Oblomovka

2007-09-22»

I’ve started dreaming again. I don’t mean this metaphorically — for the last few years, I’ve dreamt very very rarely and could not remember anything of the dreams when I did.

A few nights ago, I had a wonderful dream, integrating lots of metaphorical images of San Francisco, full of dioramas and mise en scenes, a giant commune-theme-park in the mountains, full of the nicer kinds of aging in drag and with guns, where I wandered with Liz and Ada, and got into miscellaneous (and continuous) adventures. It went on for hours, and I woke up open-mouthed.

I don’t know what it means, or whether it will continue. It may just mean that I had more grilled cheese on toast than I should have done (I have something stomachy and unpalatably unbloggable going on, which involves me inventing a low residue diet while it resolves, so plenty of cheese and bread for me).

But I’ve also noticed my writing capacity eking up. Also, I realised earlier this year that I’ve answered my two big questions for the last decade, at least to my satisfaction. They were, nostalgia-fans: “How deep a culture is geek culture?”, and:”How many people do you need to be famous for?”.

The second wasn’t really my question, it was Stew’s (at least, it was his response to NTK‘s micro-pico-celebrity that prompted it), and so it’s fitting that he answered it. In a piece about being unable to evade druck heckling English rugby fans, even in New Zealand, he noted:

In the mid-90’s I was on television, and was of the mistaken belief that this represented a logical end-point in comedy. Returning to stand-up recently after four years off, the actual numbers game seems much simpler. I need about 7000 fans. If each of them gave me about £5 a year after tax, agent’s commission and travel expenses, I would be making a fine living, and probably never having to deal with sports fans coming to my shows. There is no need for that 7000 strong audience to include English rugby fans. If I can find some way of operating at such a level whereby they never find me, I could have the most wonderful life.

(Stew will probably now be picketed by thousands of fundamentalist rugby fans, furious at his blasphemous comments.)

So, there you go, the answer is: 7000 people. It sounds about right.

The first question was “how deep a culture is geek culture?”, and I have always had terrible problems explaining it, or how I would know when I had found an answer. The nugget explanation I gave was that I wanted to know whether geekdom was intergenerational: was it like the beatniks, or the mods, likely to be buried in aspic within a decade of its beginning. Or did it have more life than that: like Quakers at one end, or Goths at the other; able to leap generationally, and grow a depth beyond the years of its earliest creators?

I declare that I have discovered the answer to this now, but I’m not sure I can show it to you. It’s a small pamphlet by Len Anderson, a poet from Santa Cruz. It’s a wonderful, 15-page parody of Howl, giving the history of the personal computer.

1.0

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by MS-DOS in T-shirt & sneakers eating microwave popcorn,

dragging themselves through endless dungeon arcades at dawn looking for an angry joystick

longhaired hackers burning for the serial port connection to the silicon dynamo that powers the machinery of thought &mdash

3.0

Bill Gates! I’m with you in Redmond
where you’re the richest man in the country, engaged to be married, building a new home that includes a nursery and you are madder than I am

Steve Jobs! I’m with you in Silicon Valley
where you still dream the next dream and have a wife, a home, kids, a dog and like it and still are madder than I am

Steve Wozniak! I’m with you in Los Gatos
where now you’re retired and built a cave playhouse for your children and you must feel very strange! and I think we’re both about equally mad

It’s beautiful and funny and to me, who so often can only mediate my emotional reactions through accurate parodies, quite moving.

It was also, as you might be able to tell from the second extract, written over a decade ago, in 1993. It doesn’t feel like history, though. It doesn’t even feel that much like nostalgia. The litany it reels off (before Gates and after), would wring a response from a whole class of geeks aged from fifteen to their fifties. It feels like a plumb-line on the sort of depth I was looking for.

Deep enough, then. Deep sleep with enough deep dreams.

