find us!
Don’t worry if you forget something, just head to CVS or Walgreens on the strip. Stock up on good things for you that will help you keep your energy up.
These are my tips for trying to maintain balance during big conferences. What are yours?
I grew up very poor in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. That’s the town next to Destin, smack in the middle of the Redneck Riviera. I did what many poor girls did, I got married and immediately after high school. Which led to a divorce in my early 20s, and navigating life as a poor, young single mom.
I’ve always been good at figuring out how to adapt to fit in. I read Glamour magazines in the school library (I could have never afforded to buy them!), and figured out what I needed to wear to fit in. Once I started working (at 15), I bought my own wardrobe, and glasses and contacts, trying to look like I wasn’t as poor as I was. I masked my accent when I lived in Bermuda. I learned what to say and what not to say by trial and error. I’m pretty good at reading social ques and understanding what would and what would not let me pass as *not poor*. White skin has always given me an extra boost in that area.
I knew my daughter was different from a very early age. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong with her, after all I’d been caring for babies since I was 12 and my favorite brother was born. I would go to the library and research her behaviors as much as one could in the pre-Google days. I was convinced she had autism. I told her pediatrician when she was 4 about my concerns (the children had federal medical assistance because they were under 5). The pediatrician laughed at me and pointed out that she could talk, and assured me that she could not be autistic.
I knew he was wrong. I learned right then and there that the doctors were not going to help me. I had to figure out how to help her get by, how to help her fit in. In the 9th grade, she was finally diagnosed with Sensory Integration Disorder, and 4 years later Asperger’s Syndrome. But the diagnosis didn’t come before a middle school principal in Tallahassee (we had moved so I could attend FSU) used her power to torment my daughter because she was different.
It has always pained me that I left Florida, but I have always wished I had done it earlier. My daughter got the accommodations she needed in Massachusetts. She’s thriving in the weirdness and cultural familiarity of Austin.
But watching what happened in North Miami this week has brought all of the memories of living with undiagnosed child with autism in Florida rushing back to me. Here’s the TL;DR of what happened this week:
Hispanic guy with autism leaves his group home with the toy truck he uses to stim.
His aide (a black man) went to calm him down and get him back to the group home.
Someone calls 911, reportedly to report a guy with a gun in the road acting suicidal
The cops show up
The aide lays on his back on the ground with his hands up. He keeps working with the guy with autism, trying to get him to lay down on the ground as well.
The aide shouts to the cops that the other guy has autism, and only has a toy truck in his hands.
The cop shoots the aide as he lies on the ground
The cop handcuffs the aid and the guy with autism
The cop later says he really meant to shoot the guy with autism
I honestly don’t have the words for what I feel. I am so angry. I am so sad. I am so scared for MY daughter. I am so disgusted with people with power and authority that refuse to allow for any deviation of the norm. I’m so tired of this.
If you are black or brown, or poor, you are treated like you don’t matter. And god forbid you are one of those things and there is any additional thing that makes you different. It’s obvious that the State of Florida has not changed at all in this regard. If you fall into one of those categories, you are suspected of being lazy, a drain on society as a whole. Anything bad that happens to you is your own fault.
If you are white, and you have never been poor, you may not understand this reality. That’s why you don’t hear the power in the coded words being used in this election cycle. That’s why you are offended when people don’t explicitly state that all lives matter.
It is important to embrace our differences. It is what makes us strong. Just stop all this bullshit, it’s been this way my entire life and I’m just so sick of it. I’m not sure what to **do** about it. If anyone knows how I can reach the autistic man’s mother, please let me know.
In the meantime, I leave you with John Cena. Yeah I can’t believe it either, but this pretty much sums up where I think we should be as a nation.
By this time, I’m sure you’ve seen it. I also know that some of you are sick of talking about it. But, if we want things to get better, we have to have action.
Yes, I’m talking about the picture from the Nutanix party. The one with the women in the bikinis on the Next-branded ferris wheel. When I saw it, it literally took the wind out of my sails. I had a long, difficult day and seeing such a classic text-book example of objectification was just soul-crushing. The only bright spot was the fact that the men were the ones leading the conversation, they are the ones who called it out. This is the first time I can remember that the conversation was started by our community’s men.
Thank y’all, sincerely.
After tweeting about my planned career change to farming, I went to bed. The next day I texted my good friend Amy Price, who works there now. I have given her hell for going to work for “the mean girls”. I asked her what the heck was up with their party??!! Amy’s a lot like me, she doesn’t suffer fools well. I knew she’d tell it to me like it was. And the real story started to unravel.
