Strata R. Chalup

Reflections on LJ after long disuse

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 06:39:43 GMT

Snap.com is the penumbral discouragement death of web technology that LJ has waited all its life for, and I'm not inclined to come back until I bother to turn it off again by setting a 127.0.0.1 snap.com entry in my /etc/hosts again.

I wish more of my friends used filters and I could pick which ones I'm on.

Sad to miss the commiserating and congratulating... but feel it's had too little impact. I should start calling people or writing them notes with funny stickers via usmail again.

Time to experiment with reading some LJ's via RSS, maybe funnelling that and twitter thru NewsFire or some custom web thang. Feeling like I'm out of touch but would rather trade occasional high-quality interaction for the web-friend whale dream.

Not likely to be back soon. Feel free to write if ya want.

I don't live here any more...

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 05:17:19 GMT

...but I still love y'all.

Sorry for the LJ-neglect. I think I need to find an email gateway that sends LJ to me, as I am sucking at pull media right now.

Two big product ships now are done. More big stuff is underway but with less insanity (I hope). Meanwhile, recurring overwork + stress results in sinus plague and I spent most of this week underwater in Nyquil land.

This week only! Make $10 and help a researcher online

Mon, 04 May 2009 18:47:54 GMT

A friend (and colleague) of mine is finishing up her dissertation, and could use a few more study participants before closing results up at the end of the week. She's studying education and learning in virtual worlds, specifically in Second Life.

Visit http://www.iit.edu/~filiste/ for details; basically, get a free Second Life account, spend a little time inworld (free class on building in SL!), and fill out a couple of short surveys along the way.

Please give it a shot if you have a few minutes! Thanks!

Farm Subsidy Reform: $9.5B over 10 years

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:50:55 GMT

Either mosey on over to Food Democracy Now to use their letter or write one of your own.

Senators Boxer and Feinstein, Representative Eschoo, Mr. McGlynn
Washington, DC
RE: Comment on Farm Program Payment Limitation Rule, Federal Register, Vol. 74, No. 23, February 5, 2009
Dear elected officials and Mr. McGlynn,
Thank you for your hard work on behalf of your fellow Americans. I am writing today to urge you to close the farm subsidy loopholes that permit direct payments to businesses that do not directly farm. Agricultural subsidies should be directed at preserving independent farms and farm familiies not at corporations or funding partnerships.
Please provide strong and specific definitions for "farmers" and those “actively engaged in agriculture” to specify that those receiving subsidies should provide at least 51% of the active crop and personnel management of the farm.
Please limit subsidies to actively farmed land, and end the practice of paying organizations not to grow crops.
I also encourage you to strongly support tax incentives for diversified small farming and diversified organic farming, e.g., the 'a little of everything' traditional family farm. CAFOs and acres of identical crops, whether organic or conventional, hurt the soil and weaken our food security.
Finally, I beg of you to get Monsanto and other patent-seed companies OUT of our foreign-aid and Middle Eastern programs, where they are destroying traditional agriculture and (literally!) driving small farmers to suicide, and support non-patent, open-pollinated, and heirloom seed efforts.
Sincerely,
Strata Chalup
Sunnyvale CA 94089
Woman Small Business Owner

Potlatch 18: Always Coming Home Friday Night session

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:44:38 GMT

O so brief, so blinderingly brief...these are pretty much only my own notes to myself, waiting to speak, didn't note the whole session.

Conjurer's trick: whether you see the tricks, you are still following the hand, forgetting your seat. Whole novel is this way, creating an altered state when linearly read (or not!)

Nice point by a gamer (nicely riffing off previous session on Growing Up Weightless): they read the book like gaming material: description of world, with short adventure set in world to help you grok it, then tables at end, lol!

Bram Stoker's Dracula: inaccessible to me, until in a moment of clarity I saw it blogged as what it is, a series of letters (doh!) and then I got hooked. Note: only recently has novel been ensconced in form it takes now, was much more a collection of notes, letters, etc in some previous states. Refs to some early work in non-linear novels, did not get details bah.

I think ACH would work better for me if considered as a Group Blog. Most multicharacter, shifting storyline, multiview stories maintain a uniform tone. The tone changes in ACH suggest (deliberately, I am certain!) different authors, which is more of a break for me than style. Original edition came With A Box and a Tape (ooh!) which I didn't realize. Can still get the tape/music/material off a related website.

Good point on prescriptive utopia & asthma sufferers (aud memb: I'd be dead!) but raises questions for yrs trly:
* Why is that not a utopia? AudMem: genetic disease, they argue, etc
* Stealth utopia, imho, tho in eye of beholder
** If society is in balance, is that utopian or dystopian? Isn't that a viewpoint? Depends on where your place is in the heap and if you like it, eh?
* Guy panelist says he'd like to visit but not to live there
** Intrigued: what would he gain by visit? What does he perceive he'd lose by residency?

Second level of indirection present in the book for me. I could not read it at first, had to make a real effort-- dropped it the first couple times I tried, stuck it out for Potlatch until I suddenly got hooked in, not sure where exactly, within first 25% by volume.

