Monday, March 31, 2008

Reupholstering chairs 101

Today I managed to teach myself to reupholster chairs! My mother and I had these really horribly ugly metal chairs from our old house with vinyl seats.


Well, I guess it could be worse, but it's still a darn ugly chair.

Mom and I picked up some gorgeous fabric in a black and red batik from a local fabric store which carries some beautiful patterns. The real trouble was finding a fabric thick enough to be up to the challenge of accepting our bodacious bottoms for years to come. The truth was, we didn't go to a decorators' fabric store. The fabric we finally chose was just a regular old cotton, but we discovered we could make it thicker by ironing black Pellon backing onto one side of it.

I prepped the chair by unscrewing the cushion from the frame, and getting all my tools ready.


Tools!: Thick fabric, fabric scissors, screwdriver, pliers, and a staple gun.
And a healthy sense of respect for the kind of damage a staple gun can do to your fingers.

I laid the cushion upside down on my fabric, and trimmed the fabric around the cushion so that when I stapled the fabric on, it wouldn't overlap the screw holes to reattach the cushion. Then I started stapling, starting with the straight edge, then working my way out to the sides towards the back.


My first use of the staplegun. It takes more stregnth that it would seem.
More imporantly, You can kill someone by stapling them in the throat.

Using the staple gun took some practice, as I'd never used one before and I did the whole project on my own so I didn't really have any instruction. It's good to note that poorly applied staples can be removed by using your screwdriver as a lever, and using a pair of pliers to yank the offender out. The rest of the fabric should be stapled to the cushion, trying to keep the pleats that come from rounded edges symmetrical. And mostly towards the back where they'll be hidden by the slats of the chair.


The finished cushion from both sides. Much nicer than that hideous blue vinyl,
Amirite?

The last step was to reattach the cushion to the metal frame. Which was actually harder than it sounds, since the screws have a tendency to not want to go in straight. If you ever do a similar project, I highly recommend trying to put in all the screws just a little bit at a time and tightening them all by hitting them all in order. Ultimately, this is a much better plan of attack than my original attempt of trying to screw in one whole screw at a time.



This fabric looks so much better on the chair than it did on the floor.
And the chair looks so much better than it did in blue vinyl. No lie.

So, there you have it! Reupholstering chairs in awesome! Sorry this wasn't more entertaining... it's late and I've been doing my taxes!

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Upcoming Film: Forbidden Kingdom

I'd like to do a a little post on movies now and then. Close friends of mine know that movies have always enthralled me and i love seeing the newest releases on the big screen and often plan out part of my budget to allow for me to bring them home when they come out on DVD (not so much, now that I don't have a working DVD player of my own -- my PS2 has been acting up lately).

My father has always been a movie junkie, particularly old-school sci-fi and adventure flicks and we spent many a Saturday morning and afternoon watching MST3K and StarWars movies, or Star Trek or Indiana Jones. We love an epic adventure story. We love good vs. evil. And even more, we LOVE a great movie we can watch over and over again and never get bored.

While it's certainly true that many many stories have been retold in movies (sometimes several times over -- think of all the variations available on Peter Pan!), a truly classic tale can be exciting nevermind that you've heard it a billion times before. Which is why I was so incredibly excited the first time I saw this:


Oh Jackie Chan. How I love you so.
Is there anything you can't do?

While I knew nothing of the movie when I first saw the poster, I was immediately reminded of the classic tale of Journey to the West. So I guess it was pretty fitting, since a search of Moviefone pretty much concluded that that was exactly the case.

Journey to the West has inspired a lot of other media. Well, it's an old story, older than Shakespeare, and as prevalent to the asian culture and media as the bible is to Christian cultures. The basics of the plot are that the monkey king is journeying west and destroys demons and rids the land of evil, meeting fellow travelers along the way and becoming enlightened.


Two different animated versions of Journey to the West.
Saiyuki likes to pretend it's not about man-love,
and DBZ likes to pretend that it has a real, honest-to-goodness plot. Pffft.

So really, it wasn't terribly surprising that I positively choked on my tongue when I saw there was a version of JttW coming out with Jackie Chan as a main character. AND Jet Li. For real. Here, feast on this tasty morsel of a trailer!






You can find out more about Journey to the West at the Wikipedia page. To see more about the Forbidden Kingdom movie, go to the Moviefone Page

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Girls, Technology, and Confidence

As most people are aware, the female presence in technology is very, very minor. This is a result of far too many causes to discuss in a single post, but you'll probably be seeing a number of posts from me about this issue. These posts will likely be based largely on girls in the technology classroom, as well as how classroom experiences translate into the world beyond school. For the moment, a few recent experiences in my classroom have me contemplating confidence and self-esteem as one of the issues girls face in the technology classroom.

It would be great to get more girls starting out in technology. But at the same time, it's just as important to avoid losing the girls we've already got. In watching my students, I've been noticing that one of the things hurting my female students is that they don't have the confidence their male classmates have. One of the most striking differences I've noticed is how the students react to their own mistakes.

