Some of you have asked what I've been up to the last few weeks. Thanks to a late-night wiki cleanup crew (thanks, Xavi, Nikki, Andy, and SJ!) we are finally ready to go live.
So without further ado... I proudly present the Summer of Content (SoCon), a collaboration between OLPC and the Commonwealth of Learning. In a nutshell, we match interns who want to contribute to open content with mentors from existing open-content projects who can help them, while providing stipends to the interns that allow them to work full-time on their project.
SoCon runs two summers a year, one for each hemisphere. This summer is the Northern Summer pilot, with projects running from August 10 - September 24. Groups like Google and Fedora are already on board. We're ridiculously excited and can't wait to get started.
What's the Summer of Content?
It's kind of like Summer of Code, minus the code, plus a few key differences (below text mostly lifted from the stuff I wrote for the website).
We're aiming for the inverse demographic.
The Summer of Code program has traditionally attracted a large number of individual students with technical backgrounds from the developed world. By making our stipend $500 instead of $5000 and allowing teams to apply together, we're hoping to attract an even larger number of collaborating creators from the developing world - including non-students and people with non-technical backgrounds.
Collaboration is good.
I mentioned above that you can apply in teams. I'd like to point it out again. Actually, applying in teams only helps your chances. (The catch is that the team all has to split a single stipend, but if you come from the developing world, that's still pretty good money.)
Emphasis on joining the community, not cranking out a product.
You do have to get something done. But we're going to make it very clear that the real job of the interns is to learn how to work with a particular content community, not to act as a contractor that just churns out stuff for them in exchange for pay. There are people involved. Get to know them. Collaborate.
"Content" doesn't just mean Content.
We're aiming to nurture a self-supporting networked ecosystem of projects. In other words, in addition to more traditional content-production projects (write a book, curate an encyclopedia, compose a piece of music, etc) there will be meta-content projects - for instance, accessibility and documentation projects with interns whose jobs will be to publicize, disseminate, and make other SoCon projects more accessible to various populations.
There will also be event/testing projects with interns whose jobs will be to run Test Jams and other local free culture conferences/events to get feedback to other SoCon creators about the work they're producing. Other types of projects will also be encouraged, but the important point to note is that SoCon is not just about the creation of open content, but instead about making that content useful and accessible and therefore used for Awesome purposes by the rest of the world.
We're hiring, and we need help!
We're looking for mentor organizations, mentors, and interns as well as volunteers. Check out the current project proposals (better yet, suggest your own)!
The deadline for applications this round is August 6, so please help us spread the word - if you're interested or know anyone who might be, there are some template letters you can use. We're especially looking for non-English-speaking organizations, mentors, and interns, and for participants from the developing world.
We also have an immediate need for volunteer translators - if you can help us translate the website into your language, please contact me. We're especially looking for people who can do Amharic, Arabic, Hindi, Nepali, Portuguese, Thai, and Urdu.
Questions? Thoughts? Ideas?
We'd love to hear what you think. Leave a comment on this blog or a message on the official Summer of Content Talk Page, and we'll get back to you (make sure we have your contact info, though).
Monday, July 23, 2007
Sunday, July 22, 2007
The quest for plane tickets + recipe for Tim Neng
I didn't win the round-trip plane tickets which I was going to use to run a Curriculum Jam in Manila (for those following along, Roger did - congrats, Roger!) so it's time to crack out the ol' thinking cap and find myself another way to get there. I reckon $1,200 should do the trick - that's all for transportation, by the way, planes and taxis... need to ask my family if I can unroll my sleeping bag on their couches.
Also need to find a local coordinator, a location, and food donations for the Manila Curriculum Jam. If you're in the area or know anyone who might be interested (or know someone who might be interested), holler! We're looking for teachers, students, and people interested in creating educational materials for the One Laptop Per Child project. If you're interested in finding out what we're about or lending a hand in helping us do it (giving every kid in the world the power to teach themselves anything they want to know), a Jam is a fantastic way to get started.
I've been spending the last 5 days sleeping on various couches in the area (Lauren's, Matt's, my aunt Lynne May's, and the floor in the back corner room of the OLPC office between 5 and 7:30am one morning) and I am so happy to have wireless back again. My apologies to people I was supposed to communicate with this weekend... maybe I should pay for internet on my phone?
Also, thanks to my aunt Joji, a recipe for Tim Neng. It's a sort of Asian quiche - tasty. I'll need to hit Super 88 to get ingredients and make this at some point.
How To Make Tim Neng
Ingredients:
1/2 lb ground pork
1/4 lb shrimp, chopped
1 pc dried shitake mushroom. chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
salt & pepper to taste
4 pcs eggs, beaten + water mixture (1:1 ratio, but add a bit more water if you want a softer Tim Neng)
spring onions, chopped (for topping)
Instructions:
Saute garlic until fragrant. Add pork, mushroom, shrimp and continue to saute until cooked. (about 10 mins). Add salt and pepper to taste.
Put all sauteed ingredients in a big soup bowl or pyrex (or an 8x8 cake pan, or anything else you can heat and cook in). Pour egg/water mixture into the meat mixture; it will soak through and surround them (you don't need to mix). Sprinkle the chopped spring onions on top.
Steam for 45 minutes or until eggs are fully set. The easiest way to do this is to set the bowl of eggs into the middle of a shallow pot of boiling water; make sure the boiling water is shallow enough that it doesn't spill into the eggs - there should only be boiling water between the inside of the pot and the outside of the bowl of eggs. (And remember to cover the container you're steaming in.)
Dig in!
Also need to find a local coordinator, a location, and food donations for the Manila Curriculum Jam. If you're in the area or know anyone who might be interested (or know someone who might be interested), holler! We're looking for teachers, students, and people interested in creating educational materials for the One Laptop Per Child project. If you're interested in finding out what we're about or lending a hand in helping us do it (giving every kid in the world the power to teach themselves anything they want to know), a Jam is a fantastic way to get started.
I've been spending the last 5 days sleeping on various couches in the area (Lauren's, Matt's, my aunt Lynne May's, and the floor in the back corner room of the OLPC office between 5 and 7:30am one morning) and I am so happy to have wireless back again. My apologies to people I was supposed to communicate with this weekend... maybe I should pay for internet on my phone?
Also, thanks to my aunt Joji, a recipe for Tim Neng. It's a sort of Asian quiche - tasty. I'll need to hit Super 88 to get ingredients and make this at some point.
How To Make Tim Neng
Ingredients:
1/2 lb ground pork
1/4 lb shrimp, chopped
1 pc dried shitake mushroom. chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
salt & pepper to taste
4 pcs eggs, beaten + water mixture (1:1 ratio, but add a bit more water if you want a softer Tim Neng)
spring onions, chopped (for topping)
Instructions:
Saute garlic until fragrant. Add pork, mushroom, shrimp and continue to saute until cooked. (about 10 mins). Add salt and pepper to taste.
Put all sauteed ingredients in a big soup bowl or pyrex (or an 8x8 cake pan, or anything else you can heat and cook in). Pour egg/water mixture into the meat mixture; it will soak through and surround them (you don't need to mix). Sprinkle the chopped spring onions on top.
Steam for 45 minutes or until eggs are fully set. The easiest way to do this is to set the bowl of eggs into the middle of a shallow pot of boiling water; make sure the boiling water is shallow enough that it doesn't spill into the eggs - there should only be boiling water between the inside of the pot and the outside of the bowl of eggs. (And remember to cover the container you're steaming in.)
Dig in!
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Computing thinking
Amusing ad from october 1998: this made me smile.
Today's train of thought comes from a conversation I had with Eric Munsing on the notion of "computing thinking" (during which I went on a long spiel about the use of computers as thinking tools - this was several months before I read Papert's book Mindstorms, which words it much more eloquently).
The following is taken almost verbatim from notes on the conversation and some scattered emails - side conversations on other topics have been clipped for clarity, and some sentence fragments have been filled in to add context, but otherwise they're untouched.
Eric: I'd hazard a theory that computers are naturally conservative analytical tools - they only process existing data reflecting the current structure/beliefs and don't introduce new concepts or frames for analysis.
Mel: Interesting exercise - take your four lines of text above and replace the word "computers" with the word "languages."
I see computing thinking partially as a different type of language. Mathematics as well, for that matter. There's a grammar, a vocabulary, and a set of structures you can build both mentally and electronically. In and of themselves, they don't mean anything, but they can be used to build spectacular things that do have meaning, and as tools to help people express and create meaning. It's the "Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people" philosophy, except the non-depressing version with computers and innovation instead of guns and death.
From one perspective, computers are very powerful tools for manipulating information in ways that enable humans to see new concepts and come up with different paradigms for viewing the world. The plots that facilitated the development of chaos theory, prototyping houses in SketchUp, sorting columns in Excel, or Hans Rosling's first Gapminder presentation on TEDtalks are all new worlds of creativity we couldn't have explored before. There's more. The entirety of Eyebeam's R&D lab output. The communications capabilities of the internet; croudsourcinig, open-sourcing. The ability to provide statistical, historical, analytical proof to back up a glimmering hypothesis you came up with in the shower.
They're powerful tools. But tools need to be learned, mastered, understood, and appreciated. There's a craftsmanship behind the black boxes that I feel that many people don't even try to understand.
If computers become the dominant tools we use for gathering information, they will be stagnant and silent (and we won't realize it, trapped inside that box). My lack of fluency in non-English languages restricts my thinking to English structures. My lack of fluency in non-engineering disciplines restricts my thinking to technical structures. (I'm finding this a difficult thing to cope with in my sociology class.)
Eric: I'm of the belief that most technology is like this. I'd say that funding a new computer science program is not very likely to give new insight into major societal problems like environmental injustices or the eradication of slavery.
Mel: But it can help you track and understand, however imperfectly, how you're doing in working towards those goals.
This powerhouse was configured with a Pentium II 266MHz MMX processor, 128 MB of RAM, 24xCD ROM drive, 6.4 GB hard disk, 56Kbps USR modem, built in Zip 100MB drive, Matrox Millennium II graphics card and Altec Lansing's ACS90 multimedia speaker system. It is still a great performer.Currently in New York on the couch of Lauren's (OLPC) apartment. The traffic noise of Brooklyn is drifting through the window, which has a stained-glass plate of a robot hanging in front of it with fishing line. This post is my online indulgence before I return to the Massive Block Of Tasks awaiting me on the OLPC wiki... it's definitely a working trip. (And as I write this, there are at least three simultaneous conversations on the #olpc-content IRC channel, where Nikki and I - among others - have become regulars. You can join us if you'd like; ask one of us if you don't know how.)
Today's train of thought comes from a conversation I had with Eric Munsing on the notion of "computing thinking" (during which I went on a long spiel about the use of computers as thinking tools - this was several months before I read Papert's book Mindstorms, which words it much more eloquently).
