Letters from Limbo

2007-12-31T11:52:00.000-08:00

Bruce

I don't know how to write this. It's just... much, much too big. But Bruce always started with the story, and let things grow from there, so I'll try to do the same.

I met Bruce Steinberg when I was 20 years old, and I was vaguely scared of him. It was 1988, and I was halfway through college, and starting my first corporate job, at SCO. He was Vice President of something or other, and I was naive enough at the time to think that meant he was Very Important Indeed, and Not To Be Disturbed, lest he Rain Down Disapproval Upon Me.

I got to know him better over the next few years via the SCO-internal USENET newsgroups. He had a breezy, friendly, funny, encyclopedically-knowlegeable writing style, and as letters on a screen he wasn't so scary.

One day, someone said something in one of the groups about Bruce's "old band", It's A Beautiful Day. I was taken aback--I loved that band--and I went home and looked at the cover of their first album, and there his name was in the credits. I thought it must be a joke--the person posting must have been kidding Bruce around because he had the same name as a famous harmonica player. But when I asked Bruce about it, he said, "Yeah, that's me." It seemed oddly unimportant to him.

A few years passed. Bruce and I worked together on a short-term project, designing a customer survey card and a database for the results, and got to be friends. We'd shoot the breeze a little bit in the cafeteria from time to time, chitchat in the hallways. Then one day he walked past my office on the way to a meeting and stopped off to say hello. I don't remember now what we talked about at first--probably some recent upper-management idiocy at the company--and I said, "I am never going to be a manager."

He said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, look... I just have a few minutes, but I need to tell you a story, so listen..."

And Bruce pulled up a chair, turned it around and straddled the back of it, and started telling me his life story. After a few minutes he realized he wasn't anywhere close to the end, so he decided to blow off his meeting, because this was more important to him.

Bruce started out as a child performer, doing summer stock and (I think) Broadway, singing as "The Li'l Bad Wolf" on a Mitch Miller-produced Walt Disney/Little Golden Record of the same name, and appearing on a Sunday morning live TV show. I'm not sure--I don't think he ever mentioned--how he'd gotten involved with all that, but he told me once that he'd had an insight working on that TV show: that the things he did for a few minutes every Sunday were appearing on 8-inch B&W TV screens all over metropolitan New York, and that that was really cool. It wasn't an ego trip at all, he wasn't immodest about it--but he really grooved on the feeling of action at a distance--a little thing done here that ripples outward into the world and has effects there. It was a formative experience for him.

He developed an interest in ham radio and electronics, and spent his time and allowance skipping signals off the ionosphere, getting signal reports from far-off countries, and tape-recording Sputnik. In the fullness of time he went to Cornell, studied electrical engineering, graduated, and went to work for NASA, designing telemetry hardware for Apollo at the Kennedy Space Center, and later working on the Mariner probes at Berkeley.

Meanwhile, he had developed an interest in music, art, and photography, and now that he was living in the Bay Area, he started taking pictures of rock 'n roll shows on spec. One day, with a casual fearlessness borne of having been around celebrities lots of times in his life, he called up Janis Joplin--her phone number was listed--introduced himself and asked if she'd like to see some of his photographs of her and her band from the San Jose Pop Festival. She was encouraging--eventually selecting one of his shots for cover art on her first solo album--and it led to regular work for him. He left engineering and pursued photography and art direction full time, designing some great album covers.

Somewhere in there he hooked up with It's A Beatiful Day, worked with them in his usual capacity as photographer and art director, but also played harmonica and worked as a truck-driver and roadie and all-around useful guy. Somewhere in there he produced an album by Link Wray. Somewhere in there he designed a billboard for Tower of Power, which gave him contacts in advertising, and somewhere in there he started branching out to working as an advertising designer and copywriter. As I remember the story, he'd done exactly one gig in that capacity, working for a hi-fi store, and the client was pleased--and recommended him to Larry and Doug Michels, who were starting a little software company in Santa Cruz called SCO.

They called Bruce in to help write copy for some early XENIX material, and the three of them hit it off. He hadn't been an engineer in a while, but he had the engineering background going for him--he understood technology, and he understood techies even better. And he had a key insight: That techies aren't any different from rock stars: kind of geeky, obsessive people who spend a lot of time immersed in highly technical details, building something beautiful. The story he told in his work was that techies are rock stars, in their own world.

Doug and Larry liked him enough to want to hire him full-time to do their marketing communications. He said he'd consider it, but set conditions: He wanted a title, so when he made calls it would be obvious he wasn't just some flunky, and he wanted the facilities to do all his production in-house. They gave him what he wanted, and he moved to Santa Cruz, and that's the story of how Bruce Steinberg, engineer and rock'n'roller, became the Vice President of Marketing and Communications at a high-tech company.

And here he got down to the point. "It sounds like a pretty random career, going from Apollo to rock'n'roll to SCO, but there was always a common thread that's run through all those jobs--it's always been about communication, about action at a distance. Every step happened organically, but I could never have told you five years in advance what I was gonna be doing. And I sure as hell couldn't have told you what I was never gonna do. Maybe you'll end up as a manager someday, maybe you won't, but you can't decide that now."

It was a hell of a good story, and well told, too, but mainly what I was struck by that day was the fact that this cat--this very hip and funny and in all ways admirable guy--was so generous with his time as to skip a meeting and sit down and Lay Wisdom on me, just because he didn't want to see me making the mistake of foreclosing too many options in my life. And he really did permanently change the way I see the world.

That set a pattern for us, afterward. We didn't talk all that often, but when we did, in person or by phone, more often than not it'd be two or three hours before we stopped. Sometimes there'd be email correspondences that went on for days or weeks, letters hundreds of lines long going both directions. He was one of only three people whose email I always saved. We were both storytellers, with similar conversational styles in some respects--both of us had a tendency to turn dialogues into monologues--the main difference being that his monologues were better. (Though I guess he appreciated mine. He once compared our conversations to "having a lounge gig playing for tone-deaf drunks who are challenged by the occasional jazz chord in a blues tune...then coming home to play with a neighbor who's into exactly the same kind of music you are".)

Several times, by happenstance, we ran into each other at Costco, and it got to be a running joke between us that we had a regularly scheduled meeting there. I always got home really late after those Costco trips, and my wife would want to know what took so long. "I ran into Bruce..." "Oh."

Bruce fell ill early this month with something I'd never heard of before called cardiac amyloidosis. I'd spoken with him for a few hours a few days before that, and he was fine--we had a great talk; I was trying to hook him up with my new employer, ISC, for some marketing consulting. But then I went off on a business trip, and then came back and got busy with holidays. A few weeks passed before I got around to one of my email folders and found a note from a mutual friend saying Bruce was in the hospital.

As soon as I read it, I called Bruce, and we talked for a while, then I went to visit him for a few hours the day after Christmas. He was obviously in bad shape, but in fairly good spirits, aside from some worry that he was having difficulty with words--"I feel brain damaged," he said. I knew he wasn't expecting to recover fully, but he had hopes of recovering enough to go home and get back to a less energetic version of his life. I left him an old powerbook we'd had around, and it turned out the hospital had wi-fi, so I was hoping that there'd be some email contact from him... but a few days passed and there was none.

Then yesterday the news arrived that Bruce had died in the wee hours of December 30, surrounded by his family. He was 64.

One of the last things I told him was about my six-year-old son, Ben--who Bruce quite liked, and it was mutual, though they'd only met a few times. "How's m'boy?" he'd ask me. I told him Ben has lately developed a deep enthusiasm for print advertising: paging through catalogs and magazines, pointing out the poses and props in the photographs, analyzing how and why each ad was made, improvising and reciting his own ad copy for imaginary products he's planning to invent someday, making the occasional powerpoint slide presentation on his mac. Bruce got a kick out of it, and showed me pictures and talked to me about his granddaugther Teagan.

I started noticing that Bruce was spacing out and falling half-asleep at odd moments during our conversation, so I told him to call me if he needed any assistance with the laptop, gave him a hug and told him I loved him, and drove home. I'm really, really grateful I had a chance to do that.

I told his daughter Jenny on the phone yesterday that Bruce was... well, not like a father to me, but a hip uncle, or a big brother. And one of the best friends I'll ever have. He might have given me some flack for saying this, but fuck it: The world's a much emptier place today.

Rest in peace, my friend. I miss you.

2006-12-24T23:53:00.000-08:00

Winter Howdies!

As my gift to you all, I hereby present:

Flying Spaghetti Gingerbread Monsters!

A new holiday recipe, from me to you. May the Noodly One keep you in His sauce forever. Ramen.

2006-12-21T19:11:00.000-08:00

Unexpected Side-Benefits of Blogging

Or, to put it more accurately, "of not blogging, but nevertheless having a disused blog sitting around somewhere..."

One of my oldest best friends, someone I'd been close to from sixth grade until high school but hadn't seen or heard from in about twenty years, googled me and found this page. I'd been wanting to talk to him for ages, but google didn't come across for me; his name's a little too nonunique.

It had never occurred to me that such a thing might happen. This "blog" thing has actual practical utility. Who knew?

Makes me want to post a little more often. Maybe I can attract a few more old friends I've lost touch with. Holly? John?

2006-08-24T20:14:00.000-07:00

I Am A Frickin' Genius

I have thought up a Plan for building a bipartisan consensus on an issue of national importance. Here's how it goes:

Single, affluent people have to pay significantly higher taxes than married people with the same income, right?

And there's nothing Republicans like better, or care about more, than cutting taxes on wealthy people, right?

Okay, now, follow along with me here. Ever since a Supreme Court decision in the nineteenth century, we in the US have had a legal principle called "corporate personhood"--corporations are literally viewed by the law as people.

So, let's say you're single, and you want to pay fewer taxes. Why not form a small shell company, incorporate it in Delaware or Nevada, and get married to it? It is a person, after all. And, I mean, it's pretty good setup, when you think about it. Not only do you get a nice fat tax deduction, but your corporate spouse will never leave the toilet seat up, or complain about it if you do.

