Dyepot, Teapot

We survived the return trip, airport and all. It was crowded but not terrible. I managed to bring an illicit 4 oz. bottle of contact lens solution through security at both airports by sticking it in with the other “liquids and gels” and not doing anything to draw attention to myself. Alaska Airlines is a massive improvement over America West, which was last year’s Vegas trip airline. Alaska: friendly and clean. America West: planes that look like they should have been retired 30 years ago, and so little leg room that my knees touched the seat in front of me. I’m only 5′6″, so if I don’t have enough leg room, the place must have been designed for midgets or children. Plus the terminal Alaska flies from is newer and has multiple coffee stands.

I’m in the process of pulling all the photos off my camera to load to Flickr. Stay tuned.

I’ve been using my Sunday afternoon to catch up on tech blogs, which reminded me of this: there are lots of ways to make a website not very useful, and if it’s something you might need to access from the road, it would be smart to make it mobile-friendly. AAA makes you enter a zip code before you can get any useful information (like the location of their closest office), and the submit button on the form doesn’t work in my phone’s browser, so instead of trying to pick up a free-to-members map, we ended up navigating Arizona by a combination of Google Earth, following road signs, and asking for directions. (Yes, I know we could have purchased a map in any truck stop or grocery store, but I’m cheap, we mostly knew where we were going, and for some reason the rental car didn’t come with anything of the sort.)

I’m just saying, if you’re thinking about doing something really clever or flashy with your website, some of us would like you to consider asking: How badly will this screw over someone with minimal internet access? Am I encouraging people to go elsewhere? There is much to be said in favor of plain old text. Especially for people who’re traveling in places where dial-up is more common than wifi. A cell phone with a web browser can only handle so much.

Thanksgiving is over, but right now I’m very thankful for wifi and doughnuts and the rumor that I could get online from the Krispy Kreme on Fremont St. (downtown Vegas, under the big light-up roof) turning out to be entirely correct.

The actual holiday was okay. Let’s stick with “no one got food poisoning, I had the sense to leave the room when they started arguing about who sits where, and northern Arizona is very pretty”. A couple years ago I had a post-holidays dinner so I could cook everything the way I wanted it, because the actual holiday meals (with my family) had been kind of a bust, and I’m thinking about doing that again this year. Maybe I’ll roast something (duck? turkey? lamb? I’m pretty sure I can find happy local farm versions of all of those without too much trouble).

Lucas’ sister has a really nice recipe for stuffing. She makes it with big bread cubes and sausage and cranberries and apples (I fed the sausagey bits to Lucas), and I want to try copying it sometime.

I bet you’ve been waiting to see my pictures of the Grand Canyon, so here you go.

It’s big.

You probably knew that.

We saw a family of deer just hanging out, a few hundred feet from the trail. Didn’t seem to mind us at all.

Lucas and I managed to get a couple of “look, we’re standing in front of a big tourist landmark” pictures without falling in.

The sun set while we were on the train heading back to Williams. Click on the picture above to see it full size (sunsets are prettier that way).

We’re down to our last full day in Vegas. This is okay with me. I’m feeling like the weekend in Laughlin followed by another full weekend in downtown Vegas might be a little too much old people at slot machines. I’m not that into gambling in general, I just like the cheap drinks and people watching and all the rest of the spectacle. But I miss my kitties, and too much sitting around watching other people get wasted and blow their money makes me feel restless to actually do something constructive. So we’ll finish off by wandering around the strip for a while today (it’s really a different crowd and kind of show than downtown), and then come back here for the rest of the night. Maybe I’ll try my luck at blackjack.

I hope you all had a nice turkey day.

When I last posted, we were in Flagstaff.

It’s a quiet little college town. Decent beer, not a lot going on. Knowing that we had all day today free to do whatever, I poked around for scenic things within a short drive, and came up with Sunset Crater and Wupatki National Monument, just a little to the north.

Sunset Crater has nothing on our PNW volcanos, but there were some neat rock formations and scraggly Ponderosas.

We hiked half a mile straight up a hill to check out one of the crater views. I need to get more exercise so things like that don’t make me want to throw up. We were hiking at about 7k feet, but still.

The pueblo ruins at Wupatki are amazing. They date back to about 1100, and were already abandoned about 150 years after that. I’m amazed that so much of it is still intact. I would really encourage anyone who happens to be passing through this area to check the site out. One thing my home region lacks is much in the way of big archaeological structures.

Here’s Lucas playing explorer at the Citadel Pueblo, just down the road from Wupatki.

