As promised, here are my slides from my talk at Women in Advanced Computing today. I understand that there’s also video forthcoming, I’ll share a link to that when I get it.
Photo credit to Arek Dreyer, who heard my title and asked if this picture would be useful.
I mentioned that I’m giving a talk this week at Women in Advanced Computing 2013 titled “The Mid-Career Donut Hole”. I started out with the idea that there is a hole in the middle of your career, that hole is where women are the most likely to drop out of a technical career, and that there are steps that we as individual technical women can take to make it less likely that we and others drop out of technical careers. With that idea, I wrote up an abstract and submitted it to speak at WiAC.
I’ve had the idea in the back of my head for months. Ever since that idea arrived, I’ve been jotting down notes that are related to it. As I’ve read books and articles, and they’ve led me to think about the topic more, I’ve fleshed out more of what might be included in the talk. When I got the notification that my proposal had been accepted, I began working on it in earnest. I first started looking at my notes and creating pieces of the talk, figuring out what would work and what wouldn’t work. In working on those pieces, I spent a lot of time talking to myself in an empty room, to see if those pieces sounded good and felt natural when I talked about them. Some things didn’t survive this cut, others were changed dramatically from their starting point.
When I felt like I had enough pieces that sounded right, I had to figure out how they fit together. I had more pieces than I had time, but that’s okay: some of those pieces didn’t work in the context of a larger talk. Some got cut, some got condensed. New pieces got added when I discovered that I needed a bridge from one topic to the next. I went from pieces that were related to this idea to a something that I hoped was a single cohesive discussion.
When I thought that I had the whole thing done, I stood in an empty conference room and gave the whole talk from start to finish. This helped me be more comfortable with the talk as a whole, as well as identify places where it didn’t flow well. More cutting ensued, as well as some new additions. I tried again, felt more comfortable with it, and then rounded up a couple of colleagues to give me feedback on it. They gave me fantastic feedback, which resulted in more revisions and more practice.
The talk is Thursday morning, 11am. I really want to get this one right. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I have hit a second snag in moving my iTunes 11 library on my old Mac to iTunes 10 on my new Mac.
When I plug in my iPhone, which was previously syncing with my old Mac, to my new Mac, I get the warning that this iPhone is synced with another Mac. I’m given the option of either erasing it and syncing it, or doing nothing. I would be happy to let it erase and sync since all of the content that is on the iPhone is on the new Mac. However, the vast majority of the 64GB of content on my device is music, and I really don’t want to have to go through all of the playlists and artists and albums and configure which ones get synced.
Other than manually rebuilding this information, is there any other way to do this? All of the content that’s on the phone is on the new Mac, so I’m not trying to transfer content off of the iPhone. I just don’t want to have to go through and manually configure what syncs to the iPhone and what doesn’t. I have the same issue with my iPad 2 syncing with the new Mac: same error message, all of the content is on both the iPad and the new Mac, I don’t want to have to rebuild the list of what syncs and what doesn’t (which is about which movies and books sync).
I still have the old Mac and its old iTunes library. I would try to reimport the iTunes library, but I’ve added a bunch of content to the new iTunes library before I tried to sync with my iPhone. Moving to iTunes 11 on the new Mac is not an option. I’d rather take the time to rebuild the sync lists rather than do that.
Next week, I’m speaking at Women in Advanced Computing 2013, part of USENIX Federated Conference Week. I’ll be talking about “The Mid-Career Donut Hole” on Thursday at 11am. If you’re at WiAC, I hope to see you there!
I asked earlier if anyone had any pointers on moving an iTunes 11 library to iTunes 10. I didn’t want to downgrade iTunes 11 to iTunes 10 on a single computer, but rather wanted to move an iTunes 11 library that exists on one Mac to an unused iTunes 10 library on another Mac.
The answer appears to be an almost-perfectly-unqualified yes. Via Twitter and app.net, I got several suggestions. I decided to try the one that was the easiest: export my iTunes 11 library to XML, and then import it into iTunes 10. I figured if it didn’t work, then I probably hadn’t lost too much time. It worked!
So here are the steps that I followed:
Next up is to move my photo library from my old Mac to my new Mac, which should be a lot easier, and then sync my iPhone and my iPad to the new Mac and make sure that everything works. Once that is done, I’ve got a few clean-up items to do on my old Mac, and then I can let it go to its final resting home.
Many thanks to Brian Webster for the original suggestion. I’m pleasantly surprised that it was so easy.
I have an old MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard and iTunes 11. I have a spiffy new retina MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion and iTunes 10. The abomination that is iTunes 11 was released after I got the rMBP, and I never upgraded it.
The old MBP is the machine that is the one that syncs with my iPhone. It has my portable iTunes library, as well as my photo library. I’d prefer to move everything over to my spiffy rMBP, but I also don’t want to have to upgrade to iTunes 11 on it. I also don’t want to lose all of the metadata that I have stored in my iTunes library, such as playlists and song ratings.
I’m not trying to downgrade iTunes 11 on my old MBP. My iTunes library has been updated multiple times (new songs, new ratings, new playlists) since I unwittingly accepted that update, so I don’t think that any of the downgrade options will work for me.
iCloud syncing is very much not an option, not least of which because my iTunes library is larger than its limit.
I realize that I’m asking for a lot here, but I’m hoping that someone might have done this and my search-fu just isn’t awesome enough to have found the documentation of it. I’ve found plenty of documentation about downgrading, but not my scenario.
An alternate scenario would be for me to start syncing with my server at home instead of syncing with my laptop. I haven’t pursued this seriously because there are multiple iPhones in the house (mine, my husband’s, and our household line) and I haven’t found a good solution for dealing with one iTunes library, multiple Apple accounts (and the resulting differences in which apps are available where), and multiple iPhoto libraries. We currently have the home media server set up with a shared account (which is what is used for adding new content to the iTunes library and all playback), and we have individual accounts on the server. Apple’s guidance for using multiple devices on the same computer is useless for this household’s use case. So unless there’s an awesome solution that I haven’t found, it seems like it’s a lot easier and less error-prone to maintain my own iTunes and iPhoto libraries on my own laptop.
At WWDC this week, Apple showed off iOS7. Macworld has a great overall review of the new iOS, and they’ve done some deeper dives as well. The beta of iOS7 is visually quite different: lots of changes to the icons, the default color palette is lighter (to the point that some are questioning whether it will even look good on a white iPhone), and lots of the overwrought skeuomorphism has been removed.
Such a big visual change has, predictably, brought about a lot of sturm und drang from people who like to imagine that they’re visual or interaction designers who work on mobile operating systems. These are always entertaining to read, so long as your tolerance for uninformed opinion and hand-wringing is high.
The most entertaining, and also the most infurating, example of the sturm und drang that I’ve discovered is “iOS 7: An Estrogen-Addled Mess Designed for 13 Year Old Girls”. There’s probably a drinking game to be written for that article, although I fear the idea of creating one because it would likely result in alcohol poisoning while trying it out.
You have to appreciate that someone was offended enough by the leaked slides about the PRISM data-collection program that they gave them a sleek re-design. The former is reality, the latter is what would happen in a science-fiction film.
© 2010-2024 go ahead, mac my day All Rights Reserved