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2007-09-17»

[I refuse to admit that I am restarting this blog until further evidence is provided. But, anyway, it occurred to me that almost everyone who still has this in their RSS feed is probably the CEO of some Web 2.0 startup by now, so let me plug my sainted employer’s latest wheeze for you:]

Save the Date: October 10 for EFF’s Compliance Bootcamp .

Does your interactive company have to contend with the maze of laws dealing with user privacy and publishing user content? Want to do the right thing by the online community that gives your business value, and still fulfill your legal obligations?

EFF is hosting a one-day session for Web 2.0 workers who handle issues arising from users and user-generated content. From DMCA to CDA to ECPA, the law surrounding internet content can be confusing, especially for the folks who have to decide on the fly whether to let something stay up or take it down, or whether to give their customer’s name to the FBI agent on the phone. Let us help.

What

One-Day bootcamp. EFF’s staff attorneys will be teamed with private attorneys specializing in the various legal issues. We’ll give you the basics on the key topics and you’ll leave better able to protect your customers, your company and your job.

Topic areas

• Defamation, harassment, and other accusations of bad behavior.
• Fair use, free culture, and the right to remix.
• Copyright take-downs and put-backs: Understanding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
• How to respond to cops, crooks, and courts who want your customers’ communications and other private information.
• How to avoid becoming the next Napster and stay on the safe side of the Copyright Wars.
• The rights of anonymous speakers.
• Porn, predators, and the pressure to police.
• Lightning rounds on Creative Commons licenses, webcasting and what to do when you’ve been hacked.

Who should attend

People who do front-line or mid-level work for companies and projects that rely on user-generated content and communications. This includes compliance, customer service and community management workers.

Why

In the past year or so we’ve met with several Web 2.0 companies, sometimes before — and sometimes after — embarassing incidents when they found themselves out of step with their communities or the law. We’d like to give the people who make these important initial decisions the tools they need to do the right thing by their companies and their customers.

Where

Fenwick and West Silicon Valley Center
Mountain View, California

How much

Sliding scale of $100-200 per person. For individuals, some portion may be deductible as a charitable donation. Space is limited, so sign up soon. Email bootcamp@eff.org.

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2007-08-16»

I love the secularism of America’s holidays: Thanksgiving, Labor Day, Festivus. It seems funny to me that the only one commemorating a Christian martyr, Martin Luther King Day, is the one most grudgingly celebrated by the religious areas of the country.

But I like Independence Day the most. I get to make a joke that all Americans smile at. “Good riddance day!” I say in my toy British accent. Ahaha. Americans like to win, and the British like the purifying sting of a sustainable loss. I have my own ritual of sitting through “1776: The Musical” and singing tunelessly along to all the songs. (I have a friend who really is a Lee of Old Virginia, and sings that song more enthusiastically than the Lee in the film).

Last July 4th was the best. All in all, I’ve had a horrid two years, and July 4th was the best day in a long, long time. Ada and I went down to the beach. On the way I explained about how some countries had birthdays and that this was hers. When we got to North Beach, she screamed with joy to find the beach so close to her home, and ran into the waves, soaking herself and laughing like a sea-spirit. We wieved through the holiday crowds, still ten times thinner than Britain’s beach packs, past a brilliant Eighties cover band that made her stop in amazement and then dance until she ached, onto a shop where I converted an outsized tanktop into a warm jacket for her, to pizza, to carrying her across darkening San Francisco, asleep and happy.

I also thought a little about independence. I’ve seen endless technology booms now: the Eight-Bit Ascendancy of the seventies (I was a kid, but used to play games where Apple battled Atari), the British Cambrian Explosion of 1981-1986, the Windows Anchsluss of 1990, the False Boom of 1995, the Even Falser Boom of 1997-2001, and, lately, the Ajax Restoration of 2005.

If you want to make no money at all but find the interesting ideas, I’ve found the trick in these booms is to tack against the primary trends. If everyone is talking about portals, seek out single-function websites, if Windows is imposing a monopoly, look for where everyone who likes multiple OSes is hanging out. These ideas won’t necessarily form the components of the next boom, but you’ll be able to import the best ideas in these spaces cheap. And when you say them to others, you’ll seem a very clever controversialist with outrageous yet fruitful ideas. You can trust me on that, I’m a columnist.

