nerding out

Site was down a bunch yesterday.

Here’s why.

Nice to have transparency from a hosting provider.

Unrelatedly, here’s this music that seemed to be following me in the distance at Burning Man, and which I tracked down because I’m working in a client’s office this Saturday, and one of the clients themselves had it play on his radio stream.

Looks like I’ll miss out on JetBlue’s in-air internet service rollout by a couple of days:

Starting next week and over the next few months, several American airlines will test Internet service on their planes.

On Tuesday, JetBlue Airways will begin offering a free e-mail and instant messaging service on one aircraft, while American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer a broader Web experience in the coming months, probably priced at about $10 a flight.

In a certain dream of techno-utopian fantasy, I can see the appeal of blasting off around the world — business class, natch — and never skipping a beat in terms of social participation. We’d be masters of the universe, each and every one.

Part of my DC meditation is trying to hone in on the distinctions between the old world and the new one, between a world based around corporations that are modeled after the WWII-era Pentagon, and a post-postmodern world modeled on networks. There was maybe something in-between these two — there in the 80s and 90s — some intermediary stage marked by first-wave globalization, a world modeled on TV commercials maybe.

Ok. Now I’m rambling. Back to work!

Another politics post, this time to note something techy about how campaigns use email. Previously, I’d said mean things about Team Obama for sending out a message “from a supporter” to a much wider subset of their email list. Today, the Dodd campaign used another SpamKing tactic, faking an apparent “mistake email” as a gimmick to get people to donate.

This stuff may work in bringing in the dough, but I really hate it. Creating the illusion of peer-to-peer contact (in Obamas case) or of an unfiltered “behind the scenes” look into a campaign (as Dodd’s email does) undermines the most important virtuous things I like to think teh internets can bring to a Democracy.

You know, people want real connections, they want to know what’s really going on, and instead of actually engaging, these tactics prey on that desire. They’re false in very important ways, and they undermine the hope that such things as an egalitarian and transparent society are really possible, even in a networked era.

It calls to mind this quote from George Meyer (the most influential of all the Simpsons writers) in a Believer interview:

GM: I don’t remember a lot of what I write. I try to release it after it’s out there so that I can be fresh again. I find that the creative side of my brain and the archival side of my brain don’t work well together. When I’ve done my best work, I’ve been in a trance-like state. I write jokes that are more by-the-numbers, but they tend to have a flat, pedestrian quality compared to the dizzying flights of silliness that we occasionally achieve. That said, I’m pretty sure I wrote “Pray for Mojo.” Do you remember that line?

BLVR: Weren’t those the dying words of Homer’s helper monkey?

GM: Uh-huh. It’s almost like an epitaph for Western civilization.

BLVR: That seems about right.

GM: It’s this bloated, fucked-out corpse that washes up on the beach, burping up its final breath.

BLVR: What a lovely, pro-America message for the kids.

GM: [Laughs] I do what I can.

In other news, I’m off to DC on Sunday. Should be fun.

A quick nerd-note. Since upgrading to my new laptop, which came with the new version of the Mac OS, Leopard, I’ve been stymied by the fact that drop-down menus don’t always work in FireFox. Basically, select form elements on a lot of sites (including Basecamp, which we use for work) don’t drop-down when you click them. You can still switch the settings using the arrow keys, but this is unpredictable and a pain.

Anyway, leaning on my ever-expanding reach of A-list contacts, I hit up Mr. Ponderer and he pointed me to the nightly build ftp spot. The 2.0.0.10 package has dropdowns working fine and isn’t unstable in any other ways I’ve observed yet. Plus, you can run some pre-release software, which is worth at least two or three geek credits.

So, just in case anyone has this problem. Maybe google will send them here and find a solution.

I got a chance to peep the OLPC product at Drupal Camp last weekend in Berkeley. Now mine is on its way.

This project may or may not work, but it’s the strongest concerted effort to date by socially conscious technologists to directly alter the course of human events. I think it sets an important precedent.

Plus, based on my brief test drive, these are awesome little machines. I’m looking forward to playing with mine.

Update: extended through the end of the year if you want one (thanks for the tip, Andrew!)

