°02.09.26.th | changes

"In time, even sad endings will become happy. The sad ending is only because the author stops telling the story. But it still goes on. It's just untold." - Francis Falls, Twin Falls Idaho

The sentiment above is one of my favorites. I'll tell you why. Eight years ago I was in a bad way. I was new to the pain of my repetitive stress injury (RSI) and the anxiety resulting from its effect on my career. I was new to the sometimes harshness of MIT and the intimidation of so many smart people. I was new to Boston and a frightful loneliness: I was without my college friends and the relationship with which I assuaged all other anxieties.

But, by my second year I was managing my RSI, had made new friends, had realized that my best efforts were often still good enough, and that I had to be a source of and responsible for my own contentment. When I graduated from MIT I was happy and confident: moving to New York would be an adventure! I had begun to live life instead of fearing it. That's not to say that the past seven years has been uniformly great. While my general outlook has improved greatly, anxiety has stepped forward as an occasional and specific tormentor. Before I was often depressed and generally anxious; now I'm generally happy and at ease but three and a half years ago a crushing panic attack knocked me on my ass, repercussions included anxiety about meetings/talks (which while natural sounding was new to me!) and obsessing about how much I swallowed or blinked my eyes. But for the past three years life has been charmed. My job has been challenging and rewarding, the Cambridge streets are full of friends and acquaintances, I've traveled the world over, and I have a fantastic relationship with an awesome woman! All of this came with an ease of the moment. All big questions could be postponed.

However, in turning 30 this year, I've thought that with the benefits of experience also comes a responsibility of decision. I can't keep thinking, "I'll go back to school one day," or "I'll stop throwing away rent in this place some day." My current projects at work are finishing up and I've been thinking about "what's next?" Will I be able to find a new project that is compelling to me at W3C? What about a different job, in this economy? Do I want to stay in Boston, or move elsewhere? Will I find and enter the right PhD program? Or should I focus on buying a home? And of course, any movement (even if productive) in any of these positions unsettles my whole frame. So I've been stressing: sometimes sleep doesn't come easy, my RSI acts up, my immune system takes a dive, I break out and feel ugly, and I'm probably not as charming as I usually am. The usual stuff!

However, I'm not writing to complain or bitch. Relative to all else, I've got little cause and I now know how to at least try to deal with it. (I used MIT's new athletic facilities and swimming pool for the first time last night!) Nor do I have to do anything I don't want to, I could go live in a Buddhist commune for a year if I wanted. What I wanted to capture is a very heartening irony: I look at it like my Grandfather thinks of WWII. He once told me, "I would never want to go through that again, but I wouldn't give up those experiences for anything either." Despite the intense misery of eight years ago, it set me on a course that I'm thankful for. So when I think about future uncertainty, I must remember that if life only presents to me what I anticipate, I've stopped living it to the fullest.

°02.09.25.we | scientology

The Church of Scientology (CoS) is again attempting to censor and harass those critical of the organization. LawMeme reports:

The Wayback Machine (aka Archive.org, The Internet Archive) has, with little fanfare, removed entire domains from its archive in accordance with a request from Scientology's lawyers ... The problem is not that the Internet Archive received such a request from the Church of Scientology's lawyers, or even complied with the legal portions of the request, but that the Internet Archive has not taken minimal steps to defend free inquiry and access to information. LawMeme reveals the sordid details... This current attack by Scientology on freedom of expression appears very similar to what happened to Google back in March 2002...

The malice of CoS shouldn't be new to anyone who's ever heard of the organization, but I just noted that their efforts are, to some degree, working. A google query shows only one link to a critical site, Operation Clambake at third place, which is the one that is now purged from The Internet Archive. Link to it if you can, it should be the first thing people read!

°02.09.24.tu | night lights

Photography at night is difficult because of the varied sources of lighting. Artificially lighting is notoriously ... artificial. While our eyes+brain is good at compensating, our imaging devices are not so sophisticated. We must use a filter or change the white balance mode to achieve a natural cast. Scenes with more than one light source escape easy correction because there's no single filter or mode that can accommodate all of the sources!

But occasionally, the results are interesting. In this photograph, I like the greenish cast of the mercury-vapor street lamps and the brown hue of a hazy sky lit by the harvest moon.

°02.09.23.mo | life and death

The romantic interpretation — if such a thing is permitted for house flies — of this image is "the final embrace": la petite et grande morte. The cynical interpretation is that male male flies have trouble distinguishing between fungus infected corpses and females!

°02.09.18.we | design is like a mortgage

Someone asked me what I meant by "amortize" in my thoughts on Balancing the Swinging the Seesaw. Since I'm fond of metaphors, I dragged yet another one (home mortgages) into play.

Amortize: "To write off an expenditure for (office equipment, for example) by prorating over a certain period."

