I know not everyone feels they are better off since the storm, but I do. Now I can barely recall the restless and unfulfilled person I used to be. Five years ago I spent my time obsessing about my career and ambitions, now I spend it enjoying my family and friends via backyard BBQs, music or food festivals, cooking with my windows open, or just lounging on my porch with a beer while the babies play at my feet. Sure, I still have ambitions, but I don’t lose sleep over them. And I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.

From Katrina, I’m Over You Bitch by Andrea of Pistolette.

It turns out that many of the most common stereotypes about aging are dead wrong. Take the cliché of the youthful entrepreneur. As it happens, the average founder of a high-tech startup isn’t a whiz-kid graduate, but a mature 40-year-old engineer or business type with a spouse and children who simply got tired of working for others, says Duke University scholar Vivek Wadhwa, who studied 549 successful technology ventures. What’s more, older entrepreneurs have higher success rates when they start companies. That’s because they have accumulated expertise in their technological fields, have deep knowledge of their customers’ needs, and have spent years developing a network of supporters, often including financial backers. “Older entrepreneurs are just able to build companies that are more advanced in their technology and more sophisticated in the way they deal with customers,” Wadhwa says.

From Newsweek’s piece The Golden Age of Innovation.

This gives me hope.

1. In most situations where I am with other people of color, white people will try to communicate with me first.
2. I am more likely to appear in the media, especially if my skin affords me the designation “omniracial.”  (Hello, Beyonce.)
3. People will think I am pretty. full stop.
4. I am more likely to get a promotion than my darker skinned counter parts.
5. I can write blog pieces about my skin color and not reflect on the privileges that are associated with it.  (Wallace Thurman notwithstanding, literature, films, blogs are littered with primary and secondary textual analysis of the meanings of light skinnededness.)

From Huey Newton Complexes over at Crunk Feminist Collective, which may be the second dopest blog* ever on black feminism.

This.

I’d be lying if I said my ethnic ambiguity wasn’t an advantage in the privilege Olympics. I’m the Safe Negro. That’s made especially so because I’m also a smarty-art Negro from a middle class family.

Even as I feel defensive about the labeling and the stereotype that the beige among us feel compelled to prove our blackness (‘cuz uh, my Afro started off as a cost-and-manageability issue and my blackness is rooted in 30+ years of living as a black person), I recognize that I have the ability to trade in on my color privilege at any time. (And if I’m being real, I actively trade on my class and education privilege all. day. long.)

* Pssht. Y’all BlackFeminism.org was the dopest ever.

“If you need a job and you need to improve your life chances, you know, why not? I mean, it’s not that it’s free and it’s not that it doesn’t cost you, but it may be worth paying that price.”

That’s Joe Gyourko, a real estate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He was quoted in an NPR piece Devalued Homes Anchor Prospective Job Seekers. A less-discussed side effect of this housing crisis: decreased mobility and an inability to land perfect-match job candidates because they can’t sell their homes.

When your options are “stay put, hope you don’t get fired, and hope for the best” or “lose your down payment money plus whatever improvements you’ve made,” you can see why many job candidates are turning down plum opportunities to stay put.

Friendship is uniquely suited to fill this void because, unlike matrimony or parenthood, it’s available to everyone, offering concord and even intimacy without aspiring to be all-consuming. Friends do things for us that hardly anybody else can, yet ask nothing more than friendship in return (though this can be a steep price if we take friendship as seriously as we should). The genius of friendship rests firmly on its limitations, which are better understood as boundaries. Think of it as the moderate passion—constrained, yet also critical. If friendship, as hardheaded Lord Byron would have it, really is “love without his wings,” we can all be grateful for its earthbound nature.

From a wonderful essay in The Wilson Quarterly titled America: Land of Loners?. (Via Farbod)

ActionScript sounds like a weird choice, right? It’s client-side, not server-side. You can’t connect to a database or create files on the fly without some sort of middleware. And why would I suggest that budding programmers learn a dying language? HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript are going to (eventually) take over the world, right?

That stuff is true, or will be in the near term. Yet I still think ActionScript 3.0 is worth learning, and that it’s a great starter language for budding developers. Here’s why.

• ActionScript 3.0 is syntactically similar to other C-style languages. Curly braces rule! Semi-colons are awesome! Getting comfortable with how AS3 looks and works will make PHP or Java less intimidating.
• ActionScript 3.0 is strongly-typed. Strongly- (or strictly-) typed languages enforce rules for variable behavior. It’s particularly useful when debugging, and will help you understand what different variable types are and how they work across languages.
• ActionScript 3.0 is Object oriented. Objects are at the heart of several programming languages, and supported in several more. Getting comfortable with how OOP works in AS means it is easier to understand how it works in JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, and Java. In fact, ActionScript is in some ways similar to Java in how it’s structured.
• ActionScript 3.0 is a dialect of ECMAScript. So is JavaScript. It’s remarkably easy to switch between the two, which brings me to my next point.
• ActionScript 3.0 and Flash documents have a Document Object Model (DOM). Think of a Flash FLA as an HTML or XML document and ActionScript as the JavaScript that manipulates it. If you’re comfortable working with ActionScript objects and hierarchy, learning how to manipulate the HTML DOM is a breeze (and vice-versa).
• ActionScript 3.0 supports Local Shared Objects, which is similar to HTML5 storage, and other key-value based datastores. Yep. Local storage “super cookies” have been available in Flash for years now. Learning how to use them in Flash and ActionScript will help you transition to an HTML5 future. What’s more, key-value datastores are the next wave of databases. The data structure for a “NoSQL” store is similar to those for a local shared object.
• ActionScript 3.0 supports event-driven programming. Event listening and handling is critical to game development or interactive experiences in which the sequence of user input can’t be (or shouldn’t be) controlled. Knowing how to generate, add and remove elements from the stage, or when an item can be safely garbage collected are portable concepts that you can learn with ActionScript.

