Freelance Web Design & Development

Some friends of ours who had originally planned to get married in San Francisco this fall changed their plans at the last minute to get married in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, so Jesse and I hopped a plane for a whirlwind vacation — well worth it! Neither of us had seen the Northwest before. We only had a day and a half in the city, but we made the most of it with whirlwind tourism; we walked and took buses to a couple of different neighborhoods, climbed a water tower in a park to get a great view of the city, drank delicious coffee, and kayaked on the sound. Seattle struck me as a very chill city; everyone there seemed to be doing their own thing and not really trying to be “cool”, but in a friendly way. (Several strangers struck up conversations with us during our short time there — you don’t get that in New England!) Oh, and the weather was gorgeous — apparently the famed Seattle rain is mostly a fall/winter/spring phenomenon.

The wedding itself was on a lake on an island off the coast — an extremely picturesque setting. Several of our college friends were there — I love that even though we live in places that are far away from each other, we still find ways to meet up and spend time together a couple of times a year. And the ceremony was beautiful and inspiring. Thanks, Laura and Jesse F.!

Then last weekend, we biked to Government Center (it’s always fun to bike downtown on a nice day), took the train to the Orient Heights T stop (on the blue line) for the first time and went to Constitution Beach. The beach was pretty full of a wide variety of people; we sat on the sand and read and watched planes take off and land (the beach is right across the water from the airport).

Books! Kind of like websites, but you can take them outside and sometimes they have complex ideas in them.

What I’ve been reading:

• Metamagical Themas - Douglas Hofstadter:
  Hofstadter is one of my all-time favorite authors — I love his broad range of interests, smart analysis, and clever writing. This book is a collection of his Scientific American columns from the early ’80s; thought-provoking and fun (even if his strong concern about the possibility of nuclear war doesn’t seem as urgent today as it must have then).
• All The King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren:
  This classic is a dense political novel; I read it after Jesse taught it for a course on Southern Literature and Culture this spring. Fantastic prose, intricate structure and plotting, complex ideas conveyed through fiction - highly recommended!
• The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan:
  A classic, obviously. Friedan’s analysis is straightforward and chilling; despite the amount of time that has passed, the concepts ring true; although it isn’t as strong as it was a few decades ago, the feminine mystique of relegating woman’s function to the sexual still exists.
  She more or less leaves out queer women, women of color, and lower-class women, but even with these problems, the ideas are still valuable. (This book was also fun to read while watching through the first season of Mad Men; the character of Betty is obviously based on Friedan’s examples.)
  I’m in the middle of The Second Sex right now and both books share a key takeaway for me: it’s impossible to fully develop yourself without a role in the world that involves meaningful interaction with other members of society, something that’s been denied to women in a lot of times and places. Finishing up The Feminine Mystique actually helped inspire me for another project that’s in the works — stay tuned!!
• The Drunkard’s Walk - Leonard Mlodinow:
  Read this one for the book club, and it was a lot more interesting than I expected it to be. Mlodinow gives clear explanations of key ideas in randomness and probability along with straightforward examples of their application and engaging anecdotes about the mathematicians who discovered them.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been working on a particularly exciting new project: launching Parallactic Consulting — a new web design and development company in Boston and Chicago!

I teamed up with some friends and fellow U of C alums to form Parallactic; it’s awesome to get to work with this much combined talent and experience (as you can see). With both more personpower and a greater variety of skills and experience, we should be able to take on much larger projects than any of us can do as individuals. I’m pretty excited about what’s in store for this!

I’m still accepting small/mid-size projects as an individual, but for larger projects, I’m steering people toward Parallactic - spread the word!

What I’ve been working on lately:

• Launched the new site for Templeman Automation. I created a custom design for this product development company and implemented the design with a custom version of WordPress so that Templeman can easily add new product or project pages and display news blurbs and a featured product on the front page. I integrated Google Checkout with the site to give users an easy way to purchase Templeman’s products. I also got to learn sIFR for this project, which was lots of fun to work with — all the headlines in the site are automatically transformed into a custom font.
• Added some new features to the Fly Over The City bike messenger dispatch site — the client wanted a holding area for jobs to be deleted and a label printing function for clients.
• Made some tweaks to Flathound, a real estate search site written in Ruby on Rails; the coolest part of this project was adding an edit-in-place feature for administrators, so a user can just click on a field in a list of apartments and immediately get an edit box without having to go to a separate page.
• Added some new features to Espressy; in addition to listing several countries they identify with, users can now add specific details about their relationships to those countries and share thoughts, memories, and recommendations.