But there's a problem. You see, right now, this marvelous tax-saving opportunity is against the law. And why? Because of a bunch of pesky government regulations that define marriage as being a union of "one man and one woman".

I know that all Republicans will stand with me as we fight to end this injustice. Rich single people need our help! People's money is at stake!

Deregulate marriage now!

2005-12-24T14:04:00.000-08:00

Neologism du jour

nutnip 'n*t-nip n [fr. nut + catnip, see CATNIP] : any person or substance that is irresistibly attractive to insane people.

As in, "I don't know what the hell it is with David Letterman. I swear, the guy's like nutnip or something."

2005-01-26T11:30:00.000-08:00

Well, Kudos

The Democrats on the Judiciary Committee did, in fact, stand up on their hind legs and say No.

A big thank you to Senators Leahy, Kennedy, Biden, Feingold, Schumer, Feinstein, Kohl and Durbin.

2005-01-26T11:10:00.000-08:00

December of the Eternal September?

AOL quietly announced that it will no longer provide USENET access to its users.

Eleven damn years too late.

(Not that I'm bitter or anything. . .)

2005-01-25T19:49:00.000-08:00

No.

At DailyKos, Kos and his fellow bloggers have posted an open letter to all US Senators calling for their opposition to Alberto Gonzales's nomination for Attorney General, and they have asked for other bloggers to sign on as well.

I'm not what you could call a big fish in the blog pond. I'm not even a guppy. At best, maybe I'm one of those weird little bugs that crawl on the surface, but if the trivial little ripple I'm capable of making is of any use to Kos, then I'm glad to make it.

As the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Administration, Gonzales's advice led directly to the abandonment of longstanding federal laws, the Geneva Conventions, and the United States Constitution itself. Our country, in following Gonzales's legal opinions, has forsaken its commitment to human rights and the rule of law and shamed itself before the world with our conduct at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The United States, a nation founded on respect for law and human rights, should not have as its Attorney General the architect of the law's undoing.

In January 2002, Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions inoperative. Gonzales's endorsement of the August 2002 Bybee/Yoo Memorandum approved a definition of torture so vague and evasive as to declare it nonexistent. Most shockingly, he has embraced the unacceptable view that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States. He has called the Geneva Conventions "quaint."

This man should be defeated. The venality of the Republican Party virtually guarantees that he won't be, but at least the Democrats can stand up on their hind legs and say No! Maybe we can't stop evil, but we should by God try.

2004-12-25T22:56:00.000-08:00

Winter Howdies to all!

Well, now, last year I made a New Year's resolution to blog more often, and here it already is, twelve months and six posts later. Sigh. Maybe in 2005.

Anyway, the title of this post comes from a phrase that I started hearing several years ago from a bunch of my friends, either as a standalone greeting, or in phrases like, "I still have to mail out my winter howdies this year." I wasn't quite sure what it meant at first, but I was able to glark from context that it was a generic, nondenominational, universally-inoffensive term for seasonal greetings, Christmas cards, family newsletters, Hanukkah cards, etc. Clever!, I thought, and began using the phrase myself.

A year or so passed, and Christmas rolled around again. I was visiting my friends Qarin and James, when Qarin happened to mention something about her winter howdy cards, and I stopped her to ask, once and for all, where the heck "winter howdy" had come from.

"From you," she said.

"Say what?"

"From you. You coined it."

"I did what?"

James jumped in. "On icb, a few years ago. You don't remember?"

"Um... no."

"We were talking about how it's always a hassle with mixed families to be sending Hanukkah cards to some people and Christmas cards to other people, and you said, 'Why not just say Winter Howdy! and make it easy on yourselves?' and everybody liked that and started saying it to each other. You really don't remember this?"

"You are so making that story up."

"I'm not! It was totally you!"

This went on for a while, and eventually, when the events were confirmed by the testimony of other witnesses present at the scene of the alleged coining, I had to confess that I must indeed have been the progenitor of the Winter Howdy. I still have no recollection of it whatsoever. But... it seems that it has continued to spread; it was a year after that conversation that I first received a personalized printed card that read "Winter Howdies!" Not many Google hits yet, but it's out there, it's out there...

And it is a festive addition to the holiday-greeting canon, don't you think? I may not remember it, but I'm certainly pleased by it.

And perhaps the world needs it. From what can I glean from the blogosphere, it seems this year there was a little flurry of political dudgeon on cable TV over "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays", with assorted GOP spokesvermin like Fox News's Bill O'Reilly trying to convince their followers that these two phrases--which most people had long understood to be harmless, cheerful expressions of friendly wishes at a time when many Americans are celebrating--were in fact coded messages meaning, respectively, "Enjoy the yuletide celebration, my fellow patriotic, Christian Republican," and "Fuck you, baby Jesus!" (I exaggerate a bit, but judging from the quantity and intensity of the flamage that made it onto the internet in the wake of this made-up controversy, not that much.)

Of course, very few scholars believe the Christmas holiday originally had anything to do with the birth of Jesus; pretty-much everyone agrees that the Catholic Church simply adopted a pre-existing pagan holiday. Why do such a thing? Because people do love their holidays, and if you can find a way to piggyback your message onto the rituals and traditions that families and communities happily re-enact each year, you've got yourself a very potent--and self-sustaining!--marketing message.

And that, of course, is exactly what O'Reilly and his ilk are trying to do now--graft their message of antiliberal hatred onto the holiday traditions so it all gets mixed up in people's heads. Just as the Catholics successfully exploited a pagan holiday to spread their story, O'Reilly wants to exploit it again to spread his.

With, unfortunately, some success. I say "Merry Christmas" all the time (sometimes in August, if I happen to be feeling whimsical), and I say "Happy Holidays" equally often, and never gave it much thought or got any notably surly responses to either one. But, as Kevin Drum at Washington Montly recently said, this year's GOP effort to turn seasonal greetings into political shibboleths has succeeded at making me feel self-concious every time I used either one to a stranger--concerned that, if this person happened to be an O'Reilly viewer, he or she might be reading messages into what I said that were not there. Which is exactly what O'Reilly and the others wanted, and it bugs me that they manipulated me so easily. (I don't even watch TV!)

It is into this charged climate that I hereby offer, to any of you looking for a way to express feelings of warm respect and holiday cheer to your fellow men and women without participating in these jerks' latest kulturkampf, the humble Winter Howdy. Suitable for any occasion, and so far completely uncharged with negative associations by schmucks on TV. May it serve you long and well!

And to all a good night.

2004-08-20T00:03:00.000-07:00

And speaking of the woods...

I spent yesterday afternoon with Mike, and a friend who was visiting him from out of town. The three of us took a lovely hike up into the Forest of Nisene Marks state park.

Our destination was a signpost, way out in the middle of the forest, that marks the precise epicenter of the massive 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

That was a day when, I can tell you from vivid memory (and perhaps in a future post I will do so), the forces of nature made it very clear that they're a lot bigger and more powerful than people are.

So to commemorate the day, some people went out and put up that signpost. It's the only human-built structure for a half mile in any direction.

Turns out, sometime in the past year, a gigantic tree fell over and smashed it to shit.

I'm not sure I can explain why, exactly, but I find that completely hilarious. Jesus Christ, what were the odds?

2004-08-16T14:26:00.000-07:00

I took my laptop to the woods to live deliberately...

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau.

2004-05-10T14:56:00.000-07:00

Soon, this page will be #1 for chair hanging sex

Mike's recent post about an experience with a hilariously outre spambot has, it turns out, propelled him from a Google ranking of 43 on a search for "chair hanging sex" to numero uno.

This has given me an idea for a new internet toy: You type in a URL, click "submit", and a perl script reads the URL, puts together a hundred or so random combinations of two or three words from the page, submits them to Google, and presents to you your Google ranking for each phrase--sorted numerically so that your #1 rankings show up first. For example, this program might be able to tell me that my blog has a Google ranking of #5 for the words evil CSN. It's fun!

All I need now is a catchy name like Googlewhacking or Googlefight, and to forget the whole idea because who the hell has time.

2004-05-07T14:25:00.000-07:00

A little pre-Mother's-Day appreciation

I gave my mom the address to my blog the other day (not, of course, without some slight trepidation), and her response to the nostalgiathon in my previous post was:

Your mother would have blistered your bottom if she had known you were crawling around in that dirty creek. . . That's the other side of the reminiscence thing - if you could have properly appreciated it then, just think what I would have thought!

. . . but on second thought, I don't think I'd have stopped you. Children need episodes such as these - you just grit your teeth & pray that any hurts are transient. Modern parents are unfortunate - they have to be so panicky about children alone - pick them up at school even when they are perfectly capable of walking a few blocks. Uphill both directions, of course.

Right on. And thanks, Mom. Thank you.

One of the difficult, and more than a bit creepy, aspects of parenting in this decade is the apparently widespread, paralyzing fear that Something Bad Will Happen. I was walking six blocks to school and back when I was five years old, stopping to watch trails of ants, float leaf-boats in the rain gutters, feel the sticky sap oozing out of a pine tree. But these days? Do five-year-olds still get to do that? It sure doesn't seem like it.

I mean, it was nice to see families playing at the Hidden Parks the other day, but you know what I didn't see? I didn't see kids playing unsupervised in the open courtyards of my old apartment complex, where thirty years ago there would have been armies of 'em. Nor did I see any children walking by themselves for the pure joy of it. And actually, maybe a casual observer wouldn't have seen those things so readily back in the 70s, either. Perhaps I only remember them as uibiquitous sights because I was a kid, and tended to be out and about when kids were out and about.

But I don't think so. I think America--at least the suburban America I'm familiar with--has undergone a real shift and become, in the words of Barry Glasser, a Culture of Fear [gratuitous partner link]. We fear insane things, ridiculous things, like Anonymous Lurking Kidnappers (who do, unquestionably, exist, but in such tiny numbers you'd be better off worrying about lightning strikes). And razor blades in Halloween candy (though nothing of the sort has ever happened).

