As I was leaving from Utrecht to Amsterdam at the train station yesterday, Guus, the first Debian developer that I interviewed here asked me

Yesterday, I had this flash of insight as to why I love the blog genre (despite, its well, less than flattering name). I have been in grad school for six years now, writing mostly in my private journal and for classes,fieldwork notes, or conference papers. Thus, the two main bodies of my writing were really separate in style, form and content, one of which, my private journal (which I have nearly stopped now), was well that exactly private, the center of attention being me! The later stuff was my analytical writing where the “I” is totally exorcised as if the I had nothing to do with the material being that the subject matter (in terms of my papers) is about culture, history, and politics. But really the I is always there at some level, I just get rid of myself for those pieces. The blog allows for that nice melding between the I and not-I. I have also enjoyed getting away from my private journal externalizing and exploring topics that I probably would not have either written about in either my public or private writings; they are thoughts that mostly sit in my head and until the blog they had no where, no place to go And then there is the fact that the blog is so perfect for the short attention span that I have, both in terms of reading other people’s blogs or writing for them. As much as I know that my entries are way longer than your traditional blog, they are a heck of a lot shorter than writing a conference paper, proposal, masters, dissertation, etc.

Speaking of writing, I met one of my favorite writers yesterday in the afternoon. Will and I talked with Ellen Ullman for over an hour about so many different topics that ranged from her new novel, “The Bug” to the dangers of identity politics, transformation of geek political orientations especially since the DMCA, and why we should treat computers like a notebook. We were talking to her to see if she would like to join one of the advisory boards of the Online Policy Group.

One of my favorite pieces ever written on Linux and the humanizing experience of having access to the source is “Programming Under the Wizard’s Spell” written by her for Harpers in August 1998:

“That this sudden movement to freeware and open source is our desire to revisit the idea that a professional engineer can and should be able to do the one thing that is most basic to our work; examine the source code, the actual program, the real and unvarnished presentation of the system. I exaggerate only a little if I say that it is a reassertion of our dignity as humans working with mere machine; a return quite literally, to the source.”

When I first read this, I probably had still not seen source code and was not really studying free software academically, just spending inordinate amount of time online reading about it. This little piece inspired me in part to have the confidence to pursue something that seemed so antithetical to my path at the time.

Las summer, I read her semi-autobiographical book Cose to the Machine which is an insider and very intimate account (and a female perspective) on the life of a software engineer in the Bay Area that neither lauds or rips at the industry/technology but offers amore subtle and complex narrative, sometimes being critical, other times passionate of technology and at time neither, leaving the reader to be the final judge. After reading it, I was like “wow, this Ellen Ullman, is quite a lady, very unconventional, racy…” and I always wondered what she was like in person!

It is always interesting to meet someone you have literally wondered about. She was quite charming and as complex as she paints herself in Close to the Machine, brimming with stories from the mundane, to the fantastic, to the political, most stemming from her own experiences. I could have stayed talking for hours. I look forward to her next book “The Bug’ which is about the software developer who spends an entire year trying to solve this one bug. Ha, sounds like somewhat of a horror story One thing that made me laugh a lot is that she treats laptops as literal notebooks, in that they have a beginning and end in terms of a project. So when she is done with a large project (which might span years), it then is time to retire her laptop and she puts it up on her bookshelves with her other books. It of course got me thinking “hmmmm, I just might need that new laptop for when I start to write my dissertation”

Finally, finally, I can kiss Saturn’s 28 year cycle goodbye tonight….

What happens when every single dimension of your life (work, personal, research, family) decides to pay you a visit the weekend before your birthday which also happens to be your birthday celebration weekend? I dunno, have fun with it and breathe a lot and drink a lot of caffeine to deal with the lack of sleep. But I think I am really able to deal with all of this craziness because my passport finally arrived in the mail so I now know that I can leave the country at the end of the month!

I am off to the beautiful pacific coast for the night. Hopefully that will have some effect on my psyche. It always does.

I had the funniest dream this morning between about 8 and 9 am. So, I ride my bike a lot which means I lock up my bike a lot using this very nifty and small kryptonite lock known as the Evolution 2000. I love that lock as it is small yet sturdy. You know, it doesn’t weigh down on my style

Anyway, I lost one of the two keys so I am always paranoid that I am going to lose the one key I have especially when my bike is locked so that I will need some super-duper tool to get the lock off. And of course this is exactly what happened in my dream. But instead of using my brute strength to wrangle the lock off or use the power of heat with a blowtorch, I simply used another key and used my own chi to make the key fit and work. It was the raddest thing in the whole world. I felt like a super-hero/sly detective. But the more ludicrous thing was that when I woke up, I did not feel like anything strange had happened. It was just like a very mundane, obvious, commonsense thing happened with my bike, lock, and chi… Speaking of which, I should probably get ready for my chi gong class, which heck, who knows, maybe one day I will be able to pick any lock with my own chi.

