Thanks to all and sundry who came out for me and the Slarz's birthday. A good time was allegedly had by all. The final chapter remains a mistery to me, but that's kind of fun. Considering that I woke up at 3pm, I figure it must have gone on for some time. Flashes in my minds eye of sunrise, but I couldn't tell you the details.

One thing I do remember is Julia Henning's Momster, Claire Henning, gave me some really spot on advice about life. Unexpectedly, it reinforced my wild bohemian values.

And it appears I lost my cellphone... and my iPod Shuffle. Posessions are fleeting.

You know my politics, and my reactions to 9/11 and whatnot. Those on the other side of the divide rarely pass on the opportunity to make hay out of it, the fear, the sense of mission, danger, the role of the righteous victim. It's not unusual to see people justify all sorts of crackpot politics and authoritarian excess by bleating about how that day "changed everything."

It did, in a lot of ways, but for some reason only the Right has the right to talk about how they were affected. That's crap. It's on all of us. Like the other day taking the F train up over Smith and 9th, I looked into Manhattan and there was a thick low cloud obscuring the Empire State building, looked like the billowing smoke of yesteryear. So of course I wondered if something terrible had happened, what shape the next wave of awful would take.

90 seconds later the wind moved the clouds along and the moment passed, but that's the reality we all live in. Even those of us without paranoid authoritarian fantasies.

(Music to go with this)

In my dayjob land of open-source development, we talk about "scratching your itch" sometimes. It's the thing that tends to drive really innovative creations, and it comes from people who have the skills to speak the machine-language who want to get something done for their own purposes.

This is how bad-ass shit happens, because there's passion involved. It's not a job. You don't watch the clock while you scratch your itch. You scrach and scrach until either you get worn out and quit, or else the itch don't need no scratchin' no more. Or maybe you're a millionare or whatever and you move on to other things.

This is what people talk about when they compare open-source to poetry, to art, to those whacky "creative" pursuits that the B-schoolers secretly scorn and envy. It's apt. Not all poetry is socially useful, nor is most open-source code, but when you hit a real vein it shakes things up. It's how you get rapid advancement, frame breaking, watershed achevements. It's also how you can waste a lot of time.

I haven't done this in a while, in any arena. No art. No tech. No real itch-scratching at all. You might say that instead of scratching my itch I've been using various creams, salves, herbal tinctures and prescription forumulas to keep those sort of symptoms at bay. Maybe I'm straining the metaphor a bit too far here, but there are lots of ways to numb yourself, and I think mainline society encourages this to some degree. Law and Order, 24/7. Go along to get along. Hump day! The weekend is your kingdom.

Well, fuck all that noise. Life is your kingdom, it's the adventure of your lifetime. Kick out the jams and all that. And I found out that my back-tax bill for this year isn't so bad -- me vs. the IRS, an epic struggle -- so I'm bully for the summer, yes.

This is the summer of scratching the itch, of brewing biodiesel and grinding my own mustard, of moonshine and long-form writing. It's a summer for home-media and bonfires, a time to dig down and push. It's time to try out those other ways of living, because this half-square compromise crap just isn't cutting it for me.

Anyway, stay tuned. I'll let you know how it goes.

We Are Surrounded By The Dark Red...

That's pretty funny. Also, were you aware that the UN is trying to take control of the internet? Edads!

Finally, Bill O'Reilly informs is that Lefty zealots want to replace the white christian power structure with a multicultural tide. I don't know that he's exactly wrong, but it's a heck of a way to put it.

Paranoia strikes deep...

GD it:

After telling an audience that young people today "think work is a four-letter word," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said she apologized to her daughter.

If it comes down to it, I will of course vote for this woman. I don't think she's got any better than a 3 to 1 chance of being nominated, and I almost certainly would vote elsewhere in a primary, but hey, I want Health Care, so...

But it's fucking distressing. I know a lot of people who've worked personally with Ms. Clinton, and they all assure me she's nice, personable and cool in real life. It boggles my mind then why she seems hell-bent on creating a public persona that's an almost comic caricature of a square ex-liberal baby boomer sellout parent.

Billmon, talking about the right-wing's inability to not go completely over the top when talking about the "dire threats" we face:

They're waxing hysterical about the immigrant "threat" for the same reason they've been waxing hysterical about the "Islamofascists" for the past five years: because it legitimizes their paranoid, authoritarian world view -- which in turn justifies the kind of paranoid, authoritarian state they want to see established in this country.

