I Will Never Ever…

I went to pick up mom’s glasses in the middle of the day – an excuse to be outside when the weather was so amazingly springy. Waiting for a bus, hopping on, hopping off, walking and squinting on the bright sun,,, navigating the crowd, passing people… and remembering March 2020…

I will never ever take it for granted – the ability to walk on the streets, hoping on a bus, being with others… Never ever…

Spring cleaning in Millennium Park

Weekend Protests Follow-up

I had so many work-related and conference-related things going on that I didn’t even finish posting about the weekend events. There were reporters out there,m both Friday and Saturday, and they took better pictures than us. All the pictures below are copied from the Chicago Tribune gallery. There is Annam and a part of me :).

I still feel dissatisfied, and I regret that I didn’t do more. The most important message we had to send was a message to our legislators to continue supporting the Ukraine war effort and to make it clear that it is not a general humanitarian thing,” but keeping the rest of the world safe. Looking and the news coverage, I feel that this mission was not achieved.

I also blame myself that I didn’t speak at the end of the meeting when the floor was available. It was already too cold, and everybody started to feel it (though nobody had left). Yes, I was unprepared, and it was cold, and I thought that Nadia and Kira could get completely frozen at any moment. That’s all true, but I still could.

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All About Yesterday

There were a lot of different events happening in Chicago on Friday and Saturday, marking a year of the Russian war against Ukraine. I have an acute feeling that I haven’t done enough, haven’t said enough, and that people, in general, are more indifferent than they should be.

Still, I want to report some positive news.

The Ukrainian rally on Friday was massive, with lots of city and county officials in attendance. I was hoping to be there at least for a part of it, but I had an unreconcilable conflict with the girls arriving at the same time. Igor was there and took a lot of pictures.

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We Stand With Ukraine

Hopefully, there will be more photos and videos tomorrow, just the short episode including a rally in which Igor, Anna, and I participated.

NBC Coverage

Anna was interviewed by CBS2, but I haven’t seen it online yet

Why your female co-workers do not come to meetups?

Continuing discussion about women at meetups

Hettie D.'s avatarThe World of Data

Thank you to everybody who responded to my post about the complete absence of women at the Chicago PUG February meetup on all three platforms where it was posted. While I understand that it is not an isolated issue but a part of the overall gender disbalance in IT, the lack of women in Postgres is striking compared to other IT fields. And even on top of that disbalance, it is even more pronounced at meetups.

During last week’s discussions, some people stated that going to any meetup or not is a personal choice, and there may be many reasons why people do not come. I completely agree with that, but I am leaving the discussion on “what are the benefits of attending meetups” to a future discussion. In this blog, I focus solely on gender disproportion.

Several commentators suggested providing daycare or allowing participants to come with children would…

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I Hope People Will Come!

Last Saturday, I distributed some flyers about tomorrow’s rally to the protesters by the Lyric Opera Building. It turned out that Chicago Tribune did an interview with one of the Ukrainian refugees who were there, and … they mentioned the rally in the article!

Also, Igor and one other rally organizer were interviewed by NBC today, so there will be even more visibility.

I hope that people will come!

Today at Jewel Osco. I imagine some people might think it’s bad taste, but I felt it like a touching gesture.

The Orchid Show 2023

My friend Lena started a tradition of visiting me in sprig to attend the Chicago Botanic Garden Orchid Show. We did the first one right before the pandemic lockdown, then we did the second one last spring, right after the war in Ukraine started. And last Sunday, we went to the 2023 Orchid Show. Same as before, we took my mom along, and Lena’s friend from Palatine came to join us.

I do not think anybody needs words to describe the orchids. They are magical. This year, the show organizers placed magnifying lenses close to some of the orchids, and neither Lena nor I liked this. We both think, it was a good try but the result was not as magical as one could imagine.

Here they are:

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Anna Karenina at Joffrey

Joffrey Ballet put on a new “Anna Karenina” production with an all-new score by Ilya Demutsky, which is stunning. I spend almost an hour searching for the best photos, and they can only remotely reveal what a stunning production it is. There is very little of Tolstoy left. For example, the best part is the scene of Anna and Vronsky’s intimacy, which is 100% against Tolstoy’s beliefs. If you remember this part of the novel, he does not describe the scene, he just said that “it happened.” And then, he describes all the horrible feelings of “murder” and how Anna is disgusted with what just happened. This goes with Tolstoy’s idea that sex is sinful and “unnatural” and ruins the love, not compliments it. All the nonsense that people with a strong desire often say since they feel guilty about how they feel.

Anyway, is erotic scene is so beautiful and so powerful!

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I have a question again – a different one

Hettie D.'s avatarThe World of Data

On February 15, we had one more live meetup of the Chicago PostgreSQL User Group. I am very happy with how it went, except for one thing.
Positive things first, the attendance was at the pre-pandemic level first time after the pandemic! I would even say it was on the higher side of pre-pandemic attendance. The speaker was outstanding (would you ever expect less from Kirk Roybal?) There were a lot of questions during the talk and after the talk, and some people stayed after 8 PM. All of this was great, and I think that how a good meetup should look like, and that’s why we have live meetups.
However, there was one thing that I didn’t like. Look at the picture below:

I asked the audience how many people had female coworkers. At least two-thirds raised their hands. And then I asked: so where are they? Why didn’t…

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The Ripple, The Wave…

Flexible theatre memberships always look appealing because you think you will just choose the day which works best for you when it is closer to the show. And then, since a show is not on your calendar, you forget that you must choose.

This happened to me with my Whenever Goodman membership: the play “the ripple, the wave which carries me home” looked very interesting, but I thought, “I will look at it next week, this week is too busy,” until all of a sudden, I received an email saying that the show must close the upcoming Sunday.

Fortunately for me, I opened this email before Sunday, and luckily, Igor and I found one show time that worked for both of us.

We were almost late for the show because we went out for dinner and got very engaged in our conversation, so when we rushed into the Owen theater five minutes before the show started, and ended up sitting close to the extended family of the actress who played a leading role!

It is surprising how many people are unaware of the history of pool segregation and how many horrible things were happening fairly recently. Even the author of the play admits in the interview that she was not aware of many of them before she started working on this play. For me, the show’s most shocking moment was when the main heroine’s mother talks about three boys, two black and one white, who were killed (she does not give details of what happened, except “out of four only one returned”), and she says about their funerals:” They should have been buried together, but no cemetery would do this.”

I am glad we got a chance to go. This is one of the plays which is almost too close to reality, and although there are a lot of funny moments, it is very tragic, and very close to ho