Oblomovka

2009-06-04»

A couple of months back when I decided to go and see some live comedy in the city. I mostly avoid watching stand-up, because I’ve picked up the habit from real comedians of sitting at the back, nodding and saying “Okay, that’s funny”, instead of actually laughing. Also, after a decade or so of orbiting comedy, I was pretty burnt out on watching it. The last time I’d seen any stand up in the US was in 2002 or so, and it wasn’t that appealing. Racist jokes about Mexicans and other people who don’t go to comedy clubs, extended Seinfeldisms, and witty self-deprecation from guys who were hovering dangerously close to public self-loathing didn’t seem that interesting.

The show I went to in April was interesting, though. Even the new acts were clearly very polished, and the established acts were clearly going in interesting directions. Nobody made bad mistakes, and some of them were making deliberately great “mistakes” — trying out new directions that most circuit stand-ups just don’t dare do. The mood of the show was very upbeat and friendly, and the comedians obviously liked each other and hung out socially. I went away thinking “there’s something going on here”, and spent the night clicking around the web to find out what it was.

Here’s what I patched together. In 2000, San Francisco got a comedy college, started up by old hand Kurtis Matthews. Matthews had been doing comedy from 1984 onwards, starting in L.A. and rising up with Bill Hicks, Jon Lovitz and others. In the late Nineties, he burned out on the dream and instead pursued his (by then) elaborate fantasy of actually getting a proper office job and not having to live out of Travelodges, Denny’s and unfriendly bars. But still the back-monkey wouldn’t exit: he still wanted to be involved in comedy, just not as one of its many frazzled front-line infantry in the sweatshop comedy club chains of America. So he started teaching comedy in his home town: taking all those people who wanted to do stand-up the way some people want to sky-dive — not necessarily as a career, but as a primal fear to overcome — as well as semi-professionals who wanted some honest feedback and advice from people who weren’t, at that moment, drunk and waiting for buffalo wings.

My stand-up career began and ended on a Summer night in Edinburgh in 1990. I’d finished college. My parents had just separated, so I didn’t really have a home to come back to. I’d rolled up to the Fringe without any shows to be in, because one of my friends had called me and told me that my best friend had broken up with his practically-wife, and was now sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend. Oh, and they were all trying to run shows and sleep in the same room, as you do when you go to Edinburgh for the Fringe. I think I was there on a combination-mission of suicide-watch and youthful rubber-necking.

I also desperately needed to know what to do with my life. My college friends, Ben Moor and Al Murray, were both setting off to London to be famous. Others, like Stewart Lee and Rich Herring, were already there, grinding through the circuit. Armando Ianucci was I think doing some weird thing on Scottish radio, but there were rumours he was heading down south too. We all knew Armando was brilliant. We all wanted to be there when he hit. Meanwhile, my father, alone and worried that I was become attracted to a duther education course in Advanced Bohemian and Defaulted Student Loans, had put in an application in my name for a job at a computer magazine called .EXE. They were asking for 1000 words and an example of my coding style.

I hung around Edinburgh, without a show. I stood in as compere for a lunch show we did called the £1.99 cabaret, masterminded I think by Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley. Eventually I plucked up enough courage to do a real open mic, outside the protection of an audience half-made up of my friends. I’d seen Stew and Rich do it; it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

I don’t remember much. I remember we all had 30 seconds or so before we were gonged off. I remember a Scottish lady actually standing on a table and screaming at me “You’re shite!” for most of my half-minute. I remember running into Simon Munnery, but I couldn’t tell him what had happened. I wandered around Edinburgh’s yeasty night for hours.

At the end of the night, I decided, grandiosely, that I had two options as a life goal. Either I could do stand-up, or I could try and devote my life to writing a computer program that would make people cry (with happiness or sadness, I didn’t care). I plumped for the latter. No-one I explained it to understood what I meant at the time, because this was before Myst or Doom or the Internet. A few weeks later, I went for the interview at .EXE. They asked me who my favourite comedians were. They hadn’t heard of them, because all my comedy heroes were 23 years old or younger. I was 21.

