In response to Neil Santos’ rant about computer science education:

What a pity it is that you’ve never had a good teacher. A good teacher can help you grow immensely. I’ve had great teachers, and they really changed my life. Let me share with you some things I’ve learned from them and why I’m crazy about computer science.

When you meet a lot of brilliant people, you’ll quickly realize that technical skills do not guarantee people skills and vice versa. One of the best ways to meet brilliant people is through open source. Look at Richard Stallman: undoubtedly a genius, but his personality rubs a lot of people the wrong way. (He’s really cool, though.) On the other hand, there are people who combine both technical know-how with passion and great communication skills; these are the teachers who can change your life.

I owe so much to the teachers I’ve learned from inside and outside the classroom. The best teachers I’ve had taught me that I’m not limited to the classroom. They helped me gain the confidence to try things on my own. They showed me things I didn’t know about and might not have discovered on my own. They questioned my assumptions and challenged me to do better. I remember when I was in first year college and I was slacking off in subjects like English; it was my computer science
teacher who told me that I should pay attention to details!

My teachers really helped me deal with my insecurities about our curriculum. I always kept my eye on schools abroad, and because I was already working on open source in college, I could see how people my age were doing really fantastic things like maintaining the Linux kernel or writing their own operating systems. My teachers helped me take advanced classes and get into extracurricular projects and
competitions. When I started working on things on my own, they gave me encouragement and great recommendations.

I’ve heard many, many stories about teachers who aren’t as good as the ones I had, though. Most teachers don’t seem to care about their students or their subjects. I want to help change that.

Computer science changes every day. The accelerating pace may make you think that it’s impossible to keep up. The truth is, as things get faster and faster, a strong foundation becomes more and more important.

That’s what I’d like to think I teach. I do not teach how to program in Java or C++ or Perl. I teach people how to _think_, how to break a problem down into solvable parts, how to learn more and more and more. My job is not to pour information into passive students, but rather I am here to show them the basics and then challenge them, make them hungry for more, guide them through questions and hints. I don’t know everything, but I love sharing whatever I know, and I love learning new things from students and the world.

I messed up a lot as a beginning teacher, too. There were days when the explanations I prepared the night before didn’t work and everyone was just confused. There were days when I’d just get so frustrated with my inability to express something or to convince people that copying isn’t going to teach them as much as actually sticking it out and solving the problem. But still, there were days when I’d see students get that Aha! moment, and that made things worthwhile.

I enjoy computer science so much that I cannot think of _not_ teaching it. I want to get other people hooked. I want people to fall in love with learning and problem-solving. I want people to discover that they too are capable of mental wizardry; that they too can make the computer dance to their tune. I want to be a fantastic teacher. In order to do that, I’m working on not only getting the theoretical and practical background to share with my students, but also learning how to teach and teach well.

Let me tell you that computer science education doesn’t have to be like what you’re suffering. I know it can be good, and I want to make it even better.

What does this mean for you, now, while you’re taking up your degree at Adamson University?

Well, if you can’t do anything about your teachers right now, you have many ways of coping. Open source gives you an opportunity to test your knowledge and make a difference world-wide. Even as a student, you can work on really cool things! Come hang out with us, too. We can challenge you. We can help you stay enthusiastic and passionate about computers. When are you usually free?

I took a taxi just to make it to my 4:00 appointment at DermLink,
a small dermatology clinic along Arnaiz Ave. near Park Square 1. I
made it there by 4:05. The receptionist retrieved my record, which
indeed had “Tuesday 4:00” written on it. However, there was no
available slot, so they asked me to wait.

After finishing an entire magazine (cover to cover, including articles
on swimsuits and makeup and all of these things I’d ordinarily not
even glance at) and sketching a stool (complete with shadows from two
light sources), I looked up at the clock. Thirty minutes had passed
without a word, an apology, or even an estimate of how much longer I
would need to wait.

Eventually the middle bay cleared and I was asked to recline on the
elevated bed. I had scarcely settled in when the assistant was told to
transfer the person in the far bay to the bed I was in the process of
occupying, so I put my glasses back on, gathered my things, and moved
to the next bay.

As the assistant smeared cream on my face and wiped it off with a
sponge, she kept asking me: “Are your meds complete?” It took me a
while to realize that she was asking about my medication. I said yes.
Not that I would know if it was complete or not, but hey, we sat
through the song-and-dance yesterday and my mom bought whatever the
dermatologist was pushing. A short while later, she (or another
assistant) asked again, “Are your meds complete?” I was starting to
get really annoyed about the hard sell, but I decided that it wouldn’t
be wise to piss off people who are working on your face.