"There will always be a sickness in man." Good point. Culture as a mitigating force vs a redirecting force, goes back to u/dis/topia again. I see a transfer or encapsulation of xenophobia here that is in some ways healthy: brought plants, animals, environment inside as 'brethren'. Contrast with Condor Culture, City of Mind: are they opt-outs for Kesh, or is Kesh the opt-out for them? Mutual "islands of the blind"?

I need to get a strong binder clip to use as a notebook capo for best legibility of notes!

Potlatch 18: Graphic Novels panel

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:31:53 GMT

Mostly list of pointers; GREAT panel!

* drewwing.com
* xkcd.org
* Farley (sp?) on dicebox.com
** "Adventures into Digital Comics"
* Finder, Carla Speed MacNeil, Lightspeed Press
* Castle Waiting
* Amy Unbounded
* 13 Marys Ballad (hard to describe but definitely fractal media!)
* "God's Man", 1920s-ish graphic novel without any text or captions
* "Afterlife", Donna Barr; combining finally the plotlines/characters of:
** Stinz, centaurs in the fictional Gieselthal Valley of Switzerland in WW-II timeframe
** Desert Peach, Erwin Rommel's gay younger brother Pfirsch and his misfit army unit in the African Desert
* great looking site on comics, The Midnight Library
* Scott McCloud has 3 books now, sheesh, yr hmbl nttkr is 2 books out of touch
* Delta Thrives

Concept of The Gutter, the action happening in your head like in a text-book, only in graphics: this panel has The Axe, and this other panel The Scream, *you*, you killed the guy! In the gutter! between the panels!
** Hey, the whole Talmud is kinda like this, they just only transcribe the gutters every generation or two and condense stuff ;-) (yr nttkr gn)

* Astro City
* The Classics Illustrated from the 1950's
* Astroboy's Osamu Tezuka now doing The Life of Buddha illustrated manga
** Vol 1, Kapilavastu, I think vols up to 6 or 7 are out now
* Zhuangzhi Speaks: the Language of Nature
** popular graphic novel format telling of ZhuangZhi, Lao Tzu, Confucian teachings, great series
** Tsai Chih Chung is the author; gold here! :-)

Concept: Tribes (McCloud), e.g., Robert Crumb of the Iconoclast tribe (prolly Ernie Pook's Comeek would fit there too), also Harvey Pikar's "American Splendor" where the lines of expression on characters' faces tell so much of the story; homage to Will Eisner, of course, on that. Fagin the Jew passed around, Eisner's hookup/mashup on Dickens.

Linearity, graphic novels/comics vs movies; point brought up that Tivo and the like changing how we view that content, loop back and slowmo to grok the fullness; convergence!
** Close captioning apparently sometimes gives name of song and also sometimes lyrics, so you can see the metapoint being made there by the soundtrack, adds dimension

Web comics are Da Bomb: so many demos of great stuff!

* Girl Genius, Phil & Kaja "civilizing influence" Foglio (ooh, my fave!!!)
* Yowtzel / Yotzel (sp?), sketchbook form retelling of 'what if my family had not left Warsaw during WW2'
* Strangers in Paradise
* Fables (Rose Red, Sleeping Beauty, others, in Manhatten, war vs ancient evil, etc)
* Akiko, for kids just too old for Moomin, not anime; Mark Crilley
* Why the Last Man (title?) Brian K Vaughn
* Alan Moore nonsuperhero, like V for Vendetta and a ton more
* insanely ossm (imho) James Blish meets psychedelia, flying guitar cities
** dicebox.com/asides/dontlookback
* Larry Madar's ossm Tales from the Beanworld
* copy of Bone was being passed around
* Sinfest, another ossm webcomic

Enjoy! Send links! will update!

Potlatch 18: Scalzi Rules Panel

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:08:41 GMT

Notes from the spirited yet finely moderated discussion that is/was the Scalzi Rule panel. Attenuated due to hotel computer costing in the office module. USA Today, the Nation's New PAP. ;-)

Tracking the bulleted points of journaled thought:
a) A libertarian is someone who believes zhe has a shot at (pun intended) having The Biggest Gun.
b) Fandom treats rules as challenge-damage (just scream and leap!) and tries to route around them.
c) The Scalzi Rule can be the Gun of the Meek, and some support it therewith.
c-prime-alpha) Roleplaying the Bad Cop, or how Moderators can Still be a Nice G/Shy
c-prime-beta) The Stream of Consciousness Damocles is hanging over my notes; I'm forwarding my mindtrack in the hoping that you'll like what I wrote; oh, the huge manatee; what's coming over me...[zippit!]
d) There's a metapanel (never that I didn't like) in here somewhere:

entertain
share knowledge
feel good moments/barricade of culture
15 mins of fame
brainstorming
get acquainted/closing the gap
(added later) see/hear Foo who never comes to conventions anymore, or who is a Very Unusual Guest the Like of Which We'll Prolly Neva See Agin
(ditto) Like but not exactly the same, come see/hear Foo and Bar compare notes on being founders of the Foo Bar and Grille or likewise

e) I love the idea (who spake?) of iconography in conbooks to denote which of above categories are met; knife, fork, spaceship, deathray, no gas for 3.75M parsecs, etc
f) Also love the "Scalzi bringing his blog/net culture into 'real life'"
There's a metidea in here: tools for creating & maintaining consciously consensually managed communication space

