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junior year of grad school begins

2008-08-30T13:13:00.006-05:00

it has been a long while, my friends - many things to report on. summer is over, school is starting again, and here in grad-school land, things is moving fast. that is to say, what day is it? holy crap. classes are back in full swing, and boy are they geeky: programming, web development II, information security, and research methods. i'm still not quite sure what my master's paper topic will be, or what i'll be doing next may, but for now, things are good. school, work, and life: going well.

also, caitlin and i went on an epic midwest roadtrip two weeks before school started. pictures below. and hopefully more updates as the semester progresses, now that i've gotten this initial oh-lordy-i-haven't-blogged-in-a-while hump. faincy.

one year in carolina

2008-07-21T21:47:00.004-05:00

it was a year ago today that my folks helped me move my ass and all my crap up to carrboro, north carolina, to begin my life here. it's been a twisty-curvy year full of new friends, new life experiences, new school experiences, and new directions for me. i started out with some substantial fears about the future, but those sadnesses were quickly squelched when i was welcomed into the librarian fold and began learning the ropes of life here in carolina-ville. a year later, i am loving north carolina, its offerings, and its fine denizens who have welocomed me into their lives. without getting super-sappy about my life here in NC, the cadre of awesome people i've met and come to care for in the past year, and how damn happy i am just to be here and have this opportunity to be in school at UNC, i will just say thanks, north carolina, for the past year. it has been quite wonderful.

___ of summer

2008-07-13T17:06:00.009-05:00

badass dusk activity: biking around the neighborhood with a posse of ladies
congratulations: david and ellen, for stella kate
dessert: homemade horchata popsicles
dinner: burgers 'n' brats grilled out in the back yard, with homemade slaw on top and on the side
excitement: the new x-files movie, which may or may not be terrible
highlight, june: hanging out with the wonderful women of wanderlust
highlight, june (II): housesitting for a weekend in deep pittsboro
highlight, july: fourth of july on the porch with seven librarians, right as the gullywasher began
hombres: enlightened librarians, hippie roommates, deli gals, open-source advocates, IT geeks, carrboro
life-planner: google calendar
life-saver: window AC units (seriously)
missed person: lnb, in my life
operating system: ubuntu linux on the house computer
snack: yogurt + fresh-picked blackberries from the neighborhood
sucky phone company: verizon wireless, for not providing adequate cellular coverage to carrboro. what gives, verizon?
tv on dvd: the wire, strangers with candy, 30 rock, planet earth
watering hole: the front porch

epic summer day

2008-06-15T16:00:00.008-05:00

yesterday was the quintessential summer day. in honor of hk's birthday, we took an epic bike ride up to the eno river quarry, close to durham. it was about 15 miles up -- hk, jen, ethan and i covered it in about an hour and a half. that was my first lengthy bike ride, and i was pleased that i made it to the quarry alive. the second half of the posse arrived shortly after we did, with wonderful mediterranean deli foods in tow, and we hiked down to the quarry, gorged ourselves, and went swimming. afterwards we drove into durham and got some excellent vietnamese tofu at bahn's on ninth street. after a lethargic drive home, we all parted ways and took what could only be described as tandem disco naps. night fell, and soon after we got up and moving again, danielle and caitlin came by with a beautiful sprinkle cake (amy sedaris's recipe!). birthday jubilation! followed by another carpool to durham for a michael jackson vs. prince dance party. overall, a long and ridiculous day, but in the best possible way.

i flew home to alabama last weekend, saw my family and an old friend, and drove my dad's new pickup truck to town. surreal times. i am (slowly) getting used to the idea of flying home, rather than driving. since i moved away from home the first time, i've always been tied to the notion that all i needed to do was steer my car to i-85 or i-65 and find myself at home within a few hours. nowadays, though, it's more practical to fly--it just saves time, money, and though it doesn't do a lot, it means one less car on the road.

so, that's how things are going here. oh! thanks to a few friends kind enough to bestow some recommendations, i've started seeking out music again. we'll see how this newly rekindled relationship goes. for now, as i sit at work on a sunday, nary a patron in sight, i am temporarily caught up in the sweeping, epic, cocteau-twins-meets-80s-teen-movie beauty "skin of the night" from m83's new album, saturdays=youth (an apt title, given our youthful activities yesterday):

summer goals

2008-06-01T16:20:00.004-05:00

it's another incredibly slow sunday in the SILS lab, and i figured it's time for a life update before i close up shop here and bike home in the sweltering heat that is north carolina on june 1. i am very excited that i have a wonderful new home and new roommates to go home to, now that we've gotten moved in and are settling at poplar. beyond the not-having-central-air thing, this house is going to rule--once we procure internet from the time warner's beastly talons. but hey, a tech detox was not un-called-for in the past week, and it's been nice to just sleep and read a lot.

