Author: Mary

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Lesbian sues over IVF twins article is one of those annoying ones where I realise halfway through the article that I’m being hurried down the garden path by the writer. But, babies! I’m supposed to say. Each one is a gift! That selfish woman (Andrew notes that the ABC version of the story uses the noun ‘mother’ to describe her by the way), the more the merrier!

Reading on, it turns out that the case hinges on the patient’s claim that she asked for a single embryo to be transferred via IVF, and that there were (at least) two transferred instead, as can be deduced from the subsequent birth of fraternal twins. While I’m not sure that the pain and suffering resulting from that is worth a wrongful life claim (but hey, that’s up to the courts) she does rather have a point. Multiple pregnancies are high risk for mother and child. Parenting twins is hard. IVF practitioners are criticised relatively regularly for tending to transfer too many embryos rather than too few and exposing women who are more likely to have a difficult pregnancy anyway to the extra risks of twins, triplets or higher multiples. (There’s a correlation between having difficulty conceiving and having a high risk pregnancy: that’s why you can’t get travel insurance if you get pregnant with any kind of medical assistance.) If you leave out the ‘lesbian!’ ‘wealthy!’ ‘ungrateful!’ ‘bad mother!’ overtones, the underlying facts sound like they are rather worthy of a complaint or a day in court. I hate those sort of articles.

I’ve had my current mobile phone number since early 2002, and only today did I discover that the Australian version of it (although not the one with the country code in front) is prime.

I’m sure everyone’s just hanging on for this one.

First, the dodgy screen. Since this is a Dell Latitutde, which is a business class laptop, it comes with next day business service. Andrew rang the special support number and they agreed that it sounded like a dodgy screen. A technician came out the next day with an electric screwdriver and duly replaced the screen with one that works properly, hooray.

Then there was a short saga of trying to get data off my old laptop’s hard drive. I did this the usual way in the end: I got an adaptor from the 2.5″ output to normal IDE and plugged it into a desktop. The only problem was finding an IDE cable that didn’t require a missing pin, since the adaptor doesn’t have a missing pin. Andrew’s oldest dead computer had one such cable, problem solved. Our dumb BIOS then immediately decided to boot off the laptop’s drive… (Oh, and the other problem was trying to get a master and slave configuration on our new desktop’s single IDE channel, eventually we gave up and just unplugged the other one for the duration.)

We’re not quite sure what to do with the old laptop, which is now sitting in pieces on a table. The hard drive is known good (currently being run through all 25 passes of shred for all partitions except the Windows recovery partition), the LCD is I think also working. It should have at least three cents value as scrap bits, but where?

Finally, getting the D630 to work. I upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy G-something, which means I have everything except sound, which at the moment requires either fiddling ALSA config files or compiling ALSA or compiling a new kernel depending on what I read. I haven’t bothered trying yet.

So on the balance: done. Hooray.

Reader caution: I’m not particularly looking for technical advice here, unless you own a recent model Dell laptop and have also had the display rendering only every second vertical line. We’re fairly sure it is broken, not that I’ve made some laughable technical error.

Story so far: late last year or earlier this year it started getting harder and harder to get power to my Fujitsu Lifebook. The connector had to be wedged at a funny angle… one that got increasingly funny. Eventually it could only be used at my desk, wedged in a very particular position, and of course the battery was useless after all the constant partial drains and partial recharges.

Sometime in May a friend took it to a local laptop repair place that he’d had good experiences with in the past. I paid just under $300 for a re-solder of the power connector so that it was more stable. A pleasant week of laptopping from the couch ensued. Two weeks later it was as unstable as it had ever been and negotiations started with the repair guy, who insisted that the repair could only have been broken by mishandling of the laptop and furthermore that the crack he’d put right through the casing was an inevitable part of the flimsiness of Lifebooks. Anyway, he eventually agreed to Araldite the crack and re-solder the power connector again. The soldering worked about another fortnight, just long enough for him to completely close down his business and disappear.

I switch to using our gateway as a desktop machine which is not so bad except that desktop machines need to be rebooted all the time (hahaha use LINUX lol… oh wait, I already am, never mind) and reboots are rather annoying for Andrew, who runs his IRC sessions on it and interrupt our net access and email too.

And that I’m completely unproductive on trains. I spend a lot of times on trains and I wish that time was more productive than it has been the last few months.

