Author Archives: Greg Moore

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About Greg Moore

Founder and owner of Green Mountain Software, a consulting firm based in the Capital District of New York focusing on SQL Server. Formerly, a consulting DBA ("and other duties as assigned") by day, and sometimes night, and caver by night (and sometimes day). Now, a PA student working to add PA-C after my name so I can work as a Physician Assistant. When I'm not in front of a computer or with my family I'm often out hiking, biking, caving or teaching cave rescue skills.

NY ComicCon

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Last week I talked about Kids These Days. This past weekend I went with my daughter to NY ComicCon. It was a late 8th grade graduation present she had requested. Due to me messing things up last year, we missed our chance to go, so I made up for it this year. And it was well worth it, for a couple of reasons. I want to focus on two, one topical and one personal. The topical first.

The topic is in the above photograph.  I apologize for it being blurry, “I’m a DBA Jim, not a photographer.”  But I took it for a reason. This was the panel for a talk titled: Join the Resistance! (Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker). It was an interesting panel that talked about the books they wrote that cover the time between The Last Jedi to this December’s The Rise of Skywalker. But partway through listening, something dawned on me about the panel.  Can you figure out what I realized?

It’s there in the picture, but if not, let me list the panelists: authors Rebecca Roanhorse, Justina Ireland, Kevin Shinick, Ethan Sacks, Delilah S. Dawson, audiobook narrator Marc Thompson and moderator Ashley Eckstein.

What strikes you about that list of names? Now compare that to the panels you see at a number of tech events such as various SQL events. Note what it’s not. This is NOT a MANEL!

Science Fiction has for far too long been treated as the domain of boys and then later men. Marketing for decades often focused on boys. It was assumed that every boy wanted to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker or Captain Kirk.  Women in shows and books were often only there as props for the male characters to react to. Granted, this statement isn’t 100% true, even Princess Leia had some meat to her character in the original Star Wars (back before it was episode IV or A New Hope.) Even then though, she served the role set out in much of mythology as the princess in distress to be rescued. Fortunately her role and the role of women in Star Wars was greatly expanded over the series, to the point now where Rey is our hero.

Ahsoka Tano in triplicate!

Ahsoka Tano in triplicate!

And this panel shows exactly how equitable the Star Wars universe has become. The moderator was Ahsley Eckstein, who voices the character Ahsoka Tano in various animated Star Wars series. Three of the authors on the panel were women. In other words, women were well represented.

Think about this when planning your tech event such as SQL Saturday. Do you have equal representation? “But wait Greg, there’s just not that women doing SQL! I only had 3 women apply to talk and 30 men!” I’m going to give you some advice. Ask for more women. Talk to those three, see if they know anyone who might want to speak, but was too nervous to put in a submission. Talk to Kathi Kellenberger and Rie Irish of the PASS Virtual Group Women in Technology.  Yes, there may not be as many women in tech as men, but I can guarantee that there’s more than you think and that it won’t change without encouragement and representation. If you as a guy get invited to speak on a panel, make sure there’s diversity. Turn down opportunities if it looks like it’s going to be a manel. Call out your fellow community members if they’re engaging in sexist behavior. It’s not always comfortable,especially if it’s a friend or a co-worker, but it needs to be done. Do your part.

If ComicCon can have an equitable panel in regards to Star Wars, you can do the same in regards to SQL or other tech panels.

Now for the personal:

Live Long and Prospoer

Autograph and picture with two amazing women, Nichelle Nichols and my daughter Rebecca.

Two amazing women: Nichelle Nichols is an amazing woman and helped represent African Americans on television in the 1960s and helped inspire people like Whoopi Goldberg and Mae Jemison. And as for my daughter, her future and journey is in front of her.  I will admit to basically being speechless in front of such an icon and here I am, still three days later grinning ear to ear thinking “I was in the presence of Uhura!”

(BTW, for those who recognize it, that’s a 1st edition Star Fleet Technical Manual with her signature. It also contains the signature of George Takei and James Doohan.)

 

Kids These Days

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“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” – Socrates 

We’ve probably all seen that quote in some form or other over the years. If not, it’s usually presented as a modern day rant (though given the use of the words chatter and dainties, I suspect the translation is a few decades old) and then is revealed to be close to 2500 years old.

But, it still holds true. Well, not so much the part about how terrible kids are, but how poorly many adults think of kids. How often have you heard someone say, “Kids these days, they always have their head down in their phones!” “Kids these days, they don’t read like they used to?” “The music kids listen to these days….”