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2009-06-03»

So it was being stuck without wifi in the Library of Congress the other week that finally made me decide to overwrite the T-Mobile firmware on my Android G1 with something with root access. I was talking with the US Copyright and Patent offices about how to improve access to copyrighted material for the reading disabled (in the hopes, partially, to encourage them to support the Treaty for the Visually Impaired at WIPO the following week).

I know some people frown on net access at such affairs, but as Cory once noted, if you think people are distracted when they have net at meetings, you should see how distracted they get when they don’t have net.  A bunch of us were scrabbling to get information in and out of the public meeting in advance of the transcript becoming available. So, for instance, I recorded my comments onto my phone, and then mailed them out to the rest of the EFF international staff to hear as they were already preparing to fly to Geneva.

The same thing happened, only more fervently at WIPO, with Jamie Love and other attendees  frantically twittering out to the wider world about the imminent attempts to kill the treaty, and thus getting the visible external support they needed to put pressure on countries to keep the Treaty alive (thanks to everyone who contacted their governments, by the way).

All of this networked analysis and activism gets much harder when you don’t have laptop connectivity. Because my G1 phone wasn’t rooted (and T-Mobile forbids tethering apps in Google’s Android app Market), I couldn’t link my computer to my phone’s 3G network. And I wasn’t quite ready to multi-task listening to my fellow panellists and attempting to re-flash firmware at the same time.

I’m glad I waited. It turns out that these days, it’s relatively easy to drop in a version of Android that gives you power over your own device. These instructions on how to root your G1 take you through the tortuous (but by now pretty foolproof) procedure.

In the end, I chose to install JesusFreke’s distribution of the Android OS, which now has a great little utility to manage who gets root on your phone (each application’s request is intercepted, and you, as user, get to allow or deny it). This tethering application is incredibly easy-to-use, and lets you share your 3G connection via wifi or bluetooth (I haven’t tried the bluetooth). You can WEP encrypt the wifi connection, or allow access to only selected users.

Of course, next time I go to the LoC, I’ll be sure to keep the wifi node open. I wouldn’t want the MPAA guys doing without!

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2009-06-02»

Brief summary: Having a great deal of fun.

I am currently trying to break my brain by simultaneously book-kegging Austrian economics and feminist science fiction (as well as the conventions thereof). I am truly enjoying the mental thrashing I endure as I flick from glorious syndicalist manifestos to fierce denunciations of unionism, optimistically chatting with Seasteaders while sceptically surveying current libertarian paradises. I’ve been reading up on Dale Spender and William F. Buckley, Murray Rothbard and Murray Bookchin. I’ve gone politically non-linear. It’s akin to snorting magical policy pixie dust off Ken Macleod‘s bare back. I hope to have some screwed-up ideas of my own, very soon.

I also have a s3krit pr0ject, which I am currently bad at, but getting better. You shall not hear of it until I fail to suck. I also have a not-so-secret work project, which I hope to introduce to you soon, if only as I angst through to its final production. But most importantly, I have agreed to conduct an internal psychological experiment (n=1) that will involve far more blogging. Hooray! Onward! Outward! Excelsior!

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2009-04-28»

You go away from the Internet for a couple of days, and all hell breaks loose. Everyone dies of swine flu, and then the Rails community goes into one of those fantastic explodey nosedives where all the geek social fallacies come out to play (probably including the one that claims that all geek social fallacies are on that list).

Maggie Koerth-Baker, BoingBoing’s current guest blogger, gives the best answers to the whine flu epidemic.

And, completely belying the normal trainwrecks that occur in comment threads about sexism in the tech world, here’s the best encapsulation on the Presentation of Doom and the whole You’re Just Offended Because We’re Flipping Sexy Rockstars response, taken from the Slideshare comments:

It’s not about whether it’s porn or not porn. Those commenting on people’s supposed hypersensitivity to nudity or bodies are completely missing the point.

It’s about presenting women as ‘the other,’ not ‘us.’ It would have been just as offensive if all the women shown were domineering mothers in aprons, shaking their fingers and threatening with rolling pins.

Can I just say that slowly, oh so nanometer-by-painful-nanometer slowly, we are perhaps getting better at dealing with both pandemics and parochialism?

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2009-03-24»

I gave up picking just one woman in tech who has inspired me over the years. I certainly knew that I couldn’t list them all. Here’s a roughly chronological list, which breaks down at the end when I realise that there could be no end.