so, things have definitely slowed a lot in the past few weeks since school has gone away and work and summer have taken over. the lack of huge academic obligations has been very nice. i've made myself a lot of promises in the past few months about how i'd use all this newfound time this summer, and with the support of caitlin, who is also creating a list of goals, i've come up with a few:

cook--more often and more healthily
take at least 3 longer (7+ miles) bike rides
not drive my car unless absolutely necessary
learn ruby on rails
go on a trip
get my master's paper topic nailed down

there are others, but those are the most interesting. i'm daydreaming now about the the plan once i get home: put on some flip-flops, ankle over to tres amigos taqueria in carrboro, and buy me a delicious gordita for dinner. oh yes. more boring, lazy summer stories to come, rest assured.

may again

2008-05-18T13:46:00.003-05:00

it's been forever again, and a ton has happened since my last post. most importantly, this semester came to a quick and forceful close, and my summer began with a tiny, tiny roar. rather than even attempt summing anything up, i am, as usual, just gonna put stuff in bullet points to keep all involved interested:

my semester wrapped up at 9:30pm on april 30th, at which point i breathed a gigantic sigh of relief. our systems analysis group project about WXYC's music cataloging was my proudest accomplishment this semester (maybe even this year). it was a ton of work, but a semester and 56 single-spaced pages later, it's through. and damn good, if do say so.
jen and i found time to buy me a bike from some folks in cary, somehow, during the last couple weeks of school. it's a beautiful royal-blue 20" men's 1985 trek 400-series, and damn if i am not jazzed to have a road bike again. my old-ass huffy got stolen off the porch of our pulaski house a couple years ago, and i've been riding mom's teal 1994 gt mountain bike since then. the trek is a nice lil' change and feels faster and easier to ride on these chapel hill/carrboro streets.
i dropped down to athens for a few days that weekend of may, took in meghan's exit show, and saw tons and tons of beautiful familiar faces. there is a whole photo set up on flickr, of course.
i started work at webslingerz in carrboro once i returned from ATH. the folks there are super-cool and the atmosphere is very supportive, so i'm looking forward to working on some good projects with them this summer and learning a ton. i'm also holding down the SILS lab for 30 hours/week this summer, learning a lot there and wearing the manager's cap, which basically means i make the schedule.
i got to hang out with a bunch of lovely visitors from various cities who were coming in to visit my sally girls, ate some delicious barbecue, went down to the haw for river-times, and generally enjoyed the company of some fine new friends. i'm immensely sad that lnb will be leaving us for a while to hang in STL, but i know she'll be back soon--at which point, river-times and barbecue will be had in spades.
the house on poplar is almost ready for us to move in--we're about halfway through painting the upstairs bedrooms. hopefully when all's said and done i won't have permanent kilz primer stains, which i'm currently claiming are artsy white tattoos, all over my hands and feet. i'm very excited about moving into this huge old house with sam, heather, and jen -- it will be an adventure and a welcome change to live in a house with close friends again. last weekend we went to durham and picked up some lovely green-gold velour couches with beautiful tassel-fringe for the living room. let the summer begin.

april showers

2008-04-06T20:27:00.005-05:00

another busy week in chapel hill. aside from carolina's devastating final-four loss to kansas last night, the past week has been pretty good. this wednesday i turned in the largest chunk of my user interface design project, which was a huge weight off. the other large project in my life, working with WXYC's music cataloging system for systems analysis class, will begin consuming the rest of my time very soon. this semester is rapidly drawing to a close, which both frightens and excites the hell out of me. it means the coming weeks will be increasingly intense, but it also means that in less than a month, i'll be relatively fancy-free for a few months. yes, please.

in other news, i got to hang out with some wonderful visitors last weekend: elizabeth, kristy and alex were in town from their respective cities, north and south, and it was good to see all of them. there are tons of photos up on flickr, of course.

spring in carolina

2008-03-27T14:39:00.004-05:00

things that make me happy:

my first carolina spring: warm climes, beautiful skies, flowers burstin', and scores of students laying out on the quad in the sunlight;
carolina basketball! yet another tourney game tonight;
UNC, because it is so good and brings much joy to my life;
stephanie haas, my systems analysis teacher, who will dance across the room to illustrate a point;
the promise of summer: work, no school, porch-sittin', river-going, bbq-eating, beer-drinking, and general destressing.