The truth is, perhaps things have changed more in the past few decades than in centuries past simply because of the advances in technology. But, the truth is, in some ways, things are still. This is not to say that phones and tablets are 100% harmless (there’s a lot of evidence that for very young children they’re probably not a good idea). But, they can also be a huge impact. I have a friend whose autistic son can pretty much only communicate because of the use of a tablet. Without it, he’d be locked into a world of little communication. Kids these days…. can communicate in ways they previously couldn’t.

When I was starting college I discovered that through the local mainframe and then later the Internet (long before it was truly publicly available) I could communicate with people miles or 100s or even 1000s of miles away. I made deep, lasting friendships that way. I learned a lot. These is even more true. I know kids who have friends across timezones and countries and these are deep and meaningful friendships. It’s much like having a penpal, but basically in real-time. This has helped them develop cross-cultural understandings and learn more about the world.  Kids these days, can communicate in ways we never could have hoped for.

Just last night, on a chat system run out of RPI that I’ve mentioned, Lily, we were having a discussion about the advances in computing languages and the discussion included people from across the country, including my own son who could add his perspective from several hundred miles from away.  Kids these days, can interact with adults with decades of experience, and can provide their own perspective.

My daughter recently started a new seasonal job at a local haunted hay-ride. Granted, I’m on the hook (as is her mom) for doing a bunch of driving, but it was her initiative and work that helped her find the job and get the job. This is in addition to the school work she does, the sports and planning on helping with the school play down the road.  Kids these days, are not lazy and have their own initiative.

People talk about the state of today’s music. I’m sorry, but any generation that enjoys a song where half the words are basically “I want to ride my bicycle” or variations on that has no place criticizing the simplicity of lyrics today. For every Bohemian Rhapsody there’s a Bicycle. That was true then and is true today.  Kids these days, actually listen to as wide a range of music as we do, and some of it is actually pretty good.

Kids these days, sail across the ocean, alone, to make a plea for their future. And in return, people mock her and call her names. She’s literally asking us to consider her future and too many simply want to insult her. Adults these days, can be as cruel as always.

Kids these days simply want to inherit as good a world as we did. They’re working hard to make it a better place, but adults seem hell bent on denying them that. They’d rather smugly look down their noses at kids these days.  Don’t be those adults.

 

 

IIS FTP 530 error

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To my usual readers, you can ignore this. This is simply my way of making sure that the next time I have to google an issue, or someone else days, there’s a better chance of finding a solution. Note, there are other places posting the same solution.

But simply put, over the weekend client’s IT group rebooted a server and an FTP process started to fail. It took a lot of digging to solve it.

It appears that two things happened:

The IUSR to the FTP root directory got munged (it’s not 100% clear and this may not be a necessary step. But, things did NOT work for me until I did this, but then they continued to work when I removed the IUSR to see if I could recreate the problem.)

The part that was 100% necessary was this: https://manage.accuwebhosting.com/knowledgebase/941/FTP-Error-530-User-cannot-log-in-home-directory-inaccessible.html go to Step 8 and add all users. Why this was removed, I don’t know. But adding this after re-adding the IUSR step seems to have solved the issue.

That said, before anyone asks, “why in the world are you using FTP in the 21st century?” I won’t disagree other than to say this is purely an internal process that simply moves some non-PII data to a 2nd server.  Not a huge justification, but there it is.

Caving along the Great Divide

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The title is a rife on a favorite folk song of mine, “Railroading on the Great Divide”, apparently first made famous by the amazing Carter Family. In this case, the Great Divide is a feature of a local cave known as Knox Cave in the town of Knox NY.

So, what do you get when you take 2 Canadians, a number of students who are just starting in college and a pair of cavers who have been caving for over 50 years each, two medical students, a fire chief, and a mixture of other people and toss them into a classroom and then a cave? You get an excellent teaching and learning experience.

I again had the privilege of working with a great group of people teaching a 2 day class on cave rescue. On the first day we test the students patience by seeing how many Powerpoint slides they can sit through. If they successfully survive that, we then unlock the doors to the classroom and let them outside. We then do some patient packaging and patient movement.  We end the day with a large quantity of food.

