I had some computer troubles yesterday, so I’m posting my Ada Lovelace Day post a little late. It’s still March 24th in Hawaii though, so I think I’m alright really

Like many others, I had a seriously hard time trying to decide who to write about. I’ve been so lucky in many ways, and one of them was finding the right people at the right time.

In the end though, I had to go with Valerie Aurora. I cringe to re-read the email I sent Val, as she was known then, when I saw her book scholarship for Women Don’t Ask. But her response was warm and gracious, as I have always found her to be since. The book has certainly made a difference in my life. But Valerie has made an even bigger difference.

I’ve learned so much from Valerie, both from watching how she does things and from talking to her. She’s seriously smart, and yet she’s never once made me feel stupid. She’s tough as nails, up for a laugh, inspiring, funny, interesting, and just damn brilliant! And I still owe her dinner

So three cheers for Valerie Anita Aurora. And Valerie, if you’re reading this, big props on the name change. I think you now have the coolest name of anyone I know

Feb4, originally uploaded by NoirinP.

Self-portrait in the bathroom mirror

---

Yes mum, I’m still taking photos

Feb24, originally uploaded by NoirinP.

Impromptu party for Pancake Day

---

Stephen and I threw a last-minute Pancake Day party on Tuesday, and had great fun. We used 3l of milk, 10 eggs, and more than a kilo of flour – all happily devoured by ten hungry engineers

A couple of people have now asked me for the basic pancake recipe, so here goes.

You’ll need 600ml of milk, two eggs, and 225g flour. The milk doesn’t have to be fresh – when I was a kid, we loved it when milk went sour, because it meant we’d get pancakes!

If you’re making it in an electric mixer, check the instructions, and just throw everything in and blitz it until it’s smooth.

If you’re doing it the old-fashioned way, put the flour in a bowl, make a hole in the middle of the flour, and break in the eggs. Mix in a small amount of milk with the eggs, and then mix the egg-milk mixture into the flour until you have a solid, doughy lump. Slowly add milk and keep mixing and stirring, until you have a beautiful, lump-free pancake batter.

Ideally, you should let the batter stand – half an hour if you can, overnight is even better (although you’ll need to mix it again in the morning, and might need to add another drop of milk).

Make sure the pan is super hot – the first pancake is nearly always dud, and it’s nearly always because you haven’t waited long enough for the pan to heat. Pour some batter in, cook it until it comes off the pan easily, flip, and repeat.

Hey presto, pancakes!

Feb14, originally uploaded by NoirinP.

Spork!

---

For my friends on the Apache helpdesk!

Once you’ve made it once, you’ll never again need a recipe for banoffee – it’s a fantastically forgiving dish

Step one, somewhat unintuitively, is the middle – the toffee. This basically involves cooking a can of condensed milk until it turns into caramel My mum always used to make this on the stove, but I never bothered to enquire about the details while she was still making my desserts. There’s plenty of scary stuff on the internet about exploding the cans, so I used the method described by Ian Dowding in his “Original Banoffi Pie Recipe“. Ian says that Banoffi wasn’t so much invented as it evolved, so I don’t feel too bad about the vast differences between his recipe and what I came up with…

Find a saucepan big enough to fit a few cans of condensed milk (gezuckert, available in Migros, yay!), but small enough to fit in the oven. You’ll need two cans for one banoffee pie, but it keeps for approximately forever Preheat the oven to 140C. Put the cans in the saucepan, and cover them with water. Boil the water on the stovetop, put a lid on the pot, and transfer it to the oven. Leave it there for 3.5h, and be very, very careful taking it out – it will be hot!

While that’s going on, you can make the base – empty a packet of biscuits into a freezer bag, and bash them up with a rolling pin until they’re just crumbs Melt up about 100g of butter, and mix it in with the biscuit crumbs. Fill the bottom of a (lined!) springform pan with the biscuit mixture, and let it settle.

When the toffee is ready – be careful, don’t slice your finger on the can! – empty two cans of toffee onto the biscuit base, and spread it around gently til the base is evenly covered in toffee. Slice the bananas, and lay them out on the toffee in a double layer. Sprinkle a little bit of lemon juice over the bananas if you have it, to make sure they don’t get brown too quickly. Clingfilm and pop it in the fridge until you’re ready to go.

When you’re ready to serve, whip up a pint of cream – with a small amount of instant coffee, if that’s your thing – and spoon it out over the bananas. Sieve a sprinkling of cocoa powder over the top, and you’re ready to go

Tasty++! And once you have the toffee made, it’s super-quick too… Just don’t even try to count the calories

Costigan Quist says he’s not taking the Ada Lovelace challenge. But I think he’s missed the point, and in my own rambling fashion, I’ll shortly explain why.

Before I do though, what is the challenge? Suw Charman-Anderson set up a pledge on PledgeBank, saying “I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.” Within a week, 1,000 other people signed up, and I can’t wait for 24th March, to read about all those amazing women! The pledge is still open to sign up, and there’s more about the background on the Finding Ada blog, if you’re interested.

Costigan says he’s not in, because the women he knows in technology are just as anonymous as the men. He says ‘all I can do is to say of someone “she’s achieved the same as a man, but she’s only a girlie – well done you!”‘. Which, to give him his due, he recognises as rather patronising I think he’s missed the point big-time though.