And then the gateway’s motherboard dies very suddenly and very completely and we go off and buy a new machine to replace it and spend hours of fun remembering why it was that we hated SATA so much installing the original machine. That mystery is still unsolved: basically SuSE’s enterprise editions and the machine’s BIOS can see a SATA channel that Ubuntu just can’t.

I whined a lot about electronics prices in Australia and eventually settled down and put a Dell Latitude D630 on order. In the meantime I go on a trip to Romania where a laptop would have been awfully useful (I could have spoken to Andrew at an affordable rate about my food poisoning, for one). The Dell order was delayed substantially until, well, early September. I started it up tonight. The display rendered so badly that all the EULA screens for Windows were completely unreadable. It started up Windows proper. That display is unreadable too. I knock the resolution down to 1024×768, on which it is readable but by no means pretty while endless dialog boxes pop up telling me that native resolution is 1440×900 and it will look much better with that. No it doesn’t, I tell the dialogue boxes. It’s so unreadable it garbles dodgy contracts.

Driver updates from the Dell website do not help.

I install Ubuntu. The Live CD doesn’t work, the alternative install CD does. Kind of. Except X doesn’t work. I’ve never seen a backtrace in my X error output before.

I install the Intel driver from the development branch of Ubuntu. X does work then, but the display is just as unreadable as it was on Windows: it looks like only every second or third vertical line of pixels of the display image is being rendered. Also, we notice that when the screen is dim there’s a huge cluster of pixels that do not dim properly, making looking at my display on the text consoles rather like looking at the moon when you’re terribly near-sighted.

So looks like the laptop is going to be taking a trip back to the factory, which I believe in in Malaysia, for some indeterminate period of time; that’s if we can convince them of this "part of the display glows like the moon on water and at the recommended resolution only every second vertical line of pixels appears" story. It doesn’t sound all that convincing to me, when I imagine a dialogue with first level technical support about it.

I’m even more tired of this than you’d think.

Last year I ran the well received (and fun) LinuxChix miniconf at linux.conf.au 2007 which spawned AussieChix among other things. Melissa Draper is running a second LinuxChix miniconf at linux.conf.au 2008 (January in Melbourne). Melissa has the website up and the Call For Presentations out (closing October 15). Be excited, be very excited!

Another women-in-computing event currently has a Call For Participation in circulation: the Women in Open Source event at SCALE, February 8–10, 2008, Los Angeles (CFP, closes 30th November).

A women’s unconference is also coming up: She’sGeeky, October 22–23 2007, Mountain View, California. If you dig a little though you’ll find that there’s a USD125 registration fee though which is high for an unconference.

James Gregory has two posts up about writing a CV: CV Advice and More CV Advice. I’m pretty sceptical about the CV advice genre in general because it gets into contradictory personal preferences pretty quickly: one recruiter will never look at a CV with a career objective section, another insists on them, you might as well spread out your chicken entrails. But James’s are mostly grounded in making your CV either easily to skim or easier to file (eg, name it ‘FirstnameLastnameCV.doc’) and largely seem fair enough.

Rather than add to it (I’ve never been in a hiring position), I thought I’d pass on some advice I also gave a job seeker a while back: some potential questions to ask when you are asked do you have any questions? at the end of an interview.

All of this is obviously common sense dependant. If you know that the company has a total of four employees, there’s no point asking about the intricacies of your reporting hierarchy or transfer possibilities. If you’re applying for a high level role, asking about independent work will make you sound like a doofus (but then again, if you’re applying for a high level role, you’ve probably made it through interviews before). Don’t ask for stuff you don’t actually want (eg lots of travel). Don’t for the love of all that’s holy and right print this out and fire off the entire list at them like a robot. And so on.

Work policies and procedures:

• dress code
• work hours
• expectation of overtime
• leave policies: how much? when?
• performance and pay reviews. how often? is it a formal or informal process? is it based on individual performance? is it tied to promotion?

Workplace and team placement:

• will I work in a team? what roles would the members of my team have?
• what is the hierarchy like? who would I report to and how much supervision could I expect from them? what level of independent work is required?
• is there any opportunity in the future for travel/transfer to another office?

Company structure:

• how many people work for you?
• how many of them are in this office?
• what kind of jobs do they do?
• how long do employees stay with you?

Career progression:

• where can I expect to progress to after a year or two here? what about in five years?
• what skills might I need in the future here? how will I obtain them?
• is there any training or further education you offer or that I should consider doing independently if I work for you?

I know making fun of Australia’s proposed citizenship test is all the rage, but really, some of this stuff needs paragraph length answers.