Often I’ll spend the Saturday night at the fire house (our typical location for these classes) but this time I had to head home. On the way one of my fellow instructors texted me to let me know that the student who was staying with her had not arrived at her house. We started to worry.  About an hour later the missing caver had shown up. Turns out she and several other students had decided to take advantage of a baseball backstop and practice their SRT skills and spend some time teaching each other. Even after a long day of teaching, the students were still eager to share their skills with each other.

On Sunday, we spend less than 1/2 an hour in the classroom, essentially just enough time to grab some breakfast and handle some housekeeping chores. We then start a practice rescue. In this case it was at nearby Knox Cave. While the students had known that the practice would be at Knox, they had no idea what the actual would actually involve.  So when the first group showed up, including the local fire chief who was also part of our training, they sprang into action. The reporting party told them that two cavers were in the cave. Both were at the Great Divide, one with a broken leg, the other taking care of the injured caver.

Very quickly the students found the the injured caver but quickly learned that no plan survives the first encounter with reality; the non-injured caver had wandered off and they had to go find her.  The apparently simple rescue had now become a search problem.

After a few missteps, the students found the missing caver and assisted her to the surface. And shortly later the injured caver was also brought to the surface.  It was a successful practice.

At the end of the weekend, instead of 22 students with very little if any cave rescue experience (including at least one student who had never been in a wild cave before) we now had 22 students who had gained a bit of experience and I would actually trust to call if a real rescue was called. From the reports I got back, everyone had fun and more than one person is now very eager to take our weeklong class next year!

For me, it was a long weekend with not enough sleep, but I ended it more energized than I started it. This is typical when I teach courses like this. It’s because I love the aha moment students often have when they’re learning, and this weekend was full of those.

I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by great groups of people over the years and I must say my cave rescue family is among the best, and I’m proud to welcome even more members to that family.

P.S. Don’t forget to check out my latest article at Redgate’s Simple Talk: How to Use Parameters in PowerShell

Thoughts on Writing

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“I also did the copy edit. If it looks good to you, then I can get it published ASAP!”

This is an excerpt from an email I received yesterday. It was probably my favorite email of the week. It means another article of mine will be published at Red-Gate. I’m quite proud of this and once it is published I’ll be updating my page on published articles.

Let me be clear, while I appreciate getting paid for the Red-Gate articles and for the book I wrote, the truth is, I write for more than the money.

I write because I enjoy it. Getting paid sometimes is a bonus. Knowing that others may gain something from my writings is another bonus.

Just about two years ago I decided to go from writing for this blog on an occasional or “as inspiration” hit me basis to a weekly basis. This has had two impacts. I think I have fewer truly inspired posts, but overall I think my (and have been told, but you can judge for yourself) writing has improved. It’s like pretty much any activity, the more you do it, the better you get at it. And it has paid off, literally. I don’t get paid to write this blog, but it indirectly lead to my writing gig for Red-Gate.  So I guess it’s been worth it.

I’m still nowhere near close to giving up programming and writing full-time, but it would be a fun idea to explore. Right now though my writing gives me that little extra “fun money”.  I’m content with that.

Writing also brings me closer to my father. He was an English major at UConn and as such when he graduated became a carpenter. He had bills to pay after all! Some of my earliest memories of him are him sitting in his office trying to write. Based on what I know of him, I suspect he was trying to write the next Great American Novel.  Sadly that was never to be. That said, in the garage below my office I have all his notebooks with all his handwritten stories. Someday I plan on trying to decipher his handwriting to see what it is he did write.

In terms of non-fiction however, I do have some knowledge. He was for many years a stringer for some of the local newspapers and I remember him calling in articles he had written on a variety of topics, including coverage of the local media sensation, the trial of Peter Reilly who was charged with the brutal murder of his mother. Later my father covered the retrial of Mr. Reilly, after it was shown his initial confession was coerced and there were other issues were found with the trial.  He covered more than that, but was the biggest story he covered.

He never had a book published, which I know was a dream of his. I finally did get a book published, unfortunately after he died. That said, in fairness, I think a technical book, especially in today’s climate is a bit easier than the fiction book he was shooting for.

One writing tip I took from Stephen King (and others to be fair) is to set aside a time each week to simply write.  On my calendar I have a period set aside every Tuesday to write this blog. It’s a constant reminder that I need to make time to write. More recently I added a similar block on Wednesdays to write for Red-Gate.  It doesn’t mean I’m always successful during those times or that I only write during those times, but it forces me to set aside some time to write. And the end result is, I write more. And it’s been good.

That said, I think my next goal is to write a non-technical book, whether it’ll be a work of fiction or non-fiction remains to be seen. I may need to put that on the schedule now.

