Friday, September 21, 2007

Second Toronto Girl Geek Dinner

This past Wednesday saw the second Toronto Girl Geek Dinner. This time I hosted, solo, as Maggie Fox was out of town -- but thanks to her thorough prep work everything went smooth as glass. In my humble opinion, of course. :)

The event's defining principle seems to have engendered quite a lively debate over on the TGGD blog -- interestingly, the most enflamed comments have come from those who weren't able to attend. Huh.

Maybe I'm naive, but when I co-founded the TGGD with Maggie, we weren't thinking of excluding men at all -- having attended a few testosterone-heavy geek dinners, the whole point was to encourage any guys who wanted to attend to bring a girl with them, to encourage the ladies (particularly female students) to come out more and network.

Anyway, the whole thing is a minefield of misread intentions, so I'll say no more. Except to ask this: do YOU think it's exclusionary? If so, what's the solution -- a merge with the ad hoc Geek Dinner crowd? Suggestions welcome!

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Speaking of breaks... and tweets

Wow, I'm horrified to realize just how long it has been since I posted last! Talk about taking a break! Oddly, I do have lots of thoughts to share and ideas that I want to seek feedback on -- I just don't have a lot of time these days. Now that summer is over, work is on like Donkey Kong, as the kids say. But I will try to make time to post when I am moved to do so, rather than putting it off and putting it off until I forget what it was I wanted to post about.

One thing that's happened lately is that I finally (FINALLY) signed up for Twitter successfully. Yeah, I know what you're thinking: I'm about 5 months too late. It's true! I was momentarily thrilled that I finally managed to get our corporate IT department to modify my firewall enough so that I could sign up... only to find that Twitter is akin to a desolate ghost town. Maybe I'm just not following the right people. Or maybe I've missed the boat completely. Either way, I gotta say that there doesn't seem to be much action there, and when there is, my reaction is mostly: meh. I think I prefer longform blogs to the micro-thoughts posted on Twitter.

So I'm hoping someone can educate this naive newbie. What am I missing? Has Twitter jumped the shark? Or am I using it wrong?