War Widow Brought Bush to Tears

In a personal visit with President Bush, the widow of a soldier killed in Afghanistan claims she brought him to tears and admonished him, "It's time to put our pride behind us and stop the bleeding, for all of us."

The anecdote appears in a Washington Post front-page story this morning about the president's private feelings regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Hildi] Halley, 41, lost her husband, National Guard Capt. Patrick Damon, also 41, in June in Afghanistan to what officially was ruled a heart attack. When Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) called to offer condolences and asked if she could do anything, Halley requested a telephone call from the president. Instead, when he came to Maine to visit his parents in Kennebunkport, the White House invited her to meet him at a school.

When Bush walked in, Halley told him about Patrick, how they had met at American University, moved to Maine and had a family. "After I spoke about my husband for quite some time, I said, 'And now he's dead. For what? Why? I've lost my soul mate.' " She asked her children, Mikayla, 14, and Jan-Christian, 12, to leave the room, then wept as she told Bush how hard life had become for them. "He started crying. I said, 'These two children do not like you and they have good reason for that. And I hold you responsible for the death of my husband.' "

Bush seemed surprised that she opposes even the war in Afghanistan, and he cited the Taliban. "And I said, 'Who put them in power?' And he got a little defensive and said, 'I'm really not here to discuss public policy with you.' And I said, 'That's probably wise, and I'm not here to talk about public policy, either.' "

Bush said he hoped their meeting helped her healing. "You know what would help my healing?" she recalled responding. "If you change your policies in the Mideast." Bush smiled, she said, but did not reply.

Halley said the meeting did not change either of their minds. She would still vote against him. But she said she appreciated that he opened himself up to her. "I don't think he's a heartless man," she said. "I think he's pulled in a lot of different directions by very intelligent people. . . . I don't think it's going to change his policies, but I hope it does make him think about it. I hope I'm in his dreams."

Politics · 2006/09/25 · 27 COMMENTS · Link

Women in Tech: Spring Forward or Fall Back?

One of my friends had a baby girl this week, which naturally raises the question of what kind of world she can expect to inhabit. I didn't know this until I had my first son, but parenting is the strongest act of optimism you can ever commit. You're placing a bet on the state of the world for the next century and taking the over on peace and prosperity. I'm a practicing pessimist, so that realization gave me the heebie-jeebies.

If my friend's newborn develops an interest in computer science, engineering or another technical profession, I'm afraid she'll find a world that actively discourages her from those pursuits because of her gender.

I've been a comp-sci geek since I stole my dad's Timex Sinclair ZX81 the minute I first laid eyes on it in 1980. From that day on, every step I took in that direction was encouraged and reinforced by my parents and peers. My father worked as an engineer and everyone I knew with an interest in coding and BBSes was male. (Correction: One girl wandered into the Dallas BBS community when I was 16. She was immediately subjected to a merciless barrage of awkward, mumbled pick-up lines directed at our own shoes.)

Some will say that the gender imbalance in tech is a natural consequence of males being more inclined to these pursuits. But looking back, I wonder whether I would have stuck with programming if it had been a female-dominated field in which family, friends and teachers all treated my interest as unusual.

A quarter-century later, the tech world is overwhelmingly -- sometimes even exclusively -- male.

Shelley Powers recently called out the Office 2.0 conference for its original 53-speaker roster, which included only one woman.

A conference I'd like to attend, the Spring Experience on Dec. 7-10 in Hollywood, Fl., has 38 scheduled speakers and describes them in this manner:

Presenters at The Spring Experience are recognized subject matter experts. They are published authors and/or committers on the Spring Project. No marketecture, no hype, just quality technically focused sessions to help you get the most out of Spring.

All 38 are men.

There are women involved in the Java Spring framework and related areas of programming, but the lack of a single one in the event's roster shows that organizers placed no priority on finding them. I spent an hour looking into the companies, projects and technologies mentioned in the bios of the 38 speakers and found 10 women well-qualified to speak at the event:

• Portia Tung is a committer on the Spring Framework project team and an instructor at Core Spring bootcamps.
• Dr. Helen Hawkins is a committer on the AspectJ Development Tools project and a member of IBM's aspect-oriented software development team.
• Julie Waterhouse, another committer on AspectJ Development Tools, spoke at the Aspect-Oriented Software Development conference last year.
• Deborah Hartmann is the agile community editor for the enterprise IT portal InfoQ and a speaker at Agile2006.
• Dr. Rebecca Parsons, a speaker at several NoFluffJustStuff events, is a ThoughtWorks executive and comp-sci professor specializing in enterprise architecture.
• Kathy Sierra is the author of Head First EJB and Head First Java and a former master trainer at Sun.
• Fabiane Bizinella Nardon, a health care company's CTO and a member of Java Champions, gives frequent speeches on enterprise Java development.
• C++ and Java instructor Angelika Langer is the "Effective Java" columnist for Java Spektrum and a speaker at numerous Java-related conferences.
• Wendy Smoak is a committer on the Apache Struts, Shale and MyFaces projects and a member of the Apache Software Foundation.
• Heather VanCura, a speaker at Europe's JavaPolis conference in 2005, is the marketing manager of the Java Community Process

I think it's time to expect technology conference organizers and invited speakers to care about the glaring lack of female leaders at their events. Spring's a Java 2 Enterprise Edition framework for hardcore professional development, yet I quickly found 10 female experts worthy of consideration. If each of this event's speakers had been asked a simple question, the embarrassment of the all-male roster could have been avoided: "Do you know any women in this field who ought to speak at the conference?"

