adiwho’s Neighborhood

One of the biggest differences I noticed between living in the U.S. and living abroad is the number of stupid laws made here and signs to inform you of all of them and those other things the control freaks want you to know.

Go to any park or into an underground MUNI station to see what I mean.  No smoking, no pets, no offleash pets,  no loitering, no camping, no panhandling, no vending, no solicitig, stay to the right, yield seats for handicapped and elderly, stay behind yellow line, no unauthorized personally, don't touch the third fucking rail.

O RLY?

Since returning from Europe -- where there are relatively few of these things -- I've been tormented by the condescension.  But there was something else; some other reason it bothered me.  Upon reading this (via ydnar), it hit me:

The Drachten Experiment
Think of Drachten, where they removed all of the traffic lights and stop signs, based on the work of the late Hans Monderman. "The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior," says Monderman. "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles."

That's it.  Making sure that Everything You Need to Know is written on the walls and signs around you creates an environment where an individual is essentially absolved of the full breadth of things that make us good neighbors and educated well-mannered citizens.  When communities try to hold their people and way of life together with tactics akin to passive-aggressive sticky notes on the refrigerator, we all become lesser co-habitators.

I don't need a sign to tell me to give my seat on the bus to those who need it.  I don't need a sign to tell me to pick up my dog's shit.  I don't need a sign to tell me not to jump down onto the track of the BART train and touch the third-goddamned rail.  These things should be completely and utterly obvious and ingrained in everyone.  And if the failing of our society seems imminent without these prescriptions, then perhaps a few third rail surprises might actually help us all.

EOM

I worked for a little over a straight hour tonight on a new wiki document.  During that time, I kept previewing but never saved.  Dumb I know, but I kept thinking that I was done and then wanted to add a little more.  What's more, I didn't really want the page to show up in the recent changes list.

So I got to the point where I was actually done.  I had read over the document all the way to the bottom and had just decided to save when, of course, the computer completely freezes.

I did it to myself.  It was stupid.  I had two other text editors open that I could have used, saving the whole time, but no.  This was the price I had to pay for my idiocy.  Still, as you can imagine, I could have crushed rocks with my teeth.

So, after attempting (via another computer) to regain access to the UI, I finally threw in the towel and did a hard reboot.  After the reboot, I opened up all of my apps again.

So, you know how when Firefox crashes, it asks you if you want to restore your last session?  I love this feature.  Well, I did that and would you believe?  The browser remembered every single word of what I wrote and it was there waiting for me in the text area, ready for submission.

Seriously, Firefox, I don't think I could love you much more.

I've become much more pragmatic in the last year or so when it comes to trying out the latest and greatest apps.  That's mostly because I have a setup that works well for me and it would take something big to make me want to take time to learn a new app or a new habitual workflow.

Of course, when both Allan Odgaard and John Gruber link to the same one with glowing reviews, that's when I sit up and listen.  In fact, ExpanDrive is the app I've been waiting for.  And waiting for.  And waiting for.^[*]

ExpanDrive (and its Windows counterpart) allows you to very simply mount a remote filesystem over SSH as if it were just another drive on your Mac.  What's more, it apparently does so with blazing speed when compared to MacFUSE et al.  I can confirm this at least insofar as I've tested.

Now, I can easily move crap around my various webservers and edit remote files and entire directory hierarchies effortlessly from TextMate.  I can mount my mini (not as painful as it sounds) making it simpler to share an iTunes library.  I can even set things up so I can access my FireWire hard drives while on the road.

This is the future I've been waiting for. Minus, of course, the jetpack that's been back-ordered all my life...

^[*] - MacFuse had promise but the installation, cautions of latency and my pragmatism kept me away until they refined it. Ironically, at least some of the MacFUSE underpinnings are used in ExpanDrive but the latter adds some caching elves and other magical creatures to make up the speed difference.

While video has already hit the big time with YouTube, Vimeo, Revver and countless others, no release has gotten me excited about actually creating videos than Flickr's new video feature.  I actually said to Jen with real feeling behind it that I wanted to buy a video camera.  I've never wanted to hassle of tapes or the endless rising tide of hard disk space necessary to deal with video, not to mention the editing/rendering time.

I suppose the reason is that it's a site I love and already use and more importantly all of my friends already use it.  It's comfortable.  It's familiar.  It's simple and beautiful.  Not to mention that The Flip makes it look pretty damn easy for a very nice price.

And now all of my friends are MOVING like wizard pictures in Harry Potter!

I mean, how can you NOT love this?! (*Ahem* Vox we need embed support! :-)  You can go check out a whole bunch of other "editor's picks" from this group.

Of course, like anything on or off of the web it has its detractors...  Of course, if God came down from heaven and created ponies for every human being, there would still be people bitching saying "Ponies are smelly and too expensive to keep" or "Oh great, who's going to clean up all the horseshit?!" or "Horses make it dangerous for walkers!" or "You've been gone 2000 years and THIS is all you brought us!?" or "Hey, YOU'RE not supposed to be a black woman!?"

Like unemployment, there is always a baseline of assholes because some segment of the entire population at any one time is in a sufficiently shitty mood to want to ruin it for the rest.

But me?  I am a big fan.  Thank you, Flickr for proving once again (and time after time) that you guys are awesome.

Over the last 10 years, I've read a great deal about the Middle East most memorably "The Crusades through Arab Eyes" and although the history behind modern events goes back thousands of years, some of the concepts are very simple. 

