A little while back, the plucky Canadian magazine for young women and trans youth Shameless ran a feature on yours truly for the Shameless Women section of their blog. I’m hella flattered and humbled to have been covered and allowed a space to speak of the Montreal Girl Geek Dinners Group as well as some of my personal perspectives.

If you’re interested, here’s the link to the post for you to check out.

Beatrice was born in Mexico in 1922 and went on to attend the Bishop Strachan School in Toronto, and then to graduate in 1944 with first class honors in Math and Physics from the University of Toronto. Throughout wartime, she worked with the Royal Canadian Navy to design torpedoes complete with small computing devices and then went on to receive a S.M. in Math from MIT in 1947.

She went on to develop a programming system known as Transcode and continued to study at Cambridge where in 1952, she received her Ph.D and became one of the first women to receive a doctorate in computing. Beatrice worked at the University of Toronto as an associate professor for several years and then transferred to Queen’s University where she helped found the Queen’s Computing Centre.

In her final years of life, she took a sabbatical from her work at the University of Waterloo’s Department of Applied Analysis and Computer Science to work on assembler language design related to the logical structure of computers.

Throughout her career she published roughly 17 papers in various professional journals as well as many which appeared in the Quarterly bulletin of the Computing and Data Processing Society of Canada.

Beatrice passed away from a heart attack on May 8th, 1972 at the young age of 52.  The year before her passing, she donated many of her research papers to the Smithsonian Institute.

Semantics aside, what I appreciated was seeing so many folks in the audience who were interested in hearing our thoughts, sharing their own and asking questions. It struck me that not enough outreach has been done with my franco-girlo-geeko community here in Montreal and I’m looking into ways to change this (including ramping up my French classes).

I left the session and had an inspiring chat with one of the volunteers at the event who came up to me and said that he thinks that what I’m doing with the Montreal Girl Geeks is awesome. It left me tearing up because after some of the knocks I have taken in my life as the underdog, the goofy geek with glasses -  his shared story of not feeling like he fit in made me feel that I had found my people at this event.

I was thrilled to see an event as the Festival de Geek as it featured such a diversity of information, booths and interests. A heartfelt thanks goes out to the organizers, volunteers and exhibitors and sponsors for bringing the community together.

Oh and to the whole question of “Where the @#$% are the Girl Geeks?” – I came out of pre-internet society, but I still found a way to find like-minded folks to be inspired by – even living in small town New Brunswick. I joined groups, I created groups, I had pen pals who wrote zines (yes, I’m old) and traded cassette and video tapes with them. Life wasn’t as easy as it is now kids. Chances are that if you’re a pagan, Buffy fan over the age of 50 who prefers Star Wars to Star Trek, there’s a group out there for you to be a part of. Connect with folks- online and offline and chances are you’ll find someone who’s just as interested in your passions as you are and from this, a community will grow.

Where the girls are. MTL Girl Geek Dinner. Photo by Simon Law

I’m part of a panel discussion on this topic at the Montreal Geek Festival this weekend and I can’t really guarantee I have any answers to this question.

I know they’re out there and I’m stoked when I meet them.

I hope to be this kicky when I’m her age!

I think it’s essential to engage in this kind of discussion. I do appreicate the mention provided in this video that rather than create games specifically by or for women, gender eventually becomes a non-issue. I think it will take some time to result in this kind of situation, but I’m encouraged by the steps that many have taken to encourage women to get involved in the industry as more than booth babes.

While going through my growing RSS folders, I came across a blog post from the Shambhala Sun (a very smart Buddhist oriented publication), which spoke of a session at the recent TEDIndia conference given by Sunitha Krishnan, the founder of Prajwala India. Prajwala is an non-governmental organization in Hyderabad, India, opposed to forced prostitution and sex trafficking and focuses its energies on prevention, readaptation, rehabilitation and healing.

Below is a recount by author, teacher and translator Tyler Dewar of what occurred after the talk that Sunitha Krishnan had given and the remarkable compassion that snowballed throughtout the community.