I worked a Saturday job as a teenager at an IBM dealership when I was around thirteen. The first professional programmer I’d ever met worked there. She was incredibly smart and calm, and I remember being very impressed that you could actually make a living wage coding, instead of having to hide away in your bedroom hacking up ZX Spectrum platform games until somebody mystically gave you a Jaguar.

To save time, I will now skip a little arbitrarily (hello, Verity Stob!) across a few decades.

Out of my entire generation of Net-inspired London geeks in the Nineties, Pouneh Mortazavi was the only with enough initiative to do what everybody else dreamed of: she upped sticks to San Francisco alone. First she worked at Wired, holding together their databases; thereafter she started the Flaming Lotus Girls. She was always like some George Washington of a self-collected militia, marshalling and deploying technology and resources, cajolling and inspiring.

My ex-wife, Quinn Norton, has a aircraft-carrier full of skills and virtues, but if I had to pick a technological trait I admire most in her, it would be her ability to see its historical context, as well as extropolate it into the far future (and also her Perl coding style, which is the weirdest damn thing I ever did see).

Leslie Harpold simultaneously drove up the standards of web design, usability, and common human decency online. She’s still missed.

Annalee Newitz and I worked at EFF, and shared a career in writing 1000 word pieces on 1000 year topics, before she finally ran off to join the io9 intergalactic circus and exploration unit. She’s the embodiment to me of the one of the sublime joys of technology: jumping into the deep-end with just a laptop and a head filled with implications, and asking smart questions until you know as much as the expert will admit.

Cindy Cohn, legal director, and Shari Steele, executive director, of the EFF: I simply can’t list how much you owe those two people — but free crypto, and a censorship-free US Internet is probably a good start.

Suw Charman-Anderson, the creator of Ada Lovelace Day deserves a place on this list just for that, but she’s takes her place here because of her work binding technology and civil liberties together as the co-founder of the Open Rights Group.

I suspect Valerie Aurora will be on many people’s Ada Lovelace Day lists. A kernel hacker who can write, and whose writing can make me laugh out loud or smack my head in revelation.

Liz Henry wields technology as it should be: a fire to protect what’s right, and a blast of fresh air to winnow out what’s wrong. I’ve never seen any quite so able to pounce on new tech and bring it swiftly to bear on a societal problem, as well as explain its uses to those who might otherwise be bypassed by this revolution.

Becky Hogge was ORG’s second executive director, and another forger of ideas. Astoundingly good at herding other geeks, tech wonks, and MPs into spaces where they could all understand each other.

I get far too much attention for doing one single lousy talk about “life hacking”, whereas Gina Trapani deseves all of the credit for turning a dumb idea into a a brilliant, long-lived work of real usefulness — and for cranking out the code.

On the same note, butshesagirl‘s Getting Things Done application, Tracks, got me through some tough times. I admire anyone whose managed to keep an open source project on course, but I was particularly impressed by bsag’s skills. I watched and I hope learned.

And now no time to talk about the community chops of Cait Hurley, Rachel Chalmers’ piercing analysis, Rebecca Mackinnon’s work at connecting the world, Sara Winge’s genius at O’Reilly, Anno Mitchell’s sardonic Web 2.0 charisma, Strata Chalup’s sysadmin and southbay knowledge, Kass Schmitt sailor and LISPer, Silona Bonewald’s politech savvy, Sumana Harihareswara’s geek-management hybridism, Ana Marie Cox’s snark, Cherie Matrix’s cultural vortex, Elly Millican’s web aesthetic, Wendy Grossman’s sceptical optimism, Desiree Miloshevic’s globe-trotting ICANNoclasm, the piercing tech analysis of Susan Crawford (now working at the Whitehouse!), Sarah Deutsch, Kim Plowright, Paula Le Dieu, Charlie Jane Anders, Violet Berlin, Biella Coleman, Alice Taylor, Sophie Wilson who designed my entire teenage life…

These people make the world my daughter, Ada, lives in. I’m honored she has such shoulders to climb.