Today Jason pointed to this excellent overview which gives you a basic feel for who the people of the Middle East are and who they aren't: What Every American Should Know About the Middle East

Are they teaching Middle Eastern history yet in schools?  Everyone should know at least the above if we intend to make smarter decisions in the future as a nation.

From time to time, I've pondered about how our civilized societies have seriously warped traditional Darwinism by protecting the infirmed (out of compassion and charity), the "genetically inferior" (not talking about eugenics here, knee-jerkers, but instead wonders of modern medicine) and the stupid (i.e Legislating and/or ensconcing in signage that which should be innate and/or common sense). 

The laws are further warped by economics in which the financially wealthy are far more able to likely to live longer, healthier and well and yet, perhaps in some scientific response, less likely to actually reproduce in numbers proportionate to said wealth.

If we are to look at microbiology as a microcosmic guide, one could hypothesize that we are not, in fact, masters of our own genetic destiny, impervious to our own future demise as a species but instead simply setting ourselves up for one hell of a biological knockout punch.

It's a really interesting subject to noodle on in your spare time when you're not not locked in a fight to the death with adversaries from another software project, or diligently stalking your prey on eBay or and hunting/gathering your Chinese food delivery.

All of this is a long way of getting to the original point of these post which was a demonstration that, despite our best attempts, natural selection still has plenty of opportunities:

Yesterday, I watched a whole lot of adults acting like children in the annual Bring Your Own Big Wheel race.

Bring your own Big Wheel (BYOBW) 2008

And one from the participant via a helmet cam!

[The following was written for the 2008 post-SxSW survey.  I'm posting it here not only because many people I talked to echoed the same sentiments but also because it exceed the form's maximum allowed length.  Yes, I'm verbose about things I'm passionate about. Go figure.]

This year was probably the worst SxSW for me in the many years I've been coming since 1989.  Most of it, I think, can boiled down what seemed to be massive awkward sudden growth in attendance which had two marked effects:

• Overcrowding and "denial of experience"
• Dilution of the serendipitous, memorable and opportune encounters and experiences from past years

In previous years, even the most packed panels had room for you to stand or sit on the floor.  Official parties were filled with interesting people and you could get to the bar.  And the best part, you could sit in one of two places and see within a fairly short time everyone you wanted to see.  Previous years were very much about unplanned social, business-related and educational serendipity.

This year, you had to plan things out well in advance, get into panels and parties as early as you could and then hope like hell that you were in a spot where you could hear or that you knew anyone.  And unlike all previous years, there was no central place to go and "be".  You could wander through the convention center for hours without seeing a single person you knew.

So the drastic increase in attendance, combined with the geographic dispersion of the conference rooms created what felt like a significant dilution of the entire experience and all of the things that made SxSW a must-attend even in the past.  At the same time, the massive crowds made any official party or must-see panel a "better off doing something else" event.  And that's really a shame.

So though there was little we could do about what happened inside of the convention center, we adapted outside of the convention center. The biggest success, in my opinion, this year is the same as last year: Twitter.  Thanks to Twitter, we could easily connect with friends, colleagues and others, know where the people we cared to see were and know which parties to avoid like the plague because the line was too long or the bar was out of Shiner. :-)

The most rewarding thing that fell out of all of the negatives this year was that we discovered the power of Twitter for creating our OWN parties, meetings and core conversations outside of the convention center. It only took a tweets from a handful of people converging on the same place for an unplanned party to immediately form where the bar was easily accessible, you didn't feel like you were in a cattle run and you didn't have to scream to hold a conversation.

Ideas for improvement

As far as solutions go, I can only offer a few possible ideas that would have made my experience better:

• Concentrate the locations of the panel rooms

    I've now seen parts of the convention center I never knew existed. That's not a good thing.  And if you can keep them on one floor, all the better.

• Create and/or promote a centralized space for people to gather

    This usually just falls out of a centralization of panel rooms since lots of people sit on the floow in the hallways, but you may want to go even further next year in creating and actively promoting a comfortable free-space (one indoor and one outdoor) for geeks to hang out, talk and meet one another.  It should either be central, close to high-traffic walkways (for high circulation and exposure) or be very attractive for one reason or another.  Creating a isolated space in the far corner of the convention center won't be used as you would expect unless there's something that draws people there.

• Lose the "core conversations"
  

    Originally, I was going to add "or make them work".  However, I'm not sure that that's even possible.  The conversations we used to have in the hallway were great just as they were.  It's impossible to have a conversation with 250 people who are straining to hear and that problem certainly contributed to the beyond-capacity regular panels as people would leave and camp out at the back door of a regular panel.  In the end, there just seemed to be less viable options when it came time to go to a panel.  (Again, I will readily admit, I am late to everything, but that was always fine in past years as you could still find room in the panel if not a chair).

• Station volunteer "ushers"

    I am quite sure that a number of the overflowing panels actually had room inside but people tend to stack up at the entrance in a standing-room-only situation.  To counter this, station a voluteer right inside the door for 15 minutes or so at the beginning of the panel to nicely ask people to migrate inwards and find a place to stand or sit.

I'm sure I will come back to SxSW next year not only because it's a hard habit to break but also to see if, perhaps, things change and the magic returns.  However, I have to say that if not, I am afraid that SxSW may lose its status as a "permanent holiday" that gets blocked off whenever I buy a new calendar.