I’ve also been doing some design work and some more Ruby on Rails coding for projects that are yet to be launched — and another interesting project that I’ll post about soon!

The books I’ve been reading this year, and some thoughts on them:

• America’s Women – Gail Collins: I love Collins’s columns in the New York Times and hoped this book would have a similar mix of historical detail with genuinely entertaining writing, and I was not disappointed. This is a great take on American history focused on women’s roles. Collins does a great job of weaving stories about particularly noteworthy and accomplished women with painstaking research on daily life and the experiences of average women at different periods of history. Highly recommended!
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design – Jason Beaird: A good overview of some of the basic aspects of design for the web. The most useful part of this book for me was Beaird’s explanations of the importance of texture and detailed tutorials and examples of how to use appropriate texture on a site – they definitely helped me add depth to my designs.
• Blink – Malcolm Gladwell: I bought this in an airport bookstore and blew through it on the plane. It’s a quick, fun read about the ways in which humans make decisions unconsciously (and often rationalize them later!).
• The Stone Raft – Jose Saramago: Some friends started a book club, and this was the first selection. It was pretty fun to read, if a little slow — a story of magical realism that became a lot more interesting when we looked up its geopolitical context (Portugal in the 1980s) and were able to put together some of the themes with the social and political state of the setting.
• The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon: I’d already read this book more than once (it’s one of my all-time favorites), but I re-read it after I chose it for the book club’s second meeting.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz: Another book club selection! I’d heard a lot of praise for this book, and it did not disappoint; it’s a dizzying pastiche of Dominican history, science-fiction and comic book references, mythology, Spanish slang, and compelling characters woven into an intriguing story. Highly recommended!
• A History of U.S. Feminisms – Rory Dicker: With a chapter for each of the three “waves”, this book is a straightforward summary of feminism’s ideas, conflicts, and accomplishments over the past century and a half. I’m still looking for something more theoretical/practical and less historical to recommend as a feminism primer, but for now, this is the best book I’ve found for the general newcomer to feminism.
• Feminism Is For Everybody – bell hooks: This book is really intelligent. hooks clearly explains what she believes should be the core tenets of feminism, and lays out a proposal for a new version of feminism that won’t have the heterosexist and white-centered connotations sometimes associated with the second wave, but instead will be inclusive and useful to all people. Possibly a little dense for people new to feminist thought, but highly recommended.
• Full Frontal Feminism - Jessica Valenti: By the founder of the excellent blog feministing.com. The subtitle is “A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters”, and that’s exactly what it is. I was hoping for a more seriously written introduction for a broader audience; Valenti’s slangy tone put me off a little (I could tell she was trying to be deliberately casual, but it made it seem like she wasn’t forming her thoughts carefully — even though she was). However, this would be a good introduction for the “I’m POST-feminist!” high-school/college crowd. I’ve also heard that Valenti’s later books (He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut and The Purity Myth) are less slangy and more in-depth, so I’ll probably try to pick them up.
• Better - Atul Gawande: Another book club selection. This was interesting to read since I knew almost nothing about the medical system. Gawande mixes personal anecdotes about his experiences as a surgeon with analysis on why things go wrong and what doctors can do to make improvements. A fast read that raises some interesting issues.

Scav this year was so much fun! Being on the alumni team was particularly exciting… I got to see old friends and connect with new people. I always forget how exciting it is to spend a lot of time with University of Chicago people; they have a particular kind of intellectual energy that’s not very common elsewhere. It was also great to participate in an alumni event that had some of the characteristics of traditional alumni events (for example, I did a lot of business networking, which I didn’t expect!), but was framed by this context of doing fun, silly stuff together. I’m looking forward to promoting this team to more alumni for next year as a fun alternative or supplement to stuff like the official Alumni Weekend.

When I first saw the list, I was a little disappointed, as there weren’t as many clever items that grabbed my attention as there had been in previous years. But the more I got involved in actually working on the items, I realized the list was actually better-designed than previous lists in a crucial way: the items were chosen because they were fun to do as much as or more than they were fun to think about.