The real story is not mine to tell. You can hear it yourself from Julie O’Brien tonight on the A Current Status podcast. She’s the executive responsible for the party . She wrote a blog post with an apology, but many people didn’t seem to accept it. Was it because this is the third offence from Nutanix? Was it because it was coming from the mean girls? Was it because of competitive reasons?
Let’s get beyond who did it. Let’s get to the why. Let’s get to a place we can have discussions about this. This is a community discussion. The men of our community who were at the conference as customers and analysts started this discussion. The people working at Nutanix, “the mean girls”, are part of our community and should be part of this and other discussions.
Let’s solve this as a community. We just need the right channel to do it. Interested in helping us build it? Leave a note in the comments, or email me.
I’m probably too annoyed to be blogging, but here I am.
I finally cut the cable cord a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty impressed that I can get so many TV channels over the antenna. I get over 40 channels. Ok, a bunch are church channels. A bunch are in Spanish, but we leave that on sometimes to help us have a bigger vocab in Spanish! But I get local TV stations and PBS, plus some cool channels that show old game shows, movies, and tv shows.
I have an Amazon Prime subscription, which gives us “stuff” to watch. My daughter has taken over my Netflix subscription because honestly, she has totally corrupted my queue (couldn’t have more than one queue on my Panasonic, more on that soon). I have Hulu plus too, but I’m going to be cancelling that very soon because we don’t use it.
But Brianna wanted the Cartoon Network. And I wanted to be able to watch sports. So we also got Slingbox.
And this is where the project starts to take shape. I have a 42 inch Panasonic tv that I bought about four and a half years ago. The software on it is not supported, and I can’t updated it. That means tons of apps I used to have won’t work, like YouTube (completely gone). I can’t update Netflix so we can only use my original account, which my daughter ruined with her crazy viewing habits (that’s why she pays that bill now). And there’s no way to add apps like Slingbox.
So, I got a Roku3. I got the latest version so it would have the most features and hopefully it will last longer. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to watch any shows or movies on Slingbox on the tv via the Roku. I chatted with Slingbox, they asked me to reboot the Roku to clear the cache.
This in and of itself annoyed me. I’ve had the Roku 2 weeks. Everything works except for non-live shows on Slingbox. And I’m PAYING for Slingbox, twenty bucks a month. The jury is still out on me keeping their service.
But I went ahead and power cycled the Roku, because that seemed like a reasonable troubleshooting step. When I plugged the Roku back in, the Panasonic couldn’t see it. I changed the HDMI ports. Nothing. I rebooted the TV. Nada. I reset the TV to the original factory settings. No good.
I get on support chat with Roku. They blamed it on the TV.
I know they are right.
I plugged the Roku into an old TV I had. It worked. Freaking Panasonic useless cable monitor tv. 🙁
The obvious next step is to root my Panasonic. It’s not even 5 years old. It’s ridiculous that the software wrapped around setting up the ports, and controlling apps, is not supported and is basically useless at the point. And as I started trying to find an easy route to getting to the OS of the tv, I found out the Panasonic software is incredibly insecure as well.
A couple of years ago at Defcon I attended a session on hacking your TV. I should have paid more attention. Maybe someone will do a session like that again this year.
I’ll try to blog about what I do. The most frustrating thing is trying to figure out what to do about the multiple tvs in the living room situation. Y’all know you’ve seen this before….our tvs are just too skinny to stack anymore. 😉
I’m at #EMCworld, in the social lounge. I have booth duty in a little bit, so I’m playing catch up. My [lady] dev manager wrote a killer blog post that I need to get posted. This is her first blog post, and honestly y’all she’s a natural. I also need to get my schedule worked out for tomorrow (heading to #Interop!), write a couple of blog posts; one wrapping up my launch — Spanning Backup for Office 365 now supports OneDrive for Business!!, and one summarizing EMC World that I’ll publish on 24 x 7 IT Connection.
I was trying to get all this done before folks start trickling into the lounge to watch Chad’s facemelting demos during the keynote. Then someone tagged me in a response to this tweet:
@Rimmergram@vmiss33 yeah sorry gals, with only 2 in the category I didnt include it, we need to cultivate more female bloggers
First off, I love Eric to death. He does tones of good work for the community, including the top 100 blogger list. But this soundtrack is getting old, and you guys need to do better, plain and simple.
Besides the fact that he could only think of two lady bloggers to include in his annual list, this statement: We need to cultivate more female bloggers just rubbed me the wrong way. As evidenced by the fact that I need to blog about it before I can get to my work.
