Night off

[rolanni]

So the power went down at 4:45 last night, just when I was starting to fill in the DMCA form because Yet Another person thinks it’s Perfectly OK to steal from us.  I was in a foul mood, because, well, people stealing from us — and instead of writing, I’d be form-filling, and it’s not like I have enough time in the day to write anyway. Then the power went off and that was Just. . .Ducky.

Which, as it turned out, it was.  Steve hooked up the reading lamp in the living room to the Big Green Battery and we read together on the sofa for the next five hours.  Very pleasant and cozy.  We should do this more often.  Possibly without requiring the destruction of innocent utility poles as a prompt.

In other news — The Catechism of Cliche — or at least parts of it.  Go, read, enjoy.  Then get thee to the Dalkey Archive Press and purchase for your own The Best of Myles, which collects all the “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns from the Irish Times, giving you access not only to the Catechism, but to the sordid details of the Ventriloquists War, news of The Brother, and all the various schemes launched by Myles na Gopaleen, the Da, to make money.

Also highly recommended are the na Gopaleen novels The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds.  The former is a science fiction novel disguised as a literary novel.  The latter is a writer’s novel, detailing the adventures of  a young, layabout writer, whose characters, fed up with his sloth and his bad treatment, turn on him.  Both are very, very funny.

And now — no, wait!  Everybody saw the article about the “Rosie computers” during the war, right?  Here, in case you missed it — worth a read.

And now I better get some coffee and get on the road.

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

Re: Go back to 1877

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Never apologise for being a geek! Be proud of it! Particularly in this sort of thing.

I knew that there were women doing such things earlier, I hadn't however heard them referred to as 'computers'. Thanks for the information and the link. I love the bit where "the director of Harvard Observatory became disgruntled with the sloppy work of his male assistant, saying his housekeeper could do better" and proved it...

So in fact my assumption that women were better at it than men wasn't so far off the mark. By reports they seem to have been more diligent and accurate (possibly the men resented the 'boring' work).

Re: Go back to 1877

[magda-vogelsang.livejournal.com]

When I was taking a computer programming class back in the mid 80s, the teacher said that as a general rule men wrote code faster, but code written by women had fewer bugs, and handled bad input better.

Re: Go back to 1877

[keristor.livejournal.com]

As a (male) programmer myself, and one involved in the testing of code, that fits my experience as well. Men tend to "make it work" as fast as possible (and bodge things until they do work) whereas women tend to spend longer thinking about it and how things might go wrong ("defensive programming"). Women also tend to prefer designs which are more 'elegant' (in the sense mathematicians use it) rather than a mass of 'spaghetti' code.

Obviously not universally true (I tend more to the 'elegant' side myself, and I've known women who wrote inscrutable messes) but as a general tendency I think it's fair.

(And back in the days when we used coding sheets which were then typed up onto tape or cards women had a lot better success rate than men -- their handwriting could be understood! You don't want to see my handwriting *g*...)

Unfortunately many bosses see "lines of code" as a statistic and ignore things like testability, robustness, and maintainability in favour of quantity, because that's the only quantifiable aspect they see. This can then disadvantage those who write slower but more thoroughly.