Category Archives: bio

The Taj Mahal, Then and Now

February 7, 2013 Deirdre Straughan 2 Comments

I visited the Taj Mahal two or three times on school trips, between 1978 and 1981. Although by far the most famous site in India, it wasn’t terribly crowded in those days (except with that scourge of all Indian tourist sites: hawkers trying to sell you things). Visitors could wander at will all over the main building and grounds, and the guides would take you down into the lower mausoleum and point out the scar where a gigantic gem that originally decorated the small marble tomb had been stolen by the British.

My best memory of the Taj was an unusual one. On one of these school trips, though our group had already visited during day, two or three of us, on a whim, jumped into a cycle rickshaw and asked to be taken back that same evening. It was dark and raining and no one else was there – just us and three guards, carrying lathis and wrapped in shawls over their khaki uniforms. I don’t remember whether the site was even technically open to the public that night, but they let us in and gave us a special tour, showing off their own considerable knowledge of the Taj. Among other things, they demonstrated that one person could sing a chord inside the dome, thanks to the timing of the echoes. (You couldn’t have done that during normal hours – too many people inside to hear one voice over the din.)

Although I began to travel to India again regularly from 1996, I somehow never went back to the Taj, perhaps because I did not want to sully memories like these. When I was setting up the trip I took with Brendan in 2011, I didn’t originally plan to include the Taj – it wasn’t very convenient to our other stops. But he wanted to see it, so I rearranged things and made it fit into our schedule. And I ended up being glad I did.

We hired a car and driver to take us from Kesroli, in Rajasthan, to Agra: only 150 km by car, but… everything takes longer in India. We left early in the morning and arrived in mid-afternoon, with a brief stop at Fatehpur Sikri. The tour company had insisted on providing a guide, which we hadn’t really wanted, but he turned out to be useful.

The Taj is still the most popular tourist destination in India, but it’s now also one of the best-managed. To reduce pollution damage to the delicate white marble, all automobile traffic is stopped some distance away. You park your car, buy tickets, and then are taken in electric buses to the entrance of the grounds. The broad street leading up to the gate is lined with shops and eating places, but there are no more pushy tourist touts – a pleasant change!

As foreigners, we were “high value” – we’d paid ten times as much as Indians (still only about $50). At least we got our own security line (but none of the lines were long when we arrived). Before entering the grounds, everyone goes through metal detectors and is frisked, bags are inspected and all food, drink, and chewing gum are confiscated.

Inside the gate, we found the place stunningly crowded, far beyond my (possibly faulty) memories.

I don’t like crowds, but, as we got further in I became fascinated by the composition of this one. The tourists thronging the Taj today showed a far higher proportion of Indians than I remembered. Our guide said that this was because we were there in the afternoon – the foreigners tend to go to the Taj in the morning, the Indians in the afternoon. “You were smart to come in the afternoon,” he added. “In the mornings this time of year there is often fog, so you can’t take good photos.”

I was smugly pleased by my own foresight: I had in fact planned the trip so as to arrive in the afternoon, because I love photographing in the long, golden evening light:

The interesting thing about the Indian crowd was its diversity. People from all of India’s regions, religions and social classes were represented, all enjoying a holiday trip (it was Diwali, a major Hindu festival) to one of their country’s great monuments. Clearly, such travel is within reach of many more Indians these days, a happy sign of economic progress.

Sadly, bigger crowds mean more restrictions. We had to stand in a long line to go up the stairs and into the main mausoleum. You then get rushed through and are not allowed to photograph inside. Even the bad photo at the top of this page, taken on a compact camera around 1980, would not be possible today.

