My post for Blogging Idol contest – Your IT budget on a shoestring

You have recently started a business, but don’t have a huge budget for all things IT?

Here are 17 free or inexpensive tools that will help you to establish your online presence and spread the word.

Your IT budget on a shoestring

It’s Ada Lovelace Day!

It’s a special day today: Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging about women in technology. I wanted to write about Grace Hopper but then I thought there’s too much written about Granny COBOL out there already.

I’d rather write about women I know.

My mother, who holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and has been working full-time as a researcher, together with cooking, cleaning, mending, standing for hours in lines in grocery stores, sewing and knitting for the family of four, for as long as I remember.

My mother-in-law, who worked all her life in a Soviet-style classified IT institution and still tries to teach my kids some assembler (over the phone, from Russia).

Maya Pavlovna Zimina, who headed the summer archaeological expedition, herding myself and about 10 other unruly digging teenagers throughout our most difficult ages, from 13 to about 19 when most of us were admitted to universities and at least half of us got married. Archaeology is not exactly technology, but still, she was a great role model.

My university mates. I was in the Computer Science faculty, and, strangely enough, about 90% of the people in my year were female. It is easily explained, though: university students used to be exempt from the mandatory Army draft, but a year before I entered the University the exemption was canceled, and boys flocked to the four institutes that still granted the exemption. The University was not among them, so we got only those boys who already served in the army and those who got exempted for health reasons. About 20% of all students, in total. The few that still got to serve were plucked from our ranks within the first year, and for the next 5 years we had to study in an environment resembling a nunnery.

Elena Sergeevna Ventzel, a math professor, doctor of technology, author of widely known textbooks on probability theory, scientific papers and popular science books. She also wrote great novels under the pen-name of I.Grekova (from “Igrek”, the Russian name of the letter “Y”), full of bitter truth and of praise for the glory of life and of the woman as a creative element.

My female IT colleagues in Russia. They got used to seeing job ads starting with “A programmer wanted, male, under 35 y.o.” They got used to talking to receptionists from recruitment agencies, “Er, you know, I hold a degree with honours in computer science, and I just returned from abroad where I worked for a major IT company”, and to hearing the abrupt response, “Our client asked for a man!”, followed by hanging up. I could not deal with it. It was easier for me to immigrate to Canada and build my life and career from scratch here.

My second cousin, a P.Eng., a professor in Durham College and a mother of three.

The wife of my other second cousin, a laboratory chemist and also a mother of three.

The effervescent Sacha Chua who taught me everything I know about networking, loving one’s work and being in love with life.

… I could probably go on, but there’s only 15 minutes left to midnight. That’s all folks! Or else Ada Lovelace’s day ends before I post, and my blog turns into a pumpkin.

Over 1000!

Wow, this post in my blog just got its 1004th view.
Aunt Tania’s Advice to an Aspiring Translator
(The second most popular is About me with 430 views.)

WordPress now supports easier LiveJournal migration

Great job! Check it out!

• Enter your LiveJournal username and password and you’re ready to go
• WordPress will automatically connect to the LiveJournal API and download all of your posts:

Russian President has a videoblog

http://blog.kremlin.ru/

You can leave a comment there if you like, but they are premoderated.

Free new books for book lovers – just publish your review afterwards

Do you like to read? Do you spend a ton of money on books? Do you love to share your book opinions with other people?
http://www.minibookexpo.com is for you! Just go and select the books. The publisher will even pay for the shipping. The only thing you have to do is to blog about the books you got.
(You have to be in Canada or US. Shipping to other countries may be arranged for some books, but you have to check.)

My top 11 posts

Aunt Tania’s advice for an aspiring translator
Malcolm Gladwell presents Outliers, his new book
About me
My 10-minute presentation
Obtaining your free credit report in Canada
Horrible experience in a Montreal “restaurant”
My social networking (for business and pleasure)
Good customer service: priceless, or How one should not treat bitchy customers
Toronto Public Library rant
Aunt Tania’s advice for an aspiring translator (continued)
This video is crap

Joe de Villa at tonight’s Nature Network Pub Night

Joe de Villa, whose blogging skills I always admire, will talk about blogging at tonight’s Nature Network Pub Night here in Toronto

http://www.joeydevilla.com/2009/01/26/talking-about-blogging-at-tonights-nature-network-pub-night-in-toronto/

The pub night is being held at Fionn MacCool’s at University and Adelaide (the full address is 181 University). People will start assembling there for dinner, drinks and conversation at 6:00 p.m. with the presentations starting at 7:00 p.m..

A new blog on photography

My friend Alex Gridenko, a photographer and graphic designer, who also restored photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky (and who is responsible for the header photo of my blog), now blogs in English.
Check out his blog for great photos and design insights.
Alex Gridenko – Graphic design, photography and image restoration

WordCamp 2008

I enjoyed it immensely. (WordCamp is an informal gathering of WordPress users where people teach, learn, eat, drink and have fun.) Here are the slides and video from David Peralty’s (@brandingdavid) presentation on how to make your blog really work for you: http://ping.fm/DglIK. For me, this was the most interesting presentation throughout the whole WordCamp, also Rannie Turingan’s presentation about making a visual gallery using WordPress, and Jamie Oastler’s about WordPress as a content management system with the richest interactive open source set of plugins you can ever imagine.

The next WordCamp (2009) will be hosted by PHUG.ca. You can contact Melissa Feeney if you want to volunteer.