Life as we live on a daily basis tends to be filled with a parade of events, happenings, frustrations, and joys that don’t strike like lightening. Life moves along, taking people along for a series of personal transformations that for the most part don’t feel particularly important. You only notice, many years after the fact, that things have changed. But there are those momentous events—a particularly traumatic accident, a death of a loved one, the end or start of a new project, an amazing piece of news—that leaves its imprint with you, announcing its undeniable role in changing the self or your perception of the world.
Yesterday I went on an amazing trip through the caves of Puerto Rico withAventuras Tierra Adentro and in specific caves filled with water, an underground river snaking its way through the rocks, the mud, the bats, (and unfortunately the roaches but hey, they are part of natural habitat) that make up a vast underwater river system in the northwest part of the island.
I first went on this very trip when I was 16 and it was one of those momentous, memorable events that struck like lightening. At the time, I was a budding environmentalist having recently started the first environmental club at my school, mostly recycling all the cans at school (my car was thus appropriately dubbed “the recycle-mobile). I would also organize fund-raising events such as the infamous milkshake sale (trying to outdo the usual bake sales) and send the proceeds to the most radical environmental group I knew of at the time (Earth First) to save the dolphins or turtles or whatever needed saving at the time. I also knew that the group that did anything together, stuck together, so I organized a caving adventure with the environmental club.
The trip was then as it is now, utterly breathtaking (and at points leaves you with no breath) and has only improved since the first time I made the trek, as I will explain in a moment. The first time I did it, it left its mark on my life in many many ways. Until that trip, I had never really experienced the full blown glory and mystery that is the natural world. I was exhilarated by the exhausting hike that “touched me” by basically, at the time, mangling my body. The day after the trip, I literally could not get out of my bed … for hours. That was not because the trip was (or is) so outrageously hard. The guides are completely amazing and while challenging, it is fine if you have an iota of fitness; it was just I was, like many peers of my age on the island, a rum drinking, smoke inhaling teenager who did not have an iota of fitness.
After the trip, while I was lying immobile in bed due to the pain, talking to my friends on the phone who found themselves in a similar embarrassing predicament, I decided, never again. Despite the pain, I decided I liked using my body, I really liked the outdoors, and well, it was high time to stop sucking on the smokey smokes and turn my energies and body to the natural world.
I did not quit the smokes overnight (I tried, I failed) but the desire was sparked and eventually I quit. Almost immediately, I started doing more outdoorsy stuff, decided not to go to college and become a scuba diving researcher on a Chinese junk sailing boat, and then when I eventually made my way to school, I became an Ultimate Frisbee junkie, and worked for eco-type camps for many summers. That caving trip was the catalyst that led me down a new path and I was reminded of this yesterday, which left me thankfully not as sore, but equally exhilarated.
Ok, so this is a guide to PR, so let me back away from personal ramblings to why you should take this trip if you find yourself on the island. Well, first let me state the obvious: this trip throws you smack inside a cave and caves are freaken effing amazing even more so when there is a river running through it.
But let’s get to specifics:
These tour operators, who have been doing this trip and others for over 20 years, have got this trip so nailed down that they have thought of every damn detail to make the adventure fun and safe. Now, the trip starts at a god awful time 5:45 AM (but it is done for your safety to avoid the afternoon rains, which can lead to a flash flood). To help you stay awake as they orient you, they have come up with comedy routine during the bus ride, which I personally found really funny (I am pretty easy when it comes to humor), and it was a great way to communicate the safety information to a half awake audience.
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NYC has serious office shortages (my home institution truly suffers from this). NYC also has a lot of old subway cars. Put the two together and you get magic and a solution.
After quite a few years of work, revisions, procrastination, and a few life changes, I have finally published a lengthy piece in Cultural Anthropology on code and speech entitled “Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers, published in Cultural Anthropology. Debian figures pretty prominently as does the arrests of Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov and the DeCSS Haiku
update: If you have access to a University library, you can get it now. If you don’t, it will be available for free (as in beer) in a few months, and I might also post an uncorrected proof (as I believe I have permission to do so) or can send it to you if you request it. I have posted the pre-print proof here. Since these are the uncorrected proofs, there are a few minor mistakes.
Though published, this is also, much like software, a work in progress as the material represented here will also be in my book and the good news, is I can seriously expand on the issues I have raised. So I am looking for interested readers for feedback, which will thankfully make it in a book that I can post here.
Abstract below:
In this essay, I examine the channels through which Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers reconfigure central tenets of the liberal tradition—and the meanings of both freedom and speech—to defend against efforts to constrain their productive autonomy. I demonstrate how F/OSS developers contest and specify the meaning of liberal freedom—especially free speech—through the development of legal tools and discourses within the context of the F/OSS project. I highlight how developers concurrently tinker with technology and the law using similar skills, which transform and consolidate ethical precepts among developers. I contrast this legal pedagogy with more extraordinary legal battles over intellectual property, speech, and software. I concentrate on the arrests of two programmers, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov, and on the protests they provoked, which unfolded between 1999 and 2003. These events are analytically significant because they dramatized and thus made visible tacit social processes. They publicized the challenge that F/OSS represents to the dominant regime of intellectual property (and clarified the democratic stakes involved) and also stabilized a rival liberal legal regime intimately connecting source code to speech.
What would life be without coffee? It frightens me to entertain a life without the stuff as it is one my most favorite things in the world. Some nights I am excited to go to bed just so I can wake up and have my cup of joe (I am not one of the Fortunate Ones who can drink coffee at night).
A few mornings a week I decide I would rather sit at a coffee shop to sip on my morning joe and I am quite lucky in this regard because I live down the street from what I think is the best local coffee shop in the metropolitan area: Hacienda San Pedro, which is also a local plantation, one of the many you can visit for the day.
They roast their coffee on premises (which they are doing right now) in a very cool old fashioned looking roaster, also pictured above, which they seem to do between 7 AM and -8AM when I tend to be here. When you step outside after the roasting you walk through a billowing and light poof of coffee smoke, which is like being blessed by the gods of coffee before starting your day.
The great thing about the coffee aside from its taste is the price. The cup featured below is around $ 1.60 which beats the 3 dollars you would pay at a Starbucks, which have, in the last 3 years, infested and infected the island. Given that so much coffee is grown here, it is great to see these sorts of places sprout and serve the local stuff.
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They have a good selection of baked goods for b-fest, free wireless (yay!), and great music playing, usually something like Silivio Rodirguez or some reggae. After you are done, you can head to the museum right down the street, which not only has a great collection of local and international art, but a great peaceful garden, and one of my favorite murals.
The coffee shop is located at Avenida De Diego #318 (though there is no number out front, but there is a banner). Basically it is between the highway overpass in Condado, which is right next to the art museum and a large avenue called Ponce de Leon, which resides in the heart of Santurce.
Currently, they are open Mon-Friday from 6:30 to 6, on Sat open from 9 to 3:30 and closed on Sunday.
