On my way back to the apartment today I noticed a young woman standing outside the local police box.  She was smiling sweetly and chatting to two policemen.  I couldn’t help but wonder if she was there to report her lost skirt.  From where I stood she looked as if she was wearing a coat, black tights, and shoes.

She wasn’t the only woman I saw today who was missing a skirt.  It’s not that warm yet but I get the feeling that mini skirts are back.  When the weather improves I may actually get to see some of the skirts but for now these are hidden somewhere underneath winter coats – or at least I hope they are.

On the 25th March I will be giving a short talk about The Perl Foundation (TPF) at Sydney.pm.  This will be my first visit to Australia and my first time speaking about TPF.

I love the wooden floors in our apartment but I do tend to worry that they are never clean enough.  One of my friends joked that I should buy a pair of slippers with built in floor clothes so that I could clean simply by moving about.   And tonight I did just that.

I have found a new thing to be annoyed by in T.V. programmes, films, and books – words and accents.  I didn’t mean for this to happen.  Normally it’s the science, history, or geography that bothers me.

I can’t watch something that’s supposedly set in Paris when I can tell it’s being shot at a sound studio somewhere in America.  Marty used to watch Alias and I thought it was awful.  Every week they went to a different fake location.

I can’t cope with your fictional story if your factual elements are wrong.  Singers shouldn’t sing songs that hadn’t been composed when your story was set.  Cities should be called by the name they were known by then and not the name we are calling them now.

Accents have bothered me before but usually only fake Irish ones.   I was watching Spooks recently and was driven mad by the fake American accent of one of the characters.  It’s strange how I can believe all sorts of conspiracy theories but throw in a fake accent and I can’t cope anymore.

Last night I watched the start of Season 4 of Bones.  It was set in London.  That concept made me cringe.  I imagined a room full of screen-writers dying to try out their favourite quirky British phrases.  I had to listen to people talk about “shameless rogues” and “wretched rags”.  Do real people actually say, “hells, bells, and buckets”?  It could have been worse.  Recently I read a novel where the main English character talked like a reject from a Carry On film or got confused and talked like an American.  (No old English man is ever going to talk about his luggage arriving “momentarily”).

If you want people to suspend belief and enjoy science fiction, fantasy, or even a crime thriller you have to get the factual things they can verify right.  I can believe in a vampire with a soul but give him a dodgy Irish accent and I start to doubt everything.

I decided to try a mid-week hospital visit this time in the hope it would be less crowded.  Instead of the 500 hundred or so people that are there on a Saturday morning there was about 100 this morning.  The only drawback was that I saw a different Doctor.

As I suspected, as I still spend a lot of time feeling exhausted, my medication needed to be increased.  I now have to spend another two months waiting for this new level to stabilize. Given how slow this process is I am not convinced that my hormone levels will be correctly adjusted in time for the summer conference season.  I am going to need to build in a lot of extra time to recover from the travel and the full days at the conferences.

I’ve been reading about Google’s Summer of Code.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects.

The students who successfully complete the program will receive $4500 but the experience of taking part can be worth so much more than that.

When I was at university I applied for a summer scholarship in order to get £1000 (about $1400) for 10 weeks work.  I still remember how nervous I was applying.  There were only 10 places and the university had hundreds of eligible students.  My senior lecturer sponsored me to continue working on my final year dissertation project.  This was an application for the Apple Mac written in HyperTalk that showed connecting pathways in metabolic systems.

I got the place, finished the project, and decided against a career in biochemistry.  I spent the next four years working full-time and studying at night and just before I completed my  Masters I finally got the job I wanted – Junior Analyst Programmer.  It all seems like such a long time ago but I know that getting that scholarship made me realise that I had a chance at succeeding in computing.

One of the computing related things I do now is work for The Perl Foundation (TPF). TPF is hoping to take part in GSoC this year and  Jonathan Leto has posted a request on his blog asking the world-wide Perl Monger groups to encourage students to take part.

It’s impossible to know how many students use Perl.  But there is no doubt that we want to encourage students to both use and help develop the language.

For the past few years all the technical conferences I have attended have been Perl related.  This year I decided that I should try to get to some non-Perl conferences.  So far I have registered for QCon Tokyo and the Open Source Developers Conference in Taiwan.

I still haven’t got used to the fact that I live in Asia and that I should be paying more attention to what’s on in my local area.  There are some disadvantages, as I won’t be able to understand all talks, but I will understand enough of them to make it worthwhile going.

