I don't wear a helmet here. No one does, not even the wee kiddies on the bike seats. The only people who do are tour parties and the Lycra-clad set who are training for something.
Yep. In Amsterdam, the only helmets you see are worn by Americans; elsewhere it's the Germans. When the kids bikes have little orange flags on them, they're definately German...
What the Netherlands have, that the UK and US, not even in bikefriendly cities, do not have is a culture that accepts bikes as a normal part of the traffic, as we never stopped using bikes as normal part of our commutes. And that's all bound up in culture, history and basic geography of course -- it helps to have a flat country.
I started work as a tester back in 1998, for a semi-public company involved with social security. when I got there it was almost all male, with the usual mix of newbies like me, some retrained employes fromt he shopfloor and one or two experienced consultants. Because of y2k and the introduction of the euro, as well as new developments in social security law that team grew from 30 and it became most gender balanced team I ever worked in, though still only 25-30 percent female.
The reasons it had even that high a percentage of women was imo down to two reasons: 1) the manager was female and 2) most importantly, the company made a deliberate attempt to get women on staff, through sponsoring "return to the workforce" programmes and the like aimed at mothers, being willing to let people work part-time. Whether this programme was done out of idealism or just because everybody who could get Windows to start got an IT job at the time I don't know, but it proved that if you want more women, you need to work on it.
Since I've left there I've never again worked anywhere with the gender balance being that equal; most places the number of women you work with are much much lower than the number of men. At the same time, they often tend to be key figures: managers, expert consultants and so on and much less "warm bodies". Which leads me to believe that in the Netherlands at least, female IT professionals need to be much better than their male counterparts if they want to make a career of it, much more easily discouraged from doing so, by their peers and bosses and perhaps also by their own expectations.
Abi,
I'm sure that you know it already, but you might want to look into testnet (www.testnet.org), the Dutch guild for test professionals, if you want some of that peer groupiness. Being the only tester on a project can suck hard, because everything that goes wrong is down to you and you have nobody to compare your succes rate to. It's been an eye-opener for me to be working for the last two years as a test coordinator on a large project with dozens of other testers and realise, hey, I actually am better than 99 percent of them (he said modestly). But when working on your own, you not own your successes, but more importantly all your failures too and those tend to stick in the mind more.
One reason testers don't get no respect is that really, you don't need so many macho tools to be one. Ninety percent of the work can be done using no more complicated software than Word and Excel. No cool toys = not interesting to IT geeks.
15, Bruce: I've problems with calling the survival of Anne's diary fortuitous, as it implies it was a matter of luck, rather than hard work and determination on the part of Miep Gies and Otto Frank. The first rescued the family papers from their hiding place, the second made the difficult and courageous decision to publish the diary only two years after he himself returned from the death camps that killed Anne and his other relatives, at a time when nobody really wanted to know much about it.
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