“Blog about a woman you admire” doesn’t mean “blog about someone you think should be famous”. There’s nothing wrong with being an unsung hero – or heroine! But women have a greater need for female role-models than men have for male role-models. And Ada Lovelace Day is about showing women that there are role-models out there. A role-model doesn’t have to be someone famous, or even necessarily the top of their field. A role-model is just someone who occupies a role to which you aspire. It’s someone who does something that you would like to be doing, or gotten somewhere that you would like to go…

Ada Lovelace Day isn’t about saying “she’s achieved the same as a man, but she’s only a girlie – well done you!”. I don’t even think it’s about giving the women we blog about their 15 minutes of fame. It’s about showing the women who need female role-models that those role-models exist. It’s about showing the men who need a role model – male or female! – that there are role-models out there for whatever it is you want to do, or be, or have. Maybe they are famous. Maybe they’re completely anonymous. Maybe they don’t even know that they are a role-model to someone. But they’re there.

Maybe what they’ve done is stupendous. Maybe it’s fairly ordinary. A recent example I came across was someone desperately wanting to know if there were any women who’d gotten promoted to a particular level while they had a young child, because the person asking could only find male examples of people who’d gotten promoted to that level while they had a young child. And there were women who could say “yes, I have”. And that made a difference. They were doing the same things as the men around them. They got their fair due. But this isn’t for those women. It’s for the people who are asking. Who want to know if it’s even possible. Who just need, on whatever level, to know that there are women out there who’ve done it.

And Costigan, even if it’s only namechecks, knowing that there are role-models out there makes a difference, to many, many people.

Jan7, originally uploaded by NoirinP.

---

After feeling awful all day Tuesday, all I wanted by dinner time on Wednesday was serious comfort food… Combine that with what was available in the tiny Migros on the way home, and what we came up with was a very basic, slightly square, calzone Tasty++!

Jan1, originally uploaded by NoirinP.

---

2008 was an amazing year, but I have to admit I wasn’t as diligent with the camera as I had been previously. So as the church bells rang to herald in the New Year, I decided to try taking a photo a day, every day, for 2009.

For January, the aim is persistence. Keep taking photos. Take at least one, every single day. Post them to flickr on a regular basis – at the moment, I’m planning on once a week. After that, I’ll work a bit more on getting the best out of the camera, composition & art etc. If I make it that far If you want to keep watching, I’ll be posting them in the 365 – Photo a Day set in my flickr stream.

Wish me luck!

Kae has posted his thoughts on enjoying a drink. I can’t seem to leave a comment, but I think he’s missed a fairly vital point.

I’m all in favour of enjoying alcohol. Wine or sherry, cider or beer, champagne or cocktails. Red wine isn’t generally my tipple of choice, but there are apparently clear benefits to it for certain groups (generally, the over-40s – does that mean Kae has a better excuse than me? Maybe in a year or two ). But know what you’re drinking.

The Australian guidelines in the general case recommend “no more than 4 (men) or 2 (women) Standard Drinks a day on average and no more than 6 (men) or 4 (women) Standard Drinks on any one day”. Kae seems to think that means 28 pints. But look a little closer.

What’s a Standard Drink? In Australia, it’s 10g of alcohol. In the UK and Ireland, it’s called a “unit“, and it’s 10ml, or about 8g, of alcohol. I had a can of beer tonight. It was a 500ml can, of the local Hürlimann lager – 4.8% a(lcohol)b(y)v(olume). That’s 19g of alcohol – 2 Australian Standard Drinks, or 2.5 UK units.

The Australian guidelines, even without the SNAFU of assuming that a Standard Drink is what you get when you belly-up to the bar and ask for the usual, are fairly generous. But they’re not suggesting 28 drinks a week is ok – unless your normal drink is a small bottle of Bud Lite. Know your units!

The guideline amounts are up to 3-4 units per day for men (2-3 for women). If you convert the Aussie guidelines to units, they recommend up to 5 units a day on average for men (2.5 for women), and no more than 7.5 units on any one day for men (5 for women). The Australians recommend one or two alcohol-free days per week – the Brits suggest 48h of a break after a heavy session (binge drinking is defined as 8 units in a day for men, or 6 for women, although they do state that it depends a bit on the person).

But what is a unit? UK units are dead easy to work out, even if you’re not very mathematical. A litre of drink contains one unit of alcohol for every percentage point of alcohol by volume. So a 500ml bottle of Rekorderlig mixed berries (7%abv) is 3.5 units – a day’s allowance. A 75cl bottle of Moët (12%abv) is 9 units – better get some friends over! A 35ml shot of Absolut (red label – 50%abv) is 1.75 units – two of those, and you’re done for the night.

So by all means, have a drink on the way home (as long as you’re not driving – or cycling!), or a glass of your favourite with dinner. But don’t overdo it, and remember to give your liver a rest now and then. Particularly in this, the season of Christmas parties and overindulgence – know your limits! And a huge shout out to Dad, his department and many others like it, and the ambulance crews around the world, who have to deal with the excesses of the people who don’t.

I’ll never forget,
Standing. At attention.
Fists tight to keep from shaking.
Tongue pressed hard, against my teeth.
A statue, cast in uniform,
In a house too small
For so much grief.

Only my eyes,
Revealing my heart.
A statue, cast in uniform,
But blinking, too much.
Willing back the tears.
Searing, salty tears,
That washed my face
The night before.

Matching uniforms, a sea of black.
Three generations, father, son, granddaughter.
The belt I wore, my grandad’s.
Carried with the coffin, were
His medals and the flag.
The others wept and cried,
While we statues, cast in uniform
Shared my father’s quiet grief