Ada Lovelace Day Blog Post!

I'm grateful to my parents for many things, but foremost might be that they never once told me there was something, anything I could not do just because I'm a girl. They might've been horrified if I took up football or skydiving or international banking, but it wouldn't have been because "girls don't do that." ("Sane people don't do that" would be more like it.) Dad was an engineer, he worked for the telephone company for years and knew how to climb telephone poles -- still could at 62 and how cool was that??! -- and spent WWII and the Korean War in the Signal Corps. Mom was artistic, wanted to paint and loved to sew, but she also could take apart radios and wield power drills.

So I took after both parents, and ended up a graphic designer using Adobe PageMaker and InDesign and Photoshop. I was pretty good at math, in 10th and 11th grade, and by then I'd heard of Basic...so in college, in 1980, I took my first computer programming class even though I'd already declared an art major. PL-C. Piece of cake! Assembler was a bit less cakey...and I stumbled blindly through Fortran hating every minute of it. No more programming classes. Painting and printmaking, much better. I still liked computers though. I admired a college screenwriting teacher who admitted she wrote several novels so she could afford a computer and printer in order to write more novels. (Is that tech-ie? Maybe...)

So I learned to use word processors, and bought my first (Radio Shack) PC (no hard drive) in 1986. Bought my next one (30 mb hard drive) in 1987. Cruel irony had me doing both DBase IV programming and PageMaker classes for a job. And even crueller irony that in a corporate role as a graphic designer/business communications guru I now and then ended up using my old nemesis Fortran on the VAX system to gather data. Irony complete when I, a designer on PCs, married a man who programmed on Macs. I'm writing this blog entry on my 7th lifetime owned computer.

But all this is everyday stuff. I'm just a geeky, nerdy female human who is not scared of math or technology, and make use of computers my everyday life. I admire everyone of my generation, and older, who has done this, same as I admire everyone who incorporates art in their everyday lives (by playing music or drawing or writing or taking pictures or dancing, whatever moves them).

I'm dedicating this (uh, mostly autobiographical) Ada Lovelace Day blog post to ladies of my personal acquaintance: Dr Margaret McMahon (rocket scientist) and Lori Bechtold (aircraft engineer). Fellow alumni of Hunter College High School, class of 78/79. We bonded over a mutual love of science fiction. They do stuff I can barely wrap my brain around, and they do it well, and I am extremely glad we live in a world where they and other women like them were encouraged and able to make the most of their talents and interests. You rock.

And also honorable mention to Barbara Krasnoff, who writes so well about techie-computer matters and makes it accessable to many other people over the years. And who also entered my life through interest in science fiction. And, Happy Birthday, Barbara!

May all of us be so fortunate as to find their bliss and follow it.