But the Taj is still beautiful, and even standing in line was interesting: it gave me more insight into changes in Indian society. The line snaked across a plaza at ground level, organized by security guards. When the guards’ backs were turned, people would try to cut from one turn of the line to another. Our tour guide took it upon himself to behave as line monitor, barking at them to get back to their places, with others loudly seconding him. A Brahmin (identifiable by his dhoti, sacred string, top-knot of hair, and forehead mark), casually walked into the middle of the line – and everyone yelled at him until he went back to his starting place. I found this telling and amusing; Brahmins no longer have the privileges their forefathers enjoyed.

Later, when we were up at the tomb entrance level, the line below deteriorated and nearly became a riot:

but the guards moved in quickly to restore order.

Once we’d got through the interior, we were free to stay and enjoy the beautiful evening.

Brendan helped me recreate a picture that had been taken of me at the Taj in 1980:

Note the cloth booties, which we were required to wear over our shoes. I should have chosen the alternative – checking our shoes at the racks on the way in (you used to just leave them piled up on the stairs and tip somebody to keep an eye on them). The feel of sun-warmed alabaster under your feet is a sensual treat that I’m sorry I missed this time.

On the way out, we posed for the classic Taj tourist shots:

bio, portfolio

Publish Yourself on CD-ROM

January 25, 2013 Deirdre Straughan 2 Comments

In 1993, my first (and so far only) book, Publish Yourself on CD-ROM (Random House), finally hit the shelves after over a year of work.

My then-boss Fabrizio Caffarelli was listed as the first author (and got most of the royalties), and taught me much of the technical content (I did read the standards docs myself – almost the only available reference materials before our book), while the “philosophy” parts were based on ideas that we discussed at length. I did the bulk of the actual writing.

It was one of the first books in the world to include a CD, largely so that a trial version of our Easy CD 1.0 software could be distributed with it. The whole project was a marketing tool for the software. It worked: it drew attention to the product and CD recording technology in general, and set us on the road to making Easy CD the top-selling Windows CD recording app (later named by PC World one of the 50 Best Tech Products of All Time). Fabrizio became a very rich man when he sold his company to Adaptec in 1995; he was one of the early exemplars of the “build it up to sell it” cycle so common in tech today.

Ironically, the only review we ever got was in now-defunct Byte magazine. The reviewer opined: “If the authors think that CD recording will ever become cheap and easy enough for general use, they’re crazy” – or words to that effect. I’d say we got the last laugh on that one.

Do-it-yourself CD-ROM book review 1993 - tl;dr -- reviewer didn't like it

The book itself didn’t sell hugely – Random House paid me more to do the layout than I ever earned from my portion of the royalties. But it was good experience in every aspect of writing and producing a book. It didn’t need copyediting by the publisher – our editor said it was the “cleanest” book he’d ever received. I even did the indexing, though I had no training in that.

Perhaps the most important skill I gained was a new one in the world at that time: producing electronic content. Keep in mind that I was doing this in 1992, long before most people had heard of the World Wide Web. As I wrote a few years ago:

I had wanted to publish the electronic version of the book in Adobe’s new PDF format (which I’d heard about in the course of my work as a journalist for Italian computer magazines), but that wasn’t quite ready at the time. I used instead the same FrameMaker software I’d used to lay out the book, along with a hypertext reader supplied by Frame – I negotiated the rights to include this on our CD, which I believe was the first publication to use it. (That company is now owned by Adobe).

Designing the electronic version of the book was also a formative experience: I became adept at hypertext long before I saw the Web.

The book mentioned our CompuServe address and that we’d be glad to hear from readers. Hear from them we did, because the disc didn’t work! Something had gone wrong in manufacturing, and no one at Random House had thought to test the disc before binding it up with the book.

That was my first experience with online customer service. I was just sick over the whole situation, but Random House quickly had a working disc duplicated, and arranged shipping so that anyone who contacted them could get a replacement quickly. Once this fix was in place and easily obtainable, I was pleasantly surprised at how forgiving our readers were. In a way it was a bonus, because the mistake spurred people to get in touch with us who otherwise would never have bothered.