And we fear cars hitting our children, so we keep the children in the back yard, or safely tucked away in the house watching TV, and we drive them to and fro in our SUVs and minivans, and the sidewalks become dead zones while the streets fill with deadlier vehicles. And you know what studies have shown happens when there are fewer kids along the sidewalk? People drive faster. Which makes the street even more dangerous, and discourages even more families from letting their kids play out front--and, probably, drives the sales of even more SUVs and minivans.

Now, one of the great joys of my life is acting snooty and elitist and superior and pretending I'm above the concerns of Ordinary Dumbshit Americans, but of course I'm not. I'm part of this culture too. I may intellectually know them to be irrational, but I still feel the same fears.

It's already a real challenge for me, and I know it will get harder as time goes on--to let go, restrain my control-freak instincts, and let my son have the mad adventures every kid deserves to have. It's a struggle. Ben likes to play with electrical outlets and plugs: Should I stop him? Yell at him? Slap his hand away from outlets? Inculcate in him a fear of something that is, properly handled, harmless? Or teach him the proper method of handling a plug, and just be ready to comfort him when he gets the inevitable shock?

Until a few days ago, he was afraid to go down slides at the playground. Wednesday evening, in a moment of sudden impatience, I plopped him down on his butt and pushed him down a slide. "Yes yes yes yes yes!" he said, all the way down, and has been sliding down slides fearlessly ever since. Before, I would have said that a parent who forces a child to play a game he clearly doesn't like is a fool or worse. . . but somehow it turned out to be the right thing to do.

I realized several things just then. Principally, that I'd been coddling him--and that helping him face and overcome fears is a better thing to do than helping him maintain them. But also, it dawned on me that he may well have gotten that fear from me. I'm afraid of heights myself (a fact I wasn't aware of until I learned to fly). I love heights and wide views, but I'm afraid of falling, and so naturally I'm afraid of my son falling. I tense up when I see Ben tottering high along a play structure, jerk my hands out to steady him. Surely he notices it. Surely it sends the message that he's not in a safe place, and that I don't trust him to keep himself secure. I must, I must, learn to stop doing this.

And, as he grows, I must face my own fears, and let him out of my sight more and more, so he can learn about the world without me acting as fretful nervous intermediary.

Given the incessant yapping of our cultural messengers of doom--Our schools aren't safe! Our streets aren't safe! Our food isn't safe! Is your child at risk? Film at 11!--it may be harder, this decade, for parents to overcome that fear than it was thirty years ago.

But you know something? It can't ever have been easy. It obviously wasn't easy for my mom.

And she still did it.

Thanks. And Happy Mother's Day. I love you.

2004-05-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

Speeding Up Memory Lane

I was meeting Martin for a dinner date last night at a spot about halfway between where each of us lives. As it happened, the spot we chose was a half mile or so from the neighborhood where I'd lived from the third through fifth grades... and I arrived at the restaurant about 40 minutes early. So I took a little pilgrimage to see a fondly remembered place...

I remember as if it were yesterday, though in fact it was late summer of 1976, a day when I'd strolled from our apartment over to the library to deposit my latest bolus of recently-devoured Hardy Boys mysteries, and stepping away from the book return box I was suddenly and inexplicably seized with eight-year-old wanderlust. There was a street on the far side of the intersection, tree lined and shady and filled with suburban houses and gardens and parked cars, and I'd never gone to see it up close! It was time to rectify that error. Off I went.

28 years away, I'm no longer sure what held my interest: I surely wasn't paying attention to the fine points of ranch-style architecture or admiring flowers, but something in me loved knowing the streets around my home intimately. In any case, after a flew blocks of wandering along Hacienda Avenue, I did something I might not have bothered to do if I'd been a few years older: I decided to walk to the end of each cul de sac I came to. And so I turned left.

And happily I strolled along, and then I noticed an oddity. There at the end of the cul de sac, off to one side, were two houses that had not one but two parallel fences dividing their yards from one another. What was between those two fences? I looked closer: it was some kind of alleyway. I walked into it, and a dozen yards on, I emerged into... a park.

A city park. A big rectangle of lush green grass, surrounded on all sides by tall fences and taller trees, a well-appointed playground in the middle--slides, jungle gym, half-moon swing, sand--benches and a water fountain and birds singing and nobody was there but me. There were no cars: There was no parking lot. The whole park was completely enclosed, and only accessible through a half dozen little alleyways just like the one behind me, each of them connecting to the end of a suburban cul de sac. In something like a daze, I stepped forward into it, and reverently walked around examining every detail of the place.

Now, you have to understand that when you're eight, and you're exploring, and you find something like this, you don't think Oh, a park! How nice of the city to build such a fine facility for the public's enjoyment! No, you think: I am the first person to discover this park. No one else has ever walked here before me. God put this place on Earth for me, and I am the sole keeper of its secret.

Some time later, I whispered my precious discovery to the woman who babysat me after school, and she said, "Oh, Hidden Park! Which one did you find?"

I don't remember what I said, but perhaps it was "Whahuh?"

"Why, there are two of them, you know."

Well! This was so interesting I almost forgot to be devastated by the news that I hadn't actually been the park's discoverer. So the next time I had a free moment I went looking for the other one, and in due course I found it, a couple of blocks away, concealed just as the first one was. Hidden Park 2 (as I always thought of it from then on) was, oddly, not as nice as Hidden Park 1--the grass was a little scruffier, the playground equipment not quite as nice, and it got more shade in the afternoon and felt colder--but what, I was gonna complain? Two parks!

So anyway. Yesterday afternoon, before my dinner date, I went to visit the hidden parks again. They're still there, still beautiful. The trees are bigger. In Hidden Park 1 they've replaced the playground equipment with the new, safe kind (alas, no more moon swing), and the sandbox was gone in favor of tanbark underlain with foam rubber. But I guess Hidden Park 2 is still a little neglected, though, because it still has the same old equipment I remember: The exact same jungle gym, exact same slides, I'm sure of it. One thing's clear: The parks have both got better PR now than they did 28 years ago, because they were populated: Happy families pushing kids on swings, a girl's softball team practicing throwing and catching, a fella chipping golf balls into an empty flowerpot.

I strolled around for a while, and then went to look at a few other childhood haunts: The library--now apparently closed, either for renovation or for tearing it down and building a new one--and the bridge over the shady creek where I used to scale down the almost vertical banks and catch tadpoles (and let's hear it for eight-year-old intrepidness, because I never realized until yesterday what a scary-lookin' place that was. Pretty, though).

And then I drove off to meet Martin, and as I drove I continued the nostalgiathon: Right about there is where the Sears used to be, and over there is where the movie theatre used to be, and here's the mall: These days it's a hideous shrine to consumerism and capitalist excess, but in those days it was the mall, you know?

And at that moment it came to me: One of the abiding problems of the world is that our nostalgia is out of sync with reality.

Think about it. It seems highly probable to me that when I was a third grader puttering around that neighborhood with its rosy-golden glow of childhood idyll, some thirty-six year old man was driving around thinking sadly about how great it used to be. And lord knows I didn't appreciate those days particularly at the time. Yet I'd pay big, big money to experience one of them again now.

The day before yesterday, surfing the net, I happened across a page about collectibles that discussed cute old signs from Sinclair Oil gas stations, with a friendly green brontosaurus logo. Sinclair itself went extinct in the late '60s, and now their signs are quaint. You suppose anyone thought they were quaint at the time? Of course not.

Here's what I think: We need to find a way to speed up the nostalgia process so we can properly appreciate now. How would this work? Bah, don't ask me: implementation detail. Perhaps a nice "soft focus" spraypaint. Or a pill!

Because someday, someone is going to look at an image like this:

...and think "Oooh, how darling! That takes me right back to 2004! Gosh, I wish I could go back there again and appreciate it properly."

And why can't they think it today, when they actually do have the opportunity to appreciate it properly? It would save so much time and trouble.

2004-05-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

Karma

Since it was announced on the first of April, I've been fascinated by Google's planned email system, GMail. So imagine my delight when I heard that people with Blogger accounts--such as the one I'm using right now to edit this post--were being invited to join the GMail beta program.

Then I discovered that they had to be active Blogger accounts, and apparently my highly infrequent posting (which I already felt kinda bad about) isn't enough to rate an invite.

Grump.

Well, in the unlikely event that any person or AI at Google notices this post: Please? Please please please? Pretty please? Can I pleeeeeeeeeaaaaase have a GMail account?

Please?

UPDATE: A big thank you to Mike Taht; I now have an account. ethanol@gmail.com is now the email address listed at the left column of the blog. Somebody drop me a line so I can see how it works, eh?

2004-03-08T18:27:00.000-08:00

The Passion of the Snowman

This is an old chestnut of mine that I usually perform in December, but Mel Gibson's latest action thriller has made it kind of topical, so what the heck.

Several years ago at a Christmas party, some friends and I got to discussing the fact that Christmas carols used to be these deeply spiritually significant hymns, then gradually became more and more secular, and the ones that have been written in the last fifty years--"Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" and "Up on the Housetop, Click Click Click" and so on--have no more depth than the average advertising jingle. I thought it that it was time someone wrote a Christmas song that recaptured the true meaning of the holiday while retaining the pop accessibility of the modern songs. This is how it came out. (Tune of "Frosty".)
Christ the messiah
Was the son of god they say
With a virgin mom and a perfect birth
In a manger full of hay

Christ the messiah
Was the king of all the Jews
When the Pharisees acted hard to please
He just showed what he could do

There must have been some magic in that silver grail he found
'Cause when he put in fish and bread...
There was enough to go around! (Yum!)

Christ the messiah
Was as holy as can be
All the poor folks said he could raise the dead
And he made a blind guy see

But Christ the messiah
Really made the Romans mad
So the local boss said to build a cross
And to put thorns on his head

Thumpity-thump-thump, thumpity-thump-thump
Watch him drag his cross!
Thumpity-thump-thump, thumpity-thump-thump
While all the kids throw rocks! (Ouch!)

Christ the messiah
Died for all our sins that day
But though his blood was shed, the disciples said...