Tag Team Tips Trailing, non-Tenative:
* Brad, from his moderating experience: "Any questions, or really long polemics phrased as questions?"
* Kathryn, ditto; went to a Vocal Expert of Strong Opinion before a panel in which said expert was NOT a panelist and nicely said, essentially, "I respect your expertise but please don't hog the questions, this is aimed more at beginners" and experience was more productive and less painful than zhe'd feared.

Duty of the Audience while Piloting the Airwaves (Sounding! Zhe Sounds! Thar zhe blows!)
* The whole Scalzi Rule thing is to prevent That Guy (whump, quoting Darien/Damien someone) from taking over the panel
* Modeling Not Being That Guy is a duty now for the future evermore everlasting (ting ting tinnabulation)
* Moderators should not be That Guy while on the panel
* Facilitators vs Moderators: no expectation of contribution, which can prevent accidental That Guy Zeal from emerging as a behavior
* Anecdote by ConRunner Smoftaculaire re: meeting expectations of being a moderator
** Sometimes the Moderator is an Interviewer
** Sometimes a referee
** They should do homework!
** No, say some, they should get a briefing!
** At least on what the program committee wants the panel to be, if not on the folks themselves.
* Model appropriate audience behavior! Early n often
** "My question is, 'what does this panelist think about xyz'?"
** Nicely, without the "this panelist who you skipped over, steempy you eeediot" part.

We Can Haz TrainingZ?
* tools for moderators new to it
* Guidance on how to manage cliques, err, eminence grisee, um, local FGoH's, whatever
** "You weren't fair!" --> My ox! My ox! You weren't supposed to gore MY ox!
** Great anecdote about how a moderator completely ignored a subject matter expert on a panel, audience member hated the session, but later found rave reviews from much of the audience who loved that THEY got to talk so much instead of the panelist(s); loopback to expections, expectorations, and See Figure One-ations.
** What about the Jumpers-In, who just KNOW how smart they are, and that they are Among Friends, etc but do kind of spoil it for the quiet types (/me guilty, sez note taker, sometimes)
* (??) Mindfulness: "Yes, have some!"
* "Waiting is"
** Someone also smart will ask your question, or a better version of it, likely
** You can always keep bulletpoint notes
* Beautifully working observed technique of taking queues and dividing room into quadrants

Note taker Me sez:
Want to talk to folks about programming. Sounds like we are identifying another axis of ^Hevil meaning for programming: already have topic, type (roundtable, panel, reading), fame of panelists; need to explicitly add 'affordances of panel' (e.g., entertain, knowledge share, 15 mins of fame, brainstorm, etc as above). Another kind of balance.

Would be interesting to do exact same panel description, but run as different type on that continuum, explore different ways it would manifest.

Kthxbai.

Blinking, I Emerge from Under My Rock...

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:20:03 GMT

It was only kinda sorta official before, but now there's a press release and a case study and everything. So I can finally talk about what I've been doing for the past year or so. Nope, it's not a good excuse for dropping out of all my non-work activities, but it's Very Shiny.
A
We built a behind-the-firewall Second Life Grid for IBM. (As that article said, it jumped the gun-- I sure couldn't talk about it!) I had the privilege of being the Project Manager for what turned into an amazing interdisciplinary intercompany effort-- Lindens are awesome, and it's great to be one and help with things like this. Years of experience working on challenging rollout projects with multiple vendors didn't hurt either. ;-)

Now we're in the sweet triumph phase of the project. It's time to take that deep breath and let it out with a happy sigh. "Ahhhhh." ... and then get back to work on the current thing that I can't tell you about either. I'm trying for better work-life balance this time around!

OK, maybe Twitter, Facebook, and blogging are not what we call "better work-life balance" outside of Silicon Valley, but since here is where I am, well, see you online!

More "Honeymoon Pictures"

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 08:30:38 GMT

Don't let that Promise you won't let the revolving door hit you in the butt on the way in or out ... let's say for 2 years.

Oh, and how about we comply with FOIA requests by default, mmkay? In fact, don't even wait for folks to ask.

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.

I'm in love, I tell ya.

Sure, he's married, I'm married, but this is a love that can be consummated simply by being proud to be a citizen again. This could go on the rocks. Small-minded folks will get in the way. But I think we can go the distance.

There won't be magic and unicorns overnight, but the world looks a whole lot brighter.

So Wrong... And Yet, So Right

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:28:43 GMT

Take a walk on the wilder side of artificial nature, courtesy of this alleged viral marketing experiment involving balloon animals. Not safe for most workplaces.