Sunitha Krishnan brought the house down in Mysore today. And by that, I mean that she broke hearts and moved people to action. The audience listened painfully to some of the stories of the more than 3,200 girls she has rescued, girls who had endured unimaginable torture and yet, somehow, nevertheless found the will to heal and thrive. She spoke of the need for everyone to overcome silence about the phenomenon of human trafficking, the modern form of slavery, and for us not only to offer our love and compassion to its victims, but to be willing to accept them in our communities. She admitted that rescuing girls is never a very safe business, sharing that she can no longer hear out of her right ear, and that she has been beaten up during interventions more than a dozen times. Her strong voice and powerful body language ensured that no one could claim to have misunderstood her points.

During her post-presentation interview with TEDIndia’s co-host, Lakshmi Pratury, Ms. Krishnan had just finished describing a wish for Prajwala to have permanent property to establish its headquarters in India (due to social stigmatization, Prajwala is charged extraordinarily high rent for office and work space). At that moment, a woman (whose name I will try to report here when I find it) called out from the audience, “Excuse me. I’d like to give ten thousand [US] dollars. Could I please have eight other hands of people who will also give ten thousand dollars?” Several hands sprung to the air within seconds. Ms. Pratury, later in the day, would also report that Google had pledged to offer employment to some of Ms. Krishnan’s rescuees, and that at least $100,000 in donations to Prajwala had been pledged.

To read the full article, visit the Shambhala Sun blog.

I blog in 3 differnt locations plus I added a guest gig with Frames per Second magazine to do a bit of Fantasia Film Festival coverage. Considering I let my Twitter fixation get in the way of my true love of blogging, I have a lot of apologizing to do to you, dear reader. Oh. And a lot to catch you up on.

I started a new job a few months back which gives me a good taste of community, and in particular a women’s-oriented community. I’m learning so much about the ‘average Canadian gal’ as opposed to the ‘not-so average Canadian tech gals’ which I am used to socializing with. I’m gaining some great insights on how moms-who-aren’t-mommybloggers use social networks and online websites and it’s helping me to open my eyes to how much outreach needs to be done in speaking with this audience. Most of my social media ‘mavens/ divas/goddesses’ or whatever they are calling themselves, already get it.

Stay tuned to see what this all goes. I’m still working to figure it out myself but I’m happy to watch how the community I’m now a part of is using the internet to connect and share with one another.

I’m getting married. Most of my career has been spent in the project management space. So you’d think I’d have a handle on planning, timelines and generally having my shit together. No.

Eloping is a word that I don’t say as a threat.. but as a soothing mantra.

I bought a kick @$$ ring from a talented local designer – Rachel from Brazen Design.

Isn’t it lovely?

Yet again, my love for Etsy artisans has been realized so pop on over there and pick yourself up a little treat from a local seller.

Truth be told, Etsy is also another site that keeps me from blogging so please don’t blame me if you forsake your blog for nonstop digital window shopping.

Girl Geek Dinners stuff has gone on hiatus for the summer. I need a well-deserved break while I ramp up in my relatively new job and get hitched, so our little group with a big soul will need to put on it’s lovely one-piece swimsuit and sit in a chaise lounge while momma balances life, love, career and chunky rings.

Dubbed ‘The Recession-ista Tour’, Sarah is doing a quasi-Etsy trunk show as she is going to work with local designers to create gowns from recycled, second hand clothing. She’s looking to wear a different piece for each stop and at the end of her tour, each gown will be auctioned off on ebay with the proceeds to be donated to the David Suzuki Foundation.

The first designer featured on Sarah’s site to provide clothing for part of the tour is Norma W whose technicolor bags are sooo cute. You can check out Norma W’s etsy shop via this link.

Thanks to the talented and giggily Anile Prakash for her non-BabaWawa interview style and her skills with the beautiful and omni-directional Snowball microphone.