So I patiently waited… and waited… and waited… I even fell
asleep at some point. When I woke up, I heard the whir of machinery
from the next unit. After a short pause, I heard the dermatologist’s
voice from the unit near the door, giving another consultation. It was
probably the exact pitch she’d used on us last week; no questions, but
rather just a high-speed rattling-off of things one needs to buy.

I turned my head and affixed the assistant with an impatient glare.
That netted me nothing more than a perfunctory “Please wait a while.”
I tried to settle back down, but I simply couldn’t stand that kind of
service. I got up, pulled the towel headband off my hair, and stormed
off, telling them I really couldn’t wait any longer and that their
customer service could _really_ be improved. Then I left. Looking
back, I wish I’d said something stronger, but disappointment choked my
voice and I still haven’t gotten over that innate dislike of making a
scene.

I stalked through Glorietta searching for some place that would make
me feel like they valued my business. I was annoyed. No, I was more
than annoyed—I was aggravated. I felt terrible wasting all that time
at DermLink. I thought going to a regular dermatologist would be
better than just going to a skin clinic and having a facial, but that
place just sucked. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to wait without
explanation, and I should’ve clued in that first day and refused to go
for any more treatment there. Sheesh.

I ended up going for a really painful facial at Let’s Face It, but at
least people there smiled, attended to me promptly, and explained what
they were doing.

If I’m going to go for this entire dermatology thing, I’d like to have
a dermatologist who’ll ask me about what I eat and how I live; who’ll
find a way for me to keep eating chocolate, who’ll tell me what to do
when I have pimples the day before I expect pictures to be taken…
If I can’t have that, then I’d rather not have clear skin than put up
with customer service as bad as DermLink’s.

Moral lesson: Customer service is very important. Keep your customers
in the loop. Don’t let them feel neglected. Care about them; make them
feel special instead of just another source of income for you.

ARGH.

I was thinking of heading back to DermLink and really giving them
a piece of my mind, but then I passed by National Bookstore and I got
sucked in. Still.

Oh, well. Good lesson in how personally annoying bad service can be.

Warren also grips:

I don’t think companies in Manila understand the meaning
of “customer service”. A very good example is PLDT :). Another one is
one of the biggest bank in Manila; METROBANK. They have like 40
clients in queue and they only have 1 teller serving them. My GOD!!! I
don’t know where the Managers/Supervisors of these organizations
obtained their degree.

http://www.houseonahill.net/ disables right-click on its pages. I
suppose it’s to stop people from saving webpages to their hard disk,
but it’s not a very effective way of stopping people from copying
things because people can always highlight text and then copy the text
normally.

Disabling right-click punishes power users, though. I can’t easily
bookmark pages using my del.icio.us. I can’t copy a link without
visiting it, which means I have to click on the permalink page, move
over to the address bar, and copy the address from there if I’m going
to cite something in my blog. I can’t easily subscribe via
http://www.bloglines.com .

I’ve seen a Mozilla extension for disabling pesky right-click
disablers, and I think I’ll go install that right now. I could also
always browse the website in w3m or some other text browser.

Disabling right-click is a technological attempt at solving a social
problem, and although it discourages casual users, I don’t think it’s
worth the cost.

UPDATE: The right-click script sassylawyer uses also results in an
error when I middle-click on a link in order to open it in a new tab.
The page loads, but I have to click through a “Sorry, right-click is
disabled.” message. Mrph.

UPDATE: The same site blacklists http://del.icio.us . ARGH.

sassylawyer has been plagiarized. That got me to
thinking about plagiarism, and you know? I don’t think I’ve ever been
badly plagiarized. Probably not a single line maliciously lifted from my Ph104 or
JapanTraining notes.
No one reposts me to get +5 Insightful or to increase post count on
some bulletin board. I saw a number of Google queries poking around my
notebook directory back when I still had files from college,
but those were probably people who would’ve copied netlists or
programs from elsewhere on the Net, anyway.

Conclusion: I must be really boring. ;)

I suppose it also helps that the only things I post on my blog are
random code snippets, bad short stories, business ideas,
and my TODO list, all of which can be freely reposted anywhere you want.
(In fact, please steal my TODO list!)

The only people who read my blog are geeks, my family and my friends.
They’re all smarter than I am and have no problems coming up with
insightful posts on their own.

I’m not concerned about plagiarism. I trust that if my thoughts are
being posted to a forum by someone who’s too lazy to think up cool
stuff, the mere fact that the poster would think other people would
find such things interesting means that some of the readers might’ve
stumbled across my blog before. Then they laugh at the poster,
completely destroying the poster’s reputation. Mwahaha.

Even if I never get attributed, it’s nice that the ideas are out
there. My ideas are more important than my byline. I don’t care who
eventually makes stuff happen as long as the stuff happens. I learn by
writing, and I lose nothing if people copy me. If people go to the
trouble of stripping out my identity, then they’ll just have to deal
with questions and bugs themselves.