Three weeks after Shelley Powers challenged Office 2.0 participants to ask themselves that question, the roster includes 12 more women.

Programming · 2006/09/23 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

The Blogger To Be Named Later

A few years ago, outspoken tech blogger Russell Beattie got a phone call at home after he angered someone with one of the entries on his site. They asked to speak with his young son.

Beattie didn't want the incident to feed anyone's fear, but I think it's worth recalling in the discussion of whether it's OK to reveal a blogger's identity, as Michael Arrington appears to believe.

Arrington's put the chill on the unnamed author of Dead 2.0, a blogger critical of the web 2.0 bubble that has become Arrington's reason for being.

High-traffic bloggers should know as well as anybody that there's a damn good reason to remain nameless: Publishing on the web makes you a target for a considerable amount of abuse. We live in an angry world, and when you attach your name and face to a strong opinion on any subject, you're only one click away from being the focus of somebody's rage.

When I popesquatted last year and did interviews in which I jokingly asked for a papal mitre, a man named Roger Cadenhead in another part of Florida had the misfortune of being publicly listed in the phone book. He received so many hate calls that his wife called sheriff's deputies to their house.

I take anonymous and pseudonymous critics less seriously than people who identify themselves, but the idea that it's OK to out them as a matter of principle is reprehensible. There's nothing the author of Dead 2.0 could say about Arrington that he couldn't refute in a forum that draws 100 times as much traffic.

Florida · Domains · 2006/09/22 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Katherine Harris Clowns Around in Sarasota

An AP photo taken Tuesday at Sarasota-Bradenton Airport combines two of my favorite things -- Katherine Harris and sad clowns:

One of the best things about Harris is that she keeps firing staffers, reducing the chances that someone will might tell her things like "don't do a photo op in front of a suicidal clown."

But as much as I love this photo, I have to question the decision to place a giant mural of a sad clown at Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport.

Is that really what you want to see when you're getting ready to climb aboard a 23,000-gallon aluminum gas tank with wings?

Politics · Florida · 2006/09/22 · 25 COMMENTS · Link

Captcha Worth $500,000 to Inventor

The inventor of the captcha just received a $500,000 MacArthur Genius Grant:

Luis von Ahn, 28, computer scientist, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Von Ahn, who was born in Guatemala, helped develop CAPTCHA, a test used on many commercial Web sites to determine whether the user is human.

He also devised Google Image Labeler, a game in which two Internet users tag images in real time and are rewarded for using the same tag.

A little over a month ago, von Ahn gave a very entertaining talk on the Google campus. In that talk, he mentioned that if you could just hook his game up to Google images, and get 5,000 simultaneous players, every image in Google's index would be labeled in two months.

Programming · 2006/09/19 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

AutoWeek Runs Over Creative Commons Licensee

In its July 24 issue, AutoWeek magazine published a photo found on Flickr and broke both halves of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license that it used. They didn't credit the photographer or obtain his permission to use the image commercially.

Instead of apologizing and compensating the photog, AutoWeek Art Director Ken Ross made this claim in an e-mail reprinted by Lawrence Lessig:

... this image was obtained through the savethe76ball.com uncredited and in public domain. Our customary payment for this type of shot is $50.

When I wrote Ross this weekend and said they should admit a mistake and pay the guy, he responded that the dispute has been forwarded to their legal department. I hope it reaches the desk of someone with a basic understanding of copyright law.

Nothing created from 1978 onward in the U.S. is in the public domain unless there's an explicit declaration that releases it. Everything's automatically protected by copyright from the moment it is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression," to quote one primer.

Creative Commons · 2006/09/18 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Air America Struggles to Stay Afloat

I'm a day one listener to Air America Radio, yearning to hear liberal talk since Rush Limbaugh first slouched towards a microphone in the '80s. I've never understood how there could be no market for it, especially in places where conservative gasbags saturate the air. In Jacksonville, at least three different stations broadcast Limbaugh's show live, so you can travel the length of the area and keep up with the latest world crisis or societal moral collapse caused by the Clintons.

Air America's in financial trouble, which is no surprise because the network's been horribly mismanaged. An original founder ripped off a charity, misdirecting $875,000 to the fledgling radio network. The money's been repaid to an escrow account, but the scandal and the charity's shoddy financial accounting practices led to its closure.

You can say a lot about Limbaugh, and I have, but the guy never killed a children's charity.

Liberal talk would survive the closure of Air America, because two of the most successful hosts aren't members of the network: Ed Schultz and Alan Colmes. Colmes, who gets unfairly hammered as a liberal milquetoast, runs a funny late-night show after his Hannity & Colmes gig.

If Air America folds, I hope that it doesn't mean the end of Rachel Maddow as a nationally syndicated radio host. No one ever talks about Maddow -- Al Franken, Randi Rhodes and the unlistenable Jerry Springer get all the press -- but she's the best thing about Air America. She has a skewed sense of humor, an optimistic liberal take and likes to obsess over odd stuff, such as the announcer who introduces the presidential radio address each Saturday. Her program moves to 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern beginning on Monday.

One good thing that might come from the network's closure is the end of Springer's radio career. He's terrible, throwing out soggy liberal platitudes, agreeing with each caller and constantly pimping his own projects. If you think his Dancing with the Stars stunt is dull television, imagine hearing him devote an hour a day to it on the radio.

Jacksonville · Politics · Radio · 2006/09/15 · 59 COMMENTS · Link

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