After a year of missing a Debconf, I have made it to Debconf 6 where I had planned to give my talk on hacker codes of value on Monday and then basically chill out against and depsite the the hot and spicy Mexican environment. Not a bad plan and not one too hard to keep unless your file system turns to mush, and worse it happened before I really completed the prep for the talk. Ai Bendito, Caramba, Conchale, Mama Mia… That sucked.

There are worse places where this sort of fiasco could have happen like during the luddite society annual conference or something. I mean geeks during Debconf are having fun but they are also spending a lot of time doing what they do best: hacking! So as soon as grub reported an error, there were a pack of geeks, drunk on and with and for technology (and as the day wore on drunk on tequila too) who took the challenge (as they so love to do and as I will talk about during my talk) to fix the problem.

Now my slides are recovered, my system is back (without the rest of my files but I have backups for most of them) and now it is back to the grind so I can finish my talk. This time, I will make sure to make backups every 5 minutes or so.
Hay Benditio!

If I were not going on Saturday to hang out with geeks in Latin America, I would instead go to “the shore” to check out this vintage computer fair. If you are in the area, it is worth a trip both for the computers and for the shore.

SO it looks like I know where I will be next year, the Great North, the land of the Polar Beaver, National Health Care and hockey, as I have accepted a two year Killiam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta in their Program of Science, Technology, and Society.

By most any standard, the terms of the postdoc are pretty sweet. Not only do I get 2 years with no teaching or administrative obligations, they have added an additional year of teaching, and even better there are a great number of folks there who also on the types of projects (both the hacker and pyschiatry ones) I am engaged in.

I have to admit though, once I located Edmonton on the
map, my eyes almost fell out of my sockets. As most may easily infer from my reaction, Edmonton IS far, by most any standard of the word. Ok, it is not as if I am going to Easter Island or Alaska, or some tiny town with one street, but it is not like one of those Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver that closely hug the American border. It is north of the northwestern city of Calgary. So even though I have had a secret desire to relocate to Canada and pledge my allegiance to the Red Maple Leaf ever since I first visited in 1997 (and found out that they *really* do lead a more sane life than we do here), this seemed a little too cold and north for my tropical comfort zone.

Knowing that I may have reservations about a University and city I knew very little about, the folks at University of Alberta were nice enough to get me out there to visit, which did ease most of my concerns and fears. Edmonton is a mid-sized city with a million people. And though it has all the recognizable markers of a big city (a glittering downtown skyline, bustling commercial mixed with residential centers, many opportunities for karaoke) it has some nice “nature” touches to it and in this regard, reminds me of Chicago a little for it also hosts a beautiful river that separates the city into a North and South Side. Instead of allowing massive development along the river, most of it (all of it) is protected as a park with ample trails, ripe and ready for cross country skiing and snowshoeing. Apparently it also holds the distinction of being the sunniest city in Canada and is also 3 hours from the Canadian Rockies (Bannf and Jasper) though it is also one of the coldest cities too.

Of course, Edmonton represents the proliferation of place in my life, which while I enjoy, is not always easy to juggle, practically or emotionally. With each new place are a group of people who will now be part of a bulging package of folks that I rarely see, unless they are academics, and we go to the same conferences, or they hang out on IRC with me (and then I do see them everyday). But as my mother’s illness requires me to go home to Puerto Rico up and above any other place (unless it has to do with work), I am slowly losing ground and touch with many of my relationships. I have not been back to San Francisco since I left nearly 3 years ago, which is hard to believe, I miss most of my friends weddings, and always am reluctant to just go somewhere, because I usually choose to go to Puerto Rico instead.

But in the end, this situation of constant moving may not at some level be ideal, it is by no means tragic. I am lucky that I can visit my mother, that I do see friends when I travel going to great conferences and do keep in touch with friend in other ways, and I knew very well going into academia, that we are like the birds, a migratory flock, especially as junior scholars.

Now, my mom is incredibly excited about this gig at the U of A. After I explained to her the process by which one tries to get a job in the academy (ie. competing with 100-300 people for one spot), she fully comprehended and registered the difficulty of it all with a whopping “Conchale, eso es impossible” (Damn it, that sounds impossible), and then shuffled her diminutive self away shaking her head in a bob of worry, convinced more than ever that my fate as an academic was doomed. This was my first year on the job market and it is as tough and wild (though fun) as I was told.

Right around the time I told my mom about my departure to Canada, my mom also happened to listen to some radio program on the news about Canadian beef and now she thinks that Canada is Land-Of-Beef. And the funny thing is that Alberta is Beef Country.. So what she imagines, is in fact where I am going. Now if my mom was able to see on a map how far I will be (and I won’t really try to drive this point home with her), I think her excitement-barometer may drop a few notches. And that is of course my biggest reservation. To get home is costly and long, requiring a flight either from Edmonton to Chicago to San Juan; Edmonton to Calgary to Houston to San Juan; Edmonton to Toronto to NYC to San Juan. But then again, it is not that bad (especially now that I have a half decent computer with a decent battery life). One can leave within a day and get there that same day if need be.

