My memory of the election: milling around the aisle of the Houston-San Jose flight, waiting to step off into the dark. After all that time in the air, the captain announces: “Bush is winning”. General mutter of groans from the strangers around me. And distantly, from first class, a little patter of cheers.
I’ve been spending the last few days in Florida, which is currently battened down under Hurricane Crucial Swing State. It’s hard to convey quite what it is like here. Campaign ads appear more often than Proctor & Gamble ads on the radio. Everyone’s house has a fistful of spoo-oo-ooky negative campaign leaflets that come through every door, every day. Friends start phone call with pitch-perfect imitations of the automated phone solitations: “Hello, Danny, I’m calling you about your voting intentions this Tuesday”. My friend’s answerphone is filled at the end of the day with messages from Al Gore, George Bush, Theresa Heinz, Barbara Bush…
That’s the local colour I was expecting; it’s what all the news reports will start their slice-of-life “portraits of a state under sieges” pieces with. What I wasn’t expecting was the oddity of being in a real 50/50 state.
I played around with Fundrace.org before I came out here, and was a bit surprised by how incredibly Democratic my neighbourhood back home in Californai was. As in, Kucinich/Dean democrat. I suppose that just checking the election results would have told me what a hotbed of communist sympathisers downtown is. Nonetheless, you do rather assume some diversity in your neighbours; that your idiot neighbour three blocks down must be of an opposing political opinion to you, even if he’s too cowardly to say so with a garden sign. With a bloody car like that, he’s got to be on the other side, right? Nope. Maybe he’s a Liebermann fan or something.
Here, you see Bush and Gore bumper stickers sit uncomfortably close to each other in carlots; neighbourhoods front yards flicker between the two. Churches are quietly split; political conversations sway nervously from left foot to right foot, as everyone tries to keep balance.
I haven’t learnt anything about what will happen here. Standing in the interzone doesn’t mean you know the shape of the edges of the territory. There’s a part of me that, electoral college or not, thinks it’s good to have some kind of hothouse, some kind of ground zero, somewhere in the process. It feels viscerally close here.
Not that anyone in this country needs to move to Florida to feel that. I’ve felt sick with a dread of this election since the beginnings of the Iraq war. The whole country has been pulling at its collar and chomping down antacid for weeks.
And for good or for bad, I’m going to float up and away from it all. I’m catching the flight at 3PM Florida time (-0500) tomorrow, and landing in California by nine Pacific Time (-0800). If it’s going to be decided tomorrow at all, I’m thinking it be decided between those two times. I’ll be in radio silence. No drinking games, no state by state plays, no screaming at CNN, no cellphone trees.
I shall watch 1776, read “Alternate Presidents”, and look out the window on the breadth of America, right coast to left coast, until we all land, hopefully in one piece.
Have a good trip.
The important thing about being in a self-contained bubble (or circle jerk) of people who are otherwise unrepresentative of the world of the whole, is knowing that you’re in a bubble, and trying to find out the approximate shape of that bubble. Everybody is in a bubble of some sort, and I often think the ones who are the most sneering about other people’s parochialism demonstrate the most ignorance, by assuming they speak for everyone.
And I think I speak for everyone when I say that.
What prompted this was a look through some of my old notes on things to blog. They’re so old as to be mostly incomprehensible, but the ones that do still ring true look to have some permanent worth to them. One of them was my first note about this:
JWZ has pretty much ascertained that almost everybody can now cope with HTML mail. I always use HTML mail as my own personal reminder of how small a bubble I live within. Almost every mail I get that I read is text-only. HTML mail for me is a freakish exception. That’s the exact opposite of the majority experience. Mail for all intents and purposes these days is HTML.
I worry a little that my Bayesian spam filters are slowly coming to the conclusion that I must never ever be allowed to see HTML mail – even if it’s from my sister and the message is “Would you like some of this 80 million pounds I just won in the Lottery?”. Actually, that does sounds like spam. Bad example.)