He'll be back again someday!

See what I mean? It takes the story of Jesus and gives it a little excitement, a little pizzazz.

Pity I didn't think to offer it to Mel as the theme song for his movie. Woulda fit right in, after I added a verse about scourging.

2003-12-17T23:34:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday, airplanes

Years ago when I first got my pilot's license, I daydreamed that on December 17, 2003, the one hundredth anniversary of Orville Wright's first flight, I would be in Kitty Hawk to commemorate.

Well, here that day is, and what with one thing and another, I'm not in North Carolina. (Probably for the best anyway, as it turns out pilots weren't allowed to fly in anyway. President Bush was out there giving a speech, so the airspace around him for a 25 nautical mile radius was closed. Which really leaves nothing more to be said, doesn't it?)

I didn't manage to get any flying in today, either, as I had also figured I might do. Actually I've only flown a few times in the past several years--enough to keep my license up to date, but no more than that. Not enough time, not enough money. Nevertheless, the fact that I'm a pilot is one of the things I'm proudest of, and the hours I've spent in the air have been some of my happiest, so I want to take this moment to say thank you, Wilbur and Orville, for showing us the way.

2003-11-04T14:28:00.000-08:00

From the Separated-at-Birth Department

Via Alas, a blog, a hilarious gallery of some of the worst album covers ever. Well worth a look.

But the last one is especially striking. Compare and contrast:

It's obvious that some kind of Star Trek transporter accident was involved. The only question is what the evil CSN did with their old lady.

She's probably under the couch.

2003-10-24T13:18:00.000-07:00

Remember: The Tortoise Won

My friend Mike Taht notes that it's time to register for the California primaries, and urges politically-minded bloggers to do so.

For a mere 990 dollars - or 1500 signatures - anyone can run in the primaries for assembly under the flag of any party. For 3000 signatures you can run for state senate. Both are fairly high paying jobs, if you care about that part, and the money you donate to your own campaign is tax deductable (I think) - so why not run for one of these positions? Make a difference!

Want to fix your state government? Run for state office! Want to change the democratic party? Run from within! Same for the Republicans? Run from within! Can't stand those parties? Run as an independent!

Respectfully, I think he's wrong. Getting involved in the political process is a great thing, but people who come out of nowhere with no political background or connections and randomly decide to pay a filing fee and put their names on the ballot very, very rarely win. Pursuing that as a means to political influence is like buying lottery tickets instead of putting your money in an interest-bearing account: You've got an infinitesimal chance of a big payoff, versus a certainty of a small payoff. You might wind up with an influential job (which, by the way, it's your oath-sworn duty to do as well as you can for at least two years; no slacking off if you lose interest, so you'd better be sure it's your passion). But more likely you'll get nothing, unless you have the support of a well-organized political network that's willing to work hard on your behalf--and to get that you need to pay your dues first, or at least have celebrity and/or big money going for you.

On the other hand, instead of running fruitlessly for office, you could just pay those dues. Don't try to enlist as a colonel--start out as a private. Pick out one of those local political networks that you agree with more often than not, or a statewide or national candidate you want to work for (I'll just put in a plug for my man Howard here), and get involved as a low-level volunteer grunt. Go to meetings and listen. Learn how the system works. Volunteer to bring the coffee and treats. Help out. Walk precincts. Stuff envelopes. Make phone calls. Hand out flyers and buttons at public events. Pretty soon, the like-minded politically active people in your community all know your name and your face, and you get opportunities to introduce your ideas into the mix. These being exactly the people that the local candidates and officeholders need to help them win elections, pretty soon you'll have opportunities to meet those folks, too, and they too will learn your name and face, and listen respectfully when you talk. Your friends and neighbors, knowing that you've actually met some of the candidates and might have some inkling about what they're like and where the bodies are buried, start asking you for a bit of advice on how to vote, and then, baby, you have arrived.

Maybe eventually you've paid enough dues that someone floats your name as a candidate, too. But long before that, you will have gained some measure of political influence in your community. Not a lot--but more than none. More than you'd have gotten by running as a crank candidate in a system you haven't really taken the time to learn about from the inside.

I'm just doing the merest fragment of this kind of volunteer work in the local Dean campaign, but already I find myself connected to local politics in ways I never was before. Next week, I'm attending a reception for my Assemblyman, to which I'm certain I would not, last year, have been invited. It's a small thing, but it's a step up from nothing. And these small things are what representative democracy is made of.

2003-10-08T11:33:00.000-07:00

The People Have Spoken

And they have said "Duhhhhhh...."

To be honest, the election results had little power to depress me further; it would have been almost equally dispiriting if Schwarzenegger had come in second. Either result would have been equally compelling evidence that millions of Californians think government is of absolutely no importance--knowing specifically how many Californians think so doesn't make it that much worse.

California is not a trivial state, contrary to its apparent self-regard. If it seceded from the rest of the United States, it would be the fifth richest country in the world, all by itself, and the 30th most populous, roughly tied with Poland and Spain. It leads the world in technology, culture and entertainment, has vast agricultural resources, timber, oil. Bitterly divided between the liberal coast and conservative central and southern areas, it has a government of extremes: though dominated by democrats at the moment, its political structure (requiring, for example, a two thirds vote in the legislature to pass any budget, and a two thirds vote of the electorate to increase most taxes), ensures that the republican minority will continue to wield considerable power. It takes phenomenal executive skill to manage a state like this effectively.

And Gray Davis has, on the whole, done an okay job at it. So we dumped him for a man with absolutely no executive experience whatsoever, who refused to answer a single policy question substantively and wouldn't even debate his opponents unless he could prepare scripted answers to questions submitted in advance. A man with a history of gross sexual harassment, and a "playful" enjoyment of humiliating those who are less powerful than he is. A man who, as the pampered multimillion-dollar-per-picture star, has always been given absolutely everything he wanted, and is reputed to throw temper tantrums when he isn't. Shit howdy, I can't imagine anyone better suited to assume the mantle of leadership in Sacramento, can you?

It's not like politics requires a person to know what the hell he's doing or anything, right? Or to be able to win people over by the power of ideas, build consensus when possible and compromise when necessary. Or to understand different perspectives. Shoot, you can get anything done in government if you just look and act really tough. Just ask the people of Minnesota how well their little experiment with Jesse Ventura turned out.

Okay, enough with the sarcasm. The simple fact is, most voters didn't care whether Schwarzenegger had any of the background or qualities necessary to make him an effective political leader--not enough to look beyond the surface. And that is very discouraging.

I take a little black comfort in the knowledge that they'll regret it, after he drives the state into a brick wall--but not much, because it's my state, too. But at least we can feebly hope that after the inevitable disastrous failure of Schwarzenegger's governorship, Californians will (however temporarily) learn a lesson about what sort of skills a person should have before they hire him to take care of their money, police, fire departments, highways, schools, libraries, universities, etc, etc, etc.

2003-09-23T17:37:00.000-07:00

O brave new URL, that has such wonders in't

I'm sure it will not have escaped your attention, Gentle Reader, that many otherwise-useful website addresses are longer than Ginger Baker drum solos. Consider for a moment the permlink URL for a previous post in this very blog: http://ethanol.blogspot.com/2003_06_22_ethanol_archive.html#105686200155623873. Oy!

Enter tinyurl.com. Tinyurl is a website that enables you to give it a very long URL, and it gives back, well, a tiny URL that automatically page-forwards you to the original URL. For example, the long URL above can also be reached via http://tinyurl.com/offo. Got that? Okay. The four letters at the end of the new URL ("offo", in the above example) are generated in alphabetical order as new URLs are entered into the site. It's taken them months to get into the o's. When they're done with the z's, I suppose, they'll start again with five-letter strings.

So anyway. A while back it occurred to me: These tinyurl addresses don't expire. And now that they've gotten so far through the alphabet, there must be many interesting English words in their database. I think I shall randomly enter tinyurl addresses and see what pops up!

Why yes, I was rather bored at the time, why do you ask?

Anyway, an interesting thing emerged: Many tinyurl addresses seemed, by random happenstance, to fit the content of the pages they pointed to rather poetically.

See, for example, tinyurl.com/lazy. Or tinyurl.com/dork.

It's like a new fortune-telling method: tinyurlomancy. A third-millennium I Ching. Pick out a word, tug on the thread, see what web page it lands you on, and learn what there is to learn from it. It's a quite a tinyurl.com/head trip.

(There are a few in there that I don't think are random, though. I'm sure tinyurl.com/dick and tinyurl.com/cunt are easter eggs.)

2003-09-23T14:22:00.000-07:00

I'm back

Or, still here, rather. There has been writer's block. There have been distractions. Y'know. But I've got some things in the pipeline and there will be more posts shortly.

Here's something I did while I wasn't blogging:

Living Room Gallery: The Artistry of Benjamin Hunt (2001 - )

It began as a simple page of pictures of my son's scribbles and other artistic endeavors, and sort of grew.

Here's the thing, though: I'm not really being ironic. I think the things my kid does really are art--arising from the exact same source as anything that was ever displayed in a gallery. And a whole lot less self-conscious and egotistical, to boot.

The whole question of whether this thing is art, or that thing isn't, has always struck me as a giant masturbatory waste of time. Art is seeing the world, and knowing that it's not quite finished until you've added a stroke or two of your own. As we grow older and our art begins to garner us rewards (and sometimes punishments), it gets larded down with other motivations, and after a while we forget what we were really doing it for. But the real purpose of the thing is to interact with the world around you--so that it contains more of you, and you contain more of it. Toddlers grok it in fullness.

2003-07-04T08:18:00.000-07:00

A Rerun from Last Year

Happy Independence Day, everyone! This nation has come a long way from its humble origins, 227 years ago today, when our rights were being violated by an unelected, mentally deficient, hereditary dictator named George.

Fly your flags proudly!

2003-06-28T21:46:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter and the Sincere Form of Flattery

Slate is running a terrific article defending unauthorized derivative works, such as a Russian series of J.K. Rowling knockoffs about Tanya Grotter and her magic flying double bass. Go read.

