Stargate is probably the longest-running fandom I can claim to belong to. I’m not head over heels obsessed, in fact, there is only one reason I’m up to date on Stargate Universe right now, and his initials are MS, but it’s definitely something I love. I listen to multiple Stargate podcasts, I’ve seen all there is to see, and keep up on the news and blogs. I’ve never been to a Stargate convention (as much as I would love to go, it’s one of those “if I won the lottery” things) and while I wouldn’t go chasing Michael Shanks across the country, I wouldn’t say no to seeing him at some convention if it was in SF. Which it never is, mind you.

That said, I’m still not a casual fan of anything. My favorite way to watch a tv show is start to finish, as in, watch the whole season start to finish. I will often not watch a show while it’s airing so I can do this. I get really into the show for about two weeks, crank through it, and then I’m done. For some reason, I find that much more satisfying than watching an episode a week for 20 weeks, although I definitely do feel a difference in the show’s pacing – in some cases, the storyline significantly changes in your mind if you go through a season too quickly. This also works well since I tend to prefer shows that are complex enough that it’s impossible to jump in midway through, I just wait for them to finish airing and then watch it all.

I will rewatch exceptional tv shows, listen to commentary, watch extra features, and read analysis online. If I really like a tv show, I want to learn as much as I can about it. I’m currently rewatching Babylon 5, and it amazes me how much more I notice about the show now that I know how it all ends. I’m even re-reading the episode guide as I rewatch the episode. Great shows do that…leave you amazed at the end about things they did in the first episode. They give you a reason to want to be a fan girl, to want to learn more, because there actually is more to learn! I definitely prefer shows and stories that are multi-threaded, that give you things to think about. Simple is boring.

I don’t think there’s anything negative about being a fangirl. It simply means I like complex things that require thought and invoke emotion. So what if I have a new obsession every week? It keeps life interesting, and I have a lot more fun being REALLY involved in things than minimally.

What about you? Do you keep all things at a distance? Or do you bury your head until you’re done?

That basic idea was what hooked me on Flashforward, first the TV show, and then, just yesterday, the book by Robert Sawyer. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? People need hope, they need to believe they can succeed. What happens if you KNOW your efforts will be fruitless? Or on the flip side – if you know you will succeed anyway, how hard will you try?

Flashforward, the TV show, just finished airing its only season. It was extremely disappointing, a great idea that was executed poorly from start to finish. It didn’t deal with any of the issues I mentioned above, but it did ask a lot of questions it never got a chance to answer. As entertainment, it was ok, but it came up very short of fulfilling what I thought was amazing potential. So when I found out there was a book, I jumped on it.

I read the book cover to cover yesterday. I don’t think that’s a major accomplishment, I don’t believe it was particularly long (it’s hard to tell relative book size on a kindle), and I had a long flight with nothing else to do. I also, admittedly, could not put it down.

The book had me at go just like the TV show did because of the concept, but where the show became immensely complicated and overwraught with useless subplots, the book remained simple – almost too simple. The story is about Lloyd. There are some small subplots, but they’re fairly unimportant to the overall story.

The book does completely, and very, very thoroughly, explore the science behind the Flashforward. It explains in great detail how the Flashforward happened. If you think the idea of a multi-page discussion on how Schroedinger’s cat fits into the idea of “moving the perception of now” in time travel than this is the book for you.

…but you can see the problem. While I did find that discussion fascinating, I’m not sure how many people would. And by the time I got to the end of the book, the excessive scientific detail was starting to get grating.

Unfortunately, the book does not offer any insight whatsoever into the television show. The flashforward in the TV show could not have been caused by the same thing that caused it in the book, and there is no FBI, secret spies, CIA, Mark or Olivia. No ring, no test in Somalia, no military connection at all.

Everything is different. Lloyd is Canadian, and he works for CERN. There is a character named Demetrius, but he’s not Demetri from the show. The Flashforward was 20 years ahead, and the Matrix put together not only each person’s individual flashforward, but an entire timeline of what happened between now and the flashforward. Big and small, people were able to figure out what would happen. What companies went bankrupt, who was elected president, what revolutions would fail, what marriages would last, even the lottery numbers for the day, it was all revealed.

The book kind of fizzled out at the end, I don’t even know how to describe it, it almost became another book and twisted in a very unexpected, not really enjoyable direction. But up until that point, it was a very, very enjoyable read.

