Cyborg Mommy - Refugia.net
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1. SRS BE ROSES SSE SASS SSS di SSSR RORA eo n OSORIO IOS EON an yo Computer programmers and technology executives fare some of the most sought after and well paid white collar workers in this country Desired skills include ithe ability to keep up with a quickly changing work Me creating bodies of knowledge managing flows of in formation and machines constant in i novation 3 F iers Manual aoe EN Te goes without saying that the world of technology is mostly populated by men The job description of i Mother also includes the ability to keep up with a quickly changing work environment creating bodies iof knowledge managing flows of information and machines constant innovation and creativity yet this pasisian is unpaid and for many undesirable l Obviously most Mothers are women As machines and bodies increasingly become fused Cyborg Theory celebrates criticizes and condemns the process The machine body relationship i is at once liberating and oppressing While movies and fiction depict the Cyborg as a futuristic superhuman or techno ix logical monster F propose that it is o ee actually y ur average Mother and Housewife that are among the first so called Cyborgs The machine has extended the body of the mother for centuries as she tended the stove cranked the washer peddled the sewing machine and vacuumed the house but she hardly exists in discussions of technolog2. or more from the Mother as we do from the computer and yet we condemn the Mother that breaks down under the pressure If the computer breaks down we upgrade the hardware software or memory I other words we provide what it needs to function reli ably There is no parallel of penwien for the Mother debug To fix problems in hardware or software pi Post Human Sex Toy Homework toys sewing friendships arguments need I say more Mother even debugged the dog Literally Of course that left her no time to deal with her own problems such as a husband with an alcohol problem feelings of isolation and despair lack of romance and no time to pursue her own interests or even figure out what those might be Easter egg A secret message hidden somewhere in a pro gram that can be revealed by entering some unusual i combination of commands such as pulling down a menu while holding the command and shift keys Computer users can stumble upon Easter eggs by accident or hear about them through rumors The messages can be jokes political statements music or pictures often they are credits for the developers of the software A candy egg or soft boiled eee that is hidden in the ipis or yard for hunting during the Easter holiday season 172 DOMAIN ERRORS The child who collects the most eggs or finds the golden egg wins a prize elegant Simple graceful yet effective demonstra
3. single quilt parallel processing Using more than one computer at the same time to solve a problem or using more than one processor working sim ltaneously within the same computer A technique used for bake de Each Mother would bake a pie cake brownies or cookies then congregate at the designated location and sell the goodies to raise money for school or church activities 176 DOMAIN ERRORS quanti er One that quantifies i in mathematics or logic a prefixed operator that states for which values of a variable a formula is true Mother was the quantifier for stating which values were true We often disagreed with her but we did use her basic formulas for daois our own value sets random access A way of storing and retrieving information in which all information locations are immediately avail able For example on a music CD any song can be select ed and played randomly Mother have you seen my 2 She knew the location of everything at all time and was constantly besieged by six people always searching for something emote login Logging in to a remote computer by a pro gram based on Telnet to access files etc Logging in by phone was required if you were to be late from a date or upon arrival and departure from activities or events save To store a file on a disk or other storage medium When a file is being edited the changes are only in tems i c porary memory RAM
4. and will be lost when the power is shut off To keep the changes in permanent memory the file must be saved If there is a power failure or crash all data not saved will be lost Family photos report cards art works cherished books awards Mother saved it all for the time she would pass it on to us as mementos of precious memories She also saved a lot of junk Every nook and cranny of the house was filled with stuff She said that Father was a pack rat i but the truth is that she was just as bad task management In a multitasking environment the part of the operating system that controls the running of tasks within the computer coordinating resources when several tasks are running at the same time Just think of Mother as the part of the family that simultaneously controlled the execution of tasks and the coordination of resources The Control Center And boy could she be controlling user friendly Easy to learn and use especially for people who are not experts This te term is most often used to Perfect Specimen describe software Pattie Belle Hastings 174 seeeeseseeseossseseesesseedpeocesesesosesesssesssosseseessesssessssoessssessssssssoepessseessesesossesseoessesessesesessessessseeseseeee esesesessesesseseoeesessecessssesesesosoesesossseospesseesesseesseees The Mother to child interface is implemented from birth Ours was user friend
5. ed i in a shareware program that reminds the user to register and pay the fee It usually appears when the program is opened or closed The look on Mother s face when you didn t do what you were supposed to or you did what you werent supposed to no words necessary See error message Pattie Belle Hastings 175 off load To remove data from a computer and put it on another computer or storage medium Out of season clothes were uploaded from the closets to the attic until needed along with holiday decorations and old toys i overwrite To write over data Are is already on a disk for example when updating a file Permission for a thing an act or an event was over written due to behavioral changes or in the case of trying to go around Mother and get permission from Father Approval or permission from Father was easily and often overwritten Adjusting Maternal Sensors ini packet switching A abil for sending packets of cyborg model MFAY2 K information over a net work Data is broken up into packets for trans mission All the data packets related to a mes sage may not take the same route to get to their destination they they have arrived A common process for quilting where individ ual members of a sewing circle constructed a block or section of fabric at home Patterns and fabric were distributed members sewed at individual locations and then met to assemble the blocks into a
