My article for Blog Idol contest: Resources for technology-related startups in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

This article contains some useful information that I inevitably accumulated over the past few years, as a SR&ED consultant and as someone who has recently started a business. It might save you some time that took me to figure out all this. Good luck with your startup!

Various camps, startup drinks, green drinks

Startup entrepreneurs and people who has been there and done that regularly meet to have a drink, exchange battle stories, get a sound advice and find a potential business partner or even an angel investor. Startup Drinks is a simple concept: a grassroots effort to make sure startup folks get in touch and stay in touch.

The same refers to Green Drinks which is a casual, monthly forum for environmentally-oriented individuals to have a few drinks, mingle and toss around ideas.

By the way, the next Green Drinks together with Startup Drinks will happen on May 26 at Grace O’Malleys – 14 Duncan Street, Toronto, from 5:45 to 9:00.

Various camps are also held in Toronto every month. See the description of some in this article. The admission to them is affordable or free. (Some impose a nominal fee to ensure that people who register do indeed show up, and your admission pays for your first drink.) Among other nice get-togethers, I should mention Product Camp and Girl Geeks Dinner.

Democamps

Democamps are such an important feature in the life of Toronto technology scene that it is worth a separate mention. An evening of beer, cocktails and tech demos for designers, developers & marketers, Democamp became quite an institution. It was conceived in Toronto, but now there are democamps in other cities and towns, too.

http://democamp.com/

Creative spaces for independent entrepreneurs

When you work from home, it is very difficult to concentrate! Independent business owners know that better than anyone. Besides, sitting between the four walls tends to get lonely. Because of that, several creative spaces opened in Toronto. Their founders, entrepreneurs themselves, formed a community of like-minded people and opened spaces downtown, offering reasonable monthly rates in a comfortable space. Born from the feeling of collaboration and connection found at events such as BarCamp and tech conferences, coworking is the social interaction of independent entrepreneurs, consultants, freelancers, developers, and writers out of their homes and cafes and into a creative space. A coworking facility is the shared office space for these individuals, where they can work independently in a social way. Rachel Young and Wayne Lee cofounded Camaraderie. Tonya Surman founded Centre for Social Innovation at 215 Spadina, and CSI recently acquired another building in the Annex to expand their space.

(Read more at BlogIdol website…)

Software documentation survey

What kind of documentation do you use when you’re programming? How useful do you find it? If you have three minutes to fill in a very short survey on the topic (it’s literally half a dozen questions), we’d be very grateful for your feedback.

My article for Blog Idol contest: My Microsoft Outlook Connector suddenly stopped working

Our dependency on technology becomes rather alarming.

If a global disaster strikes and you live in the country in an 18-century house, you will be able to get some firewood in the forest, bring water in a bucket from the river, catch a rabbit with a snare made of your suspenders, and roast that rabbit in your fireplace, or, at worst, on a barbecue in your backyard. And you will be able to have a proper outhouse of the system our great-grandfathers used.

If a global disaster strikes and you live in the city, on the 18th floor of an apartment building, you are helpless. There is no water source, no way of using the washroom and no way to cook food (most certainly your cooker uses gas or electricity).

What I wanted to say is, today my Microsoft Outlook Connector suddenly stopped working.

I have a Hotmail account. It is about 12 years old. It is the second e-mail address I got in my life. For many years it suited all my needs.

When I had to switch to Outlook Express, it took me about 1 minute to hitch it on to Hotmail, and everything worked perfectly.

About a year ago I started using full-scale Outlook, just because some illogical behaviour of Windows prevented me from doing something I needed, otherwise. It took me about 1 minute to hitch it on to Hotmail, and everything worked perfectly. Outlook has some extremely strange bugs but I eventually got used to them.

Then Microsoft decided that this is not good enough.

(Read more at BlogIdol website…)

Ada Lovelace Day 2010: Philippa Fawcett, English mathematician and educationalist

Related post: What do you think of diversity?

My post from the previous year: It’s Ada Lovelace day!

Philippa Fawcett’s parents were Henry Fawcett and Millicent Garrett. In many ways they are more famous than their daughter Philippa. Millicent Garrett Fawcett was a leader of English suffragists (the movement to grant women the vote). She had worked tirelessly, not only for the vote, but for the cause of women’s higher education in Cambridge. In 1871 she co-founded Newnham College in Cambridge, one of the earliest English university colleges for women. We take higher education for granted; however, it was not always so. The idea of women attending the University was greeted with derision when first seriously raised in the 19th century. In 1868 Cambridge’s Local Examinations Board allowed women to take exams for the first time. The first female colleges were formed in 1869 (Girton) and 1871 (Newnham). After that women were allowed into lectures, albeit at the discretion of the lecturer. By 1881, women were allowed to sit university examinations. Starting from 1921, they were awarded degrees rather than special certificates.

Henry Fawcett was a professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and Postmaster General in Gladstone’s government. (As Postmaster General, he introduced many innovations, including parcel post, postal orders, and licensing changes to permit payphones and trunk lines.)

Millicent Garrett also had a famous older sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who was a pioneer of women in medicine. She attended lectures and surgical demonstrations, from which everyone sought to exclude her. Some years later she had been elected President of the East Anglian branch of that very British Medical Association which at first had debated whether women could pursue rigorous medical studies.

Growing up in such intelligent, broad-minded and forward-thinking family surely stimulated and developed Philippa’s mind. At the age of fifteen Philippa was showing such outstanding ability at mathematics that her parents employed a mathematics tutor. She also began to attend mathematics lectures both at Bedford College, the first British university to grant degrees to women, and at University College London where she studied pure and applied mathematics from 1885 to 1887. Philippa Fawcett’s outstanding results in algebra and geometry led to her being awarded a Gilchrist scholarship to study mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge, the women’s College that her mother had helped to found.

Ada Lovelace Day 2010

I just pledged to participate in Ada Lovelace Day 2010, i.e. to publish a post on Women and Technology in my blog on March 24. You can join me and the others at http://findingada.com.

My post for this year: Philippa Fawcett

Here’s my post from the previous year: It’s Ada Lovelace day!

Related post: What do you think of diversity?

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.