All posts filed under: Non-Fiction

In Memoriam: Richard I Anderson

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Recently I was showing a usability issue of the institutional kind to a friend, and mentioned I had learned so much about human-centered design from taking Richard I. Anderson’s class, oh some 30 years ago maybe? So I wanted to check on Richard and stumbled upon the announcement of his passing and a memorial at BayCHI, an organization he gave so much of his time and energy. I retired early, and learned about Richard’s sickness and times of homelessness, contributed to “Friends of Richard,” and I think last time I met him at a cafe in Berkeley he was going to shelter at a friend’s house (I learned at the memorial it did happen). There was no reason for me to not believe his story and discovery of the sickness he had been afflicted with, but I was so sorry that he had relied on friends who sent him on a spiraling downfall by having him committed to a mental ward. I read his now deleted blog telling how after he had recovered (thanks to …

1978-1981: from Sherbrooke to Switzerland

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I found this job at the computer centre of the Université de Sherbrooke, having responded to an ad in the newspaper La Presse. It wasn’t quite “in my field” if there was such a thing after the experience of developing COMPO and the map-making software, and I found that the best part of it was the few hours a week I had to be at the “consulting desk” solving people’s problems. This was an IBM 360 installation, and even that was relatively new to me, but in a sense it was all about trying to figure out what they were trying to do, and find in the manuals the description of their instructions. I even learned basic computer operations, mounting magnetic tapes and disk packs, so it was fun to be around. In the late spring, the director of the Math department came to ask if I could teach a summer class to substitute a professor suddenly unable to do it. I had given them a seminar on the Pascal language, and the class was …

1978: COMPO, a Phototypesetting System

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That was the title of my Master’s Thesis. It was written in French, at the Université de Montréal. It’s on microfilm at the University’s library (I’m not sure if I kept a copy, in all my moves!). Here’s a paper I wrote in French about it, in which you can see examples of what it did: My advisor hadn’t been too pushy or specific about what to do, and he was going to spend the year away on sabbatical… I guess that was a good way to let me be creative, even though I didn’t know that word at the time. Self-expression, self-determination, and even self-esteem weren’t part of my upbringing, and I had been told to be quiet early on as a child. But I had chosen this advisor, Paul Bratley, at first because in a presentation of the department’s professors, he had the most interesting field of interest. I shyly knocked on his door, intimidated by his look (what was it? His facial expression said I could be boring), and said I found …

Références: Genre en Français

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L’usage du genre neutre en français tarde à être introduit, car c’est difficile d’altérer une langue avec des règles plutôt strictes qui nous ont été inculquées pendant toutes nos années scolaires… Après ça la maîtrise du langage devient une sorte d’outil pour maintenir la patriarchie… Voici quelques ressources que j’ai trouvé récemment qui pourraient vous aider. En même temps j’ajoute un cours sur l’identité conçu à l’université de Montréal (qui jusqu’à cette année semblait ignorer notre existence). https://divergenres.org/regles-de-grammaire-neutre-et-inclusive ‘comment je te présente’ me demanda ma soeur…  Je n’y avais pas pensé, étant donné que ma démarche trans s’est faite en anglais et que je sens que tout est plus difficile dans ma culture d’origine.  Alors je suis très heureuxe d’introduire ces conseils!  C’est bien en avance de l’académie française qui a déclaré ne pas vouloir reconnaître l’existence du non-binaire. Alors peut-être que la prochaine fois, je dirai à ma soeur de me désigner comme ‘man froeur’ … https://www.noslangues-ourlanguages.gc.ca/fr/blogue-blog/respecter-la-non-binarite-de-genre-fra Un bon côté d’être d’un pays bilingue, la question s’est posée plus vite au gouvernement du Canada …

les vaches folles

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Inspired by an actual dream, so is it Fiction or Non-Fiction? Photo Essay: the view from inside a bowl of cereal. The dream: my father on the other side of the table from me and my mother; he says something, a comment about us on the other side, alluding to how mad we may be, like mad cows (except it’s in French, and in French the cows are feminine, which is their gender, grammatically that is, as the cows haven’t expressed even their madness to be labeled mad).  I end with finding comfort inside my bowl of cereal, which is very realistic: it is my bowl, it is my cereal, in which I find comfort.  

