Last Sunday’s TransitCamp gained main-stream media coverage in today’s Toronto Star:

…last Sunday’s Transit Camp, a day of out-of-the-tunnel thinking on how to improve the Toronto Transit Commission, specifically, its clunky website, its shelters, its subway cars and the way it communicates with its riders.

The 100 or so campers were young, in their 20s and early 30s, mostly people who work in the communications and tech industries and university students, all madly in love with transit. The TTC is symbolic of their relationship with the city…

There’s a romantic connection between a certain type of young person and the red streetcars that are a symbol of the city.

The reporter seemed to be quite fascinated with both the age and the facial hair of the attendees — TorCampers as the lost hippie generation? — but gave a well-balanced view of the event (AFAIK, since I wasn’t there) as well as an accurate description of the BarCamp way of life.

I was searching for a recipe using soba noodles tonight (I had mislaid You Are What You Eat and The Hip Chick’s Guide to Macrobiotics, although I have since found them), and discovered Post Punk Kitchen, a vegan recipe site with a great recipe for Ginger Peanut Soba Noodles. I made it with almond butter rather than peanut butter, and was missing the ginger, but it was still really good.

This the site for a public access vegan cooking show of the same name, currently on hiatus but you can find all four episodes on Google Video. The PPK manifesto:

The Post Punk Kitchen will kick the Food Network’s ass. That is our mission. That is why we exist. Uh, no not really, that’s just incidental I guess. The Post Punk Kitchen is about happiness and fluffy white bunnies and running through the daisy fields barefoot, throwing tofu at passers-by and sprinkling all the earth’s creatures with magical nutritional yeast. OK, well maybe our manifesto is not yet complete, luckily writing copy for websites is not all we do, we also cook! And film it. For you, our wonderful audience! So stop reading and start watching and then start cooking and then kick Emerill’s ass and run through the fields!

Check out their recipes, I’m definitely trying the Ancho Lentil Soup With Grilled Pineapple next.

My post earlier this week about Alec Saunders’ sexist demo scenario at DemoCamp 12 (criticism that he took quite gracefully) led to both a blog post on his part, then an email and Skype discussion between us.

The topic of our private discussion quickly turned to that of hiring women in technical jobs, with Alec admitting that they have no women in their company except in support and admin, and asking what I would do to attract female engineers to an organization. This is a subject that has come up on the TorCamp Skype back channel, mostly in conjunction with the question of how to make the TorCamp community more women-friendly.

My response to Alec was as follows:

The issue of women engineers within organizations is a tough one. I went through engineering in the bad old days (U of Waterloo, Systems Design 1984), and was recently shocked to find out that the proportion of female engineering graduates isn’t significantly higher now than when I was there. What reigned in the engineering faculty at that time, and what exists in many of the technology companies that I see now, is a cowboy attitude that is a real turn-off for a lot of women. We’ve had some discussion on the TorCamp Skype chat group about this, since that attitude also prevails at DemoCamp and likely prevents a lot of women from even attending, much less presenting. DemoCamp is a sort of microcosm of what a tech startup is like: lots of bravado and showing off, which are traits that are socialized out of most girls at a very early stage of their development. As a woman, I can either choose to act like one of the boys in order to gain acceptance, which is not comfortable for most women, or just choose not to play.

I feel that the key to attracting technical women to your organization is to get some senior technical women in place. Most technology firms have “token” female VPs in finance and HR in order to appear to be non-discriminatory, but never leading technical parts of the organization. Put in a woman as VP of engineering/development, get her involved in recruitment, and you’ll see things change. I owned and ran a 40-person systems integration firm up until 2000, where I was both CEO and chief architect. My entire technical management team, and many of my developers, were women, although I didn’t select them by gender; it was an issue of technical women being comfortable working in the environment that I helped to create. I’m not saying that you should discriminate in favour of women — I am strictly opposed to reverse discrimination because it only fosters resentment — but widen your search net when you are recruiting high-level people to be sure that you’re including enough women in the selection pool.

Alec thinks that the problem is that they’re a startup; having grown a startup to 40 people and recruited a great selection of women engineers, I don’t think that’s really the problem.

I’d love to hear other opinions on this.

When I flew home yesterday from Jacksonville (where I’ve been blogging all week on my business blog about the ARIS ProcessWorld conference), I thought that I’d give the Airport Rocket a try. It’s TTC route #192, an express bus from the airport to Kipling subway; it only stops once or twice along the way and is regular TTC fare with free transfer at the subway.

I had read about this route on Joey deVilla’s blog several months ago, and the combination of arriving at evening rush hour on Friday (when there’s a lineup for taxis, and the traffic downtown is wretched) and having only a light bag on wheels made me give it a try.

The bus stops first at terminal 3 (right at the start of the arrivals level, near post C12), then goes on to terminal 1. It picked me up at terminal 3 at 4:30pm, then picked up at terminal 1 at 4:38pm, and pulled into Kipling subway at 4:55pm. I was très impressed.