Afterward we drove back south and west to Williams, “Gateway to the Grand Canyon”. His mom booked us a rail/hotel package here (very sweet of her). I like what we saw of the town on the way in, there’s a wild west theme that looks weathered enough that it’s not annoyingly hokey. We don’t have a lot of time available to look around, so I hope we’ll come back through here on a future trip.

The Grand Canyon Railway Hotel is comfy, and I’m looking forward to the train ride to the south rim tomorrow, even if it does have some silly touristy aspects like a rail bandit “shootout” before we board. We were talking about how we’re not usually package tour people, but this one seems like it’ll be fun, and we’re completely on our own for three hours once we get to the canyon (it’s only a day trip this time because we have to get back to Golden Valley for Thanksgiving), so we can mostly do our own thing.

On the other hand… the package also includes a buffet dinner and breakfast, which didn’t worry me until we got down there and saw what our fellow tourists were like.

Imagine big, lumpy, slow people who can’t tell they’re bumping into everyone else. Little girls in matching pink velour track suits and triangular poodle haircuts. Glazed eyes, wide open mouths, no problem with cutting to the end of the buffet table because there’s no one in front of the bin of chicken wings right this moment. It was a living, breathing caricature of everything people hate about suburban “middle America”.

And the food was essentially cafeteria grub. It’s been a while since I’ve seen jello and banana pudding available as dessert options (maybe college? Or my high school job at the retirement home dining hall, where pasty goo was considered a good thing because it’s easy on the dentures?). Edible, but the kind of meal that makes you wish for a do-over. They had mac & cheese topped with some kind of yellow paint that had absolutely no cheese flavor (Kraft Dinner may be artificial, but it’s way better than this stuff). There was a room full of people gobbling it all down.

It’s a good thing the Grand Canyon is a big, big place.

I’m a little sunburnt, and my eye is having a slight problem I only hope is due to the dry air and not some kind of infection, but onward. Tomorrow I’m going to see one of the wonders of the world.

I’m in the Beaver Street Brewery in Flagstaff, AZ, which was highly recommended by the guys at the tourist info desk when we asked them for a good brewpub. Good choice.

Lucas and I are doing the new bed every night thing for the first part of our trip. For various reasons (mostly involving not planning very far ahead), we spent the last two nights at different casinos in Laughlin, tonight is the Econo Lodge in Flagstaff, tomorrow the hotel attached to the Grand Canyon Rail Station in Williams, Wednesday and Thursday with his mom in Golden Valley, Friday & Saturday at the El Cortez in Downtown Vegas. I packed light, so this is actually working pretty well. Plus Lucas and I are an experienced traveling team at this point. I’m very happy to be wandering around Arizona with him.

Here’s the highlights so far (pictures below, so if you’re reading this via syndication and you don’t see them, click through to the actual post):

A quick view of the strip on our first day in town:

The slots at the Ramada Express in Laughlin, where we stayed on Saturday:

Laughlin is full of old people who look like the life has been sucked out of them, but I think I was nice enough to not try to document that.

We spent some time on Sunday visiting Lucas’ mom. Here’s her house in Golden Valley:

This is the next lot over:

Lucas’ mom feels like Golden Valley is getting too crowded for her, so she bought land in Chloride, pop. ~250.

[I moved on to the Late For the Train coffee shop a couple of pictures back. Good place for wifi and coffee.]

I have to say, Chloride has a lot more character than Golden Valley, which is a big sprawling network of manufactured homes and trailers with no real center. Chloride has a restaurant where the cowboys and bikers sing karaoke (pretty good voices, too) on Sunday evenings. Don’t go too late, it’s over by 6.

My internet access in Laughlin was limited to what I could get on my cell phone, so we ended up having breakfast at Perkins in Bullhead City (one of those chains like Denny’s or Shari’s etc) on Sunday, because that was the first place that sounded pancakey on Google Local (Bullhead City is just across the river from Laughlin, and seems to have all the non-casino businesses in the area). When Lucas’ family heard this, they said “you went where? No, no, no. Go to the Black Bear Cafe. We drive all the way into Bullhead to eat there.”

So today that’s where we had breakfast:

No real plans for tonight. We’ll probably just hang out and watch football and knit. It’s supposed to get very, very cold overnight.

After weeks of hearing “You can’t bring liquids on the plane. Wait, now you can. But each item has to be a three ounce container or smaller. And you have to put them in a ziplock bag. No, not a gallon bag. Or a sandwich bag. It has to be a quart-size bag.”–Guess what? They didn’t even look at my stupid little baggie of lip gloss and eye drops. According to the person reading off the rules at the security station, it’s not even 3 ounces now, but 3.4, and I have no idea why that size and not a full 4 ounces, which would have made my contact lens solution within the rules (you can’t purchase a bottle of the type I use that’s less than 4 ounces, and there was no way I was going to check a bag just for that one item, so I brought it anyhow and no one seemed to care).