So, inadvertently, the book also led to me to be a pioneer in another field: online customer service and communications – what we’d now call social media. And all of this experience continues to serve me well long after the book is out of print and even the technology it teaches is nearly superfluous. There’s a life lesson in that; I’m sure you can work it out for yourself!

NB: Don’t ask me to explain that cover image – we didn’t like it, either.

bio, what I do

Developers Rule, OK?

January 12, 2013 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

I warmly recommend a new book by RedMonk co-founder Stephen O’Grady called The New Kingmakers, “about how developers took over the world”. If you’re a non-tech person who wants to understand what I do in my professional life, this will help. I’m not a software developer (nor even play one on television), but a lot of my job is about helping devs communicate about their work, and helping them work as a community to reach shared goals. If you work in tech, O’Grady’s view has profound implications for how you organize and manage your company, treat your tech employees, and market your products to technical people.

O’Grady posits that: “Developers are the most important constituency in technology. They have the power to make or break businesses, whether by their preferences, their passions, or their own products.”

The company that I work for, Joyent, is both a creator and a beneficiary of this new world order. We help supply the tools that enable developers to take over the world: open source software, which we make, and hardware, which we operate so efficiently that we can afford to rent it to other developers for very, very little – aka cloud computing. As O’Grady says, “With the creation of the cloud market, developers had, for the first time in history, access to both no-cost software and infrastructure affordable for even an individual.”

This means that a skilled software engineer with an idea (and maybe a few smart friends) and very little cash can launch a business to see what the world thinks of that idea, and – who knows? – may eventually build it into a world-spanning company. Twitter, for example, in its early days was hosted on Joyent.

O’Grady gives a quick history of “How did we get here?” – helpful for those who do not live and breathe tech every day – then supports his case with The Evidence.

In a subsection titled “What would a developer’s world look like?”, one answer he gives is that: “…open source [software] would grow and proliferate. Whether it’s because they enjoy the collaboration, abhor unnecessary duplication of effort, because they’re building a resume of code, because they find it easy to obtain, or because it costs them nothing, developers prefer open source over proprietary commercial alternatives in the majority of cases.”

Perhaps for brevity’s sake, he left out some reasons that the devs I know want to open source their work, such as:

They believe deeply in open source principles.
They are artists, and open source code is their gallery show, where their peers can see, admire and use their work – this goes well beyond resumé building.
Recognition is also a form of compensation. Like all of us, coders bask in the admiration of their peers, especially those peers who are skilled enough to truly understand the quality of their work. Having their best work locked away behind a proprietary wall makes this impossible, obviously.
Very pragmatically, they want their own best tools to be available for their own later use. As Bryan Cantrill has said about his “baby”, DTrace: “it was developed out of pain”, to solve problems that he (and many others) face every day in dealing with huge, complex systems. He would not want to work in a world without DTrace.

O’Grady’s recommendations for succeeding in this new world range from “Get to them early” to “talk with developers, not at them” – all good advice, including solid recommendations on how to market to developers (hint: traditional marketing tools fail completely, beer works).

You can get a copy of the book on Kindle. 50 pages.

photo caption: To do my job well, it helps me to be around devs all the time, which isn’t hard since I report to Joyent’s CTO, and sit among the engineers at our SF office – the spot of red in the photo above is my jacket on the back of my chair. SVP of Engineering Bryan Cantrill is the one with his feet on his desk, right foreground. (This was taken in the first few days in that office – Bryan’s desk has never since been that clean.)

The title of this piece, as so often happens with my writing, is a pun that may need explaining (and therefore may not be funny to anyone but me – oh, well).

bio, opinion

American Freedoms

December 23, 2012 Deirdre Straughan 1 Comment

For those who frame the gun control debate as a matter of your personal freedoms, let’s look at that argument from another angle:

When I was young, in the 1960s and 70s, I did not have a choice about breathing cigarette smoke. I never smoked myself, but many people around me did (including my parents), and they could do so in public spaces: restaurants, planes, offices, etc. Over the following decades, the health risks of breathing secondhand smoke came to be seen as large enough to warrant legislation to protect those who do not choose to smoke. Smoking is still legal, but the right to smoke in shared spaces is now sharply curbed, so I can easily avoid exposing myself. Most of us think this is a good thing, a pragmatic matter of public health and personal choice.

