Growing Online Dating Relationships

Just like regular real-world relationships, online relationships need tending, to grow over time. Here are some quick growing tips.

1. Take time and make time. Does your online date get in touch with you regularly? Do you do the same? Neglecting virtual meetings can be considered abuse or neglect, so treat each other’s time with respect. If it’s lacking, might mean time to move on.

2. Communication needs to “feel” right for both of you. If one of you is too pushy about meeting, for instance, that can give off bad vibes. So don’t rush. Take time to learn more about each other and develop trust.

3. Respect each others privacy. Don’t share personal email addresses or digital photos online, for example, if your online date sent you the information in confidence.

4. Share special online and offline fun times. Online – send greeting cards, links to favorite places to upload digital photos of your favorite pet, download music and video clips, post on favorite forums of interest. Offline- if you’re exchanging addresses or post office boxes, send print greeting cards and postcards, small items from your area (like a key chain with your state bird).

Tend your online relationship. Water it with care and over time it can sprout and grow.

I love you perhap wedding

Search your love dating online world wide

In 1998, John Wood was a rising executive at Microsoft when he took a vacation that changed his life. What started as a trekking holiday in Nepal became a spiritual journey, and then a mission: to change the world one book and one child at a time by setting up libraries in the developing world. He was soon driven to leave his career with only a loose vision of the change he wanted to bring to the world.

http://www.leavingmicrosoftbook.com/

I like this articles. It is give me new meaning about this life.

You can read it here: New Wealth, New Priorities

About John Woods

Aaron Swartz, now in his early twenties, rose to internet fame as technology whiz kid a couple of years ago, working on such things as W3C standards or the Creative Commons. He was also blogger behind the very successful Google Weblog. Via instant messenger, I interviewed him on Reddit, activism, Google and more.

Can I ask you what you’re up to these days? Are you working for Reddit as full-time programmer?

No, I left reddit several months ago.

Why did you leave?

My boss asked me to.

Can you explain what happened?

For Christmas, I went with some friends to Europe. Towards the tail end of the trip I caught a cold and holed up in my old apartment in Boston for a week. I headed back to San Francisco over the weekend and when I came in Monday morning I was asked to leave. I spent a little while trying to figure out what had gone on, but without too much success. Eventually, I decided that I should just accept this as an opportunity. And not look a gift horse in the mouth too hard.

How long had you been with the Reddit team and what did you do there?

I was with the Reddit team back when we were coming up with the idea, in the months before the first Y Combinator Summer Founders Program started. We eventually began working together full time around that November and started a port of the site from Lisp to Python shortly after that.

There were three founders – me, Steve, and Alexis. Steve and I did the programming and Alexis handled promotion and customer service and office management and business development and the myriad of other tasks that came up. Christopher Slowe also worked with us part-time as he finished up his physics Ph.D at Harvard.

It was an exciting time, but working at an office job was quite different.

In what environment did you work before that?

Before Y Combinator, I was a student at Stanford. Then I worked at Reddit for a while – the four of us packed into a small 3-bedroom apartment in Somerville, MA (I slept in the cupboard). Then we got bought by Condé Nast (the publishers of Wired, Elle, The New Yorker, Details, GQ, etc.) and they moved us out to San Francisco to work at the Wired offices and then they fired me. On the plus side, I did get this nifty shirt.

Oh my. If you had to take a guess though, why do you think they let you go? Incompatibility with an office environment?

Yeah. I was unhappy working in an office and didn’t hide it. So I’d come in late and set up lots of off-site meetings and stuff. And my boss wasn’t really thrilled about that.

Also, I think he was upset about me disappearing for so long on vacation. One of the places I went to in Europe was the Chaos Computer Conference. And while I was there I hung out with my friend Quinn Norton, who was reporting on the event for Wired. She took my photo for one of her articles and it was featured on wired.com’s front page. “Heh,” I joked. “I bet the first time my boss finds out where I am is when he sees my photo on the front page of his own website.”

Heh. That was in Berlin?

Yes. But the best punch line was that Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, later wrote on his blog that he didn’t find out when it was on the front-page of his website – he found out when I posted that fact to my blog!
Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons

In Berlin, did you meet Lawrence Lessig? I’m sure you met him before…

I’ve worked with Lessig for years; I was one of the original people working with him on Creative Commons. But, yes, I did go visit him while I was in Berlin.

Creative Commons’ Lawrence Lessig with Aaron, some years ago.

You worked on the technical side of the Creative Commons, like the metaformat for websites right?

Yes, I think my official title was “metadata advisor.” I was in charge of designing their metadata format for describing the licenses. And naturally, since it was a small team back then, I helped out with a bunch of other stuff.

How did you get to be involved with the Creative Commons originally? Did Lawrence call you up? Did you hang out on conferences…?

I think they may have known me from hanging out at conferences, but initially I saw a story in a San Francisco paper about it. I later found out the story wasn’t actually supposed to come out until after the launch, but this one came out right as the group was starting. I saw it and sent Lessig an email noting that in the article he said he wanted to have machine-readable licenses. So I emailed him and said “I’ve been working on this machine-readable stuff with the W3C called RDF, and you should use it for reasons X, Y, and Z.” And he wrote back and said “Sounds good. Why don’t you do that for us?”

Back then you must have been the youngest W3C evangelist. Is that a good or bad thing?

I enjoyed it. People at W3C meetings and other conferences didn’t give me much trouble about my age.

It’s typical for the hacker spirit, right. Who cares about age and looks, as long as you’re smart!

