Moving

I'm moving. Hopefully you will all follow me on over to my new wordpress site. You can and should subscribe to my new RSS feed.

If Blogger can't run a decent site they don't deserve my blogging and traffic. So please, come on over to the new locale! Hopefully things will run a bit smoother. And I won't have to click "post" and "preview" 10 times in a row to comment on my own blog.

Blogger v. Wordpress

I'm thinking about switching to wordpress. Blogger is really torquing me lately. What say you oh hoardes of readers who follow my blog? Will you still read me on wordpress? Commenting will work better, that I guarantee.

Technorati Blogger Drivel

Dear Technorati,

Stop emailing me random requests to blog for your network. I respect what Technorati does. It's a decent blog aggregator. It does a good job at separating "real" human blogs from bot blogs and links to some interesting stuff. I understand you want your own content so you can make money off of that. That's all fine and good. If you sent me an email asking me to write about something I have a proven skill with and maybe a decent following to show for I would completely understand.

But by your standards my blog's "authority" is not so fantastic. You've also asked me to write about autos which was probably the best guess but still not something I've written about more than a dozen times. Then you decided to ask me to write about books, business, and amusingly enough travel. I have a constantly fluctuating authority level in those topics and pretty much never travel. This leads me to believe you are sending me spam emails.

Which is pretty crazy because otherwise I'd say the request is legitimately from you. Why would a high profile site need to send generically generated emails to random people in the blogging world? Upon visiting your about page I also discover that you all have emails either from gmail, cox, and scarily enough yahoo. Even gmail is pretty unprofessional coming from someone supposedly employed at a business. Also some of your twitter handles are neither your name nor say anything about who you are. That's pretty crazy. Someone too busy to go to the Web 2.0 seminar?

So feel free to invite me to blog for your site in the future. But please ask me to write about something I'm already doing a kickass job at. When I'm way down in your rankings and don't even have an authority level on a topic you ask me to "professionally" blog about it just makes me question you and your business model.

Blogging about STEM

With all this talk about women science bloggers a few have been mentioning a problem. That it seems as if women who blog about science do not get the same attention/audience that men who blog about science. And that women who may start off blogging about science will eventually be compelled to blog about women in science. So I was curious where I stood on the balance.

 

From the pie chart (mmmmpie) I'm actually surprised how much engineering fills up my posts. Of course this is post only, not based on reaction/audience. And I'm surprised how little bitching about work is in there. The women thing I did not foresee when I started blogging but it's something I have strong opinions about so it doesn't bother me it's part of the balance. Clearly I'm not blogging about my cat enough.

 

If any readers/commenters would like to pipe up with suggestions or what they'd like to see more/less of, go right ahead! Like I told my professor today in lecture after he criticized my design and then pseudo-apologized, go ahead, I can take it!

Try new things

I did some welding for the first time this week. Though that might be an exaggeration of what I actually accomplished, but I did something new and learned something.

I found a new blogger I like, Dr. Kathryn Clancy, and she blogged about a panel they had at Science Online 2011 and specifically about how when women want something they have to hide it. She talks about the moment I have been through many times where you are going along with your life and a colleague suddenly objectifies you and you realize you'll never be just another coworker to them, that your primary function is to be a woman. You can be smart for a woman or skilled for a woman but like Billy Joel sang, you're always a woman.

She also talked about women's tendencies not to promote themselves and a commenter had an insightful comment that despite attending the same conferences as men on "always negotiate" or "always promote yourself" that the message she took home to be aggressive was not nearly the same as what the men took home. She also talked about something I feel strongly about: we need to build an old girls club. I take this seriously here as well as in the workforce (which I'll probably talk about soon on EngineerBlogs). That we need to promote others as well as not be afraid to promote ourselves. So I did it. I joined twitter.

Two new things in one week, the hardware and the software, the yin and the yang.

New Venture

There's a new blogging game in town that I'm quite proud of. Myself and a few other of the engineer bloggers have banded together to form Engineer Blogs. So go check it out.

 

Chris Gammell asks Do you prefer to work on projects on your own? Cherish writes an introduction to metamaterials and Fluxor gives us the long awaited (by me anyways) list of transistor interview questions that he either typically asks candidates or has encountered in his work. I have even contributed my modest writing skills where I talk about where this economy is headed and a government workshop's attempt to outline the future of manufacturing while we struggle to compete with China in What the World Needs Now.

 

I will still write here, but head on over and add Engineer Blogs to your reader or feed aggregate to get the full effect of three fantastic writers (not sure why they invited me). I'll continue to link over there for new posts or when there's a fantastic post you need to run over and read. You can continue to stay and read here for whatever I don't spotlight over there which might still be engineering related, or might be my amateurish economic predictions, discussions on caffeine, or pictures of my cat.

Twelve Months of Blogging

This meme is going around now, posting the title and first sentence of the first blog post of every month. 2010 was the first full year of my blogging. So here it goes.

 

January

Happy New Year

Another year and we're still around. [Link]

 

February

Zombie Defense Programs

I remember when Democrats became the majorities of Congress in 2006. [Link]

 

March

First Day on the Job

So if you hadn't heard, the new Tinkerbelle resembles her name; she's a tinkerer. [Link]

 

April

The rumors have been greatly exaggerated...

Another soldier has joined the war to answer the eternal question, why do women leave science? [Link]

 

May

It all makes sense now

Definitely go read this beer-laden explanation of market derivatives over at Pascale's. [Link]

 

June

Wednesday

[Engineering design process diagram] [Link]

 

July

Textbook Mafia Wars

My Control Theory I Professor just saved me $160.00. [Link]

 

August

Save the failwhales

I love how banks and utility companies ask you to get your statements via email instead of paper so that you can "go green" or "save paper." [Link]

 

September

Oh is that all

A University of Michigan researcher, John DeCicco, says we can triple our fuel economy in 25 years. [Link]

 

October

Caffeinated News

A new study says that healthcare professionals are some of the people who rely the most on coffee. [Link]

 

November

Job Hunting

You know the economy is bad when people are ok with working in "hole in the wall." [Link]

 

December

December 1st: World AIDs Day

For personal reasons the plight of AIDs victims, both locally and worldwide, means a lot to me. [Link]

 

Anyways, it's been a great year and if you've been reading here I really appreciate it. Looking forward to another year, new topics, and hopefully some new perspectives. Thanks for stopping by.