A very busy day.
I had several dreams, including one very upsetting one, but I don't remember
any of them now.
I went to the chiropractor and continued to feel better.
In Berkeley, I went by
Berkeley TRiP
and got a BART Plus
pass. This is really cool; I wish I'd known about it before. I can
ride Muni and AC Transit "for free" (at a significant discount) with this
pass.
I went to Michelle's Spanish and Portuguese graduation in Zellerbach. The
speaker was Prof. Robert Alter, who talked about the importance of reading
literature, and got in a plug for independent bookstores, even mentioning
Cody's and Black Oak by name.
My nose started to bleed just before the Italian Department graduated. Oops.
Maybe it's a good thing that I never finished that hypothetical double major
with Classics and Computer Science. If I had, I'd have been in that very
graduation ceremony, and then, if my nose had started to bleed, it would
have been extremely inconvenient.
I did think a lot about the fact that, if I hadn't dropped out of Berkeley,
I would have been graduating around now, and quite possibly would even
have graduated already. Things would have been very different for me.
In the evening, I went to a party at Sumana's house, which was lots of fun.
I met Leonard in person there.
Overheard: "Geeks need advocates."
Sumana has a comic book version of the Mahabarata, in which
the Bhagavad Gita gets an entire issue all to itself. She
also has a different comic book version of the Mahabarata
in which the entire epic is a single issue, and the Gita is
a single page. I should have written down the text of that page
so I could quote it.
I wish I were a cartoonist. Cartoons can be an amazingly effective medium,
and you can certainly draw cartoons on very serious themes (I've seen
physics and African-American history as examples). No wonder the
Comics Code Authority wanted to make sure that cartoonists drew nothing
offensive to faith or morals...
(The CCA is an amazing episode in the history of "industry self-regulation"
in America, and how much more powerful it can be than the government
censorship it seeks to stave off. What do you mean, you've never heard of
it? Well, I hadn't either until I came across some of
Seth's web pages.)
We played Trivial Pursuit, and our team lost. I went to sleep.
Douglas Adams has left this Earth,
Upon which he provoked much mirth.
Just forty-two plus seven he:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Leonard woke me up really early in the morning because he and Sumana were
leaving for a trip. Amusingly enough, I decided to go back to San Francisco
so Duncan could pick me up and take me to Foothill.
And that's exactly what I did, so I ended up at Mongomery and Market around
7:00 in the morning (the last time I was there that early on a weekend,
Rick Moen still lived in the CoffeeNet!). I waited around for a while and
bought a bagel, and then Duncan picked me up, with Simon, Duncan Jr., and
Daniel in the car.
"Foothill" means the Foothill
College Electronics Flea Market, a monthly tradition which I've heard
about for years but which I'd never experienced in person. It's run in
a parking lot at
Foothill College in Los Altos.
This thing is amazing! It starts before dawn and continues until sometime
in the middle of the day. All kinds of vendors -- most of whom are
just individuals -- show up and set up tables or carpets or junk piles
in the parking lot. Then you walk around and talk to them and buy things.
There's a big ham radio focus to the event, but that's not all that you
can find there. I bought a slide rule, a bunch of LEDs, a big 12-volt
rechargeable battery (like an electric scooter battery or a an electric
wheelchair battery), two 1-watt solar panels, and, last but not least,
a traditional IBM PC keyboard! The keyboard is the big heavy type with
the very loud keys which make a satisfying clickety-clack. I learned
to touch-type on one of those keyboards, and I can still type faster
on them than on any other kind of keyboard. Some people have also suggested
that the strong springs will reduce wrist injuries. I know I really
enjoy typing on a keyboard like that.
Of course, there were other neat things I didn't buy -- whole systems,
component kits, oscilloscopes, lots of other test equipment. There was a
PAL programmer -- if only I had some use for a PAL programmer!
Michelle does want to have an electric graduation cap, so we're going to
work on that. I dug out my Engineer's Mini-Notebook set
and looked up the 555 timer chip. I think I have a few of those sitting
around, so maybe I can figure out how to produce a good clock pulse with
a 555 and then drive a relay from that and make some LEDs flash.
Duncan gave me a ride back from Foothill to Berkeley, and we met up with
Michelle and had lunch. It was still early in the day; I'd thought that
Cristina's graduation was at noon, but I was wrong. Eventually we went
to the ceremony, the Berkeley English Department graduation in the
Greek Theater.
One of the speakers gave the following reason for studying English:
I became an English major because I love to read, yes: but I also
wanted to get credit for it.