My boys tend to go right ahead and get started on an assignment, even if they don't actually know what they're doing. This tends to result in frequent (and significant) mistakes. I'll catch their errors and point them out, and the boys will say "Oh. Well, it's not that bad. I've got the idea, anyway." They know that they're talented and smart, whether or not they really are.

The few girls I have are usually more cautious when they get started. If they make an error, it tends to be a much smaller one than the boys make. Yet when I tell them they've got a minor mistake on their drawing, they don't say "Well, it's not that bad." The girls' responses are along the lines of "I'm really bad at this, aren't I?" or "I'm not very smart." They turn a minor error into a sign of a major personal flaw.

Unfortunately, my students aren't looking at this difference from the outside. The girls I teach see all their male classmates proclaiming their own awesomeness. Then they see themselves and each other saying "I'm not smart. I can't do this." They don't realize that the boys don't judge themselves in the same manner as the girls, so they take the confidence they see in the boys as a sign that the boys know what they're doing.

Not a single one of the girls I teach is incompetent, and most are quite good, but they're all overly hard on themselves. They don't have the confidence to say "Yes, I made a mistake. But I can fix it. And next time, I won't make that mistake." Instead, they tell themselves "I screwed up. I'm not good enough. I shouldn't be here." And if I can't convince them otherwise, they might not be here with me next year. They'll be with another teacher, taking a class they see as being more appropriate for a girl.

This doesn't apply only to my classes, or even just to technology. Girls in math and science are in a similar situation. Geeky girls tend to have some typically male interests, and we end up being compared to guys. We need the confidence to know that making a mistake doesn't make us inferior to them. Half the time, they're making the same mistakes, just not admitting to it. I can certainly understand the doubts my female students feel, having gone through the same thing all the way through college.

I was frequently the only girl in my classes, and even in college, the same issues of confidence applied. I was afraid to take risks for fear of messing up, and I was afraid to accept that I was a girl, because I felt like it made me inferior to my classmates. I did eventually learn to be comfortable with the idea that yes, I am different from the guys, but there's nothing wrong with that. And yes, they are better than me at some things.

I'm still not very comfortable with a table saw, and I never got the hang of soldering with a torch. Still, I have talents they don't have. Hand most of them an old SLR, and they won't even know how to focus it, let alone put together a good photo with it. Different interests. Different talents. This doesn't make me superior or inferior. Just different. It took me a long time to accept that, though, and I had to work through a lot of doubts about myself.

For a long time, I felt like I needed to be just like the guys in order to be good enough. I wish I could make the girls I teach understand that their best really is good enough.For now, I'm trying to figure out what to do to help the girls in my classes build up some confidence for themselves.

One of my girls has seemed like an entirely different person since the day she did something that got me thinking about this topic. One day, I walked over to see what she was doing, and she gave me a sad look and asked me "How did I mess up this time?" When I was able to tell her that she was doing the work perfectly, the change in her expression was amazing. I'd never seen her look so happy in my room before.

Later that day, when she finished the work before any of her classmates - and did a better job than almost anybody else in her class - she stared at me in disbelief when I told her how well she had done.

Ever since then, she's been an entirely different person in my room. She still makes mistakes, but she knows she's not stupid, and that she can do what I'm asking her to do. She's got the confidence I wish all the girls in my classes had. I want to find a way to give all my students, and especially the girls, that feeling of confidence.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Tech Support Follies

I wish I could say that this hadn't really happened at work, but unfortunately, it sort of has. Several times. Click the comic below to see full-size.


As anyone who has ever tried to call a help-support desk can tell you, sometimes it's easier to just walk away and pretend there isn't a problem after all. Unfortnunately, I think the help-support phone people use this tactic too.

Comic is drawn with WACOM tablet and Photoshop CS1

Sunday, March 16, 2008

A Short-lived Endeavor


Rosie knows all about women in technology positions.
She probably had to put up with this crap too.


The word of the day, according to Dictionary.com, is "sojourn", meaning a temporary stay or residency. I find this word to be particularly ideal for this day.

Today is the day I'm definitely certain (for real, for real) that my current job is not for me. Like Techkat, and millions of other folks our age, I work with computers for a living. More specifically, I work in hospitals, teaching nurses to use the new programs required for them to do their jobs. My own (however temporary) sojourn has already been a lengthy 4 months in the works, and my contract to stay 6 months ends in a seemingly paltry 6 weeks. Oh, I'm so ready.

I'm fascinated by the concept of learning. I love teaching others to love technology. But at a hospital where many of the nurses are well over 50 years old, many of them immigrants, this is as big a chore as any. It's one thing to teach a new program to people who've used computers before, but it's another thing entirely to have to take such baby steps as teaching someone to double-click, to use Xes to close windows, to right click a particular location. Not that I mind that so much.

