the ryan king

I spend a lot of time writing text on a computer. Mostly just one computer and increasing in one application. I write so much markup (with and without angle-brackets), code and prose that I need to have a customized environment to help me out. I really wish it could be the same environment/editor for everything, but, unfortunately, browser <textarea>s, Mail.app and IM windows all all different input environments and must all be customized separately.

Uh, why?

Text editors should be useable as plugins in other apps which require text editing. I don’t know how Cocoa internals work, but I would think that there’d be a way to define an interface which such plugins could implement, which would allow interoperability.

I just want to use TextMate for everything, but as it is I’m required to do a lot of cut-‘n-pasting to make this happen.

My favoritest coffee shop has a blog. Rock on!

Flickr had a birthday party last night and now today its having a massage. After two years of work, it probably deserves a day off.

In the SF Chronicle today there’s an article about the proportion of men in American colleges. It a pretty good read and especially troubling material.

I’m definitely all for women taking advantage of opportunities presented to them (and creating more opportunities), but I also troubled when men and boys don’t take advantage of all the opportunities presented to them. Our nation needs educated men.

While helping a friend get started on Yet Another Social Networking Site today, the topic of gender balance online came up again. It seems that no matter what, every online or technology related social situation ends up with more men than women being involved.

Now, I’m not a social scientist, so I don’t having any defensible theories on why this is the case, nor any solutions for fixing The System, but I do have an idea/experiement I’m going to try.

I have accounts on a bunch of social networking sites, but there’s only two that I use on a regular (daily) basis: flickr and dodgeball, so my experiment will be confined to just these two sites.

My experiment is this– I’m going to create and maintain gender balance in my list of contacts on those sites, equal numbers of men and women. In the short run, this means removing men from my contacts lists, but so be it.

I’m sure this seems to many like a superficial, simplistic and artificial way to solve this problem, but seriously, I’m frustrated and don’t know what else to do. Hopefully this is a good starting point.

Who’s with me?