Here’s some of the items I worked on or participated in in some way this year:

13. Take your fashion show to the streets! The city has kindly provided mannequins. If you want to park your car you have to feed the meters, but for this item you have to dress them. [7 points, 3 bonus points if the judges can recognize whom you’re making fun of]

25. Find a slide whistle and an open mic night at a Chicago bar. Impress them and you’ll impress me. [13 points]

36. Scavegon Trail #1: As the University expands, a certain breed of adventurous souls race to reach the fabled new land south of the Midway known as the Oregon Dormitory. Come to Main Quads, Missouri, at 4 pm Thursday to see your pioneering quartet off on the first leg of their journey. Who will you be? A banker from Blackstone? A farmer from the Fallers? A carpenter from Chamberlin? Their first task is to test the sturdiness of their newly constructed, flat-bottomed wagon and the fortitude of their oxen. Like all Scavegon Trail events, in addition to points the winner of this race will win valuable medicine to stave off deadly diseases. Overall Scavegon Trail points awarded for costumes, wagon construction, and number of pioneers alive by the time you reach the Oregon Dormitory. Set a Grueling Pace! [ ε points]

44. Pigs in a blanket, a BLT, and a cup of Joe? That’s far too easy. You’re gonna need your expert slang slinger or you’ll be lost like zeppelins in a fog. Bring your diner dexterity to our favorite greasy spoon, Scott’s Hamburger Heaven, at 11:30 pm Thursday for the Short-order Shout-out. Only one lingo literatus per team, and eighty-six the cheat sheets or the to-go orders won’t be the only ones taking a walk. [3 points for showing up, 25/15/5 points for placing]

56. Scavegon Trail #2: At 3 pm Friday your trailblazers arrive at C-Bench Rock. To supplement their food supply for the long journey still ahead, they are going to go berry picking. But one of your pioneers seems to have lost the use of her legs, another the use of his arms. They are going to have to team up to get these berries back to the wagon.

60. Ronald McDonald is an amicable fellow, and we would all bend a knee in allegiance to our Burger King, but don’t the local restaurants deserve a mascot of comparable level? Choose a Hyde Park restaurant and design an appropriate mascot. If it’s a legit mascot, you’d better have a legit commercial filmed in front of the establishment. [17 points]

61. Blog about your day. Now write it all out by hand with quill and ink. Now transfer it to a wood carving. Okay, you still with me? Now inscribe it in a tablet of baked clay. Bring us the electronic, paper, wood, and clay blogs. Now that’s what I call a chronological scale of blogological technology. [9 points + an understanding of what our ancestors had to go through in order to bitch about their problems]

91. Scavegon Trail #3. What was the best part of this game again? Oh yeah, hunting! After berry-picking, your grizzled foursome arrive at Fort Linnaeus to get some food and have some fun. But there are some tough choices to make. We’ll provide the animals and ammunition.

102. Our Vampire is a tracker. We saw his mind. The Hunt is his obsession. Bring your blood to the DCAM, room 5G, between 8 am and 4 pm all week or he’ll have to come for it himself. [α points]

105. Holy Mackerel! Proselytizing wall fish. [12 points]

106. Settlers of Catan: Human-Sized Edition. Bring your game pieces to (Place TBA) at 3 pm Saturday for a rousing throwdown. All game pieces must be made to scale. The hexagons must be large enough for a person to stand on comfortably (two feet across should do) and look absolutely gorgeous. Game pieces will be assigned at the Oddity. [23 points to build, 12, 9, 6, and 3 points to first through fourth places]

141. Production stills from the following movies [as many as you like, up to 2 points each]:
• Battlestar Helvetica
• Wingdings of Desire
• Comic Sans of Iwo Jima
• The Fall of the Times New Roman Empire
• or one of your own device.

159. Camp Scavvahunta, we hold you in our hearts. Few things are more evocative of the lives of young Americans than the noble institution of summer camp. This Friday, at 7 pm (set up at 6), round up your wagons, pitch your tents on the Eckhart Quad, and get ready to hunker down for a night of good ol’ fashioned fun at the Scav Campout. Festivities will involve a Scav counselor cookout and an assortment of delectable camp activities. We will begin by testing the capacity of both your brains and maws with the “Chubby Bunny Spelling Bee”. Then, the Scavvahunta Follies! Each team will present a short skit recounting their team history in a particular style to be assigned at the Captains’ Oddity. Finally, a massive battle royale Capture the Flag game on the main quads. Each team must bring their own uniquely recognizable flag and will be assigned a random position on the quads to serve as home base. Each team should have at least one tent set up on the quads for this event—expect it to be occupied until 11 pm, for we are the young Americans. [δ points]

201. “They say the Scavhunt brand is growing stale and they need a swell new ad campaign to really push the product. Get the boys down in Creative on this, pronto—the ScavCorp board of directors will be here Sunday and we need to have poster-sized mockups ready!” [25 points for the mockups at Judgment and for blanketing campus with your Scav ad campaign throughout the Hunt]

225. Put your insides on your outsides with a series of epidermal anatomical diagrams. [One major organ system per team member, 10 points per system depicted, 5 bonus points if a pregnant woman models the reproductive system.]

