The opportunity sprang up late (thanks to a post on PDX Startups Switchboard by Meet the Founder’s founder, Kevin Bastien) so we started organizing the same week of the event. Two of those days we were in Seattle for Startup Week, so we were was also limited on the amount of time we had to organize. I started our hunt by calling two, local coworking spaces. They were incredibly helpful, though we ultimately couldn’t arrange a “drop-in” event on such short notice. Had one of us been a monthly member and had weekend access, it’s more likely we could have pulled it off. However, both places also required a rental fee and we couldn’t work out a sponsorship deal in our short amount of time.

So we moved onto looking at the more popular cafes we’ve worked from in our weekly meetups and began filtering on my list of criteria:

1. large group space and ability to break into smaller groups
2. reliable WiFi
3. a variety of food and drink options
4. a variety of seating for folks who can’t sit in one chair all day
5. open later on Saturday
6. free parking, bike parking and accessible from metro transit

This led us to Ford Food & Drink. They allowed us to make a free reservation for their large, group table set in the back of their space. I initially thought we’d only be there for 4-6 hours before folks wanted to migrate, but most of us stayed until closing—between 9-10pm. (I checked in with the staff at mid-day to get a sense if we were welcome to stay and they were very supportive of us staying on.)

Their back space was perfect, as we were able to have a home base that was out of the way of the transient traffic staying for brunch, lunch, snacks, coffee and happy hour. We ran a tab, making it easy for our group to stay fueled and save the establishment on individual credit card fees. At the end of the night when we closed our tab, we saw that we spent as much on everyone’s food and drink as we would have renting a space — so our budget was happy. For folks who didn’t want to stop at 10pm, they could walk a few blocks to Southeast Grind, Portland’s only 24hour coffee shop.

We all agreed to meet back up at Bare Bones cafe the following morning to regroup and submit our team projects. We picked Bare Bones for its brunch, access to power, reliable WiFi, free parking and central location. After some food, coffee and a round of mimosas for all, we found once again that the money we spent was on par with what we’d have had to spend on renting a dedicated space.

One of my personal highlights of hosting the hackathon in cafes was the poetry reading I got to code through. It was a lovely change of pace from the sound of typing and a great shift in energy as the space filled up with folks sharing their passions, ideas and stories. Creativity is contagious — a lovely benefit to sharing spaces.

Check out what the teams all made!

View more photos shared in our Facebook group.

The post Hosting a Hackathon in Cafes appeared first on Jewels.

As I was sporting some fancy blue shoes, a lovely couple of women stopped to give me props on my incredible fashion sensibility.¹ In our brief exchange, which started with a glorious smile that powered me through a loooong day, the woman with a matching blue streak in her hair commented on how nice it was to see so many confident, powerful and strong women this year. Her colleague chimed in on what a relief this was compared to the typical dark, slouching women with attitudes she’s traditionally used to encountering. (Slouching is my word.)

This launched a conversation I tend to shy away from: expectations around and the current movement of getting more women in technology (or all STEM) fields. I, like my new friend of 5 minutes, struggle with woman focused initiatives because I’ve always been a female and I’ve always been in male dominated classes and professions. And the few women I’d meet weren’t typically very friendly. I even grew up in a single parent household with my father and my brother. (And there were a few years when strangers would insist that I was a boy, but that’s a story for another time.)

Here’s the struggle. I love when what I love becomes accessible to others. However, while it pains me to write it, I struggle with the expectation that we need a movement, a noisy focus, a show if you will, to attract, engage and empower women. Yes, role models are critical and for those that identify along gender lines, gendered role models are important.

However, what if I don’t particularly care about my gender? What about if I want to do what I want to do, independent of whether the world is giving me approval?² I stuck with math because I was fucking good at it and I loved losing myself in problem solving and winning. (If only my 34 yr old brain were as fast as my 14 yr old brain!) For me, it took a teacher ³ to throw me into computers and since then there’s been no looking back.

When I found myself in Portland for an internship summer, I ended up dropping out of college and moving here to pursue the .com dream. The dream I got was working with incredibly strong women who became my first gendered role models. I had no idea there was anything else out there. These women were working in a field that they loved just as passionately as I was. And before I turn this into a “we had to walk up hill both ways” rant, I’ll stop there.