I'm immensely happy to see this issue being discussed. The fact that a copyright holder can prevent others from producing "derivative works" is, I think, the one aspect of copyright law that bothers me more than any other (except for its duration, of course, which by the way I urge you to sign a petition about, but I digress). I don't think any other feature of the law produces quite such bizarre distortions of the whole idea of free expression.

Here's one smallish example: Dungeons and Dragons, as I'm sure most readers are already aware, is a game in which players sit at a table and interactively improvise fantasy stories, imagining themselves to be characters. Now, can it possibly be any more obvious than it already is that these stories aren't intended for commercial use, and are rarely, if ever, published? The only aspects of the game which are published are the books of rules, ideas, and statistics that help smooth out game play, and booklets with detailed descriptions of settings in which stories may be placed.

Now imagine you're an imaginative boy or girl, playing D&D for the first time, and passionately in love with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. You decide you'd like to play the game as a hobbit. Get a copy of the rulebook, and look up character types. You can play a human, an elf, a dwarf, no problem... but seek for a hobbit, and there is none to be found. All you'll find is a halfling. Why? Because the Tolkein estate refused to allow TSR Games to use a six-letter word that Tolkein had coined decades earlier and with which millions of people had become familiar. And the law in its infinite wisdom gave them the power to enforce that absurd decree.

Because if groups of teenagers playing role-playing-games were allowed to use the word hobbit with impunity, why, that might... um... reduce the market for the books? Somehow or other?

Oh, come on. While it's certainly true that Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy role-playing games owe a considerable portion of their popularity to The Lord of the Rings, it is undeniable that the reverse is also true. And in fact, I can't recall ever even hearing the word halfling at any D&D game I played in my geeky youth; we always called 'em hobbits... So the legal requirement to put a different name in the rule book was not just economically ridiculous, but actually entirely ineffective.

This kind of silliness is the default behavior of copyright law. An author actually has to go out of his or her way to permit people to make derivative uses of his or her work (as I have done with regard to this blog, using a Creative Commons license).

There may be situations in which I'd agree that a tribute, pastiche, parody, or outright knockoff really does harm an author or artist, and that it should be forbidden. I can't think of one at the moment, but I acknowledge the remote possibility. But it sure as heck isn't the usual case.

This wasn't how the law worked a century back, and authors weren't seriously hurt by that; in fact, they were arguably better off. Some literary historians claim, for example, that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland became so popular and successful in part because a number of other writers--early adopters of the "Wonderland" meme, as it were--had been inspired by it to write lighthearted stories (often politically topical, I gather) using the same style, characters and settings, and these had the effect of providing free advertising and expanding the market for the original. If fanfic had been a word in 1865, it wouldn't have been a dirty one.

Our national fergodsake anthem is an unauthorized song parody. No kidding, you can look it up--the original is called "To Anacreon in Heaven" and has a completely different lyric. "The Star-Spangled Banner" was originally published as a broadside--a set of lyrics to a familiar tune. There were thousands of these things; it was a thriving genre. If today's laws had been in place in 1814, we'd be singing something else at baseball games.

Nobody owns ideas. When people read a book or watch a movie, and are so enthralled and inspired by it as to write a fanfic and post it on the web, society benefits. Maybe only in a tiny way, but it adds up. Their knockoffs may be dreadful, but they are creating something, which is better than creating nothing, and they're building their skills, growing their confidence, developing their voices, and some of them will go on to produce better original work later.

And hypothetically, what if they produce knockoffs that aren't dreadful? What if they produce something just as good as the original, or hey, better? Do we want to suppress something that's genuinely good because it might eat into the profit margins of an already-successful author or filmmaker somewhere? Yikes.

J.K. Rowling is not being injured by the publication of Russian stories about magical preppies whose names end in "otter", any more than J.R.R Tolkein's estate would have been by pimply kids looking up the word hobbit in the D&D Player's Handbook. Sure, there's something to be said for making sure creative people get paid, so fine, we can establish a mandatory license: Ms. Rowling can have a nickel on the dollar every time someone sells a book set at Hogwarts. But don't, for heavens sake, give her the power to decide that other people can't whisper aloud the daydreams she inspired until 70 years after she's dead.

2003-06-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

On Politics: A Toe In The Water Oh The Heck With It *SPLASH*

For some reason I've been hesitating for over a week now to post this. I'm really not sure why... I think I may have unknowingly internalized a feeling, back in the days of my childhood, that it's permissible to join a conversation about partisan politics, and to be as fiery and impassioned as you like once you're there... but it's not okay to start one. It's a natural response to growing up in a family where peace is a fragile thing, I suppose: We're all having such a nice time talking about the weather, dear, so let's not spoil it by talking about that stuff, hmm?

Plus, it touches on the whole strangers-on-an-airplane scenario--those taboo subjects that send cold shivers of terror down your spine as soon as your seatmate mentions them: politics, religion, multilevel marketing schemes... If I start talking a little too enthusiastically about a candidate on my blog, will my readers all shrink away from me in their seats and bury their noses in their John Grisham novels? Such an uncomfortable thought.

But screw it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am supporting Governor Howard Dean for president. I'm even volunteering for his local campaign organization in Santa Cruz, which is a first for me, and I'm donating money to the national campaign as well. And what's more, I'm hoping you will, too! Dammit, I don't care who I alienate!

I hasten to add that I have nothing against any of the other democratic candidates. (Well, okay, I'd cringe a bit if I had to vote for Joe Lieberman, but I would vote for him if he took the nomination.) But with the others, the full extent of my support is that they'd be light years better than another four years of President Codpiece... whereas I'm actually deeply enthusiastic about voting for Dean, and I can't remember any other presidential race in my life when that was so true, so early on. I'm excited about the guy. How cool is that?

The other day my friend Larissa, a Kucinich supporter, asked me to explain my ideas for why she should get behind Dean instead, and I gave her a longwinded inside-politics sort of answer--that while Dean is liberal enough to suit me on most of the issues I care about, and outspokenly partisan in a way that energizes the liberal base of the party, he has a mix of moderate positions that could play well among swing voters and make inroads in Bush's centrist support... and furthermore, that while in other years these things might not matter to me so much (indeed, in other years I would probably be supporting Kucinich just to make sure the party's progressive wing is well represented when convention time comes), it's so critically important to the very future of the republic that we beat Bush in 2004, practical considerations have to dominate my decision-making process. So I'm going to pick the candidate I think has the best chance in a general election against Bush, and push as hard as I can to get that candidate nominated, and if that means I have to compromise a bit, so be it.

All of that is true, but on reflection I've realized that it wasn't the right answer--or rather, it was only part of the answer: I had explained why someone might want to, y'know, ahem, <mumble>vote for Howard Dean</mumble>, but not why I personally am planning to vote for Howard Dean, if you see the distinction.

The truth is, Dean isn't a compromise candidate for me. His opinions, attitudes and approaches to policymaking aren't a 100% perfect match with mine, but they resonate more than any other candidate I can remember.

I am, by emotional inclination, an idealistic progressive lefty liberal, but by intellectual bent I am a skeptic and pragmatist (hence the pragmaticrat label I was talking about in my previous post), so when discussing politics with serious progressive/green types, I often find myself in respectful disagreement with them. I'm nearly always in sympathy with them--I wholeheartedly agree with their reasons for taking the positions they do--but still, I often have the uncomfortable sense that those positions haven't been thought all the way through, and so I hesitate to support them fully, even though I share their ideals.

(Continued in next post to work around obnoxious blogger bug.)

2003-06-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

For example: I understand and share many progressives' dislike of handguns; I can see the harm that they do, especially in poor communities, and my gut instinct is to do something to help. But gun control strikes me as a glib, superficial solution--at best, it only addresses the symptom and not the disease, and at worst, it could promote black markets and other unindended consequences that exacerbate the very problem it was trying to address--and that's not even mentioning the Constitutional and civil-liberties arguments, which are not without merit, nor the research indicating that concealed-carry laws have been associated with reduced crime rates in some states, which I'm provisionally willing to accept. What's more, it's a huge political hot button among a large fraction of voters, and I can't see any reason why I'd pick a fight that size unless I were very, very sure I was right. I like handgun control activists, and dislike Charlton Heston's NRA; I think the former are motivated by a genuine desire to make the world a better place, and the latter mostly by selfishness, hostility, or paranoia. But liking and disliking isn't the same thing as agreeing and disagreeing. I'd rather address the root causes of poverty and crime and leave gun control off the table.

For example: I can see that the WTO and NAFTA are anti-environmental and anti-labor nightmares that undermine the sovereignty of national citizens in favor of international corporations, but I can also see real economic benefits to enhanced trade, and an already-stressed economy that would no doubt be hurt worse by major upheavals in the way business is done, so I don't want us to abolish those treaties overnight; I'd rather see us renegotiate them with an eye toward fairness.

For example: I recognize that single-payer is the fairest way to approach universal health care; I also recognize that it hasn't got a chance, for political reasons that are not all bad. When every hospital and clinic in America is taking money directly from the federal government, what's to stop the next republican president from applying the global gag rule to every single one of them? When it comes to politics, Occam's Razor is wrong; the simplest answer should automatically be suspect.

Ding ding ding, I just agreed with Howard Dean, straight down the board.

I like Howard Dean because I sense in him a kindred political spirit. I don't think the guy's a phony. I don't think he takes centrist positions to pander to the right at the expense of the left, or to fuzz the distinction between the two parties (in a misguided effort to do for the democrats what New Coke was supposed to do for Coke), or to get big corporate campaign donations, or even because he's afraid of being smeared as a "liberal" and losing the next election. I think he takes them, when he does, because there really are times when centrist--or even conservative!--policies are actually a better practical way to achieve liberal goals than the standard-issue liberal policies would have been.

I really, really like that about him.