I still believe that this is an amazing concept that has yet to be executed well, and I would love to see it done. Flashforward the movie, maybe?

That is, until I moved to San Francisco. I had a feeling this city was going to throw off my sense of direction, but I had assumed that was because of the hills. I was right about the sense of direction thing, but so wrong about the reason.

As it turns out, the hills don’t make a difference, the height of a street does not effect my perception of its length. What did screw me up, though, was my apartment building. My building sits in on the corner of the street. I enter my building on one street, and my window looks out onto another perpendicular street. However, when walking around that corner, I am able to cut it slightly by walking under the building, essentially walking catty corner instead of straight to the corner and turning 90 degrees. Doing this means that while walking from point A (under my window) to point B (entrance to my building) instead of only turning once in complete 90 degrees at the corner I turn twice, 45 degrees or so each. This is evidently a HUGE thing to my sense of direction.

When I first moved here, I was positive that the two streets surrounding my building were parallel to each other. Three turns must mean there’s another street, right? Just…the street is only 2 feet long and is actually a way to walk around the corner. I figured out my mistake quickly enough, but knowing and feeling are two different things.

This is where it gets interesting for me. I have lived here for over a year. Logically, I know the two streets I live on run perpendicular to each other, but it makes no difference. My mind – my “sense of direction” still insists that the streets run parallel. Even last night, someone asked me for directions, and I had a horrible time trying to point them in the right direction. I had to remember that “this street goes that way,” and even then confused myself but good.

Clearly, a “sense of direction” is related to feelings and perception more than logical thought, and changing the way your “gut” thinks is not simple. Logic does not enter into a gut reaction, and directional ability seems to be exactly the same. This is probably the first time that I remember trying to actively un-learn something because my perception is all screwy as a result, and it’s extremely hard.

What does it say about the human mind? How much of what we do is perception or gut-based, and how much is logical? My struggle with directions here in SF would suggest that I act a lot more from instinct than I do from logic, even if I don’t know that I’m doing it. I find that fascinating.

I haven’t found a second example where my gut thinks something that my head knows is wrong, but I’m absolutely keeping my eye out. I want to understand more about how this works, it’s a really neat mental, well, bug, that I want to fix.

Has this ever happened to you? Did you fix the bug?

I think that award goes to my attempt to make Chocolate Brioche. This was very early on when I’d first started seriously baking. I loved chocolate, and loved bread…it seemed natural to combine the two, right? Destined for failure, but I was still at that point in baking where I thought if a recipe was in print it must be great.

The recipe called for nearly a cup of coco powder, well over a cup of sugar, and two sticks of butter. Three cups of flour, an entire packet of yeast, oil, egg, salt, and milk. I mixed it all up, kneaded it, and was thrilled. The dough was literally bubbling in front of my eyes, it was rising so well!

I put it in a rising basket, and before I knew it, it had doubled. I had never seen dough rise like that, it was really exciting.

I didn’t know enough at the time to predict what was going to happen next, so, thinking that my massively airy dough was fantastic, I shaped it, put it in the pan, waited for it to double again (which took next to no time) and popped it in the oven.

Twenty minutes later, a nasty, almost rancid burnt smell filled the air. When I opened the oven, I could only laugh at what I saw.

Picture a mushroom cloud. Now turn the mushroom cloud brown, and explode it all over your oven.

That was my “chocolate bread.” It had risen so much it hit the top of the oven, flowing over the sides of the pan and spreading all over the place. Any bread that came into contact with the oven had burnt to a crisp, while the inside of the bread was still doughy and uncooked. I don’t think I ever fully got the smell of burnt chocolate out of that oven.

I have had very few kitchen disasters that ended up inedible, but this was my first. It was a great lesson, though, how else would I know what over-risen dough looks like, or what a “lid-thumper” truly is. There’s only one way to learn, and that’s to make the mistake.

So next time you see a recipe for something that’s completely insane, give it a shot and try it. Even if it’s not edible, you’ll probably learn something, and have some laughs along the way.

You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.

You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the Abu Grahib photos.

You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city drown.

You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when… when… wait for it… when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.

Illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all OK with you, but helping other Americans… well f*ck that. That about right?

The government did a really good thing this past weekend. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. Here’s to being optimistic about the future!