things that fill me with rage:

seeing bicyclists wearing headphones instead of helmets;
the fact that, with the end of the semester coming soon and all the subsequent work needing to be done, all i want to do is go outside and lie down in the grass.

things that i have recently encountered that are good:

mia doi todd's new album, gea;
google news alerts RSS feeds
XML, XSL, and XML schemas -- beautiful, beautiful code;
whether i like it or not -- twitter, which has turned out to be the best tech support method ever;
photo booth:

SB2k8, new york and other goodities

2008-03-15T18:40:00.003-05:00

this week i've been enjoying some temporary free time in the middle of this ridiculously hectic semester. first, i was able to get up to manhattan again to see my rach, miles, john david and some other cool kids who i haven't seen in quite a while. we had a lot of fun: saw the upright citizens brigade, scaled the empire state building, ate some delicious food, and otherwise enjoyed the city and each other. i was only there for about 56 hours, but the city is best enjoyed in quick, intense bursts anyhow. sickeningly cute photos are up at flickr, of course.

i enjoyed carousing around the city again for a few days, but was glad to get back to quiet little carrboro and get some much-needed R&R. it's been a super low-key break, which is exactly what the doctor ordered. i've started getting my affairs in order around the house, with school, and with the summer in general. looks like i'll be sharing a huge old house in downtown carrboro with three lovely librarians starting soonish, and the idea of having a yard and a sizable porch in time for summer sittin' is one of the things getting me through the end of this semester. that, and i was contacted by some of the awesome folks at webslingerz and am slated to be doing some part -time web design stuff for them over the summer. cool gig! i am very excited about it, as well as having some non-school time this summer to decompress.

in other news, unc's recent shocker is that eve carson, our student body president and all-around good kid, was murdered in the middle of one of the most affluent chapel hill neighborhoods a few weeks ago. i don't really have anything original to add to the commentary, beyond being shocked and losing little faith in the world. i took this photo at a memorial on the main quad at unc; about 5,000 of us showed up. wow. rest in peace, eve.

new york coming soon + geekery

2008-02-24T12:18:00.005-05:00

classes and work are chugging along here in chapel hill, and as spring break approaches the pile of work to do gets higher and higher. but then i'll forget all about it for a few days during the week of spring break, when i'm set to fly up to new york and see rach, miles, and john david in the big city! it's been about a year and a half since i've been up to new york, so it'll be good to take in the city with some people i love, if only for a couple days. last time i went to new york it was on UGA's dime for the college music journal conference, and i got to see a lot of the city, which was great. this time i'll be able to see the city through the eyes of folks who live there. and hopefully when rach and i travel together nothing crazy will happen like last time.

on a completely unrelated note, my achievement of the week was fixing a friend's ibook. yes! the computer geek remains...

new computer

2008-02-17T14:43:00.003-05:00

this week i went into a little debt and finally made the purchase i've been dying to make since i first saw a 15-inch powerbook, back in 2004. yep, i've bought a blacbook and i doubt i will ever look back. i'm looking forward to not having to haul around my 15-inch windows machine when i need my laptop while i'm on-campus...and, of course, there's the ridiculous battery life (5+ hours!), the neat way that everything works together without you having to think about it, the boatloads of keyboard shortcuts, and (my personal favorite) the ability to customize everything down to the tiniest detail. and all in this tiny, yet super-powerful package! damn, i can see myself becoming one of those mac nerds sometime soon.

one day i will be productive again.

jose gonzalez at unc

2008-02-12T14:16:00.000-05:00

this weekend i found out that one of my favorite musicians, jose gonzalez, is playing a show on the UNC campus in three weeks! exciting. i love every song of his that i've heard and look forward to taking in a show and hearing this man's beautiful, beautiful voice. he plays guitar real good, too.

below is gonzalez's cover of joy division's "love will tear us apart", which i've been listening to on repeat all week:

and "crosses", a song from him first album veneer, that showcases his guitar skills as well as his songwriting chops.

flu o'clock

2008-02-09T18:07:00.000-05:00

this week brought an exciting change to my schedule: a nice, healthy round of the flu. rather than attending class or going to work for three days, i spent some time in my bed, watched the entirety of 30 rock season 2, and slept more than any human should be allowed. now the weekend's here and i'm catching up on work, preparing for the week ahead, and realizing that carolina lost to duke this week. dang. everything has gone wrong.

