technology

GHC09: Women in the Flat Connected World

October 25, 2009

“Globalization has forced companies to create new processes to empower distributed teams to collaborate. It could mean that individuals have to travel for longer periods of time across the globe, work at odd hours, and work from home or make other adjustments to accommodate a new working lifestyle. Panelists will discuss and give their perspective [...]

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Transitioning Your Online Identity

May 16, 2009

7 Steps to Take Before the Axe Falls Though I have no idea what’s in store for me personally, the impending acquistion gives me ample reason to reflect upon the fact that I’ve been through this before. And to wish that someone had given me the advice I’m about to give you. When you’ve been [...]

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The First Colorado Front Range Girl Geek Dinner: Jai Ho!

March 7, 2009

The first Colorado Front Range Girl Geek Dinner was held on Thursday, March 5th, on Sun’s Broomfield campus. More than 80 people attended, only one of whom was (a very brave) male. Sun sponsored this first one with food, drink, and venue. There was plenty of interest from other individuals and businesses in helping with [...]

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Thrilled in Boulder

January 27, 2009

Last Saturday I attended a podCamp in Boulder, similar to camps I’ve attended in Italy. The topics were mostly techie (of course), and it was stimulating to talk with other folks doing social media et al, and get a fresh perspective. But the most fun part was at the end, when we learned part of [...]

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Web Women Weekend

October 28, 2007

^ the finer points of CSS – Tara and Elena in my kitchen Increasingly frustrated with the low visibility of women in technology in Italy, back in June I and a few like-minded ladies hatched a plan to start doing something about it. The first step was to get together. So I invited them all [...]

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FemCamp Bologna 2007: Sessions & Reflections

May 29, 2007

In the afternoon I attended some sessions, though I missed the most popular presentation of the day, Iocelopiulunghismo (“Mine’s-the-biggest-ism”), by Elena and Feba, a funny and ironic look at (male) bloggers’ obsession with their (blog) statistics. I poked my head into Andrea Beggi‘s unfortunately-titled presentation on “Blogging for Ladies,” but the room was so crowded [...]

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FemCamp Bologna 2007

May 28, 2007

Saturday morning I got up bright and early – way too early, considering that I had barely slept Friday night (jet lag – I had just returned from Colorado Thursday). Succumbing to travel paranoia, I took a taxi down the hill rather than wait for the first bus at 7 am, and got to Lecco [...]

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Fixing the “iPod Won’t Unlock” Problem

April 30, 2007

I belong to the “don’t have anything to lose” school of electronics repairs. Six months ago I was profoundly irritated that my new-batteried iPod suddenly wouldn’t respond to its buttons. It could still play if attached to a computer, but that didn’t do me much good, so I had to replace it with a new [...]

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Long-Distance Working – A Tale of Two Companies

April 25, 2007

Old Days, Old Ways: Adaptec When I began working for Adaptec in 1995 (as a result of their acquisition of Incat Systems, the company which created Easy CD), I was already a remote worker. Fabrizio Caffarelli, who had founded Incat in Milan, had moved himself and the engineering staff to California in late 1993 with [...]

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Six Degrees from Disaster

April 17, 2007

Massacre at VA Tech – Malaysian Students Safe read a headline I spotted via Google News this morning. Naturally, it came from Malaysia’s Straits Times newspaper. It’s facile to say that the global is local and the local is global. But there’s more to this particular phenomenon. When we hear about horror anywhere in the [...]

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Girl Geeks Dinner Italia

April 1, 2007

Some years ago Silvia, who had been one of our tech support team (of two) at Incat, paid me the enormous compliment of saying that she considered me a role model. This from a woman with a laurea in physics who holds a managerial position in a team supporting HP servers, and certainly never needed [...]

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The Boys of barCamp

January 22, 2007

For me, it started with a comment on Pandemia. Luca Conti (one of Italy’s most influential bloggers) reported the quizzical complaint of Marina Bellini: why were there practically no females signed up for barCamp Rome? Luca Mascaro, Federico, Diego Bianchi, Luca Conti I’d been reading more and more Italian blogs lately, especially since I met [...]

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Digital Camera Fixes: When Your Camera Jams, Try Fixing It Yourself

December 3, 2006

We now have three digital cameras in the family (not counting cellphones). The first was a Nikon Coolpix 775, purchased in New York for $500 in early 2002. I can’t remember how many megapixels it has, but certainly its capabilities are unimpressive by today’s standards. It takes a proprietary rechargeable battery, of which I’ve bought [...]

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Repair Your Own iPod

February 28, 2006

iPod Replacement Batteries Some of you will recall my problems with the first iPod I bought (originally for Ross, in 2003). I inherited it when she bought herself a fancier one, and resolved its “computers can’t see me” problems by connecting it via Ross’ new USB cable, instead of the FireWire cable it came with. [...]

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Let Us Now Praise Amazon

January 21, 2004

The Best Source for English-Language Books in Italy Enrico and I read a lot (Rossella, alas, does not). Our house is stuffed with books, many of which we have read several times over – if I don’t expect to want to read a particular book ever again, I give it away. Obtaining books was a [...]

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Pirating Music

September 11, 2003

“When I was a kid, we used to tape music off the radio. You never heard of record companies suing people for that.” New York Times, Sept 10, 2003 Okay, I admit it: I’ve been pirating music for a long time. The earliest copyright infringement I can recall perpetrating myself occurred in Bangladesh. I was [...]

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Cellphone Comedy

January 4, 2003

During one of my many trips to Silicon Valley, I was on a shuttle bus at San Francisco Airport, heading towards the rental car building. Four men got on together, talking animatedly, obviously colleagues on a business trip together. A cellphone rang, and all four simultaneously dived for their pockets. I burst out laughing, and [...]

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Fun with Multimedia

May 22, 2002

Now that my MBA course is over and I can, without guilt, dedicate my time to non-studying activities, I’ve thrown myself into a couple of multimedia projects which had been on the back burner for some time. One is a yearbook CD for my daughter’s middle school class. I did one last year almost by [...]

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Copy Protection Wars

January 21, 2002

This is getting entertaining; check out this article from The Register. Another article mentions that: “White Lilies Island [Natalie Imbruglia's latest] uses Israeli technology company Midbar’s Cactus Data Shield to prevent the disc from being played in a PC CD-ROM drive. The encoding process systematically corrupts the music stored on the disc. A hi-fi CD player’s [...]

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Digital Photos – Display and Storage

July 1, 2001

“WILL BAKER’S digital camera has helped solve quite a few problems around the house. Several old PC’s that Mr. Baker would otherwise have placed in deep storage have been put to work in the capacity of dynamic photo frames or, as Mr. Baker likes to put it, “picture flippers.” Mr. Baker, a 46-year-old entrepreneur, cut [...]

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