I don't agree with him on every single issue; for example, he says he'd rather not legalize medical marijuana at this time (though he would support a real FDA study), which I can understand, since he's a doctor--but it suggests he's probably not eager to legalize recreational marijuana either, and that's a pity. (On the other hand, in today's political environment, where are we going to find someone who does want to legalize pot who can get elected?) And there are issues that are very important to me--such as the DMCA and the Public Domain Protection Act--that I don't know his positions on yet.

But close enough. I agree with Dean's positions on foreign policy, fiscal policy, civil liberties, reproductive rights, gay rights (well, gay marriage would be even better than civil unions, but let's be practical), affirmative action, energy policy, environmental protection, education, and I wish he were more firmly against the death penalty but I'll take what I can get.

I'm satisfied. He's a really good candidate. I want him nominated, and I want him to be president.

Oh, and have you heard the good news about Jesus and/or Amway?

2003-06-18T11:18:00.000-07:00

The Pragmaticratic Party

What is the difference
Between apathy and ignorance?
I don't know
And I don't care

-- World Entertainment War

Years ago in a more cynical phase of my political evolution, I had an idle fantasy of starting a new party. I thought of it as the Apathetic Party (that didn't quite convey what I had in mind, but I figured I could always think of something better later on). The main thing was, our slogan would be: Who the hell cares!?

I imagined myself pounding a podium as I exhorted a vast crowd in a call-and-response chant:

"Who the hell cares!?"

school!

"Who the hell cares!?"

paying

"Who the hell cares!?"

porn

Internet!

"Who the hell cares!?"

"... While smoking a joint!!"

"WHO!! THE HELL!! CAAAAAARES!!??"

And so on. But I dropped that fantasy when I realized that it was really no different from the smug self-satisfied dismissiveness of so many people on the right, who airily wave off the things I care about as so much "political correctness". I can easily imagine them using the same rhetorical tactic, in fact ("Little Jimmy doesn't want to pray at school!!" "Who the hell cares!?").

But today it occurs to me that perhaps a milder, more thoughtful and mature version of this principle might actually be a useful thing to foment. Call it the Pragmaticratic Party. The slogan would be the decidedly less chantable, but calmer, and more intelligent, Please tell us why this issue is important.

All of which leads me up to the subject of today's rant: the recent brouhaha in Florida about the Muslim woman who was denied a driver's license unless she took off her veil to have her picture taken.

Now really... why was that important enough to make a fuss about? The state of Florida went to considerable effort and expense to make sure this woman wouldn't be driving a car without carrying a picture of herself with a bare face. What did they get out of it?

I understand why it was important to her, of course. Religion arouses great passions. Imagine the outrage if a Christian woman were told that she couldn't get a driver's license unless she took off her crucifix pendant? Or that she had to pose topless? These aren't exact analogies, obviously, but they do convey the kinds feelings that might be aroused in a devout Muslim who was arbitrarily required to take off her niqab.

The Pragmaticratic Party would ask: What purpose is served by driver's license pictures? And to what extent is that purpose hampered by an applicant wearing a niqab? And is the inconvenience to the government greater or less than the cost of going to court and fighting about it?

What is the purpose of a driver's license picture? It helps ensure that the license really does belong to the person holding it. It's nowhere near 100% effictive, though; as a teenager, I used to sneak into bars using my older brother's driver's license (not to drink, I just wanted to hear the live music), and the picture only looked like me in the vaguest way.

Right now my driver's license picture is a pretty good resemblance. However, if I cut or colored my hair, shaved my beard, wore colored contact lenses, lost or gained a lot of weight, wore makeup, got a nose job, or started taking hormones and living as a woman, it wouldn't resemble me at all--yet it would still be eight years before the state asked me to get a new license picture taken. Why? Because the state implicitly recognizes that a current and accurate picture of me isn't really all that important.

So let's say this woman gets a driver's license with her veil on. How does that hurt anyone? How often does she have to show her license to people in the first place? Say she tries to cash a check with it, or rent a car or something--the cashier's going to see a woman in a niqab and a picture of a woman in a niqab. The eyes will match. The height will match. The signature will match. Maybe the cashier accepts it as valid ID, or maybe not; either way, it's not really the state's problem, is it?

Now suppose she gets the license picture taken without the veil, as Florida requires her to do. Okay, so now she's walking around in a niqab, but carrying an ID picture of herself with a bare face. How does that make it easier for anyone to identify her? Does she have to take the damn thing off again every time she writes a check?

Is there any crime that is easier to commit if your driver's license picture has your face covered? I'm stretching my brain, and I can't think of one. So why, why, why should we care?

I think the only honest answer is, Because people who dress like Arabs and Muslims are creepy and scary and remind us of 9/11, and that's not a good enough reason.

2003-06-16T17:57:00.000-07:00

Sometimes Technology Makes Me Very Happy

Erik Ostrom bligged on the "ad pollution" post below with a link to a truly wonderful tool: LibraryLookup is a site where you can download tiny little javascript applications called bookmarklets, which enable instant searches of your local library (assuming your library's catalog is on the web).

So you're looking at a book on Amazon or BN or Powell's, decide you're interested in it, and then with a single click on a bookmark, up pops a window to tell you whether your library has the book you're looking at, and ask you whether you'd like to request it.

For the benefit of my Santa Cruz County readers, here's the bookmarklet for
our library. Bookmark that link and you're set.

Thanks Erik!

Update: I've been asked how you bookmark a link when clicking on it doesn't take you anywhere. The answer is, in Netscape/Mozilla, you right-click on the link above and select "Bookmark this Link", or else just drag the link to your bookmarks toolbar. In Explorer, you right-click and select "Add to Favorites"; I'm not sure if the drag-and-drop trick works.

2003-06-14T22:53:00.000-07:00

Meme du Jour

It was just about a year ago that I overheard my friend Heather saying to my wife, "I just blew a whole morning doing nothing but making comments on other people's blogs."

I was, at the time, only paying the barest fragment of attention to blogs, but something about the sentence caught my ear. It's kinda lopsided, I thought. After all, we're dealing with a subculture so frenetic and fastpaced that weblog, fergodsake, takes too long to say, and only blog will do. And yet there's no tight little monosyllable to take the place of the phrase "making comments."

I mentioned this to the group, and people immediately began nominating candidate neologisms. My wife, Wendy, made a suggestion, and her coinage won the instant approval of everyone present. It has since entered the everyday vocabulary of my circle of friends, as both noun and verb, and in hopes that it will spread farther through the online world, I commend the term to your attention now.

I think it works because it clearly conveys the bidirectional, give-and-take nature of these things. Input/output. Flipflop. Ping pong. GnipGnop. Blogs, and...

2003-06-13T19:51:00.000-07:00

More Thoughts on Ad Pollution

There's a lovely scene in Neal Stephenson's Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller (gratuitous affiliate link), which I'd quote in full, but it appears my copy has been toddlered, so I'll just have to summarize:

Protagonist Sangamon Taylor is a chemist and environmental activist; he works for GEE, an organization that resembles Greenpeace. He meets up with a co-worker who has been driving a GEE-owned car; when they stop at a gas station, he discovers that the dipstick is dry. When she shrugs off the matter as uninteresting, he flies into a rage, lecturing her about the cost, both environmental and financial, of replacing a car, and then he reminds her of The Tragedy of the Commons and the tendency of people to undervalue that for which they do not have to pay directly.

"Checking the oil in the Omni," he finishes, "is another kind of environmentalism."

That phrase has stuck with me for years, and come in handy in many a situation. Because what's environmentalism all about, really? Protecting the commons. It's misunderstood by some as being about the hugging of trees and the cuddling of fuzzy baby owls, but what it's about is making sure that in the future, you won't have to be rich to breathe fresh air and drink clean water and eat nontoxic food and look at a pretty landscape now and then. Those things are our common heritage... and the people who want to take them away, destroy them, and then sell inferior substitutes back to us for a profit, must be fought.

And, of course, it's not the only kind of commons.

Why is it wrong to shoplift? I'll pick a favorite example: You know those stupid little plastic packets of condiments and envelopes of salt and sugar that you get at cheap restaurants? Those sure do suck, don't they? You know why we have to put up with those? Because the salt and pepper shakers kept getting stolen. Oftentimes--probably more often than not--by people who could easily have afforded to buy salt and pepper shakers, who thought the the item was so cheap that no one could possibly miss it. This is just the tiniest, most trivial way our shared world has gotten uglier, more annoying, and less congenial--especially in places frequented by those who aren't rich--because our trust in each other has been eroded away by petty theft. Not stealing is another kind of environmentalism.

Why was Eldred vs. Ashcroft such a horrible blow? Because our generation and those that came before us were lucky enough to have a rich public domain to draw from in creating new artistic work, and our descendents will be stuck with no more than what we had--after we've already thoroughly mined it--and anything else, they'll have to pay for. Disgusting. Protecting the public domain is another kind of environmentalism.

Why are free and open-source software such good things? Because they balance the tendency of commerce to put fences up around the commons, with an opposite process--the creation of whole new commons, by people who understand that shared effort leads to shared benefit. Linux is another kind of environmentalism.

And--at last, we come to the point--it's not a coincidence that when I posted the other day about removing brands and banner ads, I used an environmental metaphor, "walking out of a vast cloud of poison".

Perhaps the very least appreciated commons is precisely the one that we'd most need the use of if we wanted to appreciate it: clarity of thought. Our lives are short, dammit; we deserve to have our brains operating at peak efficiency so we can make the best use of the time we have. And instead, we have created a half-trillion-dollar industry entirely devoted to filling our brains with mahooha.

The amazing thing is how little it bothers me, most of the time. I rarely think about it. I wouldn't be thinking about it now if Mike hadn't brought the subject up the other day. But just read his rant for a taste of how ubiquitous this crap is. And I know from my own experience how much of a burden it is--simply freeing myself from the relatively benign and unobtrusive banner ads that litter the web was a nearly religious experience. Installing SpamAssassin recently was perhaps even more of a relief (though not as dramatically eye-opening, of course, because the one thing no one will ever say about spam is Huh, I never noticed before how annoying that stuff is).