So, that’s my writing for this week!

 

Dress for Success?

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“Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.” This is advice I once heard years ago. Of course I’m not sure what you do if the job you want is the one you want.

Back around 1999 I mentioned to my dad what I was wearing to work. I think I mentioned something about cargo pants and hiking shoes. He admonished me that perhaps I should dress more appropriately for the office and see what the COO and CFO were wearing as an example.  I replied, “Dad, they wear shorts and sandals without socks to the office. I actually dress up more than the COO and CFO do!”  It took me awhile to convince him that in the new dot-com era, not everyone was wearing a shirt and tie to the office.

This all came to me yesterday afternoon as I was deciding what to wear to the Capital Area SQL Server User Group meeting. Since I’m generally the host, I do want to project a professional, but relaxed atmosphere. So, my usual fallback is khakis. But, I was also the speaker so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make sure I dressed even a bit more appropriately. Fortunately, having been to a number of SQL Saturdays, I had more than enough choices. I ended up with my SQL Saturday Albany 2016 shirt. But as it is starting to be cool here, I figured tossing a top over that would work, and funny enough, I had my Chicago SQL Saturday 2017 top to toss on over it. I’m nothing if not a shill for SQL Saturday!

My kids will claim I have a certain style when it comes to what I wear and they’re right. And while it may seem I often don’t give much thought to what I wear, the truth is, my choice of clothing, especially t-shirts, is often far more deliberate than it may appear.  I just don’t let on often to that fact.

And the truth is, between t-shirts from SQL Saturday and from National Cave Rescue Commission trainings, I probably have close to a month’s worth of shirts if need be.

Makes me wonder, do I volunteer because I like to give back to my community, or because I need the t-shirts? Hmm.

 

 

This Site Makes Cookies

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Apparently under new guidelines here and in Europe I’m ethically obligated that I’ve been known to make cookies from time to time.  Oh, excuse me, something is coming in to my earpiece now.  Oh, never mind, I’ve been informed those laws apply to a different type of cookie.

In any event, I first got into the habit of baking cookies on a somewhat regular basis while in college. It became a stress release for me, and also apparently made me quite popular among the sorority sisters and outing club members I lived with.  I would, probably at least once a month my sophomore year make a double-batch of Tollhouse Chocolate Chip cookies. They rarely lasted more than a day or two.

Since then, I’ve expanded my repertoire, including once trying “bacon cookies” for my very first SQL Saturday. Those weren’t a huge hit, but haven’t stopped me from baking.

That said, I’ve learned a few things over the years about baking cookies. For example, my daughter would bring cookies to school for an event and would often be asked, “oh did your mom make them?”  She’d patiently explain that no, her dad did. Even today, the assumption is that when it comes to school events, the mom does the baking. I’m glad that my kids both realize that it’s unfair to expect that mothers have to do all the baking and other domestic duties.

But, I also learned something else that sort of threw me for a loop. People don’t like homemade cookies from a zip-lock bag.  Sometimes I’d bring cookies to events and people wouldn’t eat many of them. Now, being practical and in a hurry, I’d almost always just toss the cookies into a zip-lock bag.  It was my daughter who suggested I start putting them into a plastic container with a lid instead. Suddenly I found the same cookies were much more popular. My daughter explained her theory, which I tend to believe. For whatever reason, perhaps hygiene, people don’t want to reach into plastic bags for food. It may be touching the same sides that everyone else did or something else. But regardless, putting them into plastic tub with a container works.

Call it a UI problem, but, it seems to work.

Today’s take-away, just because you’re comfortable with a solution and think it works, don’t be adverse to making changes, even if they seem silly or trivial, if that’s what your users desire.

P.S.: Check out my latest writing for Red-Gate: PowerShell and Secure Strings.

Two Minds are Better Than One

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I’m going to do something often not seen in social media. I’m going to talk about a mistake that I made. It’s all to common on various certain media sites to talk about how perfect our lives are and how great things are. You rarely hear about mistakes. I decided, in the theme of this blog of talking about how we approach and solve (or don’t solve) problems, I’d be up front and admit a mistake.

This all started with a leak in the downstairs shower. It had been growing over the years and I frankly had been ignoring it.  Why put off to tomorrow what you can put off to next month or even year? But finally, in December of last year it became obvious that it was time to fix the leak. It had continued to grow, and now that my son was home from college for extended break, he had setup a work area in the basement, below the bathroom.  I figured he didn’t really need to suffer from water dripping onto his desk.