When I think about an application, there's a certain expenditure one must make with respect to design. I can do it quick and cheap now and incur most of the cost later when I'm confronted with issues of scalability, interop, and extensibility. Or I can spend a time at the start by modeling and designing for flexibility and extensibility, and consequently avoid compound interest in the future. Think of purchasing an old fixer-upper home: you can select from a couple of properties on the market. First, you want something with the a sound footing and an inexpensive price. Also, you'll probably need a mortgage. The smaller the down payment, the larger the total cost. So ideally, you want your down payment to be as large a portion of the total price as possible. But, your initial cash reserve is limited, so you commit to your down payment and then you can at least move in and start fixing the house and increasing its value. Same thing with applications! In the end you want to move in and improve where most needed, but you also want something with a sound architectural footing. That's a balancing act, though sometimes there's design principles and technologies that lessen (win/win) immediate and future costs. RDF has a great architectural footing — those who don't like it are doomed to reinvent it poorly — but an immediate/localized cost of comprehension. For example, in RSS 1.0 the order semantic of RDF sequences imposes a cost without much benefit. It's a sequence, but you don't know what sort of sequence: a mandatory RDF artifact for an optional feature doesn't make much sense to me.

Plus, in the great marketplace of ideas, no single design/technology is guaranteed to succeed. Spending too much time on any single technology at the start might be an unwise investment. (Torvalds' theory on design and project management is useful reading on this note.)

°02.09.17.tu | science policy

My concerns about the way the Bush administration works, independent of the policies it sets, continue to grow. Earlier this year Washington successfully campaigned to remove Dr. Robert Watson from the Chair of UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); now the administration is removing our own scientific expertise. Bush is using an ice-pick to blind and lobotomized our country and then asking the nice industry representatives to help the nation cross the street of science policy.

"The Bush administration has begun a broad restructuring of the scientific advisory committees that guide federal policy in areas such as patients' rights and public health, eliminating some committees that were coming to conclusions at odds with the president's views and in other cases replacing members with handpicked choices...

A third committee, which had been assessing the effects of environmental chemicals on human health, has been told that nearly all of its members will be replaced -- in several instances by people with links to the industries that make those chemicals. One new member is a Californium scientist who helped defend Pacific Gas and Electric Co. against the real-life Erin Brockovich." -HHS Seeks Science Advice to Match Bush Views

°02.09.16.mo | googleticement

A friend on mine recently co-founded a small company, sweatyfrog, that sells toys for design geeks; last week he asked me how does one get the attention of Google? I responded that Google likes what the web likes: you need links. This weekend I was thinking it might even be a worthwhile marketing expense to send freebies out to top bloggers if they're likely to mention (and link to) your site. This isn't that far fetched: the W3C was recently offered money for an invisible link from the Validator page, one of the most linked to pages on the Web!

°02.09.13.fr | chris

Not counting his fiery seven inch mowhawk and shit kickers with metal shin plates, Chris was a six foot frame for occasional gentleness and frequent anger. He came to college punked out but seemingly privileged. He had his own sports car, enviable clothes, and the ability to buy a stack of industrial/punk CDs every week. I suppose I had a platonic crush on him much like a younger boy follows an older, cooler, kid around the playground. I never understood, but his anger and nihilism seemed to stem from his relationship with his macho father and the "rednecks" of his hometown. While I tried to understand, perhaps my eagerness for our friendship become a nuisance, after a year our paths diverged.

Three years later as I readied for my own graduation I bumped into Chris without the spikes, boots, and anger. We hadn't seen each other in ages but he invited me to his wedding at a Unitarian Church.

The vows were lovely but I was still befuddled. The reception was held at a gay honky tonk bar where I remember the master of ceremonies clearing the floor for the newlyweds' dance, "Where are they? Get them out here! John wanted to make sure he got to dance with Chris during their favorite song." I foolishly thought to myself, "Ah, maybe this is something I'll like since Chris's favorite band is Einst°rzende Neubauten." But as men wearing stetson hats and pointy cowboy boots quietly waited and then joined the happy couple on the dance floor I realized I'd probably never get to dance to a song I liked, and why Chris had been so angry before.

°02.09.03.tu | autumn

I love autumn: cool evenings that lend themselves to comfy sweaters, over-alls, flannel blankets, and snuggling. My cooler weather menu also opens up before me: baked potatoes, gravy, hot tea, cider and chai. If spring signifies youth, autumn is a more ancient season. Not like a dusty bookshelf, but mountains scraped clean by glaciers and tree roots anchored far below the whims of wind.

Even my musical tastes change towards the contemplative: I discovered Deine Lakaien from RusGoth and I've listened to nothing other than the song Wunderbar for the past two days.

... glittering snowflakes under your golden glow
wrap myself up well in my woolen coat
i am lying at your feet sweet guardian over my sleep ...

____

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