Note that this has nothing to do with whether mail should be in HTML. If you think it shouldn’t, you’re probably part of my bubble, which is large — certainly so large that I can’t see its end horizon, although I know that it’s not very large compared to the rest of the online world, and tiny and irrelevant compared to the global population.
The Wired News piece on Marshall Beddoe’s work with bioinformatic algorithms to crack protocol reverse-engineering has had some good results, in the sense that it’s shedding a bit more light on possible crossovers between bioinf and Net applications. (I’ve written about this sort of genetic cyborg weird-ass mutie crossrbreeding before, for New Scientist).
In the discussion I had with Marshall about his next steps, he commented that a lot of his future work had less to do with number-crunching, and more to do with visualisation. One bioinfodesign innovation that got pointed out to him as a result of the article was sequence logos.
Sequence logos are graphics used in bioinformatics to visually highlight commonalities between multiple sequences. The rows shows how often letters in a gene sequence occur at each position (the GATCs – the taller the letter, the more often the nucleotide appears) together with a measure of how much commonality is preserved over all the sequences (the curve).
If you’re trying to spot patterns in long data sequences, some adaptation of this might be useful to you too. I’m really interested in seeing what Marshall comes up with next.
So what am I doing at the moment? you ask, gripping the edge of your seat.
Well, for those of you who remember as far back as my first application for permanent residence, I’m now at the point where I can write for U.S. companies, which I’m doing with my closest personal approximation to abandon. I’m writing a little bit of stuff for the O’Reilly people, and I’ve just filed a story for Wired News. I’m feeling my way a little here, working out what stories work best for each publication, trying to not mix up everybody’s house styles. Or fuck up. Very important not to fuck up.
What I’m trying for is a bit more of a spectrum between my usual Proper Media work (where I carefully and as non-scarily as possible explain the edge of technological culture to new audiences. Or at least, that’s the idea.) and the free-wheeling, private-jokey, LOOK AT ME I’M SLAMMING MY FACE AGAINST THE WALL OF IGNORANCE. LOOK! I DID IT AGAIN! words that we make NTK out of.
Weirdly, the best medium for that middle-ground so far has been Linux User and Developer, the magazine that went bust, and now lives again. I continue to write their back page. The deceased previous company owes me money, but the new lot seem to be paying up okay. It’s one of my favourite jobs right now.
In other anti-news, no, I still haven’t updated the Life Hacks site. Maybe the next deadline will jerk me into activity – Merlin “43 Folders” Mann and I will be speaking at the MacOS X conference on Thursday October 28th, 2004. This session will primarily consist of Merlin leaping around high-kicking Macs on stage and typing in QuickSilver command sequences with his knees, while I stand behind him describing the geeky sociological and API basis of these tricks in a steady reassuring monotone. It’ll be like the KLF meets Anthony Robbins.
I quit a bunch of UK net.politics. I was thinking about doing this last year when partner-in-crime Stef Magdalinski took nine months off from the same projects. He came back looking so refreshed that instantly I regretted not taking the time myself. Apart from anything else, it had got to the point where I’d say yes to anything, whether I had the time or ability to do it or not. And standing around saying “ooh I’d love to help but…” doesn’t help anyone. So I helped myself to the unsubscribe notice.
TheyWorkForYou seems to have survived perfectly well without someone to write overly jocular body text for them. If you want to see the internal workings of how something like this gets done, they’ve just opened up their original dev wiki. (login: theyworkforyou, password: novemb3r ).
If I was still involved, my job would have have been to make impassioned speeches about why we didn’t really need to password-protect the wiki to fight off spammers, thus winning a decision which would bite us all on the arse six months down the line.
Oh, and if you want to have a go at a project like this, but worry that you’re not glitteringly professional enough, check out Stef and Tom’s first sketches.
The fame piece got a big reaction, and has been looking increasingly fascinating topic for me. Like Life Hacks, I’ve got this strong sense that this is rich new topic that may be too big for me to explore on my own. I’m doing my best.
