Latest thoughts, if any, of Rachel Lawson...

Well, I don’t think it will come as a complete surprise to hear me say that. After all, I’ve made it no secret that I have a trans history and I do talk about it, on occasion, when I feel the moment is right. 

The reason I need to state “trans women are women”, though, is because the more people who see others stating this, the easier others find it to accept and, crucially, it exposes the often vitriolic replies such a statement prompts on social media. 

So, it seems that this website does pretty well from an energy usage point of view - a good sign for an essentially "out of the box" Drupal 9 site. The Drupal community working on the new Olivero theme should be proud of themselves.

Had a bit of a wander this morning with the camera. Still getting used to my new (to me) FujiFilm X Pro-2 but LOVING it so far!

Whilst I fully appreciate I am no fan of Slack, for many reasons, not least who they seem to like to associate with, I do accept that not everyone shares my views and that Slack is at the heart of many open source communities.

Whilst I have really enjoyed building this little website, and slowly beginning to write a little more, one thing that has troubled me the whole time is how to facilitate conversation on the topics I bring up in a way that I can believe that the person making a comment is actually who they say they are. Or, at least, they are the same person I interact with on other platforms as that identity.

"Oh that's easy!", I hear you say, "Just use a tool that allows someone to login using their identity elsewhere - lots of ways to do that, such as OpenID."

I have been noticing people I know in Nigeria recently using the #EndSARS hashtag on Twitter for a little while now and I mistakenly assumed, given virus causing the pandemic known as COVID-19 is called SARS-CoV-2. It's not anything to do with COVID-19 at all, it is a purely human tragedy and it must be stopped.

I'm running the iOS public betas at the moment and something struck me - both iOS and iPadOS have very odd understandings of what browser tabs are. 
 

In iOS, we can open a new browser “sheet”, but the menu item says tab:

“Well, your consultant might insist you have the test, anyway” I hear from the nurse when I say that no, there is absolutely no possibility that I might be pregnant.

Whilst everything else about my stay in hospital this week was a delight, this particular question really got to me, yet again. It comes up every time I have had to have an invasive procedure and it somehow feels that I’m being told I’m not capable of knowing something as simple as whether I’m pregnant. 

Having had the joy of experiencing organised events etc from both sides of the coin, as a participant and as an organiser, I have had ample opportunity to notice one thing — people in open source communities can do one thing that makes the experience of organising so much more pleasant: commit early.

I see again and again organisers of conferences, from small meet-ups even up to DrupalCon itself, worrying whether people will buy the tickets they need for the event to be a success, right up until the last few weeks (and days!)