hopefully next week will be better.

north carolina residency

2008-01-29T18:48:00.000-05:00

this week i began my transformation into a full-time north carolina resident. now, this is big for me; since the day i left my fair state over four years ago, i've clung to my driver's license and thus my residency, not knowing which state i'd be living in long enough to make the switch worth my while. that lack of permanency has also been a convenient excuse for me to keep a little piece of alabama with me. anyone who knows me knows full well that i take pride in my home state, and i also like challenging people's notions about who alabamians are. in fact, what i'll miss most is showing my ID and getting wary once-overs from doormen and sales clerks who wonder if my license is fake, and if not, how i learned to read. i'll also miss those random ID checks when the door guy at the bar tells me, well how 'bout that, his family is from slapout, alabama (which, by the way, is eleven miles from my folks' house). alas. showing my north carolina license is so much easier, but it's with a wistful sigh that i relinquish those wary glances and become another carrboro resident with a wright brothers hologram on my driver's license.

long vacation

2008-01-16T18:42:00.000-05:00

well, damn. it's been two months since i've posted anything around here and i feel sortof terrible about it. so because i can be kindof a slackass when it comes to updating about my life, there's a new link on the right side of this page, below the blogroll, for a thing called botablog -- enter your email address and it'll send you a message whenever this blog is updated. or there's always the RSS feed if you're the marrying type.

that said, it's been a really busy couple of months for me here in north carolina. the last weeks of the fall semester were a whirlwind as i wrapped up my courses and subsequently my freshman semester of grad school. now, as a wizened sophomore, i'm rolling into even geekier, more exciting classes: user interface design, database 1, systems analysis, and human-information interactions. in a nutshell, this semester is all about learning how to understand what and how people do, and how to build systems that support those processes. work in the sils lab is great, still; i continue to learn a lot, and i love being able to help people. aaand on top of classes and work, i'm taking on responsibilities as webmaster and social chair (!) of the SILS student organization and am the new VP of the student chapter of ASIS&T. this semester will be intense, but in that staying-busy-and-it-feels-real-good kind of way.

otherwise, things are good. i went home for christmas, took entirely too many pictures, and got to relax and spend some time with my family and my athens kids, which is always good.

probably the most boring post to date, but more to come soon, schedule-willing.

home for thanksgiving -- tomorrow

2007-11-20T11:01:00.001-05:00

it's the day before i fly, yes fly home for thanksgiving, and i am sitting in open eye cafe in carrboro, nc, feeling somewhat good about the two assignments i've just submitted via blackboard. the rest of today will likely be a whirlwind as i go to two classes and take care of business before i leave my house at 5:30 tomorrow morning. i've been living here in north carolina for four months! and though i was not expecting it to happen so fast, i feel at home here, like where i am, and feel generally cool about where my grad program is going. beyond being really cheesy about how things are going here, i am also very excited about returning to alabama for a few days to spend some quality time with the family and catch up with a few folks. despite how much i like the triangle, central alabama will always, always be home.

not much further news from here beyond the usual: work, school, and everything else are going well. also, my roommate got an illuminated globe for her birthday; this photo was the result of me messing around with the macro settings on my camera.

november, what?

2007-11-08T09:31:00.000-05:00

hello all; once again it's been far too long, and once again, i'm resorting to bullet points because there's so much to say! and such a wide variety of things that i'm not sure i could even begin to write transitions for everything. so, here goes.

doing-it-wrong of the week: "libertarian" ron paul and his stances on sexual orientation legislation. doesn't sound very libertarian to me.
doing-it-right of the week: friend lars is partly responsible for the brand-spankin'-new npr music featuring a music blog authored by none other than sleater-kinney's carrie brownstein. nicely done.
birthday: i'm turning 23 on sunday. this year promises to be interesting, not only because 23 is a prime number (a fact i have mixed feelings about), but because i've been claiming 23 in earnest for a while, anyway.
google: we talk about the internet a LOT at school, and i'd say google occupies a solid 50% of the discourse. it's a familiar reference point for all of us, so we use it as an example when we talk about business processes, user experience, information retrieval practices, etc. that said, i would take a bullet for google if it were a person. this month i've done two presentations using presentations and have not been let down; our five-person group was able to collaborate on our class project seamlessly. in other googs:
- gmail's getting a facelift, and i like it a lot. it comes at a good time, now that i'm no longer terrified of gchat.
- via the onion: "Google Launches 'The Google' For Older Adults". frighteningly realistic! i know some folks who would probably use it.
i had the extreme pleasure of seeing caetano veloso last night at memorial hall on UNC's campus. not only was the ticket a steal ($10!), but the show was absolutely, flabbergastingly amazing. veloso is a true entertainer, a gifted musician and a heartbreaking vocalist. the show ran the gamut from dancey brasilia-rock to soft solo acoustic samba and covered a good portion of veloso's catalog. he held the crowd in thrall for two hours, and by the encore, half the audience was crowded up against the stage, dancing and shouting, no shit. he ended up playing the song he played in talk to her (helen, one of your favorite scenes in cinema, yes? i couldn't help but think of you the whole time and smile.). the clip is below; it doesn't do justice to match the marvelousness of the show last night, but it's nonetheless a beaut.
and finally, halloween was last week and i dressed up for the first time in many years (bee costume courtesy of caitlin):