Old Slide: just a plane at the airport

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The photo is not even framed properly. I would have discarded the old slide from my father’s boxes that I tasked myself with sorting out. Many of these slides were the source of our family’s entertainment, back when the only channel on black-and-white TV had the hockey game on Saturday nights, and none of us cared for it. This photo of an Air France Boeing 707, apparently taken at Orly airport, was part of the family show after my parents came back from their trip to France in the Spring of 1964. Many of the photos show street scenes, and sometimes there’s my mother sitting on a rented chair in the Jardin des Tuileries (I’m making this up, I don’t remember what jardins they were, but I remember she mentioned having to pay to sit on the chair). It must be Sunday, and they might have attended Sunday Mass at Notre-Dame, because she’s wearing white gloves… Otherwise, my father was interested in documenting his trip with his group of professors, and we saw a hydroelectric …

Water and Stones of Glendalough

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There were little man-walking-with-a-cane icons printed around the Wicklow Mountains on an old Michelin Map of Ireland, prompting my search for a quiet place to stay on my way down the east coast of Ireland. There was a daily bus from Dublin to the Medieval site of Glendalough, and both a hotel and a hostel nearby. Well aware of the uncertainties of late winter travel, I chose it as my “pillow” destination: I would not make reservations, and I would skip it, should I be significantly delayed. Little did I know it would become my favorite place to visit in this trip. Serendipity started with on-time arrival and, only carrying a small backpack, easy passage through Customs. It continued with a coffee shop serving espresso only a step away from the St Kevin’s Bus Stop to Glendalough, and the comfortable bus showing up on time. Soon we were traveling a narrow road with the sight of lamb grazing in green fields. The rain greeting me upon arrival at the visitor center was not a deterrent, …

IBM 360

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In this photo I think I just mastered the art of changing a disk pack and putting a magnetic tape on. They said never to touch the red emergency shut off button, even in an emergency. I found no interest in reading the blinking lights, but oh, the thrill of using a keypunch! My favorite key, I think, was REL – releasing the punched card and causing it to move to the stack. Smart people drew an arrow on the edge of the deck with a felt tip pen to help in case they dropped the stack on the floor. Which happened surprisingly often. Some people spent hours drawing Jesus on punched cards to print his image in EBCDIC characters and the printer had trouble turning its wheels fast enough so it looked like the mileage on a car when you have not yet reached an integer. Some people who didn’t draw Jesus printed hundreds of blank pages. I taught students SNOBOL that summer, they were thrilled. That’s when the brakes failed in my old …

Why I Run

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I just turned around the first corner of a 5K run along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, when I enumerate the reasons why I may not be breathing normally: is it the humid air in the morning, some kind of chemical poison, or just my fertile imagination? I choose the latter, given that I woke up early to arrive here on time, and I could still be in one of those anxiety dreams in which you never reach your destination for some absurd reason. In a sense, it is like a dream for someone like me to participate in organized runs, some of which have serious athletes leading the pack. I sign up on a web site, and they give me a bib number, a timing chip, and a t-shirt that I won’t wear at this race because I’m too cool and unique in my clothing style. Then on the day of the race, I have to get up and show up, but for a moment I am just as good looking as the top athlete at …

On Developing a Thicker Skin

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“You need to develop a thick skin” is the remark that came, after I told of having been thrown in a writer’s block because of a nasty personal remark at a writers’ workshop, one that had nothing to do with my writing. I understand the metaphor, but for some of us the solution may just be to avoid contact with the infection. Let me open up a new metaphor for it. I have had the unpleasant experience of a few skin infections, triggered in different ways under various circumstances, but the one thing a doctor doesn’t tell you is that you should thicken your skin. Some doctors are nice and caring enough to give you advice on prevention, and yes, you will freak out when a bee comes flying straight into your bike helmet and sting you, because the thick skin can be pierced anyway, but the other elements of an infection aren’t there anyway. The simpler prevention of keeping bacteria away, and keeping it from dwelling and developing on you, actually works. You learn …