I certainly don’t mean to insinuate that a new generation (or current generations) of women should have to work as hard (or self-directed) as we did or the women before us. I’m simply looking for a way in which I can reconcile the portion of myself fighting against having to have an expectation of inequality based on my gender and wanting instead to avoid those conversations in favor of leading by action – focus on being a role model for younger women and girls as I once was without ever even mentioning a gender word.

Whichever way I slice it, I’m more excited about the growing diversity in my fields than I am struggling with the nomenclatures and conversations at play. Still, if someone could help me stop from cringing at the sound of the simple phrase ‘women in technology’, I welcome your insights and ideas.

Asides: 

• 1 – Note the importance of an adverb in the previous sentence, as heels are not sensible on their own. On their own, I had to take them off near the end of the day and pack up the booth barefoot. (back)
• 2 – I can’t help but think about my favorite poem, A Poem About my Rights, June Jordan (back)
• 3 – More in a future post (back)

Extra: Today is Day 16, Post 14 of my 30 day blog challenge. Click ‘Follow’ at the bottom of the page to receive weekly updates in your inbox or follow me on Tumblr if that’s your scene. 

The post New in Tech: There’s a line for the women’s restroom appeared first on Jewels.

IndieWebCamp is a gathering of web creators building and sharing open web technologies to advance the state of the indie web. We get together for a weekend to talk about what has been done to empower people to own their online identities, and then spend a day hacking and creating.

After the debacle that was the Instagram terms of service and Facebook’s privacy bashing, I spent quite a bit of time dreaming and scheming of ways to clean up this virtual mess I’d made of photos, status updates, cries, cheers, ramblings, reviews … even typing this sends my stomach in a knot.

I’d long since stopped journaling and blogging, much in the same fashion as I’d stopped using my Nikon F3. Instead of cluttering my physical world, I was trying apps, baps and widgets that promised instant processing, cluttering my virtual world (which, counter intuitively, is not as easy to clean up. Electronic trails don’t burn in the campfire). While it sounds voluminous, my main concern was wildfire spread. I was posting directly on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram – you name it. I don’t even keep track of all the accounts I create in the name of trying things out anymore.

What bums me out is that in the excitement of experimentation, I burnt myself out. I lost scent of my own trail, my own vision, my own projects. So when I heard Tantek announce IndieWebCamp and their mission to inspire a world to own their own space and their own content (again), I felt hope. Hope felt like a helium balloon being let go, able to float on its own and gently tugging at the string – my spine.

OK, so that was nearly a month ago and I have a Safari to get to. In this installment of my #30dc, I’m working towards two objectives:

• Stopping the creation of new virtual clutter by using this site (at least for now) as my  funnel for sharing.
• Catching up on some exciting adventures I’d held back from sharing while I was directionless and overwhelmed.

West Coast Game Park Safari

As my girlfriend and I were driving back up from a romantic wedding on the beach, we were half trying to get as far back into Oregon as we could and half dallying to take pictures of the romantic sunset. (Try and guess which half was doing what!) As dusk settled south of Bandon we began seeing signs for a “Wildlife Safari” and having recently seen a Cheeta at Tedx I just *had* to check it out. So I begged that we wouldn’t drive tooooo far past the promised safari land so we could return the following day, after work in honor of my birthday.

I felt like I’d just been promised a stop at Walldrug on the way to Mt Rushmore and I was excited. The next day was my birthday and in all ways perfect. I woke up to birds and a big sky, had enough bars of signal to setup my own hot spot and work from the state park, was close enough to Bandon that we rolled in for lunch and finished my afternoon meetings on the boardwalk … and had enough time to jet down to the game park well before closing.

Despite my enthusiasm, we were skeptical and I’m happy to share that it was fabulous. The caretakers treated the animals with care and shared personal stories of raising the kittens and rotations of the big cats in the runs. While I’m too tired to share more, the only downside I remember is the incessant crowing of the peacocks.

Without further ado, I share a few (phone) snapshots from Oregon’s own West Coast Game Park Safari. I can’t wait to process my camera shots & share additional IndieWebCamp inspired and related actions and projects in future posts.

Extra: Today is Day 4 of my 30 day blog challenge. Click ‘Follow’ at the bottom of the page to receive weekly updates in your inbox or follow me on Tumblr if that’s your scene.