The following is taken almost verbatim from notes on the conversation and some scattered emails - side conversations on other topics have been clipped for clarity, and some sentence fragments have been filled in to add context, but otherwise they're untouched.
Eric: I'd hazard a theory that computers are naturally conservative analytical tools - they only process existing data reflecting the current structure/beliefs and don't introduce new concepts or frames for analysis.
Mel: Interesting exercise - take your four lines of text above and replace the word "computers" with the word "languages."
I see computing thinking partially as a different type of language. Mathematics as well, for that matter. There's a grammar, a vocabulary, and a set of structures you can build both mentally and electronically. In and of themselves, they don't mean anything, but they can be used to build spectacular things that do have meaning, and as tools to help people express and create meaning. It's the "Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people" philosophy, except the non-depressing version with computers and innovation instead of guns and death.
From one perspective, computers are very powerful tools for manipulating information in ways that enable humans to see new concepts and come up with different paradigms for viewing the world. The plots that facilitated the development of chaos theory, prototyping houses in SketchUp, sorting columns in Excel, or Hans Rosling's first Gapminder presentation on TEDtalks are all new worlds of creativity we couldn't have explored before. There's more. The entirety of Eyebeam's R&D lab output. The communications capabilities of the internet; croudsourcinig, open-sourcing. The ability to provide statistical, historical, analytical proof to back up a glimmering hypothesis you came up with in the shower.
They're powerful tools. But tools need to be learned, mastered, understood, and appreciated. There's a craftsmanship behind the black boxes that I feel that many people don't even try to understand.
If computers become the dominant tools we use for gathering information, they will be stagnant and silent (and we won't realize it, trapped inside that box). My lack of fluency in non-English languages restricts my thinking to English structures. My lack of fluency in non-engineering disciplines restricts my thinking to technical structures. (I'm finding this a difficult thing to cope with in my sociology class.)
Eric: I'm of the belief that most technology is like this. I'd say that funding a new computer science program is not very likely to give new insight into major societal problems like environmental injustices or the eradication of slavery.
Mel: But it can help you track and understand, however imperfectly, how you're doing in working towards those goals.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
It's official.
Apparently, I'm now a "respectable" person, as I have a house and a job as of this moment - both occurred within the last 12 hours.
The great thing is that I'm not actually going to change the things I'm doing or anything at all. It's just that I have a place to dump my stuff come January, and that my bank account will look a little less malnourished shortly.
Mmm!
The great thing is that I'm not actually going to change the things I'm doing or anything at all. It's just that I have a place to dump my stuff come January, and that my bank account will look a little less malnourished shortly.
Mmm!
Monday, July 16, 2007
Things I never thought I'd appreciate
This summer alone has seen some tiny openings of my world and worldview - stuff I never thought I'd like or appreciate. Here are a few.
Good toilet paper.
The thick, soft kind. It sounds silly, but every time I'm in a bathroom with the good toilet paper now, I go "How nice! A little luxury in my day." One of those weird, tiny little affordable luxuries that I probably won't spend the extra on for my own place without prodding, but which is... I mean, face it, comparing that stuff to single-ply is like driving a new Lexus versus a 2-decade-old Honda. Sure, they both get you there just as fast. The Lexus is totally a luxury buy. But it's so... nice.
Rap lyrics.
Roll that around on your tongue a bit. Taste the (thick, rich) spitting explosion of off-cadenced syllables - then try to say it faster, then faster, then faster, while still folding your lips fully around each word. It's a whole different sort of mastery of the English language that I've only slowly - and just now - become aware of. Whoa. I want more. I want more... who and what should I listen to? I want to learn how to appreciate it better. I'd like to learn how to do it. Need to listen to and read more, though, in order to get a feel for it.
Beer.
It really is tasty. I drink beer like I drink tea - not for the physical effect it has on me, but to appreciate the artistry of the taste. (In fact, I dislike being even mildly inebriated, and hate the jittery
feeling I get with caffeine, and do my best to avoid both.) The Cambridge Brewing Company's summer hefeweizen is currently tied with fresh-drawn Sam Adams Boston Lager for my favorite.
Cold, fresh, filtered drinking water.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, delicious. With the water cooler at OLPC's office not far from the mess of tables I work in, I'm closer to being not-dehydrated now than I think I've ever been in my life.
$2.
You can do a lot with $2. You can get a sandwich of some kind - a whole meal, reasonably filling if you eat it slowly. You can get a large drink - one that comes in a 24 oz. sports bottle, so that you can reuse it as your water bottle and have a way to tote around free hydration with you. When I have $2 in my pocket, I feel rich and free - like I can get something useful (that is to say, food) if I need to. I don't think I've thought of $2 this way since I was in elementary school.
Good toilet paper.
The thick, soft kind. It sounds silly, but every time I'm in a bathroom with the good toilet paper now, I go "How nice! A little luxury in my day." One of those weird, tiny little affordable luxuries that I probably won't spend the extra on for my own place without prodding, but which is... I mean, face it, comparing that stuff to single-ply is like driving a new Lexus versus a 2-decade-old Honda. Sure, they both get you there just as fast. The Lexus is totally a luxury buy. But it's so... nice.
Rap lyrics.
I got a thick, rich mixed bitch, handling bricks/And a quick-witted slick clique to manage the chick (from one of T.I.'s raps)
Roll that around on your tongue a bit. Taste the (thick, rich) spitting explosion of off-cadenced syllables - then try to say it faster, then faster, then faster, while still folding your lips fully around each word. It's a whole different sort of mastery of the English language that I've only slowly - and just now - become aware of. Whoa. I want more. I want more... who and what should I listen to? I want to learn how to appreciate it better. I'd like to learn how to do it. Need to listen to and read more, though, in order to get a feel for it.
Beer.
It really is tasty. I drink beer like I drink tea - not for the physical effect it has on me, but to appreciate the artistry of the taste. (In fact, I dislike being even mildly inebriated, and hate the jittery
feeling I get with caffeine, and do my best to avoid both.) The Cambridge Brewing Company's summer hefeweizen is currently tied with fresh-drawn Sam Adams Boston Lager for my favorite.
Cold, fresh, filtered drinking water.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, delicious. With the water cooler at OLPC's office not far from the mess of tables I work in, I'm closer to being not-dehydrated now than I think I've ever been in my life.
$2.
You can do a lot with $2. You can get a sandwich of some kind - a whole meal, reasonably filling if you eat it slowly. You can get a large drink - one that comes in a 24 oz. sports bottle, so that you can reuse it as your water bottle and have a way to tote around free hydration with you. When I have $2 in my pocket, I feel rich and free - like I can get something useful (that is to say, food) if I need to. I don't think I've thought of $2 this way since I was in elementary school.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Up on the roof
This post will be oddly disjointed and incoherent - it's a series of mental snapshots. The title comes from one of my favorite James Taylor songs.
I've developed a fondness for butter tea since eating at Rangzen,
the local Tibetian restaurant. I usually drink my tea straight, but a
little bit of milk, butter, and salt make it taste oddly good. It also
takes more time and means I get to wash a knife in addition to a cup,
so that's a tradeoff.
It's (almost)* official; I'm addicted to OLPC. My leave-the-office times in this week alone have crept from 7pm... to midnight... to 2am... to 4:30am in a memorable flamenco-soaked fest last night. (That, by the way, is the OLPC summer blog, which consists mostly of the Content crew so far.)
*oh, you'll find out soon, although some of you have undoubtedly guessed it by now.
(the remainder of this post written almost a full day later:)
My brain is becoming wikified. Transparency, crosslinking, talk pages, and a strange sense of stability-in-anarchy are popping up in my metaphors for everyday life. I have occasional compulsions to put things in [[Brackets]] (in mediawiki syntax, that would make a link to the "Brackets" page). I blame SJ. Well, I blame him from starting me on this and continually feeding me input that reinforces it, but I'm steering myself into it, so I suppose I really can't blame anyone but myself.
(and yet some hours later...)
A longer post tonight has been superseded by a wonderful long talk with Joe. That's not the right word, but I'm attempting to convey that the creative, expressive impulse to share what's normally the continuous introverted thought process of my mind - in an attempt to let the world in and stop myself from shutting more of it out - that impulse has been nicely fulfilled by the conversation, and my mind is quiet enough now that I can... think. And sleep. Thank you, Joe.
Some potentially cryptic notes from that conversation, which will probably mean different things to me tomorrow morning taken out of context:
The world is wonderful, and I am being selfish tonight for once... and going to bed.
I've developed a fondness for butter tea since eating at Rangzen,
the local Tibetian restaurant. I usually drink my tea straight, but a
little bit of milk, butter, and salt make it taste oddly good. It also
takes more time and means I get to wash a knife in addition to a cup,
so that's a tradeoff.
It's (almost)* official; I'm addicted to OLPC. My leave-the-office times in this week alone have crept from 7pm... to midnight... to 2am... to 4:30am in a memorable flamenco-soaked fest last night. (That, by the way, is the OLPC summer blog, which consists mostly of the Content crew so far.)
*oh, you'll find out soon, although some of you have undoubtedly guessed it by now.
(the remainder of this post written almost a full day later:)
My brain is becoming wikified. Transparency, crosslinking, talk pages, and a strange sense of stability-in-anarchy are popping up in my metaphors for everyday life. I have occasional compulsions to put things in [[Brackets]] (in mediawiki syntax, that would make a link to the "Brackets" page). I blame SJ. Well, I blame him from starting me on this and continually feeding me input that reinforces it, but I'm steering myself into it, so I suppose I really can't blame anyone but myself.
(and yet some hours later...)
A longer post tonight has been superseded by a wonderful long talk with Joe. That's not the right word, but I'm attempting to convey that the creative, expressive impulse to share what's normally the continuous introverted thought process of my mind - in an attempt to let the world in and stop myself from shutting more of it out - that impulse has been nicely fulfilled by the conversation, and my mind is quiet enough now that I can... think. And sleep. Thank you, Joe.
Some potentially cryptic notes from that conversation, which will probably mean different things to me tomorrow morning taken out of context:
- Jealousy and envy have subtly different connotations. I want to obtain things (not necessarily physical entities, mind you) for myself by creating more of them in the world, not by taking them away from other people.
- Physical awareness is good stuff. I need more of it.
- Comfort in your own skin is preferable to detachment/shutdown, but shutdown is (to me, at least - and I think to Joe as well) preferable to a mask. They're the truth, silence, and a lie, respectively.
- The preceding statement implies an objectivity and precision that doesn't actually exist around this topic.
The world is wonderful, and I am being selfish tonight for once... and going to bed.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Powering on!
Where did the power icon come from, anyhow? The jury is still out on that question, but the "stop" icon is explained here. The history of design is fantastic; it's almost like tracing back a pictorial linguistic thread.
