rosiesaysblog

Rosie in the News #6

Rosie Says — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 20:22:10 +0000

Last weekend, the National Park Service opened a brand new visitor center at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Homefront National Historic Park. Why there is slash in the name, I’m not entirely sure. Bad case of indecision?

The new visitor’s center

The event kicked off with a Native American blessing, and two dozen original Rosies were present and accounted for, including Betty Reid Soskin. Now 91-years-old, Ms. Soskin is a park ranger (Side note: I hope I’m that cool when I’m 91). At the opening ceremony, she spoke about working in the shipyards and belonging to a segregated union.

Speaking of unions, look at this promotional Rosie gimmick from the AFL-CIO, “After all, we wouldn’t have paid vacations without unions!”

Related Post: The Rosie in the News archive

So What Do You Do Exactly? Magazine Edition

Rosie Says — Thu, 31 May 2012 18:42:05 +0000

The latest subject of the So What Do You Do Exactly? series is Jessica, who comes to us from the front lines of none other than the editorial department at Parents magazine.

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What’s your actual job title? Editorial Assistant at Parents magazine

What would your job title be if it actually encompassed your day-to-day? Professional Intern. I mean this in a good way–I feel like the kind of “do anything with a smile” attitude that’s so crucial in an internship is the defining characteristic of my job. In the workplace hierarchy, I’m a step above the interns and a step below the editors. I have to be excited about pitching in wherever I’m needed. This could mean editing my own pages or wrangling person-sized cardboard boxes in our scary-packed product closet.

Sounds like your tasks are all over the place, what’s a sample of your day? Every day is totally different! I generally have a mix of administrative, editorial, and creative duties. For example:

9:30-10:30: Make contracts for freelance writers

10:30-11:30: Follow up with PR contacts about samples we requested for a photo shoot. We needed them yesterday, and there’s no sign of them!

11:30-12:30: Make origami boats for a photo shoot

12:30-1:30: Desk-side meeting with Olympic Paint to learn about ColorClix, their new mobile app that allows you to take a photo of anything and match the colors to shades in their paint collection

1:30-2:30: Unpack boxes and organize new product shipments when the samples arrive

2:30-3:30: Phone interview with Katie Workman about her new book, The Mom 100, for a cookbook excerpt I’m writing for our website

3:30-4:30: Write the table of contents for the magazine

4:30-5:30: Write text for our email newsletters

5:30-6:30: Go to the Target press preview to see the upcoming fall collection and scout for things we might be able to include in future stories

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So Parents, eh? You’re not a parent! Why would they hire you? Well, for one thing, a lot of the work that goes into creating a magazine has nothing to do with generating content! To make the magazine happen, we need to employ a lot of people with skills that don’t necessarily have anything to do with parenting. We have a photo department that arranges shoots, an art department that makes the fonts gorgeous, and a web team that makes our articles SEO-friendly. Also, a lot of what I do, like working on stories about family-friendly food or crafts, is stuff that I can relate to (Check out Jessica’s blog for crafts for parents and non-parents alike). So, it’s not as though I’m a guru shelling advice about tantrums and breastfeeding to impressionable parents!

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The key for us is developing concepts that are age-appropriate and relatable. And I do remember doing a lot of crafting with my parents, and the kinds of concerns they had about it: is this going to stain the carpet, is my kid going to slice her hand off, does this require fancy supplies or advance planning–parents want to avoid a trip to the store to buy craft supplies they’ll only use once. We try to focus on creative ways to repurpose things you already have around the house (like this cute bird feeder made out of paper plates). And luckily, I have parents! I run ideas by them, and they let me know if it’s totally off base (ie, a glass terrarium with cacti. Not toddler-friendly.)

Tell me something that has surprised you about modern parenting, or the way we talk about modern parenting, or the way we think about modern parenting. Before taking this job, I didn’t think about “parenting” as a verb. I was really intrigued by this idea of parenting not as a series of big plans (like whether or not to circumcise your son, how much money to set away for college), but as a series of small decisions you make every day–like how you’re going to teach your kids about healthy eating habits by making whole grains seem yummy (banana quinoa waffles? Sold!).

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One thing that surprised me was that the vast majority of our content (editorial and photos) is targeted towards mothers, even though we know that dads are taking a much more hands-on role in kids’ lives than they were 86 years ago, when the magazine was first published. I think (well, at least I hope?) that dads often have a really active role in modern parenting, and I’m glad when we have an opportunity to profile them (like the wonderful daddy craft blogger at Made By Joel).

