She's Geeky and a new (English) blog

The very motivation for starting an English blog is that I attended She's Geeky in Washington D.C. on Nov. 14, and met a bunch of great women in the technology fields in the area as well as people from afar, i.e. Canada! Seems not only everybody has a Twitter "handle" (didn't know this term before going to this event), people use Twitter just like using cellphones, or writing emails, etc. It was very common for them, but still pretty new to me. I still remember a person's startled reaction when seeing my name tag: "You don't have Twitter?" Well, I do; I just don't use that often -- actually, only one post thus far...and I quickly added another one after coming back. So I guess, being an Information Systems major, being in the IT field, with such little online presence, maybe it just doesn't feel right. Also because I'm not sure how far writing casual English will take me. Ironically enough, I have more confidence in my academic English writing than conversational ones...So, I decided to start this blog, to babble a little, on anything I feel like, in a second language.

She's Geeky was a lot of fun. Having been to a lot of "conferences", this is the first "unconference" for me. It is an unconference because no agenda was set beforehand. After a round of self-intro with sentence completion (I found She's geeky likes sentence completion A LOT :-) ) with "I am geeky because...", whoever wants to lead a session writes down a topic and puts them on the wall calendar, just like this, and the rest was a good talk organically developed by everyone in that session. Whenever the group member feels it's a time to end, the session ends. What an interesting way of organization! Imagine, if students get to decide whenever the class should end, it ends, companies that manufacture bells would probably be put out of business, and, professors...would have enough time to do research. While it may sound too organic, it is still a very organized event. Especially, when they mention there would be proceedings available in 2 weeks, I was impressed. Of course, the proceedings are not any individual papers; rather, they are notes taken from each session.

Most interesting thing about that day, was that it was also an "unplugged" unconference. There was no electrical power for the entire building the entire day. So people's face contours in the flashlight were the immediate images I would be able to think of about that day.

Among some cool websites I heard about on that day, one is DC Concierge, a guide to Washington D.C. The other is DC Tech Events. I probably know well enough about official tourist attractions in D.C.. However, in order to live a Washington life, these two resources are definitely a must have for me!