I am a small woman, not unattractive, long blonde hair. It is terrifying to think of approaching my car alone in a parking lot or parking garage, especially at night, and having the stranger following me know that my car doors will automatically unlock when I get near it. You can hear the locks click, and the interior lights come on. I have to turn my back on the follower in order to open the door, and it takes some time and effort to open the door, hop in, and lock the door again. How in the world is this a good idea?

A mammogram found my breast cancer quite easily, after I indicated the location of the lump in my breast. I had discovered it in the shower. I had followed the conventional guidance of having a mammogram every two years. My cancer reached stage two well before the next scheduled mammogram. So, the technology worked just fine. But it was ineffective at the task of early detection.

Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. Those are virtually meaningless to me. I use the tedious filter setup to sort my email into categories that are meaningful to me (doctor, work, events). I am still irked by the recent changes in their Calendar which forces start- and end-time into items, thereby basically forcing everything to have a duration of more than hour if I want to be able to read my caption for the event.

A customer service rep on TP-Link's chat support this morning was completely unaware of the problem. After checking with the engineers, they said they will be working on it. Hmmm, the vulnerability has been known for about six months, and is only now being reported on news sites after presumably waiting to give vendors time to develop fixes. And TP-Link has done, well, nothing? There's no word on the TP-Link.com website about the issue at all. The rep said that I would be contacted when the fix becomes available, but that is not a credible claim since the company has no information about customers. I'm disappointed, guys.

I just don't get this "hero" thing. I don't go to websites to see a gorgeous but meaningless photo. Slashdot is a conversation, not a photo scrapbook.

In the late 90's, there was a huge demand for web developers during the dot-com boom. After a long and successful career in finance and accounting, I built a huge Excel model that projected my company's financial statements out five years. Excel > VBA > VB6 > voila! This was way more fun than accounting. I got myself hired by a bespoke software development outfit in 1999 when I was 52, the only girl in a roomful of 20-something guys. I've pretty much been the only girl around since then -- the only one at work, the only one at the dev events & meetups. And always the oldest guy in the room. Right now, I am finishing up a mobile- and tablet-friendly web app done up in ASP.Net MVC4 with jQuery Mobile for a global corporation. It's been a wonderful project. I "had" to buy an iPad to test my app, which rocks on my Droid. I'm hoping to be able to do more web-to-mobile apps. This stuff is wonderful fun. I love making things. I love hitting F5 and magick happens. I compare my work to being a restaurant chef. I don't care that I am a faceless invisible worker back in the kitchen. I love imagining the client's delight when the plate is placed in front of them, my work, my product.