This was posted as part of the Ada Lovelace Day project; if you’d like to read more, I enjoyed Liz and butshesagirl‘s entries, spent a long time thinking about this sad and all too typical story, and saved the story of En-hedu-Ana, mapper of the stars, for Ada’s next storytime:

The true woman who possesses exceeding wisdom,

She consults [employs] a tablet of lapis lazuli

She gives advice to all lands…

She measures off the heavens,

She places the measuring-cords on the earth.

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2009-02-21»

So my schedule these days — I have a schedule! Do you know what a change that is in my life? — anyway, my schedule these days generally involves collapsing asleep at 9PM and waking up, actually refreshed, at around 8PM. I have traded away several hours of my life in return for not feeling attached by a very taut piece of elastic to whatever is the closest bed, tugging tugging tugging me back.

I greatly enjoy feeling well-slept, but it does mean that my usual hours of blogging (and doing any other writing or wild-eyed crazy plotting) are now contemptibly small.

Like everyone, I am still working out how to make do with less.

Also like almost everyone, I stayed up very late on New Years Eve 1999/2000. I wasn’t wandering the streets, drunk like a skunk. I was inside Netscape Communication’s server management offices, munching on sushi, and watching techies desperately guarding against the chance that the Y2K bug would take down netscape.com and other important pieces of Internet infrastructure.

A few minutes before the clockover, I realised that all the clocks in the ops center were set to slightly different times (all the better to see which ones failed, I guess), and I would have no real idea of when midnight actually happened. I eventually got hold of an accurate time signal (I think I caled POPCORN, which is the US’s speaking clock). I was the only person in the cubicles who actually knew what the time really was.

In the seconds around midnight, different engineers would shout out to their colleagues that key services were still operational: “Web3 is okay!” “DNS3 is Okay”.

At the exact moment of 00:00AM, 2000 AD, I can reveal that, at Netscape, the primary concern was the fishcam. “Fishcam is … okay!” (Big cheer).

You’ll be pleased to know it’s okay again.

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2009-01-06»

Swear to god, I woke up this morning with the following words on my lips: “I am like unto avenging God!”

Forty-five minutes later the driver of the 14 bus let me and all the other passengers know that my flies were undone.

As part of her leaving announcement, Gina Trapani mentioned that she’d been doing lifehacker.com for four years. Shocked, I double-checked, and yes, Lifehacks.com, the domain I registered minutes after coming up with the talk title, was registered on around midnight on 2003-09-26.

Over five years! That is strange and disturbing to me. Super-super-super ironically, it’s probably been my least productive period yet. I’m okay with that, in the way that you can probably forgive Europe for dropping its GDP a little during that first, tricky, world war. In those five years, the world planed me a new surface or two, mostly against my grain. I have learnt valuable lessons, but have yet to find anything I can actually trade for them.

I’ve never been truly ambitious but I have been historically, shall we say,twitchy. These days I have been growing placid. I am amazed with the magic of making my own dishes of burgers, potatoes and peas, walking in parks, and having clean laundry. I frequently go to bed early. I have a big ole beard. Young people suspect me of harboring inner wisdom, though they do not know it is all about getting infinite lives in Chuckie Egg.

Of course, all of this fondness for zen calm and gentlemanly decay happens just when my local hemisphere decides to pinball between economic collapse, n-dimensional wars, or perhaps just a planetary extinction event. Yeah, I’m all sleepy, and Bruce Sterling, the world’s oldest smart-ass punk, is right there behind my back, setting off the firecrackers.

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2008-12-16»

I’ve moved up in the world, at least geographically. I now live on top of Bernal Heights, rather than skulking at the bottom of it. I am now sitting in a little corner studio that exactly fits my remaining belongings. I am going to stay up this hill for the rest of the recession, hoping that even the fittest of the Darwinian food-rioters won’t have the puff to get up here. This will only work after all the petrol runs out of course: currently they could just drive up and run me over when I go to get coffee, and drive off to feast on my bagel. I need to think this through.

I wish I could say the new place has bought me peace of mind. Actually, I totally could (it’s lovely), but I’m trying to make this post about the scare I gave myself this weekend, and I needed a segue.

So.

It was my own fault. I was reading a thread on Metafilter about the 1983 post-nuclear portrayal “The Day After”. Many people scoffed at the fear shown at this TV movie, directed Nicholas Meyer (later to direct deathless classic Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan). For really scary, they agreed, the British equivalent, 1984’s Threads would be hard to beat.