It’s completely arbitrary. I feel so amazingly safe.

Anyhow, in about an hour I’ll be on my way to Vegas.

I’m eating breakfast down the street from my apartment at Crema because

1. sitting in a cafe with a latte and a laptop makes me feel cool
2. we ran out of milk, so I couldn’t have my usual rice crispies
3. I just bought a copy of Katamari Damacy, and I was starting to consider playing “just one game” before work, until I remembered that this never ever ever works, and so it might be a good idea to get out of the apartment quickly

Katamari is a really fun game, with a completely goofy concept. You roll things (candy, cats, cucumbers, etc) into a big sticky ball to replace the stars your father, the King of All Cosmos, knocked out of the sky one night while drunk. There are little interludes showing block-headed children asking Mommy if what they heard on the news is true, that the stars are all gone. When your ball picks up animals, they keep wiggling and chirping or meowing or barking, which is funny to watch, but you’re so busy trying to pick up more things that you only notice for a moment.

I don’t personally know a single female Ruby or Rails developer. The only one I’ve even heard of is Amy Hoy, and I didn’t really get a chance to talk to her at FOSCON, so it would be stretching things to say we’ve met.

I’m not talking about professional developers, even. I’m looking for anyone who has started a Rails app or played around with Ruby for a weekend or two. And I’m active with the local Ruby Brigade, I read other developers blogs, I search through lists of conference and event attendees.

Nothing. What’s going on here? Ruby is a rapidly growing field, as demonstrated by how quickly the conferences sell out, the number of new books released just in the last year, the number of businesses who know little about web development frameworks but are actively looking for Rails development because they heard it was good. This is an area where the interested developer can get in and have so many opportunities to do neat things. If there isn’t room for women here, then where?

Don’t take this to mean that I really think there are no other women in my field (even “the only female Ruby developer in Oregon” seems pretty drastic). But I don’t know where to find them. I’m sure that the number of developers in any area who are active in their local tech community is a small part of the total, and the number who become visible in a national or global arena, even online, is even smaller. Still, this suggests that women are such a small portion of the total field that by the time you filter down through these other criteria, they essentially disappear.

I think at least part of what I’m seeing is likely to occur in any part of the tech industry that hasn’t hit the corporate mainstream. This is an environment that weeds women out at all levels, to the point that the number who stick around long enough (or get involved deeply enough) to learn that there’s more out there than just Java or C++ is tiny, especially compared to those who enroll in beginning programming classes.

I’m very frustrated when I start to think about this too long, because I believe I belong here. And if I do, other women should be here too. Software is too big a part of modern life to let it be created by only one segment of the population.

[as a footnote, I stole the "where are the women" tag from Anne Zelenka, who has been using it on her blog and on del.icio.us to talk about women in blogging, the tech industry, etc.]

It’s a little calmer today. I’m glad. I have the proposal for the next iteration mostly finished, the styling for the current round looks decent (there are a couple of bugs, but nothing that makes the pages unreadable), and I found a little extra time to read blog posts (though I’m not even nearly caught up).

The guy peeing on the outside of our building when I went to go grab lunch was kind of gross, though.

Work is exhausting. In addition to Rails programming, I took on some of the page layout work, and the project management tasks for the site I’m working on, because essentially we’re understaffed. I really enjoy all of these kinds of work, but because I like what I’m doing, it’s easy to spend so much time on it that I feel worn out. I am trying very hard to keep work from creeping into my weekend and evening down time.

Lucas and I are taking a long Thanksgiving holiday in Arizona and Las Vegas starting on Saturday, and the timing could not be better.

It’s already over a week past the other fall holiday, but here’s what we went as for Halloween:

Lucas is Wayne Rooney. I’m Rincewind the wizzard (but not one person asked why it said that on my hat).

It’s been a good (but too short) weekend. I got two pairs of Doc Martens super cheap at a warehouse sale. I’m listening to a recently purchased copy of Bowie’s “Heroes” album. Sputnik is napping. The whole apartment smells like gouda because I just made a batch of cheese biscuits. In a week I’ll be in Vegas (or at least Laughlin, having flown into the Vegas airport, after which we’ll hang out in Arizona for most of the week, see the Grand Canyon, and come back to Sin City for two nights of cheap drinks, roulette, and taking pictures of drunk tourists and neon signs). And I’m going to a Blazers game tonight.