nerding out

My man Joe is close to internet fame. Vote for him again even if you did before (1 vote per day is allowed apparently):

http://broadcasting.projectbreakout.com/media_page/entry_id/197

It’s internet democracy, Chicago style.

Fuck. That was lame. My hosting provider hosed my server, and because I pay not so much money, it didn’t really get resolved until just now. Email is piling up and whatnot, and I’ve failed my three and a half loyal readers yet again.

On the upside, the server is all clean. I aught to do a redesign.

Sitting here in the Embarcaderro station with 10 minutes to burn, and I whipped out the old lappy for to do a little writing. Whaddya know: Wifi!

…

Three days later I’m in the BART again, and I haven’t update the site. Shoot. Here’s the short and sweet:

• Housewarming on saturday!
• Clutch is pretty awesome live, and the cello/piano player from Murder By Death is superhot.
• Saw Mike Connery last night on his book tour. Was real good to catch up.
• Work is taking up a lot of my time, but generally going well; we’re getting out of our ruts and making some moves.

And here comes the train…

Overnight flight to Boston. DrupalCon. My third. The first one was kind of magical, back in 2006, Vancouver BC, getting the real buzz for the first time. I haven’t been able to explain very well to my non-geek peers how awesome this software project is, which is a shame. Because it really is pretty rad.

To wit: some Belgan computer science students started working on a system for their dorm-hall community to use to stay in touch after graduation. Eight years later the open-source software, Drupal, is powering hundreds of thousands of websites, including bigshots like The Onion, MTV UK and others. But that’s not even the cool part.

The truly awesome thing about this project is that it’s been built by literally thousands of people. For free. There are a core cadre of a few hundred or so coders who do a lot of this, most of them (like me) making a living off it in one way or another, and an even smaller group of legendary developers at the center of all of it. But it happens openly, as a community affair, and it works in large part people people are friends over it, taking pleasure from working on something together.

This is what open-source is really all about to me. It’s the recognition that programming is an act of creativity, and the growth of communities of creators around their project. It’s no coincidence that many Drupalists have artistic backgrounds; it has many aspects of a theatrical troup, of a band.

This is a kind of cultural production that’s really new. Never before have people been able to be intellectually creative in this way and on this scale, and it’s deeply gratifying to be a part of this scene, exploring a new mode of association and camaraderie, proving that the ethos of a community can outperform that of a corperation.

I don’t know how much longer the exponential growth of the community and use of the platform can continue, but it certainly feels like each new year and each new release crosses a new threshold. The big news accompanying the 6.0 release is that project founder Dries has wrapped up his PhD (which was for unrelated computer science studies) and started a company, Acquia, with $7M in series A venture financing. That’s a first.

It’s also a first (for me) to pay for one of these conferences. Are the suits taking over? Well, by all indications, not jyst yet. Kieran Lal showed up in a Paul Revere looking hat to do a welcome session for first-timers, so that’s a good sign, and there are a lot of familiar faces and the crowd is a good mix of hip, square, scruff and smooth.

Should be fun. Nice to be back in Boston.

Among the many other things my mother does, she’s started using her position at the UO Student Union to organize an annual LAN event.

Pretty cool!

For my part, I did my nerdly community service this Sunday, and recorded a new Drupal Dojo screencast on the new 6.0 theming techniques.

That’s right. Tell a friend, sucka.

As a fan of many things sci-fi, I think it’s worthwhile to sometimes take a step back and ponder the future. For instance, in 1908 cars and telephones were just beginning to make their presence felt. The US was just starting to experiment with imperialism in Central America and the Philippines. Things were very different.

It makes me re-realize that the ginormous problems we face as a species are going to be managed, if at all, through similar deltas of change. For instance, as we learn to stop digging things out of the ground and burning them to power our civilizations, things like harvesting energy from the friction of walking will be employed along with now-familiar wind and solar power. Or maybe, on the dark side, we’ll be sending the space equivalent of oil supertankers to the moon of Titan to suck up it’s hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere to be brought back here to burn.

Who knows. My gut sense is that investing outside the status quo is probably smart.

