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Gendered Language as a Software Engineer
Imagine a (highly generalized) pair programming situation where two engineers, a man and a woman, are talking about specific subjects: When pairing partner makes a mistake Men: That’s not right, I’ll show you. Women: I do it a slightly different way. (explains it) Talking about achievements Men: I wrote the best ruby router gem. Women:…
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On Playing Chinese Bingo
I’ve been thinking of making the best bingo online app ever since we started the Bingo franchise. I have seen lots of bingo games at bingobuddha with different kinds. And that made me think of creating something new. This is perhaps the hardest language I’ve learned next to Russian, and was super excited to have…
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Games Aren’t Just for Kids: Learn French with Bingo
I’ve been doing some competitive research on adult language learning tools- namely for French but also for Spanish- and I’ve realized that we let our kids play games, but we don’t let ourselves, as adults, play games. There’s an iPhone app out there that literally, for $0.99, just has lists of vocabulary words! That’s what…
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Computers vs. Poetry Death Match
I really loved the Ada story- I heard about it in detail from How Stuff Work’s “What You Missed in History Class.” That night I ended up rehashing almost the entire story to my niece and nephew and their parents. Not just that I’m kind of obsessed with British peerage (oddly a generation or two…
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Being Laughed At
I really don’t have time to write this post but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Lately, I’ve run into a few conversational moments where people actually laughed at me. Not with me, not about something else, but at something I had said in all seriousness. Basically: relating to my career and life goals.…
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Long Car Rides
I had a long car-ride with my sister Amy- Berkeley-SF-Monterey and back a day later. We had some amazing conversations. Mostly, though, they are the conversations that don’t exhaust after 15 minutes. It’s a depth of conversation that I don’t experience usually. Sometimes with coworkers, where we see each other every day for lunch, and…
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Fearing Failure
A director friend at dinner the other night mentioned that people fear failure so much they won’t try new things. That it stunts the creative process, too. I’ve never had a problem learning in public- a contentious issue when I was learning Ruby on Rails recently. I asked this on FriendFeed the other day– “name…
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Notes About Other Languages
Ran across this phrase in my “homework” (reading my book club book in French): “d’un coup sec” Context: “Je poussai d’un coup sec les persiennes.” OK so literally I translated: “I pushed with a salty clap the Persians.” Wrong! It’s actually, “I smartly opened the blinds.” I’m not a francophile, but in reading this I…
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AHHA KAREHEHA
Ever since I was little I’d look at this one book on the shelf: Ahha Kareheha, or, that’s how I read it. We also had “CHEKHOV” which is really confusing, since that’s not even Cyrillic (there is no V like that), but some 1950s book editor who thought it’d be funny to print an English…
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Fika & Backslang
I decided to translate some Swedish this morning for practice- met my 2nd removed Swedish cousins the other day so planning on visiting at some time- and knowing (at least some of) the language always makes visiting a richer experience. Anyways, I’m translating away (a post about refugees from Iraq, “Irak” in Swedish criticizing Tobias…