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New hair...again

My name is Emma Jane Hogbin. I live and work in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. I build on-line communities and work with not-for-profit organizations on the implementation of technology-facilitated communications. Many of my local contracts are with organizations who are working toward the elimination of domestic violence; many of my international contracts are with indie craft Web communities. Within my physical community I am the conference chair for HICK Tech--the rural and modern technology conference. In 2008 speakers at this conference came from CBC, Flickr, The Guardian.co.uk, Yahoo! Canada, Neohapsis Labs and beyond.

I am an instructor for the Business Enterprise Centre and Riverside Yarns. I've also taught Web technologies at both Seneca College and Humber College. I have delivered social and technical presentations at IT conferences around the world. In 2008 my conference presentations have focused on: database migration, women in open source and community building. Additional information is available over on Geekspeakr and a list of upcoming and recent (technical) presentations is available from my Events page.

On-line I've gained popularity for knitting the drupal socks building the back-end of CrochetMe.com (with Drupal, of course), my involvement with The Linux Documentation Project, installing Debian on a remote server, acting as an standards advocate with the Web Standards Project and generally being a woman in open source. I've also been immortalized in print by The Yarn Harlot's book Knitting Rules! for my sweater disaster, in Linux Desktop Hacks for authoring Hack #96, and with a sock pattern in Shannon Okey's Alt Fiber book, release date September '08 (I also rolled the ball of yarn on the front cover--how's that for celebrity status?!). I can find either my own name or the name of a family member in virtually any (English) library or large bookstore. Although it's all very cool, it's not stuff that I tend to talk about a lot. This has resulted in comments like, "You're more important than I thought you were." Um. Thank you. I think?

I've got three darling pets: Bailey T. Cat; Gir T. Rabbit (Bunnicula for short) and Mr. Pigglesworth (the guinea pig). There are stories and pictures scattered throughout the archives. I'll let you find them on your own. There are also a growing mass of pictures on Flickr. I love their tags.

For fun I do various crafts (most are related to quilting, spinning, knitting, crochet and sometimes the paper arts and bookbinding). I am fueled by coffee and dark chocolate during the day (both of which should be organic and fair trade if at all possible) and occasionally a wee dram of Scotch in the evening (single malt, no water, and tasting like smoke thankyouverymuch). A day hasn't officially started until I put the music on. I listen to CDs on repeat until I can't stand them anymore, and then I put them away. Most of the time I use the stereo system, not my computer, to play my tunes...except my amp broke and I gave it to a friend who likes to tinker. Maybe someday I'll notice that the music isn't playing and maybe I'll buy something to replace it. In the car I listen to country music without shame. (Beowulf the City Golf replaces Grendel the Golf as my chariot of choice.)

about the tools

This site is now a Drupal5 install.
The site gets updated from a Dell Inspiron 640m notebook named Gollum (he replaces an Acer TravelMate 630 named Smeagol who ran Debian Unstable). Gollum runs on the Ubuntu Linux distro. My text editor of choice is Vim. Now that I'm doing less custom Web application work I've shifted over to a managed server (which is also running Debian). In a previous life I was much geekier but now I find I haven't got as much time to tinker for the sake of tinkering.

Contact

  • email: emma at emmajane.net
  • ICQ: 1235661
  • AIM: emmajanedotnet