Lady bloggers exist. RIGHT NOW. But y’all don’t see us. We go to the same events. We use the same hashtags. Hell a lot of times we help y’all be better bloggers by reviewing your posts and suggesting improvements.
WHY DON’T Y’ALL SEE US?
No sense cultivating more lady bloggers if you’ll just ignore them too. But let me help y’all out with some resources to check out, cuz I know y’all can do better.
This is just what came to mind immediately, if I missed you please ping me so I can add you! What kills me is I can’t include all the lady bloggers who are ghostwriting for their organizations. Need more? Comb through my girlz list on Twitter.
If you don’t like any of our work, that’s fine. But y’all gotta stop saying there aren’t ladies blogging, podcasting, evangelizing. I created Cloudbunnies because y’all forgot to include ladies on your teams at first. I’m starting a whine and wine meetup in Austin so we [all genders] can have a place to blow off steam and strategize how to make this better, at the same time we talk tech.
What will it take for this attitude that the women who are in tech now don’t matter? We are here.
I’m tired of being nice about this. WE EXIST. Do better guys. Just do better.
This Wednesday (April 27) during the OpenStack Summit, Carla Crull (of Rackspace) and I will be hosting the inaugural Austin Women in Tech’s Wine and Whine event. This isn’t an OpensStack event, this is an event for women who work in tech in Austin (and who come here for work). Oh and yes guys y’all are welcome too.
So wine is pretty straightforward. But whine…isn’t this just reinforcing negative stereotypes of women in tech? Well, no. The name was suggested by a lady CTO (who holds a few handfuls of patents). The name was shared with our orgs, and with our lady friends who work in the industry. We all love it because we are taking back that negative attitude that some folks attribute to us (whiny, bossy, etc, etc, etc). We’ve all heard it before, but I say we can’t let that keep us down!
Last year at VMworld we held an invite-only, technical ladies dinner that we dubbed #vLadiesNite. The conversations were so normal…and all over the place. Storage, cloud, virtualization, issues dealing with marketing, issues dealing with kids, issues dealing with co-workers, Microsoft, flash storage, NVMe, shoes. We just talked over wonderful dinner and incredible wine. We dished. And yes, we whined. We shared insights, strategies, technical information. It was epic, and bond-building.
I’m dying to replicate that night here in Austin. Right now, Austin women don’t have a technical enterprise women’s meetup. We need one desperately, the amount of talent in this city is staggering. Let’s bring everyone together!
And let me just put this to bed right now: this will not be a typical “women in tech event” where there is a rah-rah speech given by an exec guest speaker encouraging you to lean-in. This will be a place where you can be real. If you need to whine a little, so be it. But this will be the place where you can get encouragement, a pointer be it technical or political, or maybe if you need it a swift kick in the bootie.
So if you’re in Austin (even if its just for the OpenStack Summit), please consider coming to say hi, and helping us figure out how to make this meetup a monthly reality. We still have a few spots open! Register here.
What do y’all think about this? What do you think about reclaiming words?
I’ve been doing technical community building for a long time – I’d say about 9 years. I know lots of people in the storage, virtualization, and cloud communities — you know, infrastructure stuff. And I love y’all, I really do.
Because of my current job – Product Marketing Manager for EMC’s Spanning Backup for Office 365, I’ve been reaching out to members of the Microsoft community. Y’all – the SharePoint people are just wicked cool. It is hands-down the most open, collaborative technical community I’ve ever been a part of….or maybe it’s just a south Texas thing??
I’m really not sure, but so far the people have been amazing. Saturday I went to my first SharePoint Saturday (think VMUG). And instead of #vbeers or #storagebeers, they have #sharepint. Which was fabulous!
Here’s a storify of the day’s tweets. My brain is still full from what I learned. Thanks so much again to the organizers…what a great event!
I want to talk about this in depth later, but just I wanted to slap a quick post together to share this slide on cloud delivery models, and what those models mean to IT transformation.
Here’s the question I *think* it answers: what is the cloud? The green boxes are what IT can completely control, the grey boxes are what the cloud providers control. The blue data box is shared.
Another question I have: Do you consider SaaS applications to be part of your cloud strategy? Why or why not?
Thoughtful discussion on this representation of cloud delivery models very welcome! What do y’all think about this?
I’m sure you’ve heard the story about Talia Jane. She’s the young woman who couldn’t afford to buy groceries, turn on her heat, or even get to work even though she has a college degree and a job at a successful online services company. She was mad as hell and couldn’t take it anymore, so she wrote an open letter to her CEO that was posted to Medium.
freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…
Of course she got fired. Her CEO Jerry Stoppleman seems to care about the plight the homeless in San Francisco. Stoppleman said Talia was not fired because of her letter. In fact he agreed with her about the high cost of living.