Really, the factor that makes my stay at this particular company so unbearable is the way people in my position are treated. We're not nurses, so we're not union. Our schedule is changed on a near-daily basis. We are made to sign and re-sign contracts. We are yelled at for the most mundane of things like sitting ("You're taking a chair away from a nurse!"), checking the news ("Unprofessional behavior"), reading ("pay closer attention to the users!"). These things would all make a lot more sense, if we actually had anything to do in the first place.

The real problem is that our stint at any given location is about 8 weeks longer than we're really needed. We're left with 4 weeks before the nurses use the program -- when they don't want to learn -- and 4 weeks after they've mastered it and don't ask any more questions. Those two busy weeks in between, it's perfectly plausible for a person in our occupation to go an entire 8 hour shift without sitting, without using a computer on our own, without going bored/crazy out of our minds. But in those calm periods? Oh, it's just asking for trouble.

Today, I actually got in trouble for talking to a nurse. I wish I was joking. Although my time at this particular hospital is nearly over, I WILL miss the nurses I've worked with. It's interesting to find a profession that requires delicacy, knowledge, know-how and strength so completely dominated by females.

In the technology sector, women are a rare sight indeed. On my own shift, in my department, there are only two women (myself included) and at least eight men. And true to patterns that have proven themselves my whole life, I constantly struggle to keep users' attentions when the men are around. As the louder, and generally more aggressive gender, they easily talk over me, take my space and redirect other people's comments. While I'm not particularly interested in their ploys for power, I DO want to be taken seriously, and for that, I think it is at times necessary for a woman to summon up the courage to act like a man.

While I won't be looking at sporty cars any time soon, or peeing standing up, I DO aggressively approach problems I face at work. I tell people when I have an issue instead of trying to hide it like I normally would. I try to fix problems that we're not expected to fix (hardware issues are perfectly within my realm of capability, but rarely attempted by my coworkers). Best efforts aside, I know that I shouldn't have to do all this. It's not only exhausting, it's demeaning!

I have two X chromosomes, and I like it that way!

Rearranging our hours, constantly rechecking our schedule, getting in trouble for the most mundane of things . . . it's painful. And I have to wonder, are all tech jobs this way? Or just this one?

Friday, March 14, 2008

Welcome to Techkat

It seems only too perfect that today should be pi day, as I'm happy to welcome my dear friend, Techkat, as one of the authors on this blog.

We met in high school and her geekery knew no limits even back then. Today she continues the tradition of helping girls find their inner geek as a computer and tech teacher in a high school near where we grew up.

Her posts will mostly be about her teaching experiences and hardships women face in the technology sector, and (I don't doubt) a fair bit of book review about some of her favorite authors.

Hi, Techkat! And welcome to GirlGeekery!

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Reconnection by correspondence

Although I've never much been in the habit of letter-writing, I do find the whole endeavor to be particularly fun and amusing when I've got something adorable to send my letters in. Since I was in high school, I've been of the opinion that home-made envelopes really give your communications a nice punch that will make the folks receiving them impressed and pleased that they got something that required so much effort.

Recently, I wrote up a newsletter to send to my friends who haven't really heard from me since we graduated from college earlier this year. I'm generally very bad at staying in touch with people, but making beautiful envelopes for a newsletter provides the motivation I need to actually get my butt in gear.

The post office will send just about anything that has a stamp, assuming it's not too heavy, and I've discovered that a lot of magazine full page advertisements have interesting patterns and shapes and are the right size for some beautiful envelopes.
the supplies you need to create your own envelopes
The process of making them is also not too difficult. Find an evelope of the right size, deconstruct it, trace it onto oaktag (aka, the ever popular manilla folder), and cut it out. This is your tracing stencil. Trace the stencil onto the back of the magazine page you want on the outside of your envelope (I usually use a sharpie because it'll be visible even on black advertisements). Fold in all the edges and glue 3 of them together. You can seal your envelope with more glue, or you can do what I do and try to find some nifty stickers that match the theme.

Your friends will appreciate all that hard work when they open their mailboxes and find not only a letter from you, but that you made their envelope as well!

Here are some examples of a few envelopes I've made:




New Beginnings and a statement of intent

I think this new blog has started out on a critical note and leads me to wonder, "what makes a geek". More specifically, is a female geek all that different from her male counterparts? Can a geek be interested in objects and activities aside from those that include science fiction, fantasy, gaming or electronics? I think the answer here is yes. However, in the meantime, I've spent very nearly 4 hours trying to get the html coding on this blog just so, and I STILL can't seem to find the code for those hideous teal bars to replace them.

Perfectionism aside, I'd like to use this space to share with the world my passions and endeavors to learn more about the things that make me geek out. As a basic starting list, I love:
Long words, well-written plays, taking photos, shrinkydinks, sewing, baking, card-making, painting, water and anything that lives in it, video games, computers, sleeping, sci-fi/fantasy, manga, the color blue, shoes, the color purple, stickers, a capella music, and a large variety of other things.

Keep your eyes glued to this space to learn more about all these things and maybe dig a little deeper into ourselves to discover what it really means to geek out.