In other news, OLPC Austria had a Sewing Jam. The fuzzy laptop carriers "warm the cockles of my heart," as my high-school physics teacher Laura Nickerson would say.
We spent most of tonight working on content for the upcoming release. Or I should say we spent a long time trying to figure out the organization scheme of different hierarchies and how much curation work they'd need to become useful (the answer, more often than not, was "a lot"). Among other things, we found lessons on how to maintain a chainsaw. Especially in a way that's approved by New Zealand.
Organizing information is hard. How do you push around raw thoughtstuff? It's easier when you verbalize or symbolize and then draw/write them, easier to manipulate and sort things with some element of physicality. But information? I don't even know where to start sometimes.
When I don't know what to do, I either freeze, ask for help, or (with increasing frequency now) just try making something. It's the ask-forgiveness-not-permission philosophy; I bank on the tendency of those older and wiser than me to lunge forward and catch me before I injure anything and show me a Better Way to do things. Last night, after witnessing my flat-footed mangling of the OLPC wiki, SJ gave me a mini-lecture on how to create pages with information organized in an elegant fashion, writing the style guide as he went. (And after going back and renaming and relinking all the Jam pages, I will never forget that lesson.)
Working on "fuzzy" things, working with people, coordinating folks you may have never met in person, jumping into something while only hearing snippets of a conversation that has been going on without you for weeks if not years... it's tough. No taking a project into the back room and hacking. No being a Plant. In fact, Cliff (from Apache) said today that even with technical things, independent code modules, they'd run into problems there when someone just went off and Made Something without trying to get to know the way the community worked first.
If I ever had any doubts as to whether non-technical work was "just as hard" as technical work, they have all been erased now (in fact, at least four or five times a day, I find myself thinking that it would be so much easier to be a coder or an engineer.) But hard is good. It means you're learning.
In other news, OLPC Austria had a Sewing Jam. The fuzzy laptop carriers "warm the cockles of my heart," as my high-school physics teacher Laura Nickerson would say.
We spent most of tonight working on content for the upcoming release. Or I should say we spent a long time trying to figure out the organization scheme of different hierarchies and how much curation work they'd need to become useful (the answer, more often than not, was "a lot"). Among other things, we found lessons on how to maintain a chainsaw. Especially in a way that's approved by New Zealand.
Organizing information is hard. How do you push around raw thoughtstuff? It's easier when you verbalize or symbolize and then draw/write them, easier to manipulate and sort things with some element of physicality. But information? I don't even know where to start sometimes.
When I don't know what to do, I either freeze, ask for help, or (with increasing frequency now) just try making something. It's the ask-forgiveness-not-permission philosophy; I bank on the tendency of those older and wiser than me to lunge forward and catch me before I injure anything and show me a Better Way to do things. Last night, after witnessing my flat-footed mangling of the OLPC wiki, SJ gave me a mini-lecture on how to create pages with information organized in an elegant fashion, writing the style guide as he went. (And after going back and renaming and relinking all the Jam pages, I will never forget that lesson.)
Working on "fuzzy" things, working with people, coordinating folks you may have never met in person, jumping into something while only hearing snippets of a conversation that has been going on without you for weeks if not years... it's tough. No taking a project into the back room and hacking. No being a Plant. In fact, Cliff (from Apache) said today that even with technical things, independent code modules, they'd run into problems there when someone just went off and Made Something without trying to get to know the way the community worked first.
If I ever had any doubts as to whether non-technical work was "just as hard" as technical work, they have all been erased now (in fact, at least four or five times a day, I find myself thinking that it would be so much easier to be a coder or an engineer.) But hard is good. It means you're learning.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Learning about PGP and microformats
Because I haven't posted about anything remotely technical in a very, very long time:
Today I finally got a PGP key because I needed one to get an account on the OLPC dev server.. (For my parents: A PGP key is a special number that sort of acts like a "password" for messages. It helps make communications like email and such private.)
Aside from "it's something related to crypto," I didn't actually know what PGP was. (I'm still mildly fuzzy on it, so if anyone's into that kind of stuff and wouldn't mind explaining...) So I did a little reading, and got my key with the help of this tutorial. My favorite part was the way Phil Zimmermann challenged the US regulations on exporting PGP (they considered cryptosystems with 40+ bit keys "munitions"). Via Wikipedia:
Microformats are "adding simple semantic meaning to human-readable content which is otherwise, from a machine's point of view, just plain text." That was the idea behind Ad Libris (which is on the back-burner for now as we gather content to test it out with).
In other words, we read text (for instance, this blog post) and it means something to us; you can say "ah, the post is about pgp and microformats, and Mel wrote it." But your computer sees a bunch of letters (or ones and zeroes, really) and can't answer those kinds of questions. Microformats tell your computer that hey, Mel is the author! Hey, this post is about PGP! so it can begin to answer intelligent questions like "Computer, show me all the stuff Mel's written about OLPC in the last year" without someone having to build a custom database of time-sucking glory.
Nifty stuff. Happy Mel. Man, the world is full of great ideas.
Today I finally got a PGP key because I needed one to get an account on the OLPC dev server.. (For my parents: A PGP key is a special number that sort of acts like a "password" for messages. It helps make communications like email and such private.)
Aside from "it's something related to crypto," I didn't actually know what PGP was. (I'm still mildly fuzzy on it, so if anyone's into that kind of stuff and wouldn't mind explaining...) So I did a little reading, and got my key with the help of this tutorial. My favorite part was the way Phil Zimmermann challenged the US regulations on exporting PGP (they considered cryptosystems with 40+ bit keys "munitions"). Via Wikipedia:
Zimmerman challenged these regulations in a curious way. He published the entire source code of PGP in a hardback book, via MIT Press, which was widely sold in bookstores. Anybody wishing to build their own copy of PGP could buy the $60 book, cut off the covers and separate the pages, then run them through a scanner and an OCR (optical character - or text recognition) program to create a set of text files containing the source code. One could then build the application using the GNU C Compiler and GNU Make utility, which are freely available on the Internet. The compiled files could be put on a server anywhere in the world, and anyone could download them. The principle was simple: the export of munitions--guns, bombs, planes, software--is restricted; but the export of books is protected by the First Amendment. Anybody could buy a book and cut it up, so any computer programmer with common UNIX skills could build the software. However, the question was never tested in court.I also learned about microformats while working on the OLPC sample library, or rather, trying to find out how it ticks; it's all html and css right now. If you're looking for neat free childrens' books to read your kids, siblings, or students, check it out. They're multilingual, too. And we're looking for translators, people to read the books out loud and send us the sound-files (bonus points for , and of course... more books.)
Microformats are "adding simple semantic meaning to human-readable content which is otherwise, from a machine's point of view, just plain text." That was the idea behind Ad Libris (which is on the back-burner for now as we gather content to test it out with).
In other words, we read text (for instance, this blog post) and it means something to us; you can say "ah, the post is about pgp and microformats, and Mel wrote it." But your computer sees a bunch of letters (or ones and zeroes, really) and can't answer those kinds of questions. Microformats tell your computer that hey, Mel is the author! Hey, this post is about PGP! so it can begin to answer intelligent questions like "Computer, show me all the stuff Mel's written about OLPC in the last year" without someone having to build a custom database of time-sucking glory.
Nifty stuff. Happy Mel. Man, the world is full of great ideas.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Endless summer, or: with a single click, you can sponsor an OLPC Education Jam in the Philippines
This a post chock-full of happy excited announcements. Woo!
Endless summer finalist
First of all, I'm a finalist in the Endless Summer competition, which (by providing round trip airfare anywhere plus $1000 to donate once I get there) would put me one step closer to that 'round-the-world engineering education trip I'm working on. Vote for me here. (Voting closes July 13.) If you think someone else should go, by all means vote for them! I especially like Dawn's entry.
Now, I can't do the research trip on a single round-trip ticket. I'd also need a place to live, food to eat, that kind of thing. So if I win, here's what I'll be doing.
Running an Education Jam in the Philippines
Remember the OLPC Game Jam we did at Olin? (If not, the Boston Globe and Needham Channel article/video-clip here can quickly explain things). Well, we're doing an OLPC Curriculum Jam in the fall in several simultaneous international locations. Teachers and high-school/college students interested in education will spend a weekend developing open-content learning materials; after ~2.5 days they swap their curricula with a group in another country (so a teacher in Vancouver might make materials for a teacher in New York to use, and vice versa) and then proceed to teach their partner group's lessons to a group of younger local kids that very afternoon.
Instant feedback. Content creation, community building. And everything that's designed that weekend is automatically guaranteed to be sustainably flexible - usable by teachers in different countries with little to no support from the content's original creators.
Problem: Right now we have groups in the US and Canada. Not a very representative sample of folks from the developing world.
Solution: Go to the Philippines to run one in Manila. My family's there (read: free food and housing for the Mel). My parents went to school there and some of my cousins still do, so contacts (especially young student-testers from a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds) would be easier for me to find on short notice than most other places. Most people speak English, making communication barriers with OLPC headquarters minimal. We can mobilize the open-content community there, get something for the local userbase to nucleate around. $1000 goes a long way in Manila; I think we could do the entire Jam on that budget.
That's what I'd do with the grand prize. It's a win-win-win; starts a snowball of education goodness that ripples through a community my family once called home, jump-starts content development and a local community for OLPC, lets me visit and work within an educational system very different to the American one I'm used to. Also, I can (finally) visit my grandmother!
(By the way, if you're interested in running an OLPC Jam in your location or helping out with one in Manila, Vancouver, New York, Boston, or Chicago, give me a ping.)
And a few other things I should explain...
Astute readers of my Endless Summer entry may note some things I've forgotten to mention here.
Summer of Content
And then something you probably haven't heard because it hasn't been announced... until now. For those of you who are familiar with Google's Summer of Code, we bring you the Summer of Content. Basically, we're paying students to work with mentors from open content organizations to make... anything they want. Textbook, music, movies, photographs - want to make it? Propose it!
We're running a 5-week pilot at the end of this month (all students eligible), a Southern Hemisphere one in the Winter, and another in parallel with next year's Summer of Code. The program is still under construction, but it's moving forward fast. Interested in mentoring a project? Interested in doing a project? Know someone who would be? Please forward and ask questions!
Right-o. Thanks for reading. I just had two mugs of Golden Monkey tea, so I'm super-hyper tonight, and proportionally more shameless.
Endless summer finalist
First of all, I'm a finalist in the Endless Summer competition, which (by providing round trip airfare anywhere plus $1000 to donate once I get there) would put me one step closer to that 'round-the-world engineering education trip I'm working on. Vote for me here. (Voting closes July 13.) If you think someone else should go, by all means vote for them! I especially like Dawn's entry.