I don’t care if people stumbling upon my work never bother to find out
who I am. If they find something in my braindump useful, well and
good. If they copy-and-paste what I’ve written into something they
need to submit for class or work, they’ve lost the opportunity to
exercise their mind.

If someone ever accuses me of plagiarizing my own work, I’ll simply
laugh and point to the other stuff I’ve written or to the things I’ve
done. People know I’m real.

So there. I trust you, reader. I’ll never use Javascript hacks to make
it difficult for you to save data from my website.
I’ll never make it difficult for you to syndicate my blog
(RSS feed) or copy it
whole-sale. Heck, if you want
an archive of my planner, either wget -r
http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/plans/ or e-mail me for an archive.

Go ahead and steal my thoughts. Add your insights. Make them better.

Sean Uy wrote:

Congratulations, everyone. We put a stop to an issue that
‘insulted' the dignity of women in the IT industry.

And we did it as one big unruly mob.

Are we a mob?

I don't know. I don't think so.

We stand on our individual pulpits or post in our individual columns
and we simply speak our mind, letting other people decide what they
think and how they feel about the issue. Even my
http://del.icio.us/sachac/digitalpinay links feels like a
shopping-list of other people who wrote about the issue, and I'm sure
there are other blogs out there I hadn't seen.

Nowhere on those blogs did I see anything even remotely close to a
physical threat. People joked about having “Digital Pinoy”, a male
version of the contest. People suggested flooding the mailbox with
fake application forms or complaints, or calling them up to register
their protest. In fact, some people suggested just promoting it as a
beauty pageant instead of something different. I did not see a single
thing directed toward the potential contestants. I don't work that
way, and chances are, neither do you. I do not know anyone who'd make
such a threat. As a rule, the geeks I know prefer the pen over the
sword. This is not to say, of course, that no one out there can make
that kind of threat. All I'm saying is that there are many, many of us
who are more moderate than the press release implies.

I was outraged enough to want to raise hell about it. I didn't want
this to be an issue that quietly slipped by. I wanted them to know
that I thought what they were doing was wrong. They were perfectly
capable of continuing with the original plan, I knew, but maybe they'd
listen to the points I raised. I helped spread the word to other
people because it was something far bigger than my little corner of
the Internet or my little perspective on life, and I was not
disappointed by the variety of insights I gained.

I am not against PCS, and I am certainly not against promoting
technology. This was not some master plan to bring down PCS nor was it
a symptom of crab mentality. I sincerely want to promote computer
science in our country, and I spoke out because I strongly felt that
the contest I heard about would do more damage than good. I pointed
out flaws and offered suggestions. I knew they wouldn't be able to
remove the ‘beauty pageant' stigma from the event if they continued
with their criteria, so I suggested other things they might do
instead.

Was it really all the outrage from blogs? Companies have sponsored
highly-criticized events before. The Miss Universe contest has legions
of detractors. No, I don't think it was sheer outrage. I'd like to
think that the sponsors pulled out not because the contest attracted
lots of bad publicity but because the sponsors listened to our
thoughts and thought we made sense. Money speaks, and it took the
sponsors to make PCS consider other ideas. We argued as well as we
could, and that resulted in slight modifications of the event. PCS
thought it could deal with the other objections, but it took sponsors
to really drive the point home.

It's a pity that PCS focused on extreme reactions in their press
conference. Instead of making bloggers feel respected and listened to,
they polarized the issue, turning it into an us-versus-them fight.
That wasn't the best way to deal with this kind of issue. I would have
respected them more if they calmly outlined the issues and thanked
everyone involved, but I understand why they said those things. They
are also human, and it is hard to be calm when you see a pet project
fall apart. Other critics are also human, and it's hard to accept
someone's words as face value when you see it more as a cover-up.
There must have been better ways to deal with the whole mess, but it's
done now, and all that is left to do is to reflect on the whole
matter.

I must confess being guilty of taking pot shots at PCS when I think
what they say doesn't make sense. For example, I think their
cancellation is yet another example of bad PR, and I'm half-tempted to
volunteer to edit their press releases from now on. I'm allowed to
have and express opinions. I'm not a journalist, just a geek. I care
not only about my work but also the culture and environment I work in.