At the moment I’m just trying to listen to people as much as I can. There was all kinds of layers of irony when I tried to do this at Foo Camp this year. The year before, having a slot there to talk about life hacks (which was then called “Secret Software”) worked very well, as nobody knew what the hell it was about. So only a handful of people turned up, and we quickly brainstormed a lot of ideas. This year, the fame talk gathered a big crowd, which meant I had to quickly scale up the presentation. That worked well in some respects, not in others.
One of the problems was that I really want to talk to people about their experiences being micro-famous. But it’s a bit like talking about your salary – one-on-one it’s fine, but in a big audience, you risk sounding like you’re boasting or archly disingenuous.
What I really need is something concrete to hook the whole question on. With Life Hacks, that was sending a questionnaire about, but I suspect the Fame question needs something a little harder. I’ve thought about doing some stat analysis of how many names appear in, say, the New York Times over time. That doesn’t seem quite right yet, but may point in some good directions.
So a lot of people (including myself, late at night, staring at my ceiling) ask me – when are you going to finish off the Life Hacks site? After all, most of them don’t say, isn’t it a bit ironic that the guy who lectured people about how to be organised can’t even get around to putting up his notes?
My line here is what I’ve always said: Life Hacks was about the techniques of super-organised geeks, by someone who is spectacularly not one of them. But, you know, that’s not as helpful as a bunch of Perl scripts to tidy your bedroom, is it? So it’s really nice to be now point people to Merlin Mann’s new site, 43 Folders, which is clearly written by somebody is one of those geeks, and is really accomplished at describing and illustrating how he drives his life. It’s a bit of a relief to discover that it runs along the same lines as the Life Hacks talk indicated – text files, little scripts, Getting Things Done, index cards, all that jazz. And a bit humbling too, given that he’s uncovering stuff I never found out, even when I tortured people with hot tongs to find out their secrets.
So, hopefully I’ll be able to copy and paste enough cool tricks to get the fuller notes to Lifehacks up soon. In my continuing chasing of my own tail, I’ve now developed an unhealthy interest in the other side of the geek organisation equation: What motivates geeks? And given that, how can you trick yourself into doing stuff that you’d otherwise run screaming from, like paying bills on time and going to bed at a sane hour?
(Looks at clock.)
A-ha.
[ Ada and I come in from a walk. ]
Q: What’s that?
Me: It’s a horse chestnut. There’s a chestnut tree in the park. We could play conkers!
Q: [ Narrowing eyes ] Is this more of your weird monkey language?
Me: In the Autumn, you take one of these horse chestnuts, drill a hole in it, put a piece of string through the hole, and play conkers. You flick the chestnut at the other persons’ chestnut. The chestnut that doesn’t break into pieces wins, and goes on to battle other chestnuts. Conkers! You want to play conkers, Ada?
Q: So, here’s the thing, Danny. We have Nintendo here. Nintendo and automatic weapons.
When they launched with that funky Flash chat thing, I admit I didn’t really get Flickr. I instinctively kept my big fat ignorant gob shut, though, because they were obviously fixing things and adding other, cleverer things almost every day. In other words, they were doing a beta like a beta oughta be.
I’ve stumbled back to them in the last couple of weeks, initially because I got really into browsing their tag system. I now have an RSS feed of cute in my Bloglines feed, which has been a non-stop kawaii mix of puppies, babies and hamsters). Then I got dragged into using their picture uploading bookmarklet, which rocked. And now I’ve just found their flickr-<blog interface, which is similarly goodly.
I’m still a bit edgy about handing over all my photos to someone else’s server, but as far as being a scheme to easily make the photos I want public, it’s shaping up really well.
From this week’s Popbitch
Tatu are no more but their infamous svengali Ivan Shapovalov hasn’t abandoned his devotion to underage girls.
Ivan’s new act is called Nato (nATo – like tATu) – a 16 year old Albanian singer who looks no more than 12. And instead of a schoolgirl outfit Nato dresses in a burkha – all you can see on her super-cool promo posters are eyes and microphone.
Leggy Starlitz lives!