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What are your favorite parts/least favorite parts of the job?

It’s really exciting to see one of my ideas in print. One of my first tasks was helping to make crafts for this spread in our May issue, and I got giddy thinking that I could teach other people how to make little tissue paper flowers or cupcake topper garlands. I would like to be a kind of Martha Stewart for young, lazy people without a disposable income. Another perk is that PR companies are constantly sending people in the office products to sample. This means that we have an ever-evolving supply of random things: macaroons, nail polish, toy cars, party favors. At least at the entry level, publishing isn’t a lucrative field–but there are lots of free snacks!

What makes a successful pitch? I’ve learned that the more detailed the pitch, the better. It seems that good pitches are basically an outline of the story, not just a description of the topic. I think that good pitches are basically shortened versions of good articles: they have a strong lede and emphasize an element of service for the reader. For example, an article that discusses ways new parents waste money would be more service-y if it also described ways parents can save money (like sites such as thredUP, where parents can trade in kids’ clothes once they outgrow them).

What makes a parenting mag different than any other? Or the same? Like most other magazine, we try to have diverse content: health stories, features, essays, lifestyle, beauty, food–it’s just all targeted towards parents. But targeting a specific demographic is nothing new–men’s and women’s mags do it all the time. And there are even additional distinctions within those categories: Seventeen is for the young woman, Marie Claire is for the twenty- or thirtysomething, and More is for women in their 40s and 50s. That’s not to say that the content wouldn’t resonate with other readers–I love reading all of those magazines, and I think that the content in Parents is actually great for happily unattached people, too: there are great recipes and easy crafts that you can make without any fancy skills or tons of free time. We just published a cookbook, and these recipes are great for post-college people trying to teach themselves how to be adults–cheap ingredients, nutritious, tasty, and quick.

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What does the future of the magazine industry look like from your vantage point? I think that the future involves lots of digital content. We have a presence on Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook, and each month, the magazine produces special tablet videos and interactive elements. I hope that paper magazines don’t become obsolete, but I think that readers will increasingly expect new content to be packaged on each of those platforms.

Want more Jessica? Don’t we all. Check out her craft blog Nest, and follow her on Twitter at @JessicaHester

This is what happens to a solo cup caught in a roof fire

Rosie Says — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:43:32 +0000

So our apartment building caught on fire over the weekend.

File that under sentences I thought I’d never say. It was early evening, a hot and sticky Memorial Day weekend, and I was standing in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts while a handful of fire trucks circled my building. I stood in the parking lot with my boyfriend and my neighbors and my neighbor’s quaking bunny rabbit, watching fire fighters shimmy into the sky on extendable ladders, stomping around our roof, shooing gawkers away from the action, and all I could think was, “So this is why I pay taxes.”

When we got the all clear to go assess, I sat in the doorway to the deck and surveyed the damage. It looked bad. Our lackadaisical descent and the calm, measured movements of the fire department had suggested that this was perhaps merely a safety drill, but seeing the evidence so artfully displayed reassured me that, minutes before, this deck had actually been on fire.

Carefully picking past charred boards and our overturned grilled, we looked for souvenirs. Well, I looked for souvenirs. This is what I’m keeping:

When I later presented my finding to my roommate, she laughed and called me a hoarder. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that guarding a piece of melted trash to commemorate the event was unreasonable, or even unusual in the slightest.

On a bookshelf in my childhood home sits a black plastic rotary dial phone from the mid-70s. Straight out of a Dali painting, the headpieces is welded to the frame, the dial is dripping plastic pearls over the base, and the box is caved in, pocked and pitted like you’d taken to it with a bb gun. My dad rescued this melted relic from the remains of his cabin after it burned down in the Canadian woods thirty five years ago. He’s been hauling it from house to house across the continent ever since.

When I called him from the Dunkin’ parking lot on Saturday, he retold the story of that house and that phone for perhaps the tenth or twelfth or hundredth time. So of course I’m keeping the twisted solo cup and of course I’ll drag it from apartment to apartment. What is it they say about apples and trees?

Related Post: Why I talk to strangers.

Related Post: Small world.