In 1989, I took my infant daughter for her first checkup at the Yale New Haven health center. The pediatrician asked me a long list of questions about health and safety factors in the environment my daughter would be growing up in: did you bring her here in a car seat? does your apartment have any old lead paint? And: do you have a gun in the home, or do you visit the home of anyone who does? This brought into sharp focus a problem I hadn’t realized I would face as a parent. I can decide not to have a gun in my own home, but I can’t know whether every other environment my daughter is ever in (say, a friend’s house) may contain guns, or whether they are secured properly against curious little children.

US law gives me the choice to protect myself from cigarette smoke, but not to protect myself from the more immediately deadly risk of gunshot wounds. And I don’t mean “protect myself” by having my own gun at the ready. Since I am not trained to it, the odds of me successfully defending myself with a gun, against a gun, are very slim. This goes for you, too. Unless you are current or former military or police, or otherwise have extensive and constantly-reinforced training – not only with guns but in crisis situations – you are also not likely to be effective in using a gun in a sudden attack.

Yes, guns are sometimes used successfully in self-defense. But does the number of those successes outweigh the number of deaths that could otherwise be avoided by having fewer guns in the homes and hands of ordinary, untrained citizens?

Having guns in your home actually increases the risk that someone in your family will get hurt. Massacres committed by mentally ill people get attention, but they account for far fewer deaths (and injuries) than the accidents, suicides, and heat-of-the-moment murders that can happen so easily when a gun is readily to hand – and these account for many of the 30,000 gun deaths that occur in America EVERY YEAR.

I would like to have a choice about whether to expose myself to the risk of injury or death from flying bullets. You can choose to own a gun, and in many states you can choose to carry it into the public spaces that I also use. I do not have any choice about whether to be in your line of fire when you lose your temper, or think you’re gonna be a hero when something goes down. And, frankly, even if you’re the good guy, in the heat of the moment I don’t trust you to hit the bad guy rather than me. Some might keep their heads sufficiently to do exactly the right thing, but most won’t.

So, gun control is a matter of protecting freedom: my freedom to choose the risks to which I expose myself and my family. Your carrying a gun infringes on my right to be safe from your bullets. Even if we start from the premise that your right to be armed is as important as my right to be safe, there are pragmatic public health reasons for my right, in this case, to be given more weight.

bio, living in the USA

To My Christian Friends (the Ones Who Are Currently Upset)

November 10, 2012 Deirdre Straughan 2 Comments

I am, of course, very happy that Barack Obama will be the US President for the next four years. I am thrilled that the tide is beginning to turn to give my gay friends the same rights I have. I am deeply relieved that the Affordable Care Act will not be rolled back, so I can have far fewer fears about my own financial future and, for the next three years, my daughter’s. There is much else to be done, and I think this President will do it better. Enough, for now, on that topic.

I am sad, however, to know that the cultural divide in this country was not created by this election cycle (though it was certainly exacerbated), and it will not likely heal anytime soon.

I was recently shocked to realize that this gulf exists even between myself and some of my fellow Woodstock alumni. One woman a year or two older than myself posted one of those pictures on Facebook, a photo of a fetus in the womb, with an anti-abortion quote that I found irritatingly facile, reducing a complex issue to seeming simplicity (as so often happens on both sides of that debate). I responded, I thought, carefully and politely. Her response was also polite, but included something about how she and I have very different worldviews, because she believes in ineluctable laws that come from God, and I do not.

