You mean, that it was named McKinley in the first place?

Because there was a totally arbitrary political renaming - but this one wasn't it.

I haven't done what the OP is suggesting, but I used to (including in a much lamer age of data coverage) take off hiking while vaguely babysitting database builds - every time I'd hit a ridge or a peak I'd check for connectivity, and if I had it, I'd check to make sure nothing had broken too terribly. (And if I was feeling bratty, snap a picture and send it to my labmates.) But this was up in the Cascades - the terrain matters.

Another of my rules of thumb - more generally than just with the above excursions - was to do as much as possible on my phone (which was much easier to recharge via solar.) The solar sets ups have gotten better, and computer batteries have gotten better - I'm less stingy these days, but still. (But OTOH, the OP is describing activities where much of the time various checks might be able to be done via phone, saving the computer battery.)

Well, turning to science fiction for pleasant escapism that doesn't question the status quo is... well, I can't say made of fail, because there's an awful lot of that, but, darn, should it surprise anyone that this isn't the stuff that is winning awards?

I'm kind of fascinated by the argument around class divisions in SF, though when I try to map it to the folks I know I do find myself wondering how sensitive a measure that is. I suspect there's a generational component. I suspect there's a regional component.* But I know so many fans working service industry jobs who were all about the progressive fic, and so many well paid software engineers who weren't. (I am thinking of some hilariously awful conversations with a baby lead not so many years ago.)

* And this is where I'm probably most likely to be blinded myself - I'm from Seattle.

I think it's pretty valid to make a distinction between authors saying "Hey, BTW, my book is eligible to be nominated!" which a ton of people from all kinds of backgrounds do, and for that matter "Hey, this is a bunch of cool stuff I've read that you might want to check out that's also been eligible," to putting together a slate. There's an argument to be made as to where the sad puppies fell. There really isn't one with the rabid puppies.

(And really, as many people have pointed out, when you have so much stuff being published, and a relatively small body of people nominating things, it's a system where even a very small organized voting bloc can get something on the ballot. This isn't the first time this has come up, even, though it's the first time there's been a slate that I know of. There are a number of reforms to the nomination system being looked at, so things might be changing.)

Card... So, you do know that opposition to gay marriage is only one of the more recent bits there? And he takes it an awful lot further than a lot of people seem compelled to by their faiths. He was, at one time, one of my favorite authors. I attended one of his Secular Humanist Revivals way back when. He seemed to be a great guy. I mean, this was back when the net was flat, and I was a young thing, but still. ...and I guess I should be glad that the quality of his writing had been falling off by the time I heard about him writing about how there should be laws criminalizing homosexuality, which should then be selectively enforced to keep the unruly ones in their places. *boggle* The volume has increased and decreased at various times over the years, but I do think there's a difference, at least in degree between someone thinking that their own religion is a great reason some other people entirely shouldn't be able to get married, and their own religion is a great reason those people should be thrown in fail unless their keep their heads and voices down. Ew.

(Of course, as a bi woman it's perhaps not surprising that I'd take this a bit personally.)

I've been hearing a lot about "People don't like stories about self reliance any more! And everyone is preachy! We just want good stories!" ...as if these statements are entirely in harmony with each other.

Maybe I'm over influenced by a lack of sleep, but I've been getting pretty tempted to hang up my hat.

Okay, some basic factual errors. First off, the Hugos are a fan award, not a writer award - that's the Nebulas. They're both important, they aren't the same.

Second, the people who refused to grant awards were *the very people who paid $40 [or much more if they attended] to vote*. This wasn't some arbitrary decision, or a decision by some committee, there has always been an option of voting that it was better to not award an award in that category than to award it to the option on the ballot because they were so universally sub-par. This wasn't done by some committee, this was the voice of the voters.

Seriously - the summary was godawful and misleading, but the information is widely available.

...and most of the folks I know did indeed sit down and slog through most every story, and only voted "No Award" if they really felt nothing was up to Hugo quality. (Personally, I'm perfectly happy to stop reading about the point that stabbing pencils into my eyes sounds like more fun than continuing reading, but then I'm not a purist.)

The saddest story is the alternate universe where there wasn't an attempt to organize a voting bloc: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2...

(As an aside, I think there's at lot to be said to building bridges with sad puppies, though it has to be a mutual effort. Rabid puppies? Not so much.)

...and the thinkpad keyboards. And the thinkpad clitmice, with the hard buttons (goodness, that last almost makes me want to use one of the more polite forms of the name...) I looked at this briefly the last time I went shopping, but lack of input options made it seem awfully unattractive for some of my 3d modelling work.

(So I have two Thinkpads, a w-series for when I'm doing serious simulations and don't mind the weight, and a yoga12 for running around with.)

Yes, this. The part I found the most disturbing was:

"Maybe since we in the IT industry tend to be well paid, nobody should care, and there's no reason complain."

There's a pretty significant portion of the tech industry that isn't necessarily well paid, nor do they have much in the way of job security. When times are good, they do just fine. When times aren't, they bounce between really marginal contracts and unemployment. (I replaced IT with tech because I've spent most of my time in software development, so most of my knowledge of IT as a field is somewhat second hand.)

Tech culture tends to be all about individual achievement - and on the flip side, if you're not bringing in the buck, then you must be an underachiever, right? Which just means that if you are one of the workers who is more vulnerable, and if you are being exploited, there's more social pressure not to speak up about it, because you don't want to be labelled a whiner, when everyone knows that it's really that you couldn't hack it.

(Just in case there's any doubt, while I'm a big fan of people doing cool stuff, and rather like to do cool stuff myself, I think the above is a rather stupid and short sighted approach to structuring a either a business or a society.)

Still my favorite of his roles... but that's a hard pick. Damn, but he will be missed. So very good at being bad.

...gender essentialism already?

My experience is that most places once they are large enough to have to have real company policies have policies on office romances, and they tend to be not "Thou shalt not make a pass!" but more that you can't date within the same management structure. It's far more about power dynamics than office politics.

"Then your "black friend" is stupid..."

Or, to state the obvious, he's not your friend.

A research student was just by talking to members of our lab, and this is pretty much the argument I made. (And I wasn't making a Java bashing session, I was making a joke, though the two are not mutually exclusive.)

I'm not fond of Java, but it's a perfectly serviceable language and I'm not against writing code in it. I think I'm a little suspicious of the instructional language model, just because my observation has been that for most people it's around language three that they start realizing that learning new programming languages isn't hard and that it's not the language per se that's important. (I really realized this when I heard that Python was being widely adopted. I actively like Python - and I'm really dubious about it being a useful instructional language in a classroom setting. Even though I have run a Python club at times.)