The post IndieWebCamp and a Safari appeared first on Jewels.

So I set out to optimize my site for speed and decided to share that as today’s #30dc post.

First, a bit about my environment:

• Basic GS hosting account on MediaTemple.
• A free Cloud Flare account that I really know very little about. I clicked through a promotion one time a long time ago when I was in my Media Temple control panel.
• WordPress 3.5.2 with wp-cache plugin active.

To start with the problem of performance on the admin side, I read somewhere that the primary culprits for slowness are plugins and themes. So I went to Plugins > Active Plugins to see the full list of plugins active. I then de-activated all of my plugins via the database. In a new browser window, I loaded my admin and browsed a bit. The interactions felt faster, though not quite as zippy as I would have liked. I then went to Plugins in this new window and went through activating each of my previously active plugins taking the time to browse a bit in-between to gauge whether or not I felt that plugin was the cause of tardiness.

NOTE: I wouldn’t typically do this in production for any client site, nor would I recommend it. However, I wasn’t worried about the random, midnight visitor seeing something ‘funky’ so proceeded to test as if I were on a development or staging or otherwise private version of the site.

While this was highly unscientific, I decided not to re-active a few plugins including Feed Statistics. This was the first one that brought my admin to a crawl when it was activated. Since I wasn’t using it anyway, I recorded the few stats I had and killed it. In addition to the perceived performance gain on the admin side, I knew that my feed URLs were my most frequented URLs so I figured this could reduce the load on my server in general. From there I chose not to reactivate plugins I knew I was no longer using anyway.

Since the public portion of the site can be accessed without a login, I proceeded to benchmark my site’s current performance at Pingdom.

• Performance Grade: 87/100
  • Leverage Browser Caching – 15/100
  • Remove query strings from static resources – 90/100
  • Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header – 96/100
  • Specify a cache validator – 93/100
• Requests: 64
• Load Time: 4.79s (from the Netherlands)
• Page Size: 2.8mb

Yikes. It was as bad as I thought thought, even with wp-cache enabled and running. This got me on the hunt for a better cache plugin where I then landed on W3 Total Cache. I remembered this from my time at Substance, so considered it safe to begin playing with immediately.

Knowing that it can take some trial and error to get the settings right in that they both boost performance and don’t break the site, I proceeded to test each general option out individually. For tonight, I’ve settled on the following:

• Page – enabled (Disk:Enhanced)
• Minify – disabled (when it was enabled, my theme could no longer dish up thumbnails and I wasn’t about to dive into troubleshooting that at this hour)
• Database – disabled
• Object – enabled (Disk)
• Browser – enabled
  • All options except “w3 cache header” and “disable cookies for static files” are checked
• CDN – disabled
• Reverse Proxy – disabled
• CloudFlare – enabled
• Monitoring – disabled (while I’ve heard that NewRelic may now run on MT, I didn’t have the time to go through trying to get this setup again)
• Miscellaneous – Enabled Google Page Speed dashboard & “verify rewrite rules”
• Debug – Off

As I poked around to make sure stuff worked, I also ran my site through Pingdom again and again. When I first activated W3 Total Cache – before I had any settings enabled – the performance plummeted. So that showed me that wp-cache was doing some good.

After getting all of these options set, I was still only getting a Performance Grade of 88 and load time > 2s. Pingdom was still recommending that I “Leverage Browser Caching” so I went into my Performance > Browser Cache settings and checked all the boxes I could. When I ran the Pingdom tests this time, I got a B+ if I use my old high school’s grading scale. And while I ‘d like to edge that up even higher over time, I decided tonight wasn’t that time. Sleep is far too exciting!

So for now, I’ve settled on the following report:

• Performance Grade: 93/100
  • Leverage Browser Caching – 90/100
  • Remove query strings from static resources – 61/100 (down from 90)
  • Specify a cache validator – 95/100
  • Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header – 100/100
• Requests: 61 (down from 64)
• Load Time: 1.22s from the Netherlands, 1.11s from Dallas
• Page Size: 2.6mb  (down from 2.8mb)

As for what’s next, I’d like to look into better optimizing my images and consolidating some of the asset requests. (That doesn’t include the rest of the interface and IA changes in the hopper.) I’d love to see it come in under 2mb and load in < 1s. I have a feeling I’ll be racing something in my dreams tonight.