I’ve never been really excited about the idea of a tablet, so I was biased from the start. A keyboard is pretty essential to me for anything, I type very fast and have no patience for anything that slows me down. That said, I was still curious to see what Apple was going to do beyond making a really big iPod Touch. I mean, this is Steve Jobs, I expect to see a paradigm shift, a massive step forward, a change in the way we do things. That’s where I’m disappointed.

The iPad is a big, expensive ($499 for the cheapest version without 3G), iPod touch.

The positive – there are going to be people who will love this thing (other than the usual Apple fan boys/girls). It’s gorgeous, and if beautiful design is your thing, you’re going to love using this. It’s a nice entertainment device, a decent size to watch television on, iPod, and a good ebook reader. If someone doesn’t have access to a television or other computer, this could fill that gap. Maybe someone with roommates or college students. Business folks will also love whipping this out in a meeting to do a presentation. Assuming, of course, that they don’t mind presenting in Keynote. It’s also going to open up an entirely new world of computer gaming as people innovate with the touch screen interface. Someone who travels a lot would like this as well (battery life is reportedly around 10 hours) – so long as they don’t mind using the screen to type, or carrying another laptop/netbook.

There definitely IS a use for this. I simply don’t think that now is the time for it. It won’t replace a computer – you can’t run Word or PowerPoint on it, you can’t even do something as simple as keep AIM open while surfing the web – and it isn’t a phone either. No camera, no GPS, no keyboard, no Flash. How many programs are you running on the machine you’re reading this post on? You couldn’t do that, it’s clearly not intended for work. This would have to be complimentary, an entertainment-focused device in addition to a computer and phone and a television…and that’s where it loses me. The costs don’t work out.

I’m not the average user, I know that. I have an iPhone, iPod, Netbook, Kindle, and Macbook Pro, and they all have different uses for me. I rarely watch videos online, that’s what the Roku and TiVo are for, and I like being able to curl up in bed with a kindle without having to worry about touching the screen or it rotating. I have absolutely no use for the iPad, it doesn’t offer me anything at all beyond what I already have.

Then there’s a name. Immediately after the presentation was over, the word iTampon was trending on Twitter. The name iPad was not. The jokes are never going to end (in fact, they started years ago), and it gives me crazy giggles to think that there’s an iPeriod app for the iPad.

The bottom line is – there is nothing revolutionary about this. It’s pretty, it’s cool, I’ll absolutely drool over it when I see it, but that’s about it. If any other company had announced this, I would have shrugged. But it’s Apple – I expect innovation, and there’s very little.

Oh well. But hey, it’s first gen. I’ll wait until next year for the brain implant.

It ended up being unbelievable, and without a doubt the most memorable part of the trip – Las Vegas doesn’t even come close.

A quote from the recent Ken Burns special on PBS works well:

When the Creator made it, he forgot to create a word to describe it.

I don’t necessarily believe in a Creator, but this still fits. There are no words.

We went to the South Rim, to Grand Canyon Village, where you can go to various different spots to look around (or if you are so inclined, hike in). Our first view of the Canyon was around 5am, right as the sun was about to come up, and it truly took my breath away. We all felt a need to whisper, we didn’t want to disturb the beautiful peace in front of us. Even my pictures look amazing, and I’m a pretty lousy photographer using a fairly old camera (the friend I went with IS a photographer, so most of my pictures for posterity are hers), although the majority of my sunrise pictures didn’t come out due to low light.

The first time I went to Paris, I felt an instant connection, an immediate need to spend more time there. And I did – a few years later I spent over a week in Paris staying at a friend’s apartment and simply tooling around the city like a Parisian. I hope to do that again, many, many times.

I feel the same way about the Grand Canyon, even though the experience is completely different. I want to spend more time there, not staring at it from above, but inside of it. I want to go down the Colorado, see the things that you can only see by river.

What amazed me the most, and I think a large part of the reason I need to go back – its not want, its need – is how untouched it is. Even up on the Rim, it’s not a huge resort town with lots of cars and hotels. It’s a very bare National Park, with basic cabins and campgrounds everywhere you look. There isn’t any entertainment – the entertainment is all around you, miles and miles of nothing.

It’s not just a big hole, as Chevy Chase said. It’s a spectacular look into history, at something created by the earth itself. It is amazing to think that something like this wasn’t planned, that it just happened, and yet, it did.

