This week is class week (I’m learning how to code in .NET) and iPad week (I haz one!) and my friend’s kid’s Facebook ‘wedding’ (don’t ask, just don’t).
But today I feel like I’m learning new things that are really easily a part of my everyday life. It’s amazing how much my WordPress ‘free’ work has helped me in class, or my old MUSHing ‘free’ work with switches has helped me. Or … well, basically, all that fun stuff I do in my spare time? Really has made me smarter.
Playing games made me want to learn new things. Like ‘Well it’s great that I can use this command to shoot someone, but what I really want is…’ And with everything I’ve played (save my Wii), they’ve been Open Source code, so I was able to crack it open, study it, learn it, and run with it.
Not everyone can, but I did, and now, the college dropout no longer feels like she’s an idiot for not taking more computer classes, or finishing school. I feel like I just found a new way of learning which works for me. I feel very smart and very accomplished, even if a lot of this class is below my learned skills level. Mostly I’m using the class to learn how to use Visual Basic and Visual Studio. The latter is more important, as I’m supposed to be using it!
I work in corporate America. Men outnumber women at a sickeningly high ratio. I work with many very smart people. I am a woman, and I have no college degree. I am well respected by my colleagues (if seen as aggressive and *ahem* argumentative and opinionated). But they know I do my job, I do it well, and I’m reliable. Every once in a while, I’m suddenly reminded that being a woman makes me ‘different’ somehow, and I feel like I’ve caromed off an invisible force field. 
Blogetery was shut down, mysteriously, over the weekend. It was a WP MultiSite setup, with around 70k blogs. Not terribly abnormal to have an install that big, but the thing as an unnamed law enforcement agency shut them down. Details, such as they were, were posted at ReadWriteWeb: 
Or: You are NOT Lance Armstrong.
