Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been married for nearly five months. I still use the surname on my birth certificate rather than my husband’s surname. I haven’t talked to anyone about why, and no one has asked either, so this isn’t That Entry.

This is, however, Another Entry, which is about why people who call my house think that my name is Mrs B. This isn’t even so much about being actually married. It’s been going on for years. If I answer the phone, and it’s a telemarketer, or back when Andrew was looking for work, a recruiter, they will automatically assume that any woman who answers the phone where he lives must be both married to him and using his surname.

And this is positively weird to me. It’s true that married couples using different surnames are getting less common as time goes on after peaking about 10 to 15 years ago. However, living arrangements other than husband and wife are getting more common. De factos are common, and they almost inevitably have different surnames. We could also be platonic housemates. In any of those cases I could have any name in the world. When they want something from me, a donation or a sale, addressing me by the wrong name is a mistake. I know that English doesn’t really have a polite telephone script when you don’t have someone’s name, but that’s really too bad: it isn’t somehow better to have just guessed that I might have picked up a name from the man who lives in the house. Surnames are only communicable in a limited number of circumstances.

It’s doubly weird from telemarketers. We happen to be listed in the phone book under his first initial and surname alone thanks to old share house division of labour when it came to accounts (likewise, the electricity has been in my name since 2002, three houses ago). So the person calling has no prior knowledge that there’s even a Mr B at all. I could be the person listed in the phonebook. And yet inevitably it’s Mrs B for me. I have a surname don’t I? Stands to reason it’s because I’m married to someone.

I’ve only had the pleasure of the reverse a few times yet: where people assume from the different last names that we’re not married. Of course most people don’t give a rats nowadays, so whatever assumptions they make don’t really make it out of their heads. The only exception is the travel agent who recently booked our flights to Thailand put me down as Miss G (my understanding is that married women really don’t use the title ‘Miss’ even if we keep our surnames), that’s about it. It wouldn’t rate a mention as a bit peculiar except that we both sat in front of her wearing gold rings on our left ring fingers for half an hour.

Andrew just got invited to his 10 year high school reunion. The great thing about this is that it makes us either really old or really young, depending on your point of view.

A few years ago I was quite shocked to realise that I’d been out of high school longer than I’d been in it (six years in New South Wales), but actually, it does feel like a hell of a long time ago now. Even allowing for the magic of Facebook reunions.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a sexually transmitted disease. Some strains of it cause genital warts. Others cause cervical cancer: not in everyone who gets them, most people fight it off and regular Pap smears catch the cell changes early, but even so.

Gardasil is a vaccine against strains 16 and 18 of HPV, which are responsible for 70% of cases of cervical cancer. It also vaccinates against types 6 and 11, which are responsible for 90% of genital warts cases.

Gardasil is going to be given to high school girls from now on, apparently at more or less the same age as the rubella vaccine. However, there is also a catch up program on for women 26 and under whereby we can also get the vaccine for free. The catch up program ends in June 2009, and you must have had all three doses by then. (However, why not have them now, and enjoy that extra 18 months of protection?) It takes six months for the full course: one shot, then another two months later and another after a further four months.

You can get the vaccine for free if you are a woman and are 26 or under at the time of the first dose. Just go to any GP, hand over a Medicare card and say you want the cervical cancer vaccine. All the medical centres around here have signs up in their windows encouraging women to come in and get it anyway. I had the first dose today. My doctor didn’t feel the need to ask me about my sex life or anything else before administering it.

It’s not approved at all for any adult men or adult women over the age of 26; you won’t even be allowed to pay for it (the scheduled price is $460) unless they approve it later.

The Department of Health has a good FAQ on the vaccine and the free vaccination programme.

Hat tip to Catie, who first alerted me to the fact that the vaccine was even approved, let alone free.

Andrew and I have been studying our Certificate I course in Spanish language this year through OTEN (TAFE’s distance education arm). Certificate I is a 108 hour course: we’re trying to finish the second half of it before the semester ends in mid-November.

I’m really disappointed to hear that OTEN doesn’t intend to accept new enrolments in Spanish courses for 2008, meaning we can’t enrol in Certificate II.

I’m not quite sure what to do. My feeling is that, considering how busy we are with work, studies, diving, yoga, swimming etc Andrew and I won’t have the discipline to continue well with private and informal studies; in addition there will be no one to check our pronunciation and grammar and so on, which has been very helpful. We don’t have money to duck off to Spain or Latin America for immersion lessons more than once in about the next decade.

I can do some undergraduate units with my PhD (obviously Andrew cannot) and Macquarie University also offers a Diploma in Languages which is the equivalent of a full major over three years, but that’s an enormous commitment and neither of us really feel equipped to commit to undergraduate standard studies for any length of time (even leaving aside the commitment to continue being Australian residents). The university loading suggests that even though the Diploma is only one-third of a full-time load that we should prepare to spend 16 hours a week on it. That’s not possible: 5–10 hours for OTEN has been hard enough.

Thomson Education Direct offers Spanish, but at quite a high price and also it sounds like the course is essentially the one we’re finishing now, not the next level.

Meadowbank TAFE will likely run Certificate II in a classroom. In theory that’s only 25 minutes on the train, but those trains are half an hour apart, so there’s the up to 30 minute wait for the train at both ends plus 2.5 hours in a classroom: there goes an entire evening, and we already do this for yoga and SCUBA.

I actually went through this before choosing the OTEN course, and all this stuff was reasons why I did their course. I’m really sad that it’s being cancelled, because at this stage I really can’t find a approx 5 hour per week distance course (or one in my actual suburb, not just my region) to replace it and we can’t rearrange our life around a more intensive or more remote course.

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?