Anyway, a trend you couldn’t help but notice in this latest overexcitement is migration of data from the edge to centralised servers. Email moves to webmail, documents move to Google documents, private data moves to Mylinkedfacefriendbook-or-not?, Amazon S3, Flickr – even Blogger.

I’m curious as to what happens when one tries to buck this trend. There are clearly some functions that really should live on centralised servers: I’m not sure I can imagine how you can do web-wide search without camping out in the Googleplex or equivalent (Wikia notwithstanding). But there really isn’t any need for Google Documents to live on Google servers. The two functions that Google Documents provides over desktop applications – shareability and remote access aren’t aspects of Google’s mega-servers. They’re just workarounds for the lack of distributed ID and unfindability of edge nodes. With alternate workarounds that otherwise allow your friends to log onto your home PC to edit documents, and find your home PC in the first place, you could easily host your docs, run your webmail, hold up your end of the social network, store and share files, display your photographs, and run your website, from your home.

If that sounds terrifically inconvenient next to letting Google and Yahoo run the shebang, remember that the move from ghastly inconvenience to one click bliss is always just somebody’s smart UI innovation away. There’s nothing about Google Docs that requires shitloads of servers, except the fact that Google is singlehandedly having to deal with shitloads of users. Lovely though Flickr is, somebody, somewhere could follow its rearlights, and knock up an open source clone that runs on your own machine in the fraction of the time it took for them to polish their UI. Maintaining your own server, handling security updates, fiddling with the optimum settings, are all high hurdles now, but they don’t need to be. Running a Unix desktop used to be a nightmare until MacOS and Ubuntu came along.

There’s also a pressing civil liberty reason to start leaning back towards holding your data close to your chest. Data held by a third-party in the United States just isn’t safe. Terms and conditions deny you any recourse for leaked or lost data; courts and Congress both deny citizens the protections of the Fourth Amendment for *any* data that you share with others. That even means data you expect to keep private, or have no way of keeping to yourself (the key case here is United States v. Miller, where the court decided that you have no expectation of privacy in your bank records, because you *shared them with your bank*!)

So here’s the question: how much of our life that we share with the Web 2.0 giants do we really *need* to share? How much of these services can and should we be running from the comfort of our own homes?

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2007-02-18»

Just as it’s polite for host and guest to wear the same style of clothes, I feel that it’s right to be late to a wake; Quinn and I turned up nearly five hours late to Robert Anton Wilson’s memorial service. We missed RAW’s trip out to the beach and beyond. “Don’t they do that at the end?”, said another latecomer, confounded by Wilson’s disregard for chronology to the very end. (Or at least, three hours beforehand.)

But it was a fine event, with a string of wellwishers climbing up the steps of a stage showing clips and pictures of the man, reading their surreal, syncronicitous, or personal note, and then stepping back to join the waiting crowd.

Quinn and I agreed that our favourite moment was at the end. We were all mulling together to raise a tune to Bob’s last written words, “Keep the Lasagna Flying”, by singing a simple modification of Old Langs Syne, “For the Sake of Old Lasagna.” By this point, many of the members of the congregation had wandered from their seats to stare out at the crashing Pacific beside us, perhaps to mull a little about what they’d seen and heard. The singer asked if someone could get their attention and bring them back to the room. Instantly, an old guy went tearing off toward the wandering sheep, shouting “FIRE! FIRE! THERE’S A FIRE INSIDE!”

Everyone returned, quick time.

My photograph is of Wilson’s miraculously empty box. Schrodinger, Houdini and the Trickster Jesus would all have been proud. Dead or alive? Worse – he’s not even there anymore!

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2007-01-16»

So, Robert Anton Wilson died again. I snuck, I hope, an obituary masquerading as a tech column into this week’s Irish Times, documenting RAW’s influence (and, collaterally, drug culture) on tech culture. It should be out on Friday. Jesse Walker did a far broader and finer job on RAW in Reason. His excellent anecdote about Illuminatus!’s banned status in Soviet Leipzig reminds me of a story that typifies the chaos Wilson injected into my own life.