6. f time The extreme toll it takes on body and mind showed up in Mother as a deep and recurrent depression batch processing Processing a group of documents or files all at once In batch processing the user gives the com puter a job for example printing letters to everyone on a mailing list and waits for the whole job to be done i E E atk Ds SAL SN CRS Se i cE acai Se lL CA Rl Gi liek OU Sa EES EE E dSLR SRI i Aid Matic CAO da UR i lS ACB Mt Pattie Belle Hastings 171 Mother taught me to do laundry when I had enough like colors to make a full load If I needed my gym suit or something for the next day it might be hand washed by itself transaction pereo i cache A temporary storage area for frequently accessed or i recently accessed data Having certain data stored in cache speeds up the operation of the computer A cache hit accessing data from a cache takes much less time than retrieving information from the main memory There were always caches of lunch snacks certain foods small gift items and school supplies hidden around the house in strategic locations so that they could not be accessed by unauthorized individuals Mother had her own well hidden private caches of candy bars for her sugar addiction computer A programmable electronic machine that per forms mathematical and logical operations and assembles stores correlates and processes information We expect as much
7. ical culture except as a con suming unit for manufacturing and advertising or in ithe case of reproductive technologies the body that Ti he cyborg is a kind carries the baby There has been little or no discussion about the postpartum technologizing of the mother iof disassembled dnd and child With microchips embedded in everything from toys and greeting cards to thermometers and baby reassembled postmodern monitors increasingly the mother child relationship is Sollee dind peeing imediated complicated and enhanced by machines We i P i _Jare encouraged to feed our infants information as if we self This is the self i were storing data on a hard drive with a push to begin programming their brains i in utero What is a cyborg mother to do Here s to the recognition of the Cyborg Mommy yie Cyborg as oppressed and the Cyborg as liberated feminists must recode Donna Haraway PATTIE BELLE HASTINGS 170 DOMAIN ERRORS G OIDIS y OR Everything Know About Computers Learned From Mother agent A software program that performs a service suchas alerting the user of something that needs to be done on a certain day or monitoring incoming data and giving an alert when a message has arrived or searching for infor mation on electronic networks An intelligent agent is enabled to make decisions about the information it finds Mother operated as the intel
8. ligent agent for all of the members of the family Among the plethora of services provided by our personal agent she found art lessons for me tutors for my little sister colleges for all of us and home care nurses for my grandmother This of course meant she had little or no time for herself her interests and had no agent of her own The selflessness of the in telligent agent is both a gift and a curse avatar A pictorial repteseritatien of a participant in a three dimensional chat environment The avatar is chosen by the user and may look like a bird a fish or some other colorful character Installation of Maternal Instinct Monitor Mother had many avatars of all genders Santa Claus She was so adept at these personas that it was years before we figured out it was her background task A task a runs on its own while the useri interacts with the computer on another foreground task for example some computers can run a printer in back ground while the user edits text or reads other files There was always something going on in the background with a family of five children It might be laundry hang l ing on the line homework music practice or something cooking but you could be sure that more than one thing was happening at any given time This requires a constanti juggling of background and foreground activities making for a scattered sense of self and a surreal compression or l expansion o
9. ly with an infectious laugh and a sense of humor This is not the case with all Graphical Mother Interfaces virus A program that infects a computer by attaching itself to another program and propagating itself when that program is executed A computer can become infected by files downloaded over a network or by the installation of new software or floppy disks that are infected with virus es Some viruses are only pranks and perform harmless actions like displaying a screen with a joke message on it Others can destroy files or wipe out a hard drive If one of us got it we all got it Nothing much could be done about it except for taking us to the doctor and nurs ing us back to health But who took care of Mother Illness became a method for Mother to check out of the system She wasnt able to give herself the time or care that she needed so taking to bed was the only way for her to escape the demands isolation and drudgery of life as a housewife and mother volatile memory Memory chai loses its content when the i power is shut off The main memory Random Access Memory or RAM of the computer is volatile memory Any changes made to files must be saved to disk before the power is turned off or they will be lost We called it forgiveness forgetting all the bad choices hurtful behavior and mistakes We put Mother through various kinds of hell and she forgave and forgot it all I have yet to forgive myself for some of i