I am already looking into taking a river run sometime in 2010/2011 (these things have to be booked ages in advance), I want to plan and book it before the magic feeling the Grand Canyon created in me goes away. I know it will – feelings like that wear away with distance and time – but as long as I’ve already planned my trip back I can maybe keep some little piece of it alive.

Years ago, a woman around my age stepped up to the edge of the Rim, looked at the Grand Canyon for the first time, and was so stunned by the view that she fainted, falling in. As sad as that story is, I totally get it. The feeling is that incredible, your breath is taken away, and I can’t wait to feel it again.

You can see all my pictures from the Grand Canyon here.

I think the problems people had with sponsor related things at the conference can be broken into three groups. The conference sponsors themselves, the sponsored bloggers attending the conference, and the amount of schwag received at the conference.

1. The Schwag

People complaining about there being *too much schwag* simply haven’t attended enough conferences to see that this is what happens.

I remember needing an extra suitcase each year to bring home all the stuff I got at E3, and loving it. Don’t want it? Don’t take it or give it back. People do have the ability to say no, don’t they?

There was a schwag recycle area, and when I showed up with my stuff, there was someone standing right there who took almost everything I was giving back off of my hands. She also gave me a cute little travel candle that I rather like.

I would also be a total hypocrite if I complained about the makeup/fashion sponsors, because, well, I love what I got. I adore Lush, the new lip balm thingy is pretty neat, Mary Kay has great lipstick, and let’s face it, Ann Taylor has now given all of us the most stylist USB drive we will ever see. We ARE women, and it makes sense to me that there would be brands targeting women here.

2. The Sponsors

All conferences need sponsors to survive.

Let’s face it, sponsors are absolutely necessary. Maybe the conference needs very clear tracks to it, like others tend to do. The mommy blogging track sponsored by Wal-Mart. The Geek track sponsored by someone else (there weren’t very many geek sponsors). And an independent track nobody sponsors so there is no feeling of favoritism.

3. The Sponsored Bloggers

Biases and priorities need to be made clear.

A number of bloggers at the conference were sponsored, given scholarships, or paid (I’ve heard all three terms used to describe the same thing) to go to the conference on behalf of some brand. While there, they would then promote the brand or hand out product wherever they were, be that on a panel or at a party.

It is a given that the name of the company you work for belongs on your conference badge if you are there for the company. It should be no different with sponsors – if you’ve been sent there by random brand name, your badge should say “Sponsored by Random Brand.” That makes it very blatant, and may even prevent some people from accepting these sponsorships in the future.

Thank you to the sponsors.

Without the sponsors, the conference fees could easily have been in the thousands, as most conferences are. Many women would not have been able to go, and, well, I’m not going to need to buy laundry detergent for a while (and as a girl who doesn’t have a job, I appreciate that).

BlogHer is a conference that is growing in size and maturity, and as it grows, it will need to follow more of the standards that other conferences do. But please – sponsors – hear the message of “thank you” louder than any other. We appreciate all that you’ve done, and look forward to seeing you again next year.

So, onto the critiquing. I think this is going to end up split into a couple of posts, since as usual, I got rambly.

Where were the actual experts?

BlogHer had lots of panels run by various women, but very few actual “experts” to speak of. Seeing people who’ve been blogging or twittering for a year being elevated as ‘expert women in technology’ really gets to me. It’s just like being able to drive a car and claiming you are an expert working in the automotive industry.

The real expert, respected female bloggers weren’t at the conference. Where was Kathy Sierra – who knows better than anyone what can happen when you become too exposed as a blogger. Where was Sarah Lacy, who’s published one (second one is on the way, I think) book on the industry, and is now a regular blogger at TechCrunch. Gina Tripani from Lifehacker. Kara Swisher from All Things D. Megan McCarthy, Molly Wood, Natalie DelConte.  They don’t blog about Pampers, but they are very widely read female bloggers. What about Veronica Belmont, Amber Mac, you could call them video bloggers.

It does a lot of harm to hold people up as experts when they’re not, or at least, not without very explicitly narrowing down the field they are experts in. “This person is an expert at talking to 50k people on twitter about random stuff,” is very different than “this person is a technology expert.”

And it is, unfortunately, a gender thing. Men would never put up with it. If some article came out in the New York Times calling a guy who wrote a couple of blog entries over the last year a technology expert, Michael Arrington and others would have their hides. Men, understandably, don’t consider someone an expert until they’ve proven themselves. Women, for some reason, are a bit more loose with that, and will sometimes consider a woman an expert because the woman themselves said that they were.