At university, we had one of Britain’s copyright libraries, which meant in theory that they had claim to one copy of every book and periodical published in the United Kingdom. I blew a lot of time trying to probe the library with requests to see what obscure volumes I could pull out from the stacks. One day, I looked up Sex and Drugs by Robert Anton Wilson.

I went up to the nice librarian with my chit to call up the book. She looked at the slip I’d written out, and took me to one side. “You’ve called up one of our restricted set,” she said. “You’ll need your tutor’s permission to read that, and only in a special room we set aside for that purpose.” I said it didn’t matter, and left the desk.

I looked at the piece of paper I’d given her. The shelf mark that I’d scribbled down from the catalogue began with the greek letter ϕ (Phi) and a series of numerals.

The library had recently installed an electronic catalogue, accessible from terminals in the library. I walked over, called up the shelfmark search, and typed “Phi”. There, listed and catalogued, were all the Damned Things anyone might want you not to know about, carefully gathered and presented.

The trick still works, although you have to use the telnet interface to the Bodleian’s OLIS system, and dig down to the extended search screen. I see that the damned now includes books by Norman Lindsay, Elton John, Madonna, the Consumer Association’s 1963 Which? review of contraceptives, Aleister Crowley, Monty Python, Fiesta’s Reader’s Wives special, W.H. Auden’s The Platonic Blow, Razzle, Davey “Wavey” Winder, Henry Miller, Wilhelm Reich, William Burroughs, Sacher-Masoch and Charles Platt.

I find it reassuring that I’ve met four of Oxford’s banned authors since I left. When I met Robert Anton Wilson, I asked him if Father Christmas existed. He told me and I’ll keep that secret until I join him in the grave. See you after the circus, RAW.

Comments Off on another fine mess

2007-01-05»

Rose snagged me.

1. I got engaged to be married when I was sixteen. Aw, sweet. Her mother was ex-colonial from the isolated heights of the Seventies South American Anglo upper-class, suffering the culture shock that British ex-pats get when they return from abroad and instead of Olde Englande, find 1980s Essex. Her mother used to chaperone us to the movies (I watched Ghostbusters for the first time with her sitting between us), and she spent her remaining money on antiques which she grew to love too much to sell. My girlfriend was desperate to escape, I was very in love, and the nature of her family’s cultural timewarp required that we get engaged and married in secret to do just that. In the end, she ran off with a muslim chap she met on the tube.

   Hi, Alison!

2. I was born in Basildon. It was a home birth, in a self-build house, in a new town. my family didn’t make the house ourselves, but we bought it from someone who had. An electrician, he engineered many many electrical outlets in every room, which I now remember every time I have to string extensions across corridors. It was a fluke of my introverted nerdly childhood that I grew an accent that was more BBC presenter than Basildon cockney. I got bullied over that a lot.

3. I have one of those birth marks that if it were anywhere visible you’d stare at me when you thought I wasn’t looking. Fortunately for me, it covers most of my right shoulder blade instead. I can’t see it unless I really strain around, and I generally forget about it until either I go swimming, or a new love says, politely, “What the hell is that?” It totally ruins the odds of me being James Bond, but marginally increases my chances of being a Evil Master Criminal.

4. I write “please” on my checks. As in “Pay Foo Bar twenty-two dollars only please”. I figure it helps them to clear.

5. I have publically kissed both Pauline Calf and Al “the pub landlord” Murray on the mouth.

I nominate Stef, Begbie, Justin, Seth, and Rachel.

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2006-12-12»

I’m in complete denial. I’d like to think that if Leslie were here, she would be the same.

Kass says that in this situation Leslie would make herself useful, and make us all feel amateurs, in the nicest possible way, which is true.