If you haven't tried turning down the volume, you just can't imagine how noisy the world is, how much it knots your muscles, how distracted you are. (And there aren't any technological tools for eliminating billboards and brand names and "swoosh"-logo t-shirts.) And yet, mostly... we don't notice. We're the proverbial boiled frogs.

And I haven't even mentioned the content of the noise. Yesterday, as it happens, my wife read me a passage from the book Affluenza (another gratuitous affiliate link, but please don't buy it if your library has it, or this ever-lengthening screed will be rendered somewhat hypocritical); it was a description of a marketing conference called "Kid Power" that was held at Disney World in 1996, with a keynote address called "Softening the Parental Veto":

Speaker after speaker revealed the strategy: Portray parents as fools and fuddy-duddies who aren't smart enough to realize their children's need for the products being sold. It's a proven technique for neutralizing parental influence in the marketer/child relationship. [...] "Anti-social behavior in pursuit of a product is a good thing," [speaker Paul] Kurnit stated calmly, suggesting that advertisers could best reach children by encouraging rude, often aggressive behavior and faux rebellion against the strictures of family discipline.
Hoo ha. I can't wait til my kid starts marinating in that crap.

(There's a discursive point to be made here about the ironic fact that those politicians who make worshipful obeisance to and disdain the least interference with the almighty Free Market!, and grant privelege after privelege to the ones who so eagerly send exactly these messages, are exactly the same politicians most inclined to kvetch about family discipline and the lack thereof. But I don't feel like going there just now, so let's take the thought as the deed, 'kay? Thanks.)

It boils down to this: The ability to string two thoughts together without being shouted at is another commons. And they're stealing our commons. For money. Again.

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got til it's gone?
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

But Joni got it wrong; sometimes you don't know what you've got even after it's gone.

And shutting off the ads is another kind of environmentalism.

2003-06-12T11:09:00.000-07:00

Toddler poetry

Car seat, 11 June 2003

2003-06-09T20:54:00.000-07:00

The Logo and its Discontents

Just a quick link to a brilliant rant from my friend Michael Taht about his efforts to eliminate brands from his life.

Michael used to work for one of the bigger banner-advertising firms on the web; at the same time, he was running an ad-filtering proxy server from his home. When I started reading the web via that proxy, it was flippin' amazing how much of a psychic burden the absence of banner ads lifted from my mind. It was like I'd been living in a vast cloud of poison, and never noticed it until I walked out of it one day, and breathed fresh air for the first time in years.

Reading via a proxy made a number of web pages work less well or not at all, and eventually I took one last deep breath, and willingly walked back into the poison--glad, at least, to know that it was a choice.

But I remember the feeling of peace... and I'm sure that if the brands and logos on all the objects in my home and office were to disappear tomorrow, that same feeling would be there again.

2003-06-09T18:27:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody, I'm back.

I've been getting complaints. Turns out there are people actually checking this blog periodically, almost as if they were expecting me to post to it. Like that was what it was for or something. Weirdos.

Okay, my excessively optimistic readers, I'm sorry. It's been over a month. My last post was long and it was hard to write, a big commitment of time and effort and a trip through an emotional mangle, and finishing it kept me up late and irritated my wife, and I just found it hard to motivate myself to do it again. Plus, a number of people were kind enough to link to it, and I really did want it to be read, and the permalink was bloggered, so I hesitated to post a followup in the interest of keeping it up near the top of the blog.

But most importantly: I started this blog thinking it was mostly going to be for the telling of a particular ongoing story--to wit, my layoff, after fifteen years, from SCO. Well, I've been laid back on. They extended my job for two months, then finally cancelled the layoff altogether. I have concluded that "ability to remain employed at SCO" is my superpower. One of these days I'm sure I'll figure out how to fight crime with that.

And though I don't feel anywhere near as secure here as I once did, I'm happy about the turn of events. My life doesn't revolve around work as much as it used to, and what I want more than anything is time with my family and friends. SCO gives me a short commute, a 32-hour-a-week working schedule, co-workers I adore, and a skimpy but nevertheless adequate salary. A part of me thinks that in clinging to this job I'm turning down an invitation from life; maybe I should have let the currents of reality float me to another, maybe better career; maybe this was an opportunity to reexamine my life and priorities and do something truly new. But a bigger part is just glad to be spared the hassle for a while; this is what I care about today.

I do want to say something about SCO, though. Look: I really, honest-to-god, have no opinion at all on the merits of SCO's claims in the lawsuit they're currently pursuing against IBM. I don't have any knowledge of the code in dispute, and I wouldn't be allowed to discuss it even if I did. But I want to make a few general ethical statements, because it's an important issue to me, and to some very dear friends (including one who has linked to this blog).

Ethical statement 1: Taking someone's code and re-releasing it contrary to his or her wishes is wrong. If someone did that, then it would be right for the injured party to get some redress. Whether it happened or not is for the court to figure out, but if it did happen, that's not okay.

Ethical statement 2: I believe passionately in open source (as well as the subtly-distinct category of free) software. I really do. This world is a far better place for the existence of Linux and *BSD, and if they eventually take over the market to extent that I can no longer make a living working on proprietary UNIX, I will accept that outcome with equanimity and even happiness. I want the gift economy to thrive. I want to prove that such a radical idea can be made to work--because I think it might well be the first step that leads us into a much better future.

So I have a certain amount of cognitive dissonance here... because the leaders of the free and open source software movements, people I deeply respect and admire, apparently think my company's lawsuit is a threat. And I don't know that they're wrong. I hope they are. But I'm just caught in the middle, like a child of divorce, hoping against hope that everyone will win.

2003-04-25T08:02:00.000-07:00

Unhappy Anniversary

Clarissa: Pretty sad anniversary, huh?
Cratchit: What do you mean?
Clarissa: Didn't you realize? Today's Solstice Day.
Cratchit: Oh God, it is, isn't it. Remember how things used to be? We'd have that big party... seems like all it took to make us happy in those days was a ride on a roller coaster and a couple of drink tickets.
Keith: [Dreamily] And then we'd go watch the Follies. Sometimes for hours, and hours, and hours...

--Scene from SCO's distant future, depicted in "A Solstice Carol", SCO Follies 1998

As near as I can figure, the tradition began in 1983.

SCO was a tiny little startup, just starting to make a name for itself selling XENIX, a version of UNIX that ran on PC-compatible hardware. Its founders, Larry and Doug Michels, had wanted to start a, quote, "fun, little company," and they'd been wildly successful at it. Immense quantities of work, sixty hour weeks, but man, the place was fun.

Well, Christmas time rolled around, and the company decided to throw a big party at the Cocoanut Grove (a party hall next to, and run by, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk amusement park). Good food, lots to drink, live music, and they rented out part of the park so people could ride the Giant Dipper as many times as they wanted. Fun had by all. But, due to the religious diversity of the company, and perhaps in an amused nod to the liberalism of Santa Cruz, the idea of calling it a "Christmas party" was discarded, and instead it was dubbed the SCO Solstice party.

The party would become an annual tradition... well, for some value of "annual". The next year, Christmas was just too busy a time, so the party was pushed back to January. The year after that, a trade show interfered with January, so February would have to do. And so on, until by around 1990, the "Solstice party" was being held, fairly consistently, on the last weekend of April, and there, at last, it stuck. Who cared if it was closer to the equinox? Solstice was a great name; why change it?

But I digress. I was speaking of the first Solstice, when a group of employees thought it would be fun to borrow the risers the band would be using to play dance music later on, and put on a little show for their co-workers. A couple of skits, a few song parodies. Loosely based on Star Trek. It wasn't particularly rehearsed, I'm told--people walked onstage carrying their scripts with them. I'm sure it was very amateurish. But hey--the audience had been drinking heavily; they didn't care. It went over well, and began another annual tradition: The SCO Follies.

I suppose a lot of companies probably have talent shows at their company parties; that's not unique. But I doubt if any other company ever did what SCO did: They started paying real money for the things. The first Follies show was on borrowed band risers, but by the time I joined the company in 1988, it was a full-scale multimedia rock-musical variety show, performed on the main stage at the Cocoanut Grove, in a 1000-plus-seat auditorium, and it had a $15,000 budget.

Was it really surprising? Nah. SCO was, at that time, located in a funky old building on Mission Street that felt (and smelled) more like a dorm than an office. Posters and pictures and jokes covered every wall. Laser Tag tournaments were held in the hallways at night (when most of the engineers were usually still working). Afternoon meetings usually provided beer and wine. There was a free "Stargate" video game, a sauna, and a big redwood hot tub in a shady courtyard, and the company's stated policy that there would never be a dress code of any kind meant that nudity, both in and out of the hot tub, was considered perfectly acceptable--and was fairly commonplace . For a twenty year old hacker/hippie like me, the place was a dream come true. I would have paid them to let me work there.

But I didn't know about the Follies at first. I was hired a month after the '88 show, so I'd been there nearly a year before I saw what I'd been missing. Some friends and I had started having a regular jam session on Wednesday nights in one of the bigger offices, using whatever instruments happened to come to hand; we called it the SCO Cacaphonic Orchestra (the misspelling of "cacophony" was deliberate). One day someone suggested we bang together a few tunes for a show that was happening in a few weeks, and I was too much of a ham to turn that down.

I was a bass player in those days, but there was a better one in the band, so I switched off to the drums, which I didn't remotely know how to play, but no one seemed to care. I borrowed a snare and a high hat from my best friend, practiced for twenty minutes, and then went to the rehearsal the day of the show.

It was chaos. There were thirty or forty people running around, practicing songs and dance moves, setting up the video projector, doing sound checks, making changes to the script in the middle of the tech rehearsal, for god's sake. An all-volunteer, consensus-driven project, it was like there were thirty directors. It was the most shamefully disorganized fiasco of a production I had ever seen, and I loved every single second of it.