So, he and I went into full demolition mode and ripped out the old tile and backer board to get to the plumbing.

New plumbing in bathroom

New plumbing

You can see some of the work here. I also took the opportunity to run wiring to finally put in a bathroom fan. That’s a whole other story.

Anyway, the demolition and plumbing went well. Then we put up the backer board and sealed it. And left it like that. It didn’t look good, but it was waterproof and usable. It was “good enough”. So for about 8 months it sat like that. But with an upcoming pool party, I decided it was time to finally finish it off. One of the hold ups had been deciding on tile. Fortunately, on a shopping trip about a month earlier, my son, my wife and I found tile we liked (my daughter, who ironically still lives at home and will be using the shower more in the next few years than her brother, was in LA on vacation, so she ended up not really having much say in the matter).

So, earlier this month, while the rest of my family took a weekend to go to Six Flags New Jersey, I figured I’d surprise them with finally tiling the shower.  I went to the big box store whose favorite color is orange and bought the required materials. Since tile we had selected is approximately 6″ wide and 24″ long, I had to make sure I got the right mastic.  This was a bit different from stuff I’ve worked with in the past with a bit more synthetic materials in it and it mixed differently, and had slightly different drying characteristics. That, combined with growing darkness lead me to move quickly. The darkness was a factor since any tile cutting I was doing was outside.

And, all that lead to a simple mistake.  On the end wall, there’s a window and as a result part of that wall needed tiles just less than 24″ long. On one hand, this is a huge plus since it means less seams and less places to grout. On the other, it meant in one spot having to work around the trim of the window. And that’s where I made my mistake.  The trim had been put over the original tile, so there was in theory room behind the stool of the window to fit in a piece of tile. That had been my plan.

But, when it came to sliding in the nearly 24″ long piece of tile, it wouldn’t fit. It wouldn’t bend (obviously) to let me get it tucked behind the stool and due to the stickiness of the mastic, I couldn’t slid it in from the top.

So, I cut out a notch. In the back of my mind I somehow was thinking, that it wouldn’t look that bad and tile would cover it.  Well, I was obviously wrong.

In hindsight, I realized I should have cut the tile in two pieces, created an extra seam (like the row below it that had to cover more than 24″ wide in any event) and then I could have slide in the smaller piece and then put in the remaining piece. It would have been perfect, looked great and more likely to be waterproof.

So, this gets me to the title. Had I been doing the work with someone else, I’m sure I’d have said, “Damn, this is gonna suck, any ideas?”

A mistake

My mistake

And I’m sure someone else would have suggested, “Hey, cut the piece and slide it in.”

I like working alone, but sometimes, you need a second person to help. Or more than one brain as I’ve mentioned in the past.  If nothing else, sometimes a duck can help.

Idera Ducks!

A bunch of rubber ducks, including two from Idera!

So, the moral of the story is sometimes two heads are better than one. Oh well, I won’t be the one using that shower, so I won’t see my mistake all the time!

Oh and check out my latest Red-Gate Article on Secure Strings in PowerShell.

Old Dogs and New Tricks

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One problem with writing a weekly blog is sometimes you get the same idea in your head and realize you’re about to repeat yourself. I want to write about learning new stuff and started to repeat stuff I said here. I suppose I could just put a pointer to that and be done but… nah.

Several ideas prompted this week’s theme for this blog, the most recent being Grant Fritchey’s blog on using Extended Events. He makes some good points and I want to add my own thoughts.

I’ll start by admitting I still often use Profiler. I know it. It’s “easy”.  Well, no, not really. A better description would be “It’s familiar”. Truth is, I’ve often found the interface a bit clunky and I have to do more steps than I want to narrow down to trace exactly what I want.

But, about two weeks ago, one of my clients had an issue with a run-away query that expanded their tempdb to about 400GB before it rolled back. We wrote it off as a fluke; until it happened again the next day.  Now we had a pattern. I decided that we needed to monitor the server about the same time the next day to see if it would occur again. Now, of course one can sit there and run queries like sp_whoisactive, but I wanted more.  Profiler might work, but I figured it was time for this old dog to learn, or at least practice new tricks. I’ll admit, I basically googled for what I wanted, but I quickly found a trace I could modify and run for my needs.  30 minutes later and I had a nice extended event setup and monitoring the tempdb.