Sunday Scraps 61 (Delayed on account of flames)

Rosie Says — Tue, 29 May 2012 15:07:43 +0000

1. YOGA: A student project pokes fun at the ubiquitous Lululemon bags with a spoof product. From positive affirmations to “Your worth as a woman depends on people looking at your butt.”

2. DIET: From iVillage, a collection of stories about people who figured out how to quit dieting. Imagine all the brain space we’d have if we weren’t counting calories?

3. PROGRESS: You know what’s amazing? How drastically President Obama’s support of marriage equality has impacted views (and polling numbers) on the subject in the black community.

4. GENDER: It’s old internet news, but in case you missed it, I really enjoyed John Scalzi’s post “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is,” using video games as an analogy for gender and race and privilege. Also, his follow-up.

5. SPACES: Virtual tour of Chicago’s new start-up space, 1871, from Tech Cocktail. You ain’t got shit, Palo Alto.

6. FACEBOOK: LifeHacker explains all the rookie mistakes you make on Facebook, and how to fix them.

Related Post: Sunday 60 = Dita Von Teese, George R. R. Martin, Settlers of Catan

Related Post: Sunday 59 = psychopathic children? Michelle Obama and The Biggest Loser, Kickstarter successes?

The Roof is on Fire

Rosie Says — Tue, 29 May 2012 00:05:06 +0000

No posting this weekend due to our lack of internet. Why, you say? Oh, no big thing, the roof of our apartment building caught on fire. All is well, but a bundle of cable wires is a big toasty, melty, frayed mess.

Sunday Scraps etc. tomorrow!

Evidence

Rosie Says — Sat, 26 May 2012 21:20:37 +0000

So remember my squeaky, sexy, humiliating/empowering march across the gym floor? Remember how I said there was a photographer present? Rest assured, he captured everything.

When I got the link to the Facebook album full of evidence, I cringed. I was in a bar bathroom, and I was sure that what I was about to see documentation of my poor dancing skills, lack of coordination, and unseemly spastic movements.

There’s also the danger, with events like this, of a jarring confrontation with your true image. This is not a Photobooth session, where you can tilt your head just so, add a sepia filter and presto change find the best version of yourself to share with the world. This album is some objective shit, in-the-moment, candid as can be, and you better believe I approached with trepidation.

I skimmed, looking for my tell-tale neon orange t-shirt and found this:

Photo: African American Leadership Council

And I’m like… okay, that’s not too terrible. I don’t look too off beat, too out of step. Obviously, I’ve got nothing on the adorable 5-year-old on the right. But then there’s this:

Photo: African American Leadership Council

And I’m like… oh, hell no. Do I really look like that? I’m never leaning over again. Or wearing that shirt. Or going out in public. And there’s the same child putting me to shame! But then there was this:

Photo: African American Leadership Council

And I’m like… dammmmn, that’s what I was hoping I looked like! This is me, alone in the middle of gym, grooving out. I look ridiculous, but I look healthy and happy and strong.

Related Post: National Love Your Body Day

Related Post: Bikini love

Defunkification

Rosie Says — Fri, 25 May 2012 18:54:22 +0000

I am in a funk.

In general, I am blessed with pretty stable mental health. On a mood scale of 1 to 10, I live 90% of my life around an 8.5. Fluctuation, for me, means bouncing between a 7 and a 9. A 5 is a pretty crappy day, and even then, it’s never really that bad. I’m not sure I know what a 2 or 3 would look like, or feel like; I don’t know that I’ve ever been there.

The more time I spend with people who live at a lower number, or who fluctuate more dramatically, the more grateful I am to exist where I do. That baseline high makes personal and professional troubles feel like small pockets of discontent, instead of blanket mood-killers.

But I do get funks, just like everyone else. Mine sometimes stem from feeling overwhelmed by all of the things I want to do, read, see, watch, and people I want to be with, touch, and talk to. I find myself jumping between gchats, text messages, and emails, trying to keep up. Planning back to back outings, double booking, and angsting over when I will get personal tasks out of the way. My life feels cluttered–cluttered with good things–but cluttered nonetheless.