9. How are Members of Parliament chosen?

The given answer is by election but the first thing I thought of was which ones? Also how?

There are important, if arguably out of date or unfair, reasons why the two Houses of Parliament are elected differently. Each member of the House of Representatives represents a reasonably equal number of people in a geographical region. Each member is elected by instant run-off voting, and the entire House is dissolved at every federal election. The Senators on the other hand are at least supposed to represent the states, with each state having twelve senators and each territory having two regardless of population. They’re elected by the entire state using a modified single transferable vote (you don’t have to assign your own preferences, you can select a pre-assigned list of preferences, normally chosen by a party) Only half the Senate is dissolved in most elections, except where they disagree with the House of Representatives too much in a particular way.

Who is the head of the Australian Government?

This one has kept the press entertained since at least the 2000 Olympics. We do still have a Queen after all, and she has a Governor-General who exercises her powers here, although not to the extent of getting to have regular little chats with the Prime Minister.

The question is usually phrased as who is our head of state? and is thorny precisely because our constitution doesn’t use the phrase. Also, despite not being a republician (far from it), the current Prime Minister does like to do many of the more ceremonial head of state-like things himself (particularly when they involve shaking hands with heads of states, make of this what you will) even though by convention either the Governor-General does them or the Queen pays us a visit. So this question is an odd one. The only correct version is discuss the role of the Prime Minister and the Governor-General in the Australian government and recent controversies surrounding it.

Serving on a jury if required is a responsibility of Australian citizenship: true or false?

I suppose this one slides by. There are lots of people who aren’t required to do jury service and a number who are forbidden from it (it varies on a state basis, actually), but someone slipped in the phrase if required!

As an Australian citizen, I have the right to register my baby born overseas as an Australian citizen: true or false?

The answers say ‘true’, but really it’s only nearly true. If you yourself have citizenship by virtue of descent (being born overseas to an Australian citizen), there’s also a residency requirement for you to register your own children.

Australian citizens aged 18 years or over are required to enrol on the electoral register: true or false?

This one is, frankly, down to sort of true, because there’s apparently nearly a million Australian citizens living overseas and they do not have to enrol on the electoral register, and in fact some of them can’t choose to either.

I’ve edited Wikipedia in minor ways: there is one article that’s almost entirely my work, another couple that I’ve edited heavily and a sprinkling of minor stuff. So this entry is mainly prejudice confirmation, but a comment by Zora on Making Light supports what I’ve always suspected heavy involvement would be like, both the good and the bad:

One strength that folks here haven’t mentioned is that if you take your editing seriously, it’s an educational process. I started by editing the Muhammad article and ended up owning shelves full of scholarly texts on early Islamic history. Every argument sent me to the books and I learned more and more. I’d say that I have at least the equivalent of an MA in Islamic studies after that experience.

The grind sets in when you start having the same arguments over and over, with endless new waves of idiots who don’t intend to learn anything. If you’re just replaying old fights, you aren’t learning anything yourself.

… It is FUN to see a good article emerging out of a back-and-forth with someone who disagrees with you, but does so productively.

…

The POV warriors, however, were tireless. They drove me out. I was losing my temper and wasting my time trying to keep controversial articles respectable. I ended up feeling as if I were shoveling dung, and hating it.

I’m back from Romania, about 32 hours in transit. I shouldn’t, morally, count hanging around in Vienna for 8 hours with friendly locals who knew the places to get wine (thank you Gina, and hi from Australia!), but since it was part of my 48 hour "no sleeps only a few short naps" marathon I guess I have to. Six hours of sleep later, I am vaguely alive. Exciting stories of being sick in Romania later.

When I want to forward an email to someone as an attachment (usually because I want them to reply to it without having to snip gunky forward ‘headers’ in the body and preserving Message-ID and such) I can’t always forward-as-attachment, sometimes because I’m replying rather than starting a new mail, sometimes because I’m forwarding messages from multiple folders.

Up until today, I’ve resorted to all kinds of tricks to add other messages as attachments to mutt messages. One old favourite was copying them (shift+c) to a new maildir, attaching the individual files and manually setting their MIME type to message/rfc822. This does actually work but there is an easier way, the attach-message function, bound to shift+a by default.

On the screen where you normally add attachments, press shift+a. Navigate to the folder containing the messages you wish to attach (if they’re in different folders, just do this once per folder). Tag all the messages you want to attach (the default keybinding for tagging a message is ‘t’). Quit from the folder browser (‘q’). All tagged messages will be attached to the outgoing mail.