Now, I can't do the research trip on a single round-trip ticket. I'd also need a place to live, food to eat, that kind of thing. So if I win, here's what I'll be doing.
Running an Education Jam in the Philippines
Remember the OLPC Game Jam we did at Olin? (If not, the Boston Globe and Needham Channel article/video-clip here can quickly explain things). Well, we're doing an OLPC Curriculum Jam in the fall in several simultaneous international locations. Teachers and high-school/college students interested in education will spend a weekend developing open-content learning materials; after ~2.5 days they swap their curricula with a group in another country (so a teacher in Vancouver might make materials for a teacher in New York to use, and vice versa) and then proceed to teach their partner group's lessons to a group of younger local kids that very afternoon.
Instant feedback. Content creation, community building. And everything that's designed that weekend is automatically guaranteed to be sustainably flexible - usable by teachers in different countries with little to no support from the content's original creators.
Problem: Right now we have groups in the US and Canada. Not a very representative sample of folks from the developing world.
Solution: Go to the Philippines to run one in Manila. My family's there (read: free food and housing for the Mel). My parents went to school there and some of my cousins still do, so contacts (especially young student-testers from a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds) would be easier for me to find on short notice than most other places. Most people speak English, making communication barriers with OLPC headquarters minimal. We can mobilize the open-content community there, get something for the local userbase to nucleate around. $1000 goes a long way in Manila; I think we could do the entire Jam on that budget.
That's what I'd do with the grand prize. It's a win-win-win; starts a snowball of education goodness that ripples through a community my family once called home, jump-starts content development and a local community for OLPC, lets me visit and work within an educational system very different to the American one I'm used to. Also, I can (finally) visit my grandmother!
(By the way, if you're interested in running an OLPC Jam in your location or helping out with one in Manila, Vancouver, New York, Boston, or Chicago, give me a ping.)
And a few other things I should explain...
Astute readers of my Endless Summer entry may note some things I've forgotten to mention here.
- I'm learning how to talk! That is, I'm going to do aural rehabilitation, which is apparently code for "speech therapy for deaf people." If I'm going to teach and speak, I can't do that from behind a keyboard all the time. The catch is that the student-teachers at Northwestern are out for the summer, so I've got at least 2 months to do things on my own like learn about the musculature of the throat, learn IPA and go through lists of words people have heard me mispronounce, that kind of thing (if you have any ideas for fun things to do with this, please let me know; I'm totally making things up right now).
- I'm learning jazz piano. Okay, I'm slacking off on this and playing swing sheet music instead (my "how to play jazz piano" books are in Chicago) but I'm also starting to break away from sheet music and improvise around songs, even starting to bang out complete ones of my own instead of just aimlessly playing "things that kinda sound good." It's probably not jazz, but it's something.
Summer of Content
And then something you probably haven't heard because it hasn't been announced... until now. For those of you who are familiar with Google's Summer of Code, we bring you
We're running a 5-week pilot at the end of this month (all students eligible), a Southern Hemisphere one in the Winter, and another in parallel with next year's Summer of Code. The program is still under construction, but it's moving forward fast. Interested in mentoring a project? Interested in doing a project? Know someone who would be? Please forward and ask questions!
Right-o.
Friday, July 06, 2007
4th of July: "Boating" "on the Charles"
"We're going boating on the Charles. You should come," said Chandra.
"Sure. What boat?"
Three sporting goods stores later, I was $27 lighter and the proud owner of an inflatable raft rated to carry approximately 50 lbs less than the combined weight of myself and Matt Ritter, my co-captain in this adventure. Wrapping food in garbage bags, Chandra, Molly, and I drove to the Beef & Beer house in Somerville and chilled on the porch as more Oliners started showing with boats... and then more, and more. The lady in the house next door thought it was an auto accident because there were so many people clustered by the curb, talking.
We packed everyone into as few cars as possible, drove to the Charles, and dashed! furiously! across fences and Storrow Drive, where we inflated and launched, somewhat precariously, from the BU dock. Matt and I found that our boat was low enough in the water that we couldn't row because the oar-paths intersected with our scrunched-up knees. We proceeded to use them as paddles, sitting cross-legged across from each other, scuttling backwards because Matt didn't have his glasses and I was navigating.
A string of twenty-something tiny plastic rafts (and one canoe) scooted the mile down the Charles, their forty-odd occupants singing merrily and bashing into each other. Chris Dellin wins for Most Ghetto Paddle: tennis racket wrapped in a garbage bag and duct-taped to a pole. Did I mention it was raining? We can only imagine what it looked like to the passing helicopters.
We lashed our boats together under the Mass Ave bridge and began to eat the strawberries, bread, sausage, and cheese we'd brought. (Hypothetically we had soda, but the ginger soda Matt had was spicy and went straight up your nose, so nobody drank it.) The current driiiiiiifted us out from under the bridge and we started to get soaked. We cut loose from the flotilla, paddled back under, and began to eat again. The current driiiiiifted us out... people on the bridge started staring down at us and pointing.
After a few rounds of this, the Coast Guard came and chased us back to shore for not wearing life jackets. We hauled the raft ashore and went running back and forth along both riverbanks with Duc and Chris to see if we could find Matt's friends from Pika, who supposedly had life jackets. Four soaked, muddy college students peering from group to group, asking for directions to the sailing pavilion. I ended up watching the fireworks with Matt on the MIT side of the river, dripping river and rain onto Heather's flip-flops, which were much too large for me and cut into my feet enough that I ran barefoot as much as I could.
The fireworks were beautiful.
Later we found out that Kelcy and DJ had ripped a hole in their now-useless raft, that David (from IMSA) had capsized into the river, that some members of the scattered group had managed to stay on the Charles, that others climbed to the bridge, and that everyone had, by and large, had a grand ol' time (if not the time we'd expected). A hot shower never felt so wonderful afterwards.
"Sure. What boat?"
Three sporting goods stores later, I was $27 lighter and the proud owner of an inflatable raft rated to carry approximately 50 lbs less than the combined weight of myself and Matt Ritter, my co-captain in this adventure. Wrapping food in garbage bags, Chandra, Molly, and I drove to the Beef & Beer house in Somerville and chilled on the porch as more Oliners started showing with boats... and then more, and more. The lady in the house next door thought it was an auto accident because there were so many people clustered by the curb, talking.
We packed everyone into as few cars as possible, drove to the Charles, and dashed! furiously! across fences and Storrow Drive, where we inflated and launched, somewhat precariously, from the BU dock. Matt and I found that our boat was low enough in the water that we couldn't row because the oar-paths intersected with our scrunched-up knees. We proceeded to use them as paddles, sitting cross-legged across from each other, scuttling backwards because Matt didn't have his glasses and I was navigating.
A string of twenty-something tiny plastic rafts (and one canoe) scooted the mile down the Charles, their forty-odd occupants singing merrily and bashing into each other. Chris Dellin wins for Most Ghetto Paddle: tennis racket wrapped in a garbage bag and duct-taped to a pole. Did I mention it was raining? We can only imagine what it looked like to the passing helicopters.
We lashed our boats together under the Mass Ave bridge and began to eat the strawberries, bread, sausage, and cheese we'd brought. (Hypothetically we had soda, but the ginger soda Matt had was spicy and went straight up your nose, so nobody drank it.) The current driiiiiiifted us out from under the bridge and we started to get soaked. We cut loose from the flotilla, paddled back under, and began to eat again. The current driiiiiifted us out... people on the bridge started staring down at us and pointing.
After a few rounds of this, the Coast Guard came and chased us back to shore for not wearing life jackets. We hauled the raft ashore and went running back and forth along both riverbanks with Duc and Chris to see if we could find Matt's friends from Pika, who supposedly had life jackets. Four soaked, muddy college students peering from group to group, asking for directions to the sailing pavilion. I ended up watching the fireworks with Matt on the MIT side of the river, dripping river and rain onto Heather's flip-flops, which were much too large for me and cut into my feet enough that I ran barefoot as much as I could.
The fireworks were beautiful.
Later we found out that Kelcy and DJ had ripped a hole in their now-useless raft, that David (from IMSA) had capsized into the river, that some members of the scattered group had managed to stay on the Charles, that others climbed to the bridge, and that everyone had, by and large, had a grand ol' time (if not the time we'd expected). A hot shower never felt so wonderful afterwards.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Standardization vs specialization
At Olin tonight. Ironically, Tesch, Andrew, and Chandra all chose to visit on the same day. We even had a MetaOlin meeting (of sorts). Being back like this is always odd, but fun. It's like slipping on an old sweater that's far too ragged to wear in public and has holes and scratchety places, but which somehow feels good anyhow. While I'm in Olin-mode, here's more from Gardner - yes, the same book, Self-Renewal. (Seriously, Olin folks should read this one. These are all excerpts from my notes on the slim paperback.) This time he's talking about the difference between "learning about" and "learning to be."
He points out that being a generalist allows you to specialize in what is needed at that moment. In fact, you could say that being trained as a generalist allows you to move between different specialties. Renaissance engineering. Later, reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I saw fields of study branching out and merging into each other in a slow, melting dance through time; professions tend to change drastically within the timespan of a person's career. Think of the meteoric ascent of computer science, the fading of alchemy, the budding of systems engineering and design theory, the discussion on whether to offer 3 Olin degrees (MechE, ECE, and General Engr.) or just General Engineering (we currently do the former).
"All learning is specialization in the sense that it involves reinforcement of some responses rather than others," says Gardner, so in order to be a generalist, students need to step out of their learning and abstract it on a higher meta-level so they can identify and zoom in on the parts that most interest them. This entire process is different for each student. In order to maximize the learning of as many students as possible, schools should set up a gentle tension by training their students to be generalists and making it clear to the youngsters that it's their responsibility to create their own education that will turn them into the specialists they want to be... at that moment, at least.
Finally, my favorite.
All too often we give our young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. We are stuffing their heads with the products of earlier innovation rather than teaching them how to innovate. We think of the mind as a structure to be filled when we should be thinking of it as an instrument to be used.(How do you "teach someone to innovate," anyway? I'm getting sick of hearing the word "innovation." It's a buzzword that's used so often and so thoughtlessly that it's ceased to have much meaning. But Gardner wrote this years back before the word became so abused.)
He points out that being a generalist allows you to specialize in what is needed at that moment. In fact, you could say that being trained as a generalist allows you to move between different specialties. Renaissance engineering. Later, reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I saw fields of study branching out and merging into each other in a slow, melting dance through time; professions tend to change drastically within the timespan of a person's career. Think of the meteoric ascent of computer science, the fading of alchemy, the budding of systems engineering and design theory, the discussion on whether to offer 3 Olin degrees (MechE, ECE, and General Engr.) or just General Engineering (we currently do the former).
