Ada Lovelace Day Addition
So on actual Ada Lovelace Day, I was a little 
at being the only person on Planet Ubuntu that blogged for it. Plenty on Planet Ubuntu Women, but Planet Ubuntu was empty. And none of the guys involved posted anything.
But yay! They were just a little late. James Westby and Matt Zimmerman both joined in. Matt wrote about his mom, which I thought was pretty cool. And Miia Ranta joined in as well.
I did just realize that there are two women I should have given a little shout-out.
One is Cathy Malmrose, the CEO of ZaReason, the company that made my computer. She’s a hardware geek, so it’s only natural, right? She said they’re considering expanding into the “make their own components” direction so they won’t be constrained by what barebones brands offer. Neat! They sell t-shirts too. There used to be Little LinuxChick shirts, but now there’s this cute one that says “friends help friends use Linux” with a silhouette of two teenage girls on laptops. Also, she’s raising a few FOSS munchkins. Her 5 year old installed Ubuntu (the 7 year old helped by reading the words for her) to prove the neighbor wrong about Linux being hard to install. And the 7 year old is already programming. I think the fact that there’s a photo of him on Flickr using 3 laptops titled “Mom, what’s the kernel? Where is it? Can I mess with it? Why not? Just tell me where it is so I can play?” is hilarious and wonderful. She’s obviously a great influence on her kids.
The other is Amber Graner, the “average user mom” who’s been blogging her adventures learning to use Ubuntu (and trying Fedora and OpenSUSE), and making everyone go “oh…oh yeah…I guess we could make that easier…that’s a good point….” She’s providing great constructive feedback, and she’s just so excited to learn. I ♥ people that love to learn. I hope her love of learning is something her kids pick up. In my mind, she’s the perfect person to have promoting Ubuntu (which she does!) because she proves that anyone that’s willing to give learning an honest try can use it—it’s not a geek OS.
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