The last time I saw Leslie, she was mad at me, but hiding it. We were up impossibly early because I had an appointment to make, and I’d asked Leslie to give me a lift and she’d said yes because she always says yes and then it was hideous o’clock in the morning and she’d been working along all night in the dark on her monitor doing some godawful freelance work, and I was staying on her couch, and she gave me a lift in her awful, medical-lawsuit-required beaten-up car which she couldn’t get rid of because the fucking medical establishment would have gone “look, you see, you’re doing okay, therefore we shouldn’t give you a penny for throwing you into a coma”. And we drove around looking for the Caltrain, and there was a look of such grim determination on Leslie’s face to forgive me for putting her through this, to get through the pain, and to *do a good job*.

And what such good advice came out, concentrated, from that! Leslie gave me and everyone tips about fonts, love affairs, music, etiquette. She ran the drunken sub-committee that decided my daughter’s name one night. She told me what to do in New York; she showed me, by example, how to bear San Francisco.

Leslie didn’t talk much about the terrible shit that kept. on. happening. to her. I got the sense that this was because she didn’t want anyone else hurt, even by merely the retelling of it: the death of her husband, loss of her domain, her apartment burning down. You could piece it all together, if you of were determined. She didn’t hide anything, but she didn’t want to tell that kind of story. She wanted to tell stories of optimism and beauty, and they would have to wait. In the meantime, forgiveness, grim determination, getting through, doing a good job. Marking time, until the good times came, and then seizing on them like a joyous animal hid there in the dark.

Mark has the best first last word. Leslie still has the best pictures, and the right answer.

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2006-12-01»

So I’ve made an important life decision to spend more time with Python. I think this may be a sign of middle age. I’m of the opinion that there comes a time in one’s life when one should settle down with one language, and slowly encrust into COBOLic fuddy-duddyism in preparation for barking at youngsters about Lisp, and my time has come. I’ll still flirt with Ruby, and Perl, and Smalltalk, but I’ll try and actually get good at Python. Also, EFF is, if you really tied it the ground and submitted it to extraordinary rendition until until it admitted a preference, a Python shop at heart (with scads of PHP littering the floor).

The one painful goodbye from the fun I’ve been having with Ruby was the lovely gems package system, which, as so much of Ruby, was like Perl’s CPAN in rehab. But I’ve just discovered that Python’s setuputils utility includes an easy_install program that does much the same as gems: seeks out packages by name, downloads them from the ether, seeks out dependencies and downloads them too, and then drops it all sensibly in your site-packages.

Easy Install and setuptools were going to be included in the latest Python 2.5, but for good reasons the author decided to withdraw them. It sounds like the infrastructure is being slowly put in place though. I’m looking forward to finding out what else the Pythonistas have been doing in the past year or so.

And now I’m going to look at Eclipse. Christ, what’s happening to me?

Comments Off on things which should get more publicity but don’t – easy_install, python’s package system

2006-11-23»

“The secret of success is sincerity. Fake that, and you’ve got it made.”
– Bob Monkhouse

I remember hearing Monkhouse say this as a child, and even then it stuck with me as painfully self-referential joke. At the time, Bob Monkhouse’s performing career was stuck in the wilderness: not because he wasn’t quick, or funny, or prolific, but because he came across as appalling insincere. The secret of Bob Monkhouse’s failure right then was he was trying hard to be sincere, and looking more and more false the more he attempted it. Not because he wasn’t underneath it all, truly sincere – but because in England insincerity is best described as the presence of any sincerity at all.

A friend of mine came to America from Britain before I did. He stayed for a year in Houston, Texas in the Nineties. During Thanksgiving at a local’s house, he had to bear each of the assembled take a turn very sincerely expressing, in monologue form, what they had to give thanks for this year. They spoke of their health, their family, their neighbours, their friends. When it finally came to him to make his homily – and this, mind you, is one of the nicest politest people I know – he could only say “I’d like to give thanks that I’m finally getting out of Texas next month.”