Now, I didn’t watch Threads at the time, I don’t think because it was banned in my house, but more because I was locked upstairs nailing my brain to a ZX Spectrum. Also I don’t think I needed to be scared any further on the topic of nuclear annihilation at the time: aged 15, I was probably already maxed-out on long semi auto-biographical poems about its grim inevitability. My quota would not have been raised.

Nowadays, I’m a man however, and have put childish things like nuclear winters behind me. I’m all about the global warming now. Also, it’s pretty hard to watch anything the BBC drama department put out in the eighties without giggling a bit at the forced moralising and the peculiar mannerisms (and *cue* radiophonic workshop!). So, in a sort of shared dare with my fifteen-year old self, I kicked up the show on Google Video, and fast-forwarded to what everyone agreed was the really creepiest bits, about ten minutes from the end.

Argh. I had completely forgotten how into your bones all-out nuclear war got. On a conscious level, I was critiquing the postnuclear horrorfest as hard as I could, but damn it mashed all my buttons. I was seeing the scenarios play out under my eyelids every time I tried to get to sleep for the next few days. It was very, very, well done.

Over my many hours spent awake, I started forming a protective defensive sheath of narrative criticism. In terms of the realism of postwar life, my first thought was it played to a theory of a studied helplessness of individuals without a society around to protect them. If they’re just left alone, without the threads that the play uses as its key metaphor, things will just fall apart.

Now, I don’t think that’s true: societies are far better at rebooting themselves than this, even I’d suspect under the enormous stresses of a nuclear winter. The first impression you get from these minutes, is that humanity has just descended into brute-hood completely. They’d either do better than this, or die a lot quicker. (At this point you’re going to go and watch the movie, right? If so, I am in no way responsible for your nightmares, and I certainly don’t want to hear about how hard you laughed at it. Spoilers ahead: a bomb goes off, etc).

But actually, looking closer at those final minutes, far closer than anyone should, there’s also an off-screen implication that there is some kind of postnuclear society. It’s just that the people we are watching, Ruth and her daughter, aren’t part of it. There are hospitals, and law and order, and education: but they are minimal, the resources are closely hoarded, and Ruth and her daughter aren’t part of that society.

That makes more sense, and also fits in with how I remember lots of British serious drama at the time. It concentrated on the horrific lives of the underclass or disenfranchised in some way, lingering over its horror, and then basically screamed at you at the end. Extra marks for implying that your nice middle-class family might end up that way, Tess of the D’Urbervilles style.

I’m not saying that is a bad thing. It’s one of the functions of drama to expose what happens to the worst off. But at least in recognising the trope I, possibly horribly, got a bit less scared by the scenario in this case. You can feel pity for the individual living in a medieval world, but then you can sneak out and imagine some King Henry VIII-type revelling in his single roast two-headed chicken.

Or maybe that increases your horror at the injustice. But, for me (who always tried to guess how long Ingsoc would actually last before collapsing), I’m more optimistic knowing somebody is better off offscreen. I guess, given the horrible choice, I’d rather somebody was left holding the canticles than the whole world be echoing the experience of Ruth’s daughter.

It’s also because I am radioactively burned by all of those dramas that take you down the line of depicting the nether regions of depressing experience. I think concern drama pretty much shot all its wad at us in the 70s and 80s, when lots and lots of horrible scenarios (mostly involving no money, disability, or drug abuse) played out in predictably horrific yet inevitable way.

Because you can’t actually end that particular fictional device with someone coming out of it okay, you end up turning your watchers into more voyeurs than activists, and also narratively reinforcing that everybody below a certain income level (or number of nuclear winters) is always helpless or thick. (Threads has the extra twist, because everyone in it was individually helpless to stop a nuclear war, and the implication is that everyone became even more thick as a result of society collapsing into Ibsen-like horror.)

