Yearly Archives: 2006

25 Oct
2006

Girls and Gadgets Don’t Mix

My partner asked me the other day if I would like a new watch for Christmas. Actually I would really like a new watch for Christmas and I’m touched that he had thought of such a gift. He asked that I choose, so that he could be sure of getting something that I liked.

As a first step, we grabbed the Argos catalogue and he started to browse. I brought some drinks in and asked how he was getting on. “I’m looking for a ladies watch that actually does something”, he replied. But we didn’t find one.

Why is it that men need dates, alarms, lights and interesting energy solutions on their watches (not to mention ones that are manufactured from interesting stuff, like titanium), when women just need the time (often with no second hand and no accurate markings) and plenty of bling? I don’t get it. I want one with a backlight so I can see the time at night, and an alarm to set in case I fall asleep on the train.

With women being target market for phones, music players, and even games consoles these days, it seems very odd that such a fundamental market hasn’t caught up. I’m not a gadget freak really (not much anyway) and I don’t need something which remote controls my talking entertainment centre and is waterproof to 100m or anything. My current watch was an emergency buy from Next when the last one died and its pretty good – it has minute markings and a second hand – and a diving bezel thing that I use when I’m cooking to remind me when something will be ready.

I suppose the answer is to buy a man’s watch. I’m a big girl after all (at almost six feet tall) and I do have big hands. The trouble is that I have tiny wrists, ladies watches are too big even after I’ve had links taken out – an average man’s watch is big enough for both my wrists at one time, which isn’t practical!

Short of starting my own gadget accessories range, I’m not sure how I’m going to solve this!

23 Oct
2006

PHPWomen: A Community is Born

This post has been a week or so in the making, I just wanted to find the right words to tell the story. I saw a post on the PHP DevZone saying that Ligaya Turmelle wants to hear from women in PHP.

Well I hopped right across to the her blog post and raised my hand, thinking there wouldn’t be too many other people there. How wrong was I? To date there’s 44 responses to that one post.

The dawn of a new group

The new community is now online at www.phpwomen.org and its thriving. The forums are very active and full of people introducing themselves and discovering there are fellow phpwomen nearer to them than they thought. So far I think my nearest is either Belgium or Amsterdam – but there’s a lot more in Europe than I thought and I’m sure there are others in the UK just waiting to emerge. I’m a moderator on those forums as well, which is my first online position of that kind although I did briefly help out with experts-exchange before it went commercial.

The threads on the forums vary widely from “this is me”, through comparing notes on sanitising input variables, and along to who has which dog and a riveting post entitled Work and Babies.

The main site has interviews with both Ligaya and Elizabeth Narramore who had the original idea, announcements of conferences and will include other PHP news updates too, among other additions to numerous to list here.

Looking to the future

Well the community has certainly started with a bang and I hope that everyone continues to contribute as actively as time goes on. For me I hope that I continue to build relationships with the lovely women I’ve met so far, and that we will also be able to contribute to the PHP community as a whole. Here’s to a bright future!

22 Oct
2006

Sporting Update

It struck me the other day that I hardly ever write about netball here, which is odd if you think about how much time I spend playing it! So here’s an update on the season so far.

I’m playing in the Northern League (in England) for Shipley Netball Club. There’s been lots of changes to the competition structure in England and to be frank things still seem to be shaking down into place! This season also sees the introduction of a new kit at the club – little purple dresses with very little matching shorts. Its best described as “ickle” and leaves me feeling like a porn star as I de-fuzz and fake-tan for each outing! Its short, sleeveless and I definitely wouldn’t have chosen it myself, but I’m sure we look great.

I’m now playing for the first team and I’ve had a slow start to the season, only getting on court for three quarters [1] out of four matches so far – but watch this space and who knows how things will progress :)

The same team is playing in some other leagues as well and hopefully I’ll see more action in these. I played a whole match in our first Challenge Cup fixture and really enjoyed the game – although we got drawn against Linden (who are one of the best teams in the country) and predictably got walked on. We’ll also be playing in a Yorkshire and Humberside league but I haven’t got full details of that yet.

1 Netball is usually played as four quarters of fifteen minutes each.

19 Oct
2006

Accidental E-Self-Discovery

Something wierd just happened …. I was trying to do something on the PHP Community Book Site (more about them another day), to get dokuwiki to hyperlink to sections. I was confused about the syntax so I googled for it.

Can you guess what happened next?

My own website was one of the hits

Wow. I was eighth hit for the search term “dokuwiki internal hyperlinks”. That has never happened to me before.