Sincerity is physically painful to the British. Delivering a sincere statement in front of them is like spraying a mouthful of holy water in the face of a vampire. Americans, by contrast, use sincerity as a subtle rhetorical weapon. It was my wife who first demonstrated this to me, delivering an explanation of its place in American society with such doe-eyed earnestness that by the end I was screaming for mercy. She pointed out the little sincerity competitions Californians play; the subtle social markers open goodwill plays in the mid-west. How in Washington politics, there were five hundred flavours of faked sincerity, which, like eskimo words for snow, my English mind could only perceive as one gormless act of yokelism.

I’ve been here nearly seven years. I’m at Ascension Island in terms of my nationality. I’ve learnt some sincerity: used it to patch up the social graces that the English universal social solvent, making dumb jokes, don’t fill here.

While I’ve been gone, Britain has been turning slowly and ineradicably alien; it’s wandered plate-techtonically from where it was when I lived there. The vein of new-agism that was just beginning to pulse when I left has got more of a hold. The buses seem cleaner. Europe isn’t as scary. Sneering at underclasses is more socially acceptable. And people are noticeably more capable and willing to be sincere at me, even when not drunk.

But I’m not there yet, and I’m not here yet. It’s hard for me to sincerely say thanks, even though on this best of American holidays, I want to express some sort of gratitude for my genius wife, and my mischevious daughter, and my extended family, and my friends, and my co-workers: Suw and the hard-working people at ORG, and San Francisco, and the mailing lists, and my cat and my computer and music and all the absent friends.

So let me slip it in as a hypothetical at the end of this entry, and just take it as read that I did, okay?

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2006-11-15»

Some of you may have been wondering where I’ve been the last few months. Others, idly mulling on why you haven’t seen me much on the Internets for the last year or so. And a few of you might be repeatedly IMing me saying “Where are you? What’s happened to NTK? Did you sell the gossip-packaged-in-horrific-web-design-and-courier meme to Nick Denton or something?”

One and all, thank you for your interest.

A core group of you – we’ll call them Team O’Brien, and give them a special hypothetical bandanna to wear – have known that I’ve been, as the English say, poorly recently. It’s true I’ve been sick, and they have been lovely throughout the last few months, and I have gratefully appreciated sucking their charitable instincts dry.

Everyone else – WHERE WERE YOU? Did you not see the signs? I thought we were friendsters! You were in my third-degree linked-in list, dammit! You clicked the “I care about him/her” checkbutton! Yet you never wrote, you never called.

Oh wait, you did, and I kept not answering or going “Mmmm kind of busy, let’s talk soon.” Almost as though I had a script that wrote that to you. Or was having an in-service-of-denial attack.

Nevertheless. I’m back now to tell you a thing or two. One is that while it’s not all better yet, doctors are now smacking their fists in frustration at not being able to prod me any further: a good sign. I am feeling much better, and I hope to become a threat to myself and others again shortly.

I am also having some fun raising my head above the parapet and discovering how much everything has changed in the last year or so. Apparently the dream of “hacking life” itself has become an industry (rather than the hubristic act against nature I originally believed it to be). Indeed, it transpires that almost any batshit idea anyone devised between 2000-2003 is now an industry. People who when last I saw them were living in cupboards and eating the stuff found in their keyboards are now millionaires. Okay, maybe just Linden Dollar millionaires, but still. Geeks who feared to go out lest anyone talk to them have now turned their social software upon themselves, and are now obliged to go to three or four “camps” a week merely to test the scalibility of the calendaring features. Truly, everything is new again, again. Again.

Well, almost. Some things have not changed. Debian is nearly finished, Firefox is still being rewritten. Perl people are nutty, Python people sensible, Ruby are still sensible within their domain, nutty outside it.

And I’m still burying the lede. The point is that last night I marked as unread 7000 incoming emails in my inbox, and sent them into oblivion. Your mail was absolutely right, and I’ve taken everything you said on board. I can’t make it to your thing. But I do love you. Write back, but not soon. I’m okay. I missed you.

Comments Off on declarations of absence, illness, bankruptcy and love