So today I’m in a funk, and I will begin working down the list of things that help me come out from under the funky cloud. In no specific order, I will probably try:

Exercise
A manicure
An evening cup of decaf coffee to be drunk quietly by myself with my new book
Sitting in the sun
Talking to my family on the phone
Writing a very long email to someone who deserves a very long email
Reading an article or essay I’ve been meaning to read but haven’t found the time for
Picking up every goddamn thing on the floor of my room
Making a list of really easy tasks, things like “unload dishwasher” and then checking of three of them

When I look at this list, and think about other things that would fit, it’s pretty clear that for me, defunkification is deeply dependent on simplification. The constant state of multitasking that we all live in (I have 9 tabs, 3 excel sheets, and 2 powerpoints open at this very moment) isn’t a natural fit for my temperament. When I need to detox, I do things that reduce the number of tasks/actions/items/people in front of me. Anything that forces focus (i.e. you can’t possibly do anything else in yoga except do yoga), is what helps me declutter.

Related Post: Things that put me in a good mood.

Related Post: iFOMO

public dancing + squeaky gym floors + fluorescent lighting

Rosie Says — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:21:48 +0000

This is a pretty good depiction of how I did not look.

On Saturday, I danced solo across a gym while everyone laughed, cheered, and clapped. It was terrifying.

I was at a health and wellness event put on by the Chicago Foundation for Women. When my friends invited me to the free workshop, I glanced at the website and signed on without realizing that the event was co-sponsored by the African-American Leadership Council. I still would have gone, of course, but it’s nice to know in advance when you’re walking into a situation where you’re going to be the “only” anything.

The group was 4o black women and girls, from adorable four-year-olds who were considerably more rhythmically talented than me, to grandmothers in their 60s, all gathered in a community center in University Village.

After the first hip-hop class, the instructor had us gather on one side of the gym and keep bopping along to Justin Timberlake. Then, to my immeasurable horror, she had each participant “sexy walk” across the gym, pivot in the middle, and “break it out.” Consider it my worst nightmare: public dancing + squeaky gym floors + fluorescent lighting.

My turn arrived, and I started Top Model-ing my way across the gym. Everyone watched, and magically, they didn’t cringe. In fact, they just clapped and hooted and laughed for me as they had for everyone else. One of two things is true: either I am a better dancer than I think I am, or this was an extraordinarily warm and welcoming group of people. In ten seconds, I was on the other side, clapping for the next woman to strut. It was over, just like that.

After a zumba class later in the morning, the teacher gathered us all into a circle, hands piled in the middle, for a rousing cheer to conclude the festivities. “On three,” she said, “Black women rock!” And on three, that’s exactly what we cheered. Then she patted me on the arm, and added, “You too, sweetie.” Several black grandmothers came to give me hugs as we exited the gym, just in case I felt left out. I didn’t, but who doesn’t love a grandmotherly hug?

P.S. There was a photographer (and… ahem… a vidographer) on hand, so you may all soon be lucky enough to admire my hip-hop skills.

Related Post: Rehabilitating the hoodie.

So What Do You Do Exactly: Code Edition

Rosie Says — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:54:58 +0000

Meet Jess. Jess is latest subject of my ongoing series, So What Do You Do Exactly? Jess is the only female developer at food megasite GrubHub, where she heads up a team called something I didn’t understand until after I finished this interview:

What’s your actual job title? Manager, Quality & Release Engineering

What should your job title be? Automation Engineer. I write code to automate processes that were previously manual.

Nobody knows what release engineering is… Anytime you’re about to release new software (like a new version, or a new feature), the Quality Assurance (QA) team is the group that tests to make sure functionality is exactly as expected. On the GrubHub website, for example, if we are adding the capability for customers to pay by PayPal, we have to check, can you actually pay by PayPal? Does the product work? What happens when I try weird stuff, opening too many tabs, different payment conditions. We basically think of all the ways to break the software. Plus, we do something called regression testing, which is making sure that everything that used to work still does.

Release engineering is kind of a new thing. Back in the day, people used to have big long projects; every three years we’d release something huge, like Windows XP. The new “agile” methodology has you releasing new code really frequently. Release engineering (also called Dev Ops) is about building infrastructure so you can deploy new code painlessly.

My work is about ensuring that any time a developer changes something, like a line of code and they “check it in” to a pool of existing code and test it. We deploy the new code in a fake environment first, make sure something hasn’t broken, and then we actually deploy it to GrubHub.com.