Now, as fate would have it, that run-away query hasn’t shown up since then, so in a sense the trace hasn’t fulfilled it’s goal. But, it’s lightweight enough that I’ve decided to leave it. And, the results are easily accessible to others if I’m out of town.

In the past year or so, it’s really hit me how much my role as a DBA or IT professional has really changed from two or more decades ago. There’s stuff that I do now that wasn’t possible then and there’s stuff then that I would do that I don’t worry about now or can’t even do (who out there recalls the ability to setup SQL Server database “files” on raw partitions for the speed boost?)

Over two decades ago I wrote a fairly impressive batch file that could install a client’s application on the proper drive. It used a lot of commands most people weren’t even aware of in the batch language (this was DOS, so not even as good as what CMD in Windows NT and above gives us).  Nowadays, I’d use PowerShell.

My original programming was in Fortran. Nowadays, I tend to sling code in VB.Net or C#.

It’s ok at times to fall back on what’s familiar. Often it can be faster and easier for a single project. But in the long-term, one really needs to learn what’s new and apply what one can.

My advice, pick a new technology or skill, and use it, even if for one project.  I’m not going to be an expert in Extended Events anytime soon, but now at least I can say, I’ve used it.  I’m far from an expert in PowerShell, but I’ve now been paid for 3 (and soon 4) articles on using it.

If this old dog can learn a new trick so can you.

And, listen to music you didn’t grow up on. As much as I love to listen to the music I’m familiar with while working, I often branch out. Yes, I’ve been known to listen to some Taylor Swift and Charlie XCX. And yesterday was a bit of Imagine Dragons and Meute. Two very different styles of music, but still a good listen.

What new trick will you learn this month?

“Don’t be so Sensitive”

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I’ve mentioned in the past that I have an interest both in the SQL Server world, and the caving world. Often these both overlap in different ways, for example disaster planning and the like.

The other day I was reminded of another way in which they overlap: the ratio of men to women in each activity.  In both areas, though I don’t have firm numbers, far more men participate than women. There are a number of reasons for this, but one I’ll call “the good ol’ boys” attitude. I discussed this in a previous post concerning women in the industry. Recently however I was reminded that sexism continues to be a problem in the caving community. On Facebook, I’m a member of a number of groups with a focus on caving. The other day someone saw fit to post a picture in one of the groups I’m a member of. The picture was of a young woman, in a sports bra and short tights wearing a rock-climbing harness, and holding on to a dangling rope.

Now, there were several problems technically wrong with the picture, including the fact that she was wearing a rock-climbing harness and this was a caving group and the fact that the harness was on backwards.  But, that wasn’t the real problem.  The real issue was, this was that it simply was not appropriate for this group.  Several members posted pointing out that this picture, and pictures like this, objectify women and discourage them from caving.

And then it came, a guy saying, “Don’t be so sensitive.”

In four words, he casually dismissed the concerns and feelings of a large number of his fellow cavers.  He said, without realizing it, “I don’t care how you feel. Your feelings and concerns are not important to me.” In my experience, these are the very same men who then complain there aren’t enough women in caving.

Similar comments included, “Oh, now you’re saying she’s wrong to be proud of her body” or “what’s the matter with a hot body”.  Here the underlying subtext is that anyone who expressed an issue with the photograph in that group was a prude.

I’ve seen similar comments at times in the IT community; “What’s the matter if I call her pretty, she should be proud of that!” “What, DBAs can’t be hot too?”

What some of my fellow cavers and IT professionals fail to understand is that the women in these circles want to be considered by the same standards as their male companions, on their skills and accomplishments, not on what their body looks like.  This does not make them prudes.

Nor, when these same women dress up for a cocktail party, or have a beer, or crack a ribald joke does that make them hypocrites. This is also an important concept for many men to understand. The women I know who cave and are DBAs are just as complex and varied as the men. Some like to dress up, some like to tell off-color jokes in the appropriate setting, some like to smoke a cigar, and often do all the same things that their male compatriots do.  But when it comes to caving or IT, they want to be respected for their skills, not judged for these other attributes.

So, next time you’re about to post a hot sexy photo, or make a comment on a woman’s appearance, ask yourself, “is this the appropriate place for this? Would I do this if it was a hot sexy photo of a man? Would I make the same comment towards a man?” And as a hint, if the name of the group is something like, “Professionals in IT” or “Cavers of the World” the answer is almost certainly “no”. Remember, your fellow cavers and IT professionals are judging you.