Don't forget the various outtakes.

Follow up with When Balloon Animals Attack. Drink heavily. Enjoy.

Long-Awaited Release Notes

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:53:20 GMT

US Democracy Server: Patch Day

Version 44.0
President

* Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.
* A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes.
* Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President’s friends list, or in the President’s party. We are investigating.
* Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
* Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People.
* A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.

(There's more, a lot more, covering VP, Cabinet, etc at the original: http://www.chromecow.com/2009/01/20/us-democracy-server-patch-day/ )

Make Your Own Salvation...

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 07:21:56 GMT

...one day at a time.

Found a remarkable book up at the Harbin library this weekend. "Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey" Candid, gritty, no-nonsense retelling of the beginnings of the national drag-queen scene, drug culture, the founding of the SF Zen center, and Issan's odd journey from the brink of disaster to Climbing the Mountain, becoming Issan-roshi of the Suzuki-roshi Dharma line.

I found it very inspiring.

Had a really good visit with Mike over the long weekend. He's still up there on a medical leave (workplace stress). He's doing a lot better. Climbs the mountain every day (a trail that links up to the Boggs Mt summit, 2K+ elevation change), and is feeling very centered.

Hmm, the cat needs me. Blogging, not so much.

Oh, and there was a class on "Non-Violent Communication" on Sunday that turned out to be REALLY GOOD, and very interesting. It's apparently A Thing, Now: http://www.cnvc.org/ Worth checking out.

Six Years of LJ

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:03:33 GMT

I had previously used ljmigrate to back up my LJ back in August 2007, somewhere on or near a previous LJ acquisition event. Looked at entry00001/entry.xml out of curiosity: Jan 3, 2003 Oh yeah, right after we got settled in for the winter with a cable modem in FL on our big road-trip sabbatical rollabout.

I made a full backup in XML at the time, and then purged my journal entries. Or at least, I thought I had, but the ljmigrate -r I just ran was able to pull some missing entries, as well as the recent ones. Maybe I only made them invisible/private. I suppose I should check on that.

Thirteen hundred-ish posts, and at least a couple of "I'm outta here" entries. But I keep coming back because somehow social email lists got tougher over the years-- I stopped having a Unix box at home, stopped having static IP addresses or a colo box, and spam took on epic proportions. A pull media seemed better.

Shrug.

Still here. Have backup. Waves. :-)

Silent But Deadly

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 20:55:49 GMT

No, not that, though we HAVE been eating a lot of beans around here since we got the slow cooker.

Our carbon monoxide detector went off today. We're not sure why, and to confuse matters further, it said it was in Test Mode... yet it said it had seen (when? now?) 287ppm. The furnace, hot water heater, and oven were all going.

The alarm is not going off now. By the end of today we will have several new CO detectors in the house, a mix of the battery-powered type and the house-current type. I've learned a number of things in the past few hours which surprised me, including things I was Just Plain Wrong about. Fortunately, not Dead Wrong. If the situation were different, though, my lack of correct information might have been fatal. So, let me share, just in case you know some of the same wrong things.

What to do first. If you're like most people, including us, the first thing you do is go to the alarm and see what's up, then start looking for the problem. No. Not even remotely correct. The FIRST THING you do is LEAVE THE HOUSE. Period. No questions. Grab all family members and pets and get out. Only then do you think about what to do next and make a plan of action. [1]

Why? Because in case your alarm went off only in the cumulative exposure fuzzy-headed stage, you may already be at risk of going to the next level of CO poisoning. It can be abrupt, and you could go from 'mostly fine' to 'I can't think and need to just sit down for a moment' without any real warning. If it turns out to be that bad, you might never stand up again.

The next thing that everybody does is start opening up windows 'just in case'. Apparently that's also wrong. Instead, you should, theoretically, call the fire department, your appliance repair person, or your utility company and actually have them do a check. If you're like most of us, you're probably not going to do that, you're going to change the battery in the thing instead (you did write the date of the last change on the battery with a sharpie, yes?) and if it goes off again, then you're going to think about calling someone.

At least get folks out of the house first, and don't go opening all the windows yet. "Many CO alarm calls have been classified as 'false alarms' because the homeowner has ventilated the home and turned off the equipment before firemen or technicians can measure the CO levels and find the source." [2]

Another 'everybody knows' pseudo-fact is as long as you don't have a skull-splitting headache, you're okay. NOT! What most folks don't know, and I sure didn't, is that low levels of exposure commonly cause flu-like symptoms, including sniffling, red eyes, tiredness, nausea, mild headache. At medium levels of exposure, the ones that could tip suddenly depending on your physiology, that's where you get symptoms like "severe throbbing headache, drowsiness, confusion, fast heart rate." [3]

If you tend to be sniffly and tired at home in the evenings or weekends, but feel better at work or out of the house, well, that could be a lot of things from needing to clean the ducts to vacuuming to dust mites. But it could also be low-level CO exposure, so add that to your list. Get yourself a CO detector that measures continual exposure and make sure you get your appliances checked annually.

