There is a military cemetery in San Bruno, the Golden Gate National Cemetary. It turns out that Dan White is buried there.
Sumana, I happened across this just before reading your diary entry:
Just as memorials devoted to Americans killed in war do not focus on the countries they fought against, the Oklahoma City memorial is devoted to the victims and the rescue efforts rather than McVeigh [...]
While Timothy McVeigh was waiting to die, I was reading "So, Say Goodnight to Joshua: Homeland Defense and the Prosecution of Jim Bell" by Deborah Natsios. Here Natsios shows off her knowledge of cartography, geography, and history by connecting the history of the U.S. Pacific Northwest (where I still want to visit, much as my plans to do so have repeatedly failed) with the recent trial of Jim Bell, much watched by Cypherpunks and people who are curious about Cypherpunks. The writing style is interesting and thought-provoking; I can't say that I read the piece objectively, since I'm already familiar with several of the sources cited and have already formed some of my own opinions about them.
Natsios mentioned McVeigh and contrasted McVeigh with Bell. A major difference: Bell has never killed anybody. Instead, says the government, he placed people "in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury".
I have to admit that, when I first saw the link to "So, Say Goodnight to Joshua" on Cryptome, I thought "Why the hell would somebody write an academic paper about Jim Bell's trial? What's the interest?". But it made good reading. I hope to meet John Young and Deborah Natsios eventually.
One of the media articles about McVeigh led me to a site where Federal death row inmates have their own web diaries. One thing I learned there was that there is a Federal death row inmate younger than myself -- a very strange thought indeed. (There is a quotation from Tom Lehrer which is given in many different forms, all of which are along the lines of "It is a sobering thought that, when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for three years". I don't know the original source or the exact text. But it is a sobering thought that, when Christopher Vialva is my age, he will have been under a death sentence for three years.)
The EFF is sponsoring a protest at Macy's in San Francisco on Tuesday over Macy's privacy policies: allegedly the company shares detailed personal information from bridal registries with other companies without the knowledge of those who submitted the information.
Several people -- almost all male -- will dress up in wedding dresses and picket Macy's at Union Square.
I'm sure that the EFF position on the general issue will spark some debate among EFF supporters, because EFF has said that not only is opt-in the preferred practice, but it should be required by law. I don't think that this is proper, but protests against companies that don't respect their customers are pretty cool.
I followed a link from Sumana's diary and read most of Joel Spolsky's essay "User Interface Design for Programmers".
Many entire concepts of professional user interface designers and researchers have long irritated me, for many reasons which might be interesting to talk about. I suppose that it would be easy for me to say things at parties which would make it just as embarrassing to me for the person I'm talking to say "I'm a UI designer" as "I'm a software patent lawyer".
I enjoy the occasional excellently-designed GUI app as much as the next person, but much of the time, when I'm using proprietary software that integrates a lot of features into one UI, I feel confined. (Isn't it funny that some people claim to feel this way using command lines?)
Often, with GUI software, I feel as though I am playing a video game. (Nick, on the other hand, used the metaphor of cartoons to make fun of the strongest enthusiasts of GUIs: he said that literary culture had survived for thousands of years, and cartoons were quite worthwhile, but who could suggest that cartoons should supplant printed books in general?)
Interesting concepts: Luke 22:42, expectations, learning curves, social context. What is the purpose of computing? How does the question "What is a perfect society?" compare to "What is perfect computer program?" or "What is a perfect collection of computer software?" in various ways?
I actually think the idea of a perfect computer program is fascinating, because nowadays there is usually no lack of programmers willing to implement various ideas (for example, consider how many free versions of the vi editor exist!), but there may be a lack of ideas.
There is also the "program as device vs. program as literary work", which is coming up in court regularly now, and about which I wanted to write a long section on my home page. It seems to me that only people who see a program as a device will be willing to accept the censorship of code -- but perhaps this is the view of most computer users, and only a few programmers see software as literature. It also seems that the expectations people have for devices are quite different from their expectations of literature, and the sense of what makes a good device is different from the sense of what makes a good literary work. (Why should this be so? Is it only that devices are so regularly used for a useful purpose extrinsic to themselves?)
Also, there are two different ways "software is literature" can be interpreted: one is that software is literature when we're reading it (for example, when we read source code). Another is that software is literature when we're using it (for example, when we interact with a computer on which a particular program is running -- or, we could say, taking a different view, when we use a computer to interact with a particular program).
I actually think that distinction is interesting, too: do you say "I'm using this computer to interact with vi" or "I'm using vi to interact with this computer"? The second form is much more common, and I probably talk that way most of the time, but the first form is very exciting to me. We use computers to get in touch with programs (don't we?), in the same way that A. K. Dewdeney used computers to get in touch with the inhabitants of Flatland in his book The Planiverse.
I want to re-read the section "For Whom Does One Write?" in Jean-Paul Sartre's What Is Literature?, thinking about the question "For whom does one write computer software?". Sartre had fascinating things to say there, and I don't doubt that these could have an effect on how I think about computer programming too. Possibly I should write my own essay "For Whom Does One Write Programs?".
I managed to get a lot of cleaning done. My room is the cleanest it's been since I moved in here.
I went to Berkeley, met up with Brita, came back to the City, went off and took a ferry across the Bay to Larkspur with her, and then rode the ferry back home.
My arms felt better through most of the day, but I still had some trouble with them.
I meditated on Pirke Avot 2:7 without obtaining any particular insight into it.
I had dinner with Zack.
"Why are you a vegetarian?"
"I have an original reason, a fundamental reason, and a supplemental reason."
Contact: Seth David Schoen
