Category Archives: Home & Family

October 12, 2012 · 8:01 am

TechWomen’s last day in Washington DC

The TechWomen enjoyed their last day in Washington DC and are now slowly making their way home to either the Silicon Valley area (mentors), or to Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, and Yemen in the MENA region (mentees). I miss them already!

Wednesday was full of TechWomen-normal activities: networking, exchanging ideas and experiences, and taking pictures. It is usual for me to be given three to six cameras and smart phones and asked to photograph a posed group of lovely intelligent women. The group I am photographing may start small but if the setting is good, it often doubles and triples as other TechWomen join in. Taking TechWomen group pictures is an enjoyable if frenetic experience. My daughter Jessica lives in Washington DC and was invited to two of the TechWomen dinners – which made picture taking even more enjoyable.

We met in the morning in the Loy Henderson conference room at the US State Department for a political discussion, then had a magnificent lunch in the Benjamin Franklin State Dining Room. The TechWomen were welcomed and honored by Ann Stock, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, and Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues. We regretfully did not get to meet the program sponsor, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Ann Stock was patient and a very good sport – she stayed after the lunch to take dozens of pictures with the TechWomen. I love the diplomatic rooms at the US State Department, with cases full of china and silver (some by Paul Revere), and walls covered with portraits of American historical greats. The copy of the Declaration of Independence is my particular favorite.

After lunch, we returned to the Henderson room for Sheila Casey (Deputy Director, Office of Citizen Exchanges at U.S. Department of State) and Heather Ramsey (Director at Institute of International Education) to give the mentees their participation certificates (signed by Secretary Clinton). Our going away party was around the very windy roof pool of the Donovan House hotel (the party eventually moved downstairs since we were all freezing!).

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Filed under Home & Family, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Algeria, Egypt, Geeks, Jessica, Jordan, Lebanon, Mentoring, Middle East, Morocco, Palestine, technical women, TechWomen

October 9, 2012 · 5:10 am

TechWomen Leadership Workshop

Yesterday, the TechWomen spent a day at Georgetown University in a leadership workshop with Barbara Fittipaldi. Barbara Fittipaldi was one of those who inspired Dr. Anita Borg to start what is now the Anita Borg Institute.

Afterwards, some of the TechWomen spent the evening exploring Georgetown. My daughter Jessica and my mentee and I went exploring on the mall to see the sights at night, particularly the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. We were moved by Dr. King’s words carved on the curving wall behind the big statue. Jessica and I sang “We Shall Overcome” – the anthem for the African-American Civil Rights Movement. We also visited the Washington Monument and White House to see them wearing lights in the dark.

MLK door mural on the Luther Place Memorial Church (Washington DC), seen 9 October 2012:

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Filed under Home & Family, Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Jessica, Mentoring, Middle East, technical women, TechWomen

October 7, 2012 · 8:21 pm

National Zoo Visit

My daughter Jessica, her husband Matthew, and I visited the National Zoo (Smithsonian National Zoological Park) today in Washington DC. Highlights were the Cheetahs, Pandas, Otters, and the reptile house. The two zoo functions of conservation and education were much in evidence, with displays and interactive exhibits everywhere along with information about zoo breeding programs for rare animals. There is still sadness over the unexpected death of a panda cub at the zoo last month.

TechWomen 2011 and 2012 Meet

After travel adventures on their way here from California, the forty-one 2012 TechWomen emerging leaders arrived at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Baltimore and met three representatives of the 2011 TechWomen for the first time. We mentors and the Anita Borg Institute staff waited, talking with friends, checking out the poster session, and guarding the 2012 mentees’ box dinners. My daughter Jessica arrived from Washington DC and presented her poster (“Using the Technology to Lower the Cost of Being a Woman”). A fun evening and a good start to a great conference!

Images Copyright 2012 by Katy Dickinson
#GHC12

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Filed under Home & Family, Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business

Tagged as Geeks, Jessica, Mentoring, technical women, TechWomen

September 23, 2012 · 10:51 pm

Shakespeare Reading Group

The community at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church has just started a Shakespeare Reading group, with me as the official Shakespeare Mentor. Tonight, 13 of us met to read Midsummer Night’s Dream together. Melita Thorpe hosted the event and organized the pot luck supper. As the Shakespeare Mentor, I recommended MSND movies to watch in advance, sent out an email with background on the play and recommendations for how to read Shakespeare, brought texts to read from, and distributed roles for the evening. My favorite MSND films are those of 1935, 1968, 1996, and 1999 (see details on the Midsummer Night’s Dream wikipedia page section on films).

My advice on reading Shakespeare socially:

Shakespeare wrote play scripts – not literature – reading a Shakespeare play is entertainment and you should enjoy yourself!
Trust the punctuation – pause not at the end of a line or at a rhyme but only at the period ending the sentence.
Read as quickly as you can using a normal tone – no special accent is needed for most roles.
Keep going – do not pause between speeches or scenes – the characters should sound like they are responding to each other.
If there is a word you do not know, give it your best guess and go on (or you can ask for advice!).
The gender of the role and of the reader do not have to match – remember that Shakespeare had an all-male cast.
If the lines in your script do not match the lines in someone else’s, don’t worry about it – Shakespearean scholars don’t always agree on the text – just keep reading.

Everyone enjoyed the evening – several of the readers made us all laugh. I am looking forward to future meetings!

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Filed under Church, Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as Episcopal church, Mentoring, Shakespeare, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

September 20, 2012 · 10:20 pm

New Porch

This summer, we have been fixing up our home – doing small construction and repairs, including: refinishing the front door, filling in missing baseboards, refinishing the floor in John’s office, eliminating some dry rot and fixing a floor that shifted out of level in John’s model train room and workshop, adding a side fence and creating a pottery studio for Paul. Our next project is to add a side porch to the house. The contractors poured the concrete foundation yesterday. Months ago, we bought hundreds of old ceramic roof tiles from a neighbor – which match those already on our 1930 Willow Glen house roof. The “new” tiles will go on the porch roof so that it will look like a natural part of the house.

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Tagged as garden, House Work, John, Paul, San Jose, Willow Glen

September 17, 2012 · 11:01 pm

Metal and Clay

Last weekend, we visited two interesting companies selling the bits which make up our homes:

Sims Metal Management (1720 Monterey Highway, San Jose, CA)
Fireclay Tile (495 West Julian Street, San Jose, CA)

At Sims, we were looking for some steel pipe and angle iron for John, although I also came home with a treasure: a 4-shelf wrought iron plant stand for $20 which only needs a little work. Everything at Sims is sold by the pound – kettle drums, lawn chairs, fencing, old farm equipment, rusted bird cages, old iron stoves, and unidentifiable bits of steel. There is even a small section for sculptures.

At Fireclay Tile, we looked for the tiles to pave our new side porch. John and I rooted through the new tile showroom and also the Boneyard in back where excess and nonstandard tiles wait for adoption. We found some likely piazza tiles by Gladding McBean plus a tile mural for the center.