Speaking of which, as long as the flame is blue, not orange we tend to think it's ok. Leaky ducting can cause CO exposure even when the flame adjustment is ok, so don't rule it out just because the flame looks right. Get somebody with a sniffer to confirm your in-house levels.

The CO detector should be in your bedroom, right? Maybe one of those little plug-in ones? Well, partially. Ideally, the CO detector should be either on the ceiling or about 5 feet off the ground, since CO is generally lighter than room air. I was unpleasantly shocked to find out that the only CO detector in our place was actually in the 2nd bedroom, which Mike uses as a workroom. Why? We don't remember. Well, that will change by this evening!

We also tend to think that as long as the 'test' button works, the alarm works. Wrong, alas. Apparently very few CO or smoke detectors actually test the detector, rather than the audible alert. Pressing the 'test' button tests the NOISE circuit, not the detector, in the vast majority of detectors.

We purchased our detector when we moved in, almost 5 years ago. We assumed it was good 'forever' as long as we changed the batteries. Nope. The mechanisms they use to detect CO differ, and many of the small battery-powered ones use a colored disk that they monitor for changes, rather than more direct chemical means. Multiple sources say that most CO detectors have a 5-year lifespan but some may be valid for only a couple of years. Either way, we need to replace ours.

What kind should you get? Here in the States, I quote Underwriters' Labs: Rather than looking for specific features, look for the UL Mark with the adjacent phrase "Single Station Carbon Monoxide Alarm." [3]

Why? Because it's required to have a silence button and to re-alarm within 6 minutes if the condition persists. Many detectors will just happily shut up and not go off again if you silence them. Low batteries can cause an alarm to go off, so if one does go off, after you think it's safe (remember the first part of this article) then you can change the batteries and see if it goes off AGAIN.

There's so much more, but that's a good start. Don't freak out, but take part of an afternoon and put some safety in the bank for you and your family. Have a safe n happy new year!

[1] http://www.carbonmonoxidekills.com/faq.htm
[2] Incredibly detailed and helpful info from our Canadian buddies: http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/co/maho/yohoyohe/inaiqu/inaiqu_002.cfm
[3] http://www.ul.com/consumers/co.html

Dancing Fool

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 04:57:27 GMT

I usually love the silly links collections, but the ones going around lately about office-party dancing made me sad. Mostly I see ordinary non-glamorous people having a good time, and being mocked for their lack of perfection. I saw some pretty decent dancers and singers who just happened to be old, or balding, or fat.

Who is the bigger sad sack, the drunken office-party dancer, ineptly having fun, or the sneering cynic on the sidelines, capturing the moment and 'sharing' it on YouTube so s/he can feel superior?

There's a well-known set of trite lines that ends with "and dance like nobody's watching." A few months ago I stayed up in SF at the main office to go out with coworkers to see a band that featured one of our colleagues. The opening act was good, and their act was good. People were happy, smiling, nodding, jigging their shoulders a little, but only a couple dozen of the 100ish folks there were actually dancing. There was room, but maybe it just "wasn't cool"? I danced, and had fun, and didn't care.

Whether at an office party or out at a club, if the dancing is only For The Beautiful People or The Talented People, there'd better be signs. Otherwise this old fat chick is gonna be dancin'.

So there.

O IntarWebZ, We Has Missed Thee

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:34:25 GMT

Not that you noticed I was gone, or only spasmo-sporadically updating things, as my ties to thee sputtered off and on, mostly off.

Well, foobar felgercarb snargleblarg. The good news is that we have IntarToobZ again. The bad news is that can only get up to about 1.3 Mbps incoming, and 300ish outgoing. So say we all, including http://helpme.att.net/cgi-bin/speedtest/speedresult.cgi?1293854;321827;1;2.0;speedtest-sntcca.sntcca.sbcglobal.net , who should know.

My suspicion that requesting an upgrade to Premium 6Mbps service was to blame was correct, but in an unexpected way. The nice folks at AT&T had not actually messed up our connection (hush, o you cynics and scoffers). Instead, trying to push a higher rate through the line had revealed a physical line issue that had not manifested at our previous SBCYahoo blazing 768Kbps level of connectivity.

A very pleasant fellow came out here today at about 9:30am and just left a few minutes ago, after 3 hours of outside line work. He got us a fresh pair to what passes for the local infrastructure and did the extremely tedious phone work of contacting both departments needed to roll back the subscription from Premium to Elite (ooh, we's 'leet!).

I think the extra measure of cheer for our visiting AT&T service guy might have come from contemplating the alternative. How unpleasant his time would have been if the phone line hadn't come into our place under the nice, dry carport! He got to avoid the cold, nasty drizzle that's been watering the garden all morning. I offered to get him some hot coffee or tea, and he was surprised-- isn't anyone nice to service folks anymore?

So, welcome back, IntarWebZ, we salute thee. Just not as speedily as we'd hoped.

as jaded as I am...

