On Saturday, July 19, eleven bloggers gathered for the Feminism & Gender Room of Your Own at the BlogHer conference. Using every second of our 40 minute time slot, we introduced ourselves and the topics that are most on our minds these days. Since time was short and issues were complicated, intricate, and thoughtful, we did not have enough time to have more than a surface discussion about each one, but I thought it worth sharing our ideas to perhaps get some online conversation going. Here's what was on our minds:

I wrote before the BlogHer Conference about being a non-blogger (or sponsor) at the event, and even offered this up for male attendees:Men and women network differently. We often seek some form of commonality before we decide to team up with each other. (Men:) Careful of the hard sell, ...:Still, that didn't necessarily preclude men from trying to talk shop.

When I started my professional career in 1973, I had no idea what the minimum wage was. I just knew that the wages I was getting -- my infamous $3.25-- was impossible to live on. Turns out the minimum wage in 1973 was $1.60. Money Musings just ran a comparison of costs of things in 1973 to 2007 based on the minimum wage.

Here is the tweet From Tracey Lee Wallace that got the attention of Comcast's digital detective, that got the attention of ABC News, that gave a bunch of people the idea that they should start complaining about theirComcast service on Twitter. "Damn Internet down in my house. Arrrrrgh. Can't fix until Thursday. Shoot me."

I am pretty diligent about reviewing my monthly expenses periodically to see where and what I can trim. Recently, I got back into doing an overhaul of expenses in light of the increased cost of every little thing and as part of the Week 1 exercises in the Business Rescue teleseminar series I've been attending. When it comes down to it my philosophy is to minimize necessary expenses (insurance, taxes, utilities) while consciously choosing what I want to spend my money on and why.

One of the amazing things that happened at BlogHer 2008 was the beginning of mainstream media outreach to certain bloggers to create content for their existing web sites or new blog portals. This is not a bad thing. I repeat, it is extraordinary good thing that type of opportunity is taking place. However, there are parts of my mind that are howling like an old yappy dog. Something is amiss. I can’t see it as yet. I have the scent but I don’t have anything tangible. It nagged me on Day 2 and all the way home.

This may come as a surprise from someone who is a Contributing Editor for Business, Personal Finance and Career, but I don't like to talk about money. Truth be told, I avoid the topic at all costs. I hate money. Yes, I like to use money. But I hate what it does to people. It divides. It judges.It makes people who have great personal success feel like failures.

Like millions of others who were willing to play along and help Make History with Firefox 3 and set a world record for downloads, I downloaded Firefox 3 on the appointed day.

On paper it sounded financially delicious. When asked, moms said having a family dinner was important. They said they really, truly wanted to feed their families healthy, delicious affordable meals but they couldn’t because they just didn't have the time, what with work, soccer,and traffic jams. Enter the meal assembly business – a concept to relieve moms of their meal guilt and at the same time provide families with delicious, healthy affordable meals. Brilliant! How could it be anything but a profitable business venture?

My new laptop from Dell started having hardware problems 7 months after I purchased it. More than 4 months have passed and I've spent over 20 hours on technical support and I still have a $1000 paperweight. I have taken action with formal complaints which in theory are being "handled". (Ask me in a week or two whether this is any more productive than the last four months as the jury is still out.) No one is willing to address the problem once and for all (although they are calling and mailing regularly asking me to pay money to extend my warranty!).

Yesterday afternoon I learned that business travelers are indeed a special breed of airline customers. It's something that I've always known but never really felt until throwing a good ol' fashioned hissy fit in the middle of the B terminal at Midway Airport in Chicago. I didn't say Business travelers were mature, I just said "special".

Dieting and frugality are a lot alike. After all, when we diet, we eat less and when we live frugally, we live with less. With both, we abstain, we hold back, we do without, we make do. So they are alike, two peas, yes, in that pod called life. Right? Wrong?