The NY Times has a guest opinion piece about the analysis experiment one man and his daughter performed on their local weather forecaster’s predictions of temperature and precip in the nightly news.

Not surprisingly they found a monkey could probably make better predictions outside of a 3 day forecast, beyond that you might as well throw dice to make the predictions for you; and you might be accurate just as often.

The results were quite enlightening, as were some of the comments of the local meteorologists and their station managers. Here a few of the quotes we received:

“We have no idea what’s going to happen [in the weather] beyond three days out.”

“There’s not an evaluation of accuracy in hiring meteorologists. Presentation takes precedence over accuracy.”

“All that viewers care about is the next day. Accuracy is not a big deal to viewers.”

Here’s a recreation of TRS-80 computer system. The simulator is based on TRS-80 Level I BASIC which debuted back in 1977. It is not an emulator but rather a recreation of Level I BASIC that runs entirely within a browser.

The author has included a library of programs for you to experiment with as well, like a variant of the Lunar Lander or Trek III.

Brings back fond memories, it has everything but the cassette tape drives and the keybounce problem.

Hackers Find a New Place to Hide Rootkits…your processor.

It appears to just be proof-of-concept code thus far by a security firm but will be demonstrated publicly for the first time at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this August.

I ran across a great mermaid costume online that does well in keeping to the original cartoon movie The Little Mermaid. What do you think?

The original is from a contest at this site.

Someone recently stumbled onto Geeknews by searching for the term:

What do women wear to tech conference

Good question. Any first timer probably would want to know how to act and dress and wants to know what to expect, not wanting to stand out looking like the first timer they are.

And we know how many women (not all) are concerned about their appearances, so it’s natural to expect Ms. First Timer to launch herself at the internet to find out how to dress for success and enable the networking opportunities and at the same time not go overboard by letting her clothing make an incorrect statement (makes me glad to be a guy).

Andy’s general rule of thumb when it comes to how to dress is:

You can’t go wrong with business casual

Here’s my idea of business casual for women:

For a woman this is usually slacks, nice shoes, blouse (not loud), blazer is optional. If you’re speaking at the conference then you should wear a blazer when speaking to the crowd.

For the shoes, don’t wear high heels, not ‘power shoes’, take spiffy looking comfortable shoes because you may be standing in lots of lines for food, registration, restrooms, more food, more restrooms, airport security lines…

Go light on the jewelry, something to complement the blouse. Same thing goes for smelling great, don’t get too flowery. If you must have a scent applied then keep it to a minimum, you’re not here to pick up a date so keep the artificial pheromones at home, please.

I did an image search on Live and Google for women at tech conferences and for the most part the clothing description i’ve given above seems to apply, excluding the perfume.

If you already know how formal or informal your conference is, you can probably make some safe bets wrt dressing down or up as appropriate. For instance, there are some tech conferences that are pretty low key on the west coast of the US and folks can get away with wearing jeans and sandals, though these conferences usually have smelly hippy linux coder types that wouldn’t know business casual if it hit them upside the head.

Below is a promotional photo for the Society of Women Engineers National conference, you can’t go wrong as a women dressing like this at any tech conference. It’s smart, low key yet professional.

Feel free to correct me if i’m wrong anywhere here, while i’m not a conference expert i’ve attended my share and I’ve seen some disastrous attempts to be too dressed up and too dressed down, so aim for the middle with business casual.