The decentralization of power is going to be a vital component to the 21st Century Left's platform. It's critical that we position ourselves in opposition to centralized bureaucratic control, be it from the Federal Government or Wal*Mart.

Mmmmm... shiny.

I hate that they're charging $200 more just to make it black. I hate that I want it anyway. Fucking marketing!

I'm excited to be on the move.

Plane tickets have been purchased and a subletter found. Come June 1st I will be back to living out of a bag. Come June 7th, I will begin heading West. By the 14th I should be settling in the State of Jefferson.

My worrying side is unnerved by the way in which ramblin' comes so natural, feels so right. I'm starting to feel my age a bit, and I wonder if/when I'll evern be able to settle down. I joked a bit about this during Vagabender, that my life might become like a cheezy metallica song (anywhere I roam / where I lay my head is home), or the like. There's a long line of history there...

I love you baby
but you gotta understand
when the Lord made me
he made a ramblin' man

I'm excited by change. I can't help it. I'm an explorer by heart. My thirst for new experience and sensation seems insatiable. I don't think these are bad qualities, I just wonder how I can configure things so that I can start building a bigger pile of life-assets.

Maybe I'm being too square about the whole thing, and what I really need to do is Reclaim the Dignity of my Own Experience. Maybe what I need is to stop fucking second-guessing things so much. I'm a ways out from art school, but that work we did on judges, cops-in-the-head, and the poisonous nature of the word "should" is ringing strong lately.

In my last lifey post, I was struggling with the career choice dichotomy, and the upshot was that I have to forge forward without compromising. That felt right, and I even think I'm beginning to see what that could mean practically. The wider question of where I'm living and who I'm associating with is a little more ticklish.

This never ends, really. Oh, the joy of first-world problems.

I saw this happen a couple time at yesterday's conference: people get up in front of a microphone, they tell pretty obvious and outright lies, but do so in a calm, non-threatening, even friendly manner. Then, when people are incensed by their lying behavior, the liars can portrey their behavior as rational, and the people who attempt to call them out as irrational.

This was most definitely in evidence on the Network Neutrality panel/debate. Chris Wolf, who heads up the faux-organization called "Hands off the Internet," which is actually a front group for major phone companies like Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth, and Steve Effros, who painted himself as an independent even though he's a strategic consultant for major Cable companies and is a "Senior Advisor" for their trade association.

It was sort of maddening, which, I suspect, was part of the point.

I wrote Rep. Anthony Wiener, who was moderating and "trying to make up his mind" the following email:

Rep. Weiner,

I was one of the younger audience members who got a little hot under to collar during yesterday's debate. I apologize for that, and for perhaps making the pro-neutrality side seem less calm and professional and well-intentioned as you weigh the issues. Chris Wolf and Steve Effros used a number of disingenuous and provocative tactics in their side of the debate, and in many cases were (in my opinion) telling outright lies.

Anyway, all that aside, I had one constructive comment to add for your consideration.

As you correctly pointed out, the growth of the internet has been driven by innovators in content and services, not by companies building out physical infrastructure. Most users of the internet are not "consumers" of information, or at least not exclusively so. The most important and vital aspect of this network is its bi-directional nature, and the way in which this has empowered individuals to innovate outside an institutional framework.

As Tim Brenners Lee said, he didn't have to ask anyone's permission to invent the world wide web. This is because the fundamental rules have (until now) said that anyone is allowed to send data around any way they please.

This two-way/conversational structure is what makes the internet such an amazing marketplace for information and ideas. Like all marketplaces, it needs some regulation to prevent abuses and keep the action competitive. The Government has a role to play in establishing the rules of the game, and indeed it has historically played this role very well.

Since its inception, the rule of the internet has been that if you own a piece of physical infrastructure -- a pipe, if you will -- you have to treat anyone's data the same. This is a vital part of why the internet has developed so quickly. Without this, we're likely to see many more attempts at corporatized central-planning, backroom deals between big players to offer exclusive "consumer only" services, and a precipitous decline in the ability of individual and small-scale innovators to make an impact.

Without network neutrality, the "next generation" of the internet will likely be the exclusive province of large corporations. Google and Yahoo and Amazon and all those types we talk about, they'll be fine. They may have to pay more money to the telcos, but they can afford it. However, the so-called "marketplace" for next-generation services, whatever they might be, will be limited to these and other large scale players.