Another imageless post, but via Atrios check it out: The Eagles are also disintermediating record labels.

Building on early work by Prince, and several upstart indie successes, it looks like more and more established acts are taking this route. Look for a new kind of helper company to emerge that can do online distribution, fan-club stuff, and booking for tours.

Well, I have a new lappy. A late-night food run on my bike resulted in me marinating my old computer in Sprite for 15 minutes or so. That’s not so good. It may or may not be resurrectable, but with deadlines looming I pulled the trigger and drove over to Walnut Creek to get a fancy new black MacBook (the Apple store in Emeryville was sold out).

It was a necessary thing, but the whole experience gave me The Fear. I don’t like the Apple retail experience, a strange mix of yuppie consumer snobbery and cultish fanboyism. It’s a dark future, and the “upscale exurban shopping area” kind of scene around Walnut Creek only served to increase my paranoia. It seems like the sort of place that will be caught in the vice pretty soon — too decadent, too soft, lots of useless luxuries to lose.

But I can’t complain. BAD Camp is rolling on well. The weather here is gorgeous. Mighty Oregon prevailed over the Sun Devils. And the new computer is pretty sweet. It’s got the latest OS, and it really is way cooler to have a matte black laptop as opposed to shiny white. With any luck the old machine will live again and it can become the new house computer. At the very least, I think I’ll be able to get my old data back. Lots of ancient email that I like so search through from time to time.

Via Mr. Kos, more proof that we are not as free as we can be:

Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that’s up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it’ll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin’s secret ingredient. Whenever the truck’s juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it’ll recharge a set of “supercapacitor” batteries in seconds. This means the H3’s electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What’s more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it’s time to fill the tank, he’ll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease—as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double—from 300 to 600.

“Conservatively,” Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, “it’ll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You’ll be able to smoke the tires. And it’s going to be superefficient.”

Because we are serfs in our cars, beholden to a relatively small business elite when it comes to answering the automotive engineering questions of our times, we are not doing what we could be doing.

Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. They have long argued that fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars are a hard sell because they’re too cramped and meek for our market. They’ve lobbied aggressively against raising fuel-efficiency and emissions standards, insisting that either would doom the domestic industry.

Basically a bunch of executives with no real technical expertise set the parameters around what can and can’t be driven in America, and they do so without regard to long-run outcomes. I’ve heard reliably stories that all through the 1990s, GM had a two-man engineering team working year round on electic concept cars: putting a new-looking shell and interior together around the same never-to-be-produced drivetrain.

That’s how an aristocracy behaves. There’s an enormous institutional investment in The Way Things Are™, and as a result these people are not only myopic to scientific potential, they actively resist change for fear of losing their already tenuous position.

If the dream is a big, badass ride that’s also clean, well, [Goodwin is] there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. “They could do all this stuff if they wanted to,” he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. “The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use.” He doesn’t have an engineering degree; he didn’t even go to high school: “I’ve just been messing around and seeing what I can do.”

So, like, what the fuck? Where’s my 60mpg hummer, my Japanese-level free internet, and my universal health care? What the hell is wrong with this country?

For his part, Goodwin argues he’s merely “a problem solver. Most people try to make things more complicated than they are.” He speaks of the major carmakers with a sort of mild disdain: If he can piece together cleaner vehicles out of existing GM parts and a bit of hot-rod elbow grease, why can’t they bake that kind of ingenuity into their production lines? Prod him enough on the subject and his mellowness peels away, revealing a guy fired by an almost manic frustration. “Everybody should be driving a plug-in vehicle right now,” he complains, in one of his laconic engineering lectures, as we wander through the blistering Kansas heat to a nearby Mexican restaurant. “I can go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor, go out to my four-wheel-drive truck, remove the transmission and engine, bolt the electric motor onto the back of the transfer case, put a series of lead-acid batteries up to 240 volts in the back of the bed, and we’re good to go. I guarantee you I could drive all around town and do whatever I need, go home at night, and hook up a couple of battery chargers, plug one into an outlet, and be good to go the next day.

