booth babing is hard

OK. My ass is *kicked*. I’ve spent the last three days running around the Moscone Center telling folks about the Urban Adventure for JavaOne (a.k.a. The Go Game). Three days of smiling pretty, talking small talk, being energetic and witty and silly and pretending to smile when i’m treated like a bimbette (all the while teaching my fellow babes Object Oriented Java). Of course, the event went off with a bang and people had a great time (except for those who were cranky that they didn’t win.)

Oh, and damn those who blamed me for not giving them a good score, because i was being good and honest! I wrote my own adventure, which was utterly reminscent of my days as a CS15 TA:

Task: Find the Java Princess (me dressed up in a prom dress and tiara in front of the Virgin Megastore) and impress her with your Java talent. Compose a short applet and enact it. Be creative!

Some of those teams had me dying of laughter – i got hugs and kisses and silly poems about Java written for me. Only one team perfected the skill of compileable code complete with humor, originality and sweetness. Too many teams assumed that i knew nothing about Java or didn’t know much about it themselves. But they were cute and i gave a *lot* of points for trying. Seriously, the TA in me came out full swing!

Oh, and i met a really nice stranger on the street and had a lovely (broken) conversation as teams came and went. Plus, it was funny to watch how the questions directed towards me changed as night fell. At first, strangers kept asking if i was getting married. After night fall, i was asked if i was a prostitute. What bride or prostitute would be wearing a blue prom dress, a fuzzy tiara, cowboy boots, and a spiky collar standing on a street corner? Don’t answer that…

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blog comments spam

OK.. i’m not a big fan of the systems out there that leave “comments” on my blog which are simply spam and points to their porn or business sites. I like the comments feature… i tend to start conversations with people based on those who reach out to comment interesting things in my blog. But i do not like going through and deleting the spam ones each day. ::grumble::

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life without IM

Although i spend a lot of time researching social communities, i tend to avoid meeting new people online. It’s not that i don’t trust people online (because they usually come via friends or via interests), but that i am dreadful at maintaining virtual or long distance relationships, let alone building them. At the same time, i was thinking how essential virtual connections are for me to maintain my real life friendships. While cell phones are essential for maintaining face in teenage culture, i definitely find IM pretty crucial for my life. I’m far more likely to ping my IM friends for dinner and see them more often simply because i can reach out to them with ease. I keep up with my IM friends on daily life activities and they end up being my trusted network. I become friends far more quickly with friends i’ve met offline who have IM than those who do not. This was definitely true in college, but i’m surprised at how much it has persisted to this day and been impacted by the fact that many of my friends have stopped using IM and have fallen off of my daily radar.

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RAVE Act Suppresses Speach

Everyone knows that the RAVE Act is going to be used to suppress liberal speech, particularly that which questions the government’s drug policies. Well, the DEA has started its attacks… As warped as this is, i’m actually *very* glad that the first big attack is against NORML which has unprecedented supports in the population at large and is heavily focused on marijuana-only reform (instead of drugs at large). Since NORML will have the political support to fight them, and something like 60% of the population believes that marijuana should be legal, the outcome could be quite interesting. It’s going to be a scary decade.

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rape for crack

Because of my work with V-Day, i hear about a lot of horrifying rape and abuse stories. But it’s been a long time since one just floored me. An article came out this week describing how a grandmother, in desperate need of her crack offered her granddaughter as payment. She sat there and listened as the crack dealer brutally raped her granddaughter and then forced her to urinate and shower to conceal the evidence. When it was reported to the cops, she identified a different man to protect her dealer. OMG.

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disney doesn’t approve of metal

When i was working for Macromedia, we went down to Disneyland to meet with one of Generator’s beta clients – Disney Online. The families of some of my colleagues came along, for the vacation aspect. One of them had this darling little girl who found my tongue bar utterly fascinating and she kept staring at my mouth. I hadn’t been around many children for years so i had forgotten how cool tongue bars look to children and i started horseplaying with her. Unfortunately, she got so excited that she started sticking out her tongue and pointing to it to her mother who was not so amused. Somehow, i got coerced into washing my mouth out with soap (literally) along with her daughter to prove a point that sticking your tongue out in public was bad. ::sigh::

Five years later, i’m hanging out with the creator of Macromind (which became Macromedia) and his little girl who is equally entertained by my tongue bar. Of course, Marc had a lot more fun with this!

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javaone, the go game and booth babes

Life is odd. I’m going to be a booth babe. Does this mean that my feminism is going down the drain? Of course not. But i know i’m getting old because i don’t care if the feminazis will discontinue my membership because i think that being a smart hott geeky booth babe sounds like an adventurous thrill.

The Go Game is going to JavaOne. Using fun little techy tools, conference attendees will get to run around San Francisco trying to solve problems while getting to engage with plants who are running around trying to make the task easier or more difficult. Of course, i’m voting that they get to enact the Tumbling Duke Applet.

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