I’m a biologist, an Apple/Unix geek, an audiophile, an avid reader and film buff, and an amateur (in both the inept and unpaid senses) photographer. I lived and worked in Oxford (the one in the UK, for any US readers) for 13 years, which was quite an experience. You can see some of the photographs I’ve taken around Oxford on my photoblog, Wings Open Wide. In 2004, I moved to the heart of England—Birmingham, Land of the Brummie — which is different in many ways.

I apparently do not have the gene for interest in make-up, clothes or celebrities. Believe me, I’ve tried to be interested. I’ve even bought so-called "Women’s magazines", convinced that I can’t be so psychologically different from the rest of female-kind. But eventually I realized that I just do not have any interest in them, and now I just head straight for the computer/hi-fi magazines aisle. This makes time spent in the hairdressers very dull.

Don’t get me wrong - in respects other than my interests, I am resolutely female. I like the toilet seat left down (dammit), I worry about the cleanliness of my carpets, and I don’t find farting amusing. You might be thinking, "but surely we’ve got past this kind of gender stereotyping?" I thought so too, but the name of this blog comes from a particular look I get given at some point when I talk to someone (usually male) who knows (or thinks he knows) a great deal about a technical subject. For example, I’m in a hi-fi shop chatting to the assistant about speakers:

Me: Doesn’t the 601 have a tube-loaded tweeter derived from the Nautilus?
Him: [Thinks, confusion evident on face] But she’s a girl…

Now, I know that there must be other women out there like me — I even know a few. So part of my motivation for writing this blog is to say, "hi, you’re not alone" to them. Who knows, others who are not either female or geeks might also find it interesting, even if just from an anthropological perspective. My other reason for trying this weblog malarkey was because I had a piece of software (Tinderbox) that could do it easily, and I wanted to try it out — typical arse-backwards thinking.

In 2009, Volkan Unsal emailed me to compliment me on my unusual email handle, and mentioned that danah boyd had told an anecdote about a similar experience:

"During my sophomore year at Brown (1997), I attended SIGGRAPH. There was an Imagineering booth where Disney was doing recruiting. I approached and asked if there were internships available, but the recruiter told me that there were no internships available for artists. I responded by saying that I was a developer and that I wanted to code. The response I received was, ‘but you’re a girl.’"

Wow. At least the people I meet have the grace to only think it, not say it out loud. Thanks to Volkan for the link!

Colophon

The image of the fruit bat in the headers of this site is adapted from an image in the public domain, which was originally published in the 1911 Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (published by Merriam Webster, Springfield, MA). Why a fruit bat? Well, I’m fond of them, and the domain name (‘rousette’) is the New Caledonian French name for the fruit bat — the only endemic mammal in New Caledonia.

The site itself has been driven by a number of different bits of software over the years (Tinderbox, Movabletype, WordPress and ExpressionEngine, in that order), but I recently went back to basics and set it up as a static site, using nanoc, starting with a template by Mario Gutierrez, and adapting it to fit my preferences for permalinks, CSS styling and so on. While the pages are basically just static HTML, I do pull in some dynamic data from a variety of social media services by using Javascript: you can see the results in the sidebar and on the Lifestream page. The social media icons are either downloaded from the sites themselves or part of the Vector Social Media Icon set by Icondock.com.

The fonts are mostly handled via Typekit, a very easy way of using fonts which may not be installed on users’ system. If you visit this link, you’ll see some information about the typefaces I’m using. The site should mostly validate as valid XHTML and CSS, but I have to admit that I haven’t checked it recently!

I also maintain a photoblog which just pulls in photos tagged with ‘photoblog’ from my flickr account, and a Tumblr tumblelog called slipstream, where I tend to post images, videos, quotes or links that interest me, or brief posts.

Contacting me

Contact me and tell me where I’m going wrong (or even where I might be going right). Note: if you are rude or abusive I will give you one of my Granny’s patented Hard Stares™.