I updated the Linux tutorials and put them on the Seattle LinuxChix Web site.  I updated the Alwanza colors for January and installed some JavaScript snowflakes that I adapted from an old script at Yahoo.com (thank you, Yahoo).

I got all worked up after reading a discouraging article in the New York times about High School girls not being interested in learning math, science, and computer programming and wrote about my high school experience in an article entitled Where is Mrs. Nadel?

Something else is new, and I'm pretty happy about it.  Sometime last November I got an email thanking me for having the recipe for Toddy Coffee on my site.  In December I got another recipe thank you, and a note about my Growing Long Hair page (another woman was also interested in finding Jojoba Farms shampoo).  Today, I got a similar note from a helpful woman who has found a site that lists Jojoba Farms shampoo as one of the products you can purchase from them.  If that lead pans out, I'll add it to my Web page.  That makes my Growing Long Hair page the one that has received the most feedback (3) of all my content pages so far.

December was a record month for feedback (3 emails plus lots of trys on my Sample Web Form page).  I thought it was a fluke because I've gone so many months in the past without any reader/user feedback; but now that I have had emails for 3 months in a row, I'm starting to think that I must have reached some critical mass and that the trend is likely to continue.  Thank you to everyone who has written to me!

I had to stop working on my Linux boxes temporarily to deal with a file transfer on Windows.  As usual, it wasn't as simple as it should have been.  My sweet husband gave me his suped-up turbo-carged hyper computer (a few months ago I gave him my laptop and he found he was using the laptop rather than his desktop).

I made a poor choice by attempting to move my old Windows98 hard drives into the new computer.  One fried C drive, a borrowed FAT32 System Disk (used just for recovery and then returned) and some file transfers later, I have ALMOST all my old files back (I lost some of my email InBox - could have been much worse).

I started my second course in Java at NSCC.

I'm looking forward to getting back on track to move my domain onto my Server....

I still need to line up some speakers and install parties for Seattle Linux Chix and advertise them. 

I'm still looking for employment. 

I had some disappointing news.  I found out that one of the places where I had recently interviewed hired a young male with significantly less qualifications (skills) for the position than I have.  I found this out in an unexpected and round-about way.  What the hell can I do to help young supervisors be more comfortable with hiring me?

The part that is really disappointing about this is that I strongly suspected that other places where I had interviewed had selected a young male candidate instead of me for no other reason than because he was a young man and I'm an older woman; but this particular place... I believed better of them.

I'm getting 4.0s in my classes, I'm busting my butt networking, scouring the help-wanteds; I'm so current, I'm bleeding edge and all they see is an old woman.  How am I ever going to get employed in high tech again under these circumstances?

Most of my friends are about 10 years younger than I am (this was also true about my grandmother who died at age 94 - but whose mind was always very alert - the older she got, the younger her friends were).  Of my friends who are my age and older, we all say the same thing:  we look in the mirror and wonder how we got to be that old because in our minds we still see ourselves as young adults.

Especially being a woman, I guess, some of the people who I want to hire me think of me as "their Mother's age".  But I never had children and I don't even know how to react to such thoughts.