That said, they're fine, and they did have good intentions. I can't
imagine Leo Querubin waking up and saying “I think I'd like to have a
sexist contest,” and I believe them when they say they weren't
thinking of making it a beauty contest. They just didn't think about
it hard enough. Who here hasn't made mistakes like that before? Who
here hasn't been defensive about mistakes, trying to rationalize them
as long as possible before realizing they were wrong? I appreciate how
they invited us to join the press conference, although the timing was
bad for practically everyone. (A Saturday would've been better,
really, or they could've just held it online. That would've been much
more fun!) I appreciate how they asked someone who understood the
other side to serve as a consultant. (Hi, Ranulf!) I appreciate how,
to the very end, their intentions were sincere. I don't think they
were in this just to make money. I think they just picked the wrong
way to achieve a goal, and then a wrong way to save face.

PCS still serves a valuable purpose. They have other projects and they
don't need to be replaced or destroyed. Besides, there is no
organization ready to step into the gap. I hope that the lesson they
carry away from all of this is not that the public does not understand
them, but that we understand their objectives too well to let them
quietly make mistakes. We speak because we care.

Are we a mob? A thousand voices exploding on the Internet may seem
like a chaotic mess, but if you listen carefully you would be able
to discern the clear, calm tones of people like
Dominique,
Joey, and
Sean.
You would hear people who spoke from their hearts _and_ their minds, like
Clair and
Xenia.
You would even hear non-IT people with a clear understanding of the issues, like
Marcelle.
We are not a mob. We are simply people who know what we believe in and who care too much to be silent.

I will reflect some more on this if other people have interesting
posts, but in the meantime, I would like to thank the bloggers who
shared their thoughts, the journalists who helped us raise awareness
of the problem, and the rest of the gang for listening in.

Although it could have gone better, it was good that we did this.

My mother would be the last person to say she’s beautiful. She’d say
she’s short, or she has gray hair and wrinkles. She wears make-up, but
she doesn’t spend hours putting a face on every day and she doesn’t
buy fancy clothes. She’s too busy as the general manager of
Adphoto to get much beauty sleep, and
sees nothing wrong with trekking around in comfortable shoes. I think
she’s beautiful.

My former grade school principal, Lala Castillo, had wrinkles around
her eyes that showed how much she smiled. I never saw her dressed in
sharp business suits. I think she was always in flowing skirts or
sensible pants. She knew all of us by name. As a child, I wondered if
I could just skip being an adult and be old and wise like she was.
I think she’s beautiful.

Didith Rodrigo, the chair of the computer science department, is not
one for beauty pageants. I don’t think she wears make-up. But she made
us feel welcome. She knew what she was talking about, and she could
explain herself very clearly. She was also a great listener. I think
she’s beautiful.

If PCS wants to judge on “beauty”—which basically means how much does
a woman resemble advertisements—then they risk closing their eyes to
the real gems, people who can _really_ inspire others.

As for me, I’m going to stay in my own little world where results
matter more than appearances, where ordinary people become beautiful
when you get to know them.

I’m glad that I’m not spectacular. At least that way, I don’t have to
worry about people speculating about my breast size, unlike one of my
friends who occasionally has to put up with that despite being a
brilliant physicist. At least that way, I know people pay attention to
my ideas and not just to my body.

I still feel a little insecure from time to time. Am I where I am just
because I’m a girl, just because I was in the right place at the right
time? Would I have gotten as far if people didn’t make a fuss over the
fact that ooh, look, a girl’s _really_ into tech?

Then I go online and talk to people who don’t know anything about me,
people who even assume I’m a guy until the regulars laugh and correct
them, and I realize that I’m good enough on my own.

That’s an assurance the DigitalPinay winners might not have, because
they’ll wonder: was I hired because my resume was good and I can
really make a difference, or was I hired because I won a beauty
pageant?

PCS is expected to confirm its resolve to push through with the
controversial “Digital Pinay 2005” contest at a press conference to be
held today at 3:30 PM at AIM’s ACCEED center.

They say that the contest is a search for future chief executive
officers and chief information officers, and have decided to keep
their original criteria: 20% popularity (text votes, another
revenue-generator), 20% personality (sound bites in the question and
answer portion), and 20% poise (modeling business wear, formal wear
and sports wear). Oh, right, and 40% intelligence and achievements,
but since that’s all evaluated behind the scenes, we’ll only get to
see the 60% part.

They also deny that it’s a beauty pageant and claim they never
intended it to be one. And oh, oops, the
first application form was a
complete mistake—they didn’t mean to send *that* version to the press
mailing list. They *really* meant to send these sanitized application
forms: ../personal/digitalpinay-coed.doc and
../personal/digitalpinay-pro.doc. So they’d like to tell all you
outraged bloggers that
you’re barking up the wrong tree. It really isn’t a beauty pageant.
Even if there’s a “Coronation Night” competition where people are
judged on how they wear clothes instead of, say, their business plans
or their ability to give presentations. Even if there’s a text voting
thing.

All I can say is that if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and
quacks like a duck…

Whatever.