Well, I’m glad I got out of debt, but I’m also glad I didn’t do it early enough to sink any money into “the market.” While I’m sure many funds will still do well and long-term investors have little to fear, the current economic trajectory is pretty ugly. The dow is headed towards 52-week lows, and there’s more bad news to come.

This is what happens when you run things like the Soviets. It’s increasingly obvious that our economy, beyond being unsustainably debt-based, is also build on a series of consensual hallucinations that don’t map well to reality. Because our made-up-prowess is in “financial products” rather than steel and wheat production, we can get by for longer than they did in the USSR — and we get hit with mortgage defaults rather than breadlines, which is an improvement — but the books are no less cooked, and CNBC is a propaganda outlet, not a news channel.

The Big D may indeed be coming, although a new bubble/rally may emerge around alternative energy and infrastructure instead. Here are the fundamentals:

• Most major banks and financial firms are facing serious losses of capital and credibility as a result of the housing bubble. The “correction” for this will go on for several years, and though the effects will likely be mitigated by a bailout and other activity, the bottom remains a ways off.
• Consumer spending — which is to say people buying shit — has been the main thing keeping the boat floating, but has been based on second-mortgages and credit card debt.
• The falling dollar has been boosting exports, but is also driving inflation and exacerbating energy costs.
• The occupation of Iraq probably prevents any meaningful Federal action, cost-wise. It’s also not doing anything to help out with the energy cost situation.

A boom in infrastructural renewal based around a new energy policy could turn things around (possibly generating another bubble in the process), but it’s still kind of unlikely in my opinion, even with the odds favoring a Democrat as president next year.

Regular people are starting to come around — last year, the Toyota Prius outsold the Ford Explorer — but in general consumers are tapped-out, and anyway not in a position to drive significant changes just by altering day-to-day purchases.

Depending on how things shake out, a little economic slowness could be just what the doctor ordered. People work too hard for too little in this country, and the pie is really inequitably divided. Maybe this crunch will reverse that trend.

For anyone who’s tried to email me in the past couple days and gotten a bounce, I apologize. This old server needs to be burned down and restarted. For better accuracy, you can always use my gmail, which is where mail to @outlandishjosh.com goes anyway.

It’s outlandish.josh at the gmail.com, yo.

This is a good follow-on to the bit I quoted from Air Guitar earlier. Someone at PBS had the brains to interview my former comrade Zephyr Teachout to talk about the internets and politics this cycle, comparing and contrasting Dean For America with The Ron Paul Revolution. It’s an extremely good interview:

NOW: Could you talk about how that sense of connection to the candidate is determined by the way the campaign treats them?

ZT: I could answer to two real possibilities with politics on the Internet. One is that you use the Internet as a massive and really effective marketing tool. You build massive databases, you learn everything you can about the people in those databases, you figure out exactly how they can be useful to your campaign, and you ask them to donate money, door-knock, the virtual equivalent of being a sort of army of stamp lickers.

And you may be useful as a supporter in such a campaign. But you’re not gonna have a pretty deep identification in the campaign. It’s clear that you’re taking your marching orders from Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney. That they have figured out how you can be useful.

The other latent possibility is that it enables groups of people to come together—offline and online, outside of the campaign, do their own scheming, do their own thinking, and take real responsibility for the strategy and the policy of the candidate or group that you’re supporting.

Almost all the candidates, this cycle, have tended strongly towards the managerial use of the Internet.

…

And you come to those as a citizen, and you feel like, “This is very nicely done and I don’t belong here.” There’s no role for me as a thinking creative person. There’s a role for me as a supporter, that’s it. And you come to Ron Paul world and there are real calls for help. “We desperately need visibility in this part of New Hampshire, and we don’t know how to do it.” And that expresses itself in a 1,000 ways. In the tone, in Ron Paul’s sort of, “Gee whiz, ah shucks,” manner. “Wow, you guys are great, help me out a little more.”

Instead of, “I’ve figured out everything. Don’t think too hard, ‘cause we’ve got some really smart people on the task. Just go to this door.”

And it’s very satisfying to feel like you are being treated as a smart person. As a citizen. As somebody who might actually know more about New Hampshire—because you’ve lived there for 30 years—than the campaign.

I would quote more and longly, but if you’re at all interested in this stuff, you really should just read the whole thing.