"All learning is specialization in the sense that it involves reinforcement of some responses rather than others," says Gardner, so in order to be a generalist, students need to step out of their learning and abstract it on a higher meta-level so they can identify and zoom in on the parts that most interest them. This entire process is different for each student. In order to maximize the learning of as many students as possible, schools should set up a gentle tension by training their students to be generalists and making it clear to the youngsters that it's their responsibility to create their own education that will turn them into the specialists they want to be... at that moment, at least.
Finally, my favorite.
The truly creative person is not an outlaw but a lawmaker.You can be comfortable in chaos if you know you have the ability to create order from them in an instant if needed (like knowing you can swim strong strokes allows you to relax and float in the water). If you can create new structures - physical, mental, cultural, anything - at will, you're not so tied to old ones. You know you can always make new ones again if things don't work out. Part of why Olin's culture is so amazing is that we are, in every sense of the word, a community of makers.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Money is like chocolate.
First, I would like to rant about not having a working scanner. RANT RANT RANT RANNNNNT. "Scanning" via carefully-held digital camera just isn't the same.
Today was my splurge day - a most excellent $10 lunch consisting of an excellent raspberry seltzer, a cheddary, toothy, and gargantuan green onion scone, the best, moistest apple cake I've ever tried, and a cold mint-nutmeggy rootbeer with lovely citrus notes. In the course of our wanderings through Boston, Chris, Joe, David (an IMSA friend) and myself went from Fenway to the South End past the Commons to the North End and back (I copped out and caught the train from Government Center because I had a 6pm meeting). Along the way we met revolutionary war reenactors, scored some free basil seeds (+ dirt + time = PESTO!), drooled over gelato we did not purchase, and ogled a wine shop.
I'm starting to think of money as a convenience rather than a need. A luxury, at times - like today's lunch - but usually just an occasionally handy thing to fall back on, like when Matt and I rode to Broadway Bicycle yesterday... three times in as many hours to fix two flats, then one flat, then a stuck chain (it was the day of the Bike Curse). Could we have found a way to fix the bikes without money? Maybe. Probably. Eventually. In that short a time? Probably not. And having tools and new parts on hand definitely added a little to the fun with their shininess.
Money, like chocolate, is best when used sparingly and well. Aside from food, my other expenditures in June were rent, a T pass, 2
used books for my research that cost at total of $4, and a few dollars
in bike parts to replace the blown tire. Having dinner at DJ & Kelcy's, dining at Pika with Matt &
Ryan, and sipping tea at OLPC costs me no money at all - and in all cases, the food is even better because of the excellent company. And when people come visit us, we'll cook them extra hamburgers or lend them a spare mattress. Sharing is fun. I almost enjoy being "poor*" because you get to share so much.
*ok, I have a computer, food to eat, and a home with running water; I'm filthy rich in the grand scheme of things.
At its core, cash is really just something to barter with. Time may be money, but I prefer to say that "money is time" and spend my money so that I can do what I want with my time. Usually, doing what I want requires no money at all.
Today was my splurge day - a most excellent $10 lunch consisting of an excellent raspberry seltzer, a cheddary, toothy, and gargantuan green onion scone, the best, moistest apple cake I've ever tried, and a cold mint-nutmeggy rootbeer with lovely citrus notes. In the course of our wanderings through Boston, Chris, Joe, David (an IMSA friend) and myself went from Fenway to the South End past the Commons to the North End and back (I copped out and caught the train from Government Center because I had a 6pm meeting). Along the way we met revolutionary war reenactors, scored some free basil seeds (+ dirt + time = PESTO!), drooled over gelato we did not purchase, and ogled a wine shop.
I'm starting to think of money as a convenience rather than a need. A luxury, at times - like today's lunch - but usually just an occasionally handy thing to fall back on, like when Matt and I rode to Broadway Bicycle yesterday... three times in as many hours to fix two flats, then one flat, then a stuck chain (it was the day of the Bike Curse). Could we have found a way to fix the bikes without money? Maybe. Probably. Eventually. In that short a time? Probably not. And having tools and new parts on hand definitely added a little to the fun with their shininess.
Money, like chocolate, is best when used sparingly and well. Aside from food, my other expenditures in June were rent, a T pass, 2
used books for my research that cost at total of $4, and a few dollars
in bike parts to replace the blown tire. Having dinner at DJ & Kelcy's, dining at Pika with Matt &
Ryan, and sipping tea at OLPC costs me no money at all - and in all cases, the food is even better because of the excellent company. And when people come visit us, we'll cook them extra hamburgers or lend them a spare mattress. Sharing is fun. I almost enjoy being "poor*" because you get to share so much.
*ok, I have a computer, food to eat, and a home with running water; I'm filthy rich in the grand scheme of things.
At its core, cash is really just something to barter with. Time may be money, but I prefer to say that "money is time" and spend my money so that I can do what I want with my time. Usually, doing what I want requires no money at all.
Friday, June 29, 2007
I miss creative writing.
Walking from the Hynes stop to Fenway House is always rich with sensory overload to step back from. Puffs of tobacco smoke strain into automotive exhaust and vents, creating an olfactory tour with abrupt temperature gradients. Buses whine and Sox fans travel in packs, waving cigarettes and low halter tops or gelled hair and collared white shirts on top of cosmetically-grunged tees. Crossing lights chirp out no-cross warnings as Sox shirts wade between taxis, parting a sea of yellow chrome, neon Budweiser signs, and old Hondas packed with college kids. A trio of out-of-towners stand on the wrong corner, giggling as they try to flop down a taxi with a folding umbrella. I round the corner at the Historical Society building and skip down the sidewalk, stomach buzzing with caffeine.
I'm acutely aware that I'm not in my own voice right now. It's the residual awkwardness of having read great writing - Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones, in this case. When I soak in a book like I just did on the train, I speak with an accent for a bit afterwards. It's been seven years since I first read Bones in Chris Kuhl's English class my first year of high school, and I still remember drinking in the passages about allowing yourself to write, and the late-night essay I pounded out (assigned title: "I Am...") and how Kuhl stopped me after class a few days later and asked permission to read it in class, and the stunned silence that followed the reading with the class at a loss for adjectives. We let the silence sit for a while - no verbal dissections on the "meaning" of my work, for once - and then we took a collective breath and continued with our lives.
But that pause, that pregnant pause - I was so terrified by the silence that I forgot to breathe, gasping in a draught of air only when the silence ended. It was one of the greatest moments I've had, all the better for being barely acknowledged - classmates trickled up to me for days afterwards with quiet variants on "that was... wow." And the best part was that I didn't feel that it was extraordinary. That the clarity I'd been able to tap into while writing was something I could always reach in and do.
Anyway, after that essay, Kuhl said I really ought to keep developing my writing and would I like to do some out-of-class work with her on it. I did for a bit and it was wonderful - the odd little books and stories she'd lend me had a grace and clarity of phrasing I'd never seen before, and I would just wash the raw honey of the words over me, turning them about, slowly unraveling them, sitting down to write and finding I'd absorbed a tiny bit of them.
Eventually my parents got upset when they discovered some of the fiction literature she assigned as reading mentioned sex. (Never mind that Shakespeare continually brings it up in his plays; those are "classics.") So we stopped the independent work. I took Kuhl's one-week writing seminar during Intersession that year, wrote some short stories. And then... I slowly stopped writing. I'd still fire up on papers, and I still write parodies and little plays, and this blog - but the sustained effort of raw writing, repeatedly digging deep into a storehouse of words for hours at a time, no particular formulae or point of conviction or function to display, just sheer expression - I haven't done that for a while. I feel rusty when I do.
That's why it was so hard for me to start my sci fi story, and why I didn't make it through NaNoWriMo last year. It's like a former marathon runner trying to lope an easy 26 miles after a decade of eating potato chips on the couch. I don't practice now. It's not a part of who I am at present, but the residual memories say it should be. Maybe it can be again. I'm not going to plan for it or try too hard, since that's a surefire way for me to block myself, but I'm just going to watch a little closer, maybe tip the probabilities a little more. In this case, I do something by doing nothing.*
*I may be reading the Tao Te Ching and Tai Chi books a wee bit much. But hey, that's what writing is for - snapshot of your thoughtstream at the moment. Thoughtstreams can change.
I'm acutely aware that I'm not in my own voice right now. It's the residual awkwardness of having read great writing - Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones, in this case. When I soak in a book like I just did on the train, I speak with an accent for a bit afterwards. It's been seven years since I first read Bones in Chris Kuhl's English class my first year of high school, and I still remember drinking in the passages about allowing yourself to write, and the late-night essay I pounded out (assigned title: "I Am...") and how Kuhl stopped me after class a few days later and asked permission to read it in class, and the stunned silence that followed the reading with the class at a loss for adjectives. We let the silence sit for a while - no verbal dissections on the "meaning" of my work, for once - and then we took a collective breath and continued with our lives.
But that pause, that pregnant pause - I was so terrified by the silence that I forgot to breathe, gasping in a draught of air only when the silence ended. It was one of the greatest moments I've had, all the better for being barely acknowledged - classmates trickled up to me for days afterwards with quiet variants on "that was... wow." And the best part was that I didn't feel that it was extraordinary. That the clarity I'd been able to tap into while writing was something I could always reach in and do.
Anyway, after that essay, Kuhl said I really ought to keep developing my writing and would I like to do some out-of-class work with her on it. I did for a bit and it was wonderful - the odd little books and stories she'd lend me had a grace and clarity of phrasing I'd never seen before, and I would just wash the raw honey of the words over me, turning them about, slowly unraveling them, sitting down to write and finding I'd absorbed a tiny bit of them.
Eventually my parents got upset when they discovered some of the fiction literature she assigned as reading mentioned sex. (Never mind that Shakespeare continually brings it up in his plays; those are "classics.") So we stopped the independent work. I took Kuhl's one-week writing seminar during Intersession that year, wrote some short stories. And then... I slowly stopped writing. I'd still fire up on papers, and I still write parodies and little plays, and this blog - but the sustained effort of raw writing, repeatedly digging deep into a storehouse of words for hours at a time, no particular formulae or point of conviction or function to display, just sheer expression - I haven't done that for a while. I feel rusty when I do.
That's why it was so hard for me to start my sci fi story, and why I didn't make it through NaNoWriMo last year. It's like a former marathon runner trying to lope an easy 26 miles after a decade of eating potato chips on the couch. I don't practice now. It's not a part of who I am at present, but the residual memories say it should be. Maybe it can be again. I'm not going to plan for it or try too hard, since that's a surefire way for me to block myself, but I'm just going to watch a little closer, maybe tip the probabilities a little more. In this case, I do something by doing nothing.*
*I may be reading the Tao Te Ching and Tai Chi books a wee bit much. But hey, that's what writing is for - snapshot of your thoughtstream at the moment. Thoughtstreams can change.