Some days creep me out. I remember one of the first times I was seriously creeped out by the world. I was in 7th grade and for some odd reason, my Spanish teacher decided to show our class a video about the life, death, and predictions of Nostradamus the clairvoyant who had a penchant for seeing and cryptically writing about the horror and gorror (new word for gory : )) of death, war, and destruction. I was around 13 years old, struggling with the gorror of my hormones that were leaving half of my hair curly, the other straight, and my body more chubby than I would have liked. And then I was confronted that the end of the world, WWIII, was right around the corner and not going to be caused by the Russians!!!. The movie was creepy and I have often wondered why the school showed a group of impressionable pre-teens a film about clairvoyance, war, and the end of the world. What sort of vision of life were they trying to inculcate in us? I mean it was kinda cool that they showed us a movie about the life of a man who does not really embody the ideals of western science like rationality and reasoned calculation, but that movie did creep me out.

Reading the newspaper, which I don’t do all that often creeped me out too. I was already in a weird mood, spending the whole morning trying to figure out how to renew my passport so that I could indeed leave the country at the end of the month. So at the gym, where I occasionally pick up the left over SF Chronicles to see what the mainstream media is sharing with (and how it is shaping the) American public. No huge surprises but there are times when the news really leaves me worn and wasted for many many different reasons. Bush is moving ahead at least ideologically with his desire for war while the response from the Arab leaders is that “War would open the gates of hell” and yet Bush’s desire I bet still burns stronger. At least there has been a decent amount of open criticism from mainstream politicians and journalists although to frame it as a danger to national oil access, which some have done, is to miss the point entirely of why it is just wrong, bad, for us to go to war. There was one piece of commentary I did liked which was one by our most smiley president, Jimmy Carter .

Then there were a series of articles about our health and healthcare in our country. The cost of healthcare is rising. We are witnessing its largest increase since 1990 (while the economy is spiraling) and in the backdrop of a National Academy of Sciences huge (though not very surprising) report basically outlining new dietary guidelines. Guidelines that the American public for the most part is not even close to following, which is one of the reasons that so many people have whacked out chronic illnesses, which is one of the reasons why healthcare is so expensive. A leisurely stroll through an American supermarket does not make me too hopeful about the nutrition revolution I would so love to see this country go (though there have been some positive reorientations towards health and nutrition for sure).

Night time is when creepiness can turn into extreme creepiness. But thankfully, my night ended with a not-so-creepy-visit to the Alameda County Computer Resource Centerto help out with the getting many Linux boxes set up to send to Ecuador. The place is rad, a huge meandering warehouse exploding at the seams with computer equipment that looks sort of dead but is brought back to life by the staff to exist once again in all parts of the country and world. They had a PDP-11 which I made sure to touch with great respect as it is one of the pieces of machinery, that well, spawned and help form hacker cultural communities, which was the whole reason I was even in the Bay Area that night, having a great time despite the creepiness of the day!

What is your visions of HELL.

MInd would be one in which I had to fill out charts all day long while trying to get a handle on the ins and outs of my health insurance (why is my schools basic coverage like $1100 while the comprehensive is a whopping $1700). It would be a place where I would fast for like a couple of days, then eat raw food for like 3, then fast again, then go raw (you get the point, an endless loop). I would be barred from bikining or gonging that chi.

Well, ha, back to my charts!!!!

Life comes into being without any invitation of our own: we suddenly finds ourselves in it. And as soon as we recognize ourselves as alive we become aware that we tend toward inevitable death. If we do not gain some adequate understanding of our life and our death, during the life-span that is ours, our life will become nothing but a querulous refusal, a series of complaints that it must end in death. Then the fear of death becomes so powerful that it results in the flat refusal of life….. Death brings life to its goal. But the goal is not death—the goal is pefect life”

Thomas Merton

I forgot to mention that if you go to the Musee Mecanique make sure to check out the Opium Den machine. It is the funniest mechanical rendition of a drug trip that you will ever see.

A friend unexpectedly showed up in San Francisco yesterday so I have spent the last 36 hours roaming around having much more fun than I expected this labor day weekend. I finally got to see
Harold and Maude on the big screen last night at the Red Vic . It was the fifth time that I have seen that movie though watching it on big screen was like watching it for the first time. It is one of those rare movies that exude a sort of timeless quality even if all the clothing ties are about 3 times the current size!

Today was a hot day in SF, even by SF standards. It was perfect for going to Ocean Beach to throw a Frisbee ™ [yes, frisbee is a trademark] around before heading to my favorite of favorite places in the city, the musee mecanique, which holds a collection of coin-operated automatic mechanical musical instrument and games. It is a wonderfully fun spot that is unfortunately moving to Fisherman’s Warf sometime after it closes down at its current location at the Cliff House this month. If you have not yet gone, GO. Part of its mystique and charm is its location high up on the Cliff where one can look below at the Sutro Baths (where Harold and Maude’s anti-war scene happens) and look beyond to the still hills of the Marin Headlands. It is surrounded by the majesty of this place adding to its already magical quality. I think it is a shame that it is moving to Fisherman’s Whorf although I guess it is better than having the relics move away permanently from SF….

Now I am back home, pretty tired from all the biking, frisbee throwing, all on raw foods. Now I need sleep.