I’d like to think that’s the case, but seeing how the tech community mistreats women and people of other races, I can’t endorse that wholeheartedly.

Can you give some examples of misogyny or racism?

If you talk to any woman in the tech community, it won’t be long before they start telling you stories about disgusting, sexist things guys have said to them. It freaks them out; and rightly so. As a result, the only women you see in tech are those who are willing to put up with all the abuse.

I really noticed this when I was at foo camp once, Tim O’Reilly’s exclusive gathering for the elite of the tech community. The executive guys there, when they thought nobody else was around, talked about how they always held important business meetings at strip clubs and the deficiencies of programmers from various countries.

Meanwhile, foo camp itself had a session on discrimination in which it was explained to us that the real problem was not racism or sexism, but simply the fact that people like to hang out with others who are like themselves.

The denial about this in the tech community is so great that sometimes I despair of it ever getting fixed. And I should be clear, it’s not that there are just some bad people out there who are being prejudiced and offensive. Many of these people that I’m thinking of are some of my best friends in the community. It’s an institutional problem, not a personal one.

The last barcamp I was at, in Nuremberg, had a men/ women ratio of about 80/ 2. It was quite sad, and I was wondering what the cause of this was. Is it partly also a problem of the hacker culture, to behave anti-social, and that this puts off more social people? Many good programmers I know, for instance, aren’t too social.

I think that’s probably part of it; many people don’t have the social skills to notice how offensive they’re being. But even the people who are quite social and competent misbehave and, furthermore, they support a culture where this misbehavior is acceptable. I don’t exclude myself from this criticism.

So you think it’s partly also about creating a male-only business network?

I’m not sure it’s anything so intentional, but it definitely has that effect. If you look at the top levels of any industry, you find just incredible levels of misogyny.

For one example we have good data on, the FBI taped the executives of a major US agribusiness company, ADM. And so we have, on tape, some of the incredibly offensive things these guys said. There’s no reason to believe other firms are any different.

What do you tell someone who says, “women simply aren’t as nerdy as men, on average… that’s why they’re underrepresented in the rather nerdy tech industry”?

I think this is a big way people justify the discrimination to themselves. It’s always easier for people to blame the victim. But the fact is, we have evidence of discrimination and we have no evidence of differing aptitudes for nerdiness. Indeed, psychologists like Carol Dweck have done experiments that have found that girls’ scores in things like math can easily be raised by teaching teachers to be less discriminatory.

In Germany, there’s something called “Girls’ Day,” a chance for female students to get a sneak peak into a tech job. Do you have similar programs in the US?

There are things like Take Your Daughter to Work Day, and a few small nonprofits trying to get women into science, but I haven’t heard anything quite like that.

You also mentioned racism in the tech industry. Can you explain?

I have less data on the racism, but I’ve certainly heard prominent tech people make racist comments and the paucity of different races at tech conferences is striking.

Current activities, Google Summer of Code

I wanted to briefly go back to the Creative Commons. Are you still following the developments? I was surprised they removed the RDF stuff in version 3, apparently…

I’m still on some of the mailing lists, so I follow them a little. They moved to RDFa, a format that allows RDF to be embedded more directly in HTML. We were some of the pioneers for RDF-in-HTML and my coworker from the tech team, Ben Adida, was a big person behind the RDFa work, so it’s not surprising that they switched. Indeed, Ben from Creative Commons is the chair of the RDF in XHTML Task Force.

Are you actively involved in any current W3C initiatives, or any of the related initiatives, like… HTML5?

No, I’m pretty much out of the standards world these days.

So what are you up to these days? After having been fired…

I’m working on a bunch of open source projects, doing some writing, hanging out with my roommates. I’m going to be mentoring two Google Summer of Code projects soon. And I’ll be overseeing two more, as they’re for the project I started, web.py.

Can you briefly explain what the Google Summer of Code is, and what your role in it is?

The Google Summer of Code project is a way for Google to donate some money to so-called “open source” or free software development. Major free software projects apply with Google; Google accepts some of their applications and they recruit applications from college-age students who are looking for a summer programming job. The projects pick the best applications and then Google pays the students to work on the project for the summer.

Each student is paired with a mentor to oversee them on the project. So I helped decide which web.py applications would be accepted, organized mentors for them, and am mentoring two myself. I’m really excited about the projects; they’re going to be really fun.

What is web.py?

web.py is a free software web application library for Python. It makes it easier to develop web apps in Python by handling a lot of the Web-related stuff for you. Reddit was built using it, for example.

Google engineers use a lot of Python for smaller scripting purposes, I heard…

Yes, Python is used an enormous amount internally. Even some of their smaller web apps are written in Python, I believe.

What’s your relationship with Google? Have you ever worked at the Googleplex? Been invited? Applied…?

I’ve never worked for Google, but I’ve visited numerous times and have received many offers to work there. When I wrote a critical piece about Google, a lot of people claimed that it was sour grapes – that I had been turned down from working on Google. That’s certainly not the case.

Why did you decline Google job offers of the past?

Well, I didn’t want to work at Google when I was at Stanford, I thought I should finish school. I didn’t want to work there when I was at Reddit, working at a startup was much more exciting. And now? Well, post-IPO, Google isn’t the same exciting place that it once was. None of the people I’ve spoken to at Google seem to have jobs that strike me as particularly appealing. Interesting, certainly, but not something I can really see spending my 9 to 5 doing for long periods of time.

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html