It took me just under an hour in total to get home because I have to transfer and take the Spadina streetcar down to Queen, but if you live on the Bloor-Danforth line, it’s likely faster than a cab, especially at rush hour. Also, you have to love $2.75 rather than $50.

I was talking with a late-50’s American today about the whole BarCamp/TorCamp environment. “So why are you so excited about it?”, he asked. I fumbled around trying to find an answer that would fit his context, and finally came up with “It’s like the 60’s, only with results”. He seemed satisfied with that.

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to go away somewhere nice and warm in the middle of winter. I’m off in Jacksonville, Florida this week, so ended up having a Skype text chat with Damir earlier today while I was between conference sessions:

[10:24:29 AM] Damir says: caught a mouse last night
[10:24:39 AM] Sandy says: a mouse?? in our place???
[10:24:44 AM] Damir says: yep
[10:24:51 AM] Sandy says: funny, i thought that i heard something scrambling around the night before
[10:24:54 AM] Damir says: on windowsill in bedroom
[10:25:02 AM] Sandy says: we need to set some traps
[10:25:09 AM] Damir says: found the hole too
[10:25:14 AM] Sandy says: where?
[10:25:33 AM] Damir says: cable face plate behind the couch
[10:25:42 AM] Sandy says: get some traps from the hardware store and set them, just the cheap ones that we can throw out when they snap
[10:26:05 AM] Damir says: ok, but this is the only one
[10:26:16 AM] Sandy says: what, a lone bachelor mouse? i don’t think so
[10:26:49 AM] Damir says: well, the others are in that duct below windows
[10:27:15 AM] Sandy says: not surprising, i suppose. did you block the hole?
[10:27:20 AM] Damir says: yes
[10:27:30 AM] Sandy says: of course, dumb question
[10:27:53 AM] Damir says: named him Jerry, want me to keep him till you return?

I’m starting to get a strange feeling about this…

[10:28:02 AM] Sandy says: no thanks…
[10:28:31 AM] Damir says: maybe we could give him to Val [our neighbour] for the cats to play with

At this point, I come to the alarming conclusion that he didn’t actually *kill* the mouse yet…

[10:28:40 AM] Sandy says: is he still alive??
[10:29:39 AM] Damir says: yes - I have him in that plastic garbage bin - put a lid on it
[10:29:58 AM] Sandy says: please kill him, take him and dump him in the park if you can’t stand to do it yourself
[10:30:30 AM] Damir says: I may put him in plastic container & microwave
[10:30:40 AM] Sandy says: NOOOO
[10:30:48 AM] Damir says: cruel?
[10:30:50 AM] Sandy says: take him to the park and let him go, the cold will kill him
[10:31:29 AM] Damir says: ok

Hours elapse…

[5:44:37 PM] Damir says: sorry to report, but jerry is no longer with us..
[5:44:53 PM] Sandy says: poor jerry…did he go for a walk in the park?
[5:45:24 PM] Damir says: I don’t want to talk about it..
[5:45:43 PM] Damir says: He is in the better place now..
[5:45:49 PM] Sandy says: it better not smell like microwaved mouse in the apt when i get home…

Although not (I think) as bad as the incident at DemoCamp 9, I found a not-insignificant level of sexism in one of the presentations at last night’s DemoCamp 12: Alec Saunders of Iotum was demonstrating their Talk-Now service, and his demo scenario involved himself and three (presumably fictional) others: Frank, John and Jill.

Frank, he wanted to talk to about the budget.

John, he wanted to meet for drinks after work.

Jill, however, he wanted to ask out on a date.

Is it just me, or is it too much to ask that some man, somewhere, depict a woman in a technology demo scenario as something other than a sex object? Who knows, maybe Alec’s bi, and his “drinks” with John was just a thinly-veiled euphemism for wild man-sex, but that wasn’t the impression that I had.

…once I got it to play nice with my firewall.

Although the Flickr uploads of the magnificent ocean view from my window are going to be a bit slow.

The last few flights that I’ve taken, including the one to Jacksonville that I’ll be on in a few hours, I’ve taken advantage of the airlines’ web check-in. All of them are pretty much the same: I login to the airlines website, or use the locator/confirmation number on my reservation to call it up if I don’t have a login with that airline, go through the check-in process, change my seat assignment if I wish, and print my boarding pass. Then, at the airport, I usually just go to a fast line to drop my luggage (if any) and on to security.

The best part of doing this over the web, rather than at a kiosk at the airport, is that I can use Seat Guru (or the mobile edition on my Blackberry if necessary) to find the best seats available. Most reservations these days list the type of aircraft that is on each leg of the route, and Seat Guru allows me to select the airline, then the particular aircraft type to see a seating plan with the best and worst seats, plus the ones to be wary of (such as those in the row ahead of a window exit that don’t fully recline).

Back in the bad old days of Bubble 1.0, I had elite status on a couple of airlines and didn’t have to worry about such things, since I’d often get bumped to business class. These days, however, web check-in and Seat Guru are my friends.