my bullet-pointed life

2007-10-11T08:45:00.000-05:00

sorry for the long pause between posts; it's been a semi-hectic couple of weeks in the CH. and because paragraphs won't quite represent the randomness of what is to follow, bullet points again:

new radiohead album: i'm not sure about the rest, but i've been playing "all i need" on a damn near constant loop in the past two days. you can name your price to download the album over at inrainbows.com; it'll be interesting to see how the revenues pan out from this venture now that fans can download the album from the source for as little as free dollars. or maybe people will buy the CD when they realize that the MP3s are only available at (gasp!) 160kbps.
speaking of music, other stuff on the radar this week: jolie holland's "mexican blue", courtesy of my roommate; devendra banhart's "my dearest friend"; and the innocence mission's cover of "moon river".
how fabulously stalker-ific is facebook's online now page? i've begun to wonder if i was this creepy in a past life, or if facebook is just an enabler.
speaking of facebook, check out slate's facebook commandments. hearing people even a couple years older than me talking about facebook as a foreign culture makes me realize (sadly!) how clueless people my age (22ish) must seem to 18-year-olds. the idea that kids are growing up with technology as essential components of their lives makes you wonder just how large a tech/knowledge gap there'll be between the oldies and the youngies in the coming years. yikes.
real life stuff: school and work are good; i had a few projects due this week, but nothing too overwhelming. this weekend i'm headed down to athens for wuog's 35th birthday and alumni spectacular. couch-surfing fun times should ensue...otherwise, next week is fall break for the heels, which means time for me to catch up on homework and sleep, and chill-time with the librarians. cool deal.

life update for the end o'september

2007-09-26T17:07:00.000-05:00

school and work are going smoothly, as are Things in general in the CH. we're registering for spring semester classes this week, and my lineup will probably be as follows: human information interactions, systems analysis, user interface design, and database 1.
geeky: delicious let me in on a preview of their new site...i really like what i've seen so far.
had an amazing weekend with rach and the kids a couple weeks ago, and a raleigh-tastic visit from my parents this past weekend. it's just turning fall up here, the trees are starting to turn, and the temps are threatening to fall into the ridiculously comfortable, fall-is-coming-really-soon range.
my roommate mary beth has really taken to tin cup prophette, one of my favorite athens musicians!
on the music radar this week: goodbye lucille #1 by prefab sprout and the ride by joan as police woman. nice.

i love library school

2007-09-17T15:14:00.001-05:00

seen in the halls of SILS on this fine monday morning:

status update

2007-09-12T18:29:00.000-05:00

dear rach (and everybody else!),

i'm resorting to bullet points for the status update this week.

school's gearing up, getting a little more intensive each week. next wednesday we're delivering a group presentation and paper in our management class about, well, the hiring process for a new library director. super-exciting, i know...
to relieve stress, i started running again this week. it's been a few months since i've run regularly (jogging class this spring). last time i seriously kept up a running regimen, it was my senior year at ASMS, and i was probably in the best shape of my life. it'd be nice to up my fitness level again; we'll see how it goes. since it's finally cooling down outside, it's a little less daunting to start exercising now.
led zeppelin is reuniting for one show? meanwhile, bonham spins, spins, spins in his grave.
three words: planet unicorn heyyy.
songs on the playlist this week: "wedding day" by marla hansen, "east from west" by denison witmer, "back back back" by ani difranco, and "today" by the innocence mission. denison witmer and marla hansen are playing a show together at the duke coffeehouse at the end of september, and i'm getting excited about checking it out.

