My Ada Lovelace Day Hero – Deborah Cavel-Greant
Today (April 24th) is Ada Lovelace Day, a time each year to celebrate the achievments of women in science and technology. This year, I’m celebrating the amazing work of my mother, Deborah Cavel-Greant.
I’ve been fortunate to rely on and work with many exceptional women over the years – teachers who changed my life, employers who took a chance on me, peers who supported me, mentors who helped me out of the thickets, editors who saved my bacon, and more – but my mother stands out as achieving amazing things with many challenges and few resources. To understand how exceptional she is, a bit of back story is in order.
Somewhere in the 1940s, my mother was born to an older couple who were long past expecting any more children. Her early life was difficult. Her physical abilities were limited by childhood polio combined with undiagnosed chronic illness, but her curiosity was voracious and her intellect was keen. She read anything that she could get her hands on – Frost and Twain, Longfellow and Cervantes – and she wrote and wrote and wrote. The map of her world was prose and every point on her compass rose was a pen that pointed as far North, South, East and West as she could write.
Fast forward decades and the girl is a woman with adult children. She’s been writing professionally for nearly thirty years and has been an entrepreneur for nearly as long. Along the way she’s worked at museums, freight companies and float plane companies, trained and practiced as an herbalist, raised a family, run a health food store, raised bloodhounds, made and sold dolls, made mascot suits, written books, studied theater and drama, repeatedly attempted to save the world and generally cultivated a passion for life. Her health is still deeply compromised, but she learned to cope by becoming a self-taught expert on the illnesses that she was diagnosed with (eventually publishing a well-respected book on Myasthenia Gravis for patients and physicians.) While the variety of activities is tremendous, very little of it encounters computer technology.
In 1994, this all changed. She was taking a business course when a fellow student told her of an amazing new technology called the Information Superhighway. The idea that the written word could be published quickly and distributed cheaply in an instant set her passion alight and weeks later the entire family was planning to start a business on the web.
We settled on one idea – an online travel magazine for Calgary, Canada – and got started. My mother would write the content, my brother would take photos and I would learn how this computer and Web stuff worked (my dear father was mostly bed-ridden at the time and offered moral support.) We bought a second-hand computer and spent weeks puzzling about how to get online. In the end, it was my mother who first got a handle on HTML. She looked at some source for a while and then said, “This looks like the typesetting instructions that I had to read when I set type for newspaper presses.” She taught me and, with the help of Netscape’s view source feature, I was quickly roughing up functional (if ugly and invalid) HTML pages. Some months later we published one of the first commercial websites in Calgary, going on to try our hand at a Internet consulting and a web startup.
We’ve all come a long way since then, but I think that my mother may have come the furthest and, while her health has further declined, her ability to use the Web to foster change has continued to grow.
She’s in her sixties now and, on a shoestring budget of both money and energy, she manages to amplify every bit of good she does by sharing it over the web.
Her efforts to green her corner of the world, raise environmental awareness and to help others in need she promotes via her blog. Her expertise in managing the social, mental and physical effects of a specific chronic illness is shared on a website that she’s developed and maintained for over a decade now. She teaches less technically adept seniors how to use the net to keep their curiosity bright and family ties strong.
She’s an inspiration every day and I still strive to use technology as effectively as she does.
The My Ada Lovelace Day Hero – Deborah Cavel-Greant by Zak Greant, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 14:41
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March 24th, 2010 at 15:29
You didn’t say she can swear in five languages, is an incompetent practitioner of Buddhism, and cries when she reads the kind of swill you have just written. Nonetheless she loves you as violently as she did on the day you were born, if not more so. It’s been a wonderful adventure, hasn’t it?
Love,
Ene
March 24th, 2010 at 15:33
Madre, it has been a wonderful adventure and continues to be so.
Also, I’d have thought that it was more than five languages. In this area, I may now have bested you.
April 18th, 2010 at 12:21
Zak, you are a superman among men. Good read.