I do not think this form of artistic agit-prop had the right effect. It lead, I think, to horrible right wing people deciding that topics of concern deserve what they get because they are helpless and thick, and horrible left wing people deciding that these people can be treated like children because they are helpless and thick. I clutch what threads I do of individual libertarianism, because the bits I like don’t actually assume those things, although I do think it is often over-optimistic about how useful local intelligence and ability can be in many situations. Frankly, after gnawing my knuckles over the premises and depiction of Threads twenty-five years later, I can do with all the over-optimism I can get.

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2008-11-30»

I don’t understand why people think children aren’t capable of complex emotions, like regret or nostalgia or aesthetic pleasure or ennui or bittersweet pining. I see kids struggle to describe very subtle emotional states all the time. I loved Peanuts as a child for this reason — Charlie Brown and his friends seemed to be going through much more comprehensible stories than anything else, full of sighing and staring up at the stars in puzzlement. I used to collect all the paperbacks and my parents bought me Peanuts Jubilee when I was seven, a fairly serious memoir by Schulz which I devoured. I remember after reading one strip, asking my mum what “sarcastic” meant, and never quite being the same thereafter. I probably learned to read via Charlie Brown. It definitely taught me to absorb some of middle-America’s culture, maybe even before I’d fully absorbed my own. I have a miniature print of Linus and Snoopy bought from my friend Cait that’s sat in every homesick home I’ve lived in America.

They say that a recent Schulz biography has made him out to be a bitter, hard-to-love man. It seems unlikely, except in the way that quiet, unemotional men are sometimes be misunderstood and misplaced by their families. After the book was published, his children and wives came to his defence, rather undermining the biographers’ claim.

This quote from an interview with him (taken from the links of a lively metafilter posting) more closely represents the gentle but implacable humanism I got from his work:

“There was one strip where Charlie Brown and Franklin had been playing on the beach, and Franklin said, “Well, it’s been nice being with you, come on over to my house some time.” Again, they didn’t like that. Another editor protested once when Franklin was sitting in the same row of school desks with Peppermint Patty, and said, “We have enough trouble here in the South without you showing the kids together in school.” But I never paid any attention to those things, and I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin—he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, “Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?” So that’s the way that ended.”

There’s some fair commentary about how Schulz didn’t seem to know what to do with Franklin much of the time, and his later role as the comic page’s Token Black, but but his compact introduction to the strip — swimming at a beach with Charlie Brown, the mention of his father was in Vietnam (Charles says “My dad’s a barber. He was in a war too, but I don’t know which one.”), has a pretty light touch, given that this was published on July 31st, 1968, just a few weeks after King and Kennedy’s assassinations, and at the height of Peanuts’ popularity.

Edge of the West tells the rest of the story. I’m glad I had Peanuts to teach me how to live with disappointment and failure, as well as, more subtle, teach me of how the world was, all too slowly, improving.

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2008-11-25»

So I now have some clues as to why I suddenly stopped blogging twenty days ago. Looking over the black box recording, I note it coincides with me engaging in a rash of travel, and also obtaining a prescription for sleep medication for the first time in my life.

That makes sense. When I go on a longhaul plane for a speaking engagement, I go out into deep-space coma until I return. It’s the whole being ferried around by machines, and deposited into womb-like hotels thing. Add to that my discovery of a pharmaceutical that magically medically increases the amount of blood in my caffeinestream, and you’re going to lose me to forty-years worth of sleep catch-up and shoddy hotel connectivity.

Plus I swear to God, everyone I knew spent a few weeks wandering around in a post-election haze. Last week, I spoke at the University of Maryland (which was awesome, but I am an all-comers speaker: if you are at a US college, force your school at gunpoint to book me here: all the money goes to EFF). Honestly out of nowhere people would end any normally pessimistic discussion with this dreamy-eyed “but now, with this spirit of reconciliation in the air”, and stuff like that. Even the NASA guys at the hotel were cheery. Of course, that’s all in the beltway, but there’s languour elsewhere: Republicans are punch drunk and lolling, and the news media is sort of just lying there on the tarmac, having collapse in a heap and lazily eyeballing Obama nominations from one half-closed eye.

Things finally picked up this week, just in time to slam into Thanksgiving, which, to translate for British readers, is really the American Christmas (the real Christmas being more like a Bank Holiday with religious pretensions). You know what I think they should do to boost the economy here? Hold another couple of elections. People would be buying new cars just to have somewhere to put the bumperstickers.

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