When we allow the media to elevate women with no practical industry experience as technology experts we leave the impression that there aren’t any better experts out there. And THAT is terrible.

If there are going to be expert panels, they should be run by actual experts. Not someone who has 10,000 followers, and therefore thinks they know all about Twitter. Want to do an expert panel on Twitter? Get someone from Twitter on the panel. Panel on WordPress? Get someone from Automattic. Most of the panels at BlogHer would never fly at any other kind of conference. Harsh to say but, well, assuming the panels even got started because of the sponsorships (which I’ll cover in another entry), the panelists would have been laughed off the stage.

What are these non-experts teaching people anyway?

Teaching someone how to download Tweetie is helpful, but only touches the surface of what a lesson on Twitter should be.

A session on privacy and identity that tells people to use the privacy features on Facebook to protect themselves is misleading and dangerous.

This is what happens when people are running sessions on technology they don’t fully understand themselves, and why you really do need “real” experts to do the teaching.

Thank god for the geek lab!

The vast majority of sessions I went to were what were called “Geek Lab” sessions, held in one side of one little conference room. I learned PHP, Apache, htaccess, and CSS. Of course, I didn’t have time to learn much…while other sessions were 1-2 hrs and held in a large room, ours were 1/2 hr each and competing for attention with another session on the other side of the room.

It very much left the impression that these “women in technology” didn’t actually care about the technology part, and that’s a horrible thing.

Please guys, don’t see this as typical.

My biggest fear is that men will look at BlogHer, and assume that all women online want to write about hand cream, be paid to go to conferences, pitch air freshener, and couldn’t care less about the technology running the tools they’re using. It’s NOT TRUE.

BlogHer has to change to be a bit more accurate. Merge with Mom 2.0 or something (which really is a conference for ALL mommy bloggers) – or make a concerted effort to be what they claim to be…an open conference for all women bloggers. Merge with She’s Geeky or work with the Webgrrls to give the tech bloggers some sort of presence there.

They also need to pay more attention to their “expert panels,” and who’s on them. Expertise aside, a panelist who was sponsored by some company to go to BlogHer is obviously going to promote that company. If that’s not disclosed (as it so often isn’t), the credibility of the panel is shot.

It’s all fixable.

And that’s the good thing. These are all things that can be changed. None of the current content needs to be excluded, it just needs to be promoted more realistically for what it is. “Learn about Twitter from someone who has tons of followers,” instead of “Meet a Twitter expert.” Get someone from Twitter to do the actual Twitter expert panel. Learn about privacy from Parry Aftab instead of someone who thinks Facebook’s privacy controls are the end all and be all of content management.

BlogHer just needs to use the same quality control for their panels that other conferences use and ensure that their panelists have the credentials, experience, and knowledge necessary for whatever their panel topic is.

As I said above, I will totally be at BlogHer next year. And I would love to do whatever I can to get the right people into the right panels, to get more actual technology content into the technology conference, and make this next BlogHer a bit more inclusive for ALL female bloggers.

But in all seriousness, to me, Twitter, email, Facebook & IM are much more useful communication tools than the phone. It is pretty expected that people will be available by phone at all times. I don’t see a difference – especially when you consider that my phone doesn’t always work (thanks to AT&T). I can almost always check my email or Twitter.

I do not understand – AT ALL – people saying “I’m not going to check my email for a week.” I don’t get how that is any different than someone saying “I’m not going to answer my phone for a week,” which you know nobody ever will do. It’s simply a different form of communication.

It is an accepted fact that people are using email less because they’re moving to Facebook or IM. I would bet that people are using their phone less as well – I know in my case, if the phone rings, something is wrong. Isn’t saying “I’m going to avoid email” just shutting yourself out from the rest of the world?

It is not uncommon for me to have a conversation that starts on IM or Twitter, continues on SMS, moves to Facebook, then ends up in person. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one either. I have some friends I talk to on Twitter (privately), some on Facebook, some on MySpace, some on email. Nobody calls me, which is fine with me, all of my “real-life” friends have picked whichever format they’re most comfortable with and talk to me there.

Whatever method we use for communication, it’s clear that there are positives and negatives. I just wish that people would look at them for what they are….email is a phone call in text form, IM is a twitter sent to your screen….don’t shut it out because of what it is.

It’s the message, not the medium!