this week in tech

2007-09-06T09:47:00.000-05:00

tech stuff that's been on my radar this week:

a new google wiki service will probably be launching soon as a part of google apps, according to recent reports. this will be some very powerful collaboration/groupware (or even personal information management) software, and it'll be cool to see the google 'take' on the wiki.
google's also planning on throwing in an announcement about presentation software soon -- if you're a gmail user, you might've noticed that for the past couple months, when you sent a powerpoint file as an attachment, you could preview the slideshow in your browser. hopefully google's take on slideware will be just as spiffy as the rest of google docs.
new ipod touch from apple? yes, please. it's an iphone minus the phone (and about a hundred bucks), but still includes wifi wherever there's service. pretty dang sweet. on the other hand, the new ipod nano is ambiguously ugly:
via webware: osiris a java webapp that uses the lyrics of whatever song you're listening to in itunes to create an on-the-fly slideshow from flickr. you should have a super-fast connection to test it out, and even then it's a little jerky. it's a cool idea, but there are still some rough edges.

go heels!

2007-09-03T14:31:00.000-05:00

saturday saw my first excursion into the crazy tarheel-blue world of north carolina football. first, some backstory: i was born and bred in the SEC football tradition; to this day i'll contend that auburn university is far superior to the u. of alabama in every way, especially in football. i'll also be the first to say that, while i'm not the most avid georgia fan ever, i have been known to watch the games on TV and holler for the dawgs every now and then. can't help it; the love of football is in my blood, and my allegiances, though semi-split, are steadfast enough that i go out of my way to watch and enjoy a good SEC football game on the tube.

that said, carolina football was an interesting first non-SEC college football experience for me. firstly, the student ticketing process for UNC football games is, there's no such thing as student tickets. show up with your student ID at any game and the seats are free and first-come, first-served. getting into the stadium was a breeze, and hey, who doesn't love free entertainment? the student section was packed. having attended games in both jordan hare and sanford stadiums, i am accustomed to the spectacle that accompanies huge, 90,000-person-plus stadiums filled to capacity with rabid, screaming, partially-drunk fans. in this way, the UNC game didn't disappoint. though the stadium's a little smaller, the crowd was just as crazy and half-drunk as could be expected at any SEC game. and! beyond not knowing what the hell people were hollering for the carolina cheers, i was impressed by the batch of traditions the 'heels have developed. for instance, the stadium seats, which have some damn near unheard-of backs, were the primary source of noise during kickoffs. people would just rattle the seats, LOUDLY, to rally the troops on the field. also in the tradition-box? fireworks after every score, including the extra points. the male cheerleaders also took turns doing pushups after every touchdown, one for every point of carolina's score.

so, i 'magine the cheerleaders were a bit worn out by the end of the game; carolina ran away with it, blowing off the JMU dukes by 20-some-odd points. go heels, indeed. i left towards the end of the third quarter, once we started running away with the game, and walked towards my bike, parked a little ways up campus. by the time i reached manning hall, i couldn't hear the crowd any longer. i thought back to the fall when we kids lived on pulaski street a good air-mile away from the UGA stadium. that fall, i would watch the games on ESPN and open our windows to hear the crowd roaring from campus. there are a lot of parts of being close to SEC football i don't miss, and the carolina game was really fun, but damn if i didn't watch the auburn and georgia games on ESPN when i got home.

point of pride

2007-09-01T13:40:00.001-05:00

compare these two:

UNC.edu - february 29, 2000 - courtesy of archive.org. note the 1999 copyright date at the bottom.
UNC.edu - september 1, 2007

notice anything strange, here?

we seriously need to follow in ncsu's footsteps and kick that web presence up a notch.

women in technology

2007-08-30T08:47:00.000-05:00

this morning i really got excited about sxsw interactive 2008 and started poking around the 'net for student travel grants. during the search, i stumbled across the anita borg foundation, an advocate for women's participation in technology-related fields. they released a women in IT report earlier this year, and boy was it an eye-opener.

"Studies of technical careers in various industries have identified 4 archetypical career stages. Those 4 steps have been broadly defined as:

Apprenticeship (Step 1, entry level)
Individual Contributor (Step 2, mid-level)
Mentoring, Contributing through others (Step 3, Senior level)
Setting strategic direction of organization (Step 4, Executive level)

The proportion of women in technical careers drops significantly at stages 3 and 4, from 20% at the first stages to less than 3% at the highest stage."

this doesn't sound really bad until you look at the accompanying graph, which clearly demonstrates how women are not making it to the higher-level tech positions:

check out the full report if you're interested.