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:56:00 GMT

...this kind of thing is why I work here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxVDVggLqsA

The build techniques are, fyi, very real, just speeded up and edited. I need to go look for this build inworld, if it's still extant, and spend some time there. Very, very, nice.

Well, it's about TIME

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:44:45 GMT

OK, so this happened this summer and I missed it until now. But still, HELL YEAH.

http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/consumer/amalgams.html

The FDA finally stops ignoring tons of evidence and says, well, um, yeah, amalgam fillings release mercury when you chew, and um, pregnant women and kids and maybe possibly even sensitive types maybe possibly shouldn't use them much.

Years of arguing with dentists "so, if my old amalgam fillings are cupped and worn, where does that material go? why isn't it harmful to ingest?". Taking a major health turn for the better when I finally took the hit to pay for ALL of my amalgam to be removed and either crowned or refilled with composite. Vindicated.

Rat bastards. How much more aren't you telling us?

BTW, I didn't get any pushback on asking for a thimerosol-free flu vaccine when I got one on Tuesday. Why? "We're out of the regular kind." Nice.

transforming art into science [RelInq]

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 07:17:41 GMT

The biggest problem with transforming Art into Science is that people would rather be Artists than Scientists. No, wait, you say, I love Science! Yeah, now would you rather be a Rock Star or a Lab Tech? Yes, you see the problem.

I recently read a New Yorker article that completely kicks ass in describing how medical science is poised on the cusp of a potential transformation into something that can save Even More Lives, but via a path that's difficult to take: the humble, homely, not the science of the rocket, procedural checklist. As the article states,

Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” tells the story of our first astronauts, and charts the demise of the maverick, Chuck Yeager test-pilot culture of the nineteen-fifties. ... But as knowledge of how to control the risks of flying accumulated—as checklists and flight simulators became more prevalent and sophisticated—the danger diminished, values of safety and conscientiousness prevailed, and the rock-star status of the test pilots was gone.

Reading this, I was instantly transported into familiarity-- this is the exact problem that I spent a decade banging my head against in Systems Administration, and what drove me to spend the next decade in Project Mangement to try to solve. A number of us in the Usenix and LISA communities seemed to have a handle on this, but the way the blind men had a handle on the elephant. We specialized in dealing with our rope, our fan, our spear, our wall, our tree, and, umm, whatever the sixth thing was that the elephant was like-- oh yes, our snake. We didn't have the problem space sharply defined. Author, and doctor, Atul Gawande describes the dilemma precisely:

Something like this is going on in medicine. We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity—the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that’s what rankles many people.

"Expert audacity." Yes. Absolutely. It's what the cool kids do. Indiana Jones meets skatepunk, and checklists ain't got the cool.

While I was able to leverage automation and some ticketing systems to bring reproducible, higher levels of support to some of my clients, I didn't Get It. I did not see clearly enough that many people, even very well-meaning ones, will resist changes that reduce the intensity level of their daily jobs. They fear becoming bored, unappreciated, less vital to the organization. The addiction to the adrenaline cycle and the kind of "cult hero" status that goes with it is very, very difficult for an organization to break. As Brent Chapman noted, discussing resistance to automated network management, everybody wants to be a hero.

While I have always seen career mentoring as an important part of managing a team, I didn't realize how important it is to build up a vision of what people will be doing when they're no longer playing superhero.
Systems people are keenly aware of projects that are languishing while they respond to interrupts. It's rare to meet someone who doesn't have a "someday I'll get to this" list. Stabilizing the network and systems environment and establishing strong processes, including checklists, is vital for scaling services and being responsive to the needs of the organization. A decrease in emergent crises ("complications", in medical parlance) frees up cycles for complex projects that present true depth and scope challenges for individuals and teams.

Being a Rock Star is fun-- as countless Guitar Hero and Rock Band fans, including myself, can attest. Quiet, directed competence can be just as much fun, though, and allow personal and career growth with a bit less drama and a bit more sleep. While networks, legacy applications, and odd emergent behaviors of client desktops aren't as complex (perhaps!) as a living organism, there is plenty in common. As Dr. G says:

It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation. The body is too intricate and individual for that: good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.

Sing it, brother.

green things

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:59:39 GMT

There are some evergreen branches nearby on a chair. I wanted a wreath, but the guy at the farmers' market wasn't able to get the metal wreath blanks, so he just had trees n branches.

For the past several years I've wanted some kind of evergreen-ness in the house over the winter solstice, but Mike takes a dim view of the so-called "hannukah bush".

I finally told him, hey, it's not a hannukah bush OR a christmas tree, it's a *solstice bough*. I don't want a to cut down a tree, I just want some branches.

And I want to LIGHT THEM UP because I really don't like the whole "short dark day" thing and am very much needing a reminder that someday soon we'll start heading back to longer days.

Now I kinda think he gets it.

It's tough when you want to go back and start living your own life again, and realize that some things are always going to be out of reach because of choices you made. The good outweighs the bad, most of the time, but nothing is perfect. Perfection is stasis, and change is life.