This is how the DIY generation thinks. I guarantee you that if someone were to assemble a team around this guy, do technical documentation, and start putting it online you’d see an explosion of this kind of activity over the next few years.

“Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to,” he adds.

That’s the real point. We’re not locked into a horrible doom-cycle if we don’t want to be, if we have the courage to change, and if we can get the lazy fatback motherfuckers in charge of 90% of the useful infrastructure to realize they need to work for a living.

One can hope Detroit would take this to scale, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Hopefully Goowdin’s kits will be popular, and hopefully people-power can continue to drive innovations where corporations and catatonic 20th-century governments continue to fail.

So, in 2001 the Bush Administration cut the funding that NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab was using to investigate some promising nuclear fusion technologies. This guy's project is sitting around in need of $2M in funding to do a proof-of-concept which would demonstrate something we've never seen before: a controlled fusion reaction that produces a net energy gain.

Why can't this guy raise $2M on the internet? It seems totally possible, but there's a critical gap in expertise and entrepreneurial acumen. I'm a fan of the positive disruptive potential that this here world-wide-web offers, and if we can scrounge up tens of millions for a bunch of lag-ass politicians on a regular basis, why can't we start making strategic investments in things that Make Sense for humanity?

This would be cool, and essentially means dis-intermediating existing political systems as a means of shepherding the Public Good. It's an exciting prospect, both in this particular case (who wouldn't kick down $20 if it would get this thing off the ground?) and as a test case for how we might Solve Obvious Problems going forward. It would be nice if the State were more useful here, but it's priorities are fuxxored, and its ability to deal proactively with big problems that are associated with entrenched influences (global warming for $2000, Alex) is apparently quite weak.

Much own political activism has tended to be framed as an investment -- e.g. if it's worth some volunteer time and donations to get Universal Health Care -- or else oriented around decisions (War) which the government has more or less exclusive control over. Increasingly, my patience is wearing thin. Even as significant electoral gains are made, the static friction of "The Establishment" has not been overcome. Change is not happening. Things are not improving. I see a dark future ahead if we remain chained to these ossified, recalcitrant and massively inefficient institutions as a means of managing collective responsibility.

There are huge opportunities that are getting missed all the time, and also huge amounts of waste and corruption. Resetting priorities seems very hard. I mean, as an example, caltrans is talking about building a new highway interchange on the 101 between Arcata and Eureka, at a cost of up to $60M. That's a totally unnecessary enhancement to a legacy system that's double or triple the cost of getting a reliable redundant internet link into the area (and fund this fusion project on the side).

Now, it's not as if CalTrans can just decide to spend its money on fiber optic cables instead of asphalt, but this situation is an expression of our collective will and understanding, or at least the collective will and understanding that's been institutionalized into the state budget, where we get bogged down again in politics.

This is why one of the primary slogans of the New Freedom Movement is Move Lateral. While we can't ignore the stewardship of existing systems, neither can we afford to limit the scope of change to the reform and control of established institutions. Nothing succeeds like success, and it seems to me like the thing to do is just to start doing it.

So on Thursday a message came across the Redwood Tech Consortium mailing list proposing to set up a website to help offer housing for people displaced by the SoCal fires. I thought it sounded like a good idea, and me and a few heads from the Drupal Dojo created a site in one night that’s up for the job:

HomeMatching.org

Big ups to Matt Koglin for cooking up an excellent design, Michael Welch for snagging the domain, and to Larry Goldberg for spearheading the organizing. He’s working w/the Rotary club to get folks registered, and gotten the site some press:

”We are going to simply be a broker between people in need and people who have housing to offer,” he said. “People, especially with children and families, who need to get out of the smoke can go somewhere temporarily until literally, the dust settles.”

Those who can provide housing type information, such as the number of people and pets they could accommodate and whether smoking would be permitted, into the Rotary Home Matching system. The site then matches volunteers with those in need, and it’s up to the person providing housing to contact the other party.

”We’re a facilitator, it’s up to the volunteer to contact the person,” Goldberg said. “It’s just a person-to-person endeavor.”

Anyway, it’s pretty neat that this can be done in a matter of hours. Speaks well to the potential for the internet to continue driving change.