So afte a summer of travel and writing, off I go in September, and if you ever need a place to stay in Edmonton, by all means, mi casa fria, es tu casa fria.

More on this later but worth broadcasting because the following is a pretty strong example of incorporated, passionate, and embodied form of political protest in the hacker habitat.

If you have not read Jennifer Light’s amazing When Computer’s Were Women, today is the the day to read it.

update: yes, yes the Jennifer Light is not available freely. Just to show, we need more open access journal…

So, as readers of this blog know, I am deeply enmeshed and invested in a project that examines the cultural face of liberalism through such avenues as law, technoscience, and medicine. As part of this endeavor, I am interested in signaling and understanding the tensions in liberalism within one context (such as IP), one nation (as in the US) or across times and places.

Because I am going to this conference on Invention and Authorship at Case Western (am already in Ohio partaking of my family and the beautiful budding flowers of spring), I am revisiting these ideas as I chomp through all the marvelous papers that were pre-circulated.

And the theme of tensions in liberalism arose palpable during a visit at the CCA with Laura Murray an English professor who teaches at Queens College and runs the impressive Fair Copyright website, which every Canadian scholar should comb through, carefuly.

We read a her First Monday piece Protecting ourselves to death as well as another fascinating piece on Canadian copyrightTaking User Rights Seriously.

The session and her talk were quite interesting and my first real introduction to copyright’s life in Canada. Unsurprisingly, given the different role of the state as protector of certain rights (like health care) and a certain healthy suspicion of the US and its policy (and this is nicely explored by Murray), copyright is distinctly configured, with lines of similarity and diffferences. For example, IP provisions are not part of the Constitutional charter, the equivalent of fair use (“fair dealing”) is more circumscribed, universities often cower at what is perceived threat (she told us an amazing story about Simon Fraser’s draconian copyright policy that implored students to get permission for *every* citation, sigh), yet a a recent Supreme Court case came down very favorably strong for user rights and public interest.

By the end, it was clear that while there are similarities (and these will grow, I imagine, with “harmonization” via WIP0. TRIPS etc. but for reasons I state below, perhaps not), the life of IP is textured uniquely. And while there are differences in the law, point blank, some of the more interesting differences follow from non-legal conditions or legal factors quite independent of IP. And these are worth pointing out because they also give us a unique vantage point to really get at the motor behind SO much of American law, in general, and IP law, in specific.

During her visit, Laura Murray raised three (probably more but I am going by memory here) important differences, which were further elaborated during the disucssion:

1. Due to how governments congeal (through coaltions) and how they execute change, (apparently legal change/policy moves more slowly), this had led to change whose viscosity is more like molasses than oil in our country and often has worked in the favor of public interest and user rights in IP.
2. The Media still works in a more robust way than in the US in that it will shame and, shame some more, the government over things like IP so that they act as a constraint.
3. And in comparison to the US, the culture of litigation/lawsuits has a shadow of a life compared to the US.

So in fact much of the policy in Canada has little to do with the actual law of IP but with other legal factors or extra-legal factors. On top of this, it also made me realize that since things are stalled and since activists do and often compare things with their southern neighbors, I also wonder if activists are better positioned to actually intervne in this field than we are in the US, where things move quite fast, the media in general does not act as a lightning rod of shame (except for the Daily Show and Colbert Report, but I am not sure, yet, if we should count those as media) and even if the media does not shame, they rarely present IP as a pressing societal issue. Given these conditions, it will be very interesting, to the development and changes in IP in Canada following the pressures to harmonize.

Finally and this is perhaps to obvious to merit attention because it is signaled through the recognition that US law is largely case law, but lawsuits do truly generate so much of the law and are one of the central contexts underwhich we culturally understand (as I mean the proverbial citizenry “we”) the law. If anyone out there knows of any good articles/books that explores this, especially from a cultural, critical, or political perseptive, give me shout out… I would like to delve more into how this acrimonous and expensive (and potentially in some cases empowering) contextual matrix shapes US law.

The religious and sprit does pervade hacking, and even better, often reflexively and amusingly….

The University of Washington Law School website hosts a bibliography for literature on free and open source software as a companion to an interesting set of pieces that cover the following subjects:

* License Type Overview
* Contracts or Licenses: Does it Matter?
* Enforceability of Open Source Licenses
* Copyright Primer
* Derivative Works
* Copyright v. Patent
* Patent Risks
* Trademark and OSS
* Moral Rights and OSS

I am back in Puerto Rico paying a short visit to my mom and taking care of some errands like her taxes and so on before returning back to the US. I often get the question “what is PR like?” “Is it like the US?” Of course there are some obvious differences related to language, culture, environment, and politics. For example, Spanish is talk of the town; you can run around, barely clothed, in January to frolic in some pretty soothing ocean waters; and and unlike the US, a large percentage of the population actually takes politics very seriously, which means 81% of the voting population hits the voting booths, there is a mainstream culture of protest, and people party vigorously during voting season (and this makes politics personal, domestic, familial, leisurely, and thus, it gets woven into the fabric of everyday life ).