Before GrubHub, you worked in consulting. What’s different about start-ups? In start-ups, if you have an idea, or a better way of doing things, you can just chat with people involved, and then you just… go do it. It’s easy to make fast improvements. The bigger the group gets, the harder that is to do, but it’s still possible. When I joined GrubHub, there were 50 people and I was the fourth developer hired. I came in and one of the first things I realized was that we weren’t doing a lot of testing and so I got some of that stuff rolling.

We all use GrubHub, what would we see that you’ve worked on? I’ve worked on all kinds of things. We had a sweepstakes game called Yummy Rummy. I’ve worked on the iPhone and Droid apps, and I worked on the pay by PayPal feature.

It seems like the different apps and sites would require different coding skills. How do you learn the different languages? Once you learn how to do object oriented programming,….

Whoa whoa whoa, what’s object oriented programming? There’s two types of programming. object oriented and procedural. Procedural is one line of code at a time; do A, then B, then C. Object oriented is writing code in a modular fashion; an object is like a container for code. For example, your food order with GrubHub is an object. It has a name, the time it was placed, the items, etc. You can write code that retrieves that object, and then does something to it. It makes it a lot easier to write large amounts of code, because you can swap it in and out.

Okay, so once you learn how to do object oriented programming… Right. Every language has its own “right way” to accomplish things, and its own syntax, but the basic concepts are the same. I imagine it’s like learning other spoken languages. Once you know five, the next one isn’t as big a deal.

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How did you get into programming in the first place? My dad is an electrical engineer, so I got a computer early in high school, so I was just on the internet all the time. I wanted to build a website, so I went to other websites to learn how. I like project-based learning, gives me something to learn towards. I wanted to get into robotics, so I looked for entry-level robotics project and I found this kit (Arduino), that’s basically a prototyping board designed exactly for entry-level hobbyists like me.

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You build robots? What do you do with them? There are all these different competitions and project. Right now, I’m doing Robo Magellan, which is run by ChiBots. They place orange traffic cones all over a field, and you have to capture as many cones as fast as you can with your robot. I’m really interested in autonomous robotics. Another project was for work; we had these meetings with a guy that worked remotely, and we would put the laptop camera on a table, and manually turn it around. I built a camera on a tilting unit that he could swivel on his own. It was a smaller project, but fun to do. To see Jess’ robotics, check out her blog.

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The developer community has a reputation for being a little bro-tastic, and you’re still the only female developer at your company. How would you describe the crew? I have met a few guys like that, the bros, at other places, but to be honest I haven’t met many and I don’t work with any now. For most of them, it’s just that they literally haven’t ever worked with girls. Once they figure out you’re just another programmer, that oh wait, you’re just a human being, they figure it out. If they are being offensive, it’s only because they’ve worked with all dudes for so long that no one ever calls them on it. They don’t even realize it.

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Say I wanted to learn how to program, where do I start? Find a project. Like, say you’re interested in knitting, build a website about knitting. Use the internet, find a coding buddy or mentor. It’s hard to know where to start, which is why you need to pick a project and learn the skills for that project. I would suggest learning Python (a coding language) because it’s easy to pick up. You can take classes at Udacity which are virtually taught in an interactive lecture format. I just really recommend project-based learning because you’re working towards something you’re invested in.

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Related Post: So What Do You Do Exactly? The Beer Edition

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Related Post: Brogramming

Sunday Scraps 60

Rosie Says — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:10:46 +0000

1. DIY: Thirteen creative solutions to one of my perennial problems: where do I put all my books? From Ecosalon.

2. FLIGHT: BBC has a badass gallery of photos of Ghana’s female pilots. What have YOU been learning in your spare time?

3. PRESIDENT: After a conservative pundit referred to Obama as a “metrosexual” President (as if that’s a bad thing…) Mother Jones put together a list of the 43 other metrosexual presidents.

4. GAME: Totally mesmerizing ten-minute short film by Jay Cheel about the politics within a group of friends as the addictive board game Settlers of Catan gets the better of them.

5. PIN-UP: The Rumpus interviews burlesque performer and red carpet regular Dita Von Teese.

6. THRONES: Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin pokes fun at his most aggressively zealous fans on his LiveJournal. And yes, he has a LiveJournal.

Related Post: Sunday 59: Child psychopaths, Michelle Obama’s mistake, Kickstarter successes.

Related Post: Sunday 58: Facebook vs. Instagram, interview with Alison Bechdel, ten most read books on the planet.