Dreams
... were it not that I have bad dreams.(Hamlet, II, 2)
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I saw Mr. Bad for the second time in two days and again had lots of fun. This time it was BayFF, where Chuck D (the musician) spoke about on-line music. Mr. Bad, Biella, Mike and I sat together, heard Chuck D say various extremely funny and in some cases extremely provocative things, and then went off to the BAD meeting (no relation to Mr. Bad except that he is a Bay Area Debian developer) where I saw Joey, Justin, and Ian Jackson (special guest) as well as some people I didn't know. Then we went to dinner.
I got Ian Jackson's business card, so I could conceivably sign his PGP key now.
One interesting thing at the BayFF meeting was that somebody mistook me for Seth Finkelstein and congratulated me on winning an EFF Pioneer Award. So I said I wasn't sethf but that I would accept the congratulations and forward them along, which I will.
There was actually an e-mail thread about how people at BayFF thought I was Seth Finkelstein. I guess the confusion was for real.
Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, That all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, That all novelty is but oblivion.(Francis Bacon, "Of Vicissitude of Things"; quoted by Borges)
I walked up to Sutro Tower and back in the afternoon. It's really big! I remembered writing a poem in college about an antenna; it was a sad poem and I wish I still had a copy. (It might be on that hard drive over there, if I could recover it.)
Sutro Tower is always bigger than you think, or always further away than it looks. It's the tallest structure in San Francisco, and visible from more places than any other -- for example, you can see it at any time of day from my bedroom window, and probably from tens of thousands of other bedroom windows in the City.
I brought back a stick, like a walking stick, from a dead branch of a tree that grows right by Sutro Tower, perhaps in its shadow. The branch is unusually lightweight, like bamboo or balsa wood -- closer in appearance to bamboo.
The composition of this diary entry was interrupted by a blackout on my block which lasted for at least several hours (the power came back on after I went to bed). I was told that a transformer exploded somewhere nearby. Our UPSes lasted for an hour or so, but after that, no more Internet access, no more computer use, no more electric lights. "It was like another century", but not really.
I tried writing a letter by candlelight, which was an unusual experience, but I guess the only real benefit was that I got to write truthfully that I was writing that letter by candlelight. I suppose I could do that any time I want, since I have candles (I no longer live in the Berkeley dorms). But I wouldn't usually think of it; if it happens, it probably happens by accident.
The Moon is Full
and today is Palm Sunday. I wonder if Berkeley SANE deliberately invited Richard Dawkins to speak during Holy Week (and Passover).
Zack and I did laundry and went to CostCo. On the way back, we stopped by the new EFF office, which is still under construction down the street on Shotwell.
I fixed a DNS outage; if you couldn't resolve vitanuova.loyalty.org recently, it was due to my error. I'm still trying to get DNS over to homer properly. It's really a pain to deal with Network Solutions.
Contact: Seth David Schoen