My point with this post isn’t to start a language holy war. I’m not even sure I like ActionScript, plus my first programming language was actually PHP. Still I recognize that the way ActionScript works and as importantly, how it’s used provides a nice foundation for beginning developers.

Sometimes I love attention from men. But when it’s respectful and when I clearly indicate that I want it. Guys, here is how you tell if a girl is interested: if she makes direct eye contact with you, smiles, and asks you questions, then she probably wouldn’t mind getting to know you. (If you’re British and you’re in America, you’re pretty much given an automatic green light. This is a half-joke.) If she’s mumbling, looking down, closing off her space to you, and gives short answers, she wants you to leave. She’s just been conditioned to think that she can’t say, “Get the fuck away from me.” There are LOTS OF WOMEN, I KNOW, WHO CAN SAY THAT. And who have every right. But I’m just not one of them. I can’t. I have to to think of myself first. I can’t worry that you, strange man in a bar, is going to flip out when I reject you harshly.

From Stop Hitting On Me. So tempted to print this on a flyer and hand it out to every man between here and downtown Atlanta.

Also see: Guest Blogger Starling: Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced

Now, I’m privileged enough to have a lot of access, but just a few years ago, I certainly didn’t have a social network that connected to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, despite having a relatively large network. And I still don’t know the first thing about sports, so a sports analogy only emphasizes that I’m not part of the cultural assumptions baked into interactions with some parts of the VC world. So even somebody like me who’s male, connected and willing to cross cultural barriers can’t get in. And that reality isn’t just accepted, it’s known. Known well enough to be documented by others, in an industry where perception is as important as reality.

From bloggerrific super-star Anil Dash‘s post Mechanisms of Exclusion.

While reading And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, I came across something known as a shrub — a brew of vinegar, sugar, and berries or ginger used to flavor soda water, or during colonial times, rum and gin.

Though the book described how shrub was made, it didn’t feature a recipe. So I made one up. Feel free to change the proportions to suit your own tastes.

Ingredients

• 1 cup cider vinegar
• 1/2 c blueberries
• 3/4 c water
• 1 c sugar

What to do

Mix the vinegar, water and berries in a non-reactive saucepan. Simmer until the berries macerate (become berry pulp). Stir in the sugar, and reduce the mixture to the point where it becomes a thin syrup. If I was paying attention to the clock, when I first made this, I’d guess it takes 20 minutes. But keep an eye on it. You don’t want it to boil over.

The traditional way is to steep the berry-and-vinegar mixture overnight and add sugar the next day. But my way takes less time .

To drink

Add some shrub to the bottom of a glass, top with soda water and ice. Add light rum (10 Cane is a nice one for this) if you want to get a little tipsy.

Also try

• Strawberries
• Blackberries
• Ripe mango

A law against spousal rape. A law against spousal murder. A paycheck of her own. And egalitarian marriage. Once women got political power, they insisted on being protected by the ordinary privileges of citizens of a modern democratic society rather than a husband fenced in by the medieval kind of marriage to which Douthat and Schulman would return. Uppity women changed marriage a lot. If they hadn’t, why would any gay or lesbian person want a share in it?

That’s the last paragraph of Linda Hirshman’s Slate piece, The Damsels Demur. In it, she applies the smack down to conservative columnists Ross Douthat and Sam Schulman and their limp defenses of heterosexual marriage.

American anthropology professor Bobby Vaughn, who runs the website Afro Mexico, says research shows that Afro-Mexicans outnumbered those of European descent up until 1810 and by a factor of roughly 2:1 until the 1700s.

From Mexico’s lost culture on Global Post.

Those guys make money because they’re saying something that Fortune 500 companies and major investment banks like to hear. It’s ad copy about how Social Media empowers the little guy, and it’s simply not true. The big winners are the aggregators, the central nodes in the network, and those are all owned by the same people who own everything else, here in the Land of the Free™.

From Justin Boland’s Audible Hype piece The Top 5 Social Media Lies. Via @rafikam.

Twitter certainly had such an easy win when, while at a fraction of the scale the service now operates at, one of their engineers rewrote their in-house Ruby-based message queue in Scala. That was great, but it was scaling in the small. Twitter is still fighting an uphill battle to scale in the large, because doing so is about much, much more than which technology you choose.

So says Alex Payne in his post Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large (emphasis mine).

That’s not a knock on Twitter, per se. Alex’ larger point is that scaling is not just about hardware OR software. Instead it’s a complicated mix of the two, with a lot of testing, and at least as much magic thrown in.

[Via Saidimu]

I believe CS and Web Development currently select for certain masculine qualities that are largely unrelated to someone’s prowess as a coder. I believe it is these tangential code-cowboy qualities women are unable or unwilling to emulate, and not their skill or capacity for abstraction, problem solving, creative thinking, or communication — All of which actually make them better developers.

Right on Nicole Sullivan. (Though I hesitate to call these qualities masculine because it feels essentialist and not culturally-specific.)