I’m looking forward to hearing Martin Fowler speak at QCon and to attending Paul Bakaus’ jQuery tutorial at OSDC.tw.

February’s edition of the Communications of the ACM contains an article called “Woman in Computing – Take 2”.  I printed it out last night but it isn’t as interesting as I had hoped. I hadn’t released from the cover that this was going to be a review article.  It does contain lots of facts and figures about women in computing but I am more interested in finding out the “why”.

The papers lists some of the current initiatives that are under way to try to increase the numbers of woman in computing.  One of these is to expose girls to positive role models in the technology sphere.  This is something that I have read about recently in the blogosphere as people are starting to write about Ada Lovelace day.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

This subject was also addressed by The Information Technology Association of America who released a report [pdf] in 2003 which stated the following:

Underrepresentation of women and minorities in IT leads to the inevitable “vicious  cycle” of fewer professional role models for those who wish to enter the IT profession.   The Panel believes that the scarcity of adequate role models and mentors has a direct  correlation to the perceptions that female and minority candidates will develop about IT.

I have written about role models before but I have to admit that this is an area I still don’t understand.   Part of the problem is that don’t have clear understanding of what a role model is.  Meriam Webster defines a role model as:

a person whose behavior in a particular role is imitated by others

Now that is very clear when I read it but I can’t tell you who any of my role models are.  I don’t consciously sit around and think that I want to be like a particular person.  And I imagine the same is true for most people.  This is problematic though as it means that I am likely to underestimate the need for positive female role models in computing.

This isn’t the only thing I am confused about though.  If I forget about trying to work out who influenced me or who I imitate can I name some people that I imagine others would want to imitate that would cause them to pick computing as a career?

I still haven’t managed to come up with 101 things to do in 1001 days.   I have 97 things on my list.  And I imagine that I’ll come with a few more things over the next couple of weeks (though I have a feeling I’ve thought that since I created the list.)

I have a variety of different types of things of my list.  Some are one-off things, like organising a trip to the Galapagos Islands, and others are things I want to do on a weekly or monthly basis.  My first list had things that needed done daily but I found it was much too difficult to monitor these and have removed them.

This month I am behind in Japanese language and exercise related tasks.  I still tire easily and it puts me off exercising.  It doesn’t take much at all to put me off studying Japanese – though I have started to get into a routine again and have been on target the past two weeks.

I am on target for all cooking relating tasks.  I now eat more fish, cook dinner at home on a regular basis, and learn to cook something new each month.

I completed one task this month – visit a dermatologist.  It’s awful that I need to add something like this to a list but I find it really hard to go to a Doctor.  Not because they frighten me but because I worry about wasting their time.  I feel guilty if I go to see a Doctor.  The dermatologist was shocked that I hadn’t come sooner but I need to be sure that something really is wrong before I would consider seeing a Doctor.

I am glad that I took José’s advice and created a list. I am now working towards things that before I had only dreamt about doing.

One of the highlights of my recent trip to the U.K. was the food.  I love living in Tokyo and enjoy eating Japanese food but there are lots of things I miss eating.  Some of these are things I can’t cook for myself, because I don’t have an oven, and some others have ingredients that are difficult or impossible to get in Japan.

I have been surprised by the food that I miss.  I really miss roast turkey and roast potatoes. I never ate potatoes that often but for some reason once I got to Tokyo I started to miss them.  I’ve always loved turkey.

My family know that I crave turkey and I ended up having two fantastic turkey dinners in January.  The first one was in Belfast with Marty’s family.  This turned into a traditional Christmas dinner and was so much fun that I’m starting to think we should create our own tradition.  The second one was with my Dad and Step-Mum in Aalsmeer.  They cooked a really succulent turkey that I don’t want to think about too much now as I’m starting to miss turkey again!

To combat my food cravings I have been learning to cook new things that don’t require an oven.  And that can be made with ingredients found in the local supermarket.  This week I made spicy Italian meatballs.  I knew it was something that Marty would really like and thankfully I ended up liking it too.  In January I made Coq au Vin but I didn’t like this.  I think it’s one of those things that really needs to be made with a good red wine and I know nothing about red wine. Trying to pick a good one in a Japanese supermarket is beyond me.

I had meant to take pictures of my new cooking acomplishments for my blog but the food got eaten much too quickly for that to happen.  Marty will eat anything that doesn’t have teeth!