In spite of what she perceives as a fundamental and important difference between us, she and I have not lived very different lives, nor do we have very different attitudes about right and wrong. I didn’t know her well in school, but I’m pretty sure she was there because her parents were missionaries, probably in India or Nepal. Most of those missionaries were doing selfless, valuable work – building and staffing hospitals and schools, etc. – which I respected, even when their religious motivation for doing it did not appeal to me.

I ended up at Woodstock School because my dad was head of Save the Children in Bangladesh, doing much the same work as the missionaries. He did it in the name of justice and humanity, not specifically in the name of God. I don’t see that that made any difference. His organization worked alongside many others, religious and otherwise. He had previously been in Vietnam as a civilian with USAID, and later worked with other organizations in Thailand, Indonesia, the Maldives…

Just like those missionary kids’, my childhood was “sacrificed” for my father’s ideals. I don’t regret that, any more than my schoolmate likely regrets growing up as a mish kid. And, like her, I naturally grew up with a sense that serving others and making the world a better place is important and worthy work. She has gone on to become a nurse (obviously, a serving profession). I’ve ended up working in technology, but in my career I have focused on making tech a better place for people – helping communication flow from customers to creators and back, helping tech communities work together, and so on.

Although I will loudly defend anybody’s right to do just about anything in their personal lives, so long as no one else gets hurt, in my own personal life (I am amused to note), I have lived closer to Christian ideals than many people who call themselves Christian. My few relationships (which have been with men) have been monogamous – not because I think sex outside a relationship is necessarily evil (see Dan Savage on being “monogamish“), it just happens that way. I make absolutely no judgements on what works for others.

I was faithfully married to one man for 20 years, have had one pregnancy and one child. No abortions, because I was usually careful with birth control – and I was lucky. I’ve never smoked, rarely drink to excess, don’t do drugs (no interest in them). I am kind, loving and courteous (most of the time). I pay my taxes, obey the speed limit, give to charity, consume responsibly, and generally try to be a force for good in the world, in my small way. Why? I guess because I was both born and raised that way.

During the heated political debates of recent weeks, another schoolmate challenged me to say where my morals come from, if not from God. There’s a great deal of research being done on precisely this, showing, for example, that other primates have a sense of fairness. My current groping towards an understanding is that we humans evolved (from and alongside other primates) to have a sense of “good” and “evil” in our dealings with one another, and this moral sense exists because it has helped us survive as a species. As to why many people have and do believe that this moral sense comes from a supernatural source, I recommend Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

I don’t actually care where you think your moral sense comes from, so long as it harmonizes with my own moral sense enough not to impinge on my life or anyone else’s. If your moral sense “requires” you to convert everyone forcibly to your religion, or cut off your daughter’s clitoris, or kill your daughter because she has “disohonored” the family, or to kill gay people, or control women, or enslave anybody – then, yes, I have a problem with your beliefs. Beyond these and other extreme examples, and some outward trappings, your religiously-driven behavior is not distinguishable from my own atheist ethics.

It makes me sad to think that half my country has somehow come to believe that the other half is morally incomprehensible and is dragging the country to its doom. (Yes, I get that this applies to both sides.) I think I have a pretty good picture of how those on the other side of this crevasse from me think in general (though I’m willing to be educated – politely), but I’m puzzled on this particular point: what makes you believe that I’m so terribly different from you?

I’ve been thinking about that a great deal. I have lifelong experience dealing with and living in cultures that are “foreign” to me. I, of all people, should be able to communicate, especially with those who share large parts of my background. So… is there maybe something I can do to help you understand me and people like me? Something that will make you feel better about where we want to take the country? Can we find some common ground? I would like to. Please talk to me.

Countries Beginning with I

Category Archives: bio

The Taj Mahal, Then and Now

Publish Yourself on CD-ROM

Developers Rule, OK?

American Freedoms

To My Christian Friends (the Ones Who Are Currently Upset)

Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia

You might also like:

You might also like:

You might also like:

You might also like:

You might also like:

Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia