I am helping to kick off the Decoding Liberation Book Launch Party at the Brecht Forum in NYC. If you are in the area, and are into the politics of free software, do come along. Details also pasted below as their webpage is a little bit of an aesthetic jumble.

The Brecht Forum invites you to celebrate the release of Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software, by Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, published by Routledge in their New Media and Cyberculture Series.

October 3rd, 7:30 PM
451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune Streets, New York, NY 10014.
(212) 242-4201
brechtforum@brechtforum.org

Suggested Donation: $6/$10/$15
Free for Brecht Forum Subscribers

Featuring commentary by Gabriella Coleman and discussions with the authors
and audience.

A reception will follow.
(more…)

So for the last week or so I have been manically trying not to lose Really Important Stuff like documents, passports, files etc as I have just moved from Canada to NYC and have made a brief stop in PR to visit my mom. Well the last thing I expected to lose—my laptop—is of course what is gone, vanished, entirely. There is a small chance that the TSA at the Newark airport has it but I won’t find out till Monday as their lost and found unit is closed during the weeked. I never thought that I would so want the TSA to help me out, although they, and the whole crazy security protocols, are part of the reason my laptop is gone.

I made a backup of my computer right before leaving Canada, but I did it pretty quickly and did not check if it was really ok. All the really really important stuff is also backed up in email, or printed on paper, so Total F*cking Disaster is not imminent, just Total Disaster. So I won’t find out if I have my computer contents until Wed evening when I return to NYC. Since there is not much I can do here, I will cross my fingers and hope for the best.

When I got home to PR, at 3:30 am to find no computer, I was pretty devastated. But instead of brooding over it, I switched into emergency mode, spending the next hour changing all sorts of passwords at 4 am, stealing the wireless from the hotel that is next door to my mom’s apartment (thankfully my SO was with me, donning a laptop). Although I did not store any on my computer, I did have my userid information in various places and I am pretty sure my computer was not off but only on sleep mode.. Yuck.

After waking up after a few hours of sleep, I was pretty shocked that a good portion of my life is potentially gone, but then again, my mother’s alzheimers shocked me in other ways. Not too much has changed, though her memory loss, not surprisingly, is worse. In some ways, the fact that her data loss is permanent, that you can’t make a back up of the memories that are gone, that the data loss is so much more important than what you can have on a computer, has put things in some perspective, although I wish I only had the computer data loss to deal with instead.

Sorry if someone has already mentioned this, but I don’t think it hurts to repeat it.

If you are heading to Debconf and are traveling through Heathrow, and I reckon any UK airport, keep all your stuff to 1 bag total. Or make sure one piece can fit in the second so you can more easily pass through security.

I left there four years ago and I finally return tomorrow for a few weeks. It will be great to be back.

Wikitravel has organized an informal trip to Puerto Rico and I am of course reading the Puerto Rico blog entries as they are posted. Here are my suggestions for what to do there, which I passed over to them. One day I will update it and spend more than half an hour on the writing.

I am eager to see what they say. I love the island but know that it can be a little hard to travel in, unlike let’s say some tropical paradise like Thailand. It is just a little too formalized and expensive perhaps and you need to know a lot since there are not droves of informal travels to tell you that sort of information.

But it is a neat place with lots to do. I wish them happy and safe travels.

Recently, I got a comment on an older blog post on Edmonton that basically agreed with another comment that Edmonton was so not the cat’s meow. Despite the winter and many months later, I guess I still do think it is, although in saying so, it is not I think their assessments are wrong, I think my take has as much to do as what has come before (like NJ, which was not the high point o my life), my experiences here, and what is to come in the future.

I tend to like Edmonton because there is enough stuff to do but not too much to do. It is that whole freedom from choice that I like because I often shut down in the face of too much choice. What also colors my experience in a positive light is that generally, Canadian politics, social policy, and way of life, are a step up or two (or maybe three) than that of the United States. So the worst of Canada (if you are even to call Edmonton that, which I would not), in this regard, beats out the best of the United States. And I have lived most of my life in the US so that is my point of comparison. Even if you are living in a fantastic American city, you always face the possibility of struggling in ways that will *never* happen in Canada. It makes for a calmer, less aggressive society. For example, I recently learned that Edmonton has the highest murder rate in Canada, at a whopping …. 36 people per year (population of Edmonton = 1 million). I grew up in a place, Puerto Rico where the yearly murder rate hovers at about 700-800 per year (population = 4 million). And yet people here are freaking out over the high rate of murder, which is a good thing because hopefully they can bring it down but this fact should make the US pause and think about what they are doing up north to keep the murder rate so darn low (and the answer I think is pretty easy to find).

But perhaps a lot of my love of the place has as much to do or more with my state of mind. After a grueling year of finishing a dissertation under pressure as I had deadline, and then living in NJ where I was on the job market (which meant spending so much time churning out application after application and then flying around interviews), in addition to flying 7 times in one year to visit my mom, my life here just feels so much more sane than it has been in years. What sealed it all was that right before I moved here in August I was lucky enough to be offered a permanent job (which means this summer I will be moving to NYC to join this department and I will be back to the land of overwhelming choice), so that for the first time in 5 years I did not have to apply for anything in the fall that would guarantee my livelihood for the next academic year. I was not faced with a year of lots of travel (and actually traveling in out out Edmonton is really one of my least favorite things). With that firmly in place, I could just concentrate on things like my work, my friends, brewing kombucha and do things routinely, like exercise, which I had not consistently done for years.

There are things about Edmonton that I find totally obnoxious like the cities inability to plow roads leaving a thick glaze of black ice on the roads so that when you drive in the city, you basically are at real risk for an accident (and this is despite a 6.6 BILLION government surplus). There are a tad too many strip malls in the outlaying areas, and of course there is the infamous winter. We are still deep in it. The cold temperatures have been with us steadily for months now and according to folks, there are still two more months to “look forward to.” The cold and the constant layering of clothes are getting to me a little, although I do appreciate that the cold is just not as cold as one would think with the actual temperatures. The lack of wind, the dry conditions, the cute as chubby-as-anything- bunnies that run through the snow, and the overpowering sun all help to make -6 F much more mild, so it is not as bad as you would or I would think it was.

So while I am thrilled to join the department where I am moving too, I will be sad when I leave, though perhaps not as sad as Edmontons “darling” hockey player, Ryan Smith, who was just traded by the Oilers to the NY Islanders. The day he left, he literally was shedding tears at the airport. And I have to say, even though I have no attachment to hockey, I found the pictures endearing because there is nothing like seeing a grown Canadian man cry over hockey! : )

Recently I complained about using dial-up in PR and I believe in response to my post, Joey Hess provided some great tips for making the dial-up experience a little more bearable. He, of course, was providing a set of solution to constraints, which is what the likes of Joey Hess do a lot of their waking (and according to a recent IRC conversation, even dreaming) hours.

I as an academic am not involved so much in the business of finding real hard solutions but when I go to Puerto Rico, that is what I DO spend a lot of time doing. And I came up with 3 solutions this year, 2 of which I was particularly proud of (one of which may be useful to the blog readers), so I thought I would share them here:

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, my mom has been plagued with a problem of choking on her saliva because she is not swallowing. It causes her and those around her a lot of angst. I tired many things but when I stopped trying and just started watching and observing to see when it seemed to be worse, I finally noticed that if she wore her dentures, the problem, while not totally resolved, was like 70-80% better. With her dentures, she would never choke on her spit and often times there would be not spit. I think the dentures changes the shape of her mouth so that she can swallow with less effort. I was pretty proud to notice this because it was the overwhelming problem of the season. Now, there is, of course, another problem. She loathes wearing those teeth and well, it has been a battle to convince her it helps (I think she sort of knows but does not want to admit it) but she is wearing them a lot more than she used to…. Maybe I will come up with a long-term solution to that problem later but I have failed in all of my attempts while still there which stretched from begging, to coy deception, to outright bribery.

So in PR, we have an awesome mutt, who goes by one of three names, Isabela, Gordita (look at her tummy in the pictures to see why we call her “chubster”) and Pucha. She is literally the joy of the house and she truly revels in this role. She is, in fact, like a hovercraft of love , in the sense that she will hover over you, as you are, for example, trying to get work done, and she will whimper, or lift her little paw, or more audaciously butt her head against your hand, until you assume the position and pet her, or preferably hug her. And she wants demands this sort of attention for as long as you can humanely sustain it. Ok this is not the problem part (though it can be a problem when trying to complete work and I usually just give up and give in to her or kick her out of the room). The problem was that the pucha would routinely despoil the same spot on the floor, usually every day, usually in dramatic response to leaving her in the house alone for more than 10 minutes. And I know this is willful because she is otherwise quite potty trained. She just likes to remind those who shower her with affection and love that she wants it to rain harder.

The problem was that she was soaking and thus really rotting the wooden trimming (and poking around led me to discovering the third huge problem, termites, but more on that soon) and this had just had to stop. Giving her a light whallop in her chubby behind never helped (maybe she was too well padded?) and obedience school seemed like way too much effort and money.

Eventually, I just threw her little bed right where she peed, and vualla, she stopped peeing there and thankfully she did not have the cojones to find another spot. I am not sure if this is long-term solution, but for now I am satisfied.

Through the pucha, I found out that the wooden trimming in our house was ingested with termites. This caused a mini-heart attack, because well, termintes are a bitch to eradicate and they are a real problem in the tropics. I called the exterminators just to find out some information on termites and they assured me that once I ripped out the molding (which was my low-tech solution), I would not be putting the other wood in danger by accidentally flinging one of the little chubby white grubs over to another piece of wood and there is a lot of wood at home. Thankfully, since that is unlikely, with some help , I proceeded to tear most of the molding out only to disover a cornupia of bugs living there. It was so so so so so gross, really, gross that of course I am not replacing the trimming with wood but with some other bug-resistanant material. But that will have to wait till another trip.

I was hoping to find a “green” dry cleaner in Edmonton and have had no luck finding one (so now it is just me and the bathtub and woolite). But I did happen upon this nifty five limes site that helps you locate those super-hippie-hot-spots in major cities in the US and Canada (Edmonton does not count as a major city). It is somewhat incomplete but there is a decent start there.

It is a little weird to read Planet Debian and find a post about a place, adventure, ship that was also once my reality and home. This is the 2nd free software-head I know to have lived on that ship (I don’t count myself as I was pretty oblivious to the world of computing back then). It definitely fuels my desire to sail away again, and even try to do so with all geek-crew. Just need to find a ship and quite a bit of funding.

Micah and I have made it to Canada! Wow. We keep driving and well, we are not there yet because Edmonton, like the map shows, is far in that Western and Northen sense.

We first went to Vermont last week to visit some friends and family but then decided not to cross in Montreal and drive that way, for a number of reasons. One was that we would not have cell access, the second was the higher gas prices, and the third is that it would be slower because the highways here are not like the MASSIVE American ones but more like one to two lane unlit roads where the speed limit is 60 miles per hour. Now that we are in Canada and on the Trans Canadian Highway to Saskatoon, I am glad we made that decision. It is super nice here and there are cool road attractions like the Happy Rock in Gladstone, Manitoba, but we are just unfit to drive on these roads, at least late a night.

But one of the wildest things is that I am online, typing on a computer, via the phone/blue tooth and a Cingular Data Connection Plan. We decided against the North American Phone Plan because it was PRICEY (what good is NAFTA if you can’t just your same phone??) but the Data Plan was not too expensive and since Micah has to be connected 16 hrs of the day, we decided to go for it. We have been using the Internet all trip but it was only recently that we can now use it through the computer, which makes it a lot nicer. But what is even better is that the connection is like double the speed in Canada (prolly because it is a UMTS network and because Canadians rock) so while we may go slower on the highway, we do go faster on the information highway. Not a bad trade off.