LornaJane

I'm halfway delighted and halfway cringing to announce that the phpwomen calendar is now on sale. This was a project organised by my friend and colleague Johanna Cherry, who saw an opportunity at php|tek 2009 to photograph the majority of the core PHPWomen members all in one place and turn it into a fundraising calendar.

If you're expecting something "Calendar Girls" then you'll be disappointed. We are all clothed in the pictures!

I won't share photos from the calendar itself, if you want to see those you can buy your own, but perhaps to give you a hint I'll share an outtake of myself:



I must confess that I was rather agitated when the photos were taken - as a woman in a male-dominated industry, the risk of being seen as just my physical appearance is ever-present, and I normally try hard at unremarkable, unrevealing clothes with very little makeup and a pair of jeans. Hanging out in the lobby at the hotel during a technical conference in that dress and those shoes was significantly more terrifying than delivering three sessions during my first trip to the US as a speaker (which, considering the problems I have with speaking nerves, is saying something). Even after I saw the photos I was kind of unhappy with the whole experience, although I loved the outtake linked above!

Fast forward 6 months and I had dinner with Derick Rethans, who took the photos in the calendar and arranged the printing, and he showed me the prototype he'd had printed. As I sat and turned the pages, I started to understand why this is so important. The women in these photos are some of the leading lights in the community - respected developers, some of them core developers, key community people, and speakers. Yet I saw them as the women they are ... and suddenly remembered that actually, it's acceptable to be both smart AND beautiful.

So - get your calendar and remember all year that beauties can also be geeks! 10% of every purchase goes to PHPWomen, and we will use those funds to support our women and grow more leading lights like these.

A very quick entry today to mention a site that I've been using a LOT lately and I know I will be relying on for large quantities of travelling right through November: Accessible UK Train Timetables. It has up-to-the-minute information, including platform numbers, and you can bookmark queries for the next train between two points along with some other very cool shortcuts.

A site like this, which presents information very cleanly and I can easily use off my phone, is an excellent example of a good use of published data and I'm very grateful to them for this resource which really helps me when I'm out and about!

With increasing numbers of speaking engagements, I've decided that its time to add a dedicated page to this site just to list talks I've given and wil be giving, and link through to slides, blog posts, and perhaps some photos of me speaking (not sure about that last one). So if you're looking for material from a talk I've given - take a look at the talks page, you can find everything there.

I've added all the past talks of note (made much easier by my tendency to blog and tag all these experiences!), let me know if you have any questions or comments!

I've been thinking a lot lately about burnout, I've had a couple of encounters with it in the last year myself and also a few people close to me have found themselves struggling internally after working too hard. I don't really have any advice to give - the advice I offer to myself is to know my own limitations, know when I am close to them and need to tread carefully, and to stand up for myself against the sources of stress or overwork if the need arises.

However it happens, the question a burned-out person seems to ask is "how long will I feel this way?" and there is no quantifiable answer, and no guaranteed cure for that dragging fatigue. Most of the advice I've heard revolves around "get a hobby" - this time around I realised what I needed to hear was "give yourself permission to waste time". The first one I don't have a problem with, anyone who knows me knows I'm a live wire and always doing 6 things at once. The second one ... that's the killer.

Earlier in the year I did a lot of travel for a particular work project, at a time when my diary was already pretty full and I was preparing for a big conference. With one thing and another, by the time it was all over, I realised I needed to make some changes. Lots of elements of my life - friends, family, relationship and health - had all taken a beating while I was off dealing with all that I needed to do, and I realised there was a lot to do to get myself to where I wanted to be on all those other fronts. Last week I realised that although it took 10 weeks, now I feel like myself, finally picking up the strands of hobbies and having the energy to contribute to things that once interested me. Its not a big chunk of time to spend "healing" and I am glad now that I did step away, allow myself to vegetate and chill out with those close to me instead of being driven all the time to the next thing on the list.

Most of all - I hope other people come through the experience as unscathed as I have, and that I learned something for next time.

I play a lot of sport, and wear almost exclusively Asics trainers (sneakers if you like the other kind of English) to do so. In fact I only wear one pair of trainers, to the gym, to classes and for netball - which might be a mistake. One pair of trainers used to make my toes go dead sometimes, usually when running. A woman I was playing netball with at the time re-laced my trainers and that stopped the problem. My new trainers are giving me the same problem, and luckily I was able to dig out those old ones and copy the lacing - so here it is for posterity (and for next time I have this problem and can't remember how to do it).


Lace the bottom of the shoe as usual, then with 2 holes to go, thread down into the shoe.


Come up through the top hole on the opposite side.


Staying on the same side, go back inwards through the hole you just missed out.


Finally, thread each end through the loop on the outside of the opposite side of the shoe (see why I included pictures? This is tricky to explain)

I'm not sure why this works for me, I have a high instep so perhaps it relieves pressure on a key point? Anyway, if this works for you, or if you have any tips - leave a comment!

In January, Kevin and I went to Peru for a few weeks - to visit our friend Cally, and we did some touring while we were there. Between the two of us, we took almost 3,000 photos. Which is way too many to make granny sit through when we got home. I tried showing people the photos I put on flickr, but they make little sense since Kevin has (at least) half the good ones in his flickr stream. So instead, got a blurb book of our holiday photos - to easily show people, and to keep.



Apart from a few that came out darker than we expected, and the book taking WEEKS to arrive, its absolutely ace! Some of the photos look amazing in print - even more so than they do on the screen. We rarely have hard copies of any of our photos so this is quite a treat for us as well, and the book is really nice quality for us to have on our bookshelves.



Doing it this way was much less labour intensive than getting them printed and then scrapbooking them up or something - OK potentially this was less fun but at least its actually done and not sat on my to-do list :) We did all the layout ourselves, combined both our flickr sets (after we'd both gone through and edited and captioned the lot anyway), and just pressed the button. A few weeks later, the finished book arrived - yay!