And you know what? It was good. We're not talking Broadway, here, but for a bunch of techies messing around at a party, it was terrific stuff, with flashes of genuine brilliance (among them, the first-ever performance by a band Newsweek would one day hail as "lesser-known"--Deth Specula.) I still have a videotape of that show, and every time I watch it I expect to cringe for sixty solid minutes, and every time I'm surprised how honest-to-god funny it is. It couldn't possibly work, but it did.

So the next year I was assistant director and co-writer, then for a few years I did comedy bits, then I played a starring role. Eventually I became the director, and one of the principal writers, and I did that for seven years.

There were times in there when things got really rough at SCO. The Mission Street building closed, and the promise that they'd install a hot tub at the new office was broken. A gigantic wave of layoffs hit. The CEO resigned under fire after a sexual harassment lawsuit, and apparently overreacting to a fear of further lawsuits, the company tried to impose ridiculously straightlaced and paranoid rules--even shutting down its USENET news feed because someone might read smut and sue SCO for it. The company went public, began making almost all of its decisions in a desperate effort to please Wall Street, nearly always failed. I'm not saying there weren't good times too, but it was rough, and I often thought of leaving... and I always decided not to leave, and a big part of the reason was that at SCO, I was part of a troupe of players, and that was just too damn great to give up.

The Follies grew and changed. Bart Abicht, who preceeded me as director, proposed that we drop the variety show format and try to put on a real musical with a coherent story. It went over big, so we did it again, and again, weaving the stories as metaphors for the things we dealt with every day, whimsically casting the day-to-day tribulations at a rinkydink software company as great comic dramas: The "Phantom of the Operation", formerly an engineer, now horribly disfigured, battling against an evil vice president who is secretly working to destroy SCO. A fun-loving employee turned hateful, disillusioned executive who relearns the true meaning of SCO after being visited by the ghosts of SCO past, present and future. A marketeer with brains, a salesman with a heart, and an engineer with social skills, who all join Dorothy and go off to see the Wizard to have those things taken away.

For all the problems that SCO had (and, sometimes, caused), I will always honor them for this: Even at the worst of times, they never even considered dropping the Follies. We were an institution at that company. We added real value, and our execs were bright enough to realize it. We were like bards, in a way: By turning life at SCO into songs and stories, even though they were absurd, we explained SCO to itself, and brought people together. We were the bearers of a true corporate culture.

But, well. In August 2000, the company ran out of luck. We'd had a great couple of years in there, as people upgraded systems in anticipation of Y2K, but after that was over, our sales dropped through the floor. Hemmhoraging money, SCO made a deal to sell its operating systems business to Caldera Systems, a linux shop in Utah.

And that was pretty much that. I wanted--we all wanted--to transplant the Follies meme into new soil. We put on one of our best shows ever the following April (a takeoff on "Fiddler on the Roof"), and Caldera's CEO, Ransom Love, was there. He was a nice guy. He loved the show, told me it was a spectacular idea, wanted very much to see Caldera pick up the tradition. Two weeks later the merger/acquisition was complete. Six months after that it would have been time to start planning the next year's show... and no one would answer my mail about setting a budget.

I can't deny, it's been a hard time, and they've needed to save money. I can understand why a bunch of guys who weren't here through the company's formative years wouldn't think it was a priority. It's not a priority.

But I mourn anyway. It's been two years now, and even if the money became available, the Follies would be nearly impossible to resurrect. Most of the crew that put the shows on has left or been laid off--including me, pretty soon. Something that must have been unique in the corporate world is gone. A totally home-grown genre, a genuine indigenous theatrical tradition, dust in the wind.

It would have been this weekend. As I type these words, it's 10:30 PM. I'd just be wrapping up the Friday night tech rehearsal, sending the actors and singers home, having a last conference with the producer and stage manager and sound designer, heading home for a fitful night of sleep before the two dress rehearsals tomorrow morning. At 7:55 PM, I would have gathered everyone involved in a big "love circle", held hands, blown off steam with some group yelling, given them some last words of advice, told them I was as proud of their hard work as if I was their dad, told them I loved them, and sent them off to put on the Best Damn Follies Show Ever. 8 PM the show would have started. It would have been this weekend.

But, instead, I'm just going to drink a quiet toast. To the 200-odd people who've helped put on Follies shows over the years. To the thousands of employees and ex-employees who attended the shows and laughed and cheered even when they themselves were being ridiculed. To a company that never entirely lost its sense of humor until it was struck a fatal blow. To Larry and Doug and the many others who built that company. To the hope that somewhere out there, something just as wonderful is waiting to be found and brought to life. Cheers.

2003-04-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

On my journey

So I thought I'd post a little rundown on the sequence of emotions and thoughts that run through your head when you get laid off, if you're me:

Phase 1: Temporary stupidity
What the fuck? But... but... My fifteenth anniversary with the company is next month! They couldn't have waited a month for my anniversary?! I want my damn fifteen year plaque!!

Phase 2: Brief return to rationality
Boy howdy, that is a reeeeealllly stupid thing to be thinking about at a time like this. Come on, Evan, get your eye on the ball. Better read all this stuff about severance.

Phase 3: Fullblown jitters
Wait a minute, I can't follow this. What did that last paragraph say? [Reread paragraph] Wait a minute, I can't follow this. What did that last paragraph say? [Reread paragraph] Wait a minute, I can't follow this...

Phase 4: Denial
Say, I'm surprised I'm taking this so calmly! Wow, look how calm I am! I'm so calm!

Phase 5: Giddy fretfulness
Might as well start calling everyone I know who has a job in Santa Cruz and see if they can get me a job at their company! There is nobody hiring in Santa Cruz. Might as well call anyway! Give up, you're gonna have to commute. Maybe my friends who are doing the startup will get funding soon--I know they'll hire me! Oh yeah, there's a good decision--plan your life on the basis of some venture capitalist's whim, very bright.

Phase 6: Anger
You know what? That present they gave me after we shipped the last release sucked. It SUCKED! That present was a fucking INSULT! Fucking fuckers. Fuck.

Phase 7: Bargaining
Wait a minute. There is no possible way this company is going to get along without me. I'm the only one who's been here long enough to remember why things are done the way they are. I'm the only one who knows how the packaging and installation code work; they won't be able to ship the next release wihtout me. This is a completely stupid decision. They'll have to change their minds. Maybe it would help if I offered to take a pay cut and work a four day week...

Phase 8: Manic activity
I'm gonna work on my friends' startup project--the sooner they have a working prototype, the sooner they get funding, and the sooner they get funding, the sooner they can hire me! Oh, I should also work on the open source PPPoE implementation I started a while ago! Say, wouldn't it be neat to build a solar oven for the back yard? Hey, I know, I'll start a blog! Maybe I should update my resume or read the severance paperwor... naaaah.

2003-04-02T15:58:00.000-08:00

Hello America!

Hi, my name's Evan Hunt, I live in Santa Cruz, and apparently I have an ego the size of a planet. I can't think of any other reason I'd imagine people were interested in reading an online journal of mine, and yet here I am, starting one up. Life is full of little mysteries like this.

Here's some stuff to know about me: I'm married, for eleven and a half years now, to the scintillating Wendy, my first girlfriend, love of my life, and coolest person on earth. I'm daddy to Ben, eighteen months old, best baby ever, don't even get me started, just suffice it to say there's never been another child as cute, smart, funny, strong, or generally and in all ways admirable as mine, and what do you mean "biased"?!

Fatherhood has taken the place of most of my other hobbies; there's just no time these days. But in other years, I enjoyed writing and directing plays, acting and singing, playing music (guitar, harmonica, some piano), writing songs (mostly parodies but some originals), bicycling, flying small airplanes, serving on the board of a local community theatre, and teaching and performing improvisational comedy.

I am passionate about politics, of the strident-liberal variety, guilt and all. Also about intentional community and cohousing, though I don't live in such a community myself (yet), renewable energy and conservation, technology of all sorts, film, theatre, and architecture, principally so I can complain about it, because good God, American architecture sucks, but I digress.

What do I do for a living? Well, that's an interesting question, right there.

I'm a software engineer. A system programmer. I work on the UNIX kernel, the TCP/IP stack, network utilities. Give me an RFC and I'll implement it for you. I've worked for the past fifteen years for SCO (The Santa Cruz Operation, later acquired by Caldera Systems, later renamed to The SCO Group). I know you linux geeks out there are a little ticked off at SCO right now, but it's been a very good place to work.

I'm on a closeknit little team of about six to eight engineers (depending on how you count) and we're responsible for every aspect of the SCO OpenServer 5 operating system. There just aren't enough of us to specialize in anything, so the job is endlessly various. In addition to the things I described above, I handle packaging and integration software and system administration middleware and user interfaces, I port open source packages, I fix bugs in the X server or the compiler, I maintain all the web browsers and make sure in-place upgrades work from one release to the next. Lately I taught the OS how to deal with USB floppy disks, PCI parallel adapters, and Mozilla. It's a fun job.

And I just got canned, y'see.

Well, I mean, maybe. We'll see about that; yesterday I had a two-week transition before my job ended, and today they asked me if I could stay for the rest of the month. Next week, who knows, they may decide that laying me off was a bad idea in the first place and let me stay (I can hope). If not, I may still end up working here as a contractor, like a dozen or more other former employees who somehow still come to work every day. Or I may find a dream job somewhere else! Or I may be out of work for months. Or years. I really don't know with any certanty what's going to happen. Hence the name of this blog.

And it's weird for me to be processing this. I've been here for fifteen years. I was twenty years old when I started. It's been my whole adult life. It's not every day you let go of a fifteen year job and go do something else; maybe I should write about it as it happens and see if it emerges as an interesting story. Hence the existence of this blog.

No doubt I'll spend a lot of time ranting about politics or enthusing about solar power or drooling about how adorable my son is, too, but the reason I'm sitting here typing this right now is that I want to keep some record of this period of freaked-out uncertainty dropped into the middle of a life previously notable for a fairly unusual degree of stability. I'll try not to whine too much; I'm well aware that people in Baghdad have it a lot worse than I do right now. But it's the story I have to tell today.

Hope it's not too dull for my legions of reader. Toodleoo, now.