The Minority Report

It seems that I’ve missed Ada Lovelace Day.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.
Ada Lovelace Day — Bringing women in technology to the fore

Leah Culver gives me the heads up today by pointing out some significant women in the computer industry today. Personally, I’ve been meaning to dedicate a blog post or two to the incredible hotness of Marissa Mayer^W, Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google. Aside from her yummy gorgeousness, she must be incredibly intelligent to have been one of the first twenty employees of Google and still be there. I’d throw one up there…

Leah Culver goes on to point out some other hot chicks that have something to do with the computer industry. There is Valerie Aurora, which is an awesome name. She changed it from Val Henson and I like it because it is the name of an advanced text editor that I used to use a long time ago. Anyway, she’s hot too but I think it’s fairly obvious from her homepage that she’s dangerously intelligent. The kind of intelligent that eviscerates men for breakfast.

I’m working part-time for Red Hat
as a Linux file systems developer. I am spending my spare time on writing (about science, not fiction). I have a consulting company as well, VAH Consulting.
Valerie Aurora’s Homepage

Valerie Aurora has two old blogs that I’m going to check out Confessions of an Operating Systems Junkie, and Further Confessions of an Operating Systems Junkie. She also has a number of items published around the net including Kernel Hacking Lessons.

Leah goes on to point out Elaine Wherry, co-founder of meebo.com.

Elaine is a co-founder of meebo.com in Mountain View, California. She majored in Symbolic Systems at Stanford and upon graduating, joined Synaptics and led their Usability team for several years. In 2005, she started meebo with two friends from Stanford, Seth Sternberg and Elaine Wherry. Shortly thereafter, Nielsen/NetRatings named meebo the fastest-growing IM destination in the US – ahead of Google Talk and Skype Messenger. Investors include Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Elaine plays the violin and migrated west to California after growing up on a goat farm.
Speaker: Elaine Wherry: OSCON 2008 – O’Reilly Conferences, July 21 – 25, 2008, Portland, Oregon

Jesus, that’s three hot nerd chicks so far. Where the hell do you meet them??!?! Don’t forget about SEOAly the Jacksonville Florida search engine optimization expert that we have featured here on The Minority Report and graces us with her presence from time to time.

Finally, rounding out Leah Culvers list, there is Lisa Phillips, a brunette. I won’t hold that against her. I have no idea what she does but if the founder of Pownce thinks she’s worth mentioning then I’ll throw up a picture of her to oogle.

Finally finally, we have a new blog by Sheril Kirshenbaum over on DiscoverMagazine.com. She discusses sexism, feminism and her own feelings about being made an object in the blogosphere.

Shortly after entering the blogosphere, there was a period when I stopped posting personal pictures altogether… until I stepped back and thought about why I felt pressure to remain somewhat obscure. These reservations stemmed from wondering whether a woman can really be taken seriously as a writer for her ideas, if on some level she is first perceived as female. Evolutionary psychologists describe subconscious cues and I’ve encountered more than a few folks from the fishing industry to the Senate with overtly preconceived expectations on gender. I’d like readers here to recognize content before appearances, but I never had the option of anonymity. Eventually I realized that the truth is, by “hiding,” I’d been undermining myself by unintentionally creating self-imposed constraints based on fear. I’d been feeling the need to censor myself because of the potential for external bias. Thing is, those outside pressures are going to exist no matter what, so the only opinion of real consequence is my own.
The Intersection | Discover Magazine

Sheril and some dude, just recently moved their blog, The Intersection, to DiscoverMagazine.com.

I’d like to extend the virtual welcome mat (made of electrons only) to The Intersection — the Hive Overmind’s Discover Magazine’s newest blog! Actually, it’s not new: written by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, it’s actually been around a few years, but it’s new to DM.
The Hive Overmind grows: Welcome to The Intersection! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

I am personally glad that these chicks ventured out of the kitchen and into the world to contribute to the computer industry.

Happy Ada Lovalace Day!

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