The alternative is not what the cable, telco and other last-mile providers would have you think. The First Amendment doesn't make the government a gatekeeper to speech, and a network neutrality statute wouldn't make the FCC the boss of the internet. All we're really talking about is continuing to keep the traffic laws of the internet the same as they have been for the past 15 years. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The idea that deregulation in the context of the current marketplace will enhance customer service and promote innovation flies in the face of facts. It's an ideological position, based on the notion private corporations are agile, responsive market players, and government is a lumbering bureaucracy that smothers everything it touches.

You think the government is a frustrating bureaucracy? Try calling up Verizon for technical support. The telco and cable companies are massive and lumbering and full of small-minded people too. The only additional difference is they have a profit motive, aren't accountable to any sort of democratic force, and their leaders have actively stated their desire to annex broadband services as their personal fifedom.

Don't be fooled by the anti-bureaucracy, anti-regulation rhetoric. All we're looking for is the continuation of a level playing field.

I saw this happen a couple time at yesterday's conference: people get up in front of a microphone, they tell pretty obvious and outright lies, but do so in a calm, non-threatening, even friendly manner. Then, when people are incensed by their lying behavior, the liars can portrey their behavior as rational, and the people who attempt to call them out as irrational.

This was most definitely in evidence on the Network Neutrality panel/debate. Chris Wolf, who heads up the faux-organization called "Hands off the Internet," which is actually a front group for major phone companies like Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth, and Steve Effros, who painted himself as an independent even though he's a strategic consultant for major Cable companies and is a "Senior Advisor" for their trade association.

It was sort of maddening, which, I suspect, was part of the point.

I wrote Rep. Anthony Wiener, who was moderating and "trying to make up his mind" the following email:

Rep. Weiner,

I was one of the younger audience members who got a little hot under to collar during yesterday's debate. I apologize for that, and for perhaps making the pro-neutrality side seem less calm and professional and well-intentioned as you weigh the issues. Chris Wolf and Steve Effros used a number of disingenuous and provocative tactics in their side of the debate, and in many cases were (in my opinion) telling outright lies.

Anyway, all that aside, I had one constructive comment to add for your consideration.

As you correctly pointed out, the growth of the internet has been driven by innovators in content and services, not by companies building out physical infrastructure. Most users of the internet are not "consumers" of information, or at least not exclusively so. The most important and vital aspect of this network is its bi-directional nature, and the way in which this has empowered individuals to innovate outside an institutional framework.

As Tim Brenners Lee said, he didn't have to ask anyone's permission to invent the world wide web. This is because the fundamental rules have (until now) said that anyone is allowed to send data around any way they please.

This two-way/conversational structure is what makes the internet such an amazing marketplace for information and ideas. Like all marketplaces, it needs some regulation to prevent abuses and keep the action competitive. The Government has a role to play in establishing the rules of the game, and indeed it has historically played this role very well.

Since its inception, the rule of the internet has been that if you own a piece of physical infrastructure -- a pipe, if you will -- you have to treat anyone's data the same. This is a vital part of why the internet has developed so quickly. Without this, we're likely to see many more attempts at corporatized central-planning, backroom deals between big players to offer exclusive "consumer only" services, and a precipitous decline in the ability of individual and small-scale innovators to make an impact.

Without network neutrality, the "next generation" of the internet will likely be the exclusive province of large corporations. Google and Yahoo and Amazon and all those types we talk about, they'll be fine. They may have to pay more money to the telcos, but they can afford it. However, the so-called "marketplace" for next-generation services, whatever they might be, will be limited to these and other large scale players.

The alternative is not what the cable, telco and other last-mile providers would have you think. The First Amendment doesn't make the government a gatekeeper to speech, and a network neutrality statute wouldn't make the FCC the boss of the internet. All we're really talking about is continuing to keep the traffic laws of the internet the same as they have been for the past 15 years. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The idea that deregulation in the context of the current marketplace will enhance customer service and promote innovation flies in the face of facts. It's an ideological position, based on the notion private corporations are agile, responsive market players, and government is a lumbering bureaucracy that smothers everything it touches.

You think the government is a frustrating bureaucracy? Try calling up Verizon for technical support. The telco and cable companies are massive and lumbering and full of small-minded people too. The only additional difference is they have a profit motive, aren't accountable to any sort of democratic force, and their leaders have actively stated their desire to annex broadband services as their personal fifedom.

Don't be fooled by the anti-bureaucracy, anti-regulation rhetoric. All we're looking for is the continuation of a level playing field.