Extra: Today is Day 3 of my 30 day blog challenge. Click ‘Follow’ at the bottom of the page to receive weekly updates in your inbox or follow me on Tumblr if that’s your scene.

The post A Need for Speed: How I sped up my WordPress Admin and WordPress (.org) Blog appeared first on Jewels.

I recently found myself tired of having so many experiments out in the wild of the internet – sites I’d created for one test or another, collecting dust and confusion. So I decided it was time to kill them. And to kill them, I just needed ONE.

My dream: one, easy-to-use site where I can write and stash proof of new experiments, travels, dreams, and life. From this ONE site, I can push the content that I’ve created and own to any site or service my heart desires. I’d then be able to pull from this central content repository to feed my portfolio and project sites, thus filtering my own content to build cohesive and focused experiences. 

I spent quite a bit of time on Tumblr tonight, with the expectation that jewelmlnarik.tumblr.com could be that site.

My reality: I poorly assumed that one could search Tumblr. Turns out that one can only search tags – and by exact match only. Because I can’t take back this time, I can only hope that Yahoo! brings its search skills to Tumblr. They recently transformed Flickr into a site that’s usable by fixing the display to meet the needs of their photographer audience … so here’s to hoping they can fix Tumblr.

The post Yahoo: may you do to Tumblr what you did to Flickr appeared first on Jewels.

It’s been a long month recovering from a corrupt hard drive and many lessons have been learned. Since my track record is 1 computer corruption/data-loss/water-spill/theft per year, I’ve decided to document so next time I’m only out a few hours.

(1) INSTALL PHP & MySQL: Followed the incredibly easy steps at http://maestric.com/doc/mac/apache_php_mysql_snow_leopard

(SNAG) Ran into a snag with MySQL, as I kept getting an error when trying to start it. It wouldn’t start in the preference pane, nor at the command line.

(SOLUTION) Download the correct version for my Airbook. Intel Macs (AirBook, PowerBook, etc.) are x86

(2) Fix php.ini: I still had to fix the socket locations as defined in php.ini – but that was easy, thanks to maestric (see link above)

(3) Install MacPorts: Followed the instructions @ http://www.macports.org/install.php

(4) Install McCrypt: Pretty sure I skipped this the second time around. If I have to do another one of these fresh installs again, I’ll try better to update this list.

(5) Apache Mod_Rewrite: Lastly, I’m still struggling with getting Apache’s mod_rewrite to work correctly. That is, even though I have it installed and activated, my local WordPress sites don’t work unless I turn the permalinks off. Which is a bit of  a pain since I then have to remember to update those settings when I upload to the server.

(6) Database Backups: Unfortunately, I found out that my TimeMachine backups had already deleted the last full backup of my machine pre-wipe out by the time I realized that I’d forgotten to load in all my old databases. This meant that I lost all of the work that I’d only done locally and hadn’t yet uploaded to any dev/stage/production server. So note for the future: treat your local machine like a server and do mysqldumps that you can be easily backed up via your current backup routine and then easily loaded when needed.

Happy Instals.

The post Installing PHP, MySQL and MacPorts on Snow Leopard appeared first on Jewels.

• The USA has an estimated population of 308 Million.
  • Of these, roughly 250 Million are 14-95.
• Facebook has 400 Million users world-wide.
  • 70% are outside of the US, leaving us with 120 Million Americans.
  • That’s darn near 40% of our population – or 2 out of every 5 Americans for those of you preferential to chewing gum commercials.
• If we look at these by age ranges, I have a hunch that this ratio will creep closer to 50% – or 1 out of every 2 for those of us between the ages of 15 and 40.
  • If anyone can find Facebook data on US members by the same age groups, I’ll do the math.

Now let me go back to that word series. On one hand, I want to fill in “Dislike” and start on a rant of how Facebook is perpetuating the teenage fallacy that the world, choices and judgements are black and white. And that our opinions are facts. And there is no room for savoring chocolate or appreciating nuance. That there is only Like and Dislike.

On the other, Facebook has no Dislike button. So I can’t completely back that up, though living in America’s #2 hipster capital, Portland OR, I can begin to argue that the lack of an opinionated “Dislike” is encouraging apathy. Don’t agree with something? Eh, let it slide. No use in caring enough to disagree or debate.