Now that's really sensible, unlike the claim of another speaker that
recently scientists
have cloned the human genome.
I have a history of complaining about claims people make about the genome
in speeches. One hint: the Human Genome Project is not the same as
cloning or genetic engineering. My guess is that the speaker here meant
that scientists have mapped the human genome.
Cristina and Christine were both graduaing, and they
arranged it so they graduated one after another. Since their names are
pronounced the same way, it was amusing to hear the cheers from our
section: "Go Cristina! Go Christine!"
Some parties followed, and I went back to the City. I ran into two people
from Cal Libertarians on my way home.
As usual, Berkeley was a very educational place.
Overheard on BART:
- "I listen to Pacifica Radio and I
read the Bay
Guardian, so I know what's really going on."
- "Nobody ever falls in love, it's all a media-based lie to sell movies,
and to sell songs."
(If the second claim were true, it would give new meaning to the Dar Williams
lyric "whoever thought of love is no friend of mine".)
Saturday was the one-year anniversary of my first experience of arm pain.
It's amazing to think that I've had these injuries for a whole year.
The wisdom of Tim O'Reilly, as expressed on the Free Software Business
mailing list:
License terms like the right to fork, and the right to redistribute
under the same terms, are *protections* of open source effectiveness,
not causes of them.
Lao Tzu says:
Losing the way of life,
men rely on goodness.
Losing goodness, they rely on laws.
The laws or licenses we create are needed because people have lost sight
of or never understood why open source works (the way of life, the
science and market dynamics of why this is an effective software
development paradigm), or they have lost goodness, and look to subvert
the system for short term local benefit. They don't drive the system.
I didn't reach my mother until Monday, but I hope mothers in general had a
good day.
I had a nice time in Berkeley. Michelle wants an electric graduation cap,
and I'm trying to help out. I finally learned to use a 555 timer chip to
generate clock pulses (thanks to the Radio Shack Engineer's
Mini-Notebook on the subject), so now if I can find solid-state
relays, I can put together some really bright flashing lights.
It's amazing that someone can support free trade and oppose free immigration!
How can that be? Isn't your right to go somewhere even more obvious than your
right to sell things there? For that matter, isn't your right to sell your
labor in any market more obvious than your right to sell personal property in
any market?
It's strange that free immigration is an idea associated with the left and
free trade with the right. I can understand how you can believe in free
immigration without free trade -- if you think that the economic is not
the personal (I just wrote something on CTY-L about this issue) or that
property rights are
socially constructed. How can you believe in free trade without free
immigration? How can that be?
Is it just that free trade is good for business?
I'm getting pretty upset with trade treaty organizations, more so all the
time, for their failure to defend free trade in general, not just in narrow
areas (and for how they export bizarre U.S. intellectual property law through
"harmonization"). I wish -- this will be nothing new to readers of this
diary -- that opponents of treaties like the FTAA would take the approach
that free trade is good but that the treaty organizations don't achieve it
and mix in other things.
For me, free trade is particularly desirable, not because it's good for
business (which I do think is a benefit!), but because it erodes and
diminishes the relevance of the international system and of national borders.
National borders are so contemptible to me; free trade diminishes their
impact. So does free immigration. Today, we finally have half-decent
communication across national borders -- radio, the global telephone network,
the Internet, and the global postal system. Not so bad. That diminishes the
impact of national borders too.
I want to write something about the role of business, supporting the ideal
that politics should neither help nor hinder it, and the idea that it's (just)
one of many important parts of human life. This reminds me very much of
the injunction
You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be
partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness
shall you judge your neighbor.
(Leviticus 19:14 (RSV))
Donella Meadows too is
dead,
Who wrote about what lay ahead
For humankind in times to be:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The 555 timer circuit is cool; I'm just following a "cookbook" application,
but I have adjustible clock pulses which I can probably get to drive TTL
circuits.
I can't drive a relay coil directly, unless perhaps I use a very high
input voltage, or a transistor, and I still don't see how the transistor
would work, although there seem to be "cookbook" examples of that too.
It's more fun to understand the theory behind something than to follow
somebody's instructions.
I looked into how to get unemployment
benefits, but I haven't applied yet.
I need to do more to look for work. I'm likely to apply to
VA Linux and
Red Hat, two prominent free software
companies which have done a lot for the community. I have some concerns
about some of Red Hat's marketing campaigns, but I think the company has
done great things for the community and for the public's awareness of
Linux, not to mention
the public domain.
Perhaps they have work in the field of training.
[Main]
Contact: Seth David Schoen
