March 2003

This morning, in that half-state between sleeping and waking, I resolved to sit down and make a list of Things To Be Happy About and put it here, a bright spot of data in a morass of cynicism and death. And now I just can’t think of much to be happy about. But I guess there’s a lot to laugh at.

At a peace vigil in Virginia.

Last Wednesday I flew to Germany for CeBIT, then Friday morning to Virginia where I surprised my parents by showing up at home. And then Monday I gave a talk at a conference in DC, in the worst possible timeslot, 5:30pm, when everyone was tired and spent and openly yawning.

Friday I boarded a domestic flight in Germany (Hannover to Frankfurt) without showing any form of ID.

Hannover airport, 5am.

On the way to Reagan National Airport, around 7pm Monday, I watched some kind of government motorcade — police motorcycles then police cars then big black SUVs then black limos then more SUVs then police cars again — sail down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the white house, an hour before Bush’s speech. And then in the airport, during the speech, at the part where he said “I have heightened security in our nation’s airports,” an airport security officer a few feet away from me shrugged and gave me a half-smile.

Mom.

Yesterday my friend Rony pointed out that potassium iodide pills are seeing brisk sales online.

Mainly, I just can’t stop being so fucking sad and angry. Somehow it feels like Bush’s unequivocal warmongering gives me license to be more of an asshole too, like that’s the way things work now: don’t compromise, don’t understand, be an asshole, it’s okay, you’re allowed. You know, prison rules.

I think I have a full-on mullet.

Monday night, drunk on St. Patrick’s day, I was giving everyone 48 hours to do things. Like, you know, “Hey Pat, go get me another beer. And dude, if you’re not back in 48 hours, I’m going to come up there with a coalition of the willing and personally kick your ass.”

And Pat’s like “Here’s what I don’t understand. There’s no way he can get out of there in 48 hours. You think he’s got all his shit boxed up and ready to go at the drop of a hat? He’s got to pack, he’s got to get his electricity and gas disconnected, he’s got to setup mail forwarding with the Iraqi postal system, and do you have any idea how hard it is to get a flight out of Baghdad right now?”

Driving in Virginia. Where I dun growed up.

Did you know that 40% of the Iraqi population is 15 years old or younger? It seems wrong to laugh when thousands of Iraqi children are about to die, and, like, my parents have a nice house and I’m healthy and have a fucking cat, but what are we supposed to do?

Hack o’ the day.

And yesterday, I finally had the Fiat towed to a garage.

Flying to Germany to give a talk at CeBIT now. Ta ta.

Hey, neat, someone generalized my apology card idea. Mine are cooler, though, since they’re nicely printed on cardstock and I rubber-stamp the date on with one of those librarian date stamps.

And of course because I can use them for other things.

(How come people do this kind of thing without letting you know? I found out from my referer log.)

One of the things I’ve been hacking on with a high level of intermittence is my dashboard idea. The basic notion is automatic search of your personal information space as you go about your regular daily activities: reading and writing email, browsing the web, talking to people on IM (at least, these are my regular daily activities).

The dashboard in action.

I wrote some text about this project, but it was too long and boring for my blog, so I put it here.

The thing Miguel and I have been hacking on today is a free and open Friendster replacement. Partly because they are soon going to start charging people, and partly because we can do better.

The idea we have that they don’t have is: building an open, distributed system that allows public identity publication, so that you can syndicate yourself with XML the same way you syndicate your blog with RSS.

Right now we’re just dicking around in an amateurish way, mainly trying to figure out what ’select’ means in SQL, but soon the world will feel our power.

Syndicated identity visualization in your face.

Naturally, you want centralized servers to do things like anonymous messaging, notification, etc. So our standard consists of an XML schema and a server interface for all the interesting interactive services.

Unfortunately, we still need a nice web UI, and those are so boring to write. Miguel started on something using ASP.NET. Of course, we will build this into livejournal too. (Yes, I know about lj_connect; don’t confuse a butterfly for an owl).

In other news, I really have to stop reading news web sites late at night. They make me so angry these days that I can’t sleep, so I’ve been kept up till 8am by political rage a little too frequently.

An interesting letter about using the phrase "Bush is out of control" on your web page.

My friend DaveM sent me this, which is brilliant.

Last night, a bunch of us went to see Greg Palast talk. He is the guy who broke the Enron story, and the 2000 Florida election scandal, wherein tens of thousands of black voters (who overwhelmingly vote Democratic) were expunged from the voting lists by order of Jeb Bush.

He signed my copy of his book.

Later on I met up with Patrick and Mary and Costin at Charlie’s. Costin recommended a slew of books to me, including several by Yukio Mishima, a Japanese author thrice nominated for the Nobel prize who created an army of 100 samurais and seized the military headquarters in Tokyo before committing seppuku. Costin also went home with a bunch of my books, but I still can’t get anyone to take The Atrocity Exhibition off my hands; a completely impenetrable book I got nothing out of.

Costin.

Miguel and I have a plan to create universally syndicated identities. More to come.

I tried to get the Fiat running yesterday. It started, after massive jumping action: charging both batteries off the kitchen AC and then hooking them up to the starter in parallel. Oh baby: vroom.

But then I noticed the wheels were literally frozen to the ground. Literally, connected to the pavement with four or five inches of solid ice. It seems everyone had shoveled the snow out of their parking spaces into mine, and now a solid layer of vengeful ice is keeping me from driving my car.

So today, I bought 75 pounds of rock salt and poured it all around the wheels. Tomorrow: liftoff.

In contrast to my relatively boring life, a mail from Alex:

From: Alex Graveley
To: Nat Friedman
Subject: Re: genitalia

> regale me with tales of your grand adventures abroad

Well I've just returned from riding around a moped in the hills of Chaing Mai. On the winding way up I sort of lost control and took the bike into a 2 foot cement gutter. I was fine and some kids stopped and helped me pull the bike out.

Everything was great until on the way down the engine died. Luckily, the same kids who helped me pull the bike out, came along and with the help of a screwdriver got the engine running again.

The sad part is that for the remaining descent the kids followed me and made fun of me in Thai. I'm not entirely sure but I think they were being really cruel and hurtful, and probably calling me gay.

-Alex

Al Qaeda sells honey?

That kind of story is sure to spoil the widely-held stereotype of beekeepers as quiet, good-natured, retired old men, like Sherlock Holmes. Not airliner-hijacking lunatics bent on global religious war.