In both hands is a rather scary phenomenon: nearly half of us Americans are being faced with a seemingly trivial choice more and more frequently every day: do we like something? There is no “kinda-like”, “kinda-think-is-funny”, “don’t like it, but curious where this is going”, “my condolences, i’d like to stay in the loop so i know you’re ok”, etc. (The folks over at buzzfeed have quite the range-ometer.)

After seeing more and more disturbing tea party videos where angry constituents blather on about the only 2 options we as Americans have, to LOVE our country and to HATE our country, I grow concerned that we’re teaching our youths and even ourselves to be intolerable. That there is no in between.

I’m not saying that I want to see 5 stars everywhere, but the simple task of rating engages our brain in a much different way than the simple yes or nothing. What would happen to our collective groupthink when we began practicing critical thinking and rational assessments on a daily basis rather than emotional extremism?

Possibly Related Reading: Culture of Intolerance: Chauvinism, Class, and Racism in the United States, by Mark Nathan Cohen. If anyone reading this has read this book or has any other recommendations on the topic, please let me know.

Cheers,
-jewel

The post How Facebook is Breeding a Country of Intolerance and Extremism – NOT Bringing Us Together appeared first on Jewels.

I have a dream that one day on the golden hills of Silicon Valley and in the lush shade of Silicon Forest, business and organizational leaders will sit at the table of processes and system design, build and operation with REAL PEOPLE.

Let’s face it. In today’s fast paced world, when everyone’s faced with more decisions than ever and at an accelerating pace, we can’t afford to keep forgetting that those “users” we either need to collect data from or push data to (via our web site, application or larger organizational process) are REAL PEOPLE.

Think about yourself on a busy day. If you have to spend too much time trying to figure something out (like how to submit a form, or purchase that perfect gift) then chances are likely you’re not going to do it. And what about if you have to spend hours doing something that should take only 15 minutes? You’re likely to put that task off, or not get as much done in your week as you could. Your organization loses money and you lose valuable time.

That’s why I focus on the REAL PEOPLE. I believe everyone deserves a few extra minutes with their kids, pets, friends, family or self every day. Time I can easily give everyone via intuitive interfaces, well defined data and easy interactions.

The post An IxD Manifesto appeared first on Jewels.

After several weeks of no working printer, I finally sucked it up and decided it was time to fix it. The error message “Ink System Failure” had me thinking that I’d installed a faulty ink cartridge. (I have them refilled at the awesome Inkwell Xpress in downtown NE Portland, where Good Dog Bad Dog used to live.)

I went out and bought brand new ink cartridges, to rule out the ink-replacements as a problem. And still, no matter what I did, I kept getting the nasty Error: 0xc18a0001. HP’s support site instructed me to remove all the cartridges, turn off the printer and unplug it for 2 minutes. Then plug it in, power it up and voila! it would magically work. Only it didn’t. Then it instructed me to take it in for servicing.

Servicing? Apparently what they meant to say was “scour the web for tips from other people who have suffered from the same problem. We know about the issue and how to fix but we don’t have to care about you.”

The biggest obstacle was wading through the heaps and heaps of irrelevant posts, sketchy solutions and various rants and raves. But an hour or so later, I found it. The solution that worked. Sweet Jesus!

ANSWER (to most of life’s questions): hard reset

HP C5180 All-In-One Printer HARD RESET:

1. Hold down HELP + OK button and unplug printer (could experiment with regular power-off, but I opted for brute force)
2. Hold down HELP + OK button again as you plug the printer back in. Then power it on, if it doesn’t power on automatically. Be Safe: keep holding the buttons until the printer turns itself off. (It took mine less than a minute.)
3. Now you can release the buttons and simply power it back on. (I held my breath, but that’s not required.)
   • I got an error message about “improper shut down” since I unplugged it w/out powering down. After I clicked “OK” the printer was just fine and didn’t mind anymore. And now I can print.

The post How I Fixed my HP C5180 Printer appeared first on Jewels.

“In the End, Everyone is a Loser.”
– Andrew Ross Sorkin (new york times) on today’s/tonight’s Charlie Rose show.

Some may argue he was talking only in reference to the botched Microsoft-Yahoo deal, but the twinkle in the wunderkind’s eye illuminated omniscience.

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