The only downside is that I don’t know the answer to my question and its certainly not on this website – never mind :) The actual way to do dokuwiki’s internal links is by looking on the syntax page that comes with each wiki (hyperlink to it above the box on the edit page, if you have one) – or you can use the syntax page on the dokuwiki homepage, http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:syntax

19 Oct
2006

House Woes

We’re not buying a house! Or rather, we’re not buying the house we thought we were.

The house, as I have mentioned before, is a bit of a wreck. I mean, it has walls and windows and a roof and stuff … but internal doors, floors and a working kitchen aren’t really included in the deal so it was always going to be expensive. We hadn’t banked on the boundary wall, a retaining one as the property is on a slope, being so neglected that the survey described it as “leaning severely” and “unsafe”.

These walls aren’t cheap and unfortunately we don’t have that kind of money lying around, this is our first house and by the time we’ve paid the deposit, the stamp duty and all the relevant fees, there’s not a lot left! We wanted the house but couldn’t take it under these circumstances so we did what we thought best – and asked the vendors to fix the wall.

Almost ten days later we have finally heard back to say they aren’t prepared to negotiate1 so we’ve retracted our offer. I’ll be booking some more house viewings for the weekend then ….

1 Actually they were much ruder than that but never mind, it just served to show how much better off we are out of it!

18 Oct
2006

Cream of the Crop (of editors)

There’s a longer post in the pipeline somewhere about editors and IDEs and developments and stuff as we’ve just changed our setup at work and I’m completely thrown by trying to develop on windows! Anyway to cut a long story short, I’ve found a fabulous Vim wrapper-type-app called cream which I’m now trying out on windows.

There are a couple of instant weird things but perseverance with the dropdown menus of preferences and so on have got me into a state where I can edit. However there are two major oversights:
* files are opened in edit mode
* pressing Esc repeatedly toggles command and insert modes

This makes no sense to a vim user so I trawled the mailing list and came up with this post, showing which lines to add to cream-user.vim to change those defaults. I also found an FAQ entry which describes how to create a cream-user.vim file in the first place. So I thought I’d post it here for others and before I lose it :)

17 Oct
2006

Hugs and Shakes

I’m having an interesting etiquette issue. I’m a woman working in a male-dominated environment, and basically I don’t think like a girl. I wear flat shoes and greet people with a firm handshake and drink pints; that’s who I am and I don’t believe my gender should get in the way of how I want to live.

Other people have different ideas though, and although my boyfriend is the same age as me and works in the same industry, now we’re in our mid-twenties I’m starting to notice that social expectations of us are diverging.

A good illustration of this is the minefield of greetings – hugs or handshakes? Personally I think that people who know us both should probably treat us the same but its not really working that way. Close friends of either gender hug me in greeting; in contrast they mostly shake my partner by the hand. It does feel strange that we get treated so differently.

10 Oct
2006

Slip Sliding Away

The draft of the building survey arrived – wahey. The surveyors’ secretaries are very lovely and helpful when I ring them which is good news as I have done that three times this week already!

The actual survey is not such good news. There’s just a whole host of things wrong with this house. For the first time I am realising how seriously we can’t afford a project on this scale! There’s damp chimneys, rotten floorboards, another boiler which we were specifically told there wasn’t, missing/defective internal doors … you get the picture, and it gets worse.

Gone to the wall

The property is steep and our garden is a few feet up from the next one – the survey says that the retaining wall (20-30 yards long and about 4 feet high) is “on the point of becoming unsafe”. That could be expensive. Its a horrible reason to lose all the money we’ve already paid out on the house, but that will be cheaper that it will be to take on a house with a wall we are liable for and can’t afford to rebuild.

I’ll keep you posted, and in the meantime I’ll leave you with my favourite quote from the survey document:

The kitchen could be considered functional.

Read the previous parts of this story in Rotten Survey Results, Mortgage Application, Arranging a Mortgage and Offer Accepted

02 Oct
2006

Rotten Survey Results

I knew things were going too well, I really did.

The valuation survey has come back. Its a pretty slim document (3 pages) with tickboxes to say how many bedrooms the house has and whether its made of brick. However, there is one paragraph of text and it says that the beams in the floor under the bathroom and adjoining back bedroom are rotting and that their recommendation is that this be rectified before the mortgage is secured on the property. Eeek!

We’ve ordered a full structural survey as well so we’re waiting for that to appear and hopefully that will give us more of a clue about what we are up against, but I’m not sure we’re allowed to go pulling up floors or ripping out bathroom fixings in a house that isn’t ours so I don’t see how we can even find out what its going to cost until after we’ve completed. Hopefully someone will tell us what to do next.

The one redeeming point is that the bank have written to say they are satisfied with the valuation and that we can have the mortgage. The letter also says that they “draw our attention” to the section which says the ceiling might not survive, which amused me :)