To count means that you/it/whatever counts matters. If one counts the number of females in many tech/media conference, the number of women is dreadfully low, giving off the meaning and feeling they don’t always count, even if they are very well received.

There is a new project spearheaded by the efforts of Annina Rüst that will help us count women at conferences. The project is cleverly called Be Counted and it allows you to input information about gender representation in conferences. Here is a little more about the project and I urge you to check it out and contribute:

The project aims to collect a stream of user-contributed data on gender diversity in technology environments in the form of Gender Ratio Reports (GRRs). The longterm aim of the project is to not just collect but also provide tools for retrieving and visualizing the data in order to encourage others to collectively analyze the patterns behind the numbers.

So I love biting irony as a way to make A Point and one of my favorite essays in this regard is If Men Could Menstruate. For a while now, I have been waiting for some biting irony, really mockery, to be launched at the free wheeling Internet punditry that is so common today…. Well, here is one amazing video morsel directed at the social media guru (pictured below). Since the social media guru is just one class of Internet pundit, I hope more mockery will follow.

When I started my job, I decided to get an Apple Laptop because I wanted to try something new. I installed Linux (which is not so smooth to do on Apple). It was to put bluntly, a mistake.I really dislike the hardware and keyboard and it is just, like so much Apple hardware, flimsy. My CD/DVD player is already busted (and it is too much effort being in PR to fix it right now) and I feel like I have to treat the machine as a fragile one. I have heard so many Apple owners say “my hardware crashed, I sent my machine to be fixed” and when I point out that it messed up, many respod “but they have a great warranty.” The best warranty is not having to use the warranty. If you are not a Linux user, I understand why people prefer Apple software over MS software. But I will never get Mapple again.

Anyhow so I am going to get a netbook cuz I am traveling a whole lot next year and I can’t trust the Apple. I am thinking of IdeaPad S-series as it seems nifty and seems to work very well with Debian/Ubuntu. I have spent the morning reading reviews, and all in all, it seems like a winner.

If you have any experience with it, negative or positive, feel free to shoot me a line or drop a note in the comments.

update: Thanks for everyone’s very useful comments. I am now leaning toward Asus EeePC 1000 HE