3/5 I’ve not been personally involved in Talia being let go and it was not because she posted a Medium letter directed at me.
Talia said she found out she was fired because she lost access to her corporate email account, then got a phone call from her boss and an HR representative telling her she was being let go because the post she wrote broke the organization’s code of conduct.
my manager and Natalia in HR (convenient!) said the letter violated terms of conduct & is why I was let go. explain? https://t.co/uDAiXiTqYb
Now her former employer (via PR apparently) is refusing to talk about the reason for her dismissal. However it’s interesting that their official comment to Business Journal seems to support this employee’s spunk:
We do not comment on personnel issues. However, we did agree with many of the points in Ms. Jane’s post and we viewed it as her real, personal narrative about what it’s like to live in the Bay Area. Most importantly, it’s an important example of freedom of speech.
We agree with her comments about the high costs of living in San Francisco, which is why we announced in December that we are expanding our Eat24 customer support team into our Phoenix office where will pay the same wage.
So in review:
Young woman tries unsuccessfully to get a higher wage going through proper channels (quarterly reviews)
She is hungry and angry, and uses a blog post to skip level to the CEO, who appears to be passionate about homelessness.
She is fired for writing the post because it breaks the company’s code of contact, and used her tools to be honest and open and defend herself.
The company’s official stance is that her post was real, a shining example of free speech, and now they are free to feel no guilt about moving all those jobs to a cheaper labor market.
I knew I had to write something when I saw Dan Pontefract‘s article about this on Forbes. I know Dan, he has an amazing book called Flat Army and a new one coming soon, all about leveling command and control hierarchies in organizations so that work can actually get done. I think his purpose with the Forbes article was to give both sides of this coin even play. However, I don’t think some of the things he implied with his tone were fair to this young woman. And I honestly think this is an outstanding example of the things he fights against.
The thing that made Talia snap was hunger. She fell asleep hungry, and was so hungry she felt she couldn’t wait for her rice to cook. Have you ever been that hungry? I have. It will drive you to get what you need. I’m proud of this lady for reaching out and making her plight known. She absolutely flattened the hierarchy, after trying to resolve it for several quarters with her managers. She went straight to the top, to someone who speaks often about the plight of the homeless in San Francisco, using communications vehicles that the CEO could not ignore: a very public blogging site and Twitter.
I hope that if any of you get to the point that you are this hungry, you let someone know. You know where to find me.
I have children who are the same age as Talia, and I work with lots of young people in this age range.
it is REALLY hard not to say kids, I hope my son is proud of me for this
One of the things I love about these young people is that they don’t have the hangups we have. They are bold. They are used to just reaching out to ANYONE, and speaking their mind. Sometimes that gets them in trouble, but lots of times they say what needs to be said. Because they can’t imagine they’ve could have been misled about the meaning of “open” and “transparency”. They say things we wish we could say. They make bold statements to shake things up … and this is the only way to innovation.
Companies are paying consultants big bucks to figure out how to innovate, and we’ve got the answer sitting right next to us, telling us that the 90s are retro!
When we hold this young woman up as a shining example of what not to do, we are training the next generation of information workers to shut up, keep their heads down, never do or say anything to rock the boat. We’re killing innovation. We are teaching them to be cogs in the machine, that as long as they are good little cogs that keep up with the grind (even when they are starving) they will have a “job”. But if they speak up, challenge the hierarchy, they will be banned to struggle in the chaos with the other rabble rousers.
We’ve been working so hard to change that…..we can’t give up on them now!
Jeremy Stoppelman, I don’t know you but I want to believe you are a decent guy. Here’s my challenge to you: don’t let your corporate PR get in the way of you speaking with this employee who had the balls to reach out to you directly about the discrepancy in what you say you want (solve problems with homelessness) and the realities of your own workers (they aren’t paid enough to buy groceries, get to work, or pay their insurance co-pays). Be as brave as she was and reach out to her, have a conversation. Help her get to the next place. Use the tools she did (twitter) and go around your PR handlers and set up that meeting!
Here’s my challenge to all of you who are chiding this young woman for speaking out: we need to encourage MORE of this. How can we protect them so their energy and ideas can actually be surfaced? Remember that we (information workers) are the means of production for our information factories. We need to do better than getting to the big house so we can be fed, we need to make sure that is happening for everyone.
I think Talia was on to something. Maybe it’s time for all of us to remember that we’re human beings, not resources. And we deserve to more than widgets in an information factory, or products of the information machine. Time to get a little mad y’all.
