Dopp Juice Archive

This Saturday and Monday, I’ll be organizing the Geek Lab at BlogHer’s Reach Out tour in Boston and Washington DC.

So what’s the Geek Lab? Here’s the official spiel:

Every city on the Reach Out Tour will feature a Geek Lab happening in parallel to the Blogging Basics track and each city’s Custom track. Part OpenSpace, part mentoring program, part hack-fest. If you’re an advanced geek, here’s your all-day Birds of a Feather opportunity. If you’re not an advanced geek, here’s where you’ll find them…and find answers.

Whoever shows up will either get help or give help, or — in the case of most people — both.  I’m going to ask you about your experience levels, remind you that the stuff you already know is immensely valuable, and find out what directions you’re trying to grow in. Then we’ll skip the rest of the small talk and dive immediately into making our blogs better.

Between a core group of traveling smart folks (like blog hacker extraordinaire Liz Henry) and your fellow conference attendees, the Geek Lab will have the resources to help you with pretty much anything you’re looking for.

There’s a palpable energy that builds in the air whenever you get a room full of mostly-women into brainstorming and creative problem-solving mode, especially when technology is involved. It’s exciting and inspiring, and it leaves you with a renewed motivation to hack and revise your entire world.

Here’s what I’ve found from other events like this:

• If you don’t know what you want help with, you’ll figure it out as soon as you start talking.
• If you don’t know how you can help other people, you’ll figure it out as soon as they start talking.
• Getting help is wonderful.
• Being helpful is one of the most satisfying feelings in the world.

So if you’ll be at the conferences and you’d like some personalized bursts of brilliance, just show up to the Geek Lab, find the woman with the shaved head, and say hello.  The rest will take care of itself.

If you had unlimited resources (including a team of brilliant developers), and you were building a website that met following requirements, which programming language(s) would you use and why?

• Spider-web-style map visualizations with drag-and-drop capabilities (in AJAX, not Flash)
• A large database with lots of cross-references (tagging, stories, user accounts with different levels of connection)
• High traffic, needs to be fast
• Clear core requirements, but the expectation that lots of other features will be added in the future

Your answer will aid the widespread rehabilitation of sex on the internet.

Thank you all for the positive responses to my story about spending time with the guy I found by the ocean who was having a bad experience on too many drugs.

Even my mother, fortunately, responded with “I’m so proud of you”… which, I think, is a pretty big deal. Most moms I know would be inclined to scream, “WHAT ON EARTH WERE YOU DOING IN THAT DANGEROUS SITUATION?!”

I’ve gotten some responses, though, that put my actions up on some kind of superhuman pedestal, that’s a little weird to me.  (I got some of that after the
“homicidal drunk on the airplane” story, too)   When people need us (you, me, anyone), we help the way we know how to help, and we don’t think twice about it.  There’s nothing magical about that.  It’s just showing up.

But people can only respond to what I give them, so it seems misleading at this point not to disclose another piece of my history: I’ve gotten help for substance abuse.

Several years ago, I went through a period where I was severely depressed.  I leaned heavily on alcohol to survive it. Pretty quickly, my reliance on alcohol become more destructive than my depression.

There’s a long story here, and I’m going to give you the really short version.  I scared myself, I realized I needed help, and I went into an alcohol abuse recovery program (the famous one — the one you’re not supposed to name). I also started seeing a therapist.  I spent eight months battling my compulsive actions and the depression that caused them, until I finally got to the root of the problem:

I was queer and not accepting it.

(Ain’t that one a stinker?)

I worked through the depression, and then worked with my therapist to experiment with letting alcohol back into my life.  I drank lightly, socially, and didn’t enjoy getting drunk.  I wasn’t, by the program’s definition, an alcoholic.

The recovery program and I had a very sad breakup, in which I couldn’t really explain my story because it didn’t fit their model for recovery.  I’m still a huge fan of their program, though. I’ve seen it help lots of people — people who sincerely want to be helped — and I think, hands-down, it’s one of the best paths out there.  I know it helped me immensely.

But back to why I’m telling you this: the moral of the story is that I’ve spent stretches of time in community with people who are struggling with self-destructive behavior and trying to help each other through it.  I learned strategies that allow me to be present for people without letting their pain and flailing get too close to me.  And after a few minutes of conversation, I can usually tell the difference between someone who’s really looking for help and someone who’s still trying to control the situation.

This complicated stretch of my life, by the way, is also where I learned that hanging out by the ocean is a good way to remember that I’m not in control, either.