Stuff vs Life: the War on Accumulator Culture

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 23:14:44 GMT

Cribbed shamelessly from the extremely excellent last hurrah at http://viridiandesign.org, this is my condensed version, which I've printed out and put where I can see it EVERY DAY. I have been working on a less-conscious version of this philosophy for the past few months, as I increasingly lose items within my home, clutter and filth accumulates, and I find myself making the wrong tradeoffs between managing my stuff and my stuff demanding maintenance from me. Bruce Sterling's eagle eye cleaves the usual Gordian knots with his laser vision. Vivat! ... And yes, I am nerdy enough that the thought of using "Clear the Accumulator!" as an inspirational rallying cry is, well, damn inspirational. (Tail-swish, grin)

The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It's not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

1. Do not "economize."
2. The items that you use every day, should be the best-designed things you can get.
a. Bed: You're spending a third of your lifetime in a bed.
b. Chair: Bad chairs can seriously injure you from repetitive stresses.
c. Shoes: Shoes are notorious sources of pain and stress and subjected to great mechanical wear.
d. Clothes: Forget consumer theatricality...buy relatively-expensive clothing that is ergonomic, high-performance and sturdy.
3. Sell – even give away– anything you never use. ... Get radically improved everyday things.
4. Carry a multitool.
5. Do not stock the fort ... unless you can clearly sense the visible approach of some massive, non-theoretical civil disorder. The clearest way to know that one of these is coming is that the rich people have left your area. If that's the case, then, sure, go befriend the police and prepare to knuckle down.

Now to confront the possessions you already have. This will require serious design work, and this will be painful. It is a good idea to get a friend or several friends to help you.

You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.

1. Beautiful things.
a. If they're truly beautiful, they should be so beautiful that you are showing them to people. They should be on display: you should be sharing their beauty with others. Your pride in these things should enhance your life, your sense of taste and perhaps your social standing.
b. They're not really that beautiful? Then they're not really beautiful. Take a picture of them, tag them, remove them elsewhere.
2. Emotionally important things.
a. All of us have sentimental keepsakes that we can't bear to part with. We also have many other objects which simply provoke a panicky sense of potential loss – they don't help us to establish who we are, or to become the person we want to be. They subject us to emotional blackmail.
b. Is this keepsake so very important that you would want to share its story with your friends, your children, your grandchildren? Or are you just using this clutter as emotional insulation, so as to protect yourself from knowing yourself better?
c. Think about that. Take a picture. You might want to write the story down. Then – yes – away with it.
d. You are not "losing things" by these acts of material hygiene. You are gaining time, health, light and space. Also, the basic quality of your daily life will certainly soar. Because the benefits of good design will accrue to you where they matter – in the everyday.
3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
a. They're not beautiful and you are not emotionally attached to them. So they should be held to keen technical standards.
b. You will be told that you should "make do" with broken or semi-broken tools, devices and appliances. Unless you are in prison or genuinely crushed by poverty, do not do this. This advice is wicked.
4. Everything else.
a. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year .
b. Document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again.
c. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.
d. Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

It may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren't born with it. You won't be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.

Do not jump up from the screen right now and go reform your entire material circumstances. That resolve will not last. Because it's not sustainable.

Instead, ... think hard about it. Tuck it into the back of your mind. Contemplate it. The day is going to come, it will come, when you suddenly find your comfortable habits disrupted. .... Suddenly you will find yourself facing a yawning door and a whole bunch of empty boxes. That is the moment in which you should launch this sudden, much-considered coup. Seize that moment on the barricades, liberate yourself, and establish a new and sustainable constitution.

[Condensed and rearranged entirely from The Last Viridian Note by Bruce Sterling; it's his copyright, go read the original at http://viridiandesign.org/ ]

not from this planet, rly

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 06:56:27 GMT

Skimming thru the CostCo catalog (after declining a suggestion that we purchase the Boom Wireless Game Chair for the cats), I noticed a fake-stone pillar crowned with flame being sold as the "Morrigan Fire Bowl Column."

"Gee, honey", I said, "would you buy an explosive-powered open flame named after the Celtic goddess of war and carnage?"

To which Mike replied, "Remember, this is the society that names a line of luggage after Amelia Erhart."

Good point.

Excuse me, regional galactic coordinators. Are any of the OTHER planets ready for excursion yet? This one's has sentient surface froth, and the Giant Skimming Spoon is long overdue. PS-- be sure to use the right hole size this time; some of us are *still* pissed about the dragons and unicorns. Kthxbai.

Edit: It just occurred to me that perhaps it is the Morrigan FIRE BOWL Column, eg, for sacrifices to the Dark Lady of the Ravens and the Bloody Earth That Bears in Spring. And I really don't think that kind of tech needs to fall into the hands of J Random Condo Association or bored teens. Planet transfer request still stands... oh, but only if it has Puffs.

...it's a vegetable.

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:55:23 GMT

"Catch-up"

Reading the intertoobz until my eyes hurt, but stopping before they bleed (unless they start during this update).

