Archive for March, 2010
Ellen Swallow Richards: The Queen of Clean Water
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
Today is Ada Lovelace day. It’s a day to highlight amazing women in technology. I know some good technologists personally, but I want to focus more on the reasons we were able to go to university, to be seen as capable of doing all that we can do now.
“They are so afraid we shall break down, and you know the reputation of the college is at stake, for the question is, can girls get a college degree without injuring their health.”
-Ellen Swallow Richards
My choice for this year is Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911), the first woman to be accepted into MIT, a huge (financial and emotional) component to them accepting women undergraduates within the following 10 years, and a highly successful chemist, whose work in sanitation control forever changed the way we measure water quality.
“The Faculty [of Vassar] do not consider it a mere experiment any longer that girls can be educated as well as boys.”
-Ellen Swallow Richards
Ellen Swallow Richards
I love her story. From a poor family, she worked hard for years to raise enough money to enter college, where she earned her bachelor’s degree. When she managed to gain admission into MIT, it was recorded that “it being understood that her admission did not establish a precedent for the general admission of females”. While Ellen wished to earn her doctorate after earning multiple degrees, MIT wouldn’t dream of allowing her to pursue it (luckily, a few years after, her precedent allowed another woman to do so).
She became an active member of many university associations supporting women entering into universities. She helped to begin the MIT Women’s Laboratory in 1879, where she worked as a teaching assistant without pay, teaching chemical analysis, industrial chemistry, mineralogy, and applied biology. In 1883 the lab was closed as MIT began to accept women as general students. HURRAH!
While it doesn’t seem like a big thing now, but Ellen Swallow Richards was also the founder of modern home economics. She was very interested in efficient home management, basically designed to allow her to get her domestic duties finished quickly, so she could get back to the science. I like this: in essence, she was working within the confines of society to make careers a little bit more accessible for the average woman.
“I hope that I am winning a way which others will keep open.”
-Ellen Swallow Richards
Thanks to women like Ellen, if I wanted to learn engineering, mathematics, or any university degree I wanted, I could. She was lucky enough to have a husband and colleagues who supported her ambitions for an equal opportunity for women at MIT. She was all about supporting the next generation, to allow a space for them, if they deserved it. She had high expectations of women as academics when most of society treated women like second class citizens.
So, hats off to Ellen Swallow Richards!
If you want to read more about Ellen:
Wikipedia article on Ellen Swallow Richards
Making a race night record with wordpress
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
I’ve just completed a website for Pioneer’s Running. They are a great company, who are really passionate about what they do.
Screenshot of the homepage
Wordpress Table-reloaded
This running website really pushed the boundaries of what I have used wordpress for. Sure, I’ve used some plugins to pull content onto the homepage, for custom sidebars etc, but what I needed was a content management system that did tables, text, calendars and more. They wanted to have a way to display race results after they’ve had a timed race night every month. They wanted to be able to update the results themselves, and they don’t want to look at any code.
Luckily, I found a plugin that looks a lot like an excel spreadsheet, and it has been so easy to integrate it in! I used this plugin to make the race night results easy for them to update themselves. They’ve only had one race night, so here’s what it looks like now.
The backend interface
It’s a lot like excel, but not as complicated.
Other features
- -Add multiple tables onto any page with a simple tag onto your page [table id=1 /]
- -Every second row has an alternating background color.
- -Highlight a row by changing its background color while the mouse cursor hovers above it.
- -The first row of your table is the table head (HTML tag th).
- -The last row of your table is the table footer (HTML tag th).
- -The Table Name shall be written the table (HTML tag h2).
- -The Table Description shall be written the table.
- -Yes, use the “DataTables” JavaScript library with this table.
- -Style your table with your own custom css (although I couldn’t get it to make entry 1, 2, 3 have different styling, but if I figure out how to override it, will append this post)
- -You can export your tables
- -You can decide if you want pagination, if you want to allow them to sort, allow them to search (which works great!)
Reservations
My only issue with this solution is that as not everyone participates in every race night, hitting sort for that day puts the blank entries at the top. While it’s very customizable, if I had more client resources, I would have spent more time customizing it, but we all know how difficult changing these things can be!
Why don’t I have time?
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
I’ve recently starting working for myself. I absolutely love it– I love the projects, I love the work environment (right now I’m in my bed, with my cup of tea), the commute is tolerable (at some point I’ll have to migrate over to my desk) and I absolutely love having control over things.
But I thought I would have more time.
More time to set up my own projects, more time to spend blogging, more time to socialize, more time to learn and more time to work on my hobbies.
Except I don’t.
I don’t think I’ve ever worked such long hours. All my own projects, my pro-bono work, and even just keeping blogging (weekly blogging here sure hasn’t consistently happened) have taken the backseat. I love my clients, and I’m keeping them on good timelines, but I say I’ll have them something in a week, and I blink, and a week has gone by. Of course we all know that everything in web design takes longer than we expect, and I’m getting better at estimating and managing this, but it’s still a big thing. I must be doing something wrong, right?
This is a public display
I’ve put off the following things too long. I’ve been reading a psychology book that says people that go on weightloss programs on tv lose more weight because they are held accountable by more people. This study said that this works for lots of other things too: Tell lots of people what you’re planning on doing and you’re more likely to complete them, out of sheer will not to have to try and explain later. So here it is: a list of things I don’t get paid for, that I need to finish this month.
-A Smashing Magazine article that I researched in late January
-A pro-bono website for a non-profit learning program for kids that I started in January
-My own professional face, for more serious clients that I’ve been talking about making for months
-Design for an iphone game that my friend has developed that I’ve been toying with for months
Now, hopefully, out of sheer embarrassment, these four things will get done. Now remind me not to take on any more client work… I need to have fun one of these days too!
P.S. If you want me to berate you for anything, leave it in the comments, and I will make your life a living hell on march 30th!
