Putting Smart Women in New Media

March 5, 2010

Giving a Talk Tomorrow!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — Lisa Schaefer @ 8:13 pm

I’m giving a talk at the Podcasters Alliance tomorrow. I designed the talk to be about the process of creating Budget Justified, as opposed to the talk for women’s groups, which is about what happened while I worked in the FAA offices.

So today I’m working on the presentation slides.

February 20, 2010

It’s a Small world when you work for a big company

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Lisa Schaefer @ 4:26 pm

At a meeting this week, I chatted with a woman about Budget Justified. http://BudgetJustified.com She asked what contractor I had worked for. I told her I didn’t want to tell people which contractor was involved. Good thing I didn’t tell her because the next woman who walked up said she had worked there. And didn’t like it either.

Sheep school cancelled for snow

I went to a social media discussion meeting sponsored by SCORE (retired entrepreneurs) and Arlington Small Business Association. On the web site I saw, the meeting was supposed to start at 8:00am. But it didn’t start until 9:00. I was supposed to be home by 11:00 to talk with someone about Second Life, but I had to email him from the meeting to let him know I’d be late. And since I was logged in, I played on social media during my meeting about social media.

Then I got home just in time for my delayed meeting over the computer. I ate lunch while we talked. After we brainstormed about ideas for events and businesses in Second Life, I rushed off to St. Mark to shoot video with the teens.

There’s going to be a huge continuity problem with the video because the first footage we shot was before the huge snowstorm. So Tim, the youth minister, got the bright idea to have the Teacher Sheep in the video say, “Well, there’s too much snow. School’s cancelled for the rest of the day. Let’s go back to the barn.” So then we shot some footage indoors.

February 17, 2010

The “You Don’t Belong Here” look that I had forgotten after I left engineering

I suppose if it were a beautiful spring or summer day, I would’ve felt that my trip into DC was worthwhile just for the sake of going someplace more happening than my house in the suburbs. But the best part about tonight’s outing was commiserating with a George Washington University student about the poor duck standing all alone in the snow outside the metro station.

I trudged through the mile of snow to the Vienna metro station to attend a talk at the Arlington Public Library put on by the Arlington Small Business Association. I sat there for half an hour listening to people speaking Spanish around me before I decided to leave and go to a talk about intellectual property put on by the engineering school at GWU.

As I entered the lobby, I got that look that I had grown used to from white men during my almost 20 year career as an engineer. I had almost forgotten about the look, which I now call, “You Don’t Belong Here.” I haven’t experienced it over the past two years since I decided to refuse to be an engineer after a final straw groping and firing incident.

The look is comprised of a surprised stare (why is a WOMAN here?), then a refusal to acknowledge my presence (don’t talk to women, they’re different) until I interrupt their conversation.

If anything, I deserved the Look at the Online Media Association event I attended last night. I’m not a journalist. But in spite of the all male panel, the audience was around fifty percent female, so I “looked” like everyone else. Well, except that everyone else dressed in black and I wore a bright green British soldier blouse with purple pants.

Now I remember why I don’t go to engineer talks (which was again, a panel of white men). They’re damn boring and the information is not useful for the real world. And the networking sucks. So I left and went back to the Arlington Library.

Turns out that someone did actually appear to give a talk at the library, in English. But I missed it, returning in time only to catch the question/answer period. Sadly, the questions didn’t seem geared toward well educated people. Example: Do I use first names at the beginning of email?

I’m not sure what was said during the talk, and it looks like I won’t find out because nobody would answer my question regarding whether electronic slides were available. Possibly due to a language barrier. But after the question/answer period, I got the impression it had been a sales pitch to purchase the 25 year-old speaker’s book and $400 training session.

February 16, 2010

Panel of White Men talk about online news

Tonight I went to the Online News Association meetup. A panel of white men talked about how the news associations they worked for were adapting to doing business online.
A friend of mine, Beau Dure, was the original blogger, tweeter, and facebook guy for USAToday.com. (Right now he’s in Vancouver covering the Olympics.) One of his colleagues, Howard Kamen, was on the panel. Social media wasn’t mentioned during tonight’s discussion, although that’s a very relevant topic to online news.
There were two other events going on that I could have attended, however it was enough of a pain to get to this meeting that I didn’t want to bother waiting for a bus or walking over a mile to get to another event.
I’m glad I stayed because the socializing after the panel was great. I talked to Katie Kemple, an NPR journalist that I often see at various social media events, and to a guy who was a journalist for an English newspaper in Taiwan for several years. And I ate cheese and crackers and shrimp.

February 15, 2010

You know the bribery isn’t going on only with international governments

I’d like to know how much they’re bribing the FAA http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/05/AR2010020503811.html

February 12, 2010

The meaning of (Second) Life

I’ve been trapped inside the house for the past week with the metro not running above ground and all my professional/social events cancelled. So I decided to explore the online computer game Second Life, as suggested by a marketing consultant I talked to a few weeks ago.

It’s a rather social game, although when I first logged in, I landed as a naked man on someone’s house. Someone shouted to go away, but I couldn’t see anyone there and I didn’t know how to go somewhere else or find my clothes. So I got sent to Korea.

When I landed in Korea, my avatar walked into a guy and my head got stuck inside his chest. People were chatting not only with the text box, but also with voice. They explained to me how I could also chat with voice. They figured out I was new, so they told me how to find clothes in my inventory and how to turn into a woman.

I was invited to a church house, a couple of apartments, country dancing, a pirate ship, a waterfall, and an exotic dance club. I met a few Snoopys, kitties, and gnomes, though most avatars were in human form and dressed really weird. Someone gave me a tie-dye hat almost as tall as my avatar. I also received other articles of clothing, a stuffed animal, and different kinds of hair, which occasionally got removed, leaving my avatar bald until I could figure out how to put hair back on.

Hanging out at the church house last night, several of the staff greeted people. I asked what it means to be on the staff of a church in Second Life. At my real church, people donate money, and they money is used to pay the bills and the staff. Well, Second Life churches don’t get electric bills. And the staff of the Second Life church are volunteers. The pastor of the Second Life church is a pastor in real life, but the volunteers and the Second Life church are not affiliated with the real church. Some money exchanges hands if your avatar buys a hot chocolate. You can buy Second Life money with a real life credit card.

Anyone is welcome to hang out at the Second Life church at any time. The church holds scheduled concerts and other gatherings. People who visit can hold meetings there and watch various videos, even clips from some Pixar movies. My application crashed and my avatar went hurtling through gray space as I was trying to ask how the church got rights to show movie clips.

I’m still trying to figure out the business model of Second Life. I won a few Second Life dollars at the country dancing place for randomly guessing the answers to some trivia questions correctly. I think that’s worth a few pennies in real life. There were a few ads at the country dance place, so maybe they make some money that way, in addition to the contests.

I think what I need to do is figure out how to graffiti my web site URL on stuff in Second Life.

February 11, 2010

Surprise surprise, Superbowl ads are sexist

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Lisa Schaefer @ 7:16 pm

Many ads are sexist, Superbowl ads even more so. Here’s what other bloggers say about the Superbowl ad for the Dodge Charger

http://amydelouise.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/dodge-charger-brand-women-need-not-apply/

February 9, 2010

testing, testing

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Lisa Schaefer @ 1:19 pm

123

OK, what happens this time

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Lisa Schaefer @ 1:12 pm

Changed another setting…

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