Wei wu wei
Not's post earlier reminded me to write this; I've been meaning to for a bit.
It's easy for me to say that as well, but I think a more accurate statement would be that I want more adventures. I twitch and itch and pick anxiously at the edges of things, grasping at novelty. I'm a high-pass kid in a high-frequency world. I gulp down three glasses of ice-cold catalyst every morning and go through paradigms like cheap conference t-shirts. I want continuous metamorphosis and I want it now. Gritty, transformative experiences. An endless succession of climaxes, rites of passage. New worlds.
But it's not what I need.
I need to balance it, to learn how to sit and be happy. I don't want to be tied to a home, but I want to be drawn to one - to have something constant that I'm willing to go back to time and again. I want rituals with depth, traditions with a meaning behind them that runs out richer the longer I go on. I want to be content to find clarity in stillness and internalize that progress is possible without having to run full-tilt at the wall, or even move forward at all. Those tiny settlings in perception that sink into things, soak deliciously through your mind instead of careening off it with a thundering clang. I need to be open to not changing. It's a kind of coming of age not to need to come of age - I don't know if it's possible to reach that.
I'll still sprint, of course. I'm built to need that, so far. And I can't see myself reaching the kind of peace with the present I've just described. But I'm learning to learn from silence and stillness instead of thinking, and I'm trying to let go of my powerful thirst to learn - it can be an addictive lust as much as anything else can, though there are far worse vices in this world.
That's all.
I need more adventures, memories that stick out because they’re so odd.
It's easy for me to say that as well, but I think a more accurate statement would be that I want more adventures. I twitch and itch and pick anxiously at the edges of things, grasping at novelty. I'm a high-pass kid in a high-frequency world. I gulp down three glasses of ice-cold catalyst every morning and go through paradigms like cheap conference t-shirts. I want continuous metamorphosis and I want it now. Gritty, transformative experiences. An endless succession of climaxes, rites of passage. New worlds.
But it's not what I need.
I need to balance it, to learn how to sit and be happy. I don't want to be tied to a home, but I want to be drawn to one - to have something constant that I'm willing to go back to time and again. I want rituals with depth, traditions with a meaning behind them that runs out richer the longer I go on. I want to be content to find clarity in stillness and internalize that progress is possible without having to run full-tilt at the wall, or even move forward at all. Those tiny settlings in perception that sink into things, soak deliciously through your mind instead of careening off it with a thundering clang. I need to be open to not changing. It's a kind of coming of age not to need to come of age - I don't know if it's possible to reach that.
I'll still sprint, of course. I'm built to need that, so far. And I can't see myself reaching the kind of peace with the present I've just described. But I'm learning to learn from silence and stillness instead of thinking, and I'm trying to let go of my powerful thirst to learn - it can be an addictive lust as much as anything else can, though there are far worse vices in this world.
That's all.
Back from Vancouver and Seattle! And boy am I full.
Back from Vancouver/Seattle. I'm happy to report that the 2-4 (our room) has acquired an electric keyboard sans power cord, a disco ball, and an air conditioner which has been rendered partially usable by vigorous applications of packing tape. I've also accumulated several thousand emails, so tomorrow, after I scan some book illustrations and upload a funding proposal, will be... fun. (I'm implementing Inbox Zero. I need to be consistently reachable somehow and I've been historically terrible at that.)
The family reunion was great, despite the insipid amount of traveling it involved. My maternal grandfather's younger sister married my grandmother's older brother, leading to some really weird "I'm my own grandpaw" relationships and a very tight-knit extended family. We bought amazing handmade salami from Salumi (run by Armandino Batali - Mario's father), charred quesadillas atop the cabin's wood-burning stove, watched the kids chase each other wielding empty 2-liter bottles, waded into the (freezing) surf to scatter my grand-uncle Rizal's ashes into the Pacific, carried boxes of pizza across town, and danced disco and played limbo after dinner. It was a lovely time to be with tiny Asian people. "Every time I think I'm short," my mom (maybe 5'3"?) said, "I just stand next to my sisters, and then I go 'okay, I'm tall.'")
One thing little cousins are great at is making you apologize repeatedly to your parents for being that age at some point. I got to explain to toddlers how Jason (18) could be my little brother ("He can't be your little brother because he's big!" "Yes, but he used to be little." "But he's not little, he's big!") and repeatedly sic my cousin Neil (8) on Jason. Neil is going through the "I like to punch everything!" phase, and since he's small for his age, his fists are exactly the height of Jason's behind. This was the first reunion I've been an "adult" for, and it was neat to see my cousin Melanie (now 12) assume the "leader of the children" role that I've previously held. My youngest cousin Audrey (3) decided she didn't like me because she didn't get to drive a tractor, which I had nothing to do with - I just happened to be standing beside her when her mom told her she was too young. (Then she asked me for help getting across the playground. "Do you like me yet?" "No. But Achi Mallory, I need helllllp." "Well, okay. *help* Do you like me now?" "Almost.")
On the long route back from Tofino to Seattle we stopped at several restaurants. At the first, Kei (6) came back from the bathroom asking what the "condom police" sign on the wall meant. ("It's... for grown-ups, dear" my aunt finally managed to say as my mom and I silently doubled over in laughter. "You know, our family is awfully naive," I told my mom later. "Well, sex in Filipino-Chinese culture is very different," she said. "You don't need to know about it when you're in high school because you're not going to have it.")
Our second major degustation was at a huge Asian mall with a marvelous food court with puffy onion cakes which we ate with crisp, cold, thinly-sliced salty-sweet pig ears, soup dumplings (nip a little hole in the side and suck out the rich broth before eating the rest), egg noodles (fresh - there is no comparison) with fat shrimp in wonton wrappers and sweet broth, creamy pan-fried taro and turnip cakes, curried meat and potatoes stuffed into pillowy white bread. (And almond milk! With coconut jelly! And mango shake!) And then there was the picnic later, with grilled squash, peppercorned broccoli, thick grilled ribs and cold pesto radiatore... ah! "There are two sources of cholesterol: food and family," read an ad in the Readers Digest. "I thought those were the same thing," I told my uncle.
I also visited the Commonwealth of Learning headquarters (more on this later, I'm sure - it was awesome), saw my first Red Sox game at the Seattle Mariners stadium with my cousins (Mariners won) while eating the worst value-for-your-money food I have ever purchased; plasticky pizza, sodden fries, and some sort of fibrous, artifical-flavor drenched mass that was supposed to be bbq pork. "No beer," said my mom. "Don't worry, I can't afford it," I told her afterwards. Apparently some people could. "Look for the drunk half-naked Bostonians," I told my brother on our way back from purchasing a Horrifically Overpriced Lemonade. "Ah, yes. Guy who's showing a foot of boxer short. Our seats must be nearby." (We were across from the Half Naked Drunk Bostonians and behind some Very Vocal Mariners Fans, also endowed with liberal amounts of Miller Lite. Family fun!)
I miss them already. But now to sleep. And then awake and to work.
The family reunion was great, despite the insipid amount of traveling it involved. My maternal grandfather's younger sister married my grandmother's older brother, leading to some really weird "I'm my own grandpaw" relationships and a very tight-knit extended family. We bought amazing handmade salami from Salumi (run by Armandino Batali - Mario's father), charred quesadillas atop the cabin's wood-burning stove, watched the kids chase each other wielding empty 2-liter bottles, waded into the (freezing) surf to scatter my grand-uncle Rizal's ashes into the Pacific, carried boxes of pizza across town, and danced disco and played limbo after dinner. It was a lovely time to be with tiny Asian people. "Every time I think I'm short," my mom (maybe 5'3"?) said, "I just stand next to my sisters, and then I go 'okay, I'm tall.'")
One thing little cousins are great at is making you apologize repeatedly to your parents for being that age at some point. I got to explain to toddlers how Jason (18) could be my little brother ("He can't be your little brother because he's big!" "Yes, but he used to be little." "But he's not little, he's big!") and repeatedly sic my cousin Neil (8) on Jason. Neil is going through the "I like to punch everything!" phase, and since he's small for his age, his fists are exactly the height of Jason's behind. This was the first reunion I've been an "adult" for, and it was neat to see my cousin Melanie (now 12) assume the "leader of the children" role that I've previously held. My youngest cousin Audrey (3) decided she didn't like me because she didn't get to drive a tractor, which I had nothing to do with - I just happened to be standing beside her when her mom told her she was too young. (Then she asked me for help getting across the playground. "Do you like me yet?" "No. But Achi Mallory, I need helllllp." "Well, okay. *help* Do you like me now?" "Almost.")
On the long route back from Tofino to Seattle we stopped at several restaurants. At the first, Kei (6) came back from the bathroom asking what the "condom police" sign on the wall meant. ("It's... for grown-ups, dear" my aunt finally managed to say as my mom and I silently doubled over in laughter. "You know, our family is awfully naive," I told my mom later. "Well, sex in Filipino-Chinese culture is very different," she said. "You don't need to know about it when you're in high school because you're not going to have it.")
Our second major degustation was at a huge Asian mall with a marvelous food court with puffy onion cakes which we ate with crisp, cold, thinly-sliced salty-sweet pig ears, soup dumplings (nip a little hole in the side and suck out the rich broth before eating the rest), egg noodles (fresh - there is no comparison) with fat shrimp in wonton wrappers and sweet broth, creamy pan-fried taro and turnip cakes, curried meat and potatoes stuffed into pillowy white bread. (And almond milk! With coconut jelly! And mango shake!) And then there was the picnic later, with grilled squash, peppercorned broccoli, thick grilled ribs and cold pesto radiatore... ah! "There are two sources of cholesterol: food and family," read an ad in the Readers Digest. "I thought those were the same thing," I told my uncle.
I also visited the Commonwealth of Learning headquarters (more on this later, I'm sure - it was awesome), saw my first Red Sox game at the Seattle Mariners stadium with my cousins (Mariners won) while eating the worst value-for-your-money food I have ever purchased; plasticky pizza, sodden fries, and some sort of fibrous, artifical-flavor drenched mass that was supposed to be bbq pork. "No beer," said my mom. "Don't worry, I can't afford it," I told her afterwards. Apparently some people could. "Look for the drunk half-naked Bostonians," I told my brother on our way back from purchasing a Horrifically Overpriced Lemonade. "Ah, yes. Guy who's showing a foot of boxer short. Our seats must be nearby." (We were across from the Half Naked Drunk Bostonians and behind some Very Vocal Mariners Fans, also endowed with liberal amounts of Miller Lite. Family fun!)
I miss them already. But now to sleep. And then awake and to work.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
This book is not required
Wow. Some great insights on social entrepreneurship in the comments from the last post - I'm going through some books and articles on the topic before I respond, but right now my position is very similar to Matt's phrasing.