242. On Thursday just before midnight, in Scott’s Hamburger Heaven, actually get an item out of one of those damn skill cranes. [25 points]

Photos? Of course there are photos!

In just a couple of short hours, I’ll be on my way to Chicago for the world’s largest scavenger hunt — a University of Chicago tradition! It’s, er, intense. The item that’s gained most worldwide notoriety is probably the working nuclear reactor some students built in 1999, but there were plenty of exciting items during the years I participated in college (”get circumcised”; “the biggest goddamn sombrero we’ve ever seen”; “a graduate thesis written on napkins from a dining hall, signed off on by a thesis committee” — I also ended up going on a few of the intense road trips, including one year all the way to Princeton, NJ by way of Notre Dame, Oberlin, and the world’s largest general store).

Most of the teams are associated with student dorms, but now, some friends and acquaintances have started an alumni team (”GASH (Grad and Alumni Scav Hunt team): Those Meddling Adults”). As an alum, I’m proud to be a part of this! So who knows what I’ll be up to this weekend…

Some website projects I’ve been working on in the past couple months:

• Launching the design for MetaArts, an educational publishing development house in Chicago
• Launching MyWomanToday, which I worked on through Webstudio Boston — I did all the backend Ruby coding for this social network
• HTML coding for Really Useful Information
• Some updates and changes to Lamp Glass’s online store
• Wordpress customization for Tall Tales from the Antiques Trail — it’s still under development, but this will be a blog where a local antique dealer collects colorful stories (from his own experience as well as from colleagues) about the business

I’ve also been enhancing my Wordpress skills and learning sIFR for some other projects that are still in the behind-the-scenes stages. One of the great things about being a freelancer is getting to learn new technological skills with almost every project!

I upgraded to the new Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope, on the day it came out. “At last!” I thought. “Time to solve the problems I created for myself by upgrading to a non-Long-Term-Support release last fall!” Dreaming of a world in which pulseaudio didn’t randomly need to be restarted every few hours, I started the upgrade running… only to load Firefox and discover an even worse fate — no sound in anything Flash-based! No Pandora!! PANIC TIME!!!

Anyway, it turned out to be super easy to fix. Just go to Adobe’s website and download the .deb of the latest Flash, then install, restart Firefox, good to go. Now I can get my Sarah Haskins¹ fix complete with sound!

I got into a discussion on Trogger this morning about the question of men far outnumbering women in computer science (in my experience, this is very true — in my college CS classes of 20-25 people I would usually be one of 2 women, and of the 20 or so people my year who actually graduated with CS degrees, I was the only woman); why is this, and what can be done about it?

I think a lot of this has to do with unconscious bias and role models. As Cassie pointed out in her original post, a big factor is probably stereotype threat — the finding that members of particular groups stereotyped at being bad at certain subjects actually do worse in tests of those subjects if they are told the tests show a gender/race disparity, or even just asked to list their race or gender, than if they take the tests without race or gender brought up. Research like the Implicit Association Test suggests that most people, even female scientists and mathematicians themselves, unconsciously find it easier to associate math and science with men than with women.

Implicit biases in a person aren’t evidence that the person is actively discriminatory — they’re subconscious ideas that we get from the racist, patriarchal society all of us are raised in. No matter how consciously convinced you are that women make great scientists and technologists, you probably also have the subconscious implicit biases that suggest otherwise. So it’s not so much a question of women thinking, “Hey, I probably won’t be good at programming because I’m a woman!”, as thinking, “Oh, I just don’t see myself as a programmer”, without realizing that this idea might come from subconsciously ingrained biases about what a programmer is like (male).

But these biases can be fought! Research associated with the IAT has shown that people show less evidence of implicit biases when holding counter-stereotypes in their minds; for example, you’re more likely to associate women with science if you read about Rosalind Franklin or Marie Curie right before taking the test. This is what Ada Lovelace Day is all about — promoting the women who are already successful in scientific and technical fields is a win for everybody. The more visible women in science and technology are, the less prevalent these implicit biases will be in the future, and the more girls and young women will be motivated to enter these fields.