Yow. Lots going on. Friends traveling, dealing with bodies that want to be stillsuits with no outvalves, surviving That Month (mileage varies), birthdays, moving outta town, moving into town, job-hunting/losing/triumphing, seeing new memories destroy old ones (often physically, as in toddler creativity vs memorabilia), finding keeping losing weeping (it was pretty, but glad you found another similar).

Outside LJ there are a million things to do and more in freeze-frame. We have played towers of hanoi with our home, putting part of the DR into the LR so we could move the BR into the DR so we could rip out the nasty nasty carpet and put down something smooth n easy to keep allergen-low. All that's left is the detail work on the mopboard and putting all the stuff back. Heh. Heh. Heh. Meantime, sleeping in the LR on the couch and the kittehs are grouchy. Mebbe sleep in bed tonight, but it's all big n echo-y in there with no furrrniturrre. Chickie no likie.

Garden on hold, project on bold, grrl is cold, getting old, now to bed my story's told.

catch{flipside, $0};

Good Timing for Some Do-Gooding

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:24:46 GMT

Times are tough for some of us, less so for others. If you're fortunate enough to have the opportunity and means to contribute to a 401K account through your employer, you may have topped out your contribution around now. How about putting an extra $25 or $50 of that to work for charity, in time to count for this year's taxes?

More and more charities have easy monthly sign-up plans now, where you can give $10, $20, or however much per month. That's like, giving up one latte a week and getting a coffee instead. But over the year, it adds up for the charity you're helping. Maybe you'd find it's easier to give up something small to help somebody else than to save it for yourself. Or decide you want to give up two tall mochas a week and buy yourself something nice at the end of the year with the fund from one of them!

Anyways-- this is on my mind and I figured I'd blog my own favorites list. I try to add one every year or so, so that I kind of get used to it and can do a bit more. And if you're not in a position right now to give money, just smile at one more person a day and that will go a long way toward making the world a better place, too.

Heifer Project International; Provide farm animals, seeds, honeybees, to people, who then pass on the gift locally. A bootstrap program making a real difference all over the world.

Grameen Foundation; Micro-loans that enable small businesses and bring people out of poverty. A $10 - $20 loan can do things like enable a weaving cooperative to market directly from their village, or help people fund a local mill to grind grain.

International Foundation of Red Cross and Red Crescent; Humanitarian aid for disaster victims. You know about their efforts for earthquakes, floods, and the like, but did you know they also work locally to do things like house and help families burned out in apartment fires? Note that IFRC is the parent foundation; "National Societies" like the American Red Cross organize the work by country. IFRC has an online directory of National Societies by country.

Hesperian Foundation; Publishing books like "Where There is No Doctor" and "Helping Children Who Are Blind" in multiple languages. All of these books are available for download via their site, btw.

Electronic Frontier Foundation; Defending digital liberties, fighting vote fraud, and so very much more.

Amnesty International; Working to free the unjustly imprisoned worldwide, and providing hope to those who have been shut away in some political oubliette for speaking their mind and trying to change things.

Doctors Without Borders; Sending medical help where it is needed, sometimes into great dangers, to help people in need. Volunteer doctors, nurses, EMTs, pilots-- but they need gas money for the planes, medical supplies, logistics, etc.

Natural Resources Defense Council; Working to protect wilderness, wild areas, animals, plants, biodiversity. Not one of those "don't touch it, we don't care if you starve" orgs, NRDC works on transitioning communities to ecotourism, sustainable wild harvesting, and giving people economic incentive to preserve for long-term good rather than destroy for short-term gain.

Organic Consumers Association

There are a number of other groups I support, but they don't seem as universal or uncontroversial to me, like MoveOn, VoteSmart, Weston A Price Foundation.

Please comment with some of your favorite charities, it's always great to hear.</ul>

"And that's when the fight started."

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:44:39 GMT

After all, there's no such thing as North.

OK, let's explain a little. Am reading Susan Neiman, "Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists". It's slow going, dense with thickets of ideas and little interpretive gardens of classic philosophy. We've just finished a brief analysis of, well, I won't even go there or I'll lose this train of thought utterly. And then we get to:

"Sometimes you need only look out the window to see whether my claim that 'snow is white' is correct. In harder cases, the process may be so long and complex that some theorists prefer to give up talk of correspondence altogether. But however hard it may be to find out whether a statement corresponds to the world, the processes used in deciding claims like 'snow is white' are different from the ones used to decide that 'slavery is wrong'. Strictly speaking, *right* cannot be a matter of knowledge, though it's often the thing we want to know most of all. Yet it's wrong to conclude ... that ideas of right are therefore unreal. For ideals -- ideas of what is right -- can be practical: When we use them as orientation, we can use them to change reality itself."

Boom. Suddenly I realized with extreme clarity why the term moral compass is so uniquely apt. Because there really is no such thing as North.

Ideals. Idea L.S. Idea LodeStone.

"That's when the fight started."

(OK, the tagline is merely fresh in my mind from a rare, very rare lately, side of 0xdeadbeef. Yet it looms strangely applicable!)