In the meantime, I grabbed a $1 book on the way down Mass Ave and read it tonight. It's an underground-education book (best read with a grain of salt; like many good books, it points out interesting topics but has a bias of its own) titled This Book Is Not Required. Ironically, it's since become required reading on several sociology syllabi.
The fundamental premise is that the goal of education is not knowledge, but wisdom, which it (loosely) defines as the ability to live, understand, and direct one's life no matter what that life may turn out to be. The book has strong Buddhist and sociology overtones but is gracious enough to tell you so repeatedly. It's meant as a "everything [the author] would give as advice to her incoming college self" sort of book, and was revised and extended by a spontaneously-formed group of college students after the author's death.
A few interesting passages. As usual, I'll start with one on grades.
In the next few pages, Bell suggests an experiment which I'd unknowingly been doing for the past three years; in order to tell how affected you really are by grades, notice how tense you are right before you're being handed back a graded paper. The amount of anxiety you have that moment is a good indicator of how invested you actually are in grades, regardless of how you think you're doing or where you'd like to be with respect to them. (It's totally ok to be invested in grades and have them as goals - just understand what that means and why you're doing it.)
How much, Bell asks us, does our education enable us to understand and live our own lives better? To that I would answer "as much as you make it," and also that Bell is probably a Myers-Briggs introvert-intuitive (INXX) who places a high value on self-knowledge. I don't dispute it's a portion of education we often ignore in formal institutions. I'm a very "know thyself" sort of person, and this "how can I use this to understand my life?" aspect was one of the things I valued highly about MetaOlin. Self-knowledge is not the primary driver of everyone, nor should it be; some folks have temperaments that pull them in different directions.*
* I can't resist saying that some modicum of self-knowledge is helpful to know what direction you're being pulled in, but that's my inner INFP speaking.
Another section reflects on perceptions of self and how they're influenced by the media. Another (one of my favorites) dissects college relationships in Western culture by looking at it through the lens of an Eastern philosophy ("Hm," I thought for a moment, "perhaps I'm not asexual - just unconsciously a Buddhist sociologist with regards to this topic.") It also has the calmest "Fight The Establishment! The Big Bosses are blinding us! Down with The Man!" passages I have ever seen, mostly on the topic of lack of self-directed inquiries in college.
It's a mildly written but quietly counter-cultural book and satisfyingly chewy food for thought. Because of the clear biases in the book, you have to mentally masticate the material instead of swallowing it blindly, but that's exactly what the author advocates - so hey. Nice meta-book-design.
In the meantime, I grabbed a $1 book on the way down Mass Ave and read it tonight. It's an underground-education book (best read with a grain of salt; like many good books, it points out interesting topics but has a bias of its own) titled This Book Is Not Required. Ironically, it's since become required reading on several sociology syllabi.
The fundamental premise is that the goal of education is not knowledge, but wisdom, which it (loosely) defines as the ability to live, understand, and direct one's life no matter what that life may turn out to be. The book has strong Buddhist and sociology overtones but is gracious enough to tell you so repeatedly. It's meant as a "everything [the author] would give as advice to her incoming college self" sort of book, and was revised and extended by a spontaneously-formed group of college students after the author's death.
A few interesting passages. As usual, I'll start with one on grades.
I want you to understand the vital difference between operating within a set of rules and internalizing those rules. The cardinal point here is that what you don't internalize can't really hurt you...
In the next few pages, Bell suggests an experiment which I'd unknowingly been doing for the past three years; in order to tell how affected you really are by grades, notice how tense you are right before you're being handed back a graded paper. The amount of anxiety you have that moment is a good indicator of how invested you actually are in grades, regardless of how you think you're doing or where you'd like to be with respect to them. (It's totally ok to be invested in grades and have them as goals - just understand what that means and why you're doing it.)
How much, Bell asks us, does our education enable us to understand and live our own lives better? To that I would answer "as much as you make it," and also that Bell is probably a Myers-Briggs introvert-intuitive (INXX) who places a high value on self-knowledge. I don't dispute it's a portion of education we often ignore in formal institutions. I'm a very "know thyself" sort of person, and this "how can I use this to understand my life?" aspect was one of the things I valued highly about MetaOlin. Self-knowledge is not the primary driver of everyone, nor should it be; some folks have temperaments that pull them in different directions.*
* I can't resist saying that some modicum of self-knowledge is helpful to know what direction you're being pulled in, but that's my inner INFP speaking.
Another section reflects on perceptions of self and how they're influenced by the media. Another (one of my favorites) dissects college relationships in Western culture by looking at it through the lens of an Eastern philosophy ("Hm," I thought for a moment, "perhaps I'm not asexual - just unconsciously a Buddhist sociologist with regards to this topic.") It also has the calmest "Fight The Establishment! The Big Bosses are blinding us! Down with The Man!" passages I have ever seen, mostly on the topic of lack of self-directed inquiries in college.
The very format of school works to ensure boredom. At 9:00 a.m. three times a week you are supposed to become engrossed by medieval history. Never mind that you broke up with your boyfriend last night, or that your parents are on your back for not majoring in business administration, at 9:00 a.m. it's medieval history... our education has, all along, been answering questions we never asked.
It's a mildly written but quietly counter-cultural book and satisfyingly chewy food for thought. Because of the clear biases in the book, you have to mentally masticate the material instead of swallowing it blindly, but that's exactly what the author advocates - so hey. Nice meta-book-design.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Beer and an unrelated note about social entrepreneurship
Ray, Chris, and I scored some free Sam Adams glasses yesterday when we went on their brewery tour. The beer (tiny glasses of Boston Lager and the Summer brew) was... well, I can't enthusiastically say it's my favorite thing to quaff in the world since I'm still at the point where I haven't gotten over the bitterness of the hops and astringency of the alcohol-taste, but it was tasty, and different (and much better) than I thought beer would taste. If you add the tiny glasses up, this was the first complete glass of beer I'd had.
I was able to tell that the two beers were different, but that's about it; I'd like to taste a few more so I can start noticing more subtle things, similar to how I now taste tea (I used to think they all tasted the same too). Apparently 1.5 beers is also enough to physically affect me; it felt like my perception had a tiny bit of inertia. When I turned my head, my head would turn, my vision would go right with it, and then a half-second later my brain would say "Oh, I'm looking that way now!" and everything would be all synced-up again.
My cousin Mark came over for brunch this morning. He had some cereal while I wolfed down half the leftover Fiesta Nachos from Sunset yesterday (three young people, one $10 plate... leftovers for two servings afterwards. It's a big plate.) He's staying across the Fen with the son of our uncle's classmate and a graphic designer roommate and working for an internet marketing firm. One thing I'm learning from the jobs that Mark and my brother Jason are working this summer is that the work world often takes shortcuts that, while entirely legal, make me feel a little sketchy about the values they're espousing. I still need to reconcile my entrepreneurial desire to take advantage of opportunities with my conscience which prevents me from doing anything that could be construed as "taking advantage" (in the negative sense of the phrase).
Dad said once that the key in business was to reconcile your head and your heart. One tenet of "social entrepreneurship" (although I want it to exist badly, I'm still questioning whether that's even a valid phrase) is "doing well by doing good." Is the idea of social entrepreneurship (to quote a grad school classmate) "bullshit"?* I can't convince myself that it isn't, so I'm going to try convincing myself that it is bullshit. I need to see where both perspectives are coming from.
So tell me - why is social E! total bull? (or why isn't it? I think the first type of response will be more helpful, though.)
*Matt and Ben, before you kill me, look up the phrase "proof by contradiction" - but note that I'm not aiming towards such; I'm really trying to prove that social E! is bull. I'm not going to hold back on this, because it's the only way we can test it.
I was able to tell that the two beers were different, but that's about it; I'd like to taste a few more so I can start noticing more subtle things, similar to how I now taste tea (I used to think they all tasted the same too). Apparently 1.5 beers is also enough to physically affect me; it felt like my perception had a tiny bit of inertia. When I turned my head, my head would turn, my vision would go right with it, and then a half-second later my brain would say "Oh, I'm looking that way now!" and everything would be all synced-up again.
My cousin Mark came over for brunch this morning. He had some cereal while I wolfed down half the leftover Fiesta Nachos from Sunset yesterday (three young people, one $10 plate... leftovers for two servings afterwards. It's a big plate.) He's staying across the Fen with the son of our uncle's classmate and a graphic designer roommate and working for an internet marketing firm. One thing I'm learning from the jobs that Mark and my brother Jason are working this summer is that the work world often takes shortcuts that, while entirely legal, make me feel a little sketchy about the values they're espousing. I still need to reconcile my entrepreneurial desire to take advantage of opportunities with my conscience which prevents me from doing anything that could be construed as "taking advantage" (in the negative sense of the phrase).
Dad said once that the key in business was to reconcile your head and your heart. One tenet of "social entrepreneurship" (although I want it to exist badly, I'm still questioning whether that's even a valid phrase) is "doing well by doing good." Is the idea of social entrepreneurship (to quote a grad school classmate) "bullshit"?* I can't convince myself that it isn't, so I'm going to try convincing myself that it is bullshit. I need to see where both perspectives are coming from.
So tell me - why is social E! total bull? (or why isn't it? I think the first type of response will be more helpful, though.)
*Matt and Ben, before you kill me, look up the phrase "proof by contradiction" - but note that I'm not aiming towards such; I'm really trying to prove that social E! is bull. I'm not going to hold back on this, because it's the only way we can test it.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Visiting the Zen center
Gosh, it's nice to be able to take things one at a time, switch tasks when you feel like it, take some time to pay attention and relax into what you're doing without feeling pushed to do more things faster.
I spent the morning and much of the afternoon sending thank-you notes. Lots of them. 6.5 hours' worth. After a quick stop-in at the OLPC office, I set off for the Cambridge Zen Center's free introductory session, after which we sat on dense blue cushions atop faded green mats and asked questions of a visiting Masai chieftain (38 years old, a chief since he was 18) who wore a gold watch and black and white checkered cloth robe over his slacks and collared blue shirt.
I asked him what made a person a good leader, and he responded that it was a lack of selfishness and giving everyone consideration regardless of who they were. He does this by example as well. Masai are polygamous, but instead of four wives and 40 children he has one wife and four children - and three adopted children - because one issue facing the Masai right now is population control; "when there are more people, the land becomes small." Asked whether he worries about his children (who are attending private school) moving to the city and forgetting the Masai ways, he replied that he could not say he does not worry about it, but that he tells his children that it is their responsibility to give back to the Masai community they came from.
After the talk, we clustered around a beautiful wood table by the kitchen where huge bowls of carob-chocolate rice pudding, warm banana-pineapple chunks, and whipped cream were sitting along with a pot of smoky tea. "You mean we can just... eat it? People that just walked in?" "Yes," said a young man who lived at the Center (who'd originally mistaken me for a friend, causing mild confusion and then a good laugh). We talked about life. After I told him about going to college for engineering, he asked me if it had been fulfilling. "Yes," I said. "Well, it fulfills a part of me." There's a part of me that really needs to build and read and study. But studying can't tell you how to live or what to believe.
