Jun 17
The Lost Boys
It’s no secret that many technology circles are boys’ clubs. There’s something about the industry that seems undesirable to women. For the longest time, it eluded me as to why anyone would not love technology.
Then Matt Aimonetti and Hoss Gifford proved why it’s a culture that is generally unwelcoming to women. I won’t bother linking to them or any of the stories; you’ll have to Google it yourself to find out.
These two cartoons presented at a developers’ convention and utterly degraded the entire profession in the span of an hour or less. First, Matt mad unclever and borderline offensive slides that urged developers to “perform like porn stars.” Not to be outdone, Hoss decided to put a most definitely not safe for work image directly in his slides in a recent conference, and even acted like a prepubescent boy during the presentation. Again, you’ll have to Google it for the video.
If software engineers ever hope to be taken serious by the traditional professions, such as doctors and lawyers, this kind of crap has to stop.
Much to my dismay, Kirrily Robert decided to include an image link directly in her feed that is aggregated on Planet Perl. The result is I am reading my daily dose of software related blogs and suddenly I see a resized image of something not even remotely professional in my feed reader. Google Reader dutifully downloads a dozen feed items in advance so I am not waiting to download them. No matter what I do at that point, it won’t look good.
Now I am in the uncomfortable position of explaining to my boss tomorrow why that was in my feed reader and what I intend to do about it. I am basically going to have to cut myself off of Planet Perl and try in the most professional manner to explain that I was not looking for that sort of content. Planet Perl will now join the likes of Gizmondo and XKCD as being inappropriate to read at work.
tags: inappropriate, perl
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Oh, the irony…
Perhaps we can just change Planet Perl to clean all images out of the feed? Certainly we need stronger guidelines for authors who expect their feeds to be widely syndicated.
I agree with John. This is mega bogus. If people want to see pictures or something like that they can click the original link.
That sucks bro.
I’m trying to decide whether to offer an apology or not. On the one hand, nobody should be forced to look at material they find objectionable; on the other hand, putting objectionable material on display for criticism is important.
Ironically, this issue has some similarities to the Planet Fedora upskirt photo incident a couple of years ago! I know there are many differences in the two cases, some of them strong defenses and some of them less so. I’m putting some thought into it, and welcome further discussion.
Some points:
* low res image (intentionally; I cut it down from my usual 500px size because of the content)
* for critical purposes, not to titillate
* any discomfort felt at seeing the low-res image on my blog is probably less than that felt by women caught by it at Flashbelt
I don’t know where you work or your work’s code of conduct for Internet use, but I strongly suspect that if you are allowed to use the unfiltered web at all, seeing this image in this context will not get you in any trouble. If your boss requires an explanation, perhaps you could tell him that parts of the technical community, whose blogs you read, are discussing an inappropriate presentation at a technical conference, and included a low-res version of an image from it for illustration.
Kirrily, the point is it’s flat out not acceptable to reproduce it by remote linking the images like you did. There was no way for me to avoid the situation.
I realize you’re trying to prove a point, but the Planet is not a good place and linking directly to the image is unacceptable. If you wanted to talk about it, at least you could have just left them as links.
I had to sit in front of my boss and explain to him the situation. It’s a good thing he’s a nice and understanding guy; hopefully I don’t have to speak to anyone else about it. This put my character on the line all because I wanted to read about perl while I eat my lunch. In the end, I had to recommend that planet.perl.org be evaluated for filtering.
Next time, if you’re considering posting something to the planet, maybe you should ask yourself “what would my grandmother say if she saw this?” Do you really want to talk about “porny bingo” or the social implications of the presentations?