Shir, Shavuot in Jerusalem sounds really neat. I'd love to see it sometime. (I've got a vague sort of plan to travel around Europe and/or parts of Asia next summer after I graduate, and getting to Israel for a holiday is definitely on my list of things to try to do.)

I apologize, ita. I thought I was being stealthy enough with the tennis.

I have acheived massage. Now food - pad thai with chicken.

Hil, Shavuot is a lovely time to come here. It's usually not too hot, it's only a one-day-holiday, and no weird food regulations (read: passover). I'll see how tonight's walk will be, right now I just got a little bit scared doing this on my own. I never walked the route I'm planning to walk before, I hope for plenty others to be on the streets (after-thought: it might be too late, but I'll post a message to ask others if they're planning to come as well).

And strawberries are awesome! Although, I think I might have to wait until winter to meet strawberries again.

(Edit: grammar? What's that, again?)

I got two quarts of strawberries. I think I'm going to eat one quart fresh and try to can the other quart. Not sure how well it'll work, but strawberries seem easy enough for my first try at canning something. Once I've gotten the hang of the canning process, I'm going to try some more complicated things.

Haven't a frustrating day. Last night I dumped Dr. Who and charlie Jade to tape but fell asleep and the tape ran all the way to the end. This means that my crappy vcr ate it. And this morning when I tried to get it out the tape broke in the machine. Not feeling like dealing with it while I was watching tennis I waited. And I looked and couldn't see any bits of tape. So I put the head cleaner in. Now the head cleaner is stuck and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get it out. It will partially eject and then if you touch it it goes back in, tries to play and then partially ejects again. All the while making that obnoxious grating sound.

I have 8 hours of tv to tape for people and I think I'm not going to be able to do it at all.

As some of you may know, there are three holidays on which Jews traveled to Jerusalem. This is one of them.

...is this one of those "Next year in Jerusalem" things? Tell me more!

Revenge of the Nerdette

Is it just me, or is this subtitle annoying?:

As geeks become chic in all levels of society, an unlikely subset is starting to roar. Meet the Nerd Girls: they're smart, they're techie and they're hot.

...

The Nerd Girls may not look like your stereotypical pocket-protector-loving misfits—their adviser, Karen Panetta, has a thing for pink heels—but they're part of a growing breed of young women who are claiming the nerd label for themselves. In doing so, they're challenging the notion of what a geek should look like, either by intentionally sexing up their tech personas, or by simply finding no disconnect between their geeky pursuits and more traditionally girly interests such as fashion, makeup and high heels. In fact, calling them "nerd" is no insult at all—the Nerd Girls have T shirts emblazoned with the slogan. The crew includes Cristina Sanchez, a master's student in biomedical engineering (and a former cheerleader) who can talk for hours about aerodynamics. Caitrin Eaton, a freshman, asked her boyfriend for a soldering iron last Christmas. Juniors Courtney Mario and Perry Ross giggle when they talk about what fascinated them most about "No Country for Old Men": how did the assassin's air gun work?

...

In 2007, girls won both the team and the individual categories of the Siemens Competition for high-school students in math, science and technology for the first time in the competition's history. A recent Pew Internet & American Life project found that among users 12 to 17, girls dominate the blogosphere and social networking sites; they're also beating boys when it comes to creating Web sites of their own. Even women gamers far outnumber men ages 25 to 34, according to a 2006 study by the Consumer Electronics Association. "Back when the Nerd Girls began [in 2000], people would say, 'Why do you have to call yourselves nerds?'—like it was a bad thing," says Panetta, an electrical- and computer-engineering professor at Tufts and the founder of the group. "But I never get that question anymore. It's OK, it's smart, it's cool to be a nerd, and the girls are just embracing that."

Yet there is still a dichotomy between the culture and the workplace. Forty years ago women made up just 3 percent of science and engineering jobs; now they make up about 20 percent. That sounds promising, until you consider that women earn 56 percent of the degrees in those fields. A recent Center for Work-Life Policy study found that 52 percent of women leave those jobs, with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment and more than half believing they needed to "act like a man" in order to succeed. In the past, women dealt with that reality in two ways: some buried their femininity, while others simply gave up their techie interests to appear more feminine. "For most of my life I hid my passion for all things scientific and tried to focus on pursuits that were 'allowable'," says Cathy Malmrose, a Berkeley, Calif., mom who, at 38, is now the CEO of a computer manufacturer. "Instead of getting to play on my brother's TRS80 [computer] and study the sciences, I went into elementary education."

Which may be one reason that many of these tech-friendly women are working their pumps so hard. They're trying to break down stereotypes by being as proud of their sexuality as they are of their geekiness. "Just because I get dressed up Saturday night, that doesn't mean I won't do better [than a guy] on a test on Monday," says Nerd Girl Sanchez. Turning geek into chic isn't always easy. It took Google's Spertus, who is 39, years before she could proclaim herself girl and geek in the same breath. But it happened when she won the award for "Sexiest Geek Alive," a now annual pageant that began in 2000 as a spoof of People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive." Spertus beat out the men in her competition, and at her crowning, she paraded onstage in a corset made out of a circuit board and a high-slit skirt with a slide rule strapped to her leg. Still, some (continued...)

( continues...) women worry that being too sexy could hurt them. At the San Francisco Girl Geek Dinner earlier this year, Leah Culver, 25, the developer of Pownce, a microblogging platform, described the extra efforts she's made to convince potential employers that despite being attractive, she's actually, like, competent. "I used to carry around a copy of my computer-science degree in my purse," she said. The ideal, of course, is having gender be a nonissue, and for a few, it is. "I consider myself a normal girl who happens to like math and science," Sanchez says.

I got a signed Dinosaur Comics book!!

The Lynda Barry signing starts on 10 minutes!! I'm feeling funkier already!!!