It was a warm night, so I walked back from the Center (by Central Square) to Fenway, a stroll that took about an hour. A twentysomething man was sobbing loudly onto a streetlamp across from a Thai restaurant, his friends in baseball caps and faded hoodies clustering around to comfort him. Soft rock guitar and somebody's trumpet battled for aural dominance by the Berklee apartments.
Fenway was, according to Harvard historians via the House Manager's manual, actually built in 1903 (or thereabouts), well after the end of slavery (so Gui was off by several decades). Turns out the wee rooms were servant quarters. I also know how to exterminate cockroaches in the kitchen now, and on the table in the lounge is a black book with yellowed pages falling off; I opened it to a 1981 entry in blue ballpoint where a boy describes his disappointment at the lack of anarchy at Fenway, how he'd grown more radical over the course of his studies but that the house hadn't. "I feel like a snake shedding its skin," he wrote as he prepared to leave.
Some black and white photos of young men in scruffy beards amidst piles of books were pasted within the pages. Those young anarchists are my parents' age now. I wonder if they grew into collared salarymen with slight paunches and a lawnmower in their garage. I hope they didn't. All the same, I'm acutely aware my current behavior (not spending money, no job, living in a crazy painted house, eating at random hours, walking across the city) is tolerated precisely because I'm young and "going through an experimental phase," and at some point - twenty five? thirty? I stop being a cute, eager kid and start being a kook who never learned to live in normal society.
I feel the vague itchings of "I should really be studying something technical" in the back of my mind. I'm deliberately ignoring it and letting it build - I want to make sure it's real desire to learn instead of a sentiment of obligation because I have an engineering degree - and when I can't hold that back any longer, I'll devour something with intense speed and relish... I'm hoping my appetite will turn towards Proakis, or Horowitz and Hill, but we'll see; I've been enamored with the idea of learning kernel hacking, as of late.
Normalcy can wait. Tonight I start a new book - on ethnographic fieldwork methods. Mmm! Time to read.
I spent the morning and much of the afternoon sending thank-you notes. Lots of them. 6.5 hours' worth. After a quick stop-in at the OLPC office, I set off for the Cambridge Zen Center's free introductory session, after which we sat on dense blue cushions atop faded green mats and asked questions of a visiting Masai chieftain (38 years old, a chief since he was 18) who wore a gold watch and black and white checkered cloth robe over his slacks and collared blue shirt.
I asked him what made a person a good leader, and he responded that it was a lack of selfishness and giving everyone consideration regardless of who they were. He does this by example as well. Masai are polygamous, but instead of four wives and 40 children he has one wife and four children - and three adopted children - because one issue facing the Masai right now is population control; "when there are more people, the land becomes small." Asked whether he worries about his children (who are attending private school) moving to the city and forgetting the Masai ways, he replied that he could not say he does not worry about it, but that he tells his children that it is their responsibility to give back to the Masai community they came from.
After the talk, we clustered around a beautiful wood table by the kitchen where huge bowls of carob-chocolate rice pudding, warm banana-pineapple chunks, and whipped cream were sitting along with a pot of smoky tea. "You mean we can just... eat it? People that just walked in?" "Yes," said a young man who lived at the Center (who'd originally mistaken me for a friend, causing mild confusion and then a good laugh). We talked about life. After I told him about going to college for engineering, he asked me if it had been fulfilling. "Yes," I said. "Well, it fulfills a part of me." There's a part of me that really needs to build and read and study. But studying can't tell you how to live or what to believe.
It was a warm night, so I walked back from the Center (by Central Square) to Fenway, a stroll that took about an hour. A twentysomething man was sobbing loudly onto a streetlamp across from a Thai restaurant, his friends in baseball caps and faded hoodies clustering around to comfort him. Soft rock guitar and somebody's trumpet battled for aural dominance by the Berklee apartments.
Fenway was, according to Harvard historians via the House Manager's manual, actually built in 1903 (or thereabouts), well after the end of slavery (so Gui was off by several decades). Turns out the wee rooms were servant quarters. I also know how to exterminate cockroaches in the kitchen now, and on the table in the lounge is a black book with yellowed pages falling off; I opened it to a 1981 entry in blue ballpoint where a boy describes his disappointment at the lack of anarchy at Fenway, how he'd grown more radical over the course of his studies but that the house hadn't. "I feel like a snake shedding its skin," he wrote as he prepared to leave.
Some black and white photos of young men in scruffy beards amidst piles of books were pasted within the pages. Those young anarchists are my parents' age now. I wonder if they grew into collared salarymen with slight paunches and a lawnmower in their garage. I hope they didn't. All the same, I'm acutely aware my current behavior (not spending money, no job, living in a crazy painted house, eating at random hours, walking across the city) is tolerated precisely because I'm young and "going through an experimental phase," and at some point - twenty five? thirty? I stop being a cute, eager kid and start being a kook who never learned to live in normal society.
I feel the vague itchings of "I should really be studying something technical" in the back of my mind. I'm deliberately ignoring it and letting it build - I want to make sure it's real desire to learn instead of a sentiment of obligation because I have an engineering degree - and when I can't hold that back any longer, I'll devour something with intense speed and relish... I'm hoping my appetite will turn towards Proakis, or Horowitz and Hill, but we'll see; I've been enamored with the idea of learning kernel hacking, as of late.
Normalcy can wait. Tonight I start a new book - on ethnographic fieldwork methods. Mmm! Time to read.
Game Jam pictures, finally
At the Game jam, we had programmers...
Team Minuteman, who had to skip the last day of the Jam to graduate from high school
We had food... (thanks to the tireless efforts of the Olin crew)
And we had judges. Oh, did we have judges! So... many... judges...
And a very tired - but happy - Mel.
Now I know why most conferences are run by older people with lots of contacts, experience, and more funding... and of course, I'm going to be doing this again. :-D
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Entrepreneurship without a business
Andrew Coats, Erik Kennedy, Lindsay Redmond, and myself were panelists for an Olin-Babson conference on entrepreneurship education for engineers (somehow this becomes the acronym SvE^3). I missed the bus there by one minute, which led to me running pell-mell from the next bus (a half-hour later) down Great Plains, backpack swinging, waving a bright yellow sign that said "PLEASE GIVE ME A RIDE TO BABSON! LATE STUDENT!" and giving desperate looks to passing drivers.
I did get a ride about halfway there, and ran breathless into the room four minutes early (technically 26 minutes late for briefing), then followed the eloquent trio of Andrew, Erik, and Lindsay talking about Olin's entrepreneurship programs by telling the audience all about how I'd stayed as far away from formal programs at Olin as possible, swearing not to follow in the footsteps of my dad, a MechE-turned-MBA. "But I still consider myself an entrepreneur," I told them (roughly paraphrased). "It's not just about starting businesses. It's about creating value." When an audience member asked what Olin students went on to do after graduation, Andrew and Steve Schiffman pulled out the Post-Grad-Planning sheet and read the numbers of alumni in startups, going to Harvard Business School, and so forth; I piped in and said that the kids going to grad school or industry would be acting entrepreneurial within their institutions as well.
Thing is, Olin made it really easy to start things. Businesses. Clubs. Independent studies. Classes. Projects. Committees. Hacking the school itself (in the "changing tradition and policy" sense, not the "MIT prank" sense). Our ideas don't have to all be good, or work, or even be remotely sane for people to take them seriously and allow them to happen. They don't so much allow them to happen as tell you to take whatever initiatives you want; it's an ask-forgiveness-not-permission mentality. In Gardner's words, the school is "...a fertile seedbed from which enlightenment can spring" - not that it will spring, but that it can, and part of allowing it to spring up is making it okay for many, many things to fail.
After the panel, we were treated to a lovely dinner at which a soon-to-be-professor from Florida gave me some wonderful advice about being a master of jack-of-all-tradesness. ("Being an integrator is a very important role! You probably won't get hired for that for your first job, so you may have to start with a specific project, then move on to as many different projects as you can, until they find out you're a wonderful generalist... and then you're set.") Once the conference attendees left, Erik and I had a good conversation about IdeaTree (his startup) and then walked back to the dorms, where I ended up staying at Boris' room, then waking up at 6am to catch the train to OLPC. I love my life right now.
Fun fact: Fenway House is over a century old, something I learned from Gui when he showed me the "basement" (really a crumbly dirt pit dug out by the foundations for storage) and pointed out that the upstairs rooms used to be slave quarters. If these walls could talk, indeed.
I did get a ride about halfway there, and ran breathless into the room four minutes early (technically 26 minutes late for briefing), then followed the eloquent trio of Andrew, Erik, and Lindsay talking about Olin's entrepreneurship programs by telling the audience all about how I'd stayed as far away from formal programs at Olin as possible, swearing not to follow in the footsteps of my dad, a MechE-turned-MBA. "But I still consider myself an entrepreneur," I told them (roughly paraphrased). "It's not just about starting businesses. It's about creating value." When an audience member asked what Olin students went on to do after graduation, Andrew and Steve Schiffman pulled out the Post-Grad-Planning sheet and read the numbers of alumni in startups, going to Harvard Business School, and so forth; I piped in and said that the kids going to grad school or industry would be acting entrepreneurial within their institutions as well.
Thing is, Olin made it really easy to start things. Businesses. Clubs. Independent studies. Classes. Projects. Committees. Hacking the school itself (in the "changing tradition and policy" sense, not the "MIT prank" sense). Our ideas don't have to all be good, or work, or even be remotely sane for people to take them seriously and allow them to happen. They don't so much allow them to happen as tell you to take whatever initiatives you want; it's an ask-forgiveness-not-permission mentality. In Gardner's words, the school is "...a fertile seedbed from which enlightenment can spring" - not that it will spring, but that it can, and part of allowing it to spring up is making it okay for many, many things to fail.
After the panel, we were treated to a lovely dinner at which a soon-to-be-professor from Florida gave me some wonderful advice about being a master of jack-of-all-tradesness. ("Being an integrator is a very important role! You probably won't get hired for that for your first job, so you may have to start with a specific project, then move on to as many different projects as you can, until they find out you're a wonderful generalist... and then you're set.") Once the conference attendees left, Erik and I had a good conversation about IdeaTree (his startup) and then walked back to the dorms, where I ended up staying at Boris' room, then waking up at 6am to catch the train to OLPC. I love my life right now.
Fun fact: Fenway House is over a century old, something I learned from Gui when he showed me the "basement" (really a crumbly dirt pit dug out by the foundations for storage) and pointed out that the upstairs rooms used to be slave quarters. If these walls could talk, indeed.
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