10. nce of a human task The incorporation of machines i into the household goes back thousands of years A day i in the life of a Mother requires interaction with a number of technological devices vacuum cleaners garbage disposals washers dryers microwaves automobiles telephones answering machines TVs VCRs computers calculators cameras blenders and food u to name just a few multiprocessing Using two or more processors in the same computer or two or more computers connected togethe to execute more than one program or instruction at the same time Field trips always required multiprocessors Several Mothers would volunteer their time to assist in the over sight of the class outside of the school grounds This pre vented unruly bus rides and losing children at museums or historic sites multitasking Running more dan one program at a time When a machine has this capability i it is easy to switch between programs without having to quit or to copy material from a file in one program to a file in another Mother could switch between tasks demands and think ing at notice In fact she never had the luxury of concen trating on one thing at a time Everyone said that there was never a dull moment in our house which also mean that there was never any peace rest quiet or time to be with oneself The idea that Mother might get away for some time alone or to vacation was unfathomable nag screen A screen display
11. often used as a stalling factor Mother would also use itin conversation to stop a train of thought as in disbelief or outrage Just a minute there young lady knowledge base A database af knowledge about a subject used in artificial intelligence The knowledge base for an expert system a computer system that solves problems comes partly from human experience and partly from the computer s experience in solving problems I still consult Mother the Database about cooking clean ing child raising marital relationships and so on And believe it or not sometimes my knowledge base is of value to her LFO Last In First Out A method of storage in which the data stored last will be retrieved first LIFO is best demonstrated by lunch boxes and overnight bags Mother would put the lunch items in the box in the reverse order of consumption so that the first thing to come out of the box or bag was the sandwich This also helped to prevent mushy bread especially in the case of peanut butter and jelly there s nothing worse than a soggy purple sandwich When packing a bag for an 174 DOMAIN ERRORS overnight with a friend the last to go in were the pajamas and toothbrush because they would be the first items needed machine A device consisting of fixed and moving parts that modifies mechanical energy and transmits it into a more useful form A system or device that performs or assists i the performa
12. t well behaved Acting in aise with standards software is said to be well behaved if it uses the operating system in the expected way for such tasks as screen display key board input disk input output etc See ill behaved Simply what we were expected to be XOXOXO Kisses and hugs Char Expression No explanation necessary VARIG You Asked For It You Got It Refers to user inter faces which are not WYSIWYG What You See Is What You Get With YAFIYGI the file on the screen may show text and code but does not show what the printed out copy will look like 178 DOMAIN ERRORS A term usually associated with disappointment in a much requested new toy or food product Closely related to BCWYWF Be Careful What You Wish For you just might get it Modern Reproduction Tools i 11 Also known as sleep This occurs when the screen dims on a computer monitor in order to save energy and pre serve the integrity of its image capabilities Or in the case of laptop computers sleep mode conserves battery power Sleep The process by which the brain and body are reju venated and energy is restored Also known as something of which a Mother never gets enough i
13. ting the highest efficiency and economy of design For example in mathematics an elegant proof in computer program ming an elegant program Father was a Mason and Mother was an Eastern Star On the nights that she went to these events she wore an evening gown perfume and red lipstick I thought she was the most beautiful and elegant creature that walked the earth even though I did not want her to leave me behind with the baby sitter fault tolerance The ability of a system to keep working in the event of hardware or software faults Fault tolerance i is usually achieved by duplicating key components of the system Mother always had a back bs plan for the important goings on in the family whether it be a spare car working around weather or surprise guests There was never a standstill in the family machine It kept on cranking i come 1e what may i guiltware Freeware or Jarre that has a message attached which attempts to make the user feel guilty until making some kind of payment Actual Size 7 Parents are some of the best at enlisting guilt and Mother was no exception It sometimes worked for getting rooms cleaned the trash taken out see delete and other assort i ed chores As I got older it was used for life decisions keeping in touch and coming home for the holidays help Explanations available on the computer screen about the various icons and tools and ho
14. w to use the computer Many programs have help menus that explain all their capabilities Life questions homework questions how to N questions if Mother didnt know the answer she would find it or someone who did ill behaved Programs called ill behaved are designed to bypass normal operating system functions which may result in better performance but makes the program less Pattie Belle Hastings 173 portable and more likely to be restricted to specific hardware See well behaved This type of action restricted you to the house As simple as that If you couldn t behave you couldn t leave the house We weren t badly behaved as kids but managing a car full of five children was such a chore that we just did n t go out that much The only restaurant that we ever went to was a Chinese place owned by a friend of Father s I guess they figured friends would be more for giving if we misbehaved or became unruly iteration The process of running a series of instructions over and over until some condition i is satisfied Or one repetition of the series ABCs shoe tying flashcards spelling tests music practice multiplication tables Over and over and over until we got it right m Just A Minute Chat Expression An expression used daily in order to reach a stopping point in the task at hand before responding to a call JAM was used frequently by all members of the family and i
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