But while there are those and many other obvious differences, I am more interested (at least today) in the more subtle ones, the “fixings” and “toppings” related to things like commodities, street dogs, the law, and government services. These are more or less supposed to be standardized and thus the same between the mainland and this small Caribbean island but in fact, there are minute disjoints here and there that can be at times frustrating and, in more rare instances, amusing.

So let’s start with the amusing ones. We have US Post Offices here that look, smell, and operate as they do in the US: with lackluster aesthetics and more or less disgruntled employees. So yesterday when I walked into the local PO to buy some stamps, I was sort of floored to see that one of the tellers was also moonlighting, in plain view, running a business on the side, selling purses and other handbags that were nicely displayed on the wall. Now I can’t imagine this was legal, at all. But who knows?, perhaps there is some obscure US PO clause that, with the right paperwork and initiative, allows employee to operate a small consumer-oriented business at the same time that they process money orders, sell stamps, and accept packages. After a day of horrid horrid errand running, the handbags for sale at the post office washed away my scowling frown and I only wished I had my camera. Perhaps allowing such entrepreneurship is what the PO needs to keep employee morale high and can also be used to secure another source of revenue (they can get a commission for every article sold).

When it comes to dogs, there are wayyyyy more street dogs in PR than in the states and frankly, I find the mutts, known in local lingo as “Satos” are the most appreciative mutts I have met. If you want to get a solidly down-to-earth-and-street-smart sato, by all means, come here and get one. We now have one, “Isabella” (a.k.a. Gordita/Chubster) and she is a gem who I would like to steal in my suitcase but I am afraid my life as an academic would come to a screeching halt if I did, for she is as demanding as they get. All she wants is to be pet and hugged and to make this happen, she rams her small head into your hands. If she fails, she switches into “kiss-you-to-death-mode.” Kiss-you-to-death-mode is kicked into turbo-gear after you shower and, especially, after you put any lotion on. At this point, if she is near you, Gordita proceeds to attack you as if you turned into some human sized T-Bone Steak and licks every last ounce of any lotion off . I usually feel like I need to take another shower after this Gordita-fest, so I try to bypass her after shower time. But aside from such quirks she is as good as they get.

Now for the most part the commodity goods in PR are exactly the same as in the US. But there used to be this 6 year period when Sara Lee sold chocolate pound cake in Puerto Rico that I absolutely LOVED and this was cake simply not to be found in the United States. This is something I could never understand because well, it was fantastic tasting stuff, and it seemed like a pretty standard commodity good that should not be limited to a 100 mile long and 35 mile wide island. When I came here I used to buy like 6-7 of them, freeze them, and take em back to the US. But then one year, poof, they vanished. I always imagined that there was some Vice President of Sara Lee Puerto Rico who also was very fond of this chocolate pound cake and decided to authorize local manufacturing despite a strict cancellation order from the headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. And then it took like like 6 years for them to catch on that in fact he disobeyed such corporate orders.

Business and other such relationships are more informal here, which can produce for pleasant and unpleasant experiences, sometimes together. For example in the last few days, my/my mom’s lawyer was unwilling to give me a firm time or date for appointment. And since I needed to discuss a really obscure set of legal documents and deeds that may have required a visit to an equally obscure government agency, I pushed and pushed to get something out of her. Finally she agreed to meet with me but only during her morning manicure session. After a 15 minute conversation while her nails were being painted blood red, it was clear I was not the only client in such a predicament, as another one showed… It was pretty amusing.

I did find out I had to visit this obscure government agency “CRIM” related to property taxes and it took me 8 conversations to get directions there. No one could explain it because they did not know the street names and it is not only an obscure agency but is truly also tucked away in a seriously obscure location. One person basically said “look take a taxi” otherwise you will never get there. But finally one person knew of two streets it was near which was enough for me and I fearlessly proceeded to what I thought was going to be a pit of despair and a total time sink but that turned out to be the quickest of the day’s errands. I found out that I in fact did not own a gabillion dollars and that a change of address would take only minutes.

After I left, I was in a sate of total glee. After departing from CRIM, I could care less that Citibank had lost $4000 in deposited checks days earlier, that my mom’s SS tax information did not come in time, that I could not find the location of the accountant because their office had moved due to a fire in their office , and was ready and pumped to fight the Medicare prescription plan for enrolling my mom on the phone when in fact she has alzheimers (and they were told of this..) and can’t really make these decisions, but as I was partaking of my moment of glee, I promptly hit a shard of glass, and my tire exploded. Oh well, at least I was a block away from Western Auto and could contine uninterrupted with my endless day of errands….

Mr. Bit Shifter (as I like to call him), is going on a world tour and well, if you are into 8 bit music, the man who shifts bits is the one to catch. Not only is his music playfully electric he knows how to move to his own bit beats to provide the audience with a full-bodied performance.