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Raleigh, NC
Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting. She's a maker at heart who is often behind a sewing machine creating costumes, rolling fondant for an excessively large cake, or looking for the next great DIY project.
Authored Comments
AT&T has an interesting use of Twitter going. They've got someone watching Twitter for mentions of AT&T who then @tweets you and puts you in touch with someone else. You can see how it starts by looking at @ATTCustomerCare's stream, but it goes something like this:
@SadUser: I'm so annoyed with my iPhone dropping calls all the time. Grr!
@ATTCustomerCare: @SadUser I'm sorry you're having trouble. Please follow @ATTBob. He will DM you to try to help.
@ATTBob will then try to soothe your angry feelings. What's really interesting is how MANY of these people they have. Here are the ones showing up on ATTCustomerCare's latest tweets, although they seem to be having trouble with a fake user named ATTDSL right now.
ATTChrisL
ATTChrisF
ATTJenn
ATTTroyW
ATTJason
ATTJulie
ATTJohnathon
ATTNickT
ATTTatiana
ATTTimur
ATTJessica
ATTMIkeT
ATTEmilia
ATTCarolyn
ATTAlex
ATTNicole
ATTAlexM
It's a great solution, but the number of people they have working on it stuns me!
This is something I pay a reasonable amount of attention to since it's the intersection of two things that interest me. I've always felt like it would be appropriate to have a middle ground, but I'm pretty sure the software world has proved that to be nearly impossible. Here's why, though.
On the one end, there's a shirt-like garment. Generally speaking, you need two holes for arms, one for a head, and from there, you've got a basic shape with quite a lot of room for changes, but still, a basic shape. Clearly I'm not copying you if I also have shoulder openings five inches from a neck opening that is 15 inches with a point in the center.
On the other end, there is the real *design* work, which is more like artwork constructed of cloth. See:
http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/columns/belinda-white/TMG8087321/Harry-Potter-costume-designer-accused-of-stealing-Alexander